Last year, undergraduate applications to Brown went up 20 percent in spite of a troubled national economy. Now, with most of this year’s applications in hand as of the January 1 regular deadline, Dean of Admission James Miller and his staff expect to receive 30,000 applications, a 20 percent increase over last year’s robust total.

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A very busy Alumnae Hall
Why the upward trend? “The news from Brown has been good,” Miller says, noting widespread admiration for Brown’s recent academic growth and for President Ruth J. Simmons, as well as less tangible “viral” positive impressions in the media and on social networking Web sites.
The result: Brown’s largest-ever avalanche of applications for undergraduate admission. The applicants’ often astonishing credentials and aspirations fill 300 large boxes in Alumnae Hall, where each component is carefully coded and processed by a small army of workers in jeans and sweatshirts.
To accommodate the intensive work of these 80 temporary employees, most of them local college students working over their winter breaks, the Office of Admission has relocated the midyear sorting operation from its home on Prospect Street to Alumnae Hall on the Pembroke campus. “We could not have processed 30,000 applications in our building,” explains Miller.
After they have been labeled and filed, the applications will be read by 20 admission officers over the next several months, culminating in the April 1 notification of admission offers for the class of 2014.

This is the last year that multitudes of temporary workers and hundreds of bins will be needed to process undergraduate applications. Alumnae Hall will remain empty next winter break. “We’re moving to totally electronic applications,” Miller says.
The low hum of workers shuffling applications into files and the rumble of incoming mail bins will soon be things of the past. “We can’t wait,” says Miller.