Getting in: The not-so-secret admissions process

Myth: A formula determines whether students are admitted or denied.

Not true — and if it were, you’d have to wonder why the university keeps twenty people around just to read undergraduate applications. Wouldn’t it be easier to load a bunch of numbers into a database and spit out decisions?

Ironically, the likelihood-of-admission chart mentioned above may share some of the blame for this misconception. Some parents and guidance counselors believe the table — developed in part to answer concerns that UW-Madison fudged too much on admissions criteria — is actually what UW’s admissions counselors use when making decisions to admit, postpone, or deny admission. It isn’t. Their evaluation is much more comprehensive and, ultimately, much more human.

Counselors do have general guidelines at the start of each admissions cycle, notes admissions director Rob Seltzer. The guidelines offer an idea of how tight or lenient counselors need to be to meet the office’s goals, and they establish a measure of consistency, ensuring that all counselors are using the same yardstick in their first-glance assessment of an application.

But those guidelines are just a starting point. As they read applications, counselors weigh many other factors, from the competitiveness of an applicant’s high school to unique aspects of an applicant’s character that come through in personal statements. It matters, for example, whether a student took the most challenging courses available. It matters whether he or she was involved meaningfully in extracurricular activities or just joined a bunch of clubs to pad a resume. It matters whether a student held a part-time job or managed other family responsibilities along with school.

“That’s relevant to us, because it tells us something about a student’s work ethic and what challenges they’ve had to face while earning the grades that they’ve earned,” says Provost Patrick Farrell. “We want to look at the entire student, because that gives us a much better sense of the overall likelihood of success for this student at our institution.”

The approach is sometimes called holistic admissions, in that it entails a review of the whole person, not just his or her academic credentials. Tom Reason ’76, associate admissions director and a twenty-one-year veteran of the office, says it’s far more art than science. “Academics are always the first and foremost thing for us to consider, but even within that, there is great variability in how students are assessed and the curriculum offered,” he says. “To have a purely objective measure just wouldn’t work.”

Sheri Albers, a former high school guidance counselor, learned that firsthand when she joined UW-Madison’s admissions office in 2004. She was among those who had thought the university didn’t do a good enough job of explaining what factors matter in admissions decisions. She says she now realizes that “it is much more complicated than people think, and it’s not always easy to put into black-and-white terms. That doesn’t mean that it’s secretive or underhanded. It’s just not a formula.”

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