Georgetown Admissions Dean on UChicago Admissions' Practices

Cue7
Thu, 24 Oct 2013 16:35:02 +0000

This is a fascinating interview with Georgetown’s Dean of Admissions, Charles Deacon, who has held this post for decades:

[Admissions Dean Talks Staying Competitive - News - The Hoya](http://www.thehoya.com/news/admissions-dean-talks-staying-competitive-1.3098113?pagereq=1#.Uml94G309yI)

On pages 2-3, Deacon says the following about UChicago, as a counterexample to Georgetown:

"I’ll give you a great example: it’s the University of Chicago right now. They had a new president who came in and said, “You know, Chicago’s got this quirky admissions situation where they’re getting the ideal college students going through the process. But Chicago is as good as Columbia, and we only get 10,000 applications and they get 30,000, so we need 30,000 applications.” So they changed everything. Chicago was driven by trying to compare itself to Columbia, and they made that a big part of their application. And now, Johns Hopkins is being driven by having compare itself to Chicago.

We don’t have any particular school to compare ourselves to that causes us to have to act. If our pull is 10,000, that’d be one thing, but Georgetown has a great brand, great popularity and a very strong position. There has been no zealousness to just simply drive the numbers up for the sake of appearance, which we could easily do. Right now, we take a very responsible approach to who we even invite – we only write to about 40,000 people. Whereas obviously, Chicago is writing to much, much more than that. If we went to the common application, my guess is we’d add 10,000 people, because they would be people who’d say, “Oh, Georgetown? Yeah, it’s a high profile institution. I’ll check the box.” We’d only be adding people who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to the effort. They would look really good because their other options are Harvard, Princeton and Yale, but somebody who might have gone through the effort might end on our waiting list. How does that help anybody?"

My issues with Deacon’s analysis though, is it doesn’t account for the positional differences between UChicago and Georgetown 6-7 years ago. For decades, Georgetown was carefully building its college brand, establishing an allure, and nurturing its base. So, without needing to market heavily, it maintained striking distance in terms of selectivity vis a vis most ivy league schools. UChicago, on the other hand, treated its college like an afterthought for a good portion of the 20th century.

So, UChicago, under the directive of President Zimmer, needed to play catch up fast. I don’t think anyone anticipated the new approach being as successful as it has been, but it was a necessary step because the university had lagged on this front for so, so long.

On a related note, Deacon presents a nice student-centric view about admissions, but he’s certainly in the minority here. Most schools would like to drive up application numbers.

The key next steps for UChicago’s College to, as Georgetown, etc. have done, really burnish the brand of the College and make it as good as possible. I think there are several administrative barriers in place to this (namely, an administration that does not inspire confidence and still features many who remember the days of the College as an afterthought), but that’s really the next important step. The market has responded strongly to UChicago’s advertising, but it only takes a few missteps to turn marketing materials into a bunch of false promises.