Ever wonder how admissions officers decide which applicants to invite to join the incoming class? Jacques Steinberg, who wrote a New York Times best-seller, “The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College,” based on a year of reporting at Wesleyan two decades ago, recently spent a day behind the closed doors of Dartmouth’s undergraduate admissions selection committee. In this week’s episode, he and host Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions and financial aid, discuss what Steinberg saw and heard, as Coffin and colleagues considered, debated and voted on the applications of dozens of candidates for the Class of 2027. Among the factors the admissions officers weighed: the narratives, personal as well as academic, that emerged from the various components of the students’ applications.
Ever wonder how admissions officers decide which applicants to invite to join the incoming class? Jacques Steinberg, who wrote a New York Times best-seller, “The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College,” based on a year of reporting at Wesleyan two decades ago, recently spent a day behind the closed doors of Dartmouth’s undergraduate admissions selection committee. In this week’s episode, he and host Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions and financial aid, discuss what Steinberg saw and heard, as Coffin and colleagues considered, debated and voted on the applications of dozens of candidates for the Class of 2027. Among the factors the admissions officers weighed: the narratives, personal as well as academic, that emerged from the various components of the students’ applications.
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's dean of admissions and financial aid. Welcome to the Admissions Beat.
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If you're a college sports fan, March in the U.S. is known as March Madness. The basketball tournament gets underway and it's this all-consuming multi-week affair. I have my own version of March madness with a little "m" on madness where I come into the work of the work, and that is the selection of the class where all the recruiting, all the talking, all the reading turns into a conversation about who do we invite to join next year's incoming class. And that's known in many places as committee. And the reading turns into debating as one by one, a class takes shape. And so this week, we're bringing you inside that process for a rare peek behind the curtain into what I think is the most opaque part of the college admission process where an application gets assessed, a decision is made and at the end of the month released.
Very few people who aren't admission officers, even guidance counselors see that. But there's an exception to that norm. And that exception is named Jacques Steinberg, who 23 years ago went inside the Wesleyan admission process as a reporter for The New York Times and spent a year watching as that team of admission officers and applicants and college counselors did their work. And the book that came out of that exploration, The Gatekeepers, which was published in 2002 is to this day a really interesting case study in how a selective college does what it does. So 23 years later, Jacques came back inside the room where it happened, with a little nod to those of you who love Hamilton, to see how Dartmouth's class of 2027 was being selected.
And so in a fly-on-the-wall visit, he joined us on March 8th for a full day of community deliberations and he sat there like a kid in a candy store listening and scribbling notes. And he joins me today on the Admissions Beat to quiz me about what he saw and how many times I saw him itching to raise his hand. When we come back, my friend and colleague, Jacques Steinberg will join me again this time an inside look at the committee process. We'll be right back.
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So hello, Jacques. Welcome back to Admissions Beat.
Jacques Steinberg:
Lee, it's a pleasure to be with you and particularly to talk with you about this subject.
Lee Coffin:
Oh, you're such an admissions nerd that it's always fun to see you get a really inside look at what happens.
Jacques Steinberg:
Look, since I was an applicant to college myself many years ago, I've always been fascinated by this question, "How do admissions officers do what they do?" And that question has run like a through line through my entire career as a journalist, as an author, as a senior executive at a college access nonprofit. How do you all decide whom to invite, your word, into the class, whom to invite onto the waiting list or whom to turn down? What are the criteria? What's the process?
How do you all get through all those applications? And I was grateful for the opportunity to revisit that question yet again, as you said, sitting in on your committee session earlier this month. And I do, a little bit later in this episode, want to talk with you about some of my observations of what I saw, some of what I heard, some of your reflections having led that session. But I also don't want to assume knowledge on the part of our listeners. And so with your indulgence, I'd like to put what I saw in the context of the process that led up to it. Does that sound fair?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Jacques Steinberg:
So if we imagine in our audience, high school juniors and those who are younger who've not yet put together their applications, their parents, other adults, mentors, counselors who are going to help them. I also imagine some high school seniors who are in the middle of this literally as we speak. Let's assume they don't know what happens behind the frosted glass doors of that room that you invited me into. And I'll set more of the scene later. Take us from the moment of submit. Someone has hit submit on a regular decision application. What happens?
