Embracing Holistic Admissions: Engaging Your Programs for Success

At Illinois, we proudly serve over 20,000 enrolled graduate students across 300 diverse degree programs, with nearly 50,000 applications processed each year. Our admissions and enrollment team operates in a decentralized culture, making the task of aligning all graduate departments around holistic admissions initially seem daunting. We began by launching a straightforward holistic admissions resource portal, thinking our job was done. However, over the past few years, we’ve adopted a much more hands-on approach.

In this session, we will share the strategies we employed to secure buy-in from graduate departments and faculty for holistic admissions practices. We’ll also explore how this comprehensive approach has been essential in adapting to our evolving student demographics. Over the last decade, our online graduate student population has surged from 800 to over 8,000, bringing with it new expectations, diverse pathways, and non-traditional backgrounds. This growth has prompted us to reevaluate our admissions and student policies, enabling us to successfully implement holistic admissions across all graduate programs. Join us to learn how these changes have transformed our approach to enrollment management.