Count the spelling errors in the college admissions piece. Sorry, rejected.

ice

College admissions officers are ruining America.

Reading this, I'm really not surprised by what these admissions officers are revealing. I know the only reason I was accepted into a "Private University in Western Massachussetts" was because the school was notorious for being 'lily white' and they needed a few 'ethnic students' to shrug off their reputation. I got wise to this and left the school 2 years later. A year after that, my cousin finds a photo of me in the school's catalog talking about diversity. They spelled my name wrong and said I was from Rio DeJaniero! I wasn't born anywhere near there!

This is yet another fairly shallow treatment of the college admission process. I have worked in college admissions for 20 years, the last eight at a highly selective liberal arts college. While your anecdotes from the 20-something "green deans" offer quasi-shocking quips about the vicissitudes of evaluating applicants, the reality is more subtle. Experienced admissions officers (the majority in most offices) bring all sorts of biases to the committee table, readily admit to them, and leave them out of the evaluation process, or find them counter-balanced in committee by others' reaction to an applicant. Jager-Hyman tells half the story: admitting by committee is largely successful because natural biases are built into the conversation between admissions officers and treated as such. My experience was that the committee worked because we had competing biases that played off each other and forced more meaningful discussions. The whole process is not perfect but it's more thoughtful and is done with more integrity than shock articles imply. There's plenty to criticize about the way highly selective colleges admit students (legacies, athletes), but your everyday admissions officer looks for smart, authentic, lively minds to fill up their entering classes, whether we agree with their politics, faith traditions or priorities. Of course, that would make for a pretty boring article.

College was such a welcome relief from high school which didn't foster thinking but put a high premium on receiving information without thought and then regurgitating it like a poodle jumping through a hoop. I found that questioning the point of our curriculum - that it might be purely class based, a way to separate the haves from the have-nots - was decidedly not welcomed, to say less of encouraged. But what exactly is it that you *have* anyway, and is it really something so worth having? is a nice car ***really*** the point of life? My high school culture in affluent Palo Alto seemed to think it was. So apparently does East Palo Alto -- worlds apart where the means to get it involve nitty grittier methods more apparent in their degradation of drugs and violence/murder (see Stanley Crouch's blog today on Oakland) rather than the "go with the program" indifference of white collar corporate America (see the plane scene on fight club where an executive guiltily and blas�ly informs Edward Norton of the cost benefit analysis of selling unsafe cars) which can have the same devastating results. Cars being an unintentional unifying metaphor here... where exactly is it that we are going? I'm frankly appalled at much of college culture even while I hold out hope that "the best and brightest" are receiving some kind of thoughtful education on critical thinking. The fundamental baseline seems to be following the crowd and pushing to the front. Not so smart if it leads off a cliff. Our youngsters of today are processing a whole lot of information but we're having trouble synthesizing so much information to a cognitive coherent structure. Is college helping with this? A professor I met who teaches at an elite Ivy league had nothing but contempt for his students and their materialistic grasping even as he selectively chose his "favorites" to help on their self-serving career paths. He taught journalism. People, when you struggle so hard to get into an exceptional college -- look at what you're getting in to! That's the point of an education in it's truer form. Or that nice car you're getting into may be heading somewhere you **don't** want to go - towards a midlife crisis where you won't be very happy or fufilled at all. That may seem a long way off, but life comes quick.

Why is it that slacker journalists are always attracted to anonymous slacker sources? This reminds me of the now-classic piece on the Gloucester High School "pregnancy pact." Another argument for avoiding Columbia's J-School.

"One year I had a student with a near-perfect SAT score and straight A's. I'd originally put him in the submitted [sic...do we mean "admitted?"] pile, but then we had to reduce the list. I reread his essays and frankly, they were just a little more boring than the other kids. So I cut him. Boring was the only justification that I needed and he was out.

I got sluggish in the afternoon after lunch, so maybe I wasn't as scrupulous about a candidate as I would have been if I were fresh. Or even if my favorite sports team was in a slump, it affected who made the cut. If the [Pittsburgh] Steelers lost a game and I read your file the next morning, chances were you weren't getting in. Where I could have been nice, I just didn't go out of my way - I was a lot less charitable. Those are things that you, the applicant, have no control over. Which makes it all the more funny - the frenzy that parents and students work themselves into around getting in."

