Applications Are Up, Up, Up

This year, the Office of Admission is reading more applications than ever before. The final tally was 6,022 applications for students seeking admission in fall 2014. That’s nearly a one-third increase over last year.

Doug Badger, director of admission, says there were signs by late October last year that the applicant pool would be significantly larger. “In anticipation of that possibility, we began reading applications two to three weeks earlier this year,” Badger says, which meant starting in mid-November.

To speed things up, the staff has been more aggressive in identifying the strongest and the weakest of applications.

“Still, the vast majority of the applications go through two full reads by admission officers and a committee,” he says. Four to 10 admission-staff members sit around a table and ultimately vote on whether to admit someone. It’s a time-consuming process that took until mid-March.

The largest increases come from international and domestic students applying Regular Decision.

Badger says that most of these students haven’t visited Grinnell before applying. They’ve gotten to know the College through the website; through their interactions with the Office of Admission; through their parents, teachers, and counselors; and from the media.

“For many of these students,” Badger says, “it’s only after they’ve been admitted, visited Grinnell, and gotten to know the place and people better that they fall in love with the College.”

Students admitted through the Regular Decision process have until May 1 to say “yes.”

Grinnell’s two windows for Early Decision applications for the 2014–15 school year did not bring a significant change in the number of applications compared to the past few years.