How College Admissions Officers Make Decisions

Webinar Transcription

2026-04-08 – How College Admissions Officers Make Decisions

Anesha: Hi everyone, and welcome to tonight’s webinar. My name is Anesha Grant. I’m a senior advisor at CollegeAdvisor, and I will be your moderator for tonight’s webinar. Today’s webinar is, “How College Admissions Officers Make Decisions.” Before we get started, just to orient everyone with the webinar timing, we’ll take a quick poll just to learn who’s in the room with us, share the presentation on today’s topics, and then we’ll open up the floor to respond to your questions in a live q and a on the sidebar, you can start submitting questions on the q and a tab.

The slides are available under the handouts tab, and we are gonna meet our presenter, Dr. Aya Waller-Bey. Hey Aya, how are you doing?

Dr. Aya: Hi Anesha. Thank you so much for that. Welcome. Hello everyone and good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you are in this world. I am Dr. Aya Waller-Bey, and I will be your presenter this evening.

I’m in Detroit, so it’s evening here. Um, just a little bit about me. I often like to begin with saying I am a proud first generation college student, which means I’m the first person in my family to graduate with a four year degree. I attended Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where I studied sociology and upon graduation became an admissions officer there and the coordinator of multicultural recruitment.

So I’ve experiences reading thousands of admissions, uh, applications and making very difficult but important admissions decisions. After leaving my tenure there, I went across the pond where I earned my master’s in Philosophy of Education at the University of Cambridge in England, which was a phenomenal time.

There. I became an alumni interviewer for uh, Georgetown, and met with students across the pond and interviewed them for admissions. I recently completed my PhD in sociology at the University of Michigan, where I studied college admissions, namely the college admissions essay. So I have tons of experience both on the admissions side, um, as the student side and of course as the researcher.

I’ve been with CollegeAdvisor for now five or six application cycles, so I’m excited to talk to you about how admissions officers make decisions and answer all of your questions.

Anesha: Awesome. Thank you so much for that introduction. Before we let you get started, we’re gonna do a quick little poll. Um, so let us know what grade level you are in.

If you are a parent or a teacher, we welcome you. You can go ahead and select other as we’re waiting. Um, what question I have for you, Dr. Waller Bay, was, um, you know, you, you served as an admissions officer and then did your own set of applications. Were there any lessons that you took out of being an admissions officers that you, that shaped how you approached some of your applications for your subsequent programs?

Dr. Aya: For sure. I think, um, one of the areas where I feel like students missed opportunities, missed opportunities, if you will, the students often don’t feel like. The mundane experiences about their lives are important enough to write about or to list. And that’s something I, I realized where I would meet students and they’ll talk about, you know, babysitting or helping, you know, your younger siblings or elders and their families, but it wouldn’t be a part of their application and they didn’t feel like it was it.

Special enough or it didn’t feel significant enough. And I think there’s often missed opportunities there. So I often think I carry that in my own work, where as much as I talk about all my accomplishments, all the awards I often speak about, again, the mundane, the, the way I support my family and my nieces and nephews and those types of experiences that we sometimes don’t think are important or significant, where they actually show a lot of, uh, promise.

They show a lot of about our character, our backgrounds, our integrity. So I think that is something I, I learned and saw as an admissions officer, which has shaped my own, uh, experience about what does it mean to be a, a candidate? What does it mean to be competitive? What does it mean to, you know, illustrate like my success and excellence.

Anesha: Yeah. No, that’s a lovely, lovely response. I think it also demonstrates community ties and, and supportive of the community as well. Um, thank you for sharing that. We’ll go ahead and close our poll. I think that just sets us up for what will be a great, uh, conversation. But before I let you get to it, just for context, uh, we have a little bit of everybody in the room.

We have 4% of eighth graders, 9% of ninth graders, 15% of 10th graders. Our largest group of students, 37% are 11th graders. We have a couple of seniors, and then we have, uh, about 35 pairs of teachers with us. So a mixed bag, but mostly, um, juniors just for context. All right, I’ll stop talking, hand it over to you and be back a little bit later for our q and a.

Dr. Aya: Fantastic. Thank you again, Anesha. All right, so let’s dive in here, folks. You know, first and foremost, you might be wondering what do admissions officers do, right? What are the factors that they base their decisions on? Primarily admissions officers evaluate. Applicants. They review applications and make admissions decisions, which is what I shared earlier.

We evaluate applicants often in the context of institutional priorities, which I’ll talk a little bit more about later. Right? There isn’t just, you know, random acceptance, particularly as selective universities, which like Georgetown and some of the places that I’ve attended are more selective. So there is often a rubric or criteria or some type of way that they are making decisions.

Okay? We also look at the applicant profile, right? So students come into the applicant pool with all types of backgrounds and identities and different application co. We look at your high school and your demographics, right? So we look at the context of what classes your school offers, what percentage of students are graduating and attending four year universities or community colleges, or enrolling into armed forces.

We look at what classes you have taken in the context of what your school offers, right? So we’re looking at your academic background. We’re looking at that high school transcript, that very, very, very important piece of the application. The high school transcript. It shows how students have performed over time, right?

We’re looking at test scores where appropriate, right? Not all schools require test scores. Some schools are test optional, right? So where appropriate, we look at your test scores and then rigor. How have you been challenging yourself in the context of your classroom, in the context of your school, in the context of your academic en environment?

Right. So students often sometimes worry that if their school only has a few AP classes or don’t have necessarily the full IB diploma, they worry whether or not it will place them at a disadvantage. And we often like to remind students and families that you’re being reviewed in the context of your school.

We also look at your app, academic focus, right? What box did you check as far as your potential major or department? Did you say you want to study Chinese or did you say you wanted to study computer science or psychology? Right? So looking at your academic focus and what you may have done prior to the application cycle in that particular area, we look at your individual qualities, which are incredibly important.