As a recent high school grad ('07), this pisses me off. If I had known admissions were so arbitrary, I would've relaxed, and applied to more schools. I'm happy where I am, but Middlebury's cool, and I'm not from the coast...

Kathleen:

Great piece. As an alumnus of an Ivy-League business school program, I can attest to the fact that admissions have a huge element of randomness to them. The lesson is: (i) recalibrate your and your child's expectations; (ii) apply to at least 10-15 schools; and (iii) consider public universities, esp. if you don't aspire to get into investment banking or management consulting right out of college. Smart Money magazine (Jan. edition) had a great article on best values in public colleges. Go to a great public school (Georgia Tech, Univ of Cal. schools) for undergraduate, work 4-5 years in a good job, and then go back to an Ivy-League business or law school.

As a parent of a recent HS grad, I can tell you that there is no more neurotic pursuit than trying to get your little darling into a good school. It's not the kids. It's the parent-to-parent peer pressure lunacy, especially in any affluent area, where college admission is regarded as the culmination, the pass-fail of everything decision a parent has made since their children walked upright. Then there's the SAT prep/college counselor cottage industry that preys on parental insecurities (not to mention fishing thousands of dollars out of your pockets). It's a lot of horseshit.

As best as I can tell from the dozens of parents I've spoken with who have gone through this process, their kids, by and large, got into the colleges that really fit them and were really happy. The ones who were miserable where the ones that were overly packaged, overly prepped and stressed--especially those rare kids who got into an Ivy, but had no real reason to be there.

It's a dating game. Arbitrary as the process is, the colleges just instinctively know who will fit into the mix, and they do even highly qualified kids a big favor when they reject them from colleges that look great on paper, but are not the right fit. You can sense that if you've ever visited a campus with your child. They know in a nanosecond whether or not they belong there. So do the admissions officers.

Now if we can only get the parents to chill...

Thirty-two years after graduating from the University of California, I still regret not playing the "legacy card" (my dad went to Harvard)... I mean, NOW I realize that ALL universities are equally hard (or easy) academically... what really matters is the NAME of the place you graduate from! As for admissions officers: hey, this is reality, kids! The rest of your life, having a "juice card", being "part of the car" and having "connections" will determine where you work, and whether or not you'll be successful. Or, as my boss Howard once said, "Life ain't fair... get over it!".

omg. i went to college in 2001 and after reading this i can't believe i got into tulane. i don't think i would again if all things were the same -- just 8 years later.

What a bunch of slack-ass losers. No wonder as a country we're floating at the top of the bowl.

Hilarious

This doesn't surprise me one bit, but it still makes me angry. This fuckery starts in PRESCHOOL, by the way. Parents trying to stack the deck for their two year olds.

However, I try to remember that personality is as big a predictor of success as a "name" school is. A really likable person with great people skills can go pretty far. Skills and pedigree don't always matter.

But a "name" school and connections never hurt, either.

Wow, I never went to college. But my observation in general about people. I remember once having to have surgery. It was to take place on a Monday. I remember telling my doctor to make sure he gets plenty of rest and not to drink to much because on Monday morning I didn't want to see a grumpy doctor. I remember taking a drivers test and my instructor said make sure you to go on Monday after the weekend because the guy that was going to give you the driving test might not be in a good mood. So I went on a Wed. at 8:30 in the morning. He was in a good mood and already had his first cup of coffee. I passed. But I can see how these people would act that way. I know some of this really doesn't mean anything but it does relate to how people are in the long run.

The reality for many schools is that no one actually looks at anything other than SAT/ACT scores and high school GPAs. They need enrollments to pay their bills. I love to listen to parents brag about their kids who are going to tiny schools with tiny, limited faculty or privates with no grad programs. Welcome to 13th grade!

Reading this is nauseating. And explains a lot about why our college grads fail to compete outside of the U.S. Already decided to send my kids to Europe for college, just for the chance to at least work with other students who are serious.