Lee Coffin:
So the deadline was January 3rd, and as in most admission cycles, we have an avalanche of submissions in the week right before that. So literally thousands of applications land with an electronic thud at the deadline and they get sorted into geographic bins. So at Dartmouth, every admission officer manages a region where we travel and visit high schools and get to know the landscape of that place so when we meet the applicants, we can assess them in context and have some sense of, "Where do you live? Where do you go to school, what are the norms in that place?" Because one of the things I think that gets lost in the broad conversation about college admissions is a kid from a rural small public high school in Montana has different resources and different norms than somebody attending a large suburban public high school or maybe an independent school on the East coast or the West Coast.
And one's not right, one's not wrong, they're just different. And as readers, we need to shift as we begin the assessment to start with, "Where are we and how do we meet someone?" So the beginning of this process that culminated in the selection committee is reading season. It is spending literally weeks reading through the files. The way we do it is a two-step process. The first read by the territory manager is documentary. Read the file, distill it into its component parts, make a map if you will, of what's in the file, not so much assess it as report it and what are the courses offered at the school, what do the student take, what are the grades, what are the extracurriculars? Is there opportunity for research, advanced coursework? Is there a leadership profile? What are the essays? What are the teachers saying? So all of those pieces of the application get reviewed and distilled.
One of the ways I've often described it as we dehydrate the file into a shorter narrative of all of its elements and then when we get to committee, that assessment gets rehydrated so that we can present to the candidate, to our peers who didn't read the file and they can listen, follow along and create the conversation about who we are meeting and how we do it. But that work from January through February, very labor-intensive, very one by one. And that's what leads up to the committee process.
And by the time you get to committee, I guess the other thing to just share is some students have been eliminated by that point. So as the process unfolds and we're reading, we are doing some evaluative assessment where not everybody can proceed through every round. And so round by round, the bottom gets set aside. We reread the top cohort because ultimately in an environment like this one, there are more students in the top cohort than we are going to be able to invite into this class. And so being able to learn as much as we can from as many different perspectives as we think about a case is really important.
Jacques Steinberg:
Now the process you've described has been in place in admissions offices for decades. It's known as the holistic admissions process. And I think it's important for listeners to know that this is not a Dartmouth-specific process, far from it. For them to understand, Dartmouth enables them to understand the admissions process at dozens of other highly selective colleges and universities like Dartmouth.
Lee Coffin:
We're all idiosyncratic. Each place has its own little twist on what sequence is followed. But the idea remains the same. You read the file, you assess and evaluate the file. And some group, sometimes a huge group, I've heard of committees where there are 40 or more people voting and other places have smaller, much more interactive working groups. Same idea, how do you assess the candidates and start to look at them one by one into this larger collective that will become a class? And it's very hard—and hard to describe it, I think. I think this is the part of the work. I'm glad we're having this conversation because I think this is the part of the work that is the most impactful and also the most opaque.
Jacques Steinberg:
So again, imagining someone who has not seen it up close before, help us imagine who in addition to you is doing this reading and documenting and ultimately discussing debating and voting. Tell us a little bit about your office.
Lee Coffin:
In my office, the people doing the reading and debating are my fellow admission officers who have been traveling and doing info sessions and planning events and programs. And in this phase reading, there are some versions of this process where there are faculty who participate in reading and committee. That's not true here. But those of us doing the work are the members of the admission committee. My charge to them every year is it's our responsibility to recruit, to read, and to select the most heterogeneous cohort we can identify and ultimately enroll at the college we represent and to keep in mind that the group we're pulling together has to be able to thrive in the curriculum we offer. And that's a really important part. So we're certifying preparedness for the curriculum at this college. We're also mapping a community and making sure that the undergraduate experience is framed by the many different opinions and points of view and backgrounds and geographies that we have as a mission to bring together people from around the world into this learning community. So that's the assignment.
Jacques Steinberg:
You talked about it being a labor-intensive process. I would also emphasize that it is a human process. This is not a class being selected by ChatGPT as near as I can tell.
Lee Coffin:
In that committee, there were 10 or 12 of us depending on the moment. And it is a jury of sorts where we're listening to the evidence and when the vote is called, each person is voting on admit or decline based on the evidence that's been presented.