What are your passions? How do you spend your time inside the classroom as well as outside the classroom in your community? You know, what are you doing when no one is watching? What drives you? When you wake up? What are you excited about? And we look at your fit with the school, right? Certain schools have certain reputations and cultures and environments.

They’re located in specific places or various regions throughout the country or the world. So we’re looking like, is this a good fit? You know, are you a student who says, I love a urban environment. I love to be where the action is. I love the heart of the city. I grew up in New York, and then you apply to Penn State, which is more rural and you know, perhaps is not a good fit for what you desire and how you kind of navigate the world.

And again, uh, missions officers make recommendations and or decisions, right? So those are the primary, uh, responsibilities, if you will, of admissions officers. We also, on the, the university side, which we don’t talk, uh, quite a bit about here, uh, we greet visitors. We give admissions presentations when students and families visit our campuses as well.

So those are some of the things admissions officers do. So in the previous slide I mentioned institutional priorities. And this one is a tough, uh, thing to sell because sometimes students say, or families say, Hey, I have perfect grades 4.0 unweighted, GPA, I have a top, you know, SAT score, you know, say 1580.

Will I get into in certain institution? And we often tell students we don’t know. We cannot tell you whether or not just by looking at basic scores, for the most part, if you’re gonna get into a university that admits less than 15% of the applicant pool, okay? Universities have institutional priorities, right?

They have departmental needs. Maybe they need a certain number of students to fulfill their nursing program or the, you know, the linguistics, uh, department or the art history department needs a certain number of majors, right? Um, there also might be, you know. Certain demographics that they need, you know, geographic diversity as well.

They need enrollment, uh, for a percentage of students inside the state. Right. These large public universities, again, I get my PhD at the University of Michigan, they need a certain percentage of students in state, right. Versus out of state. Um, universities often like to say they have students from all 50 states and, and DC so sometimes they’re looking at where are students located geographically, right.

And then you have universities that have relationships with schools and third party programs. I attended a Jesuit school, right? So there might be relationships with Jesuit high schools or, or Catholic institutions, right? Like a, a Notre Dame, which is a Catholic university, might have relationships with Catholic high schools and you know, South Bend, Indiana.

There’s also third party programs, which can be community-based organizations or nonprofits, uh, or scholarship pipeline programs, whether it’s QuestBridge or something along those lines, where universities also have formalized MOUs with programs as well. And then you have finances, right? Some universities need to make sure they have enough full paying students to sustain their operations, right?

So you might have schools that are need blind where they don’t look at your financial resources. When you apply, they’ll admit, regardless of your ability to pay, and if you need $90,000 a year to go there and they accept you, they’ll give you that $90,000. Full scholarships, full grants, or sometimes a combination of loans and grants, et cetera.

Or they might be need aware where students who might fall in that middle, like they wanna admit them, but they’re not in the top kind of pile of admitted students. They might be need aware, who can afford to pay, or what percentage can they afford to pay. They’re gonna look at those finances before making a decision.

So these are some of the institutional priorities and negotiations that universities and admissions offices are making when determining how to proceed with various applicants.

So applicant profile, we, we often talk about, you know, the various components that make up your application. You know, first when you apply and they’re reading your application, there’s the demographics, right? So they might be race and ethnicity, uh, identified, and you’ll see this caveat here. Um, in two, uh, 2023, the Supreme Court made a decision on race conscious admissions, um, and the SFFA, uh, versus Harvard College and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

So there’s a decision about the ways race, um, could be considered and application processes. So universities have to make different, uh, take different approaches, um, in. Thinking about kind of racial ethnic diversity on their campuses. Um, so they have gender data. So what box you, you check, uh, again, geographic.

So where you go to high school, where do you live, right? Uh, and then college going status. This is increasingly important. Whether or not you are a first generation college student, again, are you a student, um, whose parents did not, uh, get a four year degree? Um, in some cases, universities have their own definitions of first, uh, or college point status.

Um, some schools have, are you the first person in your family to go to Ivy League School? Are you the first person in your family to go to, you know, this type of institution? So universities have in some cases their own definitions of college going status. Um, so please check out their website and when in doubt, you can call the university and ask.

You can send a note. Hey, how do you define college going status or first generation, uh, college status? It’s called, it’s okay to reach out and ask them. They look at your academics, as I mentioned earlier, your high school type. Are you public? Private, or is it magnet school? Is it charter? Is it religiously affiliated?

Um, you know, what type of school? Is it suburban? Is it an urban center? Is it, you know, how many students, um, are, have free reduced lunch? You know, how, what is the four year graduation rate? What is the average ACT score or SAT score? So looking at high school type rigor of curriculum, do you have AP courses available to you?

Do you have IB or dual enrollment courses? Do you have, is your school on a 4.0 system or is it on a different system? You know, when I worked in admissions, I visited some pride, some, you know, very kind of. Selective, rigorous private schools in the Midwest. And they saw, I saw six point scales, and some schools only had qualitative grades.

No, there was no such thing as a letter grade. Um, some schools have really, uh, stopped ranking their students because they realized that ranking sometimes could be how stu uh, admissions officers consider whether students are more competitive or not competitive within their own schools. So some, uh, schools refuse to rank their students, um, or some schools don’t disclose ranking to students, but only to admissions officers.

So they’ll look at that. And also, again, GPA, what is your GPA on a four point scale? And in some cases we recalculate GPA, so. Sometimes when students report weighted GPAs, I, I ask to see the transcript because what we wanna see is how you performed in the classes you have taken. And sometimes A GPA does not signal how you actually perform in the classes if it’s weighted right.

So if you have. At 4.1 weighted GPA, but your, your, your transcript has, you know, some B’S primarily A’s, but a, B and some C’s. There is, you know, there’s a discrepancy there. So sometimes, uh, universities will strip the weight and just look at the letter grade and the classes that you have taken. Again, standardized test scores where appropriate, right?

We know some schools have adopted testing optional policies where you have the option to submit scores if you feel like it will help your application. Some schools require students to submit testing if they’re, if students’ GPA fall below a certain, um, kind of threshold. Some schools require certain majors to select or submit test scores.

