College admissions staff - Role in College Admission Process

Ivy League colleges and elite universities send their admissions officers to college fairs to encourage students to apply. While the chance of admission to highly selective program is typically under 10%, increased numbers of applications helps maintain and improve colleges' rankings.

A typical admission staff at a college includes a dean or vice president for admission or enrollment management, middle-level managers or assistant directors, admission officers, and administrative support staff. The chief enrollment management officer is sometimes the highest-paid position in the department, earning $130,000 on average in 2014, while admissions officers average only $40,000. Admissions officers tend to be in the 30-to-40 age demographic. They are chosen for their experience in admissions, aptitude for statistics and data analysis, experience in administration and marketing and public relations. They serve dual roles as counselors and recruiters, and they don't like to think of themselves as marketers, according to one view. They are evaluated on how well they "represent their college, manage their office, recruit staff members, and work with other administrators." There are basically two types of officers: a first group of personable, sharp, people-oriented go-getter types who were often recent college grads; a second group was somewhat out-of-touch "lifers" who often did not graduate from a highly selective college. Officers are generally paid an annual salary, although there have been reports of some recruiters paid on the basis of how many students they bring to a college, such as recruiters/consultants working abroad to recruit foreign students to U.S. universities.

Many colleges and universities work hard to market themselves, trying to attract the best students and maintain the best reputation for overall academic quality. Colleges spend an average of $700 to recruit a single applicant, and these funds go to marketing brochures and hiring admissions staff. There are efforts to make increased use of social media sites such as Facebook to promote their colleges. Marketing brochures and other promotional mailings can arrive every day in the hope of persuading high school students to apply to a college.

Colleges actually send "view books" not because they intend to admit them, but "because they want multitudes of students to apply" to improve the college's selectivity ranking and to make sure that they have as many well-qualified applicants as possible from whom to choose the strongest class. Colleges get access to names and addresses after students give permission to them after taking the GRE exam. One report suggested that college admissions officers were highly focused on how their rejection and yield rates appeared in rankings by US News.