The Truth About College Admissions Interviews
College interviews are a waste of time and resources. Most universities seem to agree. Among all of the silly and absurd aspects of applying to college, interviews are the most bullshit.
Of the 16 admissions factors from the most recent NACAC survey, interviews rank fourth to the bottom. They rank below AP/IB scores, extracurriculars, and recommendation letters and above only work experience, state graduation exam scores, and even SAT II Subject Tests. Half of responding universities say they’re not important, and another quarter report that interviews are of little significance.
The emphasis on interviews in the holistic admissions process seems to be declining over the past decade, yet more programs than ever require them. In fact, no other criterion has witnessed such a steep decline. Many institutions openly concede that interviews are rarely the decisive factor for a candidate, usually couched in the language of “don’t worry so much about it, anxious applicant.” Unsurprisingly, if you google “college interview,” you’re offered nothing but guides and tips, yet no popular blogs seem to question whether they should exist at all.
If interviews are not especially important or a deciding admissions factor, then why in the hell do many students interview half a dozen or more times each year? Madness!
Determining how many universities recommend or require interviews is a challenge because, unsurprisingly, there isn’t a comprehensive database of interview requirements. They change from year to year. At least 70 universities offer the option, which isn’t including honors programs or scholarships that often require an interview component. Some universities and programs allow students to upload a short video of themselves like they’re auditioning for reality television.
Most Ivy League universities and US News top-50 private universities allow for interviews. Adding confusion to exactly how they factor into admissions are whether they’re optional, recommended, strongly recommended, or required. In most applicants’ minds, the nuances between the first three not-optional optional options are perceived as equivalent to being required by applicants seeking any way to gain an edge. NACAC’s website features a guide titled “The Truth about Interviews,” which leads with “the truth is, most college interviews are relaxed, informative, and even fun (emphasis mine).”
The Truth about Interviews is that they’re utter bullshit. Visit Reddit’s A2C any time in November and January, and you can see the stark disconnect between how universities perceive the importance of interviews compared with the subjects they’re interviewing. For most, it’s neither relaxed, informative, nor fun.
Reassuring students that, if they’re unable to interview, it in no way harms their chances seem suspect. Students may not be penalized, flagged, or assigned negative points for opting out of an interview. But the claim that interviews don’t disadvantage applicants is also suspicious.
Suppose some students are helping their candidacy by interviewing, and spaces at universities are a zero-sum game. Doesn’t it follow students who opt out or are unable to interview incur a subtle penalty? At MIT, only 1 percent of students who opted out of interviews gained admission compared with ten times the number who interviewed. If NACAC was being honest rather than serving as a shill for universities’ interests, they would correct the record. Everything universities communicate about interviews is misleading and arbitrary. Students are correct to feel doubt.
Every university that conducts interviews weighs them differently, which further complicates an already foggy holistic review system. Students and families scour the internet to find “what the interview really means” at whichever universities they apply. Alumni volunteers or admissions representatives usually conduct them. Your interviewer may or may not be the first to read your admissions file or serve as the counselor assigned to your high school’s recruitment territory. They might make written notes or assign you scores based on varied criteria such as curiosity, ambition, fit for major, etc.
Universities might request an interview of you, but for others, you’re expected to reach out. Not every student who gets interviewed gains admission and not all admitted students pursue an interview. Some universities use interviews for evaluating your candidacy, and others for “informational purposes.” It’s naïve that Cornell, for example, communicates their interviews are for informational purposes while expecting a prospective applicant to act any less neurotic. Students often attempt to set up interviews for universities that don’t provide them, such as UT-Austin or the University of California system schools.
For each highly selective university, the interview apparatus requires thousands of contact hours and tens of thousands of emails to coordinate and carry out. Applicants collectively conduct hundreds of thousands of interviews each year. It might be the single most time-intensive and wasteful aspect of the collective college admissions system, even though universities themselves admit it rarely makes a difference! It’s especially silly to conduct interviews during a pandemic when everyone is already overburdened and stressed.
The college interview started around a century ago, first at Harvard. The other Ivy League schools followed, but the interview functioned less to determine their academic qualifications or “fit” and ensure that they came from the “right” backgrounds. Adoption spread to other universities with the rise of modern holistic review in the second half of the twentieth century.
