Interview with an Insider, Part #2
Bribes, pet peeves, and college influencers
Welcome to part #2 of the College Sanity interview with Dalia (not her real name), an experienced admissions officer at a highly selective college. Find part #1 here and feel free to drop any questions for Dalia in the comments. If we have any questions, we’ll post a part #3 next week.
CS: Okay, thanks for making some more time for this!
Sure! It’s fun to talk about this stuff.
Before we start though, can I tell you something that I’ve been thinking about lately, especially since ED notifications are hitting kids hard right now?
CS: Of course!
I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of “rejection”, that people see my job as rejecting applicants and I think that I wish we called it something else.
CS: Can you say more about that?
Ok, so, think about it like this: when you go to the grocery store, are you rejecting all the apples you don’t buy?
CS: No…
Right, so, you’re at the grocery store and you see lots of good food but you can’t possibly buy all of it, because there isn’t space and you can’t afford it and most of it would go to waste, right? So instead, you pick the things you are most in the mood for that week or the things you need the most. Maybe you usually get apples, but you still have a bunch from the last grocery trip, so you get kiwi instead. Or maybe you usually get pizza rolls but you’re trying to be good and eat more protein so you get chicken instead.
Apples are still good, pizza rolls are still fire… you just don’t get them this time because you want something else instead.
CS: So applicants are groceries in this scenario?
Yes! Does that sound terrible? I guess I just want to say this: When I put an application in my “no” pile, I’m not rejecting that student. I don’t know that student, not really, and I don’t dislike them (usually) or think they were foolish for applying or anything negative. They’re probably great! Almost all of them would succeed here. They just weren’t on my grocery list this year, weren’t the thing we needed the most.
CS: I’m curious if you think you’d ever describe it that way to students or parents, in real life?
Probably not. I’d just end up with a bunch of essays where 17 year olds tell me what kind of fruit they are and why they are a kiwi.
I also kinda wonder if the parents would be offended? Like, I think they always want some REASON, some logical formula that explains why their kid didn’t get offered a spot, like hearing “if they’d gotten 10 more points on the SAT, they’d be in” would make it less of a bummer. I’m not sure if would be better or worse for parents to know that we just wanted someone else, for some reason that might be hard to quantify (why do we want grapes more than bananas on a given day?) more than we wanted their kid.
CS: Are parents or students more challenging to deal with, as a general rule?
Honestly, most of them are fine! But I’d say there are fewer truly awful applicants but when they are awful, they are AWFUL. There are more annoying parents, but they can all generally be managed. I try to not get too friendly with any of the parents, even the ones I like or think are interesting. I gotta have boundaries because people will push push push sometimes.
CS: Speaking of that, how do people react when they find out what you do for a living?
Some people make it really weird!
CS: How so?
Well, if they are alums of the school they for sure have to tell me about it. If they’re a certain kind of parent of a teenager, that can go a couple of ways. Some people want to ask me a million questions, some people want to figure out if they can use me to get some kinda in, some people still launch into tirades about affirmative action or how unfair or expensive college is.
CS: How do you handle all that?
Well, I don’t have my job listed in any social media or in my online profiles. Like, I don’t want to get into all of it with some random guy on Tinder, you know? When I travel for work, I don’t usually wear school gear. If I’m on a plane and someone asks me what I do, I make something up.
I don’t mind answering questions— but I don’t get paid enough to do it 24/7.
CS: Has anyone ever learned what you do and tried to bribe you or get favoritism in the process?
Umm… pass!
CS: Okay then! Other than random people making it weird, what are some of your current pet peeves about either your job or the field of admissions generally?
Yessss… I love a question that gives me freedom to complain.
The current list of stuff that is pissing me off or getting on my nerves would include:
Trump. Department of Education. ‘Nuff said. Also politicians who like to shit on higher ed … but who are definitely sending their kids to schools like mine
99% of online college admissions influencers. It kills me when I see these people who’ve never worked in admissions a day in their damn lives making tons of money by giving either super basic advice or advice that is actually not helpful and then they have like 700K followers. I DESPISE anyone who says “I’m qualified because I got admitted to an Ivy”. Bitch, that doesn’t make you qualified for SHIT. It just makes you lucky.
Alumni who don’t realize how much easier it was to get admitted back in their day and who act like they’d still get admitted today or who don’t understand why their kid didn’t get in. No, sir. Sit down. You were a white guy who applied in 1975 with a 3.5 GPA, you’d get SMOKED today.
The Applying to College subreddit. Filled with liars, bad advice, and admissions dick measuring.
Common App for having such terrible essay prompts
It’s gotten better lately, but affirmative action used to be on my list. Not affirmative action as a policy, but how much people used to whine about it and how little most people actually understood about how it worked.
CS: Can you say more about #5?
Oh, I just think their prompts lead to really boring writing. Even for schools that don’t use (or don’t only use) Common App, a lot of students use their Common App essays as a basis for their admissions essays or think that Common App essays are what college admissions essays should be like. I wish they would change up the prompts every year so we’d get more interesting essays. It would also mean that the admissions grifters out there would actually have to come up with new content once in a while, that would be good too.
CS: I always felt like most admissions essays are, well, pretty boring. Like 25% are truly terrible, 63% are boring, and the rest are actually good. Is that true for your applicant pool too?
I mean, it depends on what you mean by truly terrible. I don’t see a lot of essays that are bad from like a grammar/spelling/usage standpoint. Our applicants are generally going to have essays that have been proofread and are mechanically fine. These are kids who get A’s for a living, they’re gonna spellcheck.
But, yeah, a lot of them are boring. Sometimes they’ve had all the personality sucked out of them. A lot of them are repetitive… which isn’t always the applicant’s fault, really. Sometimes you can tell when a bunch of students from the same area are using the same college coach because you can, like, see the same kinds of narratives, shaped in the same ways.
Also, these kids are only 17! Sometimes their essays are boring because they think they have to tell some big, transformative trauma story and they just… don’t really have one yet? They might not have interesting stuff happen to them yet. Or the stuff that they think is super significant and unique is … just like normal developmental stuff? That’s kind of hard. A kid writes about, say, coming out as queer and how that experience changed them. That probably was a huge, significant life experience for them, right? But, for real, I’ve read that essay 1000 times because a lot of kids come out as queer in high school.
Maybe 10-15% of the essays I read are like “YES, I loved reading this”. Another 15-20% are “Okay, fine, something in there caught my attention”. The rest are pretty forgettable, most years.
CS: I agree with you that better prompts would help.
It’s the only thing I’m jealous of the University of Chicago about. Their prompts are great.
CS: Can we do an admissions related lightening round?
Love a lightening round!
CS: Private college counselors?
Overpriced! And the people who use them the most are generally the people who need them the least. Sometimes a scam. Sometimes helpful.
CS: Gap years?
Love! More kids (especially boys) should do them.
CS: CSS profiles?
Necessary evil
CS: Parents?
75% wonderful, 25% pains in my very own actual ass
CS: High school counselors?
85% angels on earth, 10% useless, 5% actively racist
CS: Admissions or alumni interviews?
Useful!
CS: Campus visits?
Essential (if you can afford it)
CS: Anything else you’d like to add?
Um, I guess I’ll just say that I love it when I see a kid thriving on my campus and knowing that our process worked, but I also want to tell the applicants who didn’t get in that they’ll be fine wherever they go. Being disappointed to not get in is so valid but it’s a process designed to end in disappointment for almost everyone, so hopefully they can shake it off and find the school that is going to be so excited to admit them.
CS: Thank you so much for your time and honesty!