Five sources included in this article requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation. Many former employees expressed concern about speaking on experiences in the admissions and financial aid office because of ties between Stanford’s office and the broader admissions community.
The Daily also used gender-neutral descriptors and withheld specific dates and other information, instead using general timeframes and descriptions, to protect sources’ identities. Pseudonyms were used to improve readability.
When Pat first started working at the Stanford Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid, they were passionate about the work. After working in the admissions field for several years prior, they were excited to join Stanford’s team and hone their skills, expanding their role within the office.
Less than three years later, Pat left Stanford University to work in admissions at a peer institution.
Pat, who requested anonymity due to fears of professional retaliation, said that optimism was met with the harsh reality of the admissions office: low pay, overwork, insufficient growth opportunities and limited pay raises and promotions. They said the office’s culture encourages employees to “move out to move up.” The only way to improve their conditions, they said, was to leave.
The Daily spoke to 10 former Stanford admissions officers and financial aid counselors who worked in various positions from 2009 to 2022. Today, only 13 of the 29 admissions officers who were employed in August 2021 remain at Stanford. Of the 16 employees who left since August 2021, the average tenure was under three years.
All of the former employees The Daily spoke to named low pay as a major factor for turnover and their own personal separation from the office.
“I remember when I first started my job, telling them, ‘I want to grow here.’ I wanted to be there for five to eight years and move up,” Pat said. “It felt possible based on what they told me. And then after a year and a half, I was like, wait, this is not the place that I can grow.”
Salary stagnation
In the college admissions industry, officers often report being underpaid for their labor, according to former and current employees of the Stanford admissions office and peer institutions. According to former admissions officers and financial aid counselors, that financial burden is felt more acutely at Stanford because of the Bay Area’s high cost of living.
In a recent job posting from Stanford’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, which is no longer available online, the listed estimated pay range for an admissions counselor is roughly $66,560 to $77,000 per year. Santa Clara County defines anyone making less than $96,000 per year as low-income and anyone making less than $62,450 as very low-income.
Former admissions officers and financial aid counselors said that pay raises are infrequent. According to former Stanford Financial Aid employee Sam Krow-Lucal, many employees are “low-balled,” receiving offers for lower salaries than expected upon hire.
When Krow-Lucal left his position as a financial aid counselor and loan coordinator at San Jose State University (SJSU) in 2015 to be a loan coordinator in the Stanford Financial Aid office, he was looking forward to a pay increase and the prestige of working for Stanford.
His annual salary offer was $56,000, roughly $2,500 higher than his previous salary at SJSU, where he said he served in a similar, more extensive role, managing student financial aid packages, scholarships and loans. Despite Krow-Lucal’s previous experience in financial aid work, his new Stanford salary was only $100 higher than the minimum salary range set by Stanford for his position at the time.
When Krow-Lucal told a human resources employee that he expected the salary offer to be higher, given the posted range, he said they told him he should have stayed at a public university if he expected a higher salary.
At the time, Krow-Lucal was not in a financial position to decline more income, and accepted. Though Krow-Lucal was surprised by the negotiation procedures, he was informed upon hire that he’d be eligible for salary increases within six months, he said.
However, Krow-Lucal and former employees said that the norms guiding performance evaluations made by supervisors prevent employees from receiving salary increases.
Salaries are predetermined across the University by human resources, and individual departments cannot set their own salaries. The University uses employee evaluations to determine annual pay increases: Employees who score higher on their evaluations receive a higher percentage increase, while employees who score lower receive lower annual increases.
Former employees reported believing that supervisors intentionally gave employees lower evaluations to avoid increasing their salaries substantially.
Former employees expressed frustration with the evaluation system, saying that it felt less important to do a good job at one’s position, as the evaluation process seemed to be rooted in tenure rather than performance. Former employees also said that the rankings they received from supervisors were often the lowest possible that did not put them on an improvement plan, a formal process designed to help employees improve their performance with specific action steps.
Chris, a former employee of the admissions office who requested anonymity due to fears of professional retaliation, said that their first performance evaluation was seventeen pages long and “unnecessarily negative.”
According to Chris, they later discovered that this was a ploy to get them fired. “Not because I did anything wrong,” they said, “but to get me out of the way so they could hire their own person.”
Most employees did not stay in the office long enough to see an “exceeds expectations” on their evaluations and the subsequent pay raise that comes with this ranking, former employees said.
Move out to move up
Former employees claim that Stanford does not prioritize retaining its staff, citing a widely known slogan in the admissions and financial aid office: “Move out to move up.”
In the year and a half that Krow-Lucal was at the Financial Aid office, “none of the counselors who were there when [he] started was there when [he] left.”
The phrase refers to the tendency of many employees who begin in the undergraduate admissions and financial aid office to move to other departments on campus, leveraging their internal candidate status, which gives them priority over external applicants.
“The open secret was that people came into financial aid to get a foot in the door, not to actually work there,” Krow-Lucal said. “There was a pipeline from financial aid to the student services center for a while, just because they could pay more.”
Krow-Lucal shared that his annual salary increased almost two-fold — from $56,500 to $94,000 per year — when he left the Financial Aid Office for the student financial services in 2016.
Additionally, many admissions officers leave Stanford for peer institutions and college counseling firms. After gaining experience at Stanford, the employees can attain higher salaries and positions elsewhere using the University’s prestige.
