If you have applied to college this admissions season, you must be curious about the path of your application.  In this post, we investigate this admission committee process at Harvard and other top colleges.

After years of familiarizing themselves with certain geographic areas and reading thousands of applications from students in those regions, Admissions Officers (AOs for short) become intimately aware of their applicant constituency.  Generally broken up geographically, the entire applicant pool (this year more than 30,000 at Harvard) is shared among several AOs, each responsible for as many as 1,800 individual applications.  (Assuming 1500 words per application, this is equivalent to reading the King James Bible cover-to-cover about three and a half times times in three months… holy admissions headache!)

In the process of reading, the intrepid AO responsible for your region will utilize her experience to categorize each applicant into certain blocks from “no chance” to “one to recruit.”  Many applicants, however, will betray easy categorization.  In those uncertain circumstances, faculty members will often be asked to lend a second opinion to evaluate student accomplishment art, music, writing, research, et. al..  After an exhaustive reading (and meticulous note-taking) process, the real decision-making begins in subcommittee.

Subcommittee: A qualifying process

Subcommittee is a gathering of all the AOs for a particular region.  During this process, the decision-making process truly begins.  Before setting foot in subcommittee, however, your AO must first review every single application she has read to ensure she has not missed any details and that no new information has arrived since the first read.  Finally, subcommittees coalesce into small groups of two to eight people with intimate regional knowledge and experience.

Organized by region and school, your AO will systematically present each of her 1800 applicants to the rest of the group for evaluation.  She will generally make recommendations, but the ultimate decision is made by the group.  After each student is presented and scrutinized, the subcommittee makes an immediate decision with three potential options:

• You are admitted immediately (pending approval from the Admissions Director of course) – this is extremely rare and only reserved for truly exceptional applicants or recruited athletes.
• You are rejected – this is the fate of most applicants (approximately 75 to 80% in the case of Harvard), who will be receiving that thin envelop in March.
• You are passed along to full committee…

Full Committee: A disqualifying process

Generally beginning in early March, full committee is the time for all AOs to assemble (between 9 and 40 depending on the school) and present the merits of their remaining applicants.  In truth, schools like Harvard cannot really make mistakes at this point.  Most any applicant who reaches committee has the discipline and aptitude for success great or small at college and in life.  That does not mean, however, the committee process is taken lightly.

Rather, scrutiny is at its height with every detail of your academics, extracurriculars, and overall accomplishments literally projected larger-than-life onto a nearby screen for all to critique while your AO presents your case.  In order to gain admission at this point, all or nearly-all of this full committee approve your case.  As opposed to the qualifying process of subcommittee, full committee tends to be a disqualifying process with scrutiny focused on the explicit and implicit details of your application.

Having survived this very process, I still find the magnitude of examination disturbing.  At Harvard, in particular, the personal representation of subcommittee is overwhelmed by the cold democracy of full committee.  Hence, the application that can traverse the razor’s edge to succeed in both arenas is rare indeed.

Therefore, it is helpful to remember that success comes to those with discipline, leadership, passion, and aptitude.  Even if you are not admitted to Harvard, competitive participation in the process signifies you have the toolkit for future success and fulfillment.