Demonstrated Interest and College Admissions: What is It and Why Does It Matter? (1 of 3)

What is demonstrated interest? What do colleges do with the data they collect about prospective students’ demonstrated interest? Most importantly, how (and why) should prospective students approach demonstrated interest as they search and apply to colleges? In this 3-part series, we’ll explore demonstrated interest and how prospective students can approach this college admissions trend that seems to be here to stay.

Demonstrated Interest: What is It?

Once again, demonstrated interest is in the news. What is demonstrated interest? Demonstrated interest refers to a prospective student’s actions, communications, or other engagements with a specific college or university that lead the school to believe the student is genuinely interested in attending their specific school. For example, prospective students can demonstrate interest by meeting with a college representative during a high school visit, clicking a link in a mass email from the college, or even just opening an email from the college. Admissions offices have the ability to track multiple data points for demonstrated interest and may utilize this data to different degrees while making admissions decisions.

Why Do Colleges Care about Demonstrated Interest?

While prospective students may not recognize demonstrated interest as an important part of the admissions process, it is a significant factor from their college’s perspective. To understand why this is, we first need to understand yield. Yield is the percentage of students who have been accepted to a college that choose to actually enroll in that school. Colleges make important plans and decisions in admissions, housing, financial aid and other offices based on their historical and anticipated yield rates.

For selective and highly selective colleges, yield is especially important as a higher yield indicates higher desirability, and therefore a higher ranking in some prominent college ranking publications. From the college perspective, trying to increase yield and accurately predict yield is important. Of course, colleges cannot control how many students will accept their offers of admission. But they can look at demonstrated interest to make a prediction of how likely a student is to accept an offer of admission.

Example of Demonstrated Interest

Consider the following example of how demonstrated interest might play out in an admissions office. Let’s pretend you are a member of the college admissions office. Your board of directors decided that increasing the school’s yield is a top institutional priority for the year, so you’re trying to have as many prospective students say “yes!” to your offers of admission as possible. Your team is meeting together in committee to review two student files and make one offer of admission. Student A has never opened an email from your college, did not attend your representative’s visit to their high school, has not visited your campus, and never responded to your email and text message offers to schedule an alumni interview. The other student, Student B, has visited your campus (signed up online beforehand and took the official tour), applied in your Early Decision early admissions program, requested to schedule an interview with you while you were in her town to visit high schools, called your office with an in-depth question about a specific academic program, and sent a thank you note to the representative they talked with at a college fair.

Which student seems more likely to accept your offer of admission? Which student would you vote for to admit? Of course, this example is overly simplified and provides no greater context for either student’s academic profile or personal circumstances. But given the information we have, Student B seems much more likely to accept our offer of admission.

As previously mentioned, colleges utilize demonstrated interest in different ways and to different degrees. Attending an information session or opening an email may or may not be tracked. These actions may factor into admissions decisions to a moderate degree, minor degree or not at all. Because colleges don’t handle demonstrated interest the same way across the board, students can feel anxious about how and how much to demonstrate their interest to their potential colleges.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll look at how and why students can engage with their colleges through demonstrated interest. Stay tuned!

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