“How was your spring break? and other Misconceptions about Admission Work
by Karen Long, former assistant vice president of undergraduate admission and marketing
It’s a bit of a joke among us. Our busiest days are when high school students are on vacation. Hundreds of students and their families flock to South Florida for a college visit and a chance to shed the down coat for a few days. We love the energy of busy visit days — students with wide-eyes about the possibilities for their future and how their minds and resumes will grow.
In fact, we spent a good part of “vacation” reading applications and finalizing admission decisions. We find that when people talk to us about an applicant, test scores are one of the first things mentioned — it’s either hopefulness that a really high score will guarantee good news, or anxiety about a score that seems too low. In fact, we spend months reading applications because we want to know all aspects of a student’s record, far beyond a test score. At the University of Miami, a holistic review means we account for a student’s work and achievement outside of class, and their potential to have a positive impact on the campus community and in the world. Things like part-time jobs, volunteer work, entrepreneurship, and special talents get a lot of air time when we are discussing an applicant.
We appreciate the stress that students and their parents feel about the college search. I sometimes hear a sense of powerlessness that they feel about the whole process. But the truth is, students do have the upper hand at many points throughout this time. Early in the search process, colleges are buying names of high school students and getting creative about ways to get their attention. We travel the United States and the world with the goal of attracting students to our university. You are wanted! It feels to students like we have the upper hand during the months when we are reading applications. But during that time we are also thinking furiously about “yield” — how to enroll the students whom we admit. As soon as the admission letters are out the door, it’s a buyer’s market again, and it’s the students who make the decisions. We don’t begrudge this at all, in fact we respect it. My colleagues and I got into this profession because we really enjoy working with young people and helping them realize their dreams. That means we are completely invested in helping students find the right match — be it our university or another.
There is a lot of science to admission work. We have to determine the right number of students to admit so that we meet our enrollment goals — not too many, not too few. We have budgets to worry about and data that gets a lot of attention. But there is an art to what we do as well. If a computer could make 30,000 admission decisions, then we might just take spring break. But a computer can’t assess the nuances of each individual’s experiences and aspirations: how their curriculum and environment and personality and good and bad fortunes come together as a story. To that conversation, we bring a ton of experience and perspective. People ask about a formula, and it just isn’t that easy.
One of the reasons this all works is because an admission staff is a human staff. Everything from our events, to our recruitment strategies, to every single admission decision gets the benefit of a diverse and invested staff of human beings. The variety of perspectives on the University of Miami team is impactful to our mission. There are 24 of us, and collectively we have worked at 37 different institutions. Some of us have toddlers at home; some of us have teenagers or grown children. We are former teachers and guidance counselors, we have worked in community-based organizations, corporate America, and some of us are lifers in admission. We’ve lived overseas, we were raised in Miami, we come from small and big towns across the U.S. All of this comes together — not unlike our classrooms, actually — in conversations where we challenge each other, have our eyes opened and our sensitivities heightened, where we crave difference and feel limited when we don’t have it. We make better decisions this way, to be sure. And we are all better for it.
I appreciate that to an outsider, admission decisions can sometimes appear random. The truth is, our work is anything but. It is nuanced and thoughtful, as we balance many variables and multiple institutional objectives. Perhaps most importantly, we strive to be transparent about what we do, and we welcome questions. Just don’t ask us where we went for spring break.
