Inside Admissions
An e-mail exchange between James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly and Jacques Steinberg, the author of The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College
September 25, 2002
From: James Fallows
To: Jacques Steinberg
Subject: Is it all a numbers' game?

Dear Jacques:
Thanks for joining this discussion, and thanks for producing quite an illuminating book. Indeed, I'll begin by stressing to readers who have not seen The Gatekeepers that it offers a more up-close view of the college-admissions process than they are likely to have had. Before reading your book, I thought I knew a fair amount about this process. I have reported on it for The Atlantic; I have recently watched my own children and their friends go through it ; I have heard discreet tales from my wife, who worked for several years on the admissions team at Georgetown University. And at another magazine, I was once involved in a project purporting to tell the "inside" story of one year in a university's admissions cycle. That other magazine, by the way, figures prominently in your book, because of its annual "Best Colleges" rankings. The rankings, and their effects, are a subject to which we'll return in a later round.

Because I'd already been introduced to the topic, I was all the more surprised by the degree of detail and revelation in your book—starting with the significant achievement of getting so many real people to let you use the real details of their lives, under their real names. Your authorial tone is sympathetic to nearly everyone you present: the students frantically hoping to get into the "right" colleges, often going overboard in the attempt to sell themselves; the parents who sometimes try to keep their children sane in this period, and sometimes only worsen the insanity; the college admissions officers who battle fatigue, personal bias, and an impossible volume of applications in trying to make reasonable decisions about students' futures; and the high school guidance counselors, who play a delicate game of negotiation among the students, the parents, and their long-standing contacts in the college-admissions offices. I got the feeling that you liked all of these people—or, more precisely, that you were not trying to put the shiv into any of them. But despite your own sympathies, a lot of what's in this book is objectively embarrassing or unflattering to many of the subjects. They lose perspective. Some of them lie. I'm not congratulating you for setting people up, because you haven't done that. But this is much more powerful for being real, and congratulations on that. You have a right to tsk-tsk any journalist who relies on the "unnamed sources" crutch.

Let me give readers a quick guide to your overall approach, and then say something about our approach here. To oversimplify, The Gatekeepers tells the story of how Wesleyan College admitted its class of 2004—the students who showed up as college freshmen two years ago. Actually, the book is both broader and narrower than that. It's broader, because you go back in time to talk about some previous students and classes—and forward to tell what happened to the students after they got in. Because the students you're examining were considering other colleges too, you also take us to places other than Wesleyan—Cornell, Stanford, Yale, et cetera. And it's narrower, because you're mainly talking about a dozen or so students, and one main admissions officer—a former lawyer named Ralph Figueroa, who is effectively the protagonist of the book.
Apart from Wesleyan, the book's main venue is the pompously named Harvard-Westlake school in Los Angeles. This is a co-ed, private school whose students mainly come from wealthy Westside-LA families and mainly go to exclusive colleges. (I've interviewed people there, too, and know many people associated with the school.) Choosing a college in the east and a high school in the west was, I think, a wise way to show the national scale of the professional-class focus on college admissions. Neither Wesleyan nor Harvard-Westlake is "representative" of American education in any broad sense. As you well know, and as I'd like to discuss further in the next round, the most striking fact about American higher education is how open and un-selective the entire system is. Only 100 or so, of the 3,000-plus colleges and universities in the country, have even twice as many applicants as they admit. But those 100 or so colleges are tremendously important to the 1,000 to 2,000 high schools aiming students at them, and Wesleyan and Harvard-Westlake well illustrate how admissions-pressure operates in the narrow environment in which it really matters. (Wesleyan gets 7,000-plus applicants for a freshman class of 700-plus, which sounds like a daunting ten-to-one winnowing out. But since most of the people it admits decide to enroll someplace else, Wesleyan has to offer places in its class to more than 1,800 students, or about one in four of those who apply. This is the "yield" game, which we'll go into later.)

My plan today is to mention a few of the findings and impressions in your book that surprised me most. I'd ask you to elaborate on them, for people who haven't read the book—and for people like me who have. In the second round I'd like to ask you about several big-picture questions, from the origins of admissions-mania to the influence of college rankings. Then we'll end with a "News You Can Use" round, drawing out the implications of your research for parents and students with admissions-hell still in front of them.

Here's my quick list of surprise findings, with questions they raised in my mind.

First was the unbelievable labor-intensity of the process. It may be stressful for students to fill out applications to multiple schools, but it sounds as if the real burden is on the admissions officers. The most amazing part of the book, to me, is the two-month period in which Ralph Figueroa apparently did nothing but read students' applications from the time he got up until the time he went to sleep. Later, during meetings when the whole admissions committee voted up or down on specific students, committee members had to restrict their fluid intake—if they left for a bathroom break, they might miss a student's case. The schedule was that tight.

