F E AT U R E S
Critical Care — Nate Lundy, Director of Admissions and Financial Aid
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ndependent school admissions has never been an equitable process. In fact, when I think back to my experience of applying to high schools, as a student coming from public school and applying for financial aid, I don’t ever remember feeling like an individual or a desired applicant. I was just another number being sent from room to room while everyone else jockeyed for position with the head of school or the admissions director. In the last 20+ years, as an admissions professional, I have seen families and students have experiences similar to the one my family and I had, and not get the support or guidance they needed to have a successful and fulfilling admissions experience. When designing an admissions process at UHS, we are forced to acknowledge the historic barriers that have always been in place for those whom a quality education was not meant for. We ask our students to commit to our core values of Integrity, Interconnection, Inquiry, Agency, and Care, with the hope that they take these values far beyond our hallways and into the world. Keeping that in mind, we in admissions hold ourselves to the same standards and values that we demand of our students. As a school with six times as many applicants as admitted students, we are mindful of the messages we send to prospective
families. We want to ensure that we are transparent about our desired outcomes of identifying and enrolling students who will move our school forward. We also want to ensure that every applicant and family feels seen and known through the process. The admissions process is not only about doing right as an admissions team, but about doing right by our applicants and improving as a school every day. At UHS, we use our core values to make decisions and guide young people through their high school years. In particular, the UHS admissions team leans on the value of care at every turn in the admissions process. The amount of care that goes into ensuring that all applicants and their families get what they need through our process is referred to by some educational experts as Critical Care. Expert Rosa L. Rivera-McCutchen says, “Critical Care in school leadership is described as going beyond traditional conceptions of care relating to trust and relationship building and is grounded in confronting and dismantling historically inequitable systems in schooling.” With this in mind, we build an admissions process with the hope of providing true and authentic access to what a UHS education is and can be for all students and families. For example, our process includes efforts to schedule events at different times and days, to allow families to choose what works best for them. Additionally, we aim to streamline as much as
we can, such as by posting the application fee waiver code on our webpage, so that families are not forced to call and ask for it. This approach is carried forward once applicants become students. We prioritize anticipating the needs of our students and families and ensuring that relevant information is passed on to our deans before school starts, so that students who are in need of technology, lunch, books, and/ or language access get exactly what they need. We expect their experiences as students to mirror the attention to detail that they experienced as applicants, which we believe is the foundation for what our students’ four years of high school are all about. We set students’ expectations early, and we aim to deliver throughout their time at UHS. Admissions teams are often seen as gatekeepers with a task of creating an air of exclusivity— an environment in which few gain true access and even fewer gain acceptance. However, this is not the case at UHS. Although our admissions standards are still quite stringent, the admissions team works tirelessly to ensure that we are opening our doors as wide as possible, thus ensuring that we have as representative a community as possible. One silver lining that we have found in the global pandemic has been giving ourselves permission to make changes and shift the way we operate an admissions
process. Providing virtual events gives us the ability to provide families from anywhere with unlimited access to the information they want. Additionally, we have been able to offer events at times, and on days, that we would not have normally been able to access due to our neighborhood agreements. Lowering barriers to access has been a part of the UHS strategic design for years, but we are finding that our Critical Care approach has taken our admissions process to the next level in relation to who has access to UHS and at what level. We are proud to say that all of our decisions are made through the lens of our mission and vision. The idea of equity and access in independent schools is not new, but the idea of providing critical and authentic care to all who walk through our doors may be. Our hope is that this concept takes flight in all independent schools and gives true access to all who want it. n
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