Article on admissions process

[SSHoya]

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/03/AR2010100304669.html

[CWS]

I was confused at first, because I saw this article last week (it was also tweeted by Vox Populi).

I see now that this is another version, now appearing in the Metro Section. The earlier version (which seems the same except a different title) appeared in a Higher Education 'blog' (?)

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/28/AR2010092804421.html

The earlier version allows comments; the Metro section one does not.

[kchoya]

"But for Nelson, the high school senior from McLean, the Common Application has proven an irresistible time-saver. Now he says he's thinking of applying to a 10th school, Harvard, "because it's on the Common App. You might as well."

Yes, that's how you ought to approach the process.

Glad to see Harvard as an afterthought. Methinks the kid's chances of getting in Harvard are probably not too high.

[Jack]

Oct 4, 2010 11:17:57 GMT -5 kchoya said:

"But for Nelson, the high school senior from McLean, the Common Application has proven an irresistible time-saver. Now he says he's thinking of applying to a 10th school, Harvard, "because it's on the Common App. You might as well."

Yes, that's how you ought to approach the process.

Glad to see Harvard as an afterthought. Methinks the kid's chances of getting in Harvard are probably not too high.

1. That is pretty much why I applied to Harvard, and I damn near got in (waitlisted).

2. Having that quote in a prominent newspaper is unlikely to help his chances.

As for the topic of the article, I have always respected Dean Deacon's purity about the Common Application, but I am beginning to wonder if the battle is lost - if every Ivy and all but MIT in the USNWR Top 25 are now on the Common App, maybe it's time to join the herd, create a supplement that still requires kids to do some extra work, and get that cozy little 2000 applicant bump.

So long as GU was not alone in their commitment to personalizing the admissions process, I was confident we would still see all the best applicants who have a genuine interest in Georgetown. Now, I worry that some kids who had Georgetown in a group of similar schools will simply decide that applications to Harvard, Penn, Duke, Stanford, and Columbia are sufficient, so why bother with a whole different application for Georgetown, too.

[DFW HOYA]

Oct 4, 2010 11:28:17 GMT -5 Jack said:

As for the topic of the article, I have always respected Dean Deacon's purity about the Common Application, but I am beginning to wonder if the battle is lost - if every Ivy and all but MIT in the USNWR Top 25 are now on the Common App, maybe it's time to join the herd, create a supplement that still requires kids to do some extra work, and get that cozy little 2000 applicant bump.

On the contrary, I think GU would do well to stay far away from the Common App. What's the point of an extra 2,000 apps for people with marginal interest in GU to begin with? The school needs less apps who see GU as a safety school for the Ivies and more with a demonstrated interest to begin with. If they really want to go to Georgetown, they'll apply.

The common app reminds me of the College Nights I attend for GU and the University's insistence that prospects mail in a post card for materials and not leave it at the table. As it was explained to me, "if someone can't bother to put a postage stamp on it, they're probably not that interested to begin with." Of course, they can use e-mail, too, but the Common Application is the equivalent of a post-card in a fishbowl for these kids, which is why BC gets 30,000 applications but yields just 28% of their accepted students. It's just another box to check.

The University should not seek to be "Brown on the Potomac" nor the "UCLA of the East", but, to borrow an old John Thompson quote, to be "the Georgetown of Georgetown". For all the programs at GU which seem to go nowhere, Admissions is not one of them--it does things right.

[Jack]

Here is the problem - 17 year old kids, even the really smart ones who get into Georgetown, do not always make rational decisions and don't always know exactly what they want out of life, or even the next 4 years of it. So when it appears that Georgetown is the only school that is putting up this additional barrier to their application, unless they know that GU is absolutely where they want to be, they may decide not to apply. I think a serious supplement, with the school-specific essay questions, is more than sufficient to make the application more challenging than ticking off a box and also provides the admissions committee with the opportunity to see whether the student is serious about attending GU.

It is true that the admissions office has been wonderful things for the university, and Dean Deacon has had better vision for what Georgetown should be than almost anyone else on campus. He is approaching 40 years as Dean and is still an innovator. But he has also made his impact by thinking from a confident position of strength. Worrying about whether students come to GU as their first choice has never been a concern of his, and keeping yield numbers high by limiting the total applicant pool is not an argument he would make. I am not convinced one way or the other, and I am not really a part of the admissions world any more so I don't have the most nuanced perspective, but I do wonder if the admirable philosophy behind the separate GU application is limiting the pool in any way.

[hilltopper2000]

I'll defer to Jack on admissions issues, but it seems to me that any strategy that depresses GU's applicant pool (and thereby inflates our acceptance rate) is ill advised. My impression is that very few high school seniors know much about any of the schools to which they apply. They see GU with a 20% acceptance rate and Brown with a 10% acceptance rate, they'll view Brown as more desirable. They won't know that the difference may be a significant number of applicants that neither Brown nor Georgetown would seriously consider. The low admissions number then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the school's actual competitiveness increases. This doesn't strike me as rocket science.

