This article is featured in the 2025 Winter Carnival Edition.
Perhaps no topic piques the interest — and anxieties — of college seniors more than the elusive admissions process. What goes on beyond the closed doors in McNutt Hall? Will the admissions team like my essays? Who is even reviewing my application, anyway?
The Dartmouth set off to explore that last question — and found an ever-evolving landscape. As applicant pools have changed over time, both in size and composition, the roles of admissions officers and deans have adapted to match.
Admissions on the Move
Today, prospective college applicants may be familiar with the regional admissions officer — an individual assigned to a review applications from a specific geographic area. But officers were not always segmented by region — and, unlike today, had little firsthand knowledge of applicants outside the United States. According to the 1961-62 Report of the Committee on Admission and the Freshman Year, the Admissions Office largely relied on international alumni to consider the “qualifications of students from foreign countries.”
In a 1956 memo in the Rauner Special Collections Library, then-director of admissions Edward Chamberlain Jr. highlighted a new “mode” of college admissions — the “traveling admissions officer role.” Tasked with visiting secondary schools across the country as a “required part of school relations” and a “[method] of procurement of outstanding college candidates,” these traveling officers took admissions on the go, the memo explained.
The change was necessitated by growing application numbers: as applications to Dartmouth more than doubled from 1940 to 1960, admissions officers began traveling to schools to learn the caliber of students firsthand, the 1956 memo reported.
By the early 1960s, traveling admissions officers had accrued an additional responsibility: recruitment. Admissions staff had “expanded efforts … to strengthen the program of attracting outstanding secondary school students to the College,” according to the 1960-61 Report of the Committee on Admission and the Freshman Year.
Specifically, Dartmouth implemented a “rifleshot program,” which recommended certain “outstanding candidates” to faculty members based on their preferred field of interest, according to the report. Faculty members would then send “personal letters calling attention to Dartmouth’s opportunities in these areas” to these “desirable men.” The year before the report was written, “59 ‘rifleshot’ letters were sent.”
Technological advancements and evolving roles
In recent decades — as technology has made the process of applying to college more accessible — admissions officers have been forced to keep pace, according to vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid Lee Coffin.
“The pool is just more heterogeneous,” Coffin said. “[Any applicant] can sit at a laptop and discover places. … Each applicant has agency, … so that’s blown the pools up to a degree today that doesn’t look anything like it did even 20 years ago.”
The makeup of the admissions office has evolved as a result, bolstering its staffing number to keep up with demand. Today, the admissions office boasts 24 readers, each responsible for evaluating between 1,000 to 1,200 applications each year, according to Coffin. Even as the College’s applicant pool has skyrocketed, its ratio of readers to applications has remained relatively stable, Coffin said. In the 1980s, for instance, there were 10 admissions officers who each looked at about 1,000 applicants per season, he explained.
Officers today are responsible for smaller geographic areas than years past, Coffin added.
“When [Dartmouth] had fewer applicants, [admissions officers] all covered more turf,” Coffin explained. “As the pools have gotten bigger, the territories we represent have gotten a little more specific.”
Tanaz Muhamed ’26, who works for the admissions office as a tour guide, noted the increased diversity of the College’s applicant pool today.
“[Students] come from all over,” Muhamed said. “… They have different reasons for wanting to even tour Dartmouth. … There are some [whose] parents were alums and … are pushing them towards considering it as an option. … There are some that had never heard of Dartmouth until their high school … [brought them on a tour].”
Dean of undergraduate admissions Kathryn Bezella, who was appointed to the role in October 2024, said the College’s growing diversity of its applicant pool has demanded more creativity from admissions officers.
“Increasingly, as places like Dartmouth go from being regional schools to being national schools, the demands of considering your audience, considering ways to connect with your audience, considering the tools to use to connect with your audience [have become more important],” she added.
As Coffin and Bezella both noted, admissions officers have become more familiar with the regions which prospective students are applying from. This has come, in part, from the officers’ familiarity with their assigned territories, according to Coffin.
“We hired three alumni from the Class of 2024 that are on the staff right now, and each of them is managing a territory that includes where they grew up,” Coffin said.
Muhamed noted that the admissions officers’ specializations have helped them better establish connections with those interested in Dartmouth.
“The fact that … each officer has a niche that they work in … really allows prospective students and families to form great, close relationships with admissions officers and the admissions office and get whatever questions they might have answered,” she said.
Even as the scope of the job has changed, Coffin explained that admissions officers are still tasked with many of the same recruitment responsibilities they have been for decades: visiting schools to attract potential candidates, designing and distributing literature on Dartmouth and spearheading programs on campus, among other roles.
Even some semblance of the “rifleshot program” still exists today — when coaches reach out to recruit high school athletes. Despite those core concepts, the magnitude and modes of recruitment have greatly evolved, Bezella said.
“It used to be that recruitment meant a rental car and a set of high schools and a road map and some hotel reservations,” she said. “Now, with virtual, with thinking about marketing and outreach, with thinking about relationships not only with students but with counselors and community-based organizations, that one piece of work has blossomed into probably a hundred pieces of work.”
What has remained more stagnant is the office of the dean of admissions. Since its creation in 1921, only nine individuals have held the position. The title of “director of admissions” only shifted to “dean of admissions” with Al Quirk in 1979, Coffin said, as “a signal that [the dean is] a faculty-connected position.”
“I’m a voting member of the faculty,” Coffin added. “The title ‘Dean’ connects this office to the … academic mission.”
Beyond job titles, the dean’s responsibilities have also evolved, with Coffin’s tenure in particular marking a novel change to the role. After the Board of Trustees appointed Sian Leah Beilock president of the College, she named Coffin to her cabinet in 2023 — making him the first dean of admissions to be named vice president in Dartmouth history.
The promotion came with portfolio changes, Coffin added.
“The biggest change for me in reporting to the president instead of the Provost was that I became a member of the senior leadership team,” he said. “I go to the leadership team meetings, the other vice presidents are my peers [and] I go to the board meetings.”
Bezella’s hiring as the dean of undergraduate admissions also signaled a shift in the department. Coffin said he and Bezella work in tandem, focusing on separate aspects of the admissions mandate. While Coffin focuses on macro-level policy, from anticipating “the national landscape” to preserving the institution’s values, Bezella oversees more of the everyday parts of admissions.
The admissions office’s current dynamic — of having two people in “this kind of coordinated role” — is a first for Dartmouth, Coffin said.
According to Bezella, this change was partly prompted by the current landscape of admissions, including “nationwide policy changes” like “the affirmative action ruling.”
“If you’re trying to, as a leader, both look up and out while simultaneously also manage the in and the complexity of all those tasks we’re talking about, it’s so much,” Bezella said. “So a lot of organizations, Dartmouth now included, have sort of divided up the leadership models.”
Despite fundamental changes to the admissions process, from demand to technology to the College’s increasingly global reach, the nature of the admissions process remains unwavering, Bezella said.
“There is something about us that loves being on a campus, that loves being in a learning environment, that loves being with students, that feels that it is interesting, keeps us young, keeps us engaged with learning,” she said. “I’ve never met someone who’s in this field for whom that wasn’t partially true.”
