Jennifer Delahunty Britz

Speaks up for student-friendly admissions

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By ERIC HOOVER

On a recruiting trip to Japan last summer, Jennifer Delahunty Britz met a high-school student who wanted to study acting. Naturally, Ms. Britz, dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, told him all about the college's drama department. Then she told him something else: Be sure to check out Yale University's program, too.

In an era of crushing competition among elite colleges, Ms. Britz has become a voice for student-friendly admissions practices. She tells her staff that they should do what they think is best for prospective applicants, even if that means advising them to consider another college. "We are marketers and we are educators," Ms. Britz says. "We need to make sure we get the balance correct."

Her career has given her a unusual perspective on how selling and shepherding overlap.

In 1989, after five years as an admissions director for two affiliated Catholic institutions, she became a consultant for the Lawlor Group, a Minneapolis-based marketing firm that works with private colleges. Getting under the hood of unsung liberal-arts institutions convinced her that conventional measures of institutional worth, like prestige and selectivity, were empty prizes. College rankings, she concluded, could not show whether or not a particular campus was a good fit for, say, jazz musicians, Rhodes scholars, or Indiana Joneses.

When Ms. Britz came to Kenyon, in 2003, she emphasized the necessity of explaining the culture of the campus to applicants, of describing clearly its qualities and quirks to them. Ronald A. Sharp, former acting president of Kenyon, says Ms. Britz brought nuanced ideas about admissions. "She was not taking the cynical view that this is a business and it's all about marketing, but ... recognizing that identifying what was unique about an institution was a legitimate academic enterprise," says Mr. Sharp, now dean of the faculty at Vassar College.

Ms. Britz has called on colleges to keep commercial pressures in check. At last year's annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, in Milwaukee, she gave a speech called "Ten (Not So) Radical Suggestions for Reforming Admissions Practices" in which she urged her colleagues to cut loose wait-listed applicants who have no chance of getting in, take more risks on promising students with lower SAT scores, and to stop filling out the U.S. News & World Report's annual "peer-assessment survey" (Ms. Britz stopped doing so last year).

"There's a counseling, mentoring side of her that inspires, and we really have a need for that in this business," says John Lawlor, founder of the Lawlor Group. "Hers is a voice being listened to ... by the young men and women who are coming up in this field."

Ms. Britz has encouraged her peers to open what she calls the "black box of admissions." She and her staff give students a list showing the college's admissions rates for early and regular applicants, among other data. They also explain how much they value students' displays of interest in attending Kenyon. "If we're going to set the rules," Ms. Britz says, "we've got to tell them what the game is."

She has tried to make her own office more student-friendly. Last year the college trimmed eight pages from its admissions packet in an effort to save harried applicants time -- and perhaps an ounce of sanity.