Why holistic applicant review needs to be mission based

April 21, 2021

There’s a lot to consider about your applicants when conducting a holistic review, such as their grades, background, experiences, and professional attributes. But what truly anchors your team’s decision is the consideration of how an applicant’s strengths and potential can help your program deliver on its mission, whether that’s serving various communities or accelerating research.

Here are two reasons why your program’s mission needs to drive holistic applicant review:

1. Align everyone on priorities and decision-making criteria

Your institution or program’s mission statement is meant to guide how you operate. Everything you do is meant to achieve that specific mission, which takes into consideration your institution or program’s unique history, objectives, as well as educational or societal contributions. As such, your mission statement should help align your team and provide clarity on what’s important when making decisions, especially where applicants are concerned.

At a time when higher education institutions are demanded to become more transparent, increase access and fairness, and better serve their community, the mission statement provides a great starting point for decision making. It helps to balance all the different factors that come into play during holistic review since it is all too easy for each individual stakeholder to focus too much on a particular metric and weight it more heavily than others. It becomes more problematic when each stakeholder focuses on different metrics, making it harder to reach decisions as a team with confidence and with the right rationale. Aligning on the mission can help you look at the applicant as a whole and determine whether they can help you achieve that mission.

Want to learn more about holistic applicant review or how to implement it in your process? We can help. Let’s Talk!

2. Attract the right kind of applicants

Applicants aren’t the only ones competing during the application process. Your program is competing with other programs for top applicants who possess the knowledge, skills, experience, and professional attributes that will enable them to succeed in a people-centered profession. What can set your program apart is your mission statement. For example, a medical school whose mission is to increase access to care in rural areas will want to attract applicants who want to eventually work in a rural setting instead of those who seek to work in urban environments. Other programs who are more research focused will want to attract applicants whose career goals lie in research. Leveraging that mission statement in recruitment efforts can give you a stronger pool of applicants to consider, and reviewing their applications for alignment with your mission can help you choose those applicants who really want to be part of your program.

Learn how to implement mission-based applicant review

If you’re interested in learning how to implement this type of process and how programs have found success with it, then watch these presentations from the 2021 Admissions Summit:

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