Would it be possible to craft an extension that would allow administrators to not only approve applicants, but choose roles for them individually? (drop down box?)
I decided against individual dropdowns for every applicant in favor of one dropdown that assigns the role for all approved applicants. It's easier to code and it saves clicks if you are approving lots of users to different roles at once.
It's an interesting problem, as the Applicants form lacks the necessary delegation hooks. I ended up hacking the select box onto the end of the label text at the top of the form. This works for the default Vanilla theme but would not work for a theme that chose to render this label outside of the actual form.