the Sam Jackson College Experience

Norman Kraft of Zen Writes Inc. keeps a higher education marketing blog called “Zen and the Art of Higher Education Marketing” which I read regularly (or at least as regularly as he posts–happily, the last couple of weeks have been pretty consistent) and generally find to be very on the mark. Two weeks ago he posed an interesting question–what effect do appearances have in the context of the admissions office itself? He writes:

For many colleges and universities, admissions office space seems almost an afterthought. Too often, the office entrances are difficult to find and once found, the admissions area is hardly one of the highlights of the college tour. I’ve seen admissions officers attempt to prevent parents and students from seeing their offices by arranging meetings in open spaces on campus, or at a library or student center.

Your admissions area is your first impression, and as the old saying goes, you only have one opportunity to make a good first impression.

Let me address this question from my perspective as a student and a recent college-admissions-office-visitor. First and foremost, the admissions office is not the first impression someone has of a school when visiting. Not precisely, at least. Parents don’t blindfold their kids, drive them in erratic randomized patterns, and then lead them up to the admissions office only to then ‘unveil’ the first impression of the entire school. There is the journey to the admissions office first, and even that little step can have a significant impact. How so?

Although I knew that there were realistic constraints for space, sometimes the positioning of an admissions office alone would seem to send a message to me. Take, for example, the University of Pennsylvania admissions office: it is very convenient and easy to find because of how central it is to campus (1 College Hall, ground floor). To get there we walked through especially nice portions of the campus and a vibrant part of Philadelphia; that was the first impression of the school. My memories of the admissions office itself are not especially great because my preoccupation at the time was coping with the 105+ degree heat wave.

The real distinction between admissions offices first and foremost is SERVICE. Yes, it was a painful heat wave at Penn and that wasn’t their fault. The day before, though, the temperatures were almost as bad and I had visited both Yale and Wesleyan with my family. The biggest difference, where tour and admissions office experience was concerned (schools aside)? Wesleyan offered free bottles of water. It was also, hands down, the nicest, most accommodating, and most convincing of anywhere I visited, but that’s another story. The water was part of that. I know it’s not in the budgets for Penn and Yale to offer water to all the people who come and visit–they had rather bigger crowds–but those are some of the differences that we take away from tours. The little details that count.

Wesleyan-Yale isn’t a very fair comparison, as I’ve said. So let me use another situation with slightly more even odds: Harvard vs. MIT.

I visited MIT on March 14th, 2006–it was the first school I visited. I remember the date because it was Pi Day! Anyway, I visited MIT with my friend Greta and we got slightly lost in the infinite corridor and on campus looking around for the admissions office because MIT buildings are all designated by numbers are we weren’t paying that much attention since it was our spring break. Something like that. We found the office in the end and it was a messy place inhospitable to visitors–we were sent elsewhere for our tour and info talk. It felt like the reception / office ratio was off. All the same, we had a good time at MIT (read the visit report).

Compare with Harvard: we wandered over to Radcliffe yard and found the admissions office after some searching, but given Harvard’s visitor volume what happened next was unfortunate. We were sent from a messy office environment to what looked like a semi-dilapidated basement auditorium where we were told about how selective Harvard was before being sent out on the worst college tour in my complete touring experience.

There were many similarities in presentation and aesthetic experience, but when I ask Greta or think myself about the MIT visit we don’t think about how the office was messy. We just think about how exciting the UROP program sounded and how friendly everyone was. The aesthetic details only come into play over at Harvard when we start trying to look for something to redeem the experience.

Are aesthetics important? Sure. But they’re not the most important part of the experience or ‘first impression,’ at least not in my mind, and it’s important to remember that. I didn’t see any places that were installing gold leaf in the admissions offices while cutting back on staff, but I just thought I’d share my thoughts on this all the same.

For the record, Johns Hopkins gave out free water bottles a few days later when it was equally hot.

MIT has an early action telethon, where current students call every one of the early action admits and congratulate them! It’s during IAP so everyone at MIT has lots of free time, conceivably. This kind of thing is easy to set up and makes admits feel really special and loved as a new part of the MIT community.

Do other schools do this? If yours doesn’t… why not? I know MIT has fewer early admits than most (fewer than 400 students) but all the same, it shouldn’t be too hard logistically to accomplish something like that.

This is a great way to produce more warm fuzzy feelings about your school. I don’t think MIT has any problem with yields, but this can’t hurt.

edit: Kate comments to us from Yale that Yale also does this and will be calling this week. Cool!

See also: Yale University mails really nice personalized notes to the EA admit crowd.

This is a ‘part 1′ because this is a very big very thorny issue which concerns affirmative action and much more. As such I will in the near future be writing a ‘part 2′ which directly addresses any AA-related concerns I’m having about this topic here… but for now, my understanding of the issue:

Pulitzer prize winner Daniel Golden wrote a piece about “whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake” in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. It focused specifically on the case of one Jian Li, a Chinese permanent legal resident who went to a NJ public school having emigrated at age 4. Mr. Li recently filed a complaint against Princeton University for rejecting him through the Dept. Education’s Office for Civil Rights; he is currently a freshman at Yale. (n.b., this is not a tort case, it is a complaint about what Li feels was discrimination.)

This is an issue that throws a lot of people off sometimes, because some people confuse a) Affirmative action with b) race-based discrimination. Private universities in the United States are not required to have the same ‘objective’ qualifications that businesses or real estate have; race discrimination is only happening if there a pattern (in this case acceptance / rejection) unique to one race or ethnicity on the basis of unfair (nonstandard) comparisons–hence the problem with Berkeley’s law program back in the early 90s, which took Asians out of the general pool and compared them against each other.

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Today my friend Greta and I decided to venture out to M.I.T. for a visit. We’d intended to do such things this week, and couldn’t conceive of anything else for today, so it wasn’t a bad idea. Greta came over a bit before twelve and we pondered for 30 minutes what we might do while I cooked some snacks; we ate them and thought some more. All this thinking came to naught so we opted for a college visit instead.

Interestingly, our information session was given by an Exonian! Namely, E___ Macci. I’m sorry I forgot your name, class of ‘99 girl whose name I think began with E, sister to Vince Macci ‘05. I discovered her Exeter-past when, having stolen a newspaper from the paper-only recycling bin, I made a passing comment to Greta about the Exonian. “You’re an Exonian!,” I hear: why yes, of course, indeed, I am. She was a senior there at M.I.T. and gave us some lovely information and nicely answered questions. Most interesting fact? MIT has such an extensive publically accessible tunnel system that one can go from any building on campus to any other without needing to go outside. Also cute: there were Pi Day celebrations this 3/14; pie and ice cream in the student center. Most appetizing MIT feature: the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. MIT’s UROP was just really cool, and the more we learned about it the cooler it seemed.

Then we had a tour, which was a little bit redundant in its coverage but at least showed us around. We saw the athetlic facilities, the chapel, looked in at the newer buildings mostly but still caught glimpses of rooms and things. Our tour guide was very nice, though he had a questionably tasteful hairstyle. Not that that mattered; he was friendly, albeit very bad at walking backwards. He was lucky to not seriously injure himself walking into something, and hit more than a few puddles.

Pleasant!