Stanford Today
Edition: March/April, 1998
Section: Features: Crunch Time in Admissions
WWW: Crunch Time in Admissions

CRUNCH TIME IN ADMISSIONS

Third in a series

By Marisa Cigarroa

ver in Credentials, a large, maze-like room divided by desks, tables and motorized shelves, about 20 people are hard at work. They are methodically sorting different parts of students' applications into single folders that will be distributed to readers participating in the long process of selecting who gets into Stanford.

Crunch time for the admission office begins the second week of January. This year, the folks in the Credentials room have a particularly grueling job ahead of them. By early January, a record 18,536 applications had poured into the office, and many more remained to be counted. This figure represents an 11 percent increase from the previous year's total of 16,842 applications.

Preparing files for reading by admission officers is tedious work. Each piece of information, such as references, transcripts, standardized test scores and student essays, is checked to make sure it all belongs to the same applicant. Once this is done, the file passes on to the first reader, a senior staff member in the admission office, who sorts files into competitive and non-competitive piles and distributes them to the next readers.

Stanford offers two early admission rounds and a regular one. Although the deadlines differ, the mechanics of the reading process are essentially the same. Before files are read, a yellow workcard is inserted in front of each applicant's file. The workcard serves as the main means of communication between readers of the application.

Files that make the first cut (about half of the applicant pool) are distributed among the second readers, who painstakingly go through every document in the file; summarize the content on the workcard with a standard blue-ink pen; write a summary evaluation; recommend two ratings based on a five-point scale for academic achievement and extracurricular achievement, and another "plus," "neutral" or "minus" rating for the degree of "intellectual vitality."

Finally, the second reader recommends "admit," "deny" or "swim"; the last designation means deferring the decision for another round.The files are passed along to third readers and the same exercise is repeated.

Third readings are conducted by the five most senior admission staff who have the authority to make decisions. They also have the power to overrule previous recommendations, based on insight gained through experience.

During the regular reading process and, roughly, over any given week, second readers may recommend "admit" on no more than 12 percent of the files read, and "swim" on no more than 38 percent of the files. This means they must recommend "deny" on at least 50 percent of the files that have been determined to be in the top half of the applicant pool. The winnowing process continues until the admit pool is filled. At the end of this process, the dean and the associate dean sign off on all offers of admission.

In theory, this sounds simple. But the process exacts a heavy toll on readers, who must examine thousands of files apiece during the four-month selection process from November to April. The tough decisions admission officers face daily are best illustrated by an experiment former admission dean Jean Fetter tried in 1985.

Fetter invited 10 highly respected professors emeriti to join in the reading of applications. The seven who accepted were asked to read 100 files and to designate 20 to 25 percent as admits, 45 to 50 percent as denies and the remaining 35 percent as swims.

"They put closer to 80 percent in the swim category," says Fetter. "Even for faculty with significant experience in teaching Stanford students, it was enormously difficult to make distinctions within a random set of 100 applicants, most of whom seemed eminently qualified to be Stanford students."

Multiply this assignment by 180 and you begin to get an inkling of what it's like to be an admission officer.

Holly Thompson, senior associate director of admission, doesn't sleep much during reading period. "But then again, that's the norm here," she says. A mother of three school-age children, she prepares for reading period as if for hibernation. "Just before we started reading," she says, "I went to the Price Club and bought, among other things, 16 rolls of paper towels, ten pounds of sharp cheddar cheese, 48 rolls of toilet paper, three industrial size boxes of Goldfish crackers, six dozen juice boxes and three dozen cans of frozen orange juice. The idea is to be able to do all the usual marketing between now and March at our neighborhood market."

Her colleague, Nicole Burrell, makes it a point to sign up for a class to get her mind off work. "The idea is that if I pay money for something, I'll actually go and it will get me away from reading," says Burrell, who has learned flamenco dance, investing and Latin American waltz in previous years. "This year," she says, "it will be metalworking and a continuing studies class."

Jonathan Reider, senior associate director of admission, says it's not uncommon to work seven days a week during reading time.

The spike in applications this year means admission officers will be working even harder to deliver decisions on time.

In December, the first offers of admission were mailed out. Of the 410 students who were admitted in the first round of early decision, more than half had perfect 4.0 grade point averages, and approximately 75 percent reported combined SAT scores of 1400 or above out of a possible 1600.