The fundamental problem here, as you point out, is that the number of applications has gone up—partly because of the mini baby boom, and partly because each student is applying to more places. But admissions staffs have barely increased. So my question is: How long can this go on? How can admissions officers stand it? As applications soar, should admissions offices be hiring more staff? Could the universities be using the admissions offices as cash cows—that is, should they raise the application fees (perhaps with some need-based waiver to avoid freezing out poorer applicants)? Does the need to make rapid decisions increase the importance of quick-sorting devices, notably the SAT? In general, how should we think about the question of sheer volume in making admissions choices?

Next: I was struck by the fundamental hydraulics of the system, as you describe it. That is, we have millions of students agonizing for months or years about which school is the right match for them. We also have thousands of admissions officers losing sleep and having long arguments about which students will constitute the right class. But in the end, if you used nothing but the cold numbers (a student's GPA and SAT score on the one hand, and a college's perceived fame and exclusivity on the other), it seems that you'd end up with a pretty close prediction of which students would get into a given college—and which of several colleges a student would choose to attend. For instance, you have an intriguing story about a student who ends up weighing offers from Wesleyan, Yale, and Stanford. The student pretty quickly eliminates one of those candidates but has a harder time choosing between the other two. Based only on the facts I have presented here, most readers will be able to figure out which colleges were the two finalists. (Hint: Stanford and Yale.)

Am I being too callous and determinist about this? The reason I ask is that the process, as you describe it, seems to involve tremendous wasted energy and stress for everyone involved. The students and their parents are so stressed out. The admissions officers are so overworked. And their efforts are in a way so doomed: if a particular student really would be a "catch" for a college, with higher scores or better talents than the college's norm, chances are that the student will also get into a college higher up the selectivity pyramid—and will go there instead. So if we ran things just the way the Japanese do, with one big test for students applying to each unversity (producing one numerical result), and one agreed-on ranking of most-to-least prestigious schools, wouldn't the result be pretty close to the way selective colleges work now in the United States? The highest-scoring students get into the most prestigious schools, and that is where they enroll. I hope you can show that the process is more variegated, nuanced, and humane than it looks.

Also: Your book delves into one well-understood departure from the strict test-and-grades emphasis. This is the quest for racial, ethnic, and geographical diversity. You say less about two other departures: those for athletes and for applicants with connections of various sorts, mainly alumni connections. You mention each of these phenomena, but they're not directly connected to the students you concentrate on, as racial and ethnic issues are. How should we think about these "exceptions" in general? If you had to balance, on one side, "merit" considerations—ranging from academic performance to personal leadership traits—and on the other the need to field a hockey team, placate graduates, or cultivate donors, how should we think about the comparative importance of each of these factors?

A minor but intriguing point: the scandal of the "waiting list." Your book is the first time I've seen discussion in print of a ruse I've often heard about. This involves the misleading nature of the "waiting list." Most students assume that it means they still have some plausible chance for admission. But as you show, colleges put hundreds upon hundreds of applicants on that list, mainly to avoid hurting their feelings, and end up admitting none or only a handful, as needs arise to balance the class. How have colleges kept this secret for so long? How should families think about it?

Now, a final question: Is life even less fair than we generally assume? Your book describes the long-standing personal connections between admissions officers at leading colleges and the guidance counselors at certain high schools. Indeed, your book begins by describing how Ralph Figueroa, of Wesleyan, had befriended a counselor from Harvard-Westlake when both were graduate students. The admissions officers and the counselors they know are constantly in touch—trading tips about students, arguing for the ones they think deserve another chance, giving advance hints about results.

Is this part of what students buy when they go to private high schools? In how many of the nation's high schools would you say these sorts of contacts exist? My faux-populist tone may reflect memories of the public high school I attended, where the guidance counselor doubled as a driver's-ed instructor rather than spending time on the phone with college-admissions officers. Is the relationship you describe between Wesleyan and Harvard-Westlake an exception? Or do many high schools operate this way?

I see that I'm just starting down my list of questions—but also that I've let this get much longer than I intended. So over to you for this first round. Again, thanks for the book.

Jim Fallows
 
 
 
September 25, 2002
 
From: Jacques Steinberg
To: James Fallows
Subject: Re: Is it all a numbers' game?

Dear Jim:

I'm grateful that you gave The Gatekeepers such a close reading and that it prompted so many questions. As you know from reading the book, I was admitted to Dartmouth (under the early-decision program, a favorite target of yours, but it was good for me!) in the fall of 1983, and I always wondered how I got in. I was particularly curious because I knew that my SAT scores were lower than most of my friends' (at least that's what they told me) and that my high school, in a small town in southeastern Massachusetts, was barely on Dartmouth's radar. A life-long curiosity about this secretive process was born.

