Meet Whitney Soule, leader of the team who decides whether you get into Penn

Since Whitney Soule became vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania a little over a year ago, she has begun to make changes in the application process at the Ivy League institution, one of the most competitive in the nation.

Soule, 54, earned her master’s at Harvard and her bachelor’s at Bates College in Maine, where she also got her start in admissions. She also spent 11 years in admissions at Connecticut College and the 13 years before she came to Penn at Bowdoin College in Maine.

» READ MORE: Want to get into Penn? Show a little gratitude - on an essay prompt

But she has roots in the Philly area. A native of Illinois, she moved to Pennsylvania as a child and went to Wayne Elementary in the Philadelphia suburbs before moving to Massachusetts for middle school.

Soule recently sat down with The Inquirer to answer some questions about admissions, changes in the works, and her new role as Penn’s admissions dean.

I applied to colleges using the Common Application, filling it out with a manual typewriter, making the copies I needed on a copy machine, sending them off in the mail, and then waiting it out for an answer to arrive back in the mail. In that process, I was required to send essentially the same materials that are still required in applications at most schools — a transcript, writing samples, activities list, and recommendations. I remember really working on my essay, trying to pick a topic that I thought the admissions committees would like. (Ironically, this is exactly what I advise applicants NOT to do!)

I had an unintentional entry into admissions work. In college, I had been a tour guide and volunteered to help with admissions. About a year after I graduated, Bates College, my alma mater, had an unexpected opening in their admissions office and needed someone right away. I was hired into a nine-month position, and 30 years later, here I am, still working in admissions! I love it because the work is human-centered, mission-driven, and complex.

We have roughly 60 people in the undergraduate admissions department. Often, when people think of an admissions office, they think of the admissions staff who recruit and read applications. We are much more than that. We have a full operations team that manages finance, events, project management, data, and systems. We also have a full communications and visitor experience team. It takes the entire office to coordinate all that goes into authentically representing Penn to prospective students, making it easy for them to find the information they need to apply, as well as for the team to manage the processing, evaluation, and decisioning of 55,000 applications each year.

Ten years ago, Penn admitted students who demonstrated curiosity, motivation and persistence. The applicant pool of 31,000 represented an abundance of students who understood how their aspirations aligned with what Penn offers and expressed excitement about the contributions they hoped to make within the Penn community and beyond. All of that is still true today, except now we review about 55,000 applications.

We are committed to helping students who are inspired by learning to see college as an opportunity, and perhaps see that opportunity at Penn. Further, we need to prioritize a process that is equitable, that invites students from all backgrounds and levels of resource to fully represent themselves in our application. We can make some changes within Penn’s application, but the real effort is directed at changing the system. For example, the function of shared application platforms like the Common Application and Coalition for College application, allows students to fill out primary application details that are accepted by all of the schools that are part of the organization, and then applicants need only answer brief supplemental questions unique to an individual school. This makes applying to multiple schools more streamlined and less intimidating, which is really important for greater access. This also highlights how making change requires committed collaboration within our application networks to create new best practices, which can take longer.

We can and are doing more. As one example, this year, in addition to the application fee waivers that we offer directly to students, we are sending application fee waiver codes directly to high school and community organization counselors who can share them with students who might find the cost of applying prohibitive. We partner with many organizations that are dedicated to helping low-income and first-generation students prepare for, and apply to, college such as Questbridge, College Horizons, Minds Matter, TEAK Fellowship, KIPP, Steppingstone and Philadelphia Futures, to name just a few.

Our goal is to bring clarity, simplification, and equity to Penn’s application process. For example, we used to require two teacher recommendations. Starting last year, we changed our requirement to include one teacher recommendation and one recommendation from any adult the applicant felt knew them well and could offer insight about their abilities to problem-solving, learn, contribute, build relationships, etc. We changed this because we know that some applicants are not in an environment where their teachers can get to know them individually, so we wanted to make sure every applicant could select recommenders who have.

This year, we included a short answer prompt about gratitude, an opportunity that benefits the applicants and those of us who get to read their answers.

Also, this year, we are part of a pilot project in the Common Application in which students have the option of using a checklist that indicates their commitment to responsibilities such as caring for family members, contributing to their household income, translating for family members. By inviting students to tell us about these responsibilities, we are signaling that we value the commitment of these responsibilities and include them in our review.

In admissions, our responsibility is to effectively evaluate and select students for Penn who will benefit from and contribute to our community and the academic opportunity we provide. To do that, we need to understand the usefulness of the materials that we require and how they contribute to our assessment. Because the move to test-optional was not something we had an opportunity to prepare for, we are taking the time now to evaluate if our processes are still effective when testing is absent.

We receive about 55,000 applications for 2,400 spaces. The odds are challenging. Not surprisingly, the low admit rate at Penn and other schools contributes to the anxiety of applying to college. Penn’s admit rate is shared in public data sources, so it’s not a secret. However, at the time we released our admissions decisions, we chose to celebrate the students we invited to the Penn community as individuals and in the ways that we got to know them, through their unique combinations of identity, accomplishment, and talent. We shared that most of our admitted students were committed to community service, many had jobs, cared for siblings, were committed to sustainability, and pursuing their interests through research. The admit rate doesn’t help people understand what we value at Penn, but highlighting what our admitted students have in common does.