How Colleges Court Admits

[asteriskea]

<p>Interesting article in The Midd on the nature of the admissions process and Middlebury’s new program to invite selected admits for a campus visit, spurred by intense competition with other LACs and the Ivies, in order to attract the best and the brightest:</p>

<p>

“Many colleges have these programs,” he said. “Carleton does and so do other colleges that are a little farther away from major metropolitan areas, like Middlebury, so it’s not at all unusual. It’s actually been going on for quite a while.”</p>

<p>Dean of Admissions at Hamilton College Monica Inzer said her school does not have a formal program like Middlebury’s but does occasionally offer students trips to campus.</p>

<p>“There are times that the Hamilton Admission Office offers ‘travel scholarships’ for select groups to come to visit our campus - sometimes to decide whether or not to apply, and sometimes for targeted admitted groups,” she wrote in an e-mail. “We assess our needs each year and make decisions according to our enrollment priorities.”</p>

<p>Cliff Thornton, associate dean of admisson at Wesleyan University, said his office regularly pays for students to visit campus. Every spring, Wesleyan invites around 50 students to its campus, and in the fall, around 100.</p>

<p>“We look for students that are outside the Northeast, haven’t visited the university and had no direct contact with us,” Thornton said. “We’ve been doing it for almost two decades.”</p>

<p>The College will send letters offering roughly 100 of its most highly qualified applicants a free trip to campus this spring in the hope of encouraging the applicants to matriculate, according to Clagett. He hopes that the College’s offer will draw between 50 and 60 students to campus, with the ultimate goal of convincing 30 or more to attend. The College identified the students who would receive the offer through a committee process.</p>

<p>“As we’re reading folders we have various indicators to try and identify the very top students,” Clagett said. “There were about 200 students who got that indicator. A week and a half ago we went through those names and selected those 101 who would get those letters. The students who received these excel academically but they also tended to have extracurricular talents that we’re looking for - and excellent personal qualities of course.”…</p>

<p>Clagett pointed out that offering prospective trips to students has become necessary due to the nature of the application process.</p>

<p>“We fear the college selection process has become a far less thoughtful process,” Clagett said. “They may not be thinking, ‘What college is the best fit for me?’ We want to make sure that they’ve gone through that thoughtful process. We think that if they see Midd that more will actually be attracted here.”…</p>

<p>Clagett said the program will cost less than one normal scholarship to fund. “It’s not costing the College that much,” he said. “We’d estimate that it will run $400 to $500 per student. For someone from Boston it won’t be much; for someone from San Francisco [will be] a little more.”

</p>

[mommusic]

<p>I wonder how common this is? I understand from previous postings on Case Western’s thread that they offer some free trips to visit the school.</p>

[bethievt]

<p>I wish they’d just ADMIT my kid already!!</p>

[hsmomstef]

<p>where do they pull the names of these “highly qualified” kids from? GCs at known schools – or elsewhere?</p>

[asteriskea]

<p>These students have applied and have been placed by the adcoms high on the admit pile - so this is not a way to lure prospective applicants to apply - those chosen for the campus visit are being courted, or wooed, by the college to accept an offer of admittance and actually attend.</p>

[cmbmom]

<p>I cannot remember the names of the schools but every April a few schools in the North East use Amtrack to transport any accepted student on east coast to their Accepted Student Days. It is free for the student. The article last year quoted an Adm. Coun. as saying it was their last chance to get these students to enroll and well worth the expense to the college.</p>

[fireflyscout]

<p>Carleton will pay half of travel costs up to $200 for National Merit finalists to visit. Hamilton has a specific endowed fund to attract students from Texas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina which offers travel scholarships as well as academic scholarships.</p>

[mini]

<p>My d. was offered free airfare and taxi to campus by three of four different places on the east coast (she only used one). Another school (my alma mater) had the head of her major department, and three recent graduates calling and e-mailing her for a month. She received a call from the college pres. of the school she now attends, and a personal(ized?) letter from the pres. at another. We also got the sense that they were willing to “find more need” if we desired.</p>

[Tarhunt]

<p>I know a young lady who is a finalist for the high school “Nobel Prize” (she won the Intel), as well as a top cross country runner. Her parents tell me that the phone simply rang off the hook for months until she “committed” to Harvard. And, yes, Harvard faculty were calling her asking her to attend.</p>

<p>I quite amazing young lady. I judged her science fair project one year when she was in the second grade. She had developed her own method of estimating pi. I’m not kidding. And she understood exactly what she was doing.</p>