Your first set of questions concerns when this madness—the ever-growing pile of applications at an ever-growing list of colleges considered highly selective—might end. I can't see any end in sight. Yes, the process is grueling for admissions officers (whose salaries are often lower than the cost of an annual year's tuition) and many burn out after seven years or less. But they can be easily replaced, at least as far as the universities are concerned. Their main qualification appears to be life experience, with the institutional goal being to assemble an admissions committee (and, by extension, a freshman class) with the broadest possible life experience collectively. I don't see the universities using admissions offices as cash cows, at least in part because they spend so much money sending admissions officers all over the country and the world in search of top applicants. But I was surprised at how much effort the universities themselves invest in beating the bushes to try to get a record number of applicants to apply each year, at least in part to impress U.S.News and its selectivity index. Raising the price of applications any more might depress these numbers, which, as of now, a college acting unilaterally can't really afford to do.

Watching this process, one can't help but wish that several dozen highly selective colleges would sign some sort of mutual non-aggression pact and all agree to stay home in the fall of, say, 2006. But in response to such a proposal, the colleges would say, rightly, that there are good candidates who might never apply to a particular institution (one where they might end up fitting quite nicely) without having met an emissary from that institution on the road.

You also raise the question of "cold numbers," a student's GPA and SAT score among them. I think that what surprised me most, after spending a large chunk of 1999-2000 in the Wesleyan admissions office as an observer, was how often such numbers were set aside when the right applicant was on the table. There was a quotation that I reproduced in the book from Douglas Bennet, the president of Wesleyan, in which he said, "It's a mistake to hold out that total fairness is the only objective." Wesleyan and many other institutions believe that an SAT score is not the ultimate barometer of merit—and must be considered in the context of everything else in an applicant's life. While numbers often decide a case, they don't always. It's a messy, idiosyncratic process carried out by humans, not computers. And I don't agree with you that these admissions officers are mostly spinning their wheels, and that an outsider could probably predict at the beginning of the season who is going to end up where. There are too few spots in the Ivies, as well as at Amherst and Williams, and at Wesleyan and Tufts. In my limited experience, there are few sure things in college admissions.

It's important for applicants and their parents to keep in mind that Wesleyan, like other highly selective colleges, is trying to build a community. Admissions officers are talent scouts, but they're also social engineers. That community certainly needs "brains"—students who score off the charts on standardized tests and who are capable of doing original scientific research. But that community also needs newspaper editors and tuba players (a perennial shortage area in the Ivies, I'm told) and second basemen, as well as a critical mass of blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. In such cases, numbers aren't always going to be as important as other factors. You observe that I don't spend much time writing about athletes and legacies. In part, that's because there were only so many students I could follow before losing the reader's attention. But I would also argue that after watching Wesleyan adjust the bar of expectation in terms of the grade-point average of one of the applicants I trail—a Native American applicant in whom Wesleyan was particularly interested, in part because of his ethnic background—it's easy to imagine how a quarterback with similar grades might be assessed. And I would argue that one can't criticize the arguably lower standard against which a minority candidate might be judged (especially one whose parents had not attended college, who would be coded as "NCP," or "non-college parent," in admissions lingo) without also looking at the standards against which other applicants with specialized talents are held.

Legacies are a relevant part of this thread of our discussion, too. While the rate of admission in general for the Class of 2004, the class that I followed at Wesleyan, was about 1 in 4, the rate of admission for legacies (applicants who were the children or siblings of alumni or university employees) was about 1 in 2. (This was the same ratio, by the way, at which Hispanic applicants were admitted.) Wesleyan, which has been admitting black applicants in large numbers for longer than most highly selective colleges, likes to say that its alumni body is diverse, and thus taking legacies helps guarantee a diverse class. Perhaps. But the university, like its competitors, acknowledges that it sometimes accepts a legacy as a thank-you for a family's generosity in the past, or as a marker for a future donation. To stretch Wesleyan's "community" metaphor, every community needs philanthropists. In the end, there are just too many components that Wesleyan needs to pay attention to in stocking its community to consider these cases exceptions. Again, this is so much messier than the "how-to-get-in" books will tell you. You really have to see it, as I was privileged to do, to understand it. And that's the experience I tried to convey through the book.

I'll close this round by trying to briefly tackle your questions about the waiting list and guidance counselors. You rightly point out that, for the Class of 2004, Wesleyan invited more than a thousand applicants to join the waiting list, about half of whom did so. Considering that only a handful of those applicants were subsequently admitted into the Class of 2004 the year I was there, applicants would be correct to assume that Wesleyan assembles such a list primarily to keep its own options open, not the applicants'. Certainly one reason Wesleyan put so many kids on the waiting list was to allow guidance counselors to save face with parents and their high school communities. Somehow "waiting list" has less of a sting than "deny." But the larger reason was that, in stocking their community, Wesleyan needed reserves, in case a prized quarterback or applicant from
Nebraska (geographic diversity is important, too) chose to go elsewhere and needed to be "replaced" in the community. Not every college does its waiting list this way, but I know that Wesleyan is hardly the exception, despite what some colleges might say publicly (which may explain why you or I hadn't heard much about this previously).

