What we learned about admissions from 100+ PA program faculty at PAEA25
Think your admissions process is brutal on faculty and students? You're in good company. We talked with 100+ PA program faculty about their admissions process. Here's what we learned.
Think your admissions process is brutal on faculty and students? You're in good company.
This past October at PAEA 2025, faculty were hot off of a busy admissions season at PA programs cross the country. It was the perfect time to ask program faculty how they felt about their admissions process. So we did. We talked to over a hundred PA program faculty at the Meshwell booth about admissions. And there wasn't any holding back.
We captured this quick 3-minute video summary with everything we learned. This is our executive team on the floor at PAEA25, getting our learnings down in realtime - enjoy!
Here's 3 minutes from our executive team with everything we learned about admissions from over 100 PA programs, standing at PAEA25 Meshwell booth in San Diego. Enjoy!
TL/DR: The universal truth about admissions PA programs is that it's painful.
- Filtering candidates out of CASPA is anything but fully automatic.
- Transcripts need to be combed over manually. Individual applications need to be hand-graded with rubrics.
- Severity of hand-grading changes with time of day, who the preceding candidate was, and whether the grader got to stop for lunch.
- And forget about ensuring all faculty are grading the same way.
- Interviews only go to a small subset of the original applicants because faculty time is limited.
- Documenting results from interviews is a headache.
- And forget about making sure all of the faculty are grading candidates consistently.
- And that's just the short list.
For faculty, the current admissions workflow is just the last straw on top of busy teaching, clinical, and administrative responsibilities. Not to mention everything else that happens outside of work.
Whew! That was a lot. Work-life balance anybody?
—Meshwell Staff
