Episode 82: Inside the Mind of an Application Reader

Episode 82

• Episode 82 Transcript

  EPISODE 82

  [EPISODE]

  [0:00:06] BT: If you've been listening to College Admissions Insider for a while, the title of this episode might ring a bell. In some of our early episodes, we invited real admissions counselors here to talk about how reading applications really works.

  [0:00:19] BHA: Today, we're doing it all again. I'm Becca Haupt Aldredge from Bucknell University. In this episode, we're taking you back inside the mind of an application reader.

  [0:00:28] BT: I'm Brooke Thames, also from Bucknell. We'll be chatting about the process front to back — and then some.

  [0:00:35] BHA: Our guest is a familiar voice. Kevin Mathes, assistant vice president & dean of admissions at Bucknell. Welcome to the podcast.

  [0:00:42] KM: Thanks for having me.

  [0:00:43] BT: So let's kick it off with a little reintroduction because you've been here before. Kevin, can you remind us of what you do here at Bucknell?

  [0:00:49] KM: Sure, Brooke. So in my role within the Admissions office, I basically oversee the entire operation. I'm in charge of working with our team to reach our institutional goals for enrollment. A class of 1,010, broken up between the three colleges, College of Arts & Sciences, Engineering and the Freeman College of Management. Then, a big part of my role, and I think part of why we're talking today on the podcast, is that I really am a final reader in the process. What has my team done as we've read applications? And then how does it make it through me to think about how are we crafting the class that ultimately gets Bucknell what we're looking for; we're also finding students who are going to thrive at the institution.

  [0:01:29] BHA: So before we get into reading an application, and what that looks like, let's talk about the application itself. There are a few ways a student might apply to school. There's the Common Application, the Coalition Application, and the option for colleges or universities to have their own personalized application for students. Can you give us an overview of those different application options and what the differences are between them?

  [0:01:50] KM: Sure, Becca. So the Common Application is an application that about a thousand different colleges and universities use across the globe. They're actually international now. It's a way that students can fill out one application and submit them to a number of places. Now, the thing with the Common Application is each institution has their own membership page, where we can ask our own individual questions. For example, at Bucknell, our member page has a question about which of the three colleges at Bucknell you're applying to. Do you have an intended major? Undecided can be one of those options. But it's our way to ask them specific questions for our institutions. So the thing about the Common Application is that you can fill out some general information, but then you need to be mindful of each individual institution and what additional questions they might be asking you.

  The Coalition Application (powered by Scoir) is a member organization. We are part of the Coalition for College, which the criteria to be a member of the coalition are strong graduation rates, affordable education, an institution that's dedicated to seeing their students be successful. So it's a more limited membership, but it's a signal to institutions that are really supporting students, whether they're underrepresented or not, and how they can get through college. With the Coalition Application (powered by Scoir), the coalition partnered with Scoir, which is a platform that a lot of high schools can use for the college search process. I think one of the great things about the Coalition Application is that when students enter high school, if their school already uses Scoir, or if they don't, once a student creates a profile with Scoir, all their information can actually feed into the application. It makes for a little bit more of a seamless process because part of the application is already done when you're a first-year student, whenever you sign up for Scoir. I think it makes it a nicer way to kind of navigate through the process. Again, that's a platform where each individual member can ask them specific questions that they need for their process.
  Then the last one you mentioned were institution-specific applications. There still are colleges and universities out there that have their own application for their college or university. They're not on a common platform with anybody. There are schools that are asking their specific application questions. You're going to have to fill that out for that school to be considered for them.

  [0:03:57] BT: Thanks for the overview of those different options. Sounds like there's some diversity there, which can be true about types of application cycles, right? There can be rolling admissions, for example, where a school kind of evaluates applications as they come in. There are also universities that have firmed deadlines where students must get all of their application materials in by a certain date. How might those differences affect a student's application and how it's reviewed?

  [0:04:22] KM: Sure, Brooke. This is a great question. There's a lot of different ways students can approach the admission process these days. You mentioned rolling admission, which is something some colleges use where they have an opening date, and then they roll out decisions as the process goes. Once your application is complete, you might be able to hear within a couple of weeks or a month, or you could be waiting a couple of months depending on how they actually run the rolling admission process.

  Then you've got schools that are using their firm deadlines, but they have different policies around those. So talking about early options, those kind of break into a couple of different categories. The main two are Early Action, Early Decision. Those have a firm deadline from an institution, Early Action is a process where students apply and get a decision early, but they are not bound to commit to that school. If you apply Early Action somewhere, you might know in a month, six weeks, maybe two months, but then you have until the typical response deadline of May 1 to make a decision if you're going to go there.

