Of all the high school students Deborah Ross, '88, met while volunteering at a college fair in Fort Worth, Texas, last fall, she can't forget the tall kid who was too shy to approach the Stanford booth.
Ross noticed the young man hovering nearby all afternoon. Finally she sought him out. A senior from Fort Worth, he wanted to know if Stanford would be right for him--and what his chances of admission might be. "He ended up applying," says Ross, human resources director for the Dallas Cowboys. "I really hope I see his name on that list of accepted students in the spring."
Ross's work in Texas is part of a three-city pilot program designed to put top-notch prospective students--and their anxious parents--in touch with Stanford alumni. The effort grew out of a recognition that the University could do more to reach out to the best applicants from distant cities. But the program has a second goal: to give alumni a new way to stay connected with Stanford. "People like to feel that they're involved in what the University is doing today--not just what it was doing 10 or 20 years ago," says Lauren Black, '83, of the Stanford Alumni Association, who helped locate and recruit volunteers for the program. "This is a way to give something back."
So far, about 75 alumni and alumni parents have joined the program, which is being tested in Dallas, Chicago and New York. They've staffed 30 college fairs and made phone calls to more than 150 prospective students. "Stanford alums have never had a chance to do this kind of thing," says Holly Haley Knapp, '80, the admission office's alumni involvement coordinator. "They're really excited about it."
The volunteers started out by getting a crash course in the admission process. A team from the admission office held four-hour training sessions in each of the three cities last fall. Using application files with the names removed, the admission officers showed what goes into an application and how it's judged. They also prepared the volunteers for the kinds of questions--from worries about homesickness to queries about academic requirements--often raised by prospective students and their parents.
Kurt Schoknecht, '73, MBA '77, joined up with the program in New York. One of the biggest issues for parents and students there is the sheer distance to Stanford. "There's always the challenge of bringing the West Coast onto the radar screen," he says. An investment bank executive with two daughters of his own in high school, Schoknecht found himself answering the same ques- concerned him.
Besides the college fairs and phone calls, the volunteers are meeting guidance counselors from local high schools. The alums will become the counselors' best source of information about Stanford. And in the spring, the alums in the three pilot-program cities will join their counterparts in 23 other cities in hosting receptions for local seniors who've been accepted to Stanford.
The admission office and the Alumni Association are also working on the program back on campus, recruiting and training seniors and members of the Student Alumni Network, which is sponsored by the Alumni Association. These "pre-alumni" already are attending college fairs at Stanford and around the Bay Area. And when they graduate, some of these twenty-somethings will likely join the new recruiting efforts around the country. They're ideal for answering many of the questions that come up about student life on the Farm, Knapp says.
As the program moves into another academic year, Knapp hopes to expand it into three more cities--Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. At the same time, the admission office plans to take a hard look at the results of the program and decide whether to pursue a permanent budget for it, says James Montoya, dean of admission and financial aid. "I'm optimistic that the evaluation we do will lead us to the conclusion that this enhances our ability to enroll the nation's very best students," he says. And, he might add, offers a great way for far-flung alumni to stay close to the University.