As for guidance counselors, there is no question that when you pay a premium to attend a school like Harvard-Westlake, one of the things you're buying is superior college counseling. The ratio of seniors to counselors might be 50 to 1, as compared to a large NYC high school, where the ratio might be 500 or more to 1. At a place like Harvard-Westlake, you're also buying that counselor's connections to admissions offices at the best colleges in the country. And that counselor will have opportunities to educate an admissions officer about the various qualities of the applicants in his or her stable—opportunities that might not be afforded to a less savvy or less valued counselor at a school with less prestige. But while there are no quotas for the number of applicants that Wesleyan might accept from a school like Harvard-Westlake or Stuyvesant in New York, there is, in truth, only going to be room for so many students from these schools. And in building that all-important community, an admissions officer like Ralph Figueroa—the main character in The Gatekeepers—would be eager to take a phone call from a guidance counselor at a top inner-city high school, where a bumper crop of top minority applicants might be being raised, if only that counselor had the time or inclination to pick up the phone and make such a call.

Back to you.
 
 
October 4, 2002
 
From: James Fallows
To: Jacques Steinberg
Subject: Is it all a numbers' game? - Part Two

Dear Jacques:

Thanks for your answers. This time I'd like to ask your opinion on three big policy questions. You don't address any of them directly in your book, but they are important background factors for the decisions and dramas you describe. As you answer them, I'd like to invite you to step out of the omniscient narrator role you play in the book, and also away from the classic reportorial function you normally fulfill at The Times. You've spent several years learning and thinking about the process of college admissions, and you have standing to tell us your conclusions and recommendations on these questions.

First: the mania for elite college admission in itself. Through most of the book, you simply assume the existence of this drive as a fact of nature, as a romance novelist can assume the existence of young men's drive toward young women. For the purposes of the book, that's a reasonable working assumption. Everyone knows that ambitious students want to get into colleges like Wesleyan; you're giving us an inside view of that process.

Still, when you view the process from even the slightest distance, it is quite a strange specimen of collective self-delusion. More precisely, it is an example of a collective decision to assign certain goods a much higher value than they're demonstrably worth. In Japan, parents pray that their children will get into the University of Tokyo—and well they should. Certain positions in society simply are reserved for "Todai" graduates. The same is true, with varying degrees of intensity, in many other advanced societies. A degree from one of the grandes écoles is a significant career advantage in France; Seoul National University really matters in Korea; and so on.

Americans think our system of elite colleges is similar, but it's not. The exception proving the rule is the service academies: if you are hoping for a military career, going to Annapolis or West Point is much more important than any college is for civilian life. Obviously it sounds better if you can tell someone you went to a selective college, and the studies I'm aware of suggest that in the search for a first job, the selectivity (and therefore prestige) of your college makes a difference. But in the long run, there's little correlation between the lists of people who are rich, influential, creative, or celebrated in America and the list of colleges that are hardest to get into.

The way you address this issue in your book actually underscores the oddity of today's American obsession. You quote a passage from Nick Lemann's book about the SAT, The Big Test—and since that book started as an Atlantic Monthly project, there's a sense of completeness in quoting it here. Nick wrote:
Here is what American society looks like today. A thick line runs through the country, with people who have been to college on one side of it and people who haven't on the other. This line gets brighter all the time. Whether a person is on one side of the line or the other is now more indicative of income, of attitudes, and of political behavior than any other line one might draw: region, race, age, religion, sex, class.
 
All the evidence I'm aware of supports what Nick says here. A degree from a college is the passport to economic and social advancement in America. But which college the degree comes from makes much less measurable difference. The whole process you describe in your book turns on the idea that getting into Wesleyan—versus more-selective Yale on the one hand, or less-selective U Conn on the other, just to use examples all in the same state—is a very consequential event. And, yes, when it comes to the teachers you have and the friends you meet and the traits that necessarily make each school unique, the decision does matter. But not in any measurable way that would explain why elite colleges have become such powerful "aspirational goods."

You've been immersed in this part of society, so you can tell us: Why, in the deepest sense, has college admission become the terrain on which educated Americans choose to run their status competition? In this market-minded society, everything usually ends up being exposed to a bottom-line economic test. Bubbles are deflated, but the elite-college bubble continues to inflate. (To be clear, it's not the cost of actually going to the colleges that's out of line. All private colleges cost more or less the same. It's the focus on getting into Yale, versus Wesleyan, versus U Conn—and then putting one of those stupid decals on the car.) Can you help us out here?

Second question: Whither early decision? This is a pet peeve of mine, but it's also interesting to me because I think we can actually see the glaciers moving. Sooner or later, it seems to me, colleges are going to be shamed out of offering so many places through binding early-decision programs, because colleges simply have no answer to the argument that the system is grossly unfair. As you point out, the system is good for those who can take advantage of it. The same can be said of any tax loophole, or the purchased draft-deferments in the Civil War. As a system, this one is bad, because the boost it obviously gives to richer whiter students from the big cities and private schools, to the detriment of everyone else, is at odds with what colleges say they're aiming for.

