My several years as an interviewer convinced me that the program is a titanic waste of alumni time and energy that could be put to better use. For openers, what other organization — of any kind — offers to interview 40,000 applicants for 1,800 positions? What organization would brag about it? The dean of admission provides two rationales: Princeton learns “vital insights” about applicants, and the interviews perform an “ambassadorial function,” even for those not admitted.
The first function would be valuable if, on the medical school model, applicants with a strong chance of admission were interviewed. Gaining an interview would be an achievement by itself, the results would really matter, and thousands of students would be spared the time and anxiety of an interview that cannot lead to admission.
As for the ambassadorial function, must it be stated that these students have already applied to Princeton? Alumni could be ambassadors for Princeton, and for higher education itself, by speaking to ninth-through-eleventh graders. Send us to the hundreds of schools admissions officers cannot visit, to schools where many students would be the first in their families to go to college. Let us speak to them about Princeton, surely, but especially about trying to go to college at all. Princeton talks a good game about seeking gifted students from difficult or neglected backgrounds. Why are alumni not inserted when and where college aspirations are formed?
Princeton should stop patting itself on the back for its open interview policy, which rests on the unstated assumption that there is nothing better that alumni could be asked to do with their time. There are better things for us to do, if the admissions office is willing to look for them.