Many current Georgetown students who haven’t repressed their memories of the college admissions process likely remember being frustrated to some degree by the number of colleges – including Georgetown – that refused to accept the Common Application.
Over the past several years, however, schools such as Brown, UChicago, UVA, Michigan and Columbia have joined the growing number of schools bowing to the pressure to give up signature applications in favor of the universal online application. With USC and Howard joining the pool of Common App schools, the Washington Post‘s Daniel de Vise reports that Georgetown is now the last top tier university refusing to accept the app (de Vise’s headline isn’t technically accurate, since MIT also insists on its own application.) According to Post, USC adopted the application after feedback from college counselors, noting that the Common App can make it easier for disadvantaged students to apply to schools.
However, Georgetown’s dean of admissions Charles Deacon has long been an opponent of the Common App, having previously stated that the App tends to encourage students to spam schools with applications and that the schools are being forced to change their process to keep their application numbers up with other top colleges. The Office of Admissions could not be reached for comment.
In an interview, Deacon argued that forcing schools to adhere to a common application diminishes the personal nature of college selection.
“We do feel that [the Common App] makes applying too easy, too homogenized, and not personalized at all,” Deacon said. “[...] In the end, students are being asked to differentiate and yet the process homogenizes them.” Read the rest of this entry »
Are you a class of 2015 hopeful who cannot think of what to write about for an admissions essay or a current student who is too busy to write an original paper?
If you’re short on cash after the holidays, eBay user alzheimers_caregiver has come up with a way to make a little extra money.
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Remember those high school days when you cursed Georgetown for not using the Common Application, instead forcing you plow through a six-page, two-part application?
Well, take comfort in the fact that future student will have to do the same. Georgetown’s single-use application isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
The Common App, which began in 1998 and is now used by 414 schools, creates an “admissions bubble” that unnecessarily swells applicant pools, according to Dean of Admissions Charles Deacon.
“We don’t have the Common App because we think that each person is unique and each school is unique,” Deacon told the Washington Post. “We don’t want people to apply for the wrong reasons.”
Georgetown has reaped the benefits of Deacon’s 38 years heading the Admissions department. When he came to Georgetown, the University accepted more than half of its applicants. After building an alumni network that mirrors the recruitment techniques of the Ivy League, however, Deacon helped transform Georgetown into a competitive, more selective college.
The strategy worked; over the last decade, applications to the University have risen 20 percent, while only accepting 18 percent of applicants.
In an email sent to the Georgetown community on Tuesday, President John DeGioia and Provost James O’Donnell gave some updates about the University’s Diversity and Inclusiveness Initiative.
Last year, faculty, student, and staff working groups recommended a variety of methods to increase diversity on campus, which the University began to adopt during the spring semester. This most recent email outlines Georgetown’s plan to continue promoting “community in diversity.”
After the jump, we’ve listed their updates and the full email.
We’ve seen the considerable talents of Georgetown students immortalized in video before: from Ben Shaw and Matt Appenfeller’s powers of satire and pulling off fake mustaches to Arman Ismail’s Joker impression to Jon Deutsch’s Georgetown Forever. But this year at Tufts University, video-literate potential students get to submit their masterpieces as part of their admissions packet.
Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin told the New York Times that he had the idea to let students supplement their admissions essays with videos when he was watching a particularly good YouTube video.
“I thought, ‘If this kid applied to Tufts, I’d admit him in a minute, without anything else,’ ” he said.
Tufts put the word out that applicants could include a one-minute video that “says something about you” (in addition to their answers to some rather outre admissions questions, like, “Are we alone?” and “Create something out of a piece of paper”), and now, over 1,000 out of the 15,000 applicants to Tufts have included videos.
Quinn’s and Klinker’s videos especially are great examples of how video allows applicants to show off talents that they couldn’t, necessarily, in an essay.
Vox thinks this is a delightful idea—and a way better use of YouTube to enhance a university than the horribly hard-to-watch “Why I Chose Yale.”
Heckler Editor Jack Stuef (COL ’10) speaking at a forum in December
In an e-mail to the Georgetown community that reflected on Martin Luther King Day, University President John DeGioia made his first remarks in response to the December Georgetown Heckler issue, which many students thought inappropriately satirized race. He also said that he and Provost James O’Donnell have also approved the suggestions of the Admissions and Recruitment Working Group, and that they will take the steps necessary to implement the suggestions.
“Mocking the history of oppression of others is not funny, does not build community, and does not reflect well on those who engage in it,” he wrote in response to the one of the Heckler‘sarticles. “We often cannot know how our words or deeds can hurt one another – how such an act can bring back into another’s consciousness an experience of a previous injustice or indignity.”
DeGioia also called the response to the Heckler incident ” responsible, respectful, and fitting for an academic community that is committed to the free exchange of ideas.”
The Admissions and Recruitment Working Group presented a draft of their proposals in late November, which it is not necessarily identical to the suggestions that DeGioia and O’Donnell have approved. That draft included suggestions to build a more diverse student body, such as:
Prominently advertising the 1,789 new scholarships that Georgetown will be adding to encourage need-blind admissions over the next five years to potential students.
