UW improves time for admissions decisions

Decisions on admission to the university are being made at a rate far faster than last year, according to Admissions Director Rob Seltzer.

“We were expecting to improve our processing time tremendously, and we have done just that,” says Seltzer. “We started getting decisions out four weeks earlier this year — beginning in mid-September — and have processed approximately twice as many applications (13,000) as last year at the same time.”

Seltzer says prospective students are sent an acknowledgment within two days of receiving their application, and first-review decisions are sent out in half the time it took last year. Most students are hearing from the university within three to four weeks this year. Last year some students didn’t hear back from the university for several months.

Seltzer credits several factors for the improvements in processing. Electronic applications, which have grown seven-fold in the past three years, directly enter the university’s database and are no longer manually entered into the system, thus saving a huge amount of staff time. The university has already received more than 6,000 electronic applications this year.

The hiring of new staff, including an assistant director for technology and an office manager, helps manage admissions technology needs and issues and make the day-to-day functions of the office more efficient, Seltzer says. In addition, the office has been reorganized internally following an intense re-engineering effort by Seltzer’s staff that reviewed major admissions processes.

Because of the high volume of applications to UW–Madison, some admissions decisions are postponed until the spring each year. Seltzer says his goal is to decide on postponed applications and notify students by the middle of March rather than the middle of April.

“We are well on our way to meeting this goal since we are postponing fewer final decisions this year,” Seltzer says.

Improving the time needed to decide on admitting prospective students has been a priority for Seltzer since he took over as admissions director three years ago. That has been in part because demand for access to UW–Madison continues to grow.

The university received nearly 18,000 applications last year for a freshman class totaling 5,736 students for fall 2000. Since 1990, applications to UW–Madison have increased 36 percent, while the size of the freshman class has increased only 24 percent.