printable versionAggressive marketing efforts outlined by dean of admission
BY RAY DELGADO
With a record-high number of applicants and an all-time-low acceptance rate this year, Stanford ranks among the elite universities in its competitiveness. And getting in is only going to get tougher for prospective students as Stanford tries to market itself more aggressively and recruit the top high school seniors in the nation, Richard Shaw, dean of admission and financial aid, told the Faculty Senate last week.
"We're really starting to develop a worldwide plan to attract the best and the brightest from everywhere," Shaw said Thursday during a presentation that focused on changes he has made to admissions and financial aid processes since arriving in September.
Shaw said he immediately made substantial changes to the evaluation system to make it more committee based, which allows a student's individuality and achievements beyond academics and standardized testing to stand out for discussion. He also praised the university's recent decision to eliminate the financial contribution requirement of parents whose annual income is less than $45,000, a move that he said will help add to the overall diversity of the student body.
Shaw said that much of the office's attention will now focus on boosting the university's national presence, part of his mandate when he accepted the job. Already, the office's recruitment travel budget has been increased almost 10-fold so that staff can attend college recruitment programs and counselor workshops with other peer institutions, he said.
Shaw also said the office has long-term goals of developing programs that better involve alumni in recruitment efforts, establishing a new welcome center for visitors and making visits to locales outside the country to recruit international applicants. The office also is currently searching for an assistant dean for multicultural outreach who will reach out to students of color and help develop a national outreach strategic plan.
"What I'm trying to accomplish, and I hope is of interest to you, is to bring a very diverse perspective from across the nation," Shaw said. "I'm not interested in more applications. I'm interested in reaching out to kids that really are not—where we're not on their wavelength. And, quite frankly, the schools we compete with do it 10 times as much as we do it."
Deborah Stipek, dean of the School of Education, expressed concern that a larger applicant pool of highly competitive candidates would make it harder to identify promising candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds. Shaw assured her that the evaluation process takes into consideration a candidate's educational background, and sometimes candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds are given more weight because they have excelled under adverse conditions.
But Shaw also said that admissions officers need to be realistic in the messages they present about how difficult it is to earn admission to the university. "We have to tell them the truth, tell them what's going to happen at the end of the process, wish them the very best, tell them what we're about and then let the cards fall where they may," Shaw said.
Shaw also implemented a new "likely program," through which many of the top candidates across the nation are first sent a letter almost guaranteeing them admission to the university, followed by a phone call from a member of the faculty or an administrator encouraging them to select Stanford. The program identified 61 academic and 60 multicultural "superstar" candidates this past year who likely will be admitted to any college they apply; they have until May 1 to declare where they will enroll, as do other regular applicants. The program, he said, is an attempt to boost the yield rate of the top candidates, many of whom are lost to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT.
"We're just trying to get at them early and convince them that this is the place that they really should want to come," Shaw said.