Looking into strategies that will increase the likelihood that an accepted student from an underrepresented group will attend Georgetown
Increasing the diversity of Blue and Gray tour guides and their knowledge of diversity issues and clubs on campus.
Including imagery on Georgetown’s redesigned website that highlights campus diversity.
Including a required essay prompt that invites students to discuss how their background or life experience would enrich Georgetown on applications.
The full text of DeGioia’s e-mail, after the jump.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is investigating whether colleges are giving men—who are making up a smaller and smaller portion of the higher education population across the nation—a leg up over women in their admissions processes, or giving them more generous aid packages to try to encourage them to attend in higher numbers.
According to the Washington Post, on Wednesday, federal civil rights commissioners voted to subpoena records from 19 Washington-area schools for their investigation—and that includes Georgetown University.
The school is not being fingered as a perpetrator of admissions discrimination. Rather, the commissioners are selecting colleges that will give them a “representative example of higher education nationally.”
Vox has been trying to get numbers on Georgetown’s admissions rates by gender for the last week or so, ever since it saw this opinion piece in USA Today, “Why men warrant a break on college admissions“—take a gander and let us know if you think that failing to give preferential treatment to men “would threaten the diversity that defines our world-class higher education system.”
We’ve been unsuccessful in getting those numbers so far, but we’ll post them when we get a hold of them.
Photo from Flickr user CarbonNYC under a creative commons license
Just ten people attended, most of whom were already involved in the working group’s endeavors, but a few outsiders provided helpful critiques of the working group’s draft of recommendations to the University. (The draft includes suggestions such as adding a diversity-oriented option to the Georgetown application’s essay question and diversifying campus groups like Blue and Gray and GAAP).
Katerina Kulagina (GRD ’09), for example, the Associate Director of Admissions for the MSB’s Executive Degree Programs, asked about diversity of Georgetown’s own undergraduate admissions staff. Senior Associate Director of Undergraduate Admissions Jaime Briseno replied that of the 15 or so people working in admissions, he and Assistant Director Kamilah Holder (SFS ’02) were the only two non-white staff members.
The working group hopes to include diversity discussion in NSO
In a campuswide e-mail yesterday evening, the Office of the Provost announced that the Admissions and Recruitment Working Group has put together a draft proposal for changes to Georgetown’s recruitment process.
The changes, which are meant to encourage a more diverse student body, are not official, and the “plan for implementation” of any changes will not arrive until January 2010, after community comment. However, the e-mail, signed by Provost James O’Donnell and Vice President for Institutional Diversity and Equity Rosemary Kilkenny, did indicate that the suggestions would be “immensely helpful” to the University’s ongoing recruitment of the Class of 2014.
Suggestions for altering the admissions and recruitment process, according to the nineteen-page working group report (PDF) provided by link in the e-mail, include, among other things:
Prominently advertising the 1,789 new scholarships that Georgetown will be adding to encourage need-blind admissions over the next five years to potential students.
Looking into strategies that will increase the likelihood that an accepted student from an underrepresented group will attend Georgetown
Increasing the diversity of Blue and Gray tour guides and their knowledge of diversity issues and clubs on campus.
Including imagery on Georgetown’s redesigned website that highlights campus diversity.
Including a required essay prompt that invites students to discuss how their background or life experience would enrich Georgetown on applications.
These proposed changes are aimed at increasing campus diversity and cross-cultural engagement. The report notes that relative to peer universities, Georgetown has a very low attendance yield among its accepted minority applicants.
Turns out last year’s economic nosedive caused more than just the stock market to decline—Georgetown’s yield rate also took a hit.
The yield rate, the percentage of students accepted to Georgetown who chose to enroll, dropped to 43 percent this year, down from last year’s 45 percent. That makes 2009 the second consecutive year Georgetown’s yield rate has slumped. From 2005 to 2007 the yield rate remained at 47%.
Charles Deacon, the Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, pointed to the economic downturn as an explanation for the drop in yield rate.
“The yield fell about three percent this year as the financial crisis affected virtually every college and family whether they were financial aid applicants or not,” Dean Deacon wrote in an email.
The yield rate for students who applied for financial aid was roughly 39 percent, significantly lower than the 49 percent yield for students who did not apply for financial aid. This disparity helps explain the markedly lower yield for minority students, roughly 80 percent of whom have applied for financial aid in recent years, according to Deacon.
In addition to a drop in yield rate, the number of applications Georgetown received also declined this year. A total of 18,617 students applied to Georgetown this year, a slight drop from 2008′s 18,700 applications. The 2008 applicant pool was the largest in the University’s history, though, so while this year’s numbers aren’t record-breaking, they’re still higher than any year besides 2008.
To combat the flagging yield rate, and the disparity between financial aid seeking applicants and non-financial aid seeking applicants, the University has increased its fundraising efforts and plans unveil additional steps later this week.
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, Georgetown University's weekly newsmagazine. Opinions expressed in posts are those of their author alone unless otherwise stated.
Are you a class of 2015 hopeful who cannot think of what to write about for an admissions essay or a current student who is too busy to write an original paper?
Men, the world is your oyster
The working group hopes to include diversity discussion in NSO
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