So it really depends and you always wanna change, uh, check the school’s website or reach out to the admissions offices at the schools because test optional policies are always shifting. We saw a huge push towards test optional during COVID because students didn’t have access to testing sites. Tests were canceled.

It was entire pandemic. Right. A global pandemic. So a lot of schools, uh, shifted to test optional. And we have since seen some schools go back to requiring a test, um, or adopting test optional policies. So you want to verify. Um, but if you provide that, that data, we will evaluate it. And again, major and department of interest, that’s important too.

Right. Are you applying, you know, I attended a school that had undergraduate schools within it. Right. So are you applying, um, to schools that have undergraduate schools or, or different com? You know, is the engineering schools separate than the economic, where the economics department is? So we’re also looking at those majors and departments of interest when reviewing the applicant profile.

So applicant ratings? You know, it is, it’s interesting because again, a lot of the folks, the parents, the students want to know the formula. Like, what do I need to do to get in? And again, as universities have increasingly holistic admissions processes where they’re not just looking at the quantitative aspects of your application, they’re also looking at the quality aspects of your application.

Sometimes it can be a bit frustrating where you just. You are like, tell me what I need to do to get in here. Right? So internally, universities have all types of ratings and systems and rubrics that they use. Right? Oftentimes you, they cannot share that. They will not share it. Um, but they’re looking at, again, that that academic part, that GPA, that high school transcript, that is the most important part currently of the application, right?

Again, we’re appropriate. They’re looking at that test scores, they’re looking at the ranking, and they’re looking at the curriculum, right? Those components, those are the core academic components that universities are using to make decisions or to inform where you go next in the process, whether or not you move on to the next stage or whether or not you are accepted outright or rejected or go to committee, et cetera.

They’re looking at activities, level of performance participation. Are you, have you shown sustained engagement? Is it, does it appear that you only joined, you know, new clubs your, your junior year and senior year? Um, are you, are you also listing some of those as, I call it, experiences of the mundane? Like are you also talking about, you know, babysitting and tutoring or family responsibilities, or do you have, you know, a job at, at, at Jimmy John’s, et cetera?

Um, are there experiences that are, that appear to be rare? Like, did you join a circus and travel with a circus, you know, the summer between, uh, sophomore and junior year, right. Experiences that are very, very rare is also something that, that errors might perk up too. Now, the caveat is, I, the goal is not to encourage you to like just go join a circus, but what I wanna share is there’s a diversity of experiences that students have based on what they have access to, their lived experiences and et cetera.

But what admissions officers are looking for is sustained engagement. Someone who shows a clear passion, um, in some cases, whether or not it connects to your, uh, post-secondary goals. Um, and I just wanna make sure students are not just building resumes for the sake of college admissions and then also activities developed by applicant.

Now, I, I think there should be a asterisk here because I’ve seen it. I’ve hear it, I read about parents and families who think if their student didn’t invent something or have a patent or publish a research paper, which as a sociologist who’s published and has done empirical research, I always, you know.

Gonna raise a eyebrow about what does it mean to publish, right? Um, and is it peer reviewed or not? But nevertheless, um, you know, some students feel like they have to create something and we have students who do, who are genuinely passionate about things in their community or, uh, abroad or globally or et cetera, and they create, they build, they find they, you know, beautiful, right?

I think that’s wonderful. But again, thinking about what does it mean to do that because you want to look impressive on the college admissions application versus you really wanna serve, you really want to, uh, create and sustain, uh, engagement or really give back to your community. So those are some of the factors that admissions officers take into consideration, specifically in holistic application reviews when reviewing applicants, and also assigning ratings or whatever kind of metric that they have to make decisions.

In addition, personal brand narrative story. My favorite part of the application will forever be the college personal statement. As I mentioned, I got my PhD in sociology where I studied admissions essays, specifically trauma in college admissions essays or struggle narratives or narratives of hardship and pain, which you all might have heard about or read stories about in the media.

Um, and. Essays, again, for schools that require them. College personal statements are important, right? So we are looking at your essays again, we are looking at your activities list, and we are also reading those letters of recommendation, right? Letters of recommendation are important, especially when students omit critical details about their backgrounds.

That might signal why or why not. Took, uh, took certain classes or course loads or why they may have, you know, have limited extracurriculars inside the school. You know, if a college counselor or a letter or teacher write that, you know, John, you know, you might notice that John only participates in, uh, football, um, and not other activities because in addition to being on varsity football, he also has a job, right?

And on the weekends he has to work to help out the family, right? The college counselor or the teacher can add that additional context to help build that personal story and narrative. Okay. Uh, we look at school fit and community again. How are you kind of talking about, um, your school? Talking about what you do, um, in your community, your service, your volunteerism, your leadership, what type of classmate are you, what type of student you are, right?

Those letters of recommendation often add to that. Um, and there’s sometimes teachers or some schools, what have you, you know, have a classmate write a letter of recommendation or you know, or write a letter to your roommate, et cetera. We’re looking at all of that, right? Are you very introverted? And, and do you, are you a student saying, you know, I’m going to put my head down to do research.

I’m interested in medical school. Right? They’re thinking about all of that as they are building a class. Remember, if colleges, uh, particularly the select more selective ones, wanted to build entire classes with students with near perfect GPAs, near perfect SAT scores near perfect, you know, class, present, et cetera.

They could, but they’re building a class and all, you know, universities benefit from the diversity of experiences and backgrounds and identities that students bring. So overall, they bring it all together, right? They, they, there’s a total or an average score or some type of ranking or marking that they use kind of to decide where students fall in their application pool.

So one of the words or expressions you might hear about or hear often, especially I know we have quite a few juniors here, is this idea of fit. What is the significance of student fit? And how do admissions officers determine which students are the best match? Well, we’re looking for students who will fit into campus life and culture.

