Kevin Mathes is the Vice President of Enrollment Management and Dean of Admissions at Bucknell University. It's a full circle moment — Bucknell is his alma mater, where he started as a first-year tour guide before spending nearly two decades working his way back to lead the whole operation. Under his leadership, Bucknell has achieved five consecutive years of record enrollment, including the largest incoming class in university history (1,040 students).
But what Kevin is fired up about right now is the plumbing underneath the admissions process that nobody talks about.
In this episode, Emily and Kevin dig into the most overlooked infrastructure problem in college admissions: the high school transcript. No two transcripts look alike. No two schools format courses the same way. No two readers process one identically. And AI, while promising, has yet to fully solve the standardization and mapping challenge at the heart of it all. Kevin shares his vision for a centralized repository of high school data.
They also get into:
- The real cost of human inconsistency in transcript review and why two readers can come to completely different conclusions on the same document
- Kevin's hands-on experience testing AI transcript processing tools, and his candid take on where the technology is genuinely useful
- Why financial aid and admissions need to be treated as one integrated process, not two separate conversations
- Bucknell's test-optional policy, now extended through 2027, and the unexpected data showing non-submitters engaging at higher rates in academic and residential life
- What it really felt like to return as Dean to a place where half the staff knew you as a student worker
And Emily tells the most chaotic story of her college career, which involves a perfect AP score, a dark lecture hall, a runaway slide projector, and a professor who eventually apologized.
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