Bari Norman, a former admissions officer at Barnard College and Columbia University who co-founded the college-consulting company Expert Admissions, said that at a small number of schools, interviews are evaluative, but at many others, they’re purely informative. Students who can’t meet with an interviewer face-to-face are typically offered the chance to have a chat via Skype.īut MIT’s interview system is far from the norm, and at some schools, participating in the conversations is just like showing up for a campus tour: another way to demonstrate interest. MIT deploys an army of trained alumni around the world to help out with this component of the application process. Stu Schmill, the dean of admissions at MIT, said the school treats the interviews as another avenue to get to know students, especially because not everyone communicates as well on paper as they do in person. The same was true for just 1 percent of those who didn’t. MIT-which received 20,247 applications last year and accepted just 7.2 percent of those students-is transparent about the import of the interview: The school’s admissions website says that 10.8 percent of applicants who opted to participate in an interview or had it waived were accepted. Take the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example. And so, as the pressure to get into the right college continues to weigh heavily on high-school seniors, it is perhaps time to consider why schools continue to offer interviews in the first place, and to question whether the practice could be done away with entirely.Ĭertainly there are schools that give weight to the interviews and make them available for virtually every applicant, and that accessibility is crucial if the practice is to have any sort of impact on an application. Plenty of universities don’t offer interviews at all, and, as evidenced by the NACAC study, many others do so for reasons other than substance. It’s gotten so intense that, for many applicants, it’s as if leaving one card on the table-even if it’s a card the dealer has explicitly said will not yield a full house-is akin to busting on purpose. The elite-college admissions process has become a frenzied, commodified race to pick up as many points as possible. In its 2017 State of College Admission report, the National Association for College Admission Counseling found that just 4.7 percent of colleges view interviews of “considerable importance” in admissions decisions-meanwhile, 46 percent of schools said the conversations were irrelevant. But unlike elements such as transcripts and personal essays, they’re often extraneous. Interviews, which kick off for some schools just after the January 1 regular-decision deadline, are in some ways like other aspects of the college-application process: stressful and mysterious. I reassured the student that this wouldn’t hurt her chances of being accepted, but still, she begged me to give her a slot, offering to fly hundreds of miles to participate in a 30-minute conversation she was convinced would make or break her future. The student was ineligible for the optional alumni interviews offered to most applicants, and she was ostensibly aware that this last-ditch effort was unlikely to change the reality: She simply lived too far from where they were offered. She had already called my alma mater’s admissions office at least twice and seemed to know what I was going to say before I started my sentence. The prospective student on the other end of the phone was frantic and desperate.
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