The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College by Jacques Steinberg

Author:Jacques Steinberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2003-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

Over the course of the day Ralph would read a total of twenty-three applications, though his goal was thirty. He rarely reached that target, for the choices were too hard. Aggie’s had not been the only case that day for which Ralph had written down a rating, or even circled a vote, only to cross it out moments later and write something else. “I think it’s knowing it’s a record number of applications, and not knowing where the line is going to be,” he said, explaining his equivocating. “I find myself second-guessing myself a lot.”

Ralph had been interrupted by only a few phone calls that day. One had been from his sister Ana, who was writing a freelance article for People en Español on a topic near to Ralph’s heart: General Hospital, the soap opera that he had watched on and off since his senior year in high school. Ralph often taped the show and watched it in the evening, though rarely during reading season. Talking about Luke and Laura with Ana had been a welcome respite.

Another call he had taken was on a more serious matter. It was from Greg Pyke, who functioned not only as the office statistician but also as an occasional prod to slow readers. Greg informed Ralph that midway through the reading season, the committee members, each working diligently at home, had given a first read to nearly four hundred more files than they had by the same date the previous year. That was no small accomplishment, considering that the number of readers had not increased, though the number of applications had. Unfortunately, Greg reported, the officers were falling behind in getting to those applications that they were supposed to consider as second readers. At the pace Ralph was working, he calculated, he would have to read seven days a week for six straight weeks, from now until the committee hearings began in mid-March, to catch up.

Ralph was also struggling with part of Natalie’s advice: “Say no.” Wesleyan intended to offer admission to about eighteen hundred of the sixty-eight hundred students who applied, or 26 percent. If past numbers held, about seven hundred of those eighteen hundred would say yes to Wesleyan, with the remainder of the Class of 2004 drawn from the waiting list, if necessary. On this day alone, Ralph had voted, however tentatively, to admit ten of the twenty-three applicants whose files he had read, or about 43 percent. If he were keeping to the average acceptance rate, he probably should have recommended admitting only six. He would have to be a little tougher tomorrow, and probably the day after that, but how? So many applicants presented good cases for admission.

On this day, in addition to the budding cancer researcher from upstate New York, Ralph had recommended admitting a young Korean American woman from Westchester County, New York. Her SAT scores were near perfect, and she had competed in a national chemistry competition. Like Tiffany Wang, she was a National Merit semifinalist; unlike Tiffany, she had received almost all A’s in the toughest classes her school offered.

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