And I say that again as someone who attended a jesuit school com. Uh, committed to service and being a man or woman or person for others, you know, students who came in with a desire to serve and be of service was really, really important. It almost seems like, you know, I, I don’t really know anyone from my class at Georgetown who didn’t.

You know, do something in service of others, whether it was tutoring in dc um, whether it was kind of volunteering, um, at local shelters or working with, um, formerly incarcerated individuals, um, or food banks and food pathways and, and homelessness. I mean, the list went on. Um, literacy, you name it. There was a lot of service, right?

So students who appeal to that, um, kind of signaled that that was a good fit. Also, campus life and where you live. I gave the example earlier of a student who wants to be in the city, who wants to sum the pavement, who wants to ride the subway, um, going to a school in the middle of Montana or another place in the region where that actually is misaligned there, there’s a difference there.

Um, so they look at, at at that, right? Also looking for students who will add to value to a diverse community. Right? So what type of roommate would you be? Um, how would you show up for the, in the classroom?

How would you kind of show up in the classroom? Um, just really thinking about what that looks like. Um, and then you really want to date, right? It’s like dating The fit needs to go in both directions, right? So what is the significance of fit for you? Is this a place where you can see yourself in the next four years?

You know, is it a good fit for your personality? You know yourself better, right? Than. The admissions officers know you, right? So I often like for students to think about as well, as much as you are, you know, as much as the universities are evaluating you, you also want to make sure that you are doing your due diligence when you visit campuses, that you’re asking questions that might appeal to different parts of your identities or different parts of your experience.

Or, you know, maybe you have really strict dietary restrictions, right? And you need to make sure they can accommodate you, or maybe you have preferences about. The housing that you live in, right? So making sure that you are recognizing that there’s fit. Is it a school that really likes to weed students out in the first year?

If they are identifying as pre-med, what is the cultural like? Is it really collaborative? Is it really competitive? So you really want to make sure that you also are dating the universities to make sure it’s a good match for you.

So as we talk about fit, there are some factors I want you to consider. Academic goals, right? I have seen quite a few students desire or say they are applying to schools that don’t have their major. I don’t really understand the, the rationale there. Um, but you want at minimum to make sure your major or department selection.

Match what you have available. So say you want to be a journalist, right? You should be applying to a school that has a journalism program or a communications program of sorts, right? If it doesn’t, you might be, you know, A, a, what is it? A, a, a round P or square peg fitting to a round hole, right? And you’re forcing it.

You want to make sure at minimum that there’s the major or department selection that you want. It’s available at the school. A lot of students increasingly in my opinion, express interest in research as a undergraduate student. Can you actually conduct research? I go to a large, you know, attended a large public research university where I’ve.

Mentored undergraduate students, um, who’ve joined me in some research projects or I have been in multi-level research projects with PhD students, faculty, undergraduate students, et cetera. Not all schools have opportunities for undergraduate students to conduct the type of research they desire. So just, you know, making sure the school aligns in that regard.

Additionally, in thinking about letters of recommendation, um, do your mentors, teachers speak to qualities in you that, you know, the university sees and their students, right? So when universities are thinking about fit, but we’re also wondering what the admissions officers are saying, right? I mean, they’re also looking at what your teachers are saying.

Your counselors are saying, how are they speaking to you? Right? What are they, what type of student are they seeing you are? What type of classmate? What type of friend, what type of peer? Okay, essays. Again, my favorite part of the application process. You know, we’re, we’re wondering what drives you as a person, you know, what motivates you?

What do you enjoy? Right? Where does this interest in medicine, like from where does that stem? So they’re really wondering like, what drives you as a person and how you would help the campus fulfill their, you know, their goals and how would this campus help you fulfill whatever desires and passions you have?

Maybe you absolutely love theater, right? Maybe theater is your, is your, is your jam and the school has the oldest theater, student theater in the country? You know, is there alignment there? Like, will, will this university help you reach the goals that you have? So, applying to a school that doesn’t have an engineering program, or at least like a partnership with another school and you are dreaming of being an engineer.

Might be a misalignment there. Okay. And again, activities, how will you contribute to student life? Once on campus, they’re looking at that, remember, they’re building a class and not everyone has to be, you know, the star, you know, student leader start social movements and, and campaigns. There’s some students who want to go to class, do their homework, graduate and go to law school or wherever.

You know, they, they desire to go. So they recognize that they just don’t want an entire class of those people entire, right. They want a diversity of students or personalities because if you all have visited college campuses or even seen campuses on, on movies, there’s all types of programming. There’s.

Sororities and fraternities and Greek life. There’s bake sales for particular causes. There’s dance showcases. A lot of that stuff is student ran, right? So they need students who will contribute to certain organizations and you know, the acapella groups, it, et cetera, organizations that have often been on campus for decades in some schools centuries, right?

Um, or at least a century rather. So they definitely want to see how students will contribute to student life once they are on campus. Now, I’ve used this language a few times. Uh, I used the language, um, holistic application review, right? So holistic application review is essentially where admissions officers are making decisions in reflection of the app as a whole.

Right. So first and foremost, academics. That’s the first cut, or oftentimes where they’re making the first kind of decision about whether or not you move forward in the application process. Then there’s the total consideration by admissions officers of those activities, those letters of recommendation, the essays, right?

So those qualitative parts of the application as I like to refer to them. So holistic application review means that they’re taking into consideration who you are in the complete package, your background, college going status, major interests. Again, everything in your application component, the applica, the list of activities, leadership, what your counselor says, et cetera.

Okay? So it’s just reviewing of the entire application. Not all schools have holistic admissions. Some schools are very cut and dry. You get in if you have this GPA. This test score, you are accepted. Some schools, if you have this test score and this GPA, you get this amount of money. So some schools are very cut and dry.

They really prioritize the quantitative parts or the academic parts of the application. Um, but other schools, again, holistic. So the holistic application review process, again, the admissions officers are making decisions in reflection of all components, and the burden is on you to paint a clear picture of who you are and your fit with the school.

