College Admissions Officer Career

College Admissions Officer Career

The Real Poop

Ah, college. Where degrees are obtained, and debt is incurred. (Source)

Quick—make a list of powerful people. Go ahead; we'll wait. Done? Great.

Your list probably includes people like doctors, politicians, and celebrities—and you wouldn't be wrong. The thing is...where did all of those people get their start?

That's right—college. Well, except for some of the celebs, but you get the point.

This is where you come in—the college admissions officer. You're the decider (except you won't have a cable TV procedural named after you), you're the person who makes or breaks the dreams of the best and brightest students, and you're responsible for giving future lawyers, engineers, and potential reality TV stars access to a top-notch education.

When you enter a room (well, certain rooms), people notice. When you stand up and speak in high school auditoriums, counseling offices, or career centers, the rooms go silent and people hang on your every word.

You hold the key to higher education, and people want in.

The Basics

As a young, up-and-coming admissions officer, you'll be recruiting the best students from all over the country. In the education world, you'll be known as a "roadrunner"—you just won't be chased around a desert by a coyote (hopefully).

You'll be the face of your university at high school recruitment sessions, college fairs, and your school's open house day, where you'll get to hold an important-looking clipboard and wear a big, toothy grin.

If you work at a small college with a modest staff, you might also get to review applications and make preliminary decisions about who gets in; although, more likely than not, you'll be weeding out the obvious undesirables with barely passing GPAs or those who spent their summers playing video games for twelve hours a day. Maybe you'll be meeting with high school guidance counselors, trying to get them to turn their top students over to you and only you.

Promotion #1

As you move up the admissions totem pole, your next stop will include everything the previous one did. Lucky you. You'll have additional responsibilities as well, such as being in charge of the open house instead of just attending it. How's that for a bonus? Now the roadrunner gets to fetch you that vanilla latte.

You'll likely be on the phone (a lot), answering calls from anxious prospective students and helicopter parents who ask the same exact things that they could easily find out from your school's website. Those obsessive callers obviously didn't read Shmoop's Do's and Don'ts of Applying to College. You can point them over here once you've answered all of their pressing, important questions.

You'll spend your days in the early part of the season (yes...the season) emailing inspirational recruitment letters to prospective candidates and offering brochures and buttons to those who knocked their PSAT scores out of the park. It's a "My School is Bigger and Better Than Your School" game at this point, and you'll kvell over things like your ranking in U.S. News and World Report.

Other lesser known schools need to work it, luring students with flattering phone calls, generous financial aid packages, and comparisons of the school to Hogwarts...minus the witchcraft, of course.

Also, our caretaker, Mr. Filch, has asked me to remind you that the third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a most painful death. (Source)

During the second part of the season, you'll be reading applications until your eyes bleed. The average admissions officer for a private school reads about 350 applications a season, while public school officers read about 825 (source). Looks like that best seller you've been meaning to get to will just have to wait.

How do you get through so many applications in a normal workday? You don't. Things can get pretty hectic, and twenty-hour workdays aren't out of the question (source).

Your main form of entertainment during this stressful time will probably be posting unique and ridiculous typos on your colleagues' doors. You'll start counting how many times students accidentally put your rival school's name in the body of their essay, and you will get really good at waste paper basketball.

Promotion #2

As a more senior admissions officer, you'll be reading college entrance essays that have been picked over for obvious gaffes ahead of time and then meet around a table in a committee, passing judgment. You'll either vote to "admit" and make someone's dream come true or drop kick them into the collegiate abyss.

The further you advance in the field, the less direct contact you'll have with prospective students and their families. More of your time will be spent dealing with boring but important things like budgeting, balancing enrollment, and other bureaucratic tasks.

But at its core, the job of a college admissions officer is spent swigging double espressos as you read thousands of student records, brag sheets, and essays—while making decisions on who gets in and who gets the boot (or the flip-flop, if you're lucky enough to work at a school by a beach).

Staffing

The size of admissions staffs vary, kind of like snowflakes, the weather in the Midwest, and what season our orange tree decides to bear fruit. Seriously, though, will we ever get oranges again?

There's a hierarchy in colleges—but you already knew that.

The top colleges have enormous power and influence, and while the schools on the second rung from the top still have a lot of power, things fall off considerably from there.

Now the bigger deal the university is, the larger the admissions staff will be. At MIT, applications pass through first readers, second readers, and then a selection committee made up of admissions staff and faculty members. All in all, an application may be picked over by twelve different sets of eyeballs (source).

For the smaller, relatively unknown college out of, say, Nome, AK, or Punxsutawney, PA, you'll have a considerably smaller staff whose job it is to convince smarty-pants seniors to ditch their dreams of the Ivy League in lieu of a "more intimate" college experience. Who knows? You might discover the next Einstein; and wouldn't it be a coup to your college cap if you could convince him to set up shop at your school?

The bottom line here is that if your school falls into this category, the job will consist more of begging talented students to come and commit early to your school. Odds are you won't be sifting through piles and piles of applications from valedictorians. Now this seems like a good a place as any to let you know that you won't be the only person doing the judging. Just because your school offers a spot to an applicant doesn't mean the student will be hanging up posters in their campus dorm come the fall.

You'll be judged (or evaluated—yeah, that has a nicer ring to it) on the percentage of students who accept your offer. This offer-to-accept ratio, also known as the yield, reveals the percentage of students who accept offers of enrollment. These yields vary, but here are a few examples from 2012:

  • Harvard: 81% accepted offers
  • Stanford: 73.6% accepted offers
  • Wake Forest: 31.1% accepted offers

(Source)

What It Takes

Just remember, whether you work for Harvard or a small, agricultural junior college in the boonies: You're making and creating potential careers. You've got the power to change lives.

It helps to be someone who likes to read and is a good judge of character. You'll have to sit through thousands of sad, inspirational, and often dull stories. You'll see essays full of personal triumphs, tragic setbacks, and life lessons learned from aging grandparents. There will be a seemingly never-ending number of teacher recommendations, and more transcripts than you'll know what to do with.

You'll be holding the precious dreams of America's youth in your hands, and you'll have to crush most of them. Wouldn't it be great if you were able to just accept everyone? Smiles and hugs all around, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. You're going to have to be skilled at saying no—yes men need not apply.

You can't please everyone, and while you'll be a hero to some, the majority of applicants will be creating voodoo dolls in your likeness because they're stuck with their second or third choice of schools.

Dear Applicant, we regret to inform you that this wad of cash in no way substitutes for your personal statement, high school transcript, and test scores. (Source)

At the end of it all, you'll get to fill out one of three letter templates:

  • The happy, congratulatory acceptance letters. (Admit)
  • The depressing, "don't call us, we won't call you" rejection letters. (Deny)
  • The "maybe, but don't count on it" letters. (Waitlist) 

Once the letters go out, you'll enter the office poll on who gets the most original insults and nasty phone calls from angry parents. Hey, you may even win the thing.

When it's all said and done, you get to sit back, take a deep breath...and start the whole process over again.