"It's hard for people outside admissions to even fathom how competitive the pool is," says Robert Kinnally, the new dean of admission and financial aid. "We're struck by it every time that we sit down and read the applications."

innally, 37, is an approachable fellow who looks as if he could be actor Matthew Broderick's older brother. His 14 years of admission experience include three years as dean of admission at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. He stumbled upon his career in admission by accident. While he was attending New York University as a graduate student in English, a friend told Kinnally about an admission job at a local university.

"It sounded great: travel, an academic setting, the chance to meet lots of interesting people. It was a wonderful opportunity. I was a starving graduate student dressed in a suit, driving a spiffy rental car and sporting an expense account. Life was good."

He soon discovered that what he loved best about the job was the chance to make a difference in young people's lives. "When I saw that perfect match between student and college, there was nothing else like it," says Kinnally, who describes his own undergraduate career at Manhattan College, his father's alma mater, as "life-changing."

"College gave me a voice. It gave me a reason to read lots of books and get credit for it. It taught me another language, how to be a better musician [he plays the organ], how to think critically and how to contribute to the world around me. College taught me to learn for the rest of my life."

Kinnally's belief in the value of higher education is shared by his staff. It's what motivates them to read through thousands of applications each year to determine how a prospective student might contribute to and benefit from the class being assembled.

While most people in admission circles would agree that the practice of judging a teenager's achievements and potential can not be perfected, admission officers at Stanford continually seek to refine their skills and heighten their sensitivities.

New and experienced admission officers alike attend reader-training workshops before the decision rounds begin.

This year, they heard presentations from faculty experts on shyness and on the predictive values of standardized test scores. They also participated in several reading exercises to make sure they are applying a similar set of values to the process.

In one exercise, eight files were passed out to senior admission officers who were instructed to select only three for the competitive pile. They reached similar decisions.

"There's a certain amount of serendipity involved," Reider explains. "But overall it balances out. When we are making the final decisions on who gets in, there is a real consistency and a real sense of reliability."

Reider discounts the notion of using a lottery in which applicants who meet certain standards of academic merit are randomly chosen. Such a process, proponents argue, would eliminate subjectivity.

"It's appealing in a simple way, because some people would think that everybody was getting equal treatment," Reider says. "But they are not all equal just because they have good grades. The other differences, such as the level of intellectual vitality they display, their contributions to their community and the unusual challenges they may have overcome, are real. We want to be able to build the class around these different strengths. If we just did it randomly, we would have all able students, everybody could do the work. But that's not my job.

"My job is to pick students who are going to energize the place and make it an exciting, vibrant institution on a whole number of ranges. Some would say, 'OK, even if we admit randomly, wouldn't there be enough people for the band and the Daily and various other areas?' Yes, proportionately, people would probably spread out in some random distribution, but the pillars of strength wouldn't be there. And we want to find those."

It's 10 a.m. on a Friday morning in early January and there's not much movement in the admission office. Reading applications is a solitary experience: Most admission officers close their doors and turn off their telephones. Or they work at home.

Kinnally, however, is roaming the halls. First, he stops by Credentials to pick up a stack of 80 applications that he must sort into competitive and non-competitive piles by Monday morning.

Lunch-time rolls around and he hasn't read a single application. His morning was spent responding to letters from upset parents and relatives of students who were denied admission during the first round of early decision, a process that attracted 1,580 applicants, a 34 percent increase from the previous year.

"I like to respond very quickly to these letters because this is really important to people," Kinnally says. "I let them know how competitive the pool is, that the student is very lucky to have such caring support from his or her parents and that they didn't do anything wrong."

This year, a record number of students will be turned away from Stanford. The exact figure of how many applicants will be accepted in order to enroll a freshman class of 1,610 is still being debated.

Last year, 2,596 students were admitted and about 40 more than had been predicted accepted Stanford's offer. As a result, housing on campus was tight and a number of common rooms had to be converted into bedrooms.

Although Kinnally's staff has its work cut out for it this year, the dean says Stanford's growing popularity can only be viewed as a success.

"It's about Stanford being a great place," he says, with a boyish twinkle in his eye. "We talk a lot in our business about hot colleges, the ones that get all the great applications. I think that's us." ST