<p>Having done interviews for Yale, I’d say they’re not particularly important. Example, I received a hand-written note from an admissions officer telling me that write-up I’d sent in - pre-internet days - gave such a wonderful picture of the applicant, etc. He didn’t get in and really deserved to. </p>
<p>I also interviewed in two very different geographic areas and found the quality of kids who got in from the one far from Yale was lower. This was a while ago.</p>
<p>I stopped interviewing when the admissions rate dropped to chance levels. Bottom line was that I started to feel that if an applicant didn’t fit a specific category - significant legacy (notably $$$), recruited athlete, certain minority - then getting in was rolling dice. I began to believe - and still believe - the school tries to pick kids but they’d do just as well establishing a statistical cutoff and then drawing at random. They don’t know a kid and the idea that they can adequately evaluate based on tiny slivers of data is kind of silly.</p>
<p>And frankly, most alumni of all but the recent past realize the odds are they would not get in today because it is just chance and the applicant pool has become ridiculously large.</p>