Is the Interview Obsolete?
Dartmouth announced last year that it would no longer offer on-campus interviews. Now Yale is the only Ivy that actually does an official evaluative on campus interview! These interviews are conducted by current Yale students at the admissions office. Harvard offers on campus interviews, but they are not added to a student’s file. Neither Stanford nor MIT offers on campus interviews. Middlebury does offer on campus interviews from June – November, but stresses that they are not evaluative in nature. Columbia and Penn allow legacies (and they count parents or grandparents as legacies in this sense) to interview on campus, but not the rest of the crowd. Keep in mind that just about all of these schools do offer alumni interviews once the student applies.
Why are schools getting rid of interviews? When Michele was working at Dartmouth, every staff member plus a hired staff of senior interviewers did 4-5 interviews per day all summer. However, only a small percentage of the students interviewed ended up applying. So why spend 90% of your time over summer doing interviews when so few become applicants? Students were in the habit of visiting 10-12 schools, scheduling interviews, and then deciding on one school to apply to early. Therefore, it makes more sense for the schools to wait until a student actually applies before doing an actual interview, hence the value of the alumni interview (which are only assigned once the student actually mails in an application).
The only downside to alumni interviews is that not all applicants are offered one as it totally depends upon whether there is an active alum near where the student lives. Also, alumni are not really trained (at least not in most cases) as interviewers, so these interviews can be all over the map in terms of what they ask and how they write up the results.
So the on-campus interview is becoming obsolete at many top schools while the alumni interviews, a better use of time, are still going strong.
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