Getting Admitted To College – The Decision Steps
Note: This is part 8 of the transcript of the information contained in the video from VanderbiltUniversity about Applying for College – an Insiders Guide for Getting Into a Good College and it’s about getting admitted to college.
For the previous segment:
Can I Get Financial Aid if My Parents Have Good Jobs?
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Getting Admitted to College:
How many people actually decide if I’m going to get admitted or not?
Typically the process and I can and I will give you a brief synopsis here at Vanderbilt that would be a standard metric or a standard rubrix, if you will at most schools like Vanderbilt where the IBs and schools like Vanderbilt. The application is going to come in.
There’s going to be an initial read and that’s typically the person called the territory manager. That manager that I visited at high school, I probably already talked to you when you were thinking of applying and or perhaps not as well. That comes in and so we walk around the United States all that way. So there’s somebody.
Then there’s what’s called a second reader and that second reader comes along with the first person makes a series of decisions and notes and that, the second one comes along and then that’s their reading the file.
Those two together, if they both agree, then goes to what’s called a sign-off officer which is the senior member of the staff. And then that sign-off officer either comes up with kind of agrees with or deny. Let’s hold that for a while and let’s see what happens in the whole pool to we think that should be an admit. That admits still never happen until the day we sent the admit letter because it’s changing. So that’s the third person.
Then when we work it out we made through our series of our evaluation. There’s kind of that a broader clear admit based on this or a broader clear deny.
Then there’s this whole pool in the middle. And that is where every single one comes to the admissions committee and the territory officer advocates to admit that student to a group of 3 people.
I chair all early decision 1 and early decision 2 with two senior members. Then in regular decision, I chair one of the committees with two senior people and then we have two other committees just of sheer volume.
And then that all comes together and then in that time, someone right there and they’re verbally telling me about the student and I make, as a group, we make the decision admit or deny at that point, or hold again.
And then it goes back. We just think it’s should be admitted or maybe shouldn’t. Can’t quite make it and it goes back to the whole pile and then we will do that again. And then eventually, that final group comes back to me and the senior folks and we look at that one more time.