Okay. Every admissions officer is working through the application hoping that those puzzle pieces fit, and we often say that we want more opportunities to emit you. We’re looking for opportunities to emit you. Okay, so they’re just trying to figure out how everything comes together. Are you explaining it’s, uh, inconsistencies on the transcript in the essays or in the other part of the application?

Are you showing that you are doing a lot of activities or you only doing a few activities or limited it to No, because you’re working, you know, X amount of hours, right? How are you spending your summers? Are you unable to spend summers traveling or working because of familial obligations? Or maybe your family has a.

Trip that they always take back to, you know, a home country if they’re, you know, first generation Americans. So there’s a lot of pieces of the puzzle that admissions officers, uh, work through, uh, when they’re making decisions on your application. So what are the stages of review for admissions officers?

Well, as I mentioned in previous slides, typically the first stage is, uh, academic cutoffs, right? Again, some schools are very explicit about admissions decisions or admissions cutoffs, right? 3.0 25 and an a CT or something along those lines. But for more selective universities that practice holistic admissions.

They’re often, again, behind the scenes. So first stage academic algorithms. I think, again, selective universities have often internal processes for large public universities. We’ll probably see an increase, uh, adoption of AI or artificial intelligence or algorithms that are built in. Or some schools might not even read applications if they fall below a certain GPA or standardized test cutoff.

Um, and then you have the second stage admissions officer’s review where admissions officers are providing ratings or comments or some type of documentation to support the rating. So they’re looking at complete application profiles. They’re making notes whether in A-C-R-M-A slate or et cetera, or back in my day by hand signaling.

Where the student might fall, right? Some ratings will drive automatic denials, okay? Some ratings might inform automatic amidst, if you are kind of deemed this particular level, you might automatically be admit. Um, and some applications will need further discussion. And for those further discussions, sometimes there is a committee review or a automatic, um, there, there might be a, a second reader.

Some, uh, schools have a second reader where, um, you can’t automatically admit a student or automatically deny them without a second reader. Or you say, I think, I really wanna admit the student, but they’re not a automatic admit. So. We need a second reader to support the decision to omit them. And then for some institutions, the next and final stage is the committee review.

Where, just where this discussions about um, students who might be on the fence and in some cases admissions officers might use the committee to, um, rally behind an applicant where based on their rating, they may not have the license to actually omit them singularly. But they could admit them through a review committee review process.

So they might say, Hey y’all, this is the profile of this student. They’re a first generation college student. They might have gotten a B in this class, but I think they were phenomenal. They may benefit from these summer programs that we have, but I think they can really do a good job and I think they’ll be, make a fantastic doctor, et cetera.

Right? So they might, um, use it to make a case for students and committee reviews and committees can consist of other admissions officers. In some cases, faculty, sometimes there might be student reviews as well. Now in thinking about the science behind emissions there, there’s a lot of processes. So there might be enrollment management, right?

A data-driven kind of com portion of the process to make sure that schools are meeting their goals. Right. So as we talked about earlier, there are institutional priorities. There are things that admissions officers and universities, or often it’s the dean of admissions having to keep in mind as they’re thinking about how many students to admit in the business school or the nursing program, et cetera.

Right? So universities are often thinking about yield. Okay, yield is the percentage of accepting students that actually enroll. Right? Yield is, is key for a lot of universities. Um, and then they’re often thinking about the time it takes to review. Some universities or admissions officers have very kind of strict deadlines where they have to review a hundred applications a day or a hundred applications a week, or 25 applications an hour.

Some universities have very specific kind of goals and metrics that they have to reach. Imagine, you know, if you’re at a large public university and the amount of applications you’re reading in a day during the review cycle, it can get pretty hectic, right? And then there’s algorithms at beginning of review and sometimes the end of review process as well.

So beginning they might be assessing academic profiles, using some type of algorithms, looking at the data. How many students are we getting from Chicago? How many students are we getting for the computer science program? How many students are we getting for the Arabic program? Right? And then at the end, there’s predictive modeling components, right?

How many of these students, if admitted, will accept, right? What is the yield of, of these students? How many will actually matriculate in the fall? How many students should we wait list? Or how many of the wait list students will accept the offer? You know, there’s all, you know, types of science and, and increasingly I think the use of, of kind of data and AI to help universities kind of make sense of emissions data and manage their enrollment processes.

So the truth, and you might have noticed this or gleaned this from what I share, is that every school is different, right? Publics versus privates. Uh, small liberal arts colleges, um, versus regional universities. Um, r ones research, you know, one universities versus our twos minority serving institutions, tribal colleges, historically black colleges.

A lot of variation. Okay? Every school is different, but all are using some type of enrollment management strategies based on the needs on the university in some shape or form. Okay? So everyone has some type of policy. Some schools don’t require an admissions essay, right? They say if we require an admissions essay, we will get fewer students.

We need more students, we need more applications because we’re in a region where the population is declining. So there’s all types of factors that they use, okay? It’s important to look at the admissions data when creating college lists and to sign on application strategy. So, you know, look at the data you have available, whether it’s the common data set, the websites that universities have that talk about the percentage of students they accepted, et cetera, right?

Or how competitive is it? What is the median, you know, GPA, what’s the median test scores and et cetera. Just to kind of give you an idea about where you might fall, where you might, right. Just an idea, right? Because you, you won’t ever truly know, but just it can help you think about your own expectations.

So how can you develop an application that’s authentic to you, but will also check up all the boxes for admissions officers? You wanna focus on presenting yourself honestly, always. That is so important. Again, there’s no need to be somebody else, right? Admissions officers want to admit, you know, students who will contribute to their environment, their classrooms based on their own kind of backgrounds and lived experiences, do not embellish, but you do wanna talk about yourself Often tell folks, admissions officers don’t know what you don’t tell them.

