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News From the AYA
The Challenge of Assessing International Applicants
March
2003
by David Westendorff '77
David
Westendorff '77 teaches urban planning at Tsinghua University.
For
the past dozen years or so, my main connection to Yale
has been through interviewing applicants to Yale College from Switzerland
and China. I have always enjoyed these encounters, thinking of it
as a kind of personality prospecting. My aim has been to find the
student whose interview "performance" might give the admissions
committee reason to re-interpret the application data in a more
telling way and find candidates who would, other things being equal,
make Yale a healthier and more interesting place for undergrads.
In Geneva,
Switzerland, where I lived for a decade, the applicants were diverse.
Only rarely did I discover a student who did not seem worldly well
beyond his or her years. In some respects, I thought that Yale might even feel a bit provincial to them.
When
the Alumni Schools Committee representative in Beijing contacted
me earlier this year to see if I would be willing to interview Chinese
applicants, I enthusiastically agreed. My preconceptions of what
it would be like dated from my own experiences in Hong Kong in the
late 1970s and in Shanghai in the mid-1980s. In 1978, I had a two-year
stint of teaching English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Most of my students were of working class origins. Many were the
first in their families to go beyond grade school.
Fast
forward to fall 1985. I settled in Shanghai, first at Fudan University
and then the U.S. Consulate General. I was besieged by requests
for information about getting into U.S. universities, albeit mostly
at the graduate level. Many of my Chinese friends interested in
studying abroad were already in their mid-20s to mid-30s. Many were
married and had a child.
For
all but an extraordinary few, English was the crucial stumbling
block. Many enrolled in English night school and listened
to bootleg English language cassette tapes and the Voice of America
nonstop. Yet, despite their efforts, the majority could not make
themselves understood in conversation or essay.
By contrast,
the applicants I interviewed this year -- all by phone -- were single
young women. Each had already submitted a set of answers to me via e-mail. I would have used e-mail alone but I wanted to hear their
voices -- and the possible pauses that might indicate the speaker
did not write the e-mails.
One of
the applicants was in a large city in southwest China I last visited
in 1981. At that time, it was hard to contact anyone there, but
just two decades later, my young interviewee not only had a home
telephone and Internet connection but also a personal cell phone.
I feel
confident that the young women I interviewed were indeed the authors
of the e-mail. They spoke English with a fluency that none of my
Chinese university students or Shanghai friends had achieved. Moreover,
their poise on the phone in a second language and quick reactions
to new lines of questioning showed a subtlety I had not expected.
They reminded me of the sophisticated "kids" I interviewed in Geneva.
Good
universities worldwide will increasingly receive applications from
such students. No doubt Yale and other top institutions welcome
this opportunity to globalize. But selecting students from China
(and possibly other developing countries) is becoming more complex.
Not only are the applications growing exponentially, but so are
the difficulties of assessing the personal characteristics of the
applicants.
The gap
between the purchasing power of China's elites and the rest of society
grows at a staggering rate. While the education systems in the countryside
are crumbling, people with money can send their children to private
schools.
Also
problematic is dishonesty in applications, which can be difficult
to verify. One interviewee wrote to me that her classmate, whose
grades and TOEFL scores were lower than her own, submitted falsified
information on her college applications. When her classmate got
admitted and she didn't, she asked me if she should take the same
tack in applying to Yale.
These
concerns may not be greatly different from those affecting applicants
to Yale from many developing countries. Here, though, the scale
is many magnitudes greater. How long will it take for the number
of applications from China alone to reach 1,000? How will Yale interpret
the application data under the conditions I describe? Will Yale
seek out deserving students from communities excluded from sharing
China's new wealth? Will interviewers like myself need new tools
and guidance? |
