Who is Reading and Ranking Your Child's College Admissions Applications?

As the new school year approaches, I can't help but think of the rising high school seniors, many of whom will be extra busy applying to colleges this year.

Since I live in the 5 college area (UMass Amherst, Amherst College, Hampshire College, Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges) and teach at UMass Amherst, I often see prospective students and their family members going on college tours.

The college admissions process has gotten very challenging, since the competition for places at U.S. colleges is international and the Common Application, which is done online, allows for a student to apply to multiple colleges with essentially the press of a button (and a fee) and, hence, there are many more applicants to highly selective colleges than even a decade ago.

According to recent data, reported on The New York Times Choice blog:

Applicant pools are growing larger; the University of Southern California received more than 47,000 applications this year. That’s 10,000 more students than just two years ago, when this year’s applicants were sophomores.

Colleges are also becoming more selective. The Ivy League reported an admit rate that dipped to 5.79 percent at Harvard this year. Stanford accepted 5.69 percent of its more than 38,800 applicants. The University of Chicago accepted only 8.8 percent of its more than 30,300 applicants.

So who is reading your child's college application with all those important essays that your child has labored over?

When a family is on its Great College Tour, where, by Friday, every campus starts to look alike and one almost feels that they could give the presentation better than the admissions officer, one statement stands out from these presentations: Each application is thoroughly read and analyzed by several persons from admissions who then make recommendations to the Admissions Director. The Director then, in a "highly emotional process," makes the final decision on admission.

Living in an academic town, we have often heard stories that contradict this. Most involve who actually reads the application. In today's New York Times Education Life, there is an essay by Ruth Starkman, Confessions of an Application Reader: Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley. Ms Starkman is not a member of the Berkeley Admissions Staff, but taught at another instiution in the Bay Area. She read and ranked (from 1 to 5) admissions packets for Berkeley as a part-time job. She lasted only a year because she did not feel comfortable with the process. I urge you to read her essay, since what she was told by senior admissions readers will shock you, I am sure.

I have heard stories that one of the locals in Amherst reads for more than one college/university and that a parent read and evaluated for their alma mater (a highly selective college) applications that were from students in competition with their own child's, who had applied to the same college. Apparently,  outsourcing is now being done in college admissions regularly, but there are also serious question of conflicts of interest, as well.

In reflecting on the task of reviewing applicants, the task appears daunting time-wise, which is likely the reason that (some) colleges and universities are now outsourcing the reading and ranking of applications. Consider a generic elite institution that receives about 24,000 applications a year and accepts about 10%. The reading needs to be performed during a 6 week period January 15 - February 28. If each application has 3 readers, each of whom spends 8 minutes on an application, this translates to 9600 reader-hours total or 1600 reader-hours per week. It would take 40 readers, doing nothing else than reading 40 hours a week to read and rank the applications. It's more likely that an individual cannot process that many per day making the total number of  needed outsourced readers more likely well over 100. Going to the next stage, even if the readers essentially knock 80% of the applicants out of the pool, the Admissions Director is left with 4800 applicants to sort out in a 2 week period, a task that would take 400 man-hours at 5 minutes per application.

With so many readers, how do you have any consistency?!

Of course, what time of day your child's application is read will certainly also have an effect.

It is a marvel that anyone gets into college these days. No wonder having a college degree is so valuable.