Note to Alumni Futures' readers: Starting June 18 I will be posting on Alumni Futures once per week (Mondays) for the rest of the summer, with occasional exceptions - more often if something newsworthy happens, and not at all when I go on vacation.
I recently asked a former alumni relations colleague, Bill Caskey, for his perspective on the role of alumni in undergraduate admissions. Bill was an Ivy League admission officer, was director of an on-campus alumni college advising program, and is now an independent college admission consultant. He said one topic's been on his mind for a while: irate alumni whose child was denied admission by alma mater.
Bill sums up the problem this way:
Universities regularly face the challenge of admission and irate alumni. Schools develop programs to counsel alumni families and they fret over potential lost donations. I believe that in the end these efforts are largely wasted. Most alumni will return to the fold anyway once they cool down and realize their child's life has not been ruined. In other words, human nature is to forgive and forget.
So Bill's advice to advancement professionals is that the legacy hurdle is neither as large nor as financially devastating as many believe. In short, "there are better ways to dedicate resources" than by creating alumni admissions counseling programs.
The source for all the alumni angst is the increased competition for elite college admission. As Bill points out:
- The number of high school graduates has grown by 35 percent over the last decade.
- More high school seniors are choosing to attend four-year colleges.
- They are applying to more schools than ever before.
On this last point, Caskey quotes some stats: 72% of college applicants are submitting apps to more than three schools. That's a 20% increase in the last decade. And the number of seniors submitting six or more applications was up 41% between 1994 and 2004.
Back to legacies. If "forgive and forget" is the eventual outcome, it's the flip side of another human trait: alumni willingness to suspend disbelief when estimating Junior's chances of being admitted at Alma Mater. And even if he's rejected, the alumni have a facile explanation, says Caskey:
If our children don't get in, we'll say it proves that the school has become a bureaucratic institution that sacrifices allegiance in favor of statistics. Alumni resign from the boards of local alumni clubs and refuse to "give another dime."
And most alumni will not be placated in the short run. As an alumni admission counselor, says Caskey,
there was little I could do other than listen sympathetically and recognize that the angry parents would likely rejoin the alumni community. Once they cooled off, most saw that their child had survived, and they realized that their wunderkind didn't care nearly as much about attending their beloved alma mater as they had.
Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed reports on a study supporting the conventional perception that alumni increase their donations to alma mater to aid a child's application for admission.
Bill Caskey is the founder of AdmissionReady and serves as an independent college admission consultant. He can be reached at bill@admissionready.com.
