After more than a year with the position empty, Lafayette has filled the vacancy at the top of the admissions hierarchy. On July 3, Krista Evans officially joined Lafayette as the new dean of admissions.
Her addition to the admissions office comes just over one year after Matt Hyde, the previous dean of admissions, left the college in May 2022. Throughout the past academic year, Kathleen Williams took over review of first-year applications as the interim dean of admissions.
“[I’m] very excited about the search that brought [Krista] here and the amount of participation we had from faculty, staff and students in finding Krista,” college Pr esident Nicole Hurd said. “She comes with a lot of really great experience and we already hit the ground running.”
Evans arrived at Lafayette after tenures at Kutztown and Lehigh Universities. At Lehigh, she designed a new admissions rubric in 2018, while also serving as a member of the senior leadership team. When she moved to Kutztown, Evans worked as the director of admissions and recently oversaw more than 80 staff members from a variety of fields as vice president of enrollment and student affairs.
Evans stressed that she is willing to help out all aspects of the Lafayette community, while ultimately striving to craft the best possible class of 2028.
“I think my main goal first and foremost is to understand the community. I’ve been incredibly impressed by the community in my very short interactions with the staff and various representatives around campus,” Evans said. “I was most impressed by how dedicated [admissions employees] are in staying connected to the students.”
Evans also values what she views as the holistic admissions practice of Lafayette, which is something that led her to take this position.
“Holistic admissions allows you to build a community and find different skills, values [and] varying backgrounds to bring them together to create a vibrant space,” Evans added.
From a geographical standpoint, Lafayette has become increasingly competitive over the past five years. While high school SAT scores, GPA averages and the school’s acceptance rate have hovered around the same mark, representation from all over the country has increased.
“I think there are a lot of communities across the country that would find Lafayette to be comparable, or to be similar in some ways to the area that they’re from,” Evans said. “I think by identifying other cities across the country that students could draw similarities to, we could find lots of pockets of students from the country that would find Lafayette and Easton specifically to be a really amazing place.”
Finding these communities will require analyzing data with the staff of the admissions office, which Evans is looking forward to.
“I’m excited to dig into the data to find areas of new markets. Of course, we’ll always have the primary markets of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, but we’re looking for growth in locations and eventually visiting these cities and towns. These are conversations I’ll have with the staff,” Evans said.
The changes in admissions also come as an increasingly diverse class of 2027 begins its four-year journey on College Hill. According to an email from Hurd in May, 25 percent of students in the class of 2027 are domestic students of color, and Lafayette saw a record number of students enroll from the South and Southwest regions of the country.
As recruitment efforts ramp up for the class of 2028, Evans aims to expand the demographic admissions of Lafayette students.
“I don’t know where [the students] are, but we’re gonna be looking for them all across the globe,” Evans said.
