This is the third article in a four part series.
Part 1: For Harvard, Luring Students Is All in the Brand
Part 2: Recruiting a New Elite
Part 4: Stairway to Harvard


While Harvard’s undergraduate admissions officers familiarized themselves with many details about this year’s 2,109 admits during the application process, they may also keep track of those students’ lives long after the admissions cycle is over.

In a previously undisclosed but longstanding practice, officers keep tabs on current undergraduates by corresponding with residential advisers. Administrators say that communication improves advising and admission decisions.

In advance of an annual meeting between the Freshman Dean’s Office (FDO) and undergraduate admissions officers to discuss the freshman class, Assistant Dean of Freshmen Lesley Nye Barth e-mailed proctors asking for feedback on their students.

“We’re having our annual check-in with Admissions in a week or so, and I’d love to convey some enthusiastic reports about your favorite students,” Nye Barth wrote in January to proctors she oversees. “Anyone come to mind that you’d like to thank Admissions for admitting? And is there anyone you’d like to make sure I mention who has been problematic?”

In response, one proctor offered a detailed description of many of the undergraduates that proctor oversees—including a passage describing two undergraduates as “so self-centered that they have trouble even imagining another person’s point of view.”

“I think freshman year would have been easier both on them and on their roommates had they come to Harvard a year later,” added the proctor, who mistakenly sent a copy of the e-mail to a Crimson reporter.

The Crimson is withholding the proctor’s name to avoid identifying the freshmen described in the e-mail.

As the admissions office in Byerly Hall sorts through upwards of 20,000 applications each year to fill just 1,675 undergraduate slots, with decisions between qualified candidates coming down to minute differences, the information marks one way for officers to measure their success in choosing a class. The feedback also provides admissions with a means to assess the rigor of high school curricula.

Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman ’67 explains that if an undergraduate came to Harvard with a stellar math record but failed an introductory college math course, it would raise the question of “should we look with even greater care at the transcript from this school and what it means.” But he adds that the feedback is “not a blunt instrument” and that one case alone might not change admissions’ views, and that “only in a small set of instances” is the information applied to admissions decisions.

In response to a question about other uses of the information for admissions decisions, including for applications from family members and siblings of undergraduates, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 and Director of Undergraduate Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73 write that a sibling’s performance at Harvard may have a marginal effect on the applicant’s prospects.

“Occasionally the admissions committee is interested to learn more about a candidate whose sibling did great things at Harvard, for example, but it is hard to quantify the effect on any actual decision,” they write in an e-mail.

Fitzsimmons says “99 percent” of the communication between the FDO and admissions is to gather information to better advise current undergraduates.

But he adds that the communication is part of a broader effort to determine how admitted students fare. Fitzsimmons says the admissions office conducts “validity studies” to assess how well test scores and grades predict students’ success at Harvard.

David Hawkins, an expert on college admissions, says that while Harvard may have the resources to engage in this practice to a greater extent than other colleges, similar communication exists in some form at many schools. Admissions officers become very knowledgeable about high schools in their assigned regions, adds Hawkins, the director of public policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

“I’ve heard on many occasions admissions officers talking about students from certain high schools in their recruiting areas that tend to do well at their colleges. If students are not as successful from a high school, it may affect the admission and or recruiting process for students from those high schools,” Hawkins says, adding that it would take a pattern of poorly-prepared students—not just one or two—to affect admissions decisions about students from a school.

Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, Jeff Brenzel, writes in an e-mail that Yale’s admissions officers and residential advisers maintain a dialogue similar to Harvard’s.

“We do stay in contact with the deans, in a similar way, with an annual debriefing and some informal contact from time to time to convey information that would be helpful to the deans in their academic or personal advising roles,” he writes.

‘A LOT OF RESPONSIBILITY’

Fitzsimmons says that this communication has existed for years—since before he began working for Harvard admissions three decades ago—but doesn’t know precisely when it started.

“This is a practice that I inherited,” Fitzsimmons says. “The impression I had is that it went back to the beginning of Harvard and that there were some very good reasons for it,” including maintaining Harvard’s high graduation rate, which he says the communication helps ensure.

Though this is a longstanding practice, it is also a secretive one. Over 50 proctors contacted by The Crimson declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. Several proctors said that they had been instructed to refer all questions to Dingman and the assistant deans of freshmen. Assistant Dean of Freshmen James N. Mancall did not respond to an e-mail requesting comment, and Assistant Dean of Freshmen Sue Brown did not respond to e-mailed questions.

“I certainly share Dean Dingman’s concerns about protecting student privacy,” Nye Barth, the third assistant dean of freshmen, writes in an e-mail. “I really have nothing else to add to [Dingman’s and Fitzsimmons’] characterization of the communication.”

Several freshmen say they are unaware of the practice but are not completely surprised by its existence. Many add that while they think the practice might be helpful, they wish they had been clearly informed about it.