My concern about Dean Deacon--much like my concern about the old guard of administrators who DeGioia has almost entirely replaced--is that they came to Georgetown long before it competed with the Browns of the world for applicants and faculty. They are thrilled with where Georgetown stands, among the most elite schoools in the country. I came to Georgetown well after it had established this position. I'm not thrilled with it. I think we need leaders who are constantly hungry; leaders who are never satisfied with where we are. I remember when the Hoyas went to the Sweet 16 and JTIII complained at the banquet about how the team should have done better. We were all quite pleased with a Sweet 16 after the Esh years, but JTIII thinks in terms of Final Fours. And (as someone commented at the time) to be a successful coach at the highest level, one needs to be that imbalanced. I think the same can be said for leaders of elite, highly competitive educational institutions. Like it or not, we are in the big leagues and we need to play like it.

[DFW HOYA]

Oct 4, 2010 13:51:44 GMT -5 hilltopper2000 said:

My concern about Dean Deacon--much like my concern about the old guard of administrators who DeGioia has almost entirely replaced--is that they came to Georgetown long before it competed with the Browns of the world for applicants and faculty. They are thrilled with where Georgetown stands, among the most elite schoools in the country. I came to Georgetown well after it had established this position. I'm not thrilled with it. I think we need leaders who are constantly hungry; leaders who are never satisfied with where we are.

I don't think anyone sits around and thinks Georgetown is set, but the school doesn't have an open checkbook for those hungry leaders, the same leaders that will go somewhere else very soon thereafter. Athletics had a "hungry" leader in Bernard Muir, but when the money ran tight he went elsewhere.

Oct 4, 2010 13:51:44 GMT -5 hilltopper2000 said:

I remember when the Hoyas went to the Sweet 16 and JTIII complained at the banquet about how the team should have done better. We were all quite pleased with a Sweet 16 after the Esh years, but JTIII thinks in terms of Final Fours.

JT III may think in terms of Final Fours, but for non-BCS institutions they are increasingly rare and not something to stake your coaching future on. His immediate problem is that while Georgetown spends a lot on basketball, it invests very little of that, and that's a long-term liability in his ability to maintain a top program.

[Jack]

Having worked for him for 7 years, I can say that Dean Deacon is anything but complacent, but he is also not driven by a goal of simply adding more applicants without actually doing anything to improve the university. His focus now is on how Georgetown can be more competitive for the best students, the ones it loses to the Ivies, and how Georgetown can be more appealing to students who are not from wealthy families - both of these goals involve improving financial aid. Adding non-competitive applicants to the pool is fool's gold, and anyone who is actually concerned about young people would not do it if they were thinking it through. My concern at this point is that GU may be losing out on very strong applicants who would otherwise come into the pool if they were given the chance to apply through the common app.

[CWS]

My concern with opening the application process to the common app is that getting into Gtown is already such a crap shoot. The times I've sat in on the process as a faculty rep, I've been amazed at how many decisions come down to things like, "I didn't like the tone of that counselor's letter"; "he sounds too intense"; "her picture makes her look 'x'", etc. There's often no consensus: one reviewer has one set of preferences, the other another, so that whether a person is accepted or not already depends too much on the idiosyncrasies of the members of that particular committee. And you can't get around such almost-arbitrary calls; since the pool is so deep and talented, you're forced to split hairs. I fear that adding more applicants to the selection process would make it even more arbitrary. At least now we have a filter in place that gives us an indication about who is serious.

[Bigs"R"Us]

If the Common Application is used by 23 out of the top-25 USNWR ranking universities, then the battle is already lost. The truly innovative schools were the ones who adopted the Common Application first. It's like stubbornly sticking to Beta, when the world has gone VHS.

[jgalt]

Oct 4, 2010 15:51:56 GMT -5 Bigs"R"Us said:

If the Common Application is used by 23 out of the top-25 USNWR ranking universities, then the battle is already lost. The truly innovative schools were the ones who adopted the Common Application first. It's like stubbornly sticking to Beta, when the world has gone VHS.

This.

You lose nothing by using a common app. Anything that you think you are losing means nothing in the scheme of things.

What it really comes down to is that gtown is adding essentially a barrier to entry for students. To many students the difference between Georgetown and Wash U and Vanderbilt is minimal, so by adding a separate application you are only making Georgetown less attractive by comparison.

There are students who have specific opinions of all the schools but most apply to a lot of schools then see where they get in then make the tough decision. Not applying to somewhere isnt the hardest of choices.

Those of you who went to Med School where there is no common app should understand this- if 75% of the Med Schools in this country were on a common app would you even consider the other 25% unless you had some special attachment to it?

[CWS]

Oct 4, 2010 15:51:56 GMT -5 Bigs"R"Us said:

It's like stubbornly sticking to Beta, when the world has gone VHS.

Is sticking to Beta that bad when consumer demand outstrips supply by several times over (and when going to VHS would only make that problem worse)?

[jgalt]

Oct 4, 2010 20:15:14 GMT -5 CWS said:

Oct 4, 2010 15:51:56 GMT -5 Bigs"R"Us said:

It's like stubbornly sticking to Beta, when the world has gone VHS.

Is sticking to Beta that bad when consumer demand outstrips supply by several times over (and when going to VHS would only make that problem worse)?

