The Challenge of Assessing International Applicants
March 2003
by David Westendorff '77 David Westendorff '77 teaches urban planning at Tsinghua University. For the past dozen years or so, my main connection to Yale has been through interviewing applicants to Yale College from Switzerland and China. I have always enjoyed these encounters, thinking of it as a kind of personality prospecting. My aim has been to find the student whose interview “performance” might give the admissions committee reason to re-interpret the application data in a more telling way and find candidates who would, other things being equal, make Yale a healthier and more interesting place for undergrads. In Geneva, Switzerland, where I lived for a decade, the applicants were diverse. Only rarely did I discover a student who did not seem worldly well beyond his or her years. In some respects, I thought that Yale might even feel a bit provincial to them. When the Alumni Schools Committee representative in Beijing contacted me earlier this year to see if I would be willing to interview Chinese applicants, I enthusiastically agreed. My preconceptions of what it would be like dated from my own experiences in Hong Kong in the late 1970s and in Shanghai in the mid-1980s. In 1978, I had a two-year stint of teaching English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Most of my students were of working class origins. Many were the first in their families to go beyond grade school. Fast forward to fall 1985. I settled in Shanghai, first at Fudan University and then the U.S. Consulate General. I was besieged by requests for information about getting into U.S. universities, albeit mostly at the graduate level. Many of my Chinese friends interested in studying abroad were already in their mid-20s to mid-30s. Many were married and had a child. For all but an extraordinary few, English was the crucial stumbling block. Many enrolled in English night school and listened to bootleg English language cassette tapes and the Voice of America nonstop. Yet, despite their efforts, the majority could not make themselves understood in conversation or essay. By contrast, the applicants I interviewed this year—all by phone—were single young women. Each had already submitted a set of answers to me via e-mail. I would have used e-mail alone but I wanted to hear their voices—and the possible pauses that might indicate the speaker did not write the e-mails. One of the applicants was in a large city in southwest China I last visited in 1981. At that time, it was hard to contact anyone there, but just two decades later, my young interviewee not only had a home telephone and Internet connection but also a personal cell phone. I feel confident that the young women I interviewed were indeed the authors of the e-mail. They spoke English with a fluency that none of my Chinese university students or Shanghai friends had achieved. Moreover, their poise on the phone in a second language and quick reactions to new lines of questioning showed a subtlety I had not expected. They reminded me of the sophisticated “kids” I interviewed in Geneva. Good universities worldwide will increasingly receive applications from such students. No doubt Yale and other top institutions welcome this opportunity to globalize. But selecting students from China (and possibly other developing countries) is becoming more complex. Not only are the applications growing exponentially, but so are the difficulties of assessing the personal characteristics of the applicants. The gap between the purchasing power of China’s elites and the rest of society grows at a staggering rate. While the education systems in the countryside are crumbling, people with money can send their children to private schools. Also problematic is dishonesty in applications, which can be difficult to verify. One interviewee wrote to me that her classmate, whose grades and TOEFL scores were lower than her own, submitted falsified information on her college applications. When her classmate got admitted and she didn’t, she asked me if she should take the same tack in applying to Yale. These concerns may not be greatly different from those affecting applicants to Yale from many developing countries. Here, though, the scale is many magnitudes greater. How long will it take for the number of applications from China alone to reach 1,000? How will Yale interpret the application data under the conditions I describe? Will Yale seek out deserving students from communities excluded from sharing China’s new wealth? Will interviewers like myself need new tools and guidance? |
