The Washington Post reports that with the increase in the number of applicants applying to college (tens of thousands of them), “colleges are more desperate than ever for any scrap of intel that might distinguish one straight-A student from another.”
To help differentiate between the good candidates and the even better candidates, admissions interviews, which in recent years had decreased in popularity due to the expenses involved (for both the student and the school), have been revived.
William and Mary, a public university if Williamsburg, VA, is one such institution that has begun encouraging interviews as part of its application process. College seniors are trained to meet with applicants for half-hour sessions. In that time, an interviewee will engage in a conversation, answer some questions, and show off his or her unique talents or skills.
“It seems like everybody who applies is the captain of their cross-country team, is a section leader in their orchestra, is in National Honor Society, has 1450 SAT scores, has a four-point-something ridiculous grade-point average,” said Nick Velleman, an interviewer at William and Mary. “When everyone is like that, then we start looking for the people who really stand out.”
Costs are still a concern for most universities. According to Maria Laskaris, dean of admissions and financial aid at Dartmouth College, there’s no way that campus interviews can truly represent the diversity of a school’s applicant pool.
Those who live far away and can’t afford travel expenses are at a serious disadvantage. That’s why schools that can afford to do so (mainly Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale) are now honing in on their global alumni networks, utilizing alumni all over the globe to interview potential candidates. Stanford University recently launched its alumni interview program, and Wake Forest University has begun offering its interviews via Skype.
The amount of weight that is assigned to the interview differs from school to school. Small, private schools, that have a better chance of interviewing more of its applicants tend to place more weight on the interviews than the large, public universities that would have no way of interviewing either a small percentage of the tens of thousands of students that apply.
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Read the full article: The Great Comeback of the College Admissions Interview