Jacques Steinberg:
You talked about the applicant pool in the community as a heterogeneous group. I would suggest that your admissions committee, your admissions office team is also a heterogeneous group. And I think in part, applicants are writers, they write essays, they're telling a story. And it's always important as a writer to imagine your audience. And I got to see that audience up close. They're human beings. They come from around the country, in some cases from around the world. They're different ages from different backgrounds, all of which means there's a high likelihood that at least somebody who comes in contact with your application is going to be open to at least giving you the floor to tell your story.
Lee Coffin:
And that's deliberate. When we hire admission officers, and this has been true for my whole career, I always invite them to share their two-minute autobiography because that informs the way they see the world, the way they read, the comments they might make in the debates. I share my background all the time. I'm attuned to students from public high schools that may not be as well-resourced and I am, as a reader, more prone to reading between the lines as part of this work. And there are other members of the team who went to independent schools and could speak to what are the norms in those kind of communities. Some of us are the first members of our family to go to college, some of us are not. Some people went to Dartmouth, some people did not. We all share the common denominator of being graduates of a liberal arts institution that feels fundamental to our ability to create this kind of learning community at this kind of place. But beyond that, liberal arts common denominator, we're all really different.
Jacques Steinberg:
So…more scene setting. Now it is March. Colleagues and you have been reading oftentimes in your homes throughout the day into the night documenting courses as you say, and grades in those courses and test scores if they were submitted, what you said in your essay, what your college counselor said about you, what your teacher said about you, maybe what a peer said about you, what an alumni interviewer might have said about you. All of that is documented, summarized, some decisions have been made. But set the scene for us at the point that the committee process begins earlier in March. Some percentage of the class is full and some percentage still remains to be filled.
Lee Coffin:
So by the time you get to early March, you've got the students who were admitted and enrolled via the early decision round. And so as we move into March, we're rounding out the rest of the class from the pool that has applied in regular decision. And as we read, we're moving our way from early January to early March. There are files that really pop and in our system, the readers can route that candidacy to my attention as an acceptance that doesn't need debate. Those are not numerous. But there are some where you just look at the file and like, "Yeah, this doesn't need two readers to tell me that this is an outstanding candidacy." And I sign off on it. And so some small number have been pre-admitted before a committee starts and some larger number have been denied. So we've moved those files out of the funnel.
And so we're talking about a small subset of our pool of almost 29,000 applicants who are in the conversation in this moment in March. We've narrowed the conversation considerably in a very competitive construct because we have to. And the people who show up on the committee docket for us are all recommended acceptances by the reader or readers. So it won't shock people to hear me say many of the students are really compelling and a super majority of the pool are qualified. So as we've moved through the work, it narrows down to these holistic canvases of quality.
And that's where it's hard because it's not like we're presenting files that don't have a meritorious case to be made. They all do. Every single one of them that you saw on that committee docket was strong in some ways and had something to offer a place like this. And the committee conversation then becomes, "How do we think about adding each student one by one to this class? Is there something that we don't already have? Is there something that really jumps out at us based on someone's intellectual curiosity or their engagement or their activism or their point of view or their creativity?" And I can keep going, but these are the qualities that surface and that we debate.
Jacques Steinberg:
So I talked earlier about an applicant as a writer trying to imagine their audience. Lee, let's take folks into that room. It's on the second floor of McNutt Hall, the red brick admissions building of The Dartmouth Green. If our listeners had been with us that day, they would have seen rectangular banquet tables from Costco or Home Depot, just like you would have in your home arranged in a rectangle. You are at the front of the room with quite a large television screen, flat panel behind you. The day that I was there, there were as many as nine other colleagues of yours arranged in that rectangle around you. It's a long day. There were snacks on the table, there were water bottles, coffee cups.
Lee Coffin:
Lot of coffee. Yeah, a lot of coffee.
Jacques Steinberg:
There were oversized M&M cookies from Lou's, popular diner, iconic in downtown Hanover, because you all were hunkered down. I was struck by the fact that it was very much like a courtroom, not in the high stakes drama sense. But in the degree that the admissions officer who was responsible for the geography that was being talked about had the opportunity to quite literally present each candidate— dozens of candidates that day. One really instructive point I think for those who either have applied or have yet to apply is that the details in your applications really get documented, synthesized, and oftentimes said aloud by colleagues to each other.
