Demonstrated Interest.
Insights from a former director of admissions
My experience as a director of admissions & admissions officer:
So what exactly is demonstrated interest and how do colleges use it?
Demonstrated interest is the act(s) of showing a college admissions office that you’re interested in their school.
Colleges often care about demonstrated interest because they care about their admit rate and yield rate. Those that factor in demonstrated interest into the admissions review don’t want to admit students who don’t seem like they want to attend their school.
Not all colleges practice demonstrated interest; most of the highly selective colleges do not expressly say they look at interest as a factor.
In my experience, it’s a bit more complicated than that. In holistic review with sometimes dozens of human admissions officers involved in decision-making, it can be tempting to look at interest. For example:
Colleges can see if you’ve opened and clicked through emails very easily.
They can see if you’ve done an official visit, or completed an interview — even if it’s optional.
Offices can search their rosters to find data on your attendance at their visit to your school (if they visited; very few high schools are visited in the grand scheme).
Colleges that take demonstrated interest extremely seriously have sophisticated models — sometimes, outsourced to ed. tech. firms — to track all of your actions, and sometimes, over years of engagement. You might even have a predicted score on whether you would yield if admitted.
So how do you officially know if the college takes demonstrated interest into account? You can start with their Common Data Set. Just Google “institution name + Common Data Set” and you should see the most recent data set published. You can then search for “level of applicant’s interest” under the relative importance of factors section. There, you will see if the college officially reports this as a factor.
Protip: Just ask. First, look on their website to see if they say anything beyond what might be listed on their Common Data Set, and if not, email your admissions officer. I have to trust that most people in this profession are ethical and will tell you the truth.
And the final question is: do you need to “demonstrate your interest” in this process?
If the college is known to take this into account, then refrain at your own peril. I’d recommend to do everything in your power if you really want to attend that school. Open the emails, click on the links, spend lots of time going through the website pages (they can see this), attend the college fair and fill out a card, go to the school visit, participate in an interview or any other optional process, and if you have the financial means, visit campus. And it doesn’t hurt to periodically email your admissions representative and ask thoughtful questions.
If they say they don’t take it into account, I wouldn’t worry about this much. Yes, you should still try to do these things above, even if it’s not officially counted, but that’s more for your benefit to see if this is a good-fit college.