Your book makes clear how early-decision programs help the colleges themselves. (In brief: since students who apply in these binding programs agree to enroll if admitted, the college has a lot less wasted admissions work to do. Also, it looks much better on the statistical charts. Wesleyan, as you point out, nabs only one out of four students it admits in the non-binding cycle. But because it has locked in several hundred students in the binding early system, its overall "yield" of admitted students looks much better.) Early decision is also a help for several of the students you mention—though being turned down in the early round is a serious blow to several of the others.

Several colleges have indicated that they're rethinking the early process. I wonder: What do you think is going to occur? Can they find an answer to the systematic-unfairness argument? (Saying that it's good for the people it's good for isn't an answer.) Will someone lead a charge? Will it muddle along in its current situation? What's next, in your view?

Finally: the U.S. News rankings. Ah, a delicate point for me. I spent two years as editor of U.S. News—and spent what felt like twenty years listening to complaints about the rankings. Some of these were fatuous: one student indignantly told me that he'd enrolled in a college because it was the highest-ranked of those that accepted him. He learned only after arrival that it didn't offer the program he wanted to major in. (I didn't tell him what was actually going through my mind, namely: How did a person who thinks this way get into any college?) University presidents made "principled" objections to the ranking system, which tended to become more intense when their own schools moved down in the ranking list and less intense when they rose.

Still, there are some obvious problems with these rankings. The schools are so different in their history, nature, and purpose that it's preposterous to say, as the rankings do, that one is 83 percent as good as another. Is the University of Chicago "better" than Cal Tech? Is an orange "better" than a peach? Even the ideal ranking system would have limits, and the actual rankings produced by real, overworked journalists have egregious shortcomings.

If the rankings had never been invented, higher education would be the better for it. But they're here, and they're not going away, and the most to hope for from U.S. News is that it will continue the process of improving them. The most important step in that direction may simply be making the rankings more diverse—different charts for private and public schools, for schools with different strengths and specialties, and so on. But the more this happens, the less the rankings have their stark, Miss America-like value of saying that name-brand schools stand in a certain order.

Time and again you show us students and admissions officers thinking about college rankings, mainly those from U.S. News. The colleges are worried about how their stats will place them on the charts; the students notice whether their target schools are going up or down.

What's the way out of this situation? How distorting are the effects of the rankings, especially U.S. News's? Will more ranking systems emerge, therefore diluting the distorting power of any one list? What would you do about ranking pressure if you were an admissions officer? What would you do about the ranking system if you were the editor of U.S. News?

Back to you,

Jim Fallows
 
 
October 4, 2002
 
From: Jacques Steinberg
To: James Fallows
Subject: Re: Is it all a numbers' game? - Part Two

I'd like to start by tackling your first question—about why college admission has become, as you observe, "the terrain on which educated parents choose to run their status competition."

One reason certainly lies with those parents who were the children of immigrants or first-generation Americans. They may have been perfectly content to attend public universities themselves but, in adulthood, have decided that those schools (even those as prestigious as the Universities of Virginia or Michigan) are not going to be good enough for their children. By many measures they might have achieved great success in their lives, but now they find themselves longing for the imprint of an Ivy or other highly selective college—perhaps the only mountain in life that they have failed to scale.

One of the sanest voices in The Gatekeepers, I think, belongs to Henry Jannol. A son of Holocaust survivors now practicing law in Century City, Henry sends his daughter Becca to the rarefied Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, in part because he has lost confidence in the Los Angeles Unified School District. But he has steadfastly resisted the temptation to push her to take the obvious next step: a mad dash for the front gate of an Ivy. Henry, a graduate of UCLA, observes: "At Harvard-Westlake, parents project their college fantasies onto their kids."

But there is more at work here than just a parent's trying to ride his child's back into what is effectively the nation's academic hall of fame. Many parents and children are under the impression—often a mistaken impression, I argue in the book—that the admissions process at a top college can be outsmarted through cunning and gamesmanship, and by spending money as excessively as a first-time political candidate with deep pockets.

Unlike so many of the things in our lives that are perceived to be out of our control, the quest for elite college admission, many parents believe, is a race that can be controlled—if only they put their children through the paces of SAT prep courses, one-on-one tutoring in core courses, and private college counseling. One private counselor in New York charges—and apparently receives—nearly $30,000 for her top-of-the-line junior-senior package. It must be a tremendous rush for a parent to be able to write that check, knowing that so many others cannot afford to do so or choose not to. Never mind that the admissions-decision process at top colleges is often far too messy—and personal to the admissions officers involved—to be manipulated by the contenders, no matter the extent of the expense.

There are other reasons that this has become the playing field of choice for so many hyper-competitive parents and their kids. I'll talk more about U.S. News a bit later, but when a publication declares an institution No. 1, any number of parents and children get excited by the prospect that, by extension, they will be known as No. 1 as well.

I agree with you that the mad quest by parents and children to land at one highly selective college over another thought to be of lesser rank can be completely irrational. Having spent the last three years traveling the country as a roving education correspondent for The Times, I know first-hand that the educational distinctions between the four dozen or so colleges generally regarded as the most highly selective are often imperceptible, and that hundreds of other colleges (even those that accept nearly everyone who applies) offer a solid education and the potential to prepare students for rigorous graduate school work or jobs at Fortune 500 companies.