So that first summary, when it's read, it's just a few sentences from that admissions officer responsible for the geography. But essays are quoted from teacher recommendations, are quoted from peer recommendations, if they're there, are quoted from the alumni interviewers, interview notes might be quoted from, courses and grades might be summarized. And then a second summary is read. If the person who wrote it is in the room, they'll read it. If not, somebody else will do the honors. One thing I was struck by was that these are read with feeling. They're not read as if they were the regulations of the Department of Motor Vehicles. They're read like really compelling short stories which I think is important for listeners to know that the time-
Lee Coffin:
Yeah
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. That you all are human beings trying to make these folks come alive as if they're in the room with us. And then there is debate. Sometimes the conversation as you say, took not a lot of time, sometimes not much more than a minute, but sometimes it seemed to me that that conversation took on one candidate perhaps close to 10 minutes. Is that fair if there was some back and forth?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. These are not hourlong debates over every single one. We'd be in committee for a year. We speak in shorthand, we know how to get to the nitty-gritty of the situation. My sister's an English teacher and I have often said to her, "How do you know who to give the A to?" And she said, "When you read the full pile, you know who the A's and who the B's and who the C's are." And that's true for file reading as well. You know over the big docket you've read. I read almost a thousand files from January to March as the reader. So as you move through that long stream of 18-year olds, you start to understand what you're looking for and when you see it. And so that comes out in committee when you're presenting. But yeah, Jacques, I think one of the hidden truths of a selective environment like the one where I work is you get to know the students.
And as a territory manager, you are invested in representing them as well as you can with the evidence that's been shared to your colleagues because in our system, you're trying to generate a vote that brings that student into the admit category. So they are read with some feeling. And I say this all the time, they're good kids. They've done well, people like them, they're interesting and engaging, and the best of them have a lot to talk about. So as readers, we have a lot to share as we are framing a candidacy and bringing it up for consideration.
Jacques Steinberg:
And the process is a messy one. And I say that-
Lee Coffin:
It's messy, yeah.
Jacques Steinberg:
And I say it not as a criticism, but it just is. When I was in the room just for that brief day, all the different yardsticks that were brought out, as you say, geographically, was the class heavy or light on a particular geography at that point, a range of backgrounds of the students, skills and interests, potential majors, activities they might bring with them, what they say they would do when they come to campus, what they'd like to have that experience do to influence them. The yardsticks, they were constantly being taken in and out and the criteria sometimes shifted depending on some of those factors.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. When people ask me, "What counts?" I say, "Well, it depends." It depends on which part of the file emerged as a salient one. And I'd be interested as you observed, one of the things I think would surprise people is how we don't get into the nitty-gritty of the grades and the transcript as much in committee because the students who have made it to that round have passed that threshold. So we don't spend a lot of time on that essential component because we've already checked that criteria and it's the more subjective parts of the file that end up being illuminated as we're having our debates.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. The question of can they do the work is a question that it oftentimes has been addressed prior to you all getting in that room. And it's an important one, I gather. The last thing you would want as an admissions officer is to bring somebody to campus who has not been...
Lee Coffin:
Prepared for the curriculum we offer. To me, that is a non-negotiable part of the selection process. I take seriously the signature I put on a letter offering someone admission. I am saying to that student, "We have read your file and we see this place as a great match for you and a place where you can thrive." I can't sign a letter when I'm thinking, "Well, fingers crossed that this is going to work." So we've done those assessments earlier in the reading process. Doesn't mean it doesn't ever come up because sometimes in the holistic review, other attributes buoy someone into this final round and then you look, "Well, did you overlook that?" And we'll spend some time there. But more often than not, we are thinking about the well-roundedness of the class we're creating, the conversations that happen inside a classroom or a residence hall. The most slippery piece is potential. What potential is represented in this candidacy and how do we nurture that and help someone achieve their ambitions? That's all part of it.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. So you asked me throughout that day what was surprising to me. A couple of things surprised me. One was the way you all do speak in shorthand, but with details. They were able to come alive in that room using a really spare number of words. And yet a person emerged with details, with quotes, with adjectives, with true life stories. That surprised me that in that span of time you were able to conjure a person in that room. But the second thing that really surprised me was something that I wasn't prepared for. You've talked about how I've been hanging out shadowing admissions offices and admissions officers for more than two decades.
