Over the last decade, admissions has become a front-page fixation, and the industry's professionals have higher profiles than ever, on campuses and off. In turn, today's admissions jobs come with heavy doses of prestige and pressure. In this article, the authors discuss the results of a new survey of college officers which suggest that, despite…

The college admissions process teaches students how to express themselves during interviews, how to describe their best qualities in application essays. It may also make them wary of college marketing campaigns, and skeptical of being treated as a statistics, due to the large role played by standardized-test scores and grade-point averages. Such…