Gladwell: Getting In, The social logic of Ivy League admissions

It is, by design, a black box process.

Colleges live and die by who they admit. The elite admission process is designed to give them the largest selection pool possible and total control over who gets in out of it. They hold all cards and will never give that up.

There are great advantages to this. If you need 5 viola players one year. You can take 5 viola players. No sweat. Those five kids will never find out that's why they got in, but that might have been the case. Certainly, these are awesome kids. But in a pool of 12,000 awesome kids, sometimes the viola swings the committee's vote.

If you need some kids from Western Michigan, you can take some kids from Western Michigan. Maybe there's a donor there. Or an influential alum who's mad that no one from that part of the state has been admitted in years. Who knows? These kids are jokingly called "area adds." Again, these are great kids. But their point of origin and perspective on it might just be the thing that swings the vote in a sea of 12,000 awesome kids. I'm fairly certain that's why I was admitted and I only think this because I spent two years admitting thousands of kids. I was a strong applicant able to talk interestingly about my origins. My grades and scores sure didn't show the firepower that the kids out east had, but they've gotta take someone from podunk Michigan now and then.

The top colleges are skeptical of all the standardized tests and most of the high school curriculums. This is both because of arrogance but also because they have data that the public doesn't. Every year we'd get a very sophisticated, confidential briefing from the folks at one of the big companies that showed the latest trends in their data. This was always somewhat shocking and fascinating, too. I can't say much about it other than this: the kids you think would do well on the tests do incredibly well. The kids you think will do badly, do very, very badly. Across the board. Everywhere. No matter what.

The things that I couldn't handle, personally, were the minority admissions and the elite prep school admissions. This is not because anything particularly underhanded or amoral or unethical was happening, but because the debates and arguments about how these cases should be handled simply required intellectual bandwidth that I didn't have. I couldn't plot a course that would carry me through how to deal with these kids and didn't much feel like making the effort it seemed I'd have to make to do so. There were times when it just seemed so unfair to admit a student with crummy grades and crummy test scores (relative to our applicant pool) because of her racial background. But there were other times when I was so impressed by other qualities in a student's application that I fought for them harder than anyone.

I visited some scary high schools in Philadelphia one year and met a kid who'd been corresponding with the foremost authority on Bram Stoker's Dracula via e-mail, on his own. I told him I wrote my senior thesis about the novel and his face lit up. I think mine did a bit, too. It's not often you get to talk about your specialty with someone else.

This was an African American student at an inner city school. All the teachers had been telling me all day that he was "the one" I needed to talk to, because it was so ridiculously apparent to them that he was sincerely, legitimately, maybe desperately trying to transcend his circumstances. And now he's able to talk about the plot structure of Dracula with someone.

Sure enough, his credentials were average for the applicant pool, but he was as easy a case as any. To speak to the audience here, he was hacking his social circumstances and we were interested in that.

So yes, it's very byzantine. It's a mess. You'd read applications for 7 days a week for 4 months all winter, annotating them, scribbling in the margins, knowing that very, very few of these kids were getting in.

Then you block out a whole month of sitting around a table eating catered food, sweeping across whole states worth of applicants in 15-hour days, debating, discussing, arguing, fighting over kid after kid after kid in committees of 5-6 people. I always enjoyed that part, but we had one officer who would cry at some point almost every day during committee. She believed we were slamming the door on a lot of these kids.

Personally, I believe they'll do fine wherever they end up if they/re as good as they say are. It'd be great to dump a bunch of resources on them so they can live "the life" for 4 years, but you can't celebrate every kid.

P.S. While I've got the floor and your ears about college admissions, I run the web's only independent directory of College Admissions Consultants at http://CollegeConsultantReviews.com. I created this many moons ago and there's a lot of interest in it from consultants who find it appearing for searches for their names. I think there's a business in there somewhere but don't have the time or technical skills to build the killer directory site that would be needed. Hit me up if you're interested.

I have no direct experience there.

But think about a few things. There's a general sense of what an undergraduate education looks like, 4 years, prerequisites followed by picking a major, etc.

"Grad school," on the other hand, is kind of meaningless. Is it a master's program? PhD? Is it in a hard science? English? It it in a trade a la journalism?

So my assumption is that every program is different and every school does it differently for grad programs. They're small and weird enough that they have to.

I do think there's a lot more faculty involvement in grad school admissions. I also think that master's programs are much, much easier to get into than people suspect. I went to the one of the top journalism schools in the country, and as far as I could tell, it had about a 50% admission rate. 50%!!!!!

2 points, based on personal experience: One, particularly in PhD programs, faculty must ultimately associate itself somehow with the student. And not as an institution but as an individual professor, as supervisor or co-supervisor of the thesis. The places are fewer. The demand on the time of the professor is higher, per head. So there is virtually no room for "legacy" or "bring home the doughnuts" type of admissions. Think about it: the professor must ultimately sign his name on that kid's thesis or, even more publicly, publish together. Perhaps some professor profits individually and then makes a strong case for such a student because he figures his reputation is worth X amount or because he thinks the student is OK anyway, but institutionally I'd say no. Two, in master's programs, the likelihood of such admissions is higher. And within master's programs, I'd say MBA has a pretty high incidence. But don't forget, in particular in this setting, MBAs are not there for "education" in terms of books or skills or intellect. It's there for making connections. And so, legacy "kids" are kind of legitimate because they bring, almost by definition, already a very valuable asset with them.

Yeah, life must suck for all the many, many kids whose childhoods are completely erradicated for a remote shot at something that people only consider valuable because people have to dedicate their lives for even a remote shot at it. The icing on the cake is that those who don't dedicate their lives to getting in probably have a better chance of getting in.

Wow, Princeton's admissions process seems to be more thorough than I could have imagined. However, you seem to be referring to those expensive international schools where most Indian applicants come from. Typical Indian schools like the one I used to attend are quite different: only 5 (out of 120) of us from this year's graduating class have applied to American universities (though I know that at least 2 students in the past 4 years were accepted by Princeton).

Nevertheless, it's quite insightful.

Good point. Having rich parents seems to be a big ace in the hole here.

I've often thought that America's goofy and somewhat unfair admissions system is actually a blessing in disguise.

Most countries have only a handful of excellent colleges, and the vast majority of the bright people end up at a small number of them. This means that it matters a great deal, in these countries, where you went to school.

In the US, partly as a consequence of the silly admissions system, the talent's much more widely spread around. So there are more colleges worth teaching at, and consequently we have 50-100 excellent schools. It also doesn't matter, because of this, nearly as much where one goes to school; it's almost irrelevant after the first job.