They, they can’t read your mind. Unfortunately, they, they don’t have the opportunity to sit down with all, you know, 20,000 applicants or 10,000 applicants, right? So you do have to talk about yourself. And I know for some people that can be difficult, but if you don’t list that in award, you don’t talk about that achievement.

They won’t know, focus on falling, what ignites your passion. Um, and, and really lean into that. Sometimes students feel like their personal statement has to reflect like what their future goals are, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do that. What I mean by that is, say you want to be a veterinarian, right?

And you’re applying to a school, you know, well known for veterinarian science, you know, animal science, maybe University of Wisconsin, Madison. But you have been a, a dancer, like a hip hop dancer for since you were seven years old. You’ve done it in college, you compete, I’m sorry, high school. You compete, you know, at a really high level.

You’ve won wars, you traveled all over the world doing hip hop dancing, right? You can write your personal statement about your love for hip hop dancing, even though you wanna be a veterinarian, right? And even though you plan to study animal science. You can still write about your passion, right? That’s still important.

They wanna see, you know, the dynamic nature of your personality and interest. Okay? Again, do your research, understand what is important to a school, and make sure there’s some alignment with what is important to you. Again, if you are a student who likes to travel, study abroad, and you notice that at that school, a lot of students don’t do that, or there’s limited study abroad opportunities, maybe it’s not a good fit for you, right?

When possible, take tours, speak with current students, alumni associations, admissions officers, okay? Recognize that, you know, it’s not financially feasible, especially in this economy, to fly across the country, to take college tours all the time. Go on a virtual tour, right? A lot of universities, particularly during COVID, adopted virtual tours and virtual info sessions or virtual conversations with, uh, alumni or virtual conversations with students.

Take advantage of those, okay? If you’re at a high school and someone from your high school has gone to a school on your list, see if you can reach out to them and talk to them. Maybe you follow them on TikTok or on social media. Okay. Uh, follow the, um, I always say the social media of high school, I’m sorry, of colleges, right.

The social media pages are often, you know, up to date and, and students are engaging with those as well, right? And again, if there’s a college of admissions officer or if the schools are visiting your area, try to visit them, right? Again, I recognize that it’s not completely phys, uh, feasible, but. If you can try it and if not, take advantage of virtual opportunities as well.

Again, you really wanna ask for help if you find yourself floating or unsure or uncertain, you know, ask for help for your application strategy, right? Um, you know, if you’re developing an authentic essay you or application in generally, you can ask for help from people who know you and people you trust, right?

They can help you think about your activities. Maybe you forgot something, um, or some, maybe there’s something you don’t find significant that they say actually, ah, yeah, that’s actually quite important, or that’s quite impressive. Tell them about it, right? So you can develop, um, an application that is authentic to you, but check the boxes of admissions officers and universities by following some of these tips here.

So, um, as we think about. Last insights or kind of a few pieces of advice. Again, as an applicant, I want you to not obsess over the science and you’re like, well, Dr. Ia, you just spent an entire presentation talking about the ins and outs, but I want you to think about what you can control, right? And that’s providing, you know, writing the best application you can.

Every school is different and decision making is driven internally by so many different factors. Oftentimes, there’s factors that have no, you have no control over. So I don’t want you to associate your self-worth with whether or not you got into a school on your list, especially if it’s a school that already only emits, you know, 10% of the applicants.

Okay? Focus on what is important to you as a student. Does the school align with your values and principles? There’s a lot of universities in the media nowadays. Read about them, see what’s going on on campus, how’s the leadership changing or, you know, evolving. Um, what is a peer, you know, sometimes they’ll include their strategic plans online.

Like, is the schools going through a lot of development? Are they building new dorms? Do they get a hundred million dollar donation from, you know, a philanthropist? Research the schools. Okay. And that goes for parents and students in terms of the application components. Do not collect activities and extracurriculars.

I mentioned this earlier. I’ve seen a lot of students do that before. You really wanna show sustained engagement and also do things you want to do. Senior, your year is going to be very busy, especially the fall. We have a lot of students applying early action and early decision nowadays. So those are those November 1st or mid-November deadlines.

Fall is gonna be madness. So you really wanna make sure you’re only doing things that you actually want to do. Choose letter writers that will write meaningfully and strong letters. I know that can be tough, especially if you’re at a large public high school and there’s 1200 of you and two counselors.

But you just wanna pick, you know, letter writers and teachers that really know you and that can speak to your experience. Write essays about your passions, right? Don’t try to write an essay that you feel like they will want to read this. Of course, you are writing for a particular audience, but you are writing for you as well.

What do you, what do you want them to know about you? Okay? And then balance your academics so you can perform well while also pursuing rigorous coursework. I have students who say, I’m gonna take all the hardest classes that my school has to offer in all the area subject areas. Now, if you know you’re not a science person, you know, take an AP Chem, ap uh, AP Bio, AP Physics.

And, you know, you are struggling with science, um, but you’re a talented writer. Or maybe you’re just really good at math. It’s okay to take the coursework that’s rigorous but aligns also with your strengths because you do want to do well in the classes you take. And then you just wanna make sure you have a balanced college list to ensure optimal success in admissions process.

That means please just don’t apply to schools that emit less than 20%. If that, if your whole list is a full of what we call reaches, or high reaches or aspirational schools, you might be very, very disappointed come December or April, okay? So we really, we wanna make sure you give yourself options, and that means applying to schools with a, uh, you know, diverse level of selectivity.

Um, so you can give yourself options come, come spring of your senior year.

Other conversation. I’m looking forward to answering your questions.

Anesha: Thank you so much, Dr. Aya. Yeah, we do have a ton of questions for you. Before we get started, just to give folks some context on how our Q and a will work. I will read through the questions you submitted through the q and a tab. Share them in the public tab so that others can see them, and then read them aloud to give Dr.

Aya an opportunity to answer them. If your q and a tab is not letting you submit questions, just double check that you joined the webinar through the custom link in your email and not from the CollegeAdvisor webinar landing page. You may have to log out, log back in, in order to submit questions, but also remember that the webinar is being recorded so you can always come back and view it later.