  Now, Bucknell is a school that its early option is called Early Decision, and that is a firm deadline as well. However, that's a firm commitment. For an Early Decision option, students are signing a form as well as their parent or guardian and their school counselor that basically, the summary of that says, “It is my top choice institution. If I'm admitted, I am coming, and I will then withdraw my applications from everywhere else I've applied.” So, it's your big goal. It's, “If I get in, I'm happy. I'm done. That's it.”

  Then, we have a couple of schools that do, I kind of call it a hybrid. There are some schools, they are typically very, very selective. The most selective in the country. They sometimes run a process called Restrictive Early Action, which is a non-binding program, but they only want you to apply to one. That gets a little trickier and that it is an Early Decision, because you can still look at other schools, apply to other schools, but they don't want you submitting multiple Early action applications or Early Decision.

  The last round is Regular Decision, which is then a lot of schools, like Bucknell, we have a deadline where you submit your application. It usually takes us longer. So that's usually the two-month plus waiting period. But when you get those decisions, you can compare all of your offers across institutions and make a decision by May 1.

  [0:06:40] BHA: So it sounds like in such a big process where there are already so many schools that a student might apply to, once they narrow down their list of schools, they also have to decide how they wish to apply to each of these institutions. There's a lot of decisions to be made. Using Bucknell as an example, where does a student's application sit in a virtual stack once they hit the submit button? Is there any kind of sorting that happens before an application reader takes a first look?

  [0:07:09] KM: Yes. So I think the interesting thing that I think folks maybe don't always realize is when they hit submit, they think it just runs. But really, for us at Bucknell, the first area your application lands is our incomplete bin. Because we need to make sure all the pieces are in before we can actually read the application. So most students when they apply, they actually don't land right into a box where my team can then start reading applications. It usually lands in the space where we have to check, “Did we get all the supporting documents? Do we have your transcript? Do we have your recommendations? We are a test optional school, but if you want test scores do we have them?” We need to check off all these boxes to make sure we have everything we need to make a decision before it's read. It usually lands in incomplete.

  Once the application is complete, it ends up falling into what we call a territory manager bin. If you go to Bucknell’s admissions website, you can find my team and the areas of the country in the globe that they oversee. What we do is we say — and Becca, let's take you for example — one of your main territories is part of Philadelphia. So the students from those areas of Philadelphia that you visit the high schools, you go to the college fairs, you meet the people, we want Becca to be the one reading those applications because she's familiar with the schools. She's met the counselors, she's met students. We're not going to know everybody in every part of the country. But it does give us some familiarity with how to approach the application.

  Then we get into that reading part, we try to make sure our territory managers are those first set of eyes that are taking that first pass at an application.

  [0:08:43] BHA: It sounds like when a student hits the submit button, they're ready to do kind of this happy dance that they're done. But they might not actually be done yet. How does the student know once their application has gone from incomplete to complete? Should they contact an admissions office? Is there somewhere that they can check and find that information?

  [0:08:57] KM: Yes, great question. Schools that students apply to typically have an application status portal of some sort. They might call it some sort of variation. But when a student applies to Bucknell, we'll send them an automatic message in return saying, “Thanks for applying. Here is information on how to log into your portal to check that you have everything.” The other reason that that's important to keep in mind is that our teams will then follow up if we are missing things. We'll say, “Hey, check your portal. You're missing something.” So you want to be on top of these portals to make sure that if you're getting those messages, you log in and see, “Oh, maybe my teacher recommendation hasn't come in yet.” Or, “Oh, I checked that I want test scores considered but the university is saying that they don't have them in any way, shape or form.” Maybe it's that we're missing the supplement because you haven't filled out that question about what college you want to apply to. So there's lots of things that we can include.

  We also, in our checklist, have information on financial aid. And while there’s lots of ways to think about financial aid in the admission process, I think the key thing is if you're seeking financial aid, there's a lot of us that include that on the checklist. So what are the forms we need for you to be considered for financial aid? We'll trigger messages off of that to say, “You're missing this. You really need to get this in.”

  I will say, I think the burden that students bear in this process is that, to my knowledge, there's no central portal that we all use. So every institution usually has their own. You have to keep track of, if you're applying to five schools, five different portals. If you're applying to 10, 10 different portals. I wish there was an easier way but at this moment, it's going to be individual and you want to be on top of all those.