But there was something I heard at least on that day that surfaced more than I realized. And it was when there was evidence in the file, when there was evidence in the application of kindness, of decency, of humanity, of humility. And it might have been something that was alluded to in an essay. More importantly, it might have been something said by a counselor or a teacher or a peer. Your colleagues and you really prized kindness and you seemed willing at times to admit affirmatively for kindness if all other things being compelling. Can you talk a little bit about why?
Lee Coffin:
Why? I think the world can never have enough kindness. And I think it's one of those qualities that make organizations, campuses, communities gel. People look out for each other. In the digital world we're in, sometimes kindness can slip away. And the place where I work, which is small, where our campus is in a college town surrounded by nature, this self-sustaining community needs to take care of itself. And seeing representations of kindness, of collaboration, of good citizenship, of civility, of an openness to people who don't think, look, believe the same way you might is valuable as a community comes together, as a classroom comes together.
And I've always seen kindness as a really essential ingredient alongside curiosity, alongside creativity, alongside academic achievement. And that's where everyone goes first and it's non-negotiable. But that in and of itself doesn't get my process to the finish line. And there are many deans who might be on a podcast interview who said, "Yeah, this is great, but it might not be the animating first order of selection for us. It is here." And so I think what you saw is an example of institutional vibe getting set through the admission process, how do we make ourselves the community we hope to be by the people we invite to join us.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. I actually think it's a fascinating, surprising and instructive and noteworthy.
Lee Coffin:
And hard to fudge. It's like if it's there, it's there. It's a lovely quality.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. And, so often it might have been inherent in a story that a student told about themselves. Maybe that was not even the intended point of the story, but it was there. But it seemed to me anecdotally just as often if not more so, it was someone else who went out of their way to say it about the student in the file.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And then we respond to that. So it's a double proposition. So is it there and how does the admission reader and then the committee as a group react to that information? You don't have to. But that's a good observation of something we do see as an important ingredient.
Jacques Steinberg:
So you talked about getting things over the finish line, and I think we're at the point in our conversation and where you are in the process right now where there are some finish lines being crossed. So all told, you would anticipate in March you all will spend roughly how many days, give or take in committee?
Lee Coffin:
Give or take, two to three weeks of committee. Over the last couple of weekends, there was work being done as well. So really the entire month of March, it's why I joke about March madness. It's like this month is its own little season where every day is long, lots of decisions are made and it just builds on itself. But the formal committee will be in session until we're done. Working backwards, we release decisions on March 30th. So you need to build in some days before that to get the letters prepared and the financial aid awards done and then I sign them.
So you have maybe a three- to four-week window between the beginning of the committee deliberations and when they must conclude. And the part that also has to happen, which is invisible to anyone who's not the dean, is there's an analytical piece that has to happen where I have to take all the files who are in the admit queue and say, "Okay, based on this rainbow of people, does my data analytics tell me this is the right number to create the incoming class we need?" And if my forecast says, "Nope," then I go back and I add a few more. If the forecast says, "This looks good," fingers crossed, it's based on the behavior of 18-year olds over a four-week window in April. But that's the other component to committee is it's human, but in the final moments it's also deeply analytical to figure out how to make this work.
Jacques Steinberg:
So we talk a lot on the Admissions Beat about news you can use, about information that is actionable. And you asked me to think about a few takeaways from this process and I wanted to offer three and then I'm going to turn the question back on you in terms of what we can share, what we can extract from this discussion that will be helpful to those who've either working on their applications or will be, or who have already submitted their applications and are waiting for decisions or perhaps have received decisions and wanting some context.
My first takeaway is that for applicants, your time is well spent on these applications. One of the few things within your control is how you tell your story. Those essays that you agonize over, I would offer that you are wise to agonize over them and sweat over them because your audience is going to be doing the same. And the time you put in making yourself come alive in an essay, there's a return on that investment, whether it's an admissions officer sitting in their home late at night or early in the morning or in that committee room where it's being discussed.
