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Two Decades at the Gates
A veteran of the admissions process argues that while the competition is tougher and the “packaging” ever more intense, the goal remains unchanged.
Summer 1996
by Annie Murphy Paul
Director of Undergraduate Admissions Margit Dahl is moving up in the world. Last year, she and the rest of Yale’s admissions office relocated from a tiny, dilapidated clapboard house on the New Haven Green to a majestic mansion on Hillhouse Avenue, opposite the President’s House. Dahl says that their former building, one of the city’s oldest, was simply too small to accommodate the office’s 15,000 annual visitors. But the move to a grander office also reflects heightened demands on the admissions department. “There’s a lot more interest today in packaging, in image,” says Dahl. “We as a society are more packaged than we were 20 years ago, and that affects admissions too.”
Dahl should know. After graduating from Yale in 1975, she took a job as an interviewer in the admissions office-a position that was supposed to last only through December of that year. She’s been there ever since. In her two decades of visiting schools, reading applications, and interviewing students, she’s seen the stakes rise on both sides. “In the past, the admissions office here didn’t have to work so hard at recruiting,” she says. “We could rely on the Yale name to attract the best students.” The University still fills its classes with top-notch scholars, says Dahl; it just has to seek them out more deliberately. That means reaching out to more students, in more places. In addition to visiting three or four high schools a day on their recruiting rounds, as admissions officers have done for years, they now hold evening meetings to which every promising high school student within a prescribed area receives an invitation. “It’s not just a matter of keeping up with the Joneses,” says Dahl of her office’s stepped-up recruiting efforts. “It’s about talking to kids from different parts of the country that we’ve never reached before.”
Dahl says that she and Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid, take the task of recruiting world-class students quite literally. In the four years since he succeeded Worth David, who had served as dean since 1972, Shaw has gone abroad four times, scouting Asia, Europe, and the Middle East for qualified students. “We realized that for a place of Yale’s stature, we weren’t attracting as many international students as we should,” says Dahl, pointing out that Shaw also initiated a major redesign of Yale’s “viewbook,” the brochure that provides some prospective students with their only glimpse of the campus.
Their department has also begun to explore the potential uses of technology in the admissions process. The office is currently updating its computer system and integrating it with other University departments, such as the bursar and the financial aid office, allowing it to serve students more comprehensively.
But Yale’s admissions office is not the only party eager to put its best foot forward. During her years in the department, Dahl has sensed a mounting pressure on students and parents. “There’s much more anxiety among high school students now about the admissions process,” says Dahl. “They are investigating more and more colleges, and those who are looking are getting younger and younger. There are more SAT prep courses, more educational consultants-even for kids who are already doing very well.” The much-hyped college rankings compiled by U.S. News and World Report and others only contribute further to the hysteria that surrounds applying to college. “Surveys are just one more thing that allows students and families not to take full responsibility for the college selection process, not to think about what’s right for that particular student,” she says.
The search for the “right” university, however, may for some be motivated more by economics than academics. “A college degree is no longer the guarantee of success it once was,” says Dahl. “Kids figure that they have to get into the college with the big name just to get a leg up in the marketplace.” And to afford college at all, students and their families may have to do some major financial juggling. When Dahl began working at the admissions office, just over half the students requested financial aid. Today, that number is close to 70 percent. “The level of aid we give out has not changed that much, but the numbers of families requesting it means that they feel they need help,” says Dahl.
Still, she says, “we don’t lose large numbers of students to state institutions, or to private institutions that offer merit scholarships.” Most students who turn down Yale for other schools, says Dahl, do so to attend a handful of similarly high-priced private institutions: Stanford, M.I.T., the other Ivies. Dahl herself is a strong believer in Yale’s policy of need-blind admissions: “Occasionally, we do miss out on a spectacular student who’s offered a free ride at another college. But the system we have is the fairest and most democratic, and it benefits the largest number of students.”
Perhaps the only thing that hasn’t changed in Dahl’s years in the admissions office is the most fundamental: how Yale students are chosen. University policy is still based on a 1967 document known as the “Muyskens letter,” a statement by then-President Kingman Brewster to Dahl’s predecessor, John Muyskens Jr. In the letter, Brewster defined the ultimate goal of the admissions office’s search: “a sharp and inquiring mind, coupled with a capacity and desire to use it.”
“From time to time, Yale Presidents have tried to update or rewrite that letter,” says Dahl, “but it remains the most eloquent expression of our ideal.” Brewster’s model has remained in place, says Dahl, simply because it has proven itself over time. “If we were getting negative feedback from the faculty, we might consider changing it,” she says, “but we keep hearing from professors that we’re letting in great kids.”
One other thing that has persisted over time is Dahl’s own enthusiasm for the job. “I’m not jaded at all. I still get incredibly excited by some of the applications I read,” she says. “I keep a file of essays that I really love-the ones that moved me, that made me laugh.”  |
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