  [0:10:31] BT: That's such a great reminder, Kevin, that there's so many different things to manage, and so many things to keep track of, and different schools might be different. You mentioned applying for financial aid. A school like Bucknell requires students to apply for financial aid and also have their merit scholarship application at the same time that they apply. It's really important to know all of that, to know that your application is complete once you hit that submit button.

  Once a student's application is officially complete, and it lands in their application readers virtual lap — who also happens to be the person who manages their territory — what does all that information actually look like on the admissions end? What's the reader looking for as they go through?

  [0:11:09] KM: The way that we run our process at Bucknell is we actually have two people read an application together. Since Becca's here, I'm going to keep using her as my example. So, Becca as the territory manager is going to hone in on a couple of specific things. First and foremost, we want to make sure that students are academically prepared for Bucknell and have the background to be successful and to thrive at our institution.

  Becca's first pieces that she's going to look at are the school profile and the transcript. School profiles are created by high schools. If a school does not have one, the applications that students fill out have a form that school counselors can fill out to give us the information we're looking for. But essentially, it's a way for us to stay grounded in our process. We know that no school is the same in terms of maybe how they operate or what they offer. We don't have cut-offs or standards that students have to have because they might not have the same opportunities at the same school. I can give you some examples of that.

  Mainly its curriculum. So we're making sure we're grounded in what type of classes does a high school offer? Some schools, their advanced classes might be up to the honors level. Others might say, “We do the Advanced Placement program.” Others will say, “We do the International Baccalaureate program.” Then, some have moved in the direction of let's partner with local colleges in our area and allow students to do dual enrollment classes. Then there is a movement among some schools — and I'll say this, it's mainly the independent or private schools in the nation — are allowing their faculty to create their own college level classes and create their own curricula. So then they have their own individual names for these courses. What our job is, it's to look at that and say, “How can a student take on academic rigor at their school?” And that's where the profile is important.

  So then, if Becca is looking at that, and then she's looking at the transcript, she's saying, “How has the student progressed academically?” We're an institution that wants to see four years of English. We want to see three years of all other core subject areas. And for our foreign language requirement, we want to see two years of the same foreign language in high school.
  So we're trying to see some of those things and then what choices a student has made. The other pieces then understand the grading scale. So, how does the school grade? Do they use a 100-point scale? Do they use an A, B, C, D scale? Do they put pluses and minuses in there? Some schools have their own scales on like a 6.0, a 13.0. There are schools that do narrative evaluation, so they actually don't give the letter or number grades anymore. We have to put all that together to understand how has a student performed in their environment. Then do we feel that they've performed well to move forward in our process?

  After that, I would say, right now, Becca is also going to be the one who's looking at the supplement. Why do you want to study the thing that you're saying at Bucknell? And then also the school counselor recommendation. What is your school counselor telling us about you as a person, as a student? And then whoever is partnering with Becca, is then looking at the rest of the application. Personal and family background. What does a student do to engage outside of the structured school day? That could be extracurriculars that are associated with a high school. But it also could be things in the community. Maybe students volunteer at a local hospital. Maybe they're in a scouting organization. The the other option, too, is some students have things that are a little more family-oriented, helping to take care of grandparents, younger siblings, maybe have a part-time job. We're looking at those types of things.

  This partner for Becca is also going to be looking at the main essay. So what are we learning about a student? I really say it's a twofold process there. One question is, we are assessing writing stability a bit to make sure that you're ready for the writing level that we're going to expect of all of our students at Bucknell. Then the second piece is what did we learn about a student? What part of themselves are they sharing?

  And then the last piece that reading partner will look at is the teacher recommendation. I always say with teachers, I think, we're trying to grasp that sense of who is the student as an academic? How do they engage in academic work in their high school with their teacher, with their peers? And I think one of the really tricky things about the admission process is that there isn't a right answer and a wrong answer because we're trying to craft diverse communities in all ways. When I talk to families, I say, “I need extroverted learners who want to participate in class discussion and be part of our roundtables here. But there's also a space for introverted learners where maybe their learning style isn't discussion all the time. They do participate, they do engage, but they are the person who reflects and thinks, and maybe they're really great writer. Or maybe they really want to do research and partner with a faculty member.”

  That's why I think this notion of what's the right thing to do, you're never going to get a clear answer because we're trying to fit all of those different styles into communities so that folks can learn from each other. They can learn from different types of faculty and then we build that well-rounded class that we're ultimately looking for.

