News · Aug 6, 2026
Inside the Admissions Office
Four admissions offices described their own process on the record this month. Taken together, they contradict the thing most applicants are afraid of.
Most people writing materials this month are working under an assumption they have never tested: that admissions is fundamentally a filter. That somewhere there is a cutoff, that a 705 and a 715 land on opposite sides of it, and that everything else is a tiebreaker.
Over the past month, admissions leaders at Duke Fuqua, London Business School, Imperial and NYU Stern described on the record how their offices actually work. What they described is not a filter. It is a slow, redundant, human review — and several of the numbers are more encouraging than applicants assume.
Your application is read for longer than you think
Fuqua's admissions dean, who has held the role since 2006, described the process in unusual detail: a first read of 45 to 60 minutes per application, then, after committee discussion, a second read of 30 to 45 minutes. Her summary of it — no single element decides the outcome.
Sit with that arithmetic. It is well over an hour of a trained reader's attention on one file, twice, by different people. An office that wanted to filter on scores would not spend it.
London Business School described the same redundancy from another angle: every application is read by at least two admissions officers, and interviewers are required to complete a full feedback form rather than deliver a summary judgment.
This runs opposite to how most people allocate their remaining weeks. If your file will be read for an hour by someone trained to read it, the marginal return on raising a score ten points is small, and the marginal return on making your materials coherent is large. The reader already has the time. What they need is something to find.
The interview is a verification round, not an elimination round
This is the number that stood out most.
Fuqua invites one-half to two-thirds of applicants to interview. Imperial interviews roughly 50%.
Those rates sit far above what applicants generally assume, and they change what the interview means. At a school interviewing two-thirds of its pool, the interview cannot be the primary cut — that happened during the reading. The interview is where the office confirms that the person on the page is the person on the call.
The format details point the same way. Fuqua's run about 45 minutes, conducted by current students or alumni, and — worth noting — student and alumni interviews carry equal weight. They are conversational, and candidates are advised to have a two-to-three-minute version of "tell me about yourself" ready to open with. Imperial's are held online, run by alumni or the admissions team, and are explicitly two-way; expect to be pressed on your CV and on why that school specifically.
None of that describes an interrogation. It describes a conversation designed to check consistency.
They are actively recruiting international students
In a year when new F-1 visas issued fell about 36%, it would be reasonable to assume admissions offices had quietly stepped back from international recruitment. They said the opposite, on the record.
London Business School's head of admissions put it directly: "The vast majority of our students are international," adding that the school always keeps in mind how important international class diversity is to it.
Fuqua's international share runs about 40% of each class, and its admissions dean recommends that international applicants apply in the earlier rounds — for visa processing and relocation time, not because later rounds are weaker. That advice carries a hard date this cycle: Fuqua's Early Action deadline is September 2, the earliest in the field, and the school has eliminated its April fourth round.
What they say they want in the writing
The consistent theme across all four interviews was not sophistication. It was recognizability.
On "25 Random Things" — the 750-word list Fuqua has kept through every redesign around it — the strongest submissions are described as the ones that feel genuine. London Business School called essays a chance to "add colour and stories," which is a low bar to clear if you have something real to say and an impossible one if you are performing.
Fuqua's official line on AI draws the boundary cleanly: AI can help polish your writing, but it cannot replicate your personal experience. Read that literally in both directions. It is not a prohibition on the tool — it is a statement about what the tool cannot supply, and therefore about what that hour of reading is looking for.
One thing that did change
Stern used its interview to flag something applicants can act on immediately: a new MBA AI specialization launching this fall, built on original coursework including an agentic AI course the school says is the first at any business school. Applicants, it advised, should understand how deeply AI is now embedded in the program.
The transferable point is not about Stern. Programs are changing faster than the source material most applicants work from. A Why School paragraph built on last cycle's website now competes against schools that have rewritten their curricula — and against readers who know exactly what changed.
What to do with this
Reallocate the weeks you have left. An hour of reading per file, twice over, means clarity compounds and small score differences do not. If you are choosing between a retake and a rewrite in August, the offices have answered that for you.
Prepare the opening two minutes. Both schools that described their interview format open the same way, and a rehearsed but natural self-introduction is the piece most applicants improvise.
Read the interview rate correctly. Where half or more of the pool is invited, an invitation is not yet evidence you are a front-runner, and not receiving one before your peers do is not yet evidence of anything.
Apply early if you are international. This is the one piece of advice the offices gave unprompted, and the reasoning is logistical rather than competitive.
The picture these interviews paint is of offices that are slower, more human and more interested in international applicants than the process is usually assumed to be. That does not make admission easy. It does mean the thing being evaluated is much closer to the thing you would want evaluated.
Current as of August 6, 2026. Interview rates and process details are as described by each school's admissions leadership and may vary by cycle.
Sources: Clear Admit Admissions Director Q&A series — Duke Fuqua, London Business School, Imperial College Business School, NYU Stern; Duke Fuqua and NYU Stern admissions pages.