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JANUARY 30, 2003 B-SCHOOL Q&A: ADMISSIONS Notre Dame Is "Very, Very Collaborative" Admissions Director Hayden Estrada on Mendoza's special appeal, its application essays, and the role of interviews
Q: You had more than 1,100 applications last year. Do you expect to hit that number this year, too? A: Yes, we're ahead of where we were last year -- not by much, but a little. To have a huge increase over last year would be pretty tough because over the past four years, our applications have increased about 165%. And if you look at the first- and second-tier schools for BusinessWeek over thatsame period, it's about 5%. Q: Last year, 21% of your reapplicants were admitted. That seems a bit higher than normal. Would you say Notre Dame is a "reapplicant friendly" school? A: I'll tell you why that happens. As I said, for the past few years we've had significant increases in applications, and the people who are left out are the ones who apply at the end of the cycle. If they had applied earlier, they would have been excellent candidates, but because of the timing they weren't necessarily competitive. What we've done with people like that is counsel them to consider reapplying the next year. That's one of the reasons why that number is so high, whereas at other schools it may be in the single digits. Q: It sounds like it's to the applicant's advantage to get his or her application in as early as possible? A: What I tell most people, tongue-in-cheek, is that if a school's applications are going up, it's definitely to your advantage to apply early because you have recourse if you get on the waiting list or you don't get in. You can retake the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) or possibly approach an interview differently, or what have you. But if you're applying at that last deadline, you're at the mercy of the applicant pool at that point. By contrast, if applications are down compared with the previous year, it could be your lucky year. Q: Even before it was fashionable, Notre Dame stressed ethics as part of the MBA program. Is ethics an important part of vetting applications for you and your team? A: Not really. Do we put it in our literature and that kind of thing? Of course we do, because it tells people what this community is about, what the ethos of the school is. Is it a strategy to get more applications? Absolutely not, because it's something that this place has been about for so many years.It's part and parcel of who we are. People tend to self-select into schools that have elements of a lifestyle that's important to them, and for people who consider ethics important, it's definitely a draw. Q: Do most of your applicants come from the Midwest? A: No. When I first got here, we did have quite a few people from the Midwest -- 40-some percent [in both the two-year and one-year programs]. Right now it's a little less than 30% from the Midwest, and this year our No. 1 state is California -- nearly 20% of our students. Q: Why the big draw from California? A: That's an interesting question. We try to canvas each major city in California. We do that all across the country but make a special effort to go out there. Occasionally we'll tack on Seattle, but usually it's concentrated on California. There are a lot of Catholics in California, for one thing. They tend to have an affinity for the school. And we really try to leverage that. Q: Do you track how many of your students are Catholic, and how many aren't? A: No, we don't. Not in the admission process. The only way I would know is if someone tells me or shows up for mass. Q: So that doesn't influence decisions at all? A: Absolutely not. Q: I wonder how international applicants view the school. I would imagine the [attraction of Notre Dame's] mystique [or history and tradition] is a bit diminished for someone who grew up outside the U.S. A: It's real interesting. Part of it depends on which country you're from. One of the great things about Notre Dame is that movies have been made about it -- and Hollywood reaches everywhere. So Notre Dame has a very good reputation overseas as well. We have 240 alumni clubs, and a lot of those are overseas. I did a trip to Latin America, visited six or seven countries, and there were alumni clubs in all but one of them. So they're very active. For instance, there's a Latin American and Caribbean Council of Alumni who want to know that we're recruitingLatin American students and doing things like Latin American studies and just really adding to the richness of the Notre Dame experience. Q: What schools are your main competitors for applicants? A: That has evolved. When I got here, it was mostly the Big 10 schools, and you would expect an Indiana or Purdue to be pretty close competitors. We still cross-apply quite a bit with those schools. I would add probably Michigan State, plus Northwestern and Chicago. We're definitely competing with a couple of the Eastern-seaboard schools -- like Georgetown, of course, the other big name in Catholic education. We'll get the Whartons and the Stanfords quite a bit, especially with our high-end candidates. People are applying to more schools now than they were 10 years ago. Q: What do you do to distinguish Notre Dame from its rivals when you're marketing it to candidates? A: The experience here is different. When you look at the top business schools, for instance, in BusinessWeek's ranking, there really aren't any bad ones. You can get a great education at most of them. But what sets a school apart is everything that surrounds the education, the type of communityyou're in. One thing that's very different about our school is that it's very, very collaborative. In fact, I don't think that any of the other schools have their students collaborating in the job search, for instance, as we do here. Students are organizing interest groups based on things like geography andfunctionality, and actually work together on developing leads, and our career development office has created this entire program out of leveraging resources like the alumni better than we have in the past. Those are some of the things that I don't think you can find at other schools. I've worked at four business schools and have never seen anything like it.
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