Adapting Admissions: How Prospective Students and SLC Admissions is handling a virtual application process

Zoe Stanton-Savitz ’23

Advertising on website for virtual touring courtesy of the Sarah Lawrence College website.

While scrolling through college websites, attending virtual tours and viewing Photoshopped pictures of college buildings in the golden hour glow and widely-grinning groups of diverse students, Sadie Wyatt, a senior at Woodrow Wilson Highschool in Washington D.C., became increasingly fatigued and frustrated.

After hours of remote classes, digital assignments and Zoom meetings, Wyatt struggled to fill out Common Applications and answer the mundane and repetitive “why our school” essay questions –– without even seeing the campuses. 

“It feels kind of crazy sometimes to be applying to college when the world is, like, falling apart,” Wyatt said. “But we do it.”

This past year, enrollment in four-year educational institutions declined nationally due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Forbes Magazine, “at the present time, overall postsecondary enrollment is down 3% compared to the same time last year.”

Colleges and universities have been forced to adapt their recruitment strategies to keep students and staff safe and healthy, while striving for a high number of applications. But high school seniors all over the country have struggled to adapt to remote education while undertaking the tedious and time-consuming college application process, facing new challenges like the inability to visit, cancelled standardized testing and extracurricular programs, economic hardship and countless other unprecedented complications the lockdown has caused. 

Palo Alto High School senior Eve DeMarzo, from Palo Alto, California, recounted that her college application process has been arduous, especially while taking remote classes. 

“It’s difficult to get yourself to fill out all of the questions online after doing school for six hours on a computer and homework on a computer for about three hours a day,” DeMarzo said. “I find myself extremely burnt out and unmotivated. It’s been really difficult to get myself to just sit down and do it.”

As the regular-decision deadline approaches, Sarah Lawrence Admissions staff is doing its best to cope with the transition to a completely digital process. According to Kevin McKenna, vice president for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid at Sarah Lawrence, the admissions staff is working hard to adapt and offer support to prospective students. 

“Measured year to date, actually, apps submitted are up,” McKenna said, asserting that the staff’s hard work has paid off. “That’s a good thing for us. It’s also not the norm across the country.”

Still, prospective college students are struggling to find their future educational home without the ability to visit campuses. When it comes to touring digitally, Wyatt said it is difficult to understand the campus –– to get a sense of what it feels like, not just what it looks like. 

“The main thing you really miss out on from virtual tours is the vibe,” Wyatt said. “The vibe of a school is very specific and can rule out you wanting to go there just by how it feels.”

Along with many other colleges, Sarah Lawrence is currently not holding in-person tours, hoping to keep both prospective students and their families safe, as well as the community on campus.

“We all feel bad, and we’re doing as much as we can safely, not just for families’ safety but for the 330 first-years and however many others who are on campus, for staff, for faculty,” McKenna said.

Although in-person touring at SLC is suspended until Covid cases drop, live virtual tours are an integral part of the new admissions process.

“The virtual tours that we offer daily are kind of a hybrid of a student panel with images and impressions of campus,” McKenna explained. “It’s loosely organized around a slideshow that would take you around campus with student voices telling you what they like about the spaces, how they use the spaces and then also answering either through spoken or through chat functionality questions the students would have.”

Student tour guide Michael Scutto ’23 said that guiding tours over Zoom has given him a greater appreciation for working the job. Scutto began working for the admissions department in January but was sent home a few months later. Scutto said that tour guides work in groups for digital tours to combat the inability to see prospective students.

“This is a really great way of doing it,” Scutto said. “It’s a great way to diversify the student perspectives during a tour.”

Scutto expressed his awe at Admissions’ use of technology to transition into a digital space and said their work “has proved to be helpful for prospective students in such an uncertain time.”

Regardless of the effort, DeMarzo questioned the efficacy of digital touring for any school.

“I feel like I don’t really know any,”  said DeMarzo, referring to the campuses of colleges she is interested in. “Like, I don’t know the vibe or what they look like without being touched up or Photoshopped.”

McKenna acknowledged that, though virtual tours do not offer the same personal connection as  on-campus tours, the Sarah Lawrence admission staff has been trying to make the experience as similar to physical tours as possible.

“It’s Sarah Lawrence: we thrive on personal one-on-one interaction. So we don’t want it to be exclusively canned material,” McKenna said. 

While there are obvious drawbacks to virtual events, McKenna said that one positive is the newfound ability to bring current Sarah Lawrence students to speak at high school visits. Sarah Lawrence is digitally visiting about three to five high schools daily and with the flexibility of remote events, Admissions can speak to more schools than previously possible.

“For every challenge we’ve identified, we’ve tried to also identify some benefits and some new opportunities,” McKenna said. 

The admissions team is also working to create an open and welcoming environment, inclusive of students without access to reliable technology. 

“We are aware that not all of our prospective students may have access to the technology to engage with us in every way we would ideally like them to, and that’s not through any fault of theirs,” McKenna said. “We make sure we’re still providing access to our staff and our expertise and our counselling staff, and our students, regardless of what technological challenges they may have.”

In addition to technological challenges, many standardized testing centers have closed or reduced capacity making it increasingly difficult for highschoolers to take college entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT.

As a result, many prospective college students have had to postpone testing. Others –– like both Wyatt and DeMarzo –– have chosen to apply only to test-optional schools.

Many high school extracurriculars have also been cancelled, preventing some applicants from demonstrating their talents to potential colleges. Wyatt, for example, an avid participant in her high school theatre program, lost the ability to perform in her senior shows. 

To address challenges created by the pandemic, the Common App has added a “COVID question” for students to explain outstanding circumstances relating to their applications or education. McKenna said the Sarah Lawrence admissions staff is reading the answers to the “COVID question” carefully and sensitively to ensure no applicant is disadvantaged.

McKenna explained that because of the new and unprecedented anxieties surrounding the application process, Sarah Lawrence is striving to offer support when it comes to deadlines. 

“We’re flexible with our application; all you have to do is reach out to us, and if you’ve got constraints that are coming up against the deadline, of course we’ll work with you,” McKenna encouraged. “We’re not trying to make an application deadline that works against you or your capacity to enroll.”

Despite the current lockdown, the staff is preparing to open up physical on-campus tours in the future, perhaps as soon as the upcoming spring semester. 

“We have started to do some remote training of tour guides for when we can open [tours] up, and we’ve designed different tours for different levels of openness,” McKenna said. “We’ve been trying to keep abreast of what safety standards are, what laws are, what suggestions are, what the CDC says, what New York State says, so that we’re ready.”

McKenna said that while admissions has previously never employed first-years, many of the tour guides in training are freshman because they are living on-campus. He understands that the current first-year class also had a nontraditional application process and hopes that this will forge a bond between this year’s and next year’s classes. 

“When you conceive of the tours as an opportunity to just hear a student voice, I actually think it’s a wonderful opportunity for Sarah Lawrence to bring together student voice to student voice,” McKenna said. “A way to create that feeling of camaraderie, create that feeling of community.”

He also said that even though all events are digital, that does not invalidate the amount of work that has gone into planning and hosting them.

“This has been more work than we’ve had in any admissions cycle,” McKenna said. “There has been so much more work involved in recruiting in a virtual environment, in a socially-distanced environment.”

Although McKenna can only predict what application numbers will look like as Sarah Lawrence approaches the regular-decision deadline, he has faith that this year, a similar amount of students will apply as in previous years. Meanwhile, as the admissions staff waits for the applications to roll in, McKenna expressed his gratitude for the exceptional work of his team. 

“The entire admissions staff, I am incredibly proud of,” McKenna said. “They do a phenomenal job for the College.”