That said, having graduated from Dartmouth in late spring of 1988—and been ushered, four months later, into a research clerk's job in The Times' Washington bureau—I know that the imprint of my alma mater gave me a boost. My résumé had been placed on the desk of the columnist who ultimately hired me, James (Scotty) Reston, by a Dartmouth alum who had graduated three years before me into the same job. My immediate predecessor in the job went to Brown. I'd like to think that without my Dartmouth connection I'd have made it to The Times by now, at age thirty-six. But I'm not sure I'd have gotten there at age twenty-two. Did arriving at The Times so young, and having the privilege to be trained there, help validate or justify my own determination to get into Dartmouth as a seventeen-year-old high school senior? It's a question I still wrestle with.

I'll move on now to your question about early-decision programs, specifically those that bind applicants to attend a college that might admit them in the fall. You asked about the long-term future of those programs.

I was certainly amazed, as you no doubt were, when Rick Levin, the president of Yale, answered the call you had made last fall in the pages of The Atlantic and proposed that Yale end such programs, if only the other Ivies would follow suit. I was less surprised that none of his counterparts in the Ivies, or at other premier private colleges, immediately do the same. Such programs, of course, have long allowed colleges to lock in highly credentialed candidates willing to pledge their love early to one institution above any other, and have allowed institutions to impress U.S. News in the bargain by improving their yields—the number of candidates offered acceptance by an institution who then accept that offer of acceptance. (U.S. News, as you know, prizes high SAT scores as well, and applicants who apply early tend to be among the most motivated, and highest-scoring.)

I've never been especially good at gazing into crystal balls. I'm confident that institutions like Yale and Harvard wouldn't lose many of their top candidates (or sacrifice their institutions' median SAT scores) if those candidates had to wait until spring to find out if they had been accepted. Indeed, Harvard already gives applicants the luxury of waiting until spring to accept Harvard's offer of early admission—the university's early-notification program is not binding. So we may yet see another top private institution answer Rick Levin's challenge and embrace the notion that such programs, whatever their virtues, should be eliminated, because they lead some applicants to declare a first choice prematurely and to give up any bargaining power in securing a more generous financial award.

I'm less optimistic that elite private colleges outside the Ivies would be willing to set aside their early-decision programs. Colleges like Wesleyan and Middlebury cannot be as confident as Harvard and Yale that their favorite applicants might still be available to them in the spring if not snapped up the previous fall. There's too much competition among colleges to take that chance, and the stakes, at least as the institutions continue to pay heed to U.S. News, are too great.

It appears I'm not going to be able to duck out of this exchange without responding to your questions about your former employer U.S. News. Like you, I do regret that so many applicants and parents have come to accept those rankings as the ultimate arbiter of comparing one complex academic institution to another. It's maddening to me that even the most educated observers will believe that Columbia has "fallen" in a particular year if it tumbles even a few rungs on the U.S. News ladder. It's as if Columbia's professors, ordinarily the top hitters on a professional baseball team, had an uncharacteristically bad year at the plate. I don't know how I could begin to assign numerical ratings to such educational entities, particularly in attempting to systematically capture and categorize what happens in their classrooms, which should be among the top concerns—if not the top concern—of applicants in considering an institution.

That said, I recognize that ours is a society that insists on declaring a winner and a runner-up in every area of our lives, whether it's which late-night talk-show host we watch, the doctors who give us our physicals, or the restaurants we patronize. If no one bought these issues, U.S. News would discontinue them. And if U.S. News decided to get out of the game on its own, someone else would clearly fill the vacuum. As you point out, alternative lists abound.

If I were editor of the magazine and getting rid of the rankings was not an option, I'd emphasize and build on two things that U.S. News already does. To the extent I felt compelled to rank colleges, either by my boss or my readers, I'd continue to add sub-categories, de-emphasizing the overall ranking and trying to compare colleges head to head in more manageable, discrete areas—the percentage of minorities on campus, for example, or the average class size.

To me, the most important information in this year's issue is in a survey detailed at the front of the magazine—the reporting of the results of something called the National Survey of Student Engagement. The survey, according to U.S. News, asks freshmen and seniors to answer questions about the education they receive. For example, students estimate how often they contributed in class, how frequently they got to work directly with a faculty member on research or how responsive a faculty member was when reached after class. U.S. News presents this information in broad categories—national universities, liberal arts colleges—but, happily, in alphabetical order. This, I would argue, is the sort of information that enables a parent or applicant to get a better sense, at least statistically, of what an institution is like.

And considering how potentially rich this material is—in contrast to information like the median SAT score of a college freshman class, which often says more about the high schools those kids attended than their colleges—the only disappointment I experienced as a reader was this: according to U.S. News, "most schools have not made the results available to the public."

Your move.
 
