Georgia Tech spent years adding to its application. It took one hallway conversation to subtract from it.
Mary Tipton Woolley is executive director for undergraduate admission at Georgia Tech, where the applicant pool has climbed close to 400% across her 17 years. This year her office dropped the "why this major, why Georgia Tech" supplemental essay. The reason it went is the interesting part: the students who wrote the best answers turned out to be the most likely to switch majors before they ever set foot on campus.
She sits down with Emily Smith to walk through how that decision actually got made, who she expected to fight her on it, and what else in the process deserves the same scrutiny. She also says the thing most enrollment leaders keep to themselves, which is that admission decisions aren't fair, and pretending otherwise doesn't help the families going through it.
In this episode:
- The hallway conversation that ended the supplemental essay, and the data that confirmed it
- The time they made the long essay optional, and why they had to put it back
- What she'd cut next, including why she doesn't love recommendation letters
- Why interviews don't work at 70,000 applications, and where they might
- The sameness problem, and what actually makes an application stand out
- Miss Robin, 500,000 documents, and what change management really looks like
- What she tells her own 14-year-old about a process she runs for a living
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