Programs that conduct interviews claim it allows them to “get to know the whole student” better, presuming incorrectly that a half-hour interview can adequately assess a candidate’s interests and character. College interviewers occupy a position of power over the interviewee whether they’re conscious of it or not. To an admissions reviewer, you’re just another application, and the same analogy applies that you’re just another interviewee among many. Whatever an interviewer’s real or perceived capacity to influence a decision, applicants feel pressure to make their best first impressions because their lifetime goals hinge upon it.
Every implicit bias and systemic cognitive error relevant for admissions reviewers also applies to interviewers. Errors in reasoning are amplified by the power imbalances between interviewer and interviewee, insider and outsider, older and younger, gatekeeper and supplicant.
The fundamental attribution error mistakes someone’s personality or behavior as fixed rather than subject to changes in environment or context. A highly talented programmer who writes beautiful code might be less able or willing to verbalize their talents. Gifted poets might write eloquently yet are terrified by an open-mic night at their local coffee shop. Each one may be talkative, humorous, and playful with their siblings or best friends and silent to teachers and adults.
Interviews naturally privilege extroverts and conversationalists, providing ripe territory for bullshitting. America’s obsession with “leadership” adds a further disadvantage to introverts who may be substantially more talented than a first impression or their resume indicates. Interviews are supposed to offer opportunities for students to “get off the resume” and discuss their interests and hobbies. However, students are coached so thoroughly to identify themselves through their accomplishments that, even if they have noncurricular interests, they’re less inclined to share about them.
Before COVID, many interviews were limited to metropolitan areas, disadvantaging students living far from cities. It should be evident by now that students living in poverty or non-college-going communities are less equipped to navigate the etiquette of the nominally meritocratic interview. Nor do they have the resources to hire consultants to prepare them.
The Atlantic journalist Hayley Glatter interviews MIT Admissions Dean Stu Schmill in “The Futility of College Interviews.” Dean Schmill makes the predictable argument that interviews supposedly level the playing field. He says, “These interviews can be particularly important and helpful for students who come from under-resourced backgrounds.”
MIT is one of the more forward-thinking and transparent admissions offices. Still, they succumb to the illusion that interviews help select talent and increase access for marginalized populations. First-generation students who might benefit the most from interviews are the least likely to access them or even know that they exist. The ubiquity of college interviews further calls into question the sincerity of elite universities’ commitment to diversity.
Malcolm Gladwell covering the corporate interview process in a 2000 New Yorker article “The New-Boy Network” concludes that conversations are less useful and potentially more misleading than intuition suggests. Preempting Talking with Strangers published two decades later, he writes, “That most basic of human rituals—the conversation with a stranger—turns out to be a minefield.” The best minds and most powerful computers at Google, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs still haven’t figured out how to reliably select for and sort their applicants.
Yale School of Management Professor Jason Dana makes the same point 17 years later after Gladwell’s article. Free-form, unstructured interviews offer the pretense of getting to know an applicant. The problem is “interviewers typically form strong but unwarranted impressions about interviewees, often revealing more about themselves than the candidates.” His research suggests that interviews don’t reliably provide information relevant to evaluating a candidate’s fit. They may even be harmful, calling into question universities’ absolute insistence that interviews can only help and never hurt applicants.
Trained interviewers and admissions counselors feel themselves better than average and demonstrate illusory superiority in their ability to assess talent. I assume interviewers from the corporate world or who assess talent for their occupation overrate their abilities even more relative to alumni interviews who work in unrelated fields. Said another way, undergraduate students may be just as good at selecting future college students as career admissions professionals.
Dana concludes in his 2013 study that “interviewers probably over-value unstructured interviews. Our simple recommendation for those who make screening decisions is not to use them.” He advises that people who interview or occupy talent selection roles recognize the limitations of their judgment and not overweight their conclusions.
College interviews are not an important part of the admissions process, yet they persist. They consume a considerable amount of institutional resources, time for the interviewers and their subjects, and are prone to bias and error. Among essays, standardized exams, recommendation letters, and other application materials, interviews seem to have the highest costs yielding the least benefits.
Universities that conduct interviews do not have your best interests in mind.