Lee Coffin:
And Jacques, yes, I hundred percent agree and it's the word I would put out there is news you could use is focus on your narrative. So it's not just your essay, it's the teachers who will recommend you. It's the interview you may or may not have with someone. It's how does your extracurricular profile tell the story about your interests, passions, talents, engagement. But narrative is the word. The data piece is your transcript and your testing and the grades you get, that's important. But the narrative that envelopes around the data is the story of you, it's your essay. It's not just your essay on the common app, it's the short essays on a supplement. Any time you put information together through the various pieces of that application creates your narrative. And what we're reading is that story. And what you witnessed in committee was the presentation of that story to our colleagues.
Jacques Steinberg:
I would argue it's reassuring to know that all the time you put in on what is that narrative, what's that story I want to tell, how am I going to use these levers to tell that story, that there's a receptive audience that very much wants to hear and consider and be moved by your story. My second takeaway is a part of the process that you can't control and accepting that as hard as it is. And it's that messiness we talked about earlier, knowing which criteria are paramount, shifting to try to control that as an outsider, based on what I saw just on that day I spent with you all and the time I've spent in other admissions committees over the years--that would be time wasted.
And it's really hard to say that there are things I can control, things I can't, and one thing you can't control is what does happen to that application when it is launched into this process with all these factors. And it can reduce stress to accept that your control over how this story will be received and what will happen to it and to you is out of your control. And the third thing I would take away from this, it reinforced for me, particularly for the high school juniors and younger who are listening, the importance of a balanced list of colleges, particularly those that are balanced in terms of their admission selectivity.
Your institution is the example of one of the most selective in the country. Not every institution is as selective and a list that includes a range and especially a range of schools where the student can honestly say that they would be happy hopefully to go to any of those schools can reduce the stress of knowing that your application is being considered in a selection process as competitive as yours. So that concludes my observations. I wonder what you as dean, as somebody who's been doing this professionally for so long, somebody who was an applicant yourself back in the day, what are some other news you can use, takeaways that I might have missed?
Lee Coffin:
Well no, you didn't... I'm curious about the comparison to what you witnessed in 2000 at Wesleyan and what you witnessed at Dartmouth in 2023. The very first sentence of The Gatekeepers, the introduction, it says, "Colleges make their admissions decisions behind a cordon of security befitting the selection of a pope. The reasons why one applicant was accepted while another was rejected are closely held by the few people permitted in the room at the time the decisions are made." And you've seen that now in two selective environments, but in very different eras of college admission, in the late nineties, early 2000s and the 2020s. What's changed? What did you witness at Dartmouth that said, "Oh, that wasn't the way it was then." And what's the same? What hasn't shifted from those days you sat with the Wesleyan admission officers in 2000?
Jacques Steinberg:
In terms of what's changed, obviously over the point of time you described, is technology. I witnessed a process that was hard copy, mailing your application, stacks of files and folders, lots of things being recorded by hand. That documenting process you described was an admissions officer sitting with something called a work card. It was literally like a ballot they would fill in by hand. I was really blown away by the technology that you all have at your disposal. The way you were able to navigate around an application on that big screen behind you into the particular parts of it, panning out to a state or a region for comparison to prior years, pulling up actual essays if need be, actual alumni interview, the speed with which that could be tapped was something that I didn't recognize. Also, the size of the pool that you all are dealing with, whether it's Wesleyan or Dartmouth or dozens of other highly selective colleges and universities, compared that to two decades ago, the volume is intense, including in a world right now in which we're largely test optional, which also a big difference.
The fact that the votes were done electronically. When I witnessed that process at Wesleyan, it was show of hands. You all would ultimately vote anonymously from keyboards and somebody would call the vote, although there was lots of body language in the room. Sometimes a vote wasn't needed because it was obvious where things were headed. Sometimes the vote was a shocker given where the conversation had been, folks were recalibrating in real time. But all of that said, I was astonished at the degree to which the process I saw has changed so little over the last two decades, how it has stood the test of time. This focus on human beings taking the measure of other human beings and trying to get to know them and imagine what it would be like as opposed to it being just computer printouts, data, what have you, that process has changed strikingly little.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I smile as I hear you say that because I feel that as well. I try and reassure people when I do presentations that technology has changed things. The part that I find so fascinating is the way in which a committee can look at the same piece of evidence together. It's not just relying on the reader. The reader can point you towards, "Look at this teacher recommendation," and we could all pull it up on our laptops and read the same paragraph and have a conversation about what's that teacher telling us about this student in that classroom that produced that grade.
