"Behind the Scenes, Admissions Offices Conquer Mounds of Mail"

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an enlightening article about all the paper, staples, and postage stamps behind the college admissions process.

You can read it here:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i20/20a02001.htm?pg=dji

Additionally, for the benefit of individuals without Chronicle subscriptions, accounts, or web passes, this is the article's text:

Behind the Scenes, Admissions Offices Conquer Mounds of Mail

By ELIZABETH F. FARRELL

If coming back to work after winter break seems daunting, consider the plight of college-admissions officials. While most high-school students are breathing a sigh of relief after finally submitting their applications, those on the receiving end are rolling up their sleeves. January is crunch time for many admissions offices, and it's common for admissions deans to spend long hours at the office while the rest of their campuses are eerily quiet.

Admissions officers emphasize how many hours they spend reviewing the qualifications of each earnest applicant, even as they anticipate record-breaking application numbers this year. What isn't as well known, however, is how much time it takes to get those applications ready to read.

Most students apply online, but the process is far from automated. Below is a guide to admissions officers' intricate yet often ignored efforts to organize the truckloads of paperwork that pour in this time of year. Handled with care? Indeed.

1. The Mail Arrives

And it's not e-mail. Think 20 bins a day of snail mail. That's what Stanford University reports receiving in the final weeks before its January 1 application deadline. Though 95 percent of applications are submitted electronically, most of the teacher recommendations, high-school transcripts, and activities résumés are mailed separately. Each applicant generates up to a dozen pieces of mail, and 24,000 applicants last year meant 250,000 pieces of mail to process. This year is just as hectic, according to Richard H. Shaw, dean of undergraduate admission and financial aid.

"A high percentage of our students apply at deadline," says Mr. Shaw. "So by January 2 we are buried alive in paper, and it stays that way until the end of the month."

2. Opening the Piles

It's not difficult to open an envelope, but it takes time to open thousands of them. That is why Kristin R. Tichenor, vice president for enrollment management at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, says, "Thank God for student labor." At her office, an army of student workers is charged with the sole duty of opening the mail and stamping each piece with the date.

Everyone chips in at Loyola Marymount, according to Matthew X. Fissinger, director of admissions. Mr. Fissinger requires all members of his staff to pick up daily letter-opening shifts during the busy times, and his receptionist takes home piles of mail at night to open in front of the television. Her husband helps out, too. Other institutions, including Villanova University and Connecticut College, hire temporary staff to keep up with the avalanche of envelopes.

"It's like getting a 25-pound bag of sugar and trying to put it in a five-pound container," says Michael Gaynor, director of admission at Villanova. "We need all the help we can get."

Old-fashioned letter openers can expedite this monotonous task, but paper cuts are unavoidable.

3. Organizing the Mail

After the piles of mail have morphed into piles of paper, they must be matched up with the online applications submitted by students. Thus begins a colossal process of data entry and document scanning. Some colleges, including Stanford and the University of Southern California, scan all related documents — recommendation letters, transcripts, etc. — and then read everything electronically. Others, such as Worcester Polytechnic and Earlham College, print everything and review paper files for each applicant.

As with envelope opening, these tasks require hundreds of hours of labor, and the work is boring but important. Hundreds of students may share the last names Abrams, Blake, and Campbell, and admissions staff must ensure that none of their materials get placed in the wrong file.

"Things do get misfiled sometimes," says Martha C. Merrill, dean of admission and financial aid at Connecticut College. "But it's remarkable that so few errors happen given the volume of applications we're processing."

4. Making the List, Checking It Twice

Now that everything is filed in one place, admissions officers must figure out how to standardize all that information. Grade-point averages can be particularly tricky. High schools have vastly different numerical scales for calculating grades, and some courses with the same names are far more challenging at one school than another.

Then comes the (other) hard part — reading those applications and deciding whom to admit and reject.

DID YOU KNOW?

The admissions office at the University of Iowa has its own mailroom, with a staff of six.

To get a jump on data processing before the afternoon mail delivery, admissions staffers at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, often drive down to the campus mailroom and load bins of mail into their cars to bring back to the admissions office.

Applicants may obsess over every word in their essays, but their high-school counselors often ignore instructions that warn them not to staple forms together. Removing staples is perhaps the only task that is more mind-numbing than opening mail.

Lehigh University's admissions office can get downright musical during crunch time. J. Leon Washington, dean of admissions and financial aid, sometimes leads his staff in singalongs of Broadway-show tunes and top R&B hits to cut the boredom of tearing through thousands of envelopes.

During the early January rush at Villanova University, mailroom staff members come in through the side door of the admissions office so those workers already buried in unopened envelopes will not feel discouraged when they see the fresh piles being delivered.

At the end of the process, Connecticut College's admissions director brings in a masseuse to give chair massages to weary staff members.

Every applicant wants to stand out from the pack, and many will send compact discs of their musical performances, portfolios of their artwork, or even baked goods to distinguish themselves. Colleges like Earlham use separate bins to catalog those items.

Worcester Polytechnic has one data-entry person who specializes in processing international applications. Why? Because not everyone is familiar with common names in Vietnam and Turkey, which account for many of the institute's foreign applicants. Transposing first and last names is a common mistake. Minor data-entry mix-ups could lead to major confusion later on.

TECHNOLOGY PROS AND CONS

Pros:

The University of California application system is one of the few in the country that is almost paperless. More than 99 percent of the 95,000 freshman applicants this year applied online, and they self-report their grades and test scores. By requesting official statements of that information only from accepted students, the UC system drastically reduces the amount of paperwork it has to process.

Fewer envelopes in the future may make this process less time-consuming.

When all materials are organized electronically, multiple admissions staffers can get access to them simultaneously. That also saves space by eliminating the need for roomfuls of file cabinets.

Those whose offices are fully online think this point is where all the electronic information helps — files are all readily available and searchable. When an admissions officer wants to pull up an essay quickly for review, or gets a call from a student wondering if her teacher's recommendation arrived, he or she no longer has to manually sift through rows of files to find it.

Cons:

For the foreseeable future, the bins of mail are here to stay at most institutions. Many are waiting for the day when a critical mass of high schools send transcripts and recommendations electronically. No one expects that to happen anytime soon.

In the meantime, there is no machine that can open and empty all the different-sized envelopes that admissions offices receive. The task may be simple, but it requires human effort.

Many applicants now get a pin number that allows them to log in and ensure the college received their admissions materials. Woe to the admissions office that doesn't scurry to update that data, as it can expect a flood of frantic calls.

Eye strain, carpal-tunnel syndrome, and backaches are rampant from all that computer use.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Students
Volume 54, Issue 20, Page A20