Taking on the role of a prospective student, select a higher education institution and gather admissions information from them. The goal of this assignment is to experience the admission process through the lens of a student-to-be.

You will be expected to write a brief paper, maximum of two pages, and summarize your findings. You should identify how your experience confirmed and/or contradicted the literature we are reading in class.

Possible roles you could assume would be: an international student, an undocumented student, a low-income student who does not have a computer, a non-traditional age student, a single parent, a high achieving student from an underrepresented group, a high-income private high school student, a student with a weak academic record, a home schooled student, etc.

You will introduce yourself to the admissions office as a prospective student of one of the above classifications. However, do not write the report in the first person of the prospective student, but simply report in writing what you found out. How did they respond to you (the student)? What were the unspoken and spoken messages about who is welcome or who belongs at that institution? What materials did they send or refer you to, if any?

(Do they automatically send some students some information and not others?) Did they fail to take you seriously? Were they aggressively recruiting you or seemed apathetic to your requests for information? In general as well, you can also look at what the general admission message is trying to convey. Who is their target student in their web site or materials?

Do they talk about their uniqueness or their similarities to other institutions? What assumptions did they make about you? For example, with an international student, did they immediately go into the rules and regulations (discourager), a hard sell (encourager), or make faulty assumptions (treat a potential student who sees herself as an elite international as if s/he were a low-income undocumented student).

Specifically, I want you to analyze the message in the institution’s response and the web site/materials they provide. What was their tone?” What do those materials say to your prospective student? How do they provide the information? Was the information tailored to your questions or a generic package they send out to all? How does the information they provide align with what we know about how students choose colleges?