Working Smarter, Not Harder, in Admissions

Back in 2013, the University of Pennsylvania confronted the scarcity of time. For years an ever-increasing number of applications had swamped the admissions staff. Cycle after cycle, the days kept growing longer. “We were reading on weekends, reading in the evenings,” says Yvonne Romero da Silva, vice dean and director of admissions. “We needed a more sustainable model.”

When two colleagues proposed a new way of evaluating applicants, Ms. da Silva was skeptical. Then as the idea sunk in, she says, the hair on her arms stood up: “I thought, If this works, it could change the profession.”

Penn has since revamped the traditional evaluation process found at many selective colleges. Previously, admissions officers reviewed applications from their own recruitment territories, writing long summaries that would inform a selection committee’s final decisions. That time-consuming “first read” was a solitary task.

These days, Penn’s admissions officers read together in pairs, simultaneously reviewing each application on separate screens and discussing it as they go. They rate each applicant on specific criteria, recommend a decision (admit or deny), and type notes into the system — no more long summaries. Based on its competitiveness, the application is grouped into one of three categories en route to a final review and verdict.

Working Smarter, Not Harder, in Admissions

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Before the change, admissions officers doing a first read reviewed four or five applications an hour. Now the two-person teams can get through as many as 15. Although the innovation might not sound revolutionary, “committee-based evaluations” mark a significant shift in the nature of admissions work. Overwhelmed by application surges, at least a dozen other selective colleges have adopted Penn’s model. For admissions offices that conduct holistic reviews — considering factors beyond grades and test scores — the challenge is to save time without sacrificing thoroughness.

Efficiency isn’t the only benefit, says Eric J. Furda, dean of admissions at Penn. Initial application reviews, which used to take at least 15 minutes, now happen in about four. That’s fast, Mr. Furda concedes. “But we’re reading better, more analytically,” he says. “Now, there’s a conversation.”

During that conversation, the admissions officers have distinct roles. One assesses an applicant’s academic credentials, looking at the transcript, test scores, and recommendation, as well as the rigor of courses. The other reader focuses on the “student voice,” considering essays, interviews, and talents.

Working through the file, they contextualize the applicant’s achievements. The territory manager, who leads the review, might note the high school’s grading policy and the number of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches. The colleague might flag that an applicant’s parents are both lawyers, or that another lacks a college degree.

Though Penn’s admissions officers, like those elsewhere, have long considered such nuances, now each application is seen by at least two sets of eyes. That helps ensure fairness, Mr. Furda says: “This sets up more layers of evaluation, and it frees up time to go back to an application later.” And unless someone figures out how to add more weeks to the calendar, the model might soon become a fixture at time-strapped admissions offices everywhere.

Sometimes good news is bad news, too. Three years ago, Swarthmore College saw a 41-percent jump in applications, a cause for celebration. Yet Jim Bock, dean of admissions, contemplated the toll that windfall would take on his staff. “If people have a crushing number of apps to read,” he says, “you have to think about morale.”

Like many deans, Mr. Bock worries about the high rate of turnover among the field’s young professionals. “People who could go on to become great deans are derailed by reading season,” he says. “We’ve been losing people because of the reading load.”

Hoping to ease that burden, Swarthmore adopted Penn’s model in 2015. Previously, applications were evaluated separately by two admissions officers, who were expected to read 40 files a day, five days a week. Now, two-person teams review about 90 a day, with no reading duties on Wednesdays. Swarthmore also nixed written summaries; readers now leave notes, directing the committee to, say, an essay passage, or the third paragraph in a teacher recommendation. Usually, evaluations wrap up around 4:30 p.m., Mr. Bock says.

Over time, he has seen a “night and day” change in his staff. They’re happier, less harried, and more engaged, he says.

But are they making better decisions? Joseph (J.T.) Duck thinks so. “We do better by our applicants because our staff is energized,” says Mr. Duck, director of admissions at Swarthmore. “They’re not dragging by the end of reading season.”

Fatigue is one concern in admission offices; professional development is another. A recent survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling found that many early-career admissions officers want more training than they get. And those who said they lacked mentors “often ‘felt adrift.’”

Tag-team reading can help there, too, proponents say. The new model enables what Mr. Duck calls “cross-training.” On a given day, an admissions officer who recruits in New York gets to work with a colleague who recruits in California. Those pairings give staff members, who’ve traditionally thought first and foremost about applicants from their territories, a fuller view of the entire applicant pool. “You’re reading with an eye toward the whole class,” Mr. Bock says. “You’re advocating for the best class versus the students from your region.”