Um, and again, another reminder that our slides are available on the handouts tab. Okay, my first question for you, Dr. Aya, when you’re ready.

Um, so this came up in three different ways, but, um, I’ll ask you someone, uh, so the first question, which I think encompasses all the different ways, but someone said, how do you think generative AI is changing How much weight admissions officers will give to the personal statement or, and how generative AI might be impacting how universities are reviewing essays generally?

Dr. Aya: Yeah. Thank you for that question. And it’s a, a popular one, so I’m not surprised that there were so many folks who asked about that. I think there’s a few ways I think that, um, more selective universities, and I’m saying students, schools that admit perhaps fewer than 30% of applicants essays are still gonna be incorporated as a part of their holistic review process.

I also think it’s still going to be an important part of the application in response to that 2023 Supreme Court decision on race conscious admissions where. The essays are one of the few places that the Supreme Court say students can talk about identity. Um, so I do think, uh, universities are still reviewing essays and that there will continue to be a part of the application.

Now, as far as generative ai, you might see a lot of kind of posts about, you know, universities running essays through ai, uh, checkers and et cetera. I have not seen that in my work just yet, that they have the capacity to do that. Um, but I do find, um, chat GBT and Claude essays to be very easy to, to, you know, I can, I can usually spot them.

Um, so I just want you to, you know, just be mindful of what does it mean to be, to have integrity and to be honest and authentic in your, in your work. I mean, no one can write a, a essay about you better than you. Um, but I, I can see universities announcing policies probably, uh, in the near future. But I think as it stands now, selective universities are still gonna require essays and still review them because they’re actually a critical piece of how they’re going to assess.

Kind of backgrounds, identities and et cetera.

Anesha: Okay. Uh, another popular question that came up in a few different ways was, um, about how students’ majors are declared. So I’ll, I’ll ask, I’ll, I’ll read it out. If our students are undeclared in terms of major, is that an issue? Would it be better to declare a major and then switch venture in the institution?

How are undecided applications? Considered?

Dr. Aya: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I think it was maybe a year ago, I saw, uh, an admissions officer say, and she was at a small liberal arts college. She was like, I actually, she said, bring back the undeclared majors, bring back the undecided. All the students come in and they’re like, I wanna do this thing.

And they’re very strict and they refuse to be flexible. Um, when I attended Georgetown, if you were in the College of Arts and Sciences, you were, no matter what box you checked, you kind of went in as undecided. Um, and your major was not declared until you were, uh, the second semester of your sophomore year.

So for some schools, undecided and undeclared is, there’s no value assigned. All students in some schools are un. Undeclared or undecided until they actually declare their major, usually the second semester of sophomore year. Um, so if the school doesn’t require you to declare a major, um, there’s also increasingly build your own majors, et cetera.

I’ve seen, like at places like NYU, um, I would not worry too much about that because just because you’re undecided about a major doesn’t mean you lack focus about what your kind of goals might be. So, um, unless the school, if a school does not require you to declare a major and you truly feel like you’re undecided, you wanna explore, by all means do that.

I, I don’t think it puts you at a, at a disadvantage, not for my professional experience.

Anesha: Uh, another popular question that came up was, oh no, this was a separate question. Someone, um, asked essentially, can you give some context on how part-time application readers are used in the process?

Dr. Aya: Oh yeah, I, and I’ve, I’ve actually applied for some of those roles in the past just to kind of support some colleagues.

Essentially some universities only have, you know, have small, full-time admissions officers. Um, so they don’t have the capacity to read all of the applications that they receive. So they often hire part-time admissions readers. These are folks who might be former admissions officers like myself. They might be, uh, high school, uh, counselors or folks who worked in the higher ed admission space.

And they have to often sign, you know, waivers about conflict of interest. Usually you cannot currently be, um, consulting students, et cetera, but if they, they kind of assign. These are part-time readers at region, you know, maybe it’s California. They have so many students applying from California. So they’ll assign these folks a zip code or as such, and then that person will review applications and kind of submit that information to the, the formal admissions officers the full-time.

And they’ll use that kind of data to kind of, maybe that’s, that’s the first round of review. Maybe then they do a second review based on their own rating or internal system. So yeah, I think part-time is just easier for them to have subcontractors and oftentimes is a bit cheaper for admissions officers.

Okay.

Anesha: Uh, ’cause someone, I think this person was concerned that they were kind of doing their own spin, but they are all getting the same training. They’re all asked to read with the same context. So it’s not an errant person. Um, out here just giving their own reading. A lot of questions about the SAT. So I guess the shortest version is optional, actually.

Optional. Um, does it actually be optional? Will students be. Um, harmed if they do not submit their test scores, should they submit them anyway, even if they are optional? That was a variety of questions that,

Dr. Aya: yeah. For the second question, should you submit them anyway? Uh, if they’re optional? No. I mean, if, you know, what we say is, if the SAT or a CT score won’t help your application, so maybe you have a really strong GPA, but those scores fall below the median, uh, for a host of reasons.

Don’t submit them. I mean, I worked with a lot of students this year who went test optional and got into some of the most selective universities in the country and these students were applying for STEM majors. Um, so if you have a strong high school, if you attend a school that’s really rigorous, if you perform really well in that school, if you have strong letters of recommendation, if you have outstanding personal statements and supplemental essays, you can get into really competitive schools without so many test scores.

So I, I don’t encourage students to just submit a test score ’cause they’re like, I need to submit it. Test scores are additional data that can help inform decisions, but, um, you can get into really competitive schools without them if you do not perform well on tests. Or, again, there’s a number of reasons why students, um, do not, so whether or not, you know, the first question was like, is it really optional?

It is really optional. Um, but you have to make a decision, you know, looking at the comma data set, looking, knowing your own self. Does this, does this test score. Help me, like does it show that I can be competitive for how well I perform, or does it kind of put a damper on my full application profile? And if that’s the case, I wouldn’t submit it.

