The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College

The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College. By Jacques Steinberg. Viking. 292 pp. $25.95   For bewildered high schoolers seeking admission to the cluster of highly selective colleges essayist Joseph Epstein jokingly labels “Yarvton,” the mysteries are legion. Does having invented an innovative medical device as a sophomore outweigh lackluster grades and a dearth of advanced-placement classes? Does coming from a top prep school help or hurt? How does Harvard University manage to reject a quarter of its applicants with perfect SAT scores? Doesn’t every school need a talented oboist? Just what strange deals, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and personal crusades shape the next generation’s elite?

A writer for The New York Times, Steinberg was given extraordinary access to Wesleyan University’s admissions office and to the applications—and lives—of a half-dozen aspirants to the Connecticut school. College admissions, he finds, is “messy work,” filled with subjective judgments. Wesleyan’s process tries to predict whether a student will “add” to the community, handle the rigor of the curriculum, and succeed after college. It seeks what admissions officers term the “angular” rather than the “well-rounded,” the student with, as Wesleyan’s dean of admissions said in 1964, “the best chance of accomplishing something in his lifetime, as opposed to the dabbler.”

Admissions officers have seen it all: the fresh cookies, the daily postcards, the recommendations from senators and celebrities, the essays crafted to pull at the heartstrings. But sheer chance may make a more decisive difference. One applicant devoted his essay to comic books; the Wesleyan officer who read the application, as it happened, “loved the X-Men.”

The officials strategize, too. Some colleges reject the most highly qualified applicants, “not wishing to waste an acceptance” on anyone who probably won’t attend. (The U.S. News & World Report rankings, which matter to those good schools without centuries of prestige and tradition, rely in part on the percentage of accepted students who enroll.) And the schools hunt down, with free airfare and professor one-on-ones, the most desirable candidates.

This book has a less epic quality than, say, Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (1998), but it depicts the admissions process with clarity and sympathy. Some readers may be troubled that admissions officers act not just as talent scouts but as social engineers, and that luck plays such a prominent role. Yet the officers’ decisions, as they choose among far too many highly qualified applicants, are not arbitrary. Steinberg shows that they consider teacher recommendations as much as ethnicity, accomplishments as much as geography, and diligence as much as creativity.