“I don’t know that it’s necessarily bad, but I don’t like the idea that it’s undisclosed,” says Matthew D. Zimmerman ’09. “I think that places a lot of responsibility in the hands of proctors, who may not be that experienced.”

Karma Frierson ’09 says she does not oppose the practice “as long as it doesn’t adversely affect” future applicants’ admissions chances.

‘NO NEED TO SHARE’

The Harvard proctor’s e-mail to Nye Barth contained several judgments on specific admissions decisions. It described one undergraduate as “a felicitous admit off the waiting list.” And the e-mail suggests multiple undergraduates, including those mentioned earlier, would have benefited from a “gap” year—a situation in which the College requires admits to take a year off before matriculating, a fairly common practice.

The e-mail also addresses the social difficulties of some students overseen by the proctor, especially those hailing from foreign cultures.

“There have been a few problems,” the e-mail says, describing a few undergraduates who have “major social issues related to their journeys here from so far away.”

Admissions officers discuss individual students “with some regularity,” write Fitzsimmons and McGrath Lewis in response to follow-up questions.

“A student’s family or other background circumstances may help the FDO and other advisors in their efforts to help the student,” they write. “Such communication is at the heart of what we do here and is an important element of increasing the likelihood that students will thrive at Harvard.”

The proctor’s e-mail included brief “thank yous” to Byerly Hall for admitting some freshmen. And it included more extensive details about certain students. Dingman says he thought the e-mail contained some “information that there was no need to share with admissions.”

“We do not recommend entrusting personal sensitive information to e-mail communication,” Fitzsimmons and McGrath Lewis write. In reference to the e-mail that was mistakenly sent to a Crimson reporter, they write, “Our principal regret about what occurred in January was the improper use of e-mail technology.”

‘ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT’

The back-and-forth between the FDO and Byerly Hall is an old practice with a new name. “The modern term for all this is enrollment management,” Fitzsimmons says. “They didn’t use those terms until very recently, but the idea was that you just didn’t admit people and forget about them—you did everything possible to make sure they got off to a good start and a successful career.”

Fitzsimmons says that either he or McGrath Lewis attend the weekly meetings of the College’s administrative board, where they see Dingman and assistant deans of freshman, in addition to senior tutors and other regular attendees. A number of admissions officers serve as proctors, forming an additional link between the FDO and Byerly, Fitzsimmons adds.

This periodic contact occurs in addition to the annual meeting between freshmen deans and admissions officers where the deans discuss their “experience with the current class,” according to Dingman.

“We learn about people at the end of the year for whom this might be a stretch,” Dingman says. “That’s a signal [for advisers] to be particularly sensitive.”

The communication doesn’t necessarily end after a student completes freshman year. Fitzsimmons and McGrath Lewis add that admissions officers occasionally communicate with senior tutors in upperclassman Houses as well.

‘WE GET TO KNOW THESE PEOPLE’

The feedback residential advisers can offer about what has facilitated students’ success or failure at Harvard can be particularly valuable for students whom admissions officers think might struggle to adjust, according to Dingman.

“If you had concerns about someone coming who you really wanted but it might be a stretch, [admissions officers] might ask, ‘how are things going? Why are things working–whether it was a good adviser or seasoned proctor or rooming,” Dingman says. “Admissions can tuck it away and say when we advise for the next round, this is something we should be alerting [advisers] to.”

Fitzsimmons says another key role admissions can play is in advising the FDO on matching roommates. “It’s so hard to room people,” he says, noting that a number of admissions officers have previously worked in rooming.

He adds that admissions can also let residential advisers know about specific academic issues a student might have or alert them to a lifelong passion displayed in a student’s record or application essays.

“We get to know these people in the admissions process,” Fitzsimmons says.

And both Fitzsimmons and Dingman say the ongoing communication helped fuel the expansion of financial aid over the past decade. Fitzsimmons says feedback from residential advisers—who said in that in some instances students were struggling to succeed because of loans or work-study, and that some were feeling pressure to select concentrations that would bring lucrative jobs to pay off debt—was “one of the big reasons” for the expansion of aid.

“A good portion of the admissions committee work in student employment or financial aid,” he adds. “We may be able to be helpful.”

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.

‘The Keys to the Castle,’ an examination of admissions practices at Harvard College, is a series funded by the Christopher J. Georges Fellowship, an annual grant awarded to journalists on the staff of The Crimson. The fellowship supports investigative projects that exemplify Chris Georges’ commitment to in-depth reporting on issues of enduring social value and the human impact of public policy. The fellowship is administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

Chris Georges ’87 was an executive editor of The Crimson. As a reporter in The FWall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, he covered politics, economics, and budget issues. Three of his stories on the welfare system were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1997. Georges also served as editor of The Washington Monthly and worked at CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He died in 1998 at age 33 from complications due to lupus.