Yes, but it is not a hard job. You figure out (to the best of your ability) which applicants are objectively the most qualified and you go down the list and admit the most qualified applicants until in order of their qualifications until all the spots are filled and then you call it a day.
Of course, that is the way it should work. In reality, too many colleges and admissions offices use bs, subjective criteria (a/k/a so-called “holistic reviews”)which leads to an opaque process in which nobody really knows what the actual criteria for admittance are and leads to opportunities for colleges to discriminate all sorts of reasons including sex/gender/race/ethnitcity/geographic location and other factors that have nothing to do with academic ability.
By the way, the bs, subjective process also leads to massive widespread cheating among applicants…a recent intelligent.com survey of college applicants and students found that 61% admitted to including “untrue information” on their college applications
Of this group, 39% misrepresented their race or ethnicity
30% faked their letters of recommendation
34% wrote about untrue stories in their essays
40% say they included volunteer hours they hadn’t actually completed
39% faked job experience
38% included fake extracurriculars
32% included false internship experience
Less than one-third were caught by an admissions officer
I feel that the “holistic review” process gives students who might not have a stellar academic record a chance to showcase other attributes that could make them a candidate for admission. At the end of the day, no college or university wants their student body to be clones of one another. Simply reducing kids to a GPA and/or test score is just wrong.
The common app indicated that JMU doesn’t require an essay (my daughter submitted one anyway). Though, I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t read them.
Essays are a really curious way to try to evaluate which students should be admitted and which ones should not. If I were an admissions officer, how would I know whether anything contained in an essay is true and how would I know whether the student even wrote it? I am sure that many essays contain false and/or exaggerated information and many essays were written by parents, AI, college admissions consultants, etc. Additionally, while you may beleive that your daughter’s essay was “slammin” someone else may think it is complete garbage as there are no objective criteria which they use to evaluate essays.
I suspect that at some schools, essays are only looked when an applicant is considered borderline. I also suspect that some schools use essays to weed out applicants who have “undesirable” political or philosophical views. My son, who is going study engineering and/or computer science actually decided not to apply to one university with a very good reputation in those field once he saw saw the choice of topics that school offered for its supplmental essays which phrased in such a way that it was obvious that they were trying to weed out applicants who did not share their world view.
Maybe some are exaggerated or untrue. But my daughter’s was authentic. And if she is borderline, and they do read her essay, I’m having faith that her assigned admission counselor would find it genuine, and it may be the very thing that puts her into the accept pile after someone supported her in committee.
I do feel for the counselors–college admissions is a hot topic right now, and so much is under the microscope. AI will be used, no doubt there. But all we can do is control what we control. And for my daughter, it is making sure that she puts her absolute best foot forward for a school she loves. Again, I am choosing to have faith in the ability of the people who review.
Perhaps we should have robots read applications then, yes?
Students with “stellar” academic records are not clones just as students with lesser academic records are not clones. What is wrong is when applicants with objectively better academic records get excluded for applicants who are obviously less qualified becuase of some BS subjective reason. That is how you end up with certain groups getting disciminated against…I am not Asian, but everyone knows that Asians have been systematically disciminated against by many top tier universities because, as group, they academically outperform other groups by a wide margin. Now, that is something that is actually wrong.
The problem is that you really have no idea why he was admitted and that is problematic. Maybe, it was his essay, maybe it was because is application was read by an admissions officer that was in a good mood that day.
So far my son has received 4 offers of admission and 1 rejection. The really odd part is that the one rejection he did receive is from an objectively inferior school that is easier to get into than at least two of the schools that accepted him. While it will not negatively affect him since he has been offered admission to some excellent schools, the lack of transparency in the process and the actual admissions standards is very troubling and the whole system appears to be purposely constructed to allow a lot of mischief.
We are conditioned to think that way because so much in this world actually is false and exaggerated. and the survey of recent college applicants that I previously quoted and other studies show that cheating in the college application process is very widespread.
If you focus only on objective criteria (grades, scores), you’re going to end up with a bunch of kids for a few spots, which requires assessment of the “holistic” subjective stuff. Plus, even evaluating GPAs isn’t even objective — some schools are harder than others, even within the same school two 3.9s aren’t the same. There is subjectivity even in what may seem like it should be objective.