With so many media articles harping on the spread admissions stress these days, it is fascinating to read this 1996 feature article on (former Dean and Director of Undergraduate Admissions) Margit Dahl, who was asked to reflect on what was clearly seen, ten years ago, to be a disturbing change that heightened demand on the Yale admissions department. Of course, Richard Shaw is currently at work to attract ever-increasing numbers of "world-class students" to Stanford.
" "There's a lot more interest today in packaging, in image," says Dahl. "We as a society are more packaged than we were 20 years ago, and that affects admissions too."
"In her two decades of visiting schools, reading applications, and interviewing students, she's seen the stakes rise on both sides. "In the past, the admissions office here didn't have to work so hard at recruiting," she says. "We could rely on the Yale name to attract the best students." The University still fills its classes with top-notch scholars, says Dahl; it just has to seek them out more deliberately. That means reaching out to more students, in more places. In addition to visiting three or four high schools a day on their recruiting rounds, as admissions officers have done for years, they now hold evening meetings to which every promising high school student within a prescribed area receives an invitation. "It's not just a matter of keeping up with the Joneses," says Dahl of her office's stepped-up recruiting efforts. "It's about talking to kids from different parts of the country that we've never reached before."
Dahl says that she and Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid, take the task of recruiting world-class students quite literally. In the four years since he succeeded Worth David, who had served as dean since 1972, Shaw has gone abroad four times, scouting Asia, Europe, and the Middle East for qualified students. "We realized that for a place of Yale's stature, we weren't attracting as many international students as we should," says Dahl, pointing out that Shaw also initiated a major redesign of Yale's "viewbook," the brochure that provides some prospective students with their only glimpse of the campus."
http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/is...dmissions.html