 
October 16, 2002
 
From: James Fallows
To: Jacques Steinberg
Subject: Is it all a numbers' game? - Part Three

Dear Jacques:

Thanks for your extensive answers. Before giving you a final, mercifully quick round of wrap-up questions, I need to take a minute to respond to your previous dispatch. In the course of this discussion, I've come to suspect that there is a basic difference in the way we feel about the college-admissions process. The difference doesn't reflect that well on me, because it shows me to be somewhat of a curmudgeon. But let me try to explain what I think it is, in the hope of getting your response.

The truth is, the whole college mania makes me more exasperated than I think it does you. I don't mean the actual mechanics of the admissions process, which you describe so vividly in the book. Instead I mean the resulting culture of anxiety, stress, fearfulness, resumé-building, test-cramming, risk-avoidance, and generally distorted behavior that comes from placing so much emphasis on which college a child will get into. You correctly mention some of the understandable sociological reasons for this behavior—for instance, the redirection of immigrant aspirations. That must be part of the story. But it doesn't account for the non-immigrant doctors, lawyers, and assorted professionals who are desperate to get their children into the right pre-schools so as not to lose an edge in the great college derby a dozen years later.
Why am I more on the warpath about this culture than you are? I think the basic reason is that I'm older, and have had almost fifteen more years to grow skeptical about the connection between college admission and anything that counts for happiness or success in life. Without delving too deeply into either your or my life stories, let me follow up on your mention of the possible impact of a Dartmouth degree on your career:

You would agree with me, I think, that as far as econometric studies can show, there is little detectable payoff to an elite-college education. Getting a college degree of some sort, from some college, has huge economic benefits, compared to lacking a B.A. Life is tremendously unfair, and it is most unfair if you don't have a college degree. But if you control for the factors that would give elite-college students a head-start anyway (mainly parental income and education), it's hard to show that it makes much long-term economic difference whether they go to Wesleyan or UConn or Yale. [I received an interesting e-mail from a reader on this point, which I attach here.] That is, the difference among colleges that may seem dramatic to those poring through the U.S. News rankings or waiting for their acceptance letters does not seem to be a significant difference when it comes to long-term economic opportunities. (This is despite the obvious fact that certain networks from certain colleges have advantages in certain fields. Since you've laid your cards on the table, I'll reciprocate: when I was in college, at Harvard, I spent nearly every waking hour working on the newspaper, The Crimson, and friends I met there have obviously been useful journalistic allies through the years.)

I would agree with you that the specific experiences from any given college lead in certain directions, and that our paths might be different if we'd gone to another college. If either of us had gone to one of the other schools we were considering, countless details of subsequent life would have been different. For me, the alternatives were a mixed bag—from Reed and Pomona to Cal Tech and Berkeley to, gasp, the Naval Academy—so things could have been really different. Would they have been worse? With one major disclaimer—that I met my future wife in college and by definition would have been worse off on any other course—I think that mainly they would have been different.

Think for a moment about the power structure above you at The Times, and above me at The Atlantic. The big boss of the Times's newsroom has a degree from Birmingham-Southern, in Alabama. The Times's number-two news executive went to the University of Missouri. I have worked for three editors in my years at The Atlantic. The first, who originally hired me, had not gone to college. The second went to the University of Oklahoma. The third, to the University of New Hampshire. I could go on, but my point is that while there are plenty of Ivy Leaguers now salted throughout the journalistic establishment, our business hardly supports the idea that the more exclusive the college, the clearer the path to success.

Why do I bother to complain about this? Because of the needless pressure on kids up through age eighteen involving this decision. Again, this may bother me more than it does you, because I've had more of a chance to see the whole cycle unfold—including seeing my children and their friends go through the wringer. Yes, students should take their studies seriously, and they should develop as many skills as possible, and they should explore a wide range of activities—and they should try to get into the colleges they think will be best for them. But they shouldn't have to start hedging bets (via "feeder schools") early on, or worry so much about the consequences of their college choice. Above all, they should not have to receive the message from their parents, clear even though unspoken, that unless they stack the odds in their favor, with the right prep schools and the right admissions strategy and the most exclusive college label, they won't really cut it in life. I can't think of a more destructive message to send to teenagers.

But enough of this! (Though I would be interested in hearing your "I agree / I disagree" thoughts.) Let's get back to reality. The culture of college-mania does exist. That's good for the magazine I once edited, as it sells its college rankings. It's good for Stanley Kaplan and the Princeton Review. It's good for us in our discussion here, and it's good for your book.

We can return the favor by giving the college-obsessed a few inside tips. I invite you to tell the anxious parents of America: what are the three most surprising things you learned about the way college admissions really work? What are the ways to Win the Elite College Admissions Game?

Thanks in advance for your answer—and for the reporting that went into your book.

