The Gatekeepers by Jacques Steinberg #2

The next section of the book is about the actual process that the admissions officers go through when not in a committee.

The Wesleyan admissions office received 6862 applications for the class of 2004 (a 7% increase from the year before) and while Wesleyan is glad to have a broader pool of applicant from which to choose, it doesn't make the admissions officer's jobs any easier.  Each application must be read twice and sometime discussed by the committee (if a decision is unclear).  Ralph's personal goal is 30 applications per day although this rarely happens since many decisions are hard to make and there are a wide variety of things to consider for each application.

Diversity is something that Ralph and the other admissions officers are told to consider highly.  Wesleyan, and other selective colleges, want very diverse campuses so that their students can benefit from the diversity of the campus.  While the argument is made that minority students get a benefit simply because they are a minority and that they can get in to X college or university with grades that aren't quite as good as those of a non-minority student and that this is unfair, there is a rationalization, a reason why colleges do this.  The Gatekeepers explains that bringing something different to college (like the experiences of being a minority) confer a benefit to the university that they are willing to exchange for grades (although several colleges and states are removing race as a factor considered in an application).   While I don't necessarily agree with this policy, I do see its merits and understand why it is in place.  An example of this policy is this story: Ralph went to a school specifically for Native Americans in the southwest; two students from that school applied and even though one of them had C's, D's, and F's on his transcript from a previous high school, he was still under serious consideration by Ralph because Wesleyan didn't have any Native Americans.

Wesleyan is a small school and so the desire for diversity has a significant impact on their decisions, but I wonder how different it is at a large state school like UofI.

Ralph (and the other admissions officers of Wesleyan) have a 'cheat sheet' that they use to grade applications.  Applicants are rated on a 1-9 scale in 3 academic categories and 2 more 'nonacademic' categories.  The three academic categories are 'academic achievement', 'intellectual curiosity' and 'commitment'; the 'nonacademic' categories are 'personal' and 'extracurricular'.  After averaging the 3 academic ratings and the 2 'nonacademic' ratings, the admissions officer must then average those two numbers.  All those numbers and certain keywords like 'discuss' are used by the second admissions officer to read the file and the committee if the application needs to be discussed by the group.  Finally there is one more rating that reflects the admissions officer's opinion of the application: admit, the officer is confident that the student should be admitted; admit minus, the officer thinks the student should be admitted but they have some doubt; deny plus, the officer thinks the student should be denied but the application has some merit; and deny, the officer is sure that the student should be rejected by Wesleyan.

The book suggests that these rating systems, or something similar, are used throughout other selective colleges, but like my previous question about diversity, I'm curious as to what the admissions process is like for a larger school.