The real answer is to be the first to move to DVD, not waiting for Shawshank Redemption to come out on Beta.

[DFW HOYA]

Oct 4, 2010 15:51:56 GMT -5 Bigs"R"Us said:

If the Common Application is used by 23 out of the top-25 USNWR ranking universities, then the battle is already lost. The truly innovative schools were the ones who adopted the Common Application first. It's like stubbornly sticking to Beta, when the world has gone VHS.

Not all public Top 25 (or top 50, for that matter) schools use the Common Application because, like Georgetown, they don't need to bump up their numbers to look better.

FWIW, of the three private schools that don't use it, USC is actively considering making the jump.

voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/10/will_usc_be_next_to_join_the_c.html

[RusskyHoya]

A little surreal to wake up this morning and find the view I had from my desk for a year and a half staring at me from the front page of the Post's Metro section...

CAD has made his case often and in great detail, and I think the logic is sound. Georgetown's pool is already so deep that we neither need nor really want the extra group of applicants who see "the difference between Georgetown and Wash U and Vanderbilt" as "minimal." If you haven't done enough research to dispel that sort of thinking, the likelihood of you being admitted to Georgetown and then choosing to attend is not terribly great. Especially when the factor that most directly correlates with yield is whether or not the student visited campus; in other words, those who had the interest in Georgetown to make the effort to visit (granted, I haven't seen those numbers broken down by visits before vs. after admission, but it would have to be mostly the former, since non-EA admits only get a month after admission to visit). If you were interested enough to make it to campus, I think the prospect of completing a separate application will not be enough to deter you from applying.

It's also true that many of the CommonApp supplements take as much time as a separate application; it doesn't take more than 5 minutes to fill out Georgetown's Part I, and the Part II is similar to some supplements I've seen. So while the whole "barrier to applying" concern is a real one, I think on balance it does not have all that great of an effect. I would say the woefully archaic nature of the online application (e.g. inability to save and come back, which required it to be completed in one sitting) has been much more of a deterrent, both because of the inconvenience and because of the impression of technological backwardness. This is being addressed, fortunately.

Of course, the three SAT II "requirement" has probably done much more to drive off applicants by several orders of magnitude. But that's a separate, though related, discussion.

[CTHoya08]

I only applied to six colleges, so it didn't matter much to me that one or two of them were not common app.

My law school application process was completely different. The law school process is basically a common app one, with some schools requiring supplemental essays. As a result I applied to 14 schools, including some to which I probably would not have had I needed to do an individualized application. Among those were WashU, which I visited upon being admitted (and hated) and Vanderbilt, where I ended up enrolling.

One school I did not apply to was Duke; despite the waiver of the application fee and opportunity to get my admission decision within a week, I couldn't bring myself to write an additional "why Duke?" essay, because I couldn't actually see myself going there.

So I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that I think common app plus a supplemental essay might be a good middle ground. If a student is truly disinterested in a school he won't write that extra essay. But I think it's foolish to weed out potential students because they don't "really want to come to GU" when they are just seventeen years old and trying to figure out what to do with their lives.

I know people here have some strange distrust for "Ivy League rejects" as students we want to attract, but I don't get it. These Ivy League rejects are often very bright and capable people who, you know, didn't know they would be rejects until they got rejected. Wouldn't we rather have that kid than lose him to a place like BC or Vanderbilt because it was more convenient for him to apply there when he thought he was going to enroll at Princeton anyway? Just because someone would have rather been in Cambridge or Hanover on April 1 doesn't mean he can't be really excited to be in DC on August 28.

[theexorcist]

(SNIP)

Oct 4, 2010 12:37:20 GMT -5 DFW HOYA said:

Oct 4, 2010 11:28:17 GMT -5 Jack said:

The University should not seek to be "Brown on the Potomac" nor the "UCLA of the East", but, to borrow an old John Thompson quote, to be "the Georgetown of Georgetown".

What a pity that the T-shirt slogans have already been chosen.

Anyway. There are two pluses to the Common App. One is that Georgetown's admit rate goes down, improving their ranking in the US News rankings. A minor plus, to be sure.

The other result is that Georgetown becomes self-selecting for those who want Catholic education, or politics/international relations, or basketball. As a few people have mentioned, Georgetown makes you work to go there. It ensures that people who are mildly interested probably don't spend the effort.

This is a good thing in that the people who go there want to go there. It's a bad thing in that there's more groupthink.

[LizziebethHoya]

The Times wrote a really good, comprehensive article on this that has some pretty telling quotes from admissions officers at top colleges. The article itself is questioning the rising selectivity of colleges and especially the marketing practices of colleges to attract more students. As a Common App holdout, Georgetown is mentioned.

www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/education/edlife/07HOOVER-t.html?pagewanted=1&hp

[happyhoya1979]

The genius of Georgetown has always been that it has been true to itself and its values. Georgetown's personalized admission process is an important part of this, every bit as important as our five course curriculum which works our undergraduates harder than virtually every other elite school in America. I hope that Georgetown keeps its own application and never succumbs to external pressure.