On Oct. 1, 2024, Kathryn Bezella started as the dean of undergraduate admissions, a new position focusing specifically on undergraduates. She reports to dean of admissions and financial aid Lee Coffin, who was promoted from vice provost for enrollment to vice president in September 2023. Bezella primarily focuses on admitting undergraduates, while Coffin guides Dartmouth’s broader admissions goals. Prior to joining Dartmouth, Bezella most recently worked as vice dean and director of strategy and innovation for undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania from 2023 to 2024. During her time as a student at Barnard College, and for several years after, Bezella was heavily involved in opera and performance. The Dartmouth sat down with Bezella to discuss her background in admissions and priorities for undergraduate admissions at the College.
How did you get involved with admissions?
KB: I was a first-year resident assistant at Barnard, which involved a lot of programming, getting to know the students and welcoming students to New York City. It was not just a “checks and boxes” kind of job. I started to meet the president and some of the other administrators and was a student leader. That introduced the idea that “I go to school here, and people also work here.” Fast forward to when I graduated — I really wanted to be a professional opera performer and needed something that would give me some sort of flexibility. But I’m also very practical as a Midwesterner, so I built a regular resume alongside a performance resume. I ended up working at Barnard’s admissions office as a staff interviewer, which was more information that admissions is a real job and a cool job. I got to do something that I really enjoyed and represented education, which was super important in my family. About six years later, I was tired of being told I was “too short” or “too tall” for different performance parts, and I was looking to make a permanent change into a different kind of career. My experience in admissions helped me find a position at the University of Pennsylvania, where I worked full-time in admissions, and I’ve never looked back. That was in 2006.
After your time at Penn, what led you to Dartmouth?
KB: I was first at Penn as a regional director in undergraduate admissions, then moved over to the MBA program at the Wharton School of Business. I did MBA admissions there and then ultimately was in a chief-of-staff role to the vice dean, who ran the whole MBA division. I then hopped to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. That allowed me to combine my love of opera with admissions and higher education administration. After that, I went back to Penn and held a few more positions that gave me a lot of really interesting experiences. My last role at Penn was as vice dean and director of strategy and innovation for the undergraduate program. It was a terrific role. I wasn’t particularly seeking anything because it was such a great and fun job, and I really loved the office. But when a recruiter calls you and tells you that Lee Coffin is looking for someone — I knew of Lee Coffin through the Ivy Plus networks — I couldn’t pass up that opportunity. He has a reputation of being a terrific mentor. I thought we would really get along, so I threw my hat in.
How did your background at Penn as part of the strategy and innovation team help prepare you for your new role here?
KB: I see my background as a performer helping me here. One of the things that you do a lot as a professional performer is working really closely with a group of people to accomplish something pretty complicated, like a show or an opera. You do that for sometimes just a couple of weekends, sometimes for six months, and then you never see them again and start it all over with the next group. When you think about how to create teams — how to really quickly get into a situation, begin to acclimate to it and begin to accomplish something — all of those things were things I did a lot as a singer and performer, and that stays with me. The foundations of undergraduate admissions are very similar here. It’s been really wonderful to be here because we read applications here at Dartmouth in a very similar way to how I was trained to do it back in 2006 at Penn.
Have you shifted your view of the admissions process since moving to Dartmouth?
KB: I’m about three months in, but I would say one of the things that’s really challenging and different about Dartmouth compared to Penn is that Penn’s class size is almost twice as big. When you think about all the things that Dartmouth wants to accomplish, we only have a tiny number of seats to do it. One of the big mechanisms that I’m shifting in my brain is the idea of scarcity here.
How have you found your time leading Dartmouth’s undergraduate admissions so far?
KB: There were so many things about Dartmouth that I knew I would love and always had. Having been part of the Ivy Plus group, I’ve known people at Dartmouth, and I’ve seen what they’ve done over the years. I knew I was walking into something that was really interesting. One of the coolest things is that there is only a liberal arts opportunity here, so students are applying to a liberal arts program and then choosing their focus from there. At Penn, there’s a pre-professional focus, and that’s wonderful, but that also means that if you’re reading an application to the nursing school, what they’re explaining is why they want to be a nurse. Here, you’re reading about someone’s general intellectual curiosity, and the way that comes across in every file is totally different. With Dartmouth’s outdoor programs, I was joking with the team that I read more applications that featured something about hunting. I know that Dartmouth students are not walking around as hunters, but there is no nature in Philadelphia that people would be drawn to. Having people describe their love of mountaineering or camping made me think, “Oh, right, I should have thought about that.” It’s been really fun to see those dimensions come through.
With recent donations toward financial aid, the Supreme Court decision to strike down affirmative action and other recent changes in admissions, how have you changed the way you think about admissions?
KB: It’s challenging, but I really enjoy thinking about when I started in admissions in 2006 and the way things worked at that point. None of those things were necessarily in play yet. The application volume has exploded since I started, and Dartmouth has seen incredible growth and continues to hold that growth. When I first started, I expected to read a total of a couple hundred applications in the cycle. Now my team is reading thousands throughout the cycle. When I first started, many more people just understood college was a necessary mechanism to get to their next step, and now people ask, “What do the liberal arts do?”, “Why would I go to college?” or even “Should I go to college?” All of these things contribute to skepticism in the marketplace that I don’t think existed.
Additionally, Dartmouth is so much more than the regional school that it was roughly 40 years ago. It’s a global program, so people understand what we offer in a totally different way. Even though the process is still the same, the work that needs to happen in order to create that process has more than tripled, more than quadrupled. It’s just unbelievable. And so I think what I see as my responsibility to the team is to really help us think about how to use technology and data and marketing tactics and other things to sort of make that surrounding process have ease and have efficiency and have clarity, so that that center part that needs to be so special can be maintained, even if now we see 28,000 applications, as opposed to 10,000 applications.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
