Description

The Wall Street Journal presents "Inside The Admissions Office." Students across America sent in their questions – expert Deans of Admissions from eight top colleges provide the real answers. In this clip they examine if it is really easier to get into a school if you live thousands of miles away?

Transcript

Guoxing: How important is geographic diversity when you're building a cost and do you have a better chance as school faraway from a hometown? Jordan Goldman: Is there a tangible benefit to applying somewhere that’s far away from where you live? Eric J. Furda: I'm going to answer this in the reverse, in many ways students that have gone to school and grew up in the city of Philadelphia, it’s probably our most important geographic area, you know, maybe into our backyard, it is critically important. Of course we can get into the diversity of geography and having an international student body overall but don’t assume that the further away from your campus the more you're going to be favored, our backyard students are important to us. Nancy Hargrave Meislahn: And geographic diversity is about diversity of experience and so it’s not about zip code, it’s not about telephone area code, it’s has the student life the different life and what experience does this student bring to that community. Now, a part of that can be geography but it’s not that per se. Jordan Goldman: And do colleges report the geographic diversity of their incoming student body each year? Eric J. Furda: Yes. Jordan Goldman: And would you say if some must to look at that and say you know what people haven’t been going from my hometown to the school in getting here that they might have better ads? Jenny Richard: Well, just like you shouldn’t necessarily do things that you think that we want you to do and you shouldn’t necessarily move to North Dakota because we have nothing against North Dakota but you shouldn’t move to a state that we don’t have—we don’t have anybody from North Dakota just because of an admission process. Jordan Goldman: And if you come from the town in which the school is located,- you shouldn’t look at that as a minus of anything. It may be a plus, it may be important to that school of that people from that area? Janet Rapelye: Yeah and we have no quotas for schools or towns or cities or states. We go into this process looking to put a class together and it might be that we would take five students out of a high school and only five applicants applied that year. We might take no applicants from that high school. But there's no set formula for this and students shouldn’t try to strategize about that. 0Every year is different and if someone says well this school hasn’t taken a student from my hometown for 10 years, you know it might be just the year to apply but it wouldn’t take someone for that reason. But don’t think that there is any kind of formula attached to this. Roby Blust: And I think sometimes for us and with eco what has been said about the students that are from our close geographic area are you know very important to us we almost for students there are far the way almost have to be stronger students because we know that they are going to face other obstacles coming to our place the far the way they actually almost have to be stronger students from if you look at from a geographic perspective. Nancy Hargrave Meislahn: I think this is one of those the areas where we have to be really careful about generalizing. At some schools may having pen is known for having a commitment to Philadelphia and you know so this could be one of the research points that the student should be looking at and in terms of lastly and has made a very strong statement about wanting to be more international. So, that’s a priority for us and we've been very public about that and I think you probably can pull each of us about what our kind of public priorities are and to the extend for the student can match who they are genuinely with those priorities they're going to be in a better position in the applicant.