Many former employees criticized the “move out to move up” ideology. Upon hire, former employees felt that Stanford made it seem like opportunities for upward movement were available and that the University planned on retaining them. But after working at the University, that feeling changed.
“One of the first things I heard…was that Stanford was a great place to leave,” said Jordan, a former admissions officer who requested anonymity due fears of professional retaliation, referencing poor pay and overwork concerns.
Once the former employees The Daily spoke with started working in other jobs, they realized how unusual the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid performance evaluation system was.
Krow-Lucal shared that at his first performance evaluation at the Student Services Center, his boss said he had exceeded their expectations, which would be reflected in his performance review, starkly different from the evaluations in the Financial Aid Office which tended to be based on tenure length.
Peyton, a former admissions officer who requested anonymity due to fears of professional retaliation, said that now that they have worked at other companies, they understand what a successful performance evaluation system should look like “for an organization that wants to uplift and give equitable salary and pay.”
“When I got this [new] job, within three months, my supervisor had already given me a two-year plan on how to get promoted,” Pat said of their position at the peer institution. “The difference was so palpable. [My new employers] envisioned me in the office, whereas when you go to HR at Stanford, it’s just kind of like, ‘this is just the way it is.’”
Former employees told The Daily that they and others often left the office due to the lack of growth opportunities and an unclear promotion structure.
Due to the structure of the office, former employees said that in order to be promoted and move up in the office, they needed to be “at the right place, at the right time,” according to Pat, saying that the only way to be promoted was if a position above became vacant.
The University declined to answer questions about the promotion process with the Admissions and Financial Aid office.
“HR is there to protect the company”
Because of the admissions office’s low pay and high cost of living in the Bay Area, employees reported that they could not live on their own or start a family. If they wanted to negotiate their salary or ask for assistance, some employees felt that the human resources department within the office wasn’t there to help.
Multiple former employees mentioned that after going to human resources to discuss their salary, they would be told to find a romantic partner or a roommate or drive for DoorDash or UberEats.
Peyton said that despite taking a second job and living with multiple roommates, they still needed to go to human resources to ask for assistance, to no avail.
“I think a lot of it is the appeal and the promise of working in such a prestigious institution, coupled with what may sound like good pay when you’re coming from anywhere else in the country. Then when you get here like, ‘Oh, this is not helpful. I can’t afford to live here on my own,’” said Chris.
“We have to live in a place that’s really expensive and not have people care about our life outside of work,” said Jordan. “That was the biggest issue on top of people [who] did not feel taken care of, they didn’t feel psychologically safe.”
Multiple former employees said that, in their exit interviews with University human resources, they stated they were leaving their positions due to the lack of pay.
In a statement to The Daily, University spokesperson Dee Mostofi wrote, “Stanford’s compensation practices are designed to set pay that is based on qualifications of candidates, internal equity, geographic location where work is performed and ensure that pay is managed in a consistent, equitable manner regardless of funding sources. Typically, staff employees’ base pay is evaluated during an annual review process in coordination with [University] HR.”
The University declined to answer questions regarding how employee exit interviews are used by human resources or changes being implemented after employees said low pay was their reason for leaving.
“HR is there to protect the company … HR’s primary focus isn’t to go to bat for you,” Chris said.
Low morale, high workload
Since employees often leave within a few years of their initial hiring, former employees say a lot of attention is paid to the hiring and onboarding process.
“Morale is down because no one’s staying here for longer than a year and a half. So everyone gets really discouraged because it’s too much,” said Pat. “People are like, what’s the point in trying to work hard? It’s not going to get you promoted.”
High turnover often left employees in the office overworked. When other employees left the office, their work was divided among their former team members, who, according to multiple former employees, would not be compensated for the extra work.
Admissions officers review applications each year from September to April, selecting the new crop of Stanford students. Last year, roughly 30 officers — according to estimations from those listed on the website — reviewed nearly 54,000 applications.
“If a financial aid counselor left, and this happened often because there was such a high turnover, then the other counselors would be required to pick up whatever they were doing and increase their level of productivity,” said Krow-Lucal.
During their time in the office, Peyton said that half of their team left. They added that when employee evaluations came around, higher-ups did not acknowledge the “extra labor that we and many other teams do because more often than not, most of the teams are understaffed.”
Former employees reported that the broader admissions industry has high turnover, but they said it’s worse at Stanford, a fact well-known throughout the field, according to former employees and employees of peer institutions.
“If you don’t have people there for a long period of time, a lot of people are re-learning how to do admissions,” Jordan said.
During application reading seasons in particular, former employees said they were expected to work six or seven days a week.
Former employees added that they felt that they were “disposable” and that their supervisors and leadership in the office “didn’t care” if they remained at the office or not.
“It would’ve been nice to have you guys want me to be here,” said Pat. “You hire people saying it’s a family and that we’re all here for each other but when it comes to ‘hey, we can’t afford things’ or ‘hey, I’m not sure how to get promoted…’ it doesn’t feel like they’re investing in you.”
“Institutions can’t run without their admission offices,” Pat added. “When you’re getting underpaid for really important work that helps keep the institution running, it’s kind of demoralizing.”
This article has been updated to reflect that Krow-Lucal left the admissions office for the student financial services, not the student services center.