  [0:16:06] BHA: So let's say I've read that transcript, I've understood that the student is academically prepared to thrive at Bucknell in the classroom. My partner reader and I are feeling really good about the student’s community contributions, who they might be here, the skills, talents, passions that they might bring to us. And we're really excited and thinking that that might be a good fit for Bucknell. What happens next?

  [0:16:29] KM: So once the first pair of readers reads the file, they recommend a next action. They can recommend admit. They can recommend deny. Then there's two different middle grounds. If it's an Early Decision application that could be deferred for further consideration. If it's a Regular Decision app, it could be we recommend waitlisting the student — which again would mean, we're interested, but maybe we're out of room, and we need to see how decisions shake out from students we're making offers to. That's when myself and some of the more veteran folks on the team go in and look at what's going on. Who have we expressed interest in? Who have we maybe put in the middle or down track?

  Then that's when we apply some of the goals we have as an institution. So, I mentioned earlier that we're looking for a class of 1,010. But we have goals by each college. I'll give you an example, which is the smallest college at Bucknell is the Freeman College of Management. Our enrollment goal for that is 180 students each year. Now, if my team loves 2,000 students that apply to management, we would go so far over that 180. We just can't fit it. We don't have enough faculty, we don't have enough literal seats in classrooms. So, that's when we have to say, “We really like a lot of these students, but there isn't enough room.” How do we then manage our goals as an institution to say, “How can we create a diverse class in the Freeman College of Management? How can we find students that that contribute to not only Freeman, but Bucknell as a whole?” And then do the same thing with Engineering and Arts & Sciences.
  That's where decisions are not linear. Just because a student goes one direction first doesn't mean that's where they end up. My veteran readers are then looking at students too to say, “Hey, I understand why this one was maybe put as a potential waitlist, but maybe new information came in.” Or maybe they're saying, “I know that this is an area where we're trying to grow majors.” So, they might be reevaluated. Where students in the admin bin might say, “I get why they're in the admin bin now.” But then once somebody sees the entire group of admits that we're looking to do, and we don't have enough room, it's like, we have to make some tough choices and move some students. We have a process that I say it's a lot of circles and squiggly lines, because to get to that end stage and get a final decision, there's a lot of different review that's happening.

  [0:18:47] BT: Yes. What I'm hearing is that it's not as simple as you're in or you're out. There's so many considerations and it makes it a really difficult process as well as a rewarding one, once you really do build that really well-rounded class. So to put the whole thing in perspective, by the time a student gets the final admitted stamp into their college and their major, how many times will that application have been reviewed?

  [0:19:09] KM: So minimum, I always say is two. You get the paired reading and then the veteran reader. In reality, it's probably three or four. I mean, by the time that we are moving students through the funnel and trying to use our knowledge and our historical knowledge of how students have responded to our offers, we're really looking at things over and over again, to make sure that we are on target with the number of students we won, and as well as we're on budget.

  I mean, one of the things that we don't talk about a lot is as an industry of higher education is, there are very, very few schools have unlimited dollars to support student enrollment. Bucknell is incredibly fortunate. We have wonderful financial aid. We do a great job. But to my point, it's not unlimited. So we do have to make that part of our process at the end to make sure that with the offers that we're giving, we're going to stay within what we can financially afford as an institution, and that's actually the vast majority of colleges and universities.

  I think it's just one of those pieces of the process that, the reviews over and over again, that's the double checking. It's the number of students. It's the budget. It's, “Are you getting the students in the right areas to make sure that you can support them in the experience you want them to have?” I think, in a word, that's the pressure we face as an admissions office, is we want to make sure students are having this really great college experience. And you understand when, if you're too big over here, how does that impact advising? How does that impact the classroom space? That's why we're trying to keep all those things in mind and why it's reviewed many times before we get to the end.

  [0:20:43] BHA: We hear the word competitive used a lot when it comes to college admissions. Is there ever a time or scenario where one student's application is compared to another? Is there information that might make student B stand out more than student A when it comes to making kind of those final choices?

  [0:20:59] KM: This is a really popular question, because I always use this analogy of I think a lot of folks think about the admissions process as a March Madness bracket, that you keep winning against somebody until you're in the final group that gets admitted. In reality, I think all of us that do this work know that that's not how it goes. Because as we talked about earlier, there's a lot of individual context we have to get, because you can't compare student A and B when they don't have the same opportunities. Even students at the same high school. They have different family backgrounds. They have different personal experiences. So how do you rationalize putting students against each other when they're uniquely individual people?

