Admit Office Slashes Travel Budget

The College’s Admissions and Financial Aid office will cut its travel budget next year by fifty percent, eliminating virtually all non-local high school visits, Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said in an interview yesterday.

The scale-down—the admissions office’s response to a Faculty of Arts and Sciences-mandated budget cut of 15 percent for all units—comes two years after Harvard announced an end to its Early Admissions program. At the time, Fitzsimmons stressed the office’s commitment to increasing outreach and recruitment efforts for underrepresented groups, given the opening in the admissions timetable.

Fitzsimmons said that admissions officers will now be occupying their time with e-mailing and telephoning prospective applicants identified by the College Board, rather than traveling.

“Because we will be contacting people in a more robust way in the mail and online, we believe we will be more effective rather than less effective because we are going directly to the individuals,” Fitzsimmons said.

Cutting back on high school visits has been on the table for some time now, said Fitzsimmons. He said that these visits are only sparsely attended and attracting promising applicants in this setting is “the random luck of the draw.”

“This [cutback] actually gives us opportunity to start recruiting in a way that we think is more competitive,” Fitzsimmons said. “Our own focus groups have increasingly made the argument that the school visit has become less and less important.”

Fitzsimmons said that joint travel trips—attended by larger numbers of students, parents, and counselors—have proven more effective in attracting prospective applicants. He added that Harvard will continue to visit 127 cities with along with Georgetown, the University of Pennsylvania, Duke, and Stanford.

When asked if he was worried that these cuts would hurt Harvard’s perception of accessibility, Fitzsimmons acknowledged that this is “always a concern,” but said that this was one of the purposes of joint recruiting trips.

Teaming up with these colleges may help attract students who might not attend an information session only for Harvard, Fitzsimmons said. Joint trips with Princeton and the University of Virginia to target students from lower income backgrounds are still on the books for November.

Student-staffed recruitment trips sponsored by the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative and the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program will also remain intact.

The admissions office will also encourage more one-on-one contact between regional officers and high school counselors in their newsletter, Fitzsimmons said.

And the Harvard alumni network will take on an increased role aiding admissions officers, said Harvard Director of Financial Aid Sally C. Donahue.

“We hope that the fact that Dean Smith and President Faust have made such a firm and inspiring commitment to financial aid will be a strong, clear message that whoever you are and whatever need you have, Harvard should be on your list,” Fitzsimmons said. “We think that message will be an enormous help.”

Fitzsimmons said it will be tempting for people to pin any change in next year’s applicant numbers on one factor—such as decreased recruitment—but that without a careful analysis of all contributing forces, such a conclusion would not be accurate. He suggested a counter-effect in the record applicant numbers in recent years, a statistic that would discourage students from applying.

In an additional effort to cut costs, the admissions office will also scale back on the size of information packets mailed to prospective applicants. The packets will still contain a copy of the common application and Harvard supplement—for the ten percent of students who do not apply to Harvard online—but much of the additional information will now be moved online.

—Staff writer Jillian K. Kushner can be reached at kushner@fas.harvard.edu.