I know an alumna who interviews for Cornell, also on a volunteer basis. She’s told me that her role was much more of a recruiter than a gatekeeper - she was there to get the high-achieving students really pumped up about Cornell, to make them look forward to receiving their acceptance letters and making plans to attend. The little bit of gatekeeper that there was was basically just making sure that they didn’t admit any psychopaths - kids who came across smooth on paper but were really weird on the dangerous side in person. She straight-up said that their recommendation was just a small part of the admissions process.
The characterization of an alumnus interviewer as an “admissions officer” is bizarre, since he’s absolutely not. I definitely don’t think alumni interviewers read over the students’ admission packets to help the office make a decision. I wish the author hadn’t inflated their role because the point they were trying to make could’ve been made adequately if they were just upfront and honest about what alumni interviewers really did.
More interesting was the [url=<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/education/19counselor.html?pagewanted=all%5Dsecond%5B/url”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/education/19counselor.html?pagewanted=all]second[/url] article he linked - a NYT piece about independent admissions consultants and some of their scant backgrounds (for example, two of them claimed to have worked for Ivy admissions offices for years; the journalist uncovered that they had volunteered as alumni interviewers for a few years). One of them gives terrible outfit advice about what to wear to the admissions interview. Given what she’s wearing in the photo at the top of the article, I wouldn’t take advice from her about what to wear in a professional setting. But these people are charging $5,000 to $40,000 and more to wealthy parents who are desperate to garner any “edge” for their kids.