Jim Fallows
 
 
October 16, 2002


 
From: Jacques Steinberg
To: James Fallows
Subject: Re: Is it all a numbers' game? - Part Three

Dear Jim:

You make a persuasive argument that many, many families in this country have run wild with the idea that their children must secure a place within the ivy-covered walls of a brand-name college to have a shot at a great job and a happy life. I'm sure it would make for livelier reading if I disagreed with you, but I can't and won't. You and I may have gained entrée to our respective careers and publications with at least partial assistance from our alma maters (and the contacts that came with them), but I am well aware that a marquee degree represents but one of the innumerable potential pathways to a Fortune 500 company or blue-chip graduate program or—most important of all—to a blissful and successful and even prosperous life. Like you, I know that there is research that bears this out. And I, too, regret that so many children and their parents fail to grasp this idea, and pretty much wreck an important time in their lives in the process.

You spend a fair amount of time imagining that you are angrier than I am about all this college-related mania, and that this difference is born partly out of the sixteen-year age difference between us. I'd like to respond with a comparison of my own, which may also be partly attributable to age and experience. I suspect I see my role as a journalist in a different way than you see your own. I believe that, at this point in my career, the greatest contribution that I can make to the nail-biting process of applying to highly selective colleges is to cast a bright light on this long-secretive world and then leave it to others (including you) to respond to what I have learned and shared.

For example, I write at some length in The Gatekeepers about one applicant for the Class of 2004 at Wesleyan who believed, at various points in high school, that his anticipated career as a writer might be stunted or slowed if he did not receive admission to an Ivy. When he gets spurned by Brown and Penn, the two Ivies to which he ultimately applied, the reader gets to watch as he picks up the various pieces and realizes, in the end, that his reasons for seeking an Ivy League bumper sticker for his mother's car were not necessarily sound. Best of all, in an epilogue that carries the reader to the end of that student's sophomore year of college, the reader sees that the student is doing well and is excited to be where he is. I wanted to tell that story, in part, because I knew that other applicants to college had succumbed to this Ivy-or-bust mentality, and did not necessarily believe their guidance counselors—or parents—when told that things would work out wherever they went to college. I wanted to show those applicants that, at least in the case of this young man, life was indeed going on—quite nicely, in fact.

If there was an anxiety I was trying to tamp down by writing The Gatekeepers, it was the anxiety that parents and applicants feel at not being able to understand how highly selective colleges select their classes. I couldn't do anything to change the odds of admission—three out of four were rejected from Wesleyan, at least for the Class of 2004, and the odds were even more daunting that year at Harvard and Yale. (Nor do I think it's my place to lessen those odds.) But I hoped that at least by seeing what happens to an application once it arrives and is slit open in the admissions office of a representative institution, parents and applicants—and even guidance counselors—might feel some sense of ease. At Wesleyan, for example, they would know that in nearly every case at least two people, and quite possibly the whole committee, would review the contents of that file, with the express purpose of giving each applicant the floor to make the best case for admission. I thought that applicants and parents would take some comfort in knowing that this work is carried out by human beings like Ralph Figueroa, the book's main character, and not computers, and that people went into such work because they believed in the importance of access to higher education—and not because they delighted in saying, "No, No, No" far more often than they got a chance to say "Yes." Indeed, Ralph, at least, often agonized at having to say "No" so often to so many good candidates.

But in presenting the human side of this process, I knew that I would invariably touch off new anxieties. Watching Ralph and his colleagues give a lift to black and Hispanic applicants with lower SAT scores than some white applicants—as well as giving a lift to some athletes and alumni children as well—has not sat well with some readers. Readers of the book also get to see that Wesleyan is no more immune than the applicants themselves to paying too close attention to the U.S. News survey.

You ask for some how-to-get-in advice. Your readers must first bear in mind that admissions considerations are very often messy and subjective, and at least partly dependent on who happens to pick up the file at a particular institution. Sometimes two people at the same college can have a very different reaction to the same file, in part because the people who make these calculations bring so much of themselves to the table. As an applicant, that can be difficult to strategize against. Indeed, I feel that the only way to try to understand this idiosyncratic process is to watch it first-hand—which is one of the experiences I tried to give readers of the book.

In that vein, I feel comfortable making the following general observations. Often, the admissions officers I shadowed looked first for evidence that an applicant had "maxed out" on the curriculum in his or her school, taking as many tough courses (usually, but not always, Advanced Placement courses) as could be handled, without becoming mired in C's (a smattering of B's was often okay) and without working to the point of physical collapse. I was also struck that admissions officers were often less likely to want to see a five-page resumé of extracurricular activities, and more likely to be impressed by an applicant who had stuck with two activities (ideally two very different activities) for a sustained period of time, perhaps becoming a leader in the process. The officers certainly looked for some sign that the student enjoyed those activities, and wasn't just engaging in them to please the committee, but that can be hard for an applicant to convey. One way is within the personal essays that highly selective colleges request and that give applicants an unfiltered opportunity to tell the admissions committee what they like to do, as well as who they are and how they think about the world.

I have enjoyed our exchanges, and hope they have served to demystify a process that has puzzled too many outsiders for too long.

Jacques Steinberg