Demonstrating Interest

Let’s talk about “demonstrated interest”.

Typically, when a college says that they consider “demonstrated interest”, they are referring to the practice of analyzing the actions of a student during the application process for hints as to where they are ranked in that student’s college list. Is the college one of their top choices or are they a safety school that sits at the bottom? If a student really likes your college, they should apply binding early decision—the ultimate expression of interest, if it’s an option—but for all other application windows and types demonstrated interest might play a role.

Demonstrated interest matters to admissions offices because, if colleges can predict with some level of success where they sit in each student’s list, the colleges can admit fewer students knowing that a higher percentage of them will ultimately matriculate. In other words, a higher “yield rate” allows admissions offices to be more selective, and as we all know, selectivity is the coin of the college admissions realm.

Some “demonstrated interest” tools are well-known. Internal college CRMs can track email open rates and numbers of visits to a college website. Colleges also track whether a student has visited campus and done a campus tour. Some colleges have told us that if a student signs up for an online info session but then doesn’t show up, they interpret that as a lack of interest, and subsequently will either deny or put the student on the waitlist. Not surprisingly, many students are told about demonstrated interest, and as a result spend time trying to game it in the hope that it helps them in the process. Obviously, this is all behind the scenes and students almost never know how their behavior could make an impact on their admissions decision. Some colleges now pronounce that they no longer consider demonstrated interest with the goal of tamping down any strategic behavior of students.

However, even for those colleges that claim to not use demonstrated interest, the intent of applicants can still matter. Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose a student made a “cut and paste” mistake in an essay so that College B realized that they already used the essay for another school, College A (e.g., the student used the name of the other college instead of the college to which they were applying). If the two colleges were competitors with an overlapping applicant pool, I think there’s no doubt the student would find themselves rejected by college B.

Here’s another way that colleges look to interest: during the “sculpting” stage of creating the admitted class. All colleges put students in buckets—like international, in-state, or intended computer science major—that reflect how it sees those students in light of their institutional priorities. Colleges also know the historical yield numbers for students in buckets down to a granular level. So an admissions leader at an institution might look at their tentatively “admitted” pool after finishing file review and see that they are about to offer admission to too many computer science majors, a prediction they can only make by looking at the historical yield of students in that bucket. If you are in a bucket that historically yields at a low rate, you might find yourself cut out of the class—but of course you’ll never know that was the reason.

This balancing or sculpting is the last step for admissions offices before they release decisions, and it is typically only done by the most senior leaders, institutional research offices, and perhaps even with the help of outside consultants. In the minds of admissions officers, this is not “demonstrated interest”, even though it is an assigning of a yield probability because you’re part of a group that historically hasn’t put the college at the top of the list.

This is of course unfair to the student who really does want to attend said college, and it’s also a loss for the college as they denied a qualified student who would have been a lock! If you know anything about InitialView, by now you will be rolling your eyes and thinking, “We get it; we should use the Virtual Stars to solve this problem” (for those not yet inundated with our marketing material, all students who use our services get two Virtual Stars that they can use in the process to avoid this very problem).

At the end of the day, this is a good example of a part of the admissions process that students have no control over. Other than broad initiatives (a new data science major that was funded by a $100 million donation, for example), it’s going to be hard to determine the institutional priorities and then estimate how those would impact your application. And it may seem unfair. However, one thing is sure: given the pressures upon college presidents—and by extension admissions officers—to continue to protect (and increase) an institution’s level of selectivity, students would use the same tools if they were in admissions officers’ shoes.