College Admission Help

College Admission Officers have difficult time with saying 'no' By Jason Katz
Daily News columnist

Q: I have now heard back from all of the colleges I applied to, and I was accepted by some and rejected by others. The rejection letters I received felt so cold. Do admissions officers even care?
A: Oftentimes it can feel like you are being judged by some nameless, faceless person hunkered down in an admissions office somewhere. You may think that to them, you are simply a number and whether you are admitted or denied has no bearing on their emotional state; they simply move on to the next applicant.
However, this couldn't be further from the truth. I have spoken with many admissions officers over the years and they are some of the nicest, most empathetic people I have met.
They simply have a very tough job.
In today's ultra-competitive college admissions environment, the fact is there are far more qualified applicants than there are spots at the top schools. Admissions officers are forced to make gut-wrenching decisions about who gets in and who doesn't. Oftentimes this decision is based more on the college's particular needs rather than the merits of any particular applicant.
For example, two applicants might have both taken a strenuous high school course load, have a high GPA, have great SAT scores, excelled at extracurricular activities, and written eloquent application essays. However, one applicant plays the trumpet, while the other plays the trombone, and it just so happens that the college that both of them
applied to needs a trumpet player for the marching band. Because of the institutional need, the trumpet player gets in, and the trombone player is rejected.
Does this mean that the trumpet player is a more qualified applicant or a better person? Of course not.
Does this mean that it is easy for the admissions officer to reject the trombone player? Again, of course not.
Angel B. Perez, director of admission at Pitzer College in Claremont, recently wrote an empathetic piece in the Los Angeles Times about how trying it is to reject so many applicants.
"It's hard to justify to someone who has just been 'denied,'" writes Perez, "that although they've done everything right, we just did not have enough seats in the class. "... No matter how many years you work in college admissions, it never gets any easier to say 'no.' At my institution, we received 4,079 applications but have only 245 spots in the freshman class. Choosing among a majority of overqualified applicants is our challenge."
Finally, Perez offers one of the best pieces of advice I have heard with respect to college rejections: "To all these students, I say that where you get into college is not a representation of your worth, and please remind your parents that your college acceptance letter is not their final grade on the parental report card of life."


College Admission Officers have difficult time with saying 'no'