Like Penn, Swarthmore rotates its reading pairs, allowing less-experienced admissions officers to work side by side with seasoned colleagues (rookies don’t read together). When newbies plowed through files in relative isolation behind closed doors, teachable moments were harder to seize, Mr. Duck says. Now, he can more readily help new colleagues understand complexities of the job, like how to fairly assess a student whose test score is low compared with other applicants — but high compared with scores of students from similar backgrounds. “There’s stuff that gets caught on Day 1 that we wouldn’t have caught before,” Mr. Duck says. “Now we get to have these conversations in person, and it’s worthwhile for me to know how everyone on my team thinks.”

This year, Swarthmore received 22 percent more applications than last. With no additional staffing, the college is on pace to mail acceptances a week earlier than it did a year ago. The new model has also allowed the college to reduce the number of part-time readers it used to hire to help carry the load. In a realm of limited resources, those are all concrete benefits.

The new application-review strategy has drawn positive reviews on many other campuses, too. The California Institute of Technology, Pomona College, and Emory University have embraced a version of the plan, and several other colleges are leaning toward adopting it.

Still, it’s worth asking what, if anything, is lost when colleges scrap age-old rituals. “There is a beauty to really knowing the applicants deeply,” says Daniel F. Evans, director of college counseling at William Penn Charter School, in Philadelphia. “Part of me worries about institutions being a mile wide and an inch deep — knowing more applicants but knowing them less well.”

Mr. Evans, a former admissions officer at Penn, understands the heavy loads many staffs must carry. He recalls that he was required to read 35 to 40 applications a day, which left him about 12 to 15 minutes per file. Not a lot of time, but enough to feel like he had passed along solid recommendations to the selection committee. “Now, the pace at which colleges have to go just baffles me,” he says. “But there may be a tipping point when your applicant pool gets so big that there aren’t many alternatives besides reading all day, seven days a week.”

The new approach is perhaps an inevitable attempt to solve a problem that colleges helped create by pushing for more applications and promoting themselves far and wide. Even so, Mr. Evans says he appreciates Penn’s willingness to consider a new process, which, he believes, does not preclude a thoughtful review.

Ralph Figueroa is more skeptical. “This kind of worries me, this two-person triage,” says Mr. Figueroa, dean of college guidance at Albuquerque Academy, in New Mexico. “We’ve spent so much time telling students that colleges pay attention to who they are, all the different aspects of themselves. This doesn’t sound like it gets at much of that.”

Mr. Figueroa, a former associate dean of admissions at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, also understands the pressure colleges are under. The calendar, he says, has long forced admissions staffs to read at a “brutal” pace. But he sees a limit. “Understanding who a student is, the context of where they’re coming from, what they’re offering, and whether I want to advocate for them — that’s a lot to process,” he says. “That’s rushed even at 20 minutes.”

Robert G. Springall understands that concern. Yet he doesn’t think a longer evaluation is necessarily a better one. “A good, professional admissions officer picks up nuances in an application very quickly,” says Mr. Springall, dean of admissions at Bucknell University. “And they’re good at understanding how it’s different from other applications.”

Mr. Springall keeps a six-minute egg timer on his desk. That’s how long most first evaluations have taken since Bucknell moved to a team-reading model this past fall. Last year the admission staff barely finished its initial evaluations by March; as of late February, it was on pace to wrap up final decisions well before that.

One change often begets another. When Bucknell changed its evaluation model, it also changed its rating system. Admissions officers now have more leeway to account for subtleties they see, Mr. Springall says.

Previously, applicants with an SAT score of 1540, for instance, would have received a specific subscore that greatly boosted their academic rating, even if their academic record was otherwise mediocre. In short, some students might have been getting more credit than they deserved on the basis of a test — and vice versa. “We want to make sure we’re not overlooking important characteristics,” Mr. Springall says. “It’s more of a mix-and-match process now. You can give someone the benefit of the doubt.”

Now that early evaluations happen in the context of a conversation, admissions officers have more opportunities to hash out nuances. “There’s an intermingling of ideas,” Mr. Springall says. “You can ask, Why is it that you think this test score is telling you more than these grades and recommendations?”

Still, a tool is only a tool. Just because an admissions office might read applications differently than before doesn’t mean it will make drastically different decisions, at least not in great numbers. After all, colleges balance many competing priorities when selecting a class. The engineering program will always need enough engineering majors, the athletic teams will always need enough goalies. And just because an institution says it uses holistic review doesn’t mean all students get the full treatment.

Michael N. Bastedo, director of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, has shown how biases can shape admissions officers’ decisions. He sees some promise in the team-reading strategy. “One potential benefit is that you can’t have hidden criteria for why you make decisions,” he says. “When you have to make the case to people, you can question each other’s readings. I do think that could be productive.”

But the new model by itself won’t solve what Mr. Bastedo describes as a prevalent problem: Colleges often have too little contextual information about applicants.

And switching up a review process is surely easier than changing institutional opinion about what matters most in admissions. “If you didn’t care about context before,” he says, “you’re not going to care about it now.”

At colleges that do care about the subtleties in an application, however, the new method is a way to preserve elements of an old-school review in a high-volume age.

Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.