Shilling for the Farm

Later this afternoon, I will be conducting an alumni interview for my undergraduate alma mater, Stanford --- or, technically, Leland Stanford Junior University, pronounced with a distinct pause between "Junior" and "University," just in case anyone gets the wrong idea about its status. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I've done a few of these before, and the students who I've met have been interesting to talk to, and one was even extraordinary and inspiring. She was from a bad part of the city but going to a good school, president of the student body, valedictorian, and completely passionate about her leadership roles and about her work. (She got in.)

On the other hand, and I now have so little in common with a bunch of high school seniors that it's become a bit difficult to carry on a meaningful conversation with them. I do remember those days in my life, with a kind of nostalgia for that kind of hopefulness and a large dose of gratitude that I don't ever have to go through that again. I remember how completely everyone's life was defined by where they were applying to college, whether they were applying early, where they got in, where they didn't get in, and where they were planning to go. It's not that those things are unimportant, it's just that I'm glad that I'm no longer faced with the feeling that I'm about to make an all-encompassing life-changing decision while steeped in the parasitic fishbowl of high school. I know that there are people who look back high school as the best years of their lives, and those people trouble me deeply.

Anyway, I'm generally looking forward to this afternoon's interview, since on the whole they've been pleasant experiences and since they give me a chance to talk about what might more legitimately qualify as some of the best years of my life. I really did love being at Stanford, and I don't mind answering questions about it or expressing my enthusiasm, which I know is exactly what the admissions office wants.

That leads me to the main reason that I'm not particularly excited about this interview. The whole thing is sold to us alumni as a tool for helping with undergrad admissions. But as far as I can tell, they aren't making any effort to test whether it is. I do the interview, I write up a report, I submit it, and then it goes out into the ether. I never get any feedback about whether I'm sending them the kind of information that they want. I never hear anything about how that information is taken into account. I don't even know who the heck is reading it. I do get emailed if my interviewees are accepted, but I have absolutely no information other than that.

Also, I'm sure that the admissions office gets a very wide range of interview reports, since the people conducting the interviews are at very different stages in their lives and in very different careers. But we interviewers are given no way to equate the way in which we describe and score the candidates. In psychology, this is known as "inter-coder reliability," and I am thoroughly convinced that the interview program has none of it. I'm used to working with college students, so I have a pretty good idea of what they're like and how they present themselves when they're trying to impress. But my interview data counts just the same as some retired lawyer who hasn't seen a college student in fifty years and thinks it's just darling that her interviewee likes to write stream-of-consciousness fiction because he totally got into reading James Joyce and thinks it's all deep and stuff.

I'll even go one further and say that I don't think that they're collecting any real data about whether the interviews make any difference in the admissions process. This strikes me as moderately insane. The smart thing to do would be to have one group of people read the files without the interviews and make admissions decisions, and then have a separate group of people read the files with the interviews and make admissions decisions. Comparing the two sets of decisions would then tell us whether the the interviews matter at all. To be fair, I don't have any hard evidence that they've failed to do this, but my bet is strongly against.

This is especially insane given that the interview program is still in its pilot phase, which means that some students have admissions files that contain an interview and some don't. Wouldn't it make a bit of sense to see whether the interviews are worth the time and effort before deciding whether to expand the program?

All of this rather non-scientific mucking about wouldn't bother me nearly so much if the admissions office would just label the interview program as what it really is: a marketing tool. It's a way to get alumni like me to sell Stanford to fresh-faced potential freshman, and it's a way to keep alumni like me feeling involved with the Stanford community so that I'll give more money come Christmastime. I have to say that I don't mind that. I spend a lot of my time in university communities, and I know that colleges these days are run like businesses and have to compete with the other products out there in the giant shopping mall that has become our higher education system. Well, now that I put it that way, it is sort of depressing. But it's reality, and if the admissions office sees the interviews as a way to stand out from the crowd, so be it. But they shouldn't go on pretending that the program is anything more than that. It's an insult to my intelligence --- which, of course, would be a stain on their admissions record. Surely they don't want that.