While not intended to be the anxiety-provoking process that it sometimes is for many applicants and their families, the college admissions process is made no easier by a pandemic that has reduced grades to pass-fail, all but eliminated most extracurricular activities, and added layers of apprehension all its own.
Whitney Soule, Bowdoin’s dean for admissions and student aid, is part of a group of college admission leaders whose goal is to ease those concerns by proactively making their priorities known.
“We are searching for students who are thoughtful about others, who are generous, and curious. We also care about motivation, which is not the same as achievement,” Soule told Forbes, one of three media outlets that included her insights in coverage of Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, whose members released a collective statement signed by more than 300 admissions deans laying out what they value in the applications they’re receiving against the backdrop of COVID-19.
Soule and her fellow signatories say their priorities are a student’s self-care, academic work, service and contribution to others, family contributions, and extracurricular and summer activities—and that, as she told Good Morning America, given the pandemic’s disruption they are expecting that “students’ transcripts will look different.”
In Inside Higher Ed, Soule spoke of how COVID-19 “doesn’t interrupt the anxiety circuit, it empowers it.”
“The point of this deans’ statement is to explicitly state that we understand, that we already apply context to our review, and that we will apply flexibility to meet that context in application review. I hope that our written statement is reassuring and can reduce anxiety."
Read the joint statement, “Care Counts in Crisis: College Admissions Deans Respond to COVID-19.”
