The Target Audience : Part 1

A Is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges
by Michele A. Hernandez

For years it has been one of America's most guarded secrets. Now for the first time, an Ivy League admissions officer breaks the code of silence to take you behind the closed doors of one of the most rigorous and competitive decision-making procedures in the world. A is for Admission reveals the complete and sometimes shocking truth: how the Ivy League chooses which applicants shall be admitted and which shall not be admitted to its schools. What admissions officers look for. What turns them off. What makes an application stand out - and shine - from among the thousands they receive from the best high school students in the world. And how you can make this complex, high-stakes system work for you.

Michele A. Hernández, herself a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College, worked in Dartmouth's admissions office for four years. She knows firsthand how admissions officers factor in such extenuating circumstances as family background, high school class size, recommendations, race, and financial profile. In A is for Admission she answers virtually every question you have, including:

• What is the AI? The Academic Index is the "trade secret" of certain Ivy League admissions committees: it's a precise mathematical formula that's used routinely to rank most applicants.

• Should I apply for early decision? Here's the truth about whether your odds increase or decrease if you apply early, or wait for the regular decision process.

• Do minority students really have a better-than-average chance of getting into an Ivy League college? A is for Admission explains how minority applicants are truly evaluated.

• Are certain applications tagged for special consideration by the admissions staff? Absolutely. Find out whether your profile fits into one of these privileged categories.

A is for Admission also tells you if going to an elite private school - or a public high school - will help you, whether where you live makes a difference, which high schools have the highest acceptance rates, and what your odds are for acceptance if you're deferred or wait-listed by a top school. Until now, no book, magazine, or newspaper article has had this inside information. Thorough, candid, and written for results, A is for Admission is an invaluable guide for students and parents (even parents of younger students) as they face the academic competition for excellence in the 21st century. This is the only book that takes you inside the hectic offices of today's Ivy League admissions officers: how they work, how they think, how they handle an admissions application from the moment it arrives at their door to the moment they make their decision. It is the only book that gives you the hard truths: whether you have a chance to get into an Ivy League school, how you can distinguish yourself from your competition, and how you can improve the odds that you will receive an A for admission.

Chapter 1

The most natural thing to assume is that you are writing your application so that brilliant Ivy League-educated people can read it and laud your humor, charm, and intellectual prowess. But have you ever stopped to think why these brilliant educators would be working in an admissions office, rather than in an upper-level teaching or administrative capacity?

The Typical Admissions Officer

In most highly selective admissions offices, two very different kinds of admissions officers can be found. Though I admit to stereotyping, most admissions people would probably agree with the basic truths surrounding these two groups.

The first group would include highly talented recent college graduates from either that particular college or another highly selective college. These individuals tend to be very bright, people-oriented, interested in education as a broad field, and anxious to gain some valuable job experience before moving on to a teaching position or perhaps a graduate program. Although they are not very experienced in admissions, they know the caliber of students who are accepted into highly selective colleges because of their firsthand experience with their supertalented classmates. They are, for the most part, extremely qualified to judge candidates in terms of their intellectual potential. Finally, they tend to have a risk-taking capacity that allows them to break the rules here and there when they really believe in a candidate. As a group, they are in touch with current students on a day-to-day basis, since they run most of the student programs, such as hosting and tour guiding.

The second group is composed of the "lifers," people from all walks of life who for some reason got into admissions and have been doing it for so long that they tend to be a little out of touch with the current quality of students. For the most part, they have much less interaction with actual college students and can be slightly out of touch with present-day realities. They may consist of graduate students; former teachers; spouses of professors and college staff; and career administrators. The majority of this group did not graduate from any highly selective college, let alone an Ivy League one.

Since they did not attend highly selective colleges themselves, they sometimes have a harder time recognizing truly great applicants. In some extreme cases, they have to learn a formula for quality applicants and then apply this formula to the applicant pool. In effect, these officers have learned to recognize truly intelligent applicants through repeated viewing. Of course, there are exceptions in this category. I feel fortunate to have worked with some of the brightest people in admissions, not only those at Dartmouth, but also admissions officers from other top colleges whom I traveled with during recruiting seasons. However, these high-quality officers are the exception, not the rule.

As you can imagine, there is little motivation for a talented young graduate to spend more than a year or two in an admissions office before moving on to other academic endeavors, such as law school, medical school, or a Ph.D. program. Thus, there is always a huge turnover in the first group, while the older guard, the career admissions officers, remains the staple of most Ivy League offices. With the exception of Harvard and sometimes Princeton, usually under 50 percent of those working on Ivy League admissions staffs (and here you can include Williams, Swarthmore, and Amherst, to name just a few) attended an Ivy League college. Even if you consider the current deans of admissions at the Ivies, very few attended an Ivy League institution themselves. My career path-that is, leaving Dartmouth for four years (one year in Spain, one in a master's program at Columbia University in comparative literature and English, and two teaching) and then going back to work in the admissions office-is atypical.

I hope by now the point is clear: For the most part, Ivy League hotshots are not the ones reading your application. You will note the conspicuous absence of Rhodes scholars or well known educators on admissions staffs. Many of the people who will be judging you went to less prestigious colleges and sometimes begrudge those who have had more opportunity than they have had. As my former colleague from the Putney School in Putney, Vermont, and former Brown admissions officer Harry Bauld writes in his hilarious book on college essays, "This is your audience. Study them well. Not exactly the Nobel Prize panel."

What I am trying to say without shocking you too much is that the very best of applicants will often be brighter than many of those who will be evaluating them.

The Implications

The main fact you should keep in mind is that sometimes admissions officers will miss subtle points because they are not extremely perceptive readers, or because they are reading too fast, or because they are trying to highlight one main point from a letter, or because they are just plain exhausted from reading applications for seven to eight hours a day for months at a time. Unfortunately, many admissions officers are not expert readers (many more have degrees in education than in an academic discipline), and most of them are not scholars or intellectuals. Add to this problem the above factors and you can understand why oftentimes subtle points are overlooked even though they can be crucial to understanding a student's academic potential.

Let me give an example that took place at Dartmouth during a reading retreat, when the whole admissions office gets together, discusses strategies and priorities for the upcoming year, and then reads through actual case studies from the current year's class. All thirteen of us prepared the five case studies the night before so we could read our write-ups aloud and then see how people voted. The biggest disagreement concerned an extremely subtle case of a girl who came from a very humble background. She knew early on that she wanted to be a veterinarian, and she had started working ten hours a week and all summer for two years in a vet's office to obtain firsthand experience.

Copyright © 1997 by Michele A. Hernandez

About the Author

Michele A. Hernandez is a native of New York City, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1989. She earned a master's degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. For the last four years, she has been assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College.