No surprises here. However, I did note that all the article's sources were from private universities. There are excellent state universities all over the country, schools which provide quality programs to a far more diverse student population than most small, exclusive liberal arts universities or private colleges. These institutions have a much larger admission percentage, better tuition rates, and are frequently nationally recognized for their academic programs. In point of fact, some of the most prestigious schools in my state are public universities.

My college years (7 of them) were an unending practice of memorization and regurgitation. Colleges are a racket (ever been to a University bookstore!) and soon will be looking for their own bail-outs. Tuitions have skyrocketed and I think we will get to a point where schools will have new standards - students who can pay or qualify for loans.
I wish I would have gotten real world experience, grown as a person, and gotten my own values so that I could truly have 'experienced' college (which I will be still paying off in 20 years). By the way, I hate my job.

I used to work in admissions at a big state school in Florida years ago. There was an "unofficial quota" on kids from New York and New Jersey because there were so many applicants from that area and the school did not want to be unbalanced with too many kids from one region. I always felt sorry for applicants who were more than qualified to attend this school and were rejected. They probably never realized it was because of their street address.

If the events the admissions officers are describing are accurate and occur regularly, then some of the administrators providing anecdotes and still employed as such ought to be disciplined or fired. Whether they like it or not, they have a responsibility not only to their employers to make decisions based on merit--not whimsical reasons such as the outcome of a football game--but also the applicants.
These officers are making decisions that will affect the directions of kids' lives. College is a business, and therefore the officers should respect the willingness of students to invest potentially more than a hundred thousand dollars into school, oftentimes incurring massive debt. A student may be relying on a school's resources to help form the professional connections that will give him or her a boost when entering the labor force. They shouldn't lose that chance because an admissions officer is in a bad mood.
It's disheartening to hear about how the gateway at multiple and presumably prestigious educational institutions are treating their admissions process with the same gravity to how one might provide entrance to a social club.

So, what you're saying here is "college admissions officers are capricious douchebags, who totally abuse their power", am I right?

It's time to go to a system where college admissions are solely based on high school GPA plus SAT score - highest grades plus highest scores wins, and that's it!

Academically serious schools should encourage and allow professors to have greater input into admissions.

Already 35 years ago a music professor at Yale told me about doing "bun time" on the admissions committee. The "professional" admissions officers stacked the committee, always made sure they had the professors' input first, then made the votes come out close but still never let the professors have their way when a academically worthy candidate didn't serve some other agenda. Today, at the university where I teach, so far as I know, professors have
no input at admissions at all - no one bothers even to maintain the pretense.

Professors crave working with mature, intellectually serious students, and professors alone have background to recognize the profile of such when they apply. A professor of creative writing can spot poetry that evinces originality and craft. A professor of science can distinguish the student ready to do real research while still an undergraduate from the mere resume builder.

The good news is that arbitrary admissions practices scatter talent to schools with diverse profiles. A very bright student,
if otherwise untroubled, quickly becomes a star at any second-tier school, gets a great deal of attention and ultimately has access to the best graduate schools anyway.

I can attest to the widespread discrimination against the best and brightest girls of my state and melanin-deficient race; I only made it into my Seven Sisters safety, while my younger sister was rejected from every college she applied to and had to leave the country to attend university. Not that we're bitter!

Also, some of my classmates' parents were so desperate to secure a top place that they would send their young to spend their high-school days living with relatives in other states, in order to squeak in under regional quotas and/or pay lower in-state tuition at a "public Ivy."

One of the most unfair stories regarding college admissions happened at a local college. This "prestigious" art school was afraid of truly creative people. They went trolling for academic black sheep from rich families, and admitted a bunch of them. In addition, they were giving scholarships to some of these people, and not giving scholarships to people who were truly needy. It came out much later that certain people in the Financial Aid department were embezzling funds!! That's where the money for the poor went. I was told by a wealthy friend of mine that giving scholarships to the rich ensures endowment money later on. Let's hope there is a higher court, when it comes to these pigs in admissions and financial aid. This was many years ago, I wonder if they are audited now. But then again they would probably use the same auditing firms that Wall Street uses. Ah, it's funny how everything always boils down to economics: the vying for scarce resources.