After enrolling the class of 2019, Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Jennifer Desjarlais stepped down earlier this month to join the executive search firm Witt/Kieffer, where she will focus on higher-education leadership in enrollment management. Desjarlais arrived at Wellesley in 1999 as senior associate director of admission, becoming director in 2001. She was appointed dean in 2004. We sat down with her to take a look back—and ahead—at the admissions picture for Wellesley.

How would you characterize the current position of the College in terms of admissions?

The College is incredibly well positioned in the world of higher education, and known for having the best undergraduate liberal-arts program for women. The visibility of the College is very strong nationally and internationally. One of the things to celebrate, I think, in terms of the applicant pool and the enrolling student group is the diversity of experiences that are represented by our candidates. And I mean not just the diversity in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, which is also considerable, but the geographic diversity, socioeconomic diversity, diversity of thoughts and opinions. So the strength, the quality, the diversity of the students is something to feel very proud of.

Applications have increased dramatically during your tenure. What has contributed to your success?

We’ve been able to be as successful as we have because of the extraordinary investment that the institution has made in financial aid, in making this kind of educational experience accessible and affordable for a wide variety of students from the U.S. and abroad. We are well advantaged by the remarkable faculty we have—all of whom at some point in their time here have done something in support of admission—and the students as well, and our incredible network of alumnae.

Certainly our recruitment efforts have been expansive, getting into communities where we knew that students should be thinking about a place like Wellesley. … And increasingly [we rely] on technology to help us reach students, too. We’ve spent a lot of time on the admission and financial aid side keeping [our web pages] current and interactive and relevant, and trying to present the story of Wellesley that will resonate with a lot of different kinds of students. The most successful way we recruit is by telling the story of Wellesley through the accomplishments of our students and our alumnae.
Why do students choose Wellesley?

The primary reason is the academic reputation of the institution. Wellesley’s mission and identity as a women’s college is not the primary reason for students to choose Wellesley. [But] it becomes a very important aspect of their Wellesley experience. It’s one of the aspects of the College that they have the most interest in learning about.
What challenges face your successor?

The challenges that remain are the challenges that we faced when I first started, just cast in a different way. We are in an environment now, as we were then, where the value of the liberal arts is not broadly understood or embraced by the population at large. It was true when I started [and] it’s true now, that the largest undergraduate major in the United States is business. And there’s a lot of discussion about the costs of attendance, not just of a place like Wellesley, but of college in general, and the return on investment, and the value of investing in this kind of experience. So we have to continue to focus on telling our story in a way that resonates.