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Who Really Reads Your Admissions Application?

There are still a number of schools where faculty members sit on the admissions committees, while at others they work in a consultative manner to the committee. At one place, for instance, faculty members conduct applicant interviews and carry quite a bit of weight in the decision process.

Faculty also tend to be much more involved in specialized and competitive programs, whether conducting auditions in the performing arts or reviewing applicants for programs with additional standards such as business or engineering. Bear in mind, this regards applications for admission to undergraduate programs. Faculty committees generally review and decide all graduate applications, especially for doctoral candidates.  Regardless, it is usually faculty that set the institutional admission standards. At Mason, for instance, faculty members do not sit on undergraduate admission committees, but there is a subcommittee of the faculty senate that reviews our undergraduate admission standards and procedures, and I present on admissions to the full faculty senate each year.

Undergraduate admission committees, then, are likely made up of the admission officers from that institution in some combination, and the number who participate may vary widely. Your application will generally be read by one to two admissions officers, and then may be brought to an admissions committee depending on their evaluation.

Many schools use some kind of scoring system, some done by computer — so the first review is done by your score, before any human even sees your application. The computer recommends a decision to an individual (who, if he or she agrees, makes the decision) or to a committee. There are even some schools where the computer makes a significant number of the decisions with no human involvement AT ALL.

In other words, it’s not really an ADCOMM that has the most influence on your decision. It’s AN admissions officer, usually the person who reads all the files from your school, state, and/or region. That person is the one most likely to be representing you at committee, if you go there at all.

So stop worrying about some scary committee that is carefully reading every word you share with them. Worry about that one person whose job it is to do so, and hope they are responsible enough to do so thoroughly. You won’t know if that’s a Dean of Admissions with 20 or more years of experience reading thousands of applications, or a first-year admissions counselor, just graduated from college, having their first application evaluation experience — and you can’t be sure which one would be better.

You also won’t know that reader’s sense of humor, or what mood might strike that day, or whether (lucky you) the reader thinks travel to Antarctica is the coolest thing EVER.

Don’t get sucked in by a lot of the bogus advice about "what works" in an essay. It’s usually shared by someone who got in (or whose kid got in) somewhere and believes (usually mistakenly) that their admission was because of this INCREDIBLE ESSAY. It happens — but it’s not like we call everyone and say, "Finally! I got an essay I LOVE — now if you would all just write like THIS I’d admit ALL of you."

 Next up – a glimpse into WHY colleges handled admission this way, then finally some insight on what you can do about it.  Be seeing you.

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Andrew Flagel is Dean of Admissions and Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Development, George Mason University

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