Missed Opportunities: Why some applications fail

By tim cantrick

The Lake Oswego Review, Jan 29, 2010, Updated Jan 29, 2010

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At a college counseling conference in Pittsburgh two years ago, I listened to an admissions officer from the Ivy League explain why some highly qualified applicants are not admitted to top tier colleges. His point wasn’t to repeat the obvious — that top colleges attract many more exceptional applicants than can be accommodated in the freshman class. It’s no secret, after all, that a certain portion of the applicant pool at highly selective colleges will be excluded for reasons that even the admissions office finds hard to explain.

Rather than worrying over the subjective element that often influences an admissions decision in mysterious ways, the speaker listed three objectively identifiable factors that negatively impact an application, emphasizing that these were sins of omission not commission. His list of applicant mistakes, in other words, did not include certain inconvenient realities (like a disciplinary issue) nor any issue relating to the affective domain (psychological health, emotional baggage, etc.).

Instead, he pinpointed errors that can emerge during the application process itself, weakening the presentation — mistakes that might have been avoided with a more thoughtful and careful approach guiding the applicant’s communication with the admissions office. His list included the following three missteps, briefly touched on here but expanded upon separately in future columns.

The shapeless message

Adolescents bursting with energy and ambition have a natural tendency to get involved in many different activities. They are curious and want to explore, but they also want to expand their resume for college admissions. So, over the course of four years in high school, these go-getters join a variety of clubs, get involved in student council, play several sports, volunteer for community service, participate in interesting summer programs, get out the vote for a local politician, learn how to sky dive, take a philosophy course at the local community college, perform in drama productions, play trumpet in the school band, and so on.

But then, when applying to college, if not careful, they present this wonderful mix of involvements as a mere laundry list of extra-curriculars. The problem for colleges is that such a list lacks focus, revealing no thematic center. The admissions officer called that “a Whitman sampler application” because the applicant had missed an opportunity to connect the dots of activity into a single, unified message. The speaker wasn’t criticizing the admirable breadth of activity, incidentally, just the absence of coherence. Applicants who present themselves as a loose aggregation of interests fade into the background during the admissions review.