No matter how much I try to scrub my mind clean, the residual smudges of my college application process still resurface when I least expect them. Sometimes it’s at 3 a.m., waking up convinced I made a typo in my Common App, only to remember I’m well into my sophomore year at Penn. Other times it’s when I get calls from nervous high schoolers, clinging to my every word as if I’m the Oracle of Delphi, when in reality I am definitely more lost about life than they are.
The American admissions process is oddly intimate for something so impersonal. You’re asked to excavate your 17 years of life, baring your soul to a faceless committee in a room you’ll never enter. It’s this deeply subjective, person-centric model that has long been the hallmark of higher education in the United States. While Oxbridge or the Indian Institutes of Technology focus almost entirely on scholarly excellence, U.S. universities posture toward the next Noam Chomsky, the next W.E.B. Du Bois, or the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In short: They want the human.
And it’s also why the quiet dismantling of that human quality, starting with alumni conversations, has lingered with me.
At Penn, the long-standing tradition of alumni interviews became non-evaluative “conversations” in 2023. Now, they are gone entirely. Beginning with the 2025-26 cycle, the Alumni Ambassador Program will stop offering applicant conversations and pivot toward a yearlong mentorship model for admitted and current students. University leaders framed it as a way to make alumni time “more relevant and rewarding” while coping with record application volume.
Among its Ivy League siblings, Penn is not alone in this decision. Columbia University discontinued alumni interviews altogether in 2023, citing equity and access. Cornell University now limits formal video interviewing to solely its architecture program. Brown University too replaced its alumni interviews with an optional student video introduction. For Harvard University and Princeton University, the interview process is murky, with availability depending on alumni or the need for “additional context,” which my good friends on Reddit interpret as code for “clearing the first round.” Only Yale University and Dartmouth College estrange themselves from their sister schools, continuing to describe their interviews as formally evaluative with written reports alongside the file.
Meanwhile, standardized testing is back with strong force. The rhetoric is about clarity, comparability, and resisting ghostwritten materials. Numbers feel clean and simple and do not risk raising questions about authorship or tone. But being human is messy, subjective, and everything contrary to a dataset. It feels, then, almost bitterly ironic, that in trying to keep artificial intelligence out of the process, we’re shrinking the parts of an application where a living voice can distort this neatness of data.
I’ll concede the obvious fact that alumni interviews had their logistical flaws. Especially after the transition to “non-evaluative” interviews, many alumni were either non-committed or dropped out entirely. But I still can’t shake the feeling that there is meaning in reaching the student before admittance, when the school is still a mirage. And that's not just to show them what the university can be like, but also to provide a report going beyond their numbers, diversity, equity, and inclusion-based essay prompts that are seemingly impossible to answer without controversy, and character counts in a format where tone, presence, and humanness can break through.
So I asked around. College sophomore Donatella Donovan said she was set on a school in Paris before her conversation with a Penn graduate changed everything. “The way [she] spoke about Penn humanized it for me. She’s still one of the coolest people I know,” she gushed. Donovan now leads the Black Ivy League Business Conference, conducts research for the Harlem Walks Project, and mentors younger students. College sophomore Elijah Ramirez from El Paso, Texas recalled that his interviewer was the first person from Penn he had met. “Three people at my high school had similar stats,” he said, “but my conversation stood out. [My interviewer] told me I had his vote of approval, and I think that gave me the push I needed. So I’m grateful for having it.” College sophomore David Tran, once nicknamed “David Cornell” back home, was drawn to Penn after a local activist and graduate introduced him to Penn Democrats and the Netter Center for Community Partnerships. He now researches labor issues at Amtrak.
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Across the board, these seemingly different stories with distinctive arcs converged on a shared theme: These students felt seen. Not sorted, but seen. And these are just three anecdotes. There are so many international students or first-generation, low-income students for whom it might have meant even more. I was left with a sinking feeling that, without these interviews, I might not be telling their stories now.
Alumni are feeling the loss too. “People are mourning the loss of the interview program,” said Laurie Kopp Weingarten, a 1986 Wharton graduate and longtime interviewer, in a recent interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian. She called it a simple way to stay connected to Penn, recounting a time when she described the “most incredible candidate ever” to the admissions office, which was then taken into consideration. With the recent institutional uncertainties, administrative changes, and donor fatigue, it feels almost imperative to hold onto any semblance of connection we still have.
What should replace the old model, if anything? I do not have a perfect blueprint. It could look like a return to classic written-report interviews, modeled on Yale’s approach of trained alumni and graduating seniors, scheduled equitably and audited for quality. To address alumni strain, it could model Harvard’s approach of only selecting applicants they “want more information from” to facilitate a more qualified pool. It might even be a hybrid that pairs short, structured video responses, like Brown’s, with a conversation to corroborate voice and reduce bias. The hard truth is that we will only reach an answer when we bring this bureaucratic footnote to the headline and discuss it.
If higher education still claims to care about the rebel, the visionary, or the kid who does not test well but can move people toward a cause, then we need to leave room for that kid to be seen. Because that is the very kid we will need when the world is automated and we struggle to hold onto the human. The more we center data over dialogue, we risk not only losing the program but the point of American higher education at all.
DIYA CHOKSEY is a College sophomore studying cognitive science from Mumbai, India. Her email address is dchoksey@sas.upenn.edu.
