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Media Coverage College Interviews Fade Fast as Race for Ivies Heats Up
BY ELIZABETH GREEN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
September 4, 2007 When preparing for interviews with top colleges, applicants often rely on typed-out talking points and new suits to make good impressions. An Upper East Side private school, Spence, even offers a senior seminar during which a teacher conducts mock interviews.
Such preparations are not quite worth the trouble, current and former admissions officers said. It would be a rare interview faux pas that could disqualify an applicant, such as wearing a bathing suit to the interview, saying the school is only a fallback option, displaying bigotry, or admitting to patricidal fantasies, the admissions officers said. Catastrophes aside, they said, an interview bears little or no say in the race for top-college acceptance.
"I don't know, quite honestly, how much it is valued in the Ivy League," a college consultant in Ithaca, N.Y., who has worked at a top admissions office, Lucia Tyler, said. "I don't think so, for most. I don't think it's valued as much."
No Ivy League university requires an interview, and most encourage talking with an alumnus rather than an actual admissions officer — an opportunity a growing number of selective schools do not even offer. Brown canceled on-campus interviews in 2003, joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which dropped them about three years before, as well as Princeton and Columbia universities. Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences has not only canceled on-campus interviews, it has stopped offering anything called an "interview." What used to be alumni interviews are now called "meetings." A spokesman for Cornell, Simeon Moss, said about half of applicants are contacted for such meetings.
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