[jmmom]

<p>My S, who was a very good student but not superstar caliber, was courted by the schools where he was merit-$$ contender. No free visits. But letters and phone calls from faculty, department heads, alums, current students. From one school, letters to us from parent of current students as well.</p>

<p>The school where he had the biggest merit offer invited him to a special “admitted students” thing - for scholarship offerrees only. But they didn’t foot the bill. It sealed the deal for him, though.</p>

[momofthreeboys]

<p>I don’t think travel stipends are that unusal with the private colleges. My S was offered travel stipends to several schools. He had already applied, they were sure bet schools. He was geographically desireable to the school and in the top 20% for the school based on common data sets. I think this is not exclusive of only the top private schools.</p>

[TheDad]

<p>I wonder if the LAC’s do this more than the large universities. Details are already lost in my foggy memory but Smith paid some money for my D’s travel to accepted students week and we had to provide receipts and I remember discounting parts of the trip because D was visiting Wellesley on the same trip and it seemed seriously uncool for Smith to have to pick up the tab for that.</p>

[ejr1]

<p>Amherst has different profs call the Early Writes. For D, it was Pres, Marx, who also teaches. Then, she was invited to Diversity Admitted Students’ Weekend, with the school making all travel arrangements, picking her up at the airport, feeding her, giving her a place to stay, and returning her to the airport. Everything paid for by the school. This happens every year.</p>

[csleslie51]

<p>Many kids from our area who had applied to schools back east were flown out free of charge, but upon closer inspection, they all turned out to be URMs. If you weren’t, you paid your own way (didn’t matter if your stats were higher)</p>

[asteriskea]

<p>According to this follow-up article in the Midd, Middlebury College</p>

<p>

was buzzing last week with the 60 prospective students who received free trips to the College. The visits were part of the busiest time of year for the Office of Admissions, which also announced plans to introduce more financial aid dollars for qualified students.</p>

<p>“With a 16 percent increase in applications, competition this year was even more intense,” Dean of Admissions Bob Clagett said. “Between the 16 percent increase this year and the 18 percent increase from the year before, we’ve had an increase in applications of 38 percent over the last two years.”</p>

<p>The College continued to maintain a very competitive acceptance rate.</p>

<p>“We had an overall admittance rate of 23 percent,” Clagett said. “We admitted 1,658 kids out of 7,185. We’re hoping for around 600 for the September class and 90 for the February class. That February number is about 14 lower than this year’s class and is part of the scaling back of the Feb program.”…</p>

<p>The rise in applications at the College exceeds the rate seen at peer institutions by at least five percent, according to Clagett…</p>

<p>Other NESCAC schools reported increases in applications, according to Clagett. Applications to Bowdoin are up nine percent, Williams increased five percent, Colby rose 10 percent and Amherst applications increased by nine percent, according to data given to the Office of Admissions from other colleges.</p>

<p>Last week, the Office of Admissions also facilitated the arrival of the 100 “likely” students who received free trips from the College to come and visit. Students arrived on Thursday and stayed until Friday night. Over 60 students accepted the offer to visit the College…</p>

<p>“One-third [of the visitors] are students of color,” said Clagett. “One-half are eligible for grant assistance.”</p>

<p>Clagett said he expects the number of admitted students who enroll in the College to remain constant…</p>

<p>In addition to sending out the notices of admittance, and hosting the likely students, the administration announced an effort last week to reduce the loan portion of students’ aid package by up to $2,500, starting with the Class of 2011.</p>

<p>“Our average debt at graduation is higher than many competitors,” Clagett said. “We are concerned, beyond whether financial aid is comparable to other schools, that students’ debt at graduation will have an impact on post-graduation plans. It would be sad if someone couldn’t pursue lower-paying public service jobs because of debts.”</p>

<p>Clagett said the College hoped that debt would not become a barrier to admissions.</p>

<p>“We certainly want to make sure the idea of debt does not affect their decision to apply,” he said. “The average debt at graduation is a very important question that is very seldom asked. Our hope is to create even more socioeconomic diversity in the student body.”

</p>

<p><a href=“http://media.www.middleburycampus.com/media/storage/paper446/news/2007/04/11/News/To.Snatch.The.Applicants.Admissions.Increases.Aid-2833109.shtml?refsource=collegeheadlines[/url]”>http://media.www.middleburycampus.com/media/storage/paper446/news/2007/04/11/News/To.Snatch.The.Applicants.Admissions.Increases.Aid-2833109.shtml?refsource=collegeheadlines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;