Anesha: Okay. All right. Thank you so much. We’re gonna take a quick little break just to talk a little bit more about CollegeAdvisor. Uh, for those in the room who aren’t already working with us, we know how overwhelming that admissions process can be. CollegeAdvisors team of over 300 former admissions officers and admissions experts are ready to help you and your family navigate the college admissions process through one-on-one advising sessions and essay editing.

Through our digital platform, CollegeAdvisor has had 10,000 total lifetime clients and, uh, 4.8 out of five rating on Trustpilot with over 750 reviews. After analyzing our 2023 through 2025 data, we found that clients working with CollegeAdvisor who have a strong academic record and testing record are 2.6 times more likely to get into an IB league.

School around three times more likely to get into a top 20 college and around five times more likely to get into Johns Hopkins, UCLA and NYU when compared to the national acceptance rates. You can increase your odds and take the next step in your college admissions journey by signing up for a free 60 minute strategy session with an admission specialist on our team by using the QR code that is on the screen.

During that meeting, you’ll receive a preliminary assessment of your academic profile, along with some initial recommendations on what you can do to stand out. By the end, you’ll also learn more about CollegeAdvisors premium packages and get paired with an expert like myself or Dr. Aya who can support you in building your college list, editing your essays, and much more.

We are here for the whole process. Okay. We will leave the QR code up on the screen and get back to our q and a. My next question for you, Dr. Aya. Um, we had a few international students and someone asked, do international students face a harder time with the admissions process? Would an IB diploma benefit them and help them be more competitive in the admissions process?

Dr. Aya: So not all international students are created equally, uh, or not created equally reviewed equally, is what I mean to say. Um, so if you are an international student in the UK or in Canada, or, uh, you know, a country in the west, the applica, the, the reviewer and, and might look different if you are, uh, a student applying from another country, right?

And, and say in Brazil, um, so a IB diploma or English speaking school. So if you’re, you could be a studying at an English speaking school in Singapore, right? So then there’ll be a little bit more comparative as far as, you know, the IB diploma, et cetera. If you are at an international school. There’s the tofl ’cause they have to check your English proficiency.

Uh, IB diploma does help because it gets, there’s a bit of standardization there, but please know that there are admissions officers that are assigned regions and that includes international students as well. So oftentimes the more senior admissions officers are reviewing the international applicants, they’ll have context about how your GPAs and transcripts look about your college, um, the way the kind of college preparatory ness of your school might look.

They have an idea of your high school profile. They might have visited the region a few times. They have a lay of the land. So there’s often admissions officers who have specific context about your region, your country, et cetera. Um, I think. The challenge could be, you know, students having access to, you know, SAT sites or students having access or being able to demonstrate, uh, English proficiency is where you might have challenges.

And then financial aid for some schools they may not offer, you know, uh, scholarships to international students. Right. And increasingly given this political climate that might pose challenges for international students as well.

Anesha: Um, going back to the AI question, I thought this was an interesting question to address.

Um, someone asked, is it okay to leverage AI to edit but not write your essay? I,

Dr. Aya: you know, I think when in doubt choose a human, um, to do that, but I know students do it, so asking me if it’s okay. I mean, sure, it’s okay. I mean, I, I don’t think that’s going to, you know, um, I don’t think that’s gonna make or break your application.

Um, I know students do it all the time. I have colleagues who sometimes do it. So, I mean, I always would choose the human over the ai, but students. Do it. You just wanna ensure it doesn’t change your words and, and your voice, because again, I can, I’ve read so many ai, I can see AI posts online now, ai, Facebook statuses.

I could just, you could just tell the cadence is very consistent. So you just wanna be careful that the AI is not doing the writing for you.

Anesha: Yeah. Um, yeah, I think that’s the best advice. You can’t use it, but use it thoughtfully and, and make sure it’s not writing for you. Um, okay. Uh, the next question I had for you.

Oh. Oh, someone was asking about, um, how would you, I guess, change any of the commentary you gave today regarding transfer students? How would this process look for transfer students?

Dr. Aya: Well, the transfer process is a little different ’cause the timeline is different. Essentially. You know, some schools don’t accept transfer students, some schools do.

Um, I guess the difference is just the timeline where instead of applying in November 1st for early action or, or early decision for some transfer students, those processes are happening, um, in the spring. You know, you might have to submit your application by March. Um, but the, the thing still stands, you know, for transfer students, you wanna make sure wherever school you’re currently enrolled, whether it’s a four year university or a community college, that you’re performing well.

Right. Especially if you’re applying to selective universities. You also wanna ensure that those credits are transferring and seeing if the school that you are attending, if they have a pathway program to a four year university, like, you know, the university, uh, or sorry, in Virginia, they have a lot of, you know.

Community colleges that help with transfers. And same thing with the ucs, the University of California institutions, they have strong transfer pipelines, so you just wanna make sure that the classes you’re taking are transferable. But the, everything really applies. It’s just the timeline is slightly pushed, uh, further out into oftentimes the spring.

In the late summer.

Anesha: Yeah. My only thought for transfers is also that your college courses. That year will count or, or are, are, are going to be considered in it. So, so be mindful of how your VP is falling out.

Dr. Aya: Very important.

Anesha: Yeah. Um, okay. We will leave it there. I think we got to most of the repeated questions.

Apologies that I didn’t get to some folks, more specific questions, but we thank you so much for attending tonight’s session. Thank you Dr. Aya, for giving your expertise and, um, thoughtfulness. And we hope that you’ll join us for our future webinars. But, um, hope that you will leave today’s session with some context on how admissions decisions are made.

We are gonna ahead and stop. We’re gonna go ahead and stop the recording, but if you did not get a chance to use our QR code, just know that you can leave your browser open until the webinar officially ends and you’ll be directed to connect with us through there. Okay? All right. Thanks everybody. Take care.

Have a good evening.