And that brings a bit more almost democracy to it so that you're not just relying on one person's interpretation of an element, but you can say, "Well, I don't know. I see it a little differently." And also read along. As one of us is presenting, someone could jump in and say, "Let me read the supplement myself." And you see this almost like a study hall going on concurrently as we listen and react and probe a little bit. But that's good. But you've heard me say many, many times, holistic review is a fundamental part of what we do. Did you see holistic review in practice?
Jacques Steinberg:
I understand holistic review to mean where you can almost substitute the word human for holistic.
Lee Coffin:
Human.
Jacques Steinberg:
And across the gamut of what makes us human, brains, bodies, in terms of athletics, skills and talents, the impression we make on others, the things we value, it was all there in the room. Another observation of something that is timeless as far as I'm concerned, are the people who are making these decisions agonizing over these decisions. We tend to on the outside, think of admissions officers like you as almost enjoying the feeling of saying no as often as you do and savoring that. What an incredible power in one sense of the word. I saw in that room among your colleagues, people agonizing that they couldn't say yes more and really sweating that. And I find that somewhat reassuring as an outsider that they cared as much as they did and, so often they didn't want to let an applicant go who was likely to lose a vote.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. There's no joy in saying no. It's not the purpose of the process. One of the ways I think about this moment of each admission cycle is we are adding, not subtracting. We are one by one, adding people to what must be a finite cohort because of scale. I'm managing scarcity in that way. But as we add, there's a point where we're full. The projection of enrollment says this is the right number of people to fill your class. And it's not that the next person in the queue was weak, it's just we filled and we stopped. But the focus on yes is, the way I think about it and you saw the vote go in favor of an applicant and that was always a happy outcome. You saw a lot of students that were not admitted, and I'm glad you put a finger on what that feeling was like because that is also invisible to a lot of people.
Jacques Steinberg:
Again-
Lee Coffin:
When the letter says, "I regret to inform you," I really do. It's not the intent of what we do as admission officers.
Jacques Steinberg:
I hope that that's reassuring to listeners. I can imagine for those who are turned away that that's perhaps a little bit of cold comfort. But the fact is that I did see in that room admissions officers who were disappointed at how a particular vote might have gone that they couldn't say yes or that the committee chose not to say yes. Lee, at this point of the discussion, I am very conscious of the fact that you have many more decisions ahead of you in terms of applicants, you and your colleagues both, later today and in the days ahead. And so I'm going to throw back to you to bring us to a close and get you back to work.
Lee Coffin:
You're sending me back into the committee room. No, I've really appreciated the outside perspective. It's unusual to have somebody who's not an admission officer in the room with us as we're debating and making our decisions and shaping the class. I'm reassured by your reaction to the work that we're walking the talk. You saw the selection in process. And I think to our listeners, what I hope you take from this conversation is what I've said many times on different topics. When you're in a selective or a very selective pool, it is a competitive construct. There's no way around that. Doesn't mean it's random.
And for those of us who navigate these pools, we're doing it with a high degree of thoughtfulness as we assess a blessing, which is a lot of really wonderful students for seats in our class. And for those of you who are seniors and you are receiving decisions in real time, as we move through March towards the finale at the end of the month, remain focused on what's important to you, how do you see a match, how do you think about what's the best place for you to do your best work as we come forward. And hopefully the yeses will give you some choices in April. And for the no's, brush yourself off and keep looking forward because the no's were not saying you were not worthy.
The no's were saying we didn't have enough space. So Jacques, thanks for joining me again on Admissions Beat for this inside look at committee. Next week, we will have a more senior-focused episode where I will bring back Jen Simons and Darryl Tiggle, who we met in an earlier episode, about making a list and getting started. And they've got some thoughts for seniors about how to move into the month of April and towards May 1st with a purposeful stride as you assess options and get ready for the big enrollment decision on May 1st. So for now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College, going back into selection committee for a few more hours of debate. I will see you next week. Thanks for listening.