  So there is never that, “I'm going to put Becca and Brooke next to each other and say, which of these two are we taking?” It's really about looking at the overall what a student has accomplished in their environment, and then how does that factor into the bigger picture? So again, I think it's one of those things where I talked about earlier that there is no right or wrong answer. It's about doing your best and then putting your best foot forward and seeing how it shakes out in the process.

  [0:22:07] BT: I think it's great for our listeners to hear that and to know that at least at a school like Bucknell, each student is being evaluated on their own merit. They're also being evaluated by a real person, not an algorithm, or ChatGPT, or any sort of computer.

  The great thing is that they're being evaluated by real people who are using every single bit of information to kind of paint a picture of who that person is and not just an amalgamation of data. But no person is without their biases. So how do application readers set aside all their personal lenses to evaluate each application fairly? Is there a rubric that they measure everything against?

  [0:22:48] KM: You'd be hard pressed to find an institution that doesn't have some sort of rubric to help them evaluate students and make decisions. But I will say, I think one of the things that we talked about a lot as a team is, just because there's a rubric doesn't dictate the outcome, right? Because there's stories to be told. Let's give an example, which is, I know, Becca and I both read these kinds of files where students experienced a lot in life. There are students who have had a really tough road. Maybe high school didn't start out the best because of personal and family reasons. But they're really knocking out of the park. We have to stay true to how we look at our rating scales and what we do. So a student might not maybe have the tippy-top academic reading that we're looking for. When you understand the story, there's context for why you'd want them at the institution. I always say the tricky thing about rubrics is that yes, all schools I think, probably have them. But again, it doesn't mean that like, “Oh, this rating means you're absolutely in,” because there's so much more to a student than just those little nuances.

  I think the way that we check our biases is number one: Every school I've ever worked for, and Bucknell is the third institution I've worked for professionally, does a reader training program every year. It doesn't matter how many years you do this. Every year, you want to go through an exercise of how do we read applications? How do we make sure we're all on the same page and how we're looking at applications? A lot of times in those trainings, at least at Bucknell, we've done bias training. We bring in colleagues that know the work well, of bias and unconscious bias, and how do we face those things head on? How might they present themselves in application? How do we mitigate that from the front end?

  I should say one of the pieces of advice I always give my team is that, you sometimes have to take that moment before you open applications to take a moment and reset and breathe and remember that each student is an individual, because when you're reading multiple applications a day, you don't want them to bleed together and mix up, “Oh, I read that story. It's made me have an emotional reaction that's now carrying over to the next one.” That's not fair to either student. We also tried to have exercises about, "How do we reset? How do we make sure that each student gets their own individual review?"

  I think we do the best we can and that's also why there's multiple people. Because that way, it's not one person making a decision and maybe their biases creeping in, because you have people to keep you in check and see things in a different light and say, “Yes, I know why you interpreted that essay that way. I actually am interpreting it completely different.” That's okay. That's part of this process.

  [0:25:25] BHA: We have covered a ton in today's episode. I think we really did justice to the title of, Inside the Mind of an Application Reader. With everything we've covered so far, is there one thing or one takeaway that you as the dean of admissions would want prospective students and their families to leave with?

  [0:25:41] KM: I think the one thing I want folks to remember, I'm going to reiterate something I said earlier, which is that there isn't a right and wrong answer to an application. I do think the best advice I can give is for students to pursue the things they like and love. Don't try to be somebody to be interesting to a college. Do the things that bring you joy and give you energy, because when you present that it comes through, and we get excited, and that's when I think there's the most success. So understanding yourself, doing those things that you really, really enjoy, and presenting that to an admissions office is going to be your best bet.

  [0:26:21] BT: Yes. It all comes down to being yourself, not just at the application stage, but once you're admitted and at every point throughout the college journey. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We're so glad that we got you here to talk about this topic.

  [0:26:31] KM: It was so much fun. Thanks again for having me.

  [0:26:34] BHA: Thanks to everyone out there listening. If you're a fan of the podcast, please take a moment to rate, subscribe, and share this episode with the students and families in your life.

  [0:26:43] BT: We'll be back with a new episode in a few weeks. In the meantime, send your questions, comments and episode ideas to podcast@bucknell.edu. We read every note you send.

  [0:26:51] BHA: Finally, you're invited to follow Bucknell on your favorite social media apps. Just look for @BucknellU on Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube and TikTok. You can also follow our student-run Instagram account which is @iamraybucknell.

  [0:27:05] BT: Until next time, keep on reaching for your dreams and your dream school.

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