READ: 4 MIN
It seems like we’ve been waiting for this book ever since we finished re-reading Jacques Steinberg’s book The Gatekeepers: Inside the College Admissions Process of a Premier College, for the third time. Steinberg’s book came out in 2002 and it still captivates - but it’s also dated by today’s even more competitive admissions standards. So when we heard that well-known journalist Jeffrey Selingo was doing his own insider’s take, we were beyond excited. Selingo’s book will be interesting to readers unfamiliar with the college admissions process inside a range of schools and was confirming to us in many ways. But it also left us wanting more - a lot more - insights into why admissions officers make the decisions they make. We’d rather have seen more pages dedicated to these tough trade-offs and negotiations, and fewer pages spent on lamenting that this world exists and that it doesn’t matter whether you go to a prestigious college or not. In general, we wish people would stop saying this just to be polite. Where you go to college does matter, whether that is fair or not.
The most interesting parts of Selingo’s book are, of course, the moments spent with the deliberators at each of the three colleges he had access to: Emory, Davidson and the University of Washington. These are the people (and the institutional forces behind those people) that are making decisions about our students. And what he reveals is worth your time: that not everything about the process makes sense and that there are kids who get lucky breaks in the admissions room and those who don’t. Here are the big three takeaways for the team at Union Hall:
Our students spend so much time prepping their applications, crafting essays with the right details and agonizing over every word of their extracurriculars list, it can be a letdown to know that admission officers spend less than 10 minutes (often much less) reviewing each application before rendering a decision. And Selingo was writing about the admissions cycle before the pandemic, prior to the 40% year-over-year application increases at many top schools. This past year, we’re sure readers spent even less time per applicant, as we know the Ivies didn’t hire 40% more admissions officers. At Union Hall we always recommend that every student has a strong, clear personal narrative, and the elements of that narrative jump out during a read. Selingo’s writing confirmed what we already knew: your story needs to interest the reader, but be understood quickly. They don’t have the time for anything too nuanced and certainly don’t have time to make sense of an application that contains randomness or contradictions.
As standardized test scores continue to wane in importance during the admissions process, the “brand name” of your high school has begun to matter more. This topic is really worthy of its own post, but Selingo makes it clear (as others have before him), that colleges are expecting a certain amount of applicants from their feeder schools. Every high school has colleges that like their graduates, and likely some colleges that don’t like their graduates. Seeing first hand, for example, how Emory reviews applicants from one “busy” high school (where they get many applications from each year), sheds light on the comfort level the college has with that high school. They don’t need to question the curriculum or how you’ve taken advantage of that curriculum, because they know it well. In a game of speed, not having to take time to understand the quality of a high school makes it easier for the admissions officer to say “yes” to an applicant. It’s one less risk factor. The downside, however, is that as a student, you will be compared to the other applicants from your school. There is a vivid example of Emory ranking all of the applicants from one high school and realizing that someone farther down the list had gained an acceptance over more highly-qualified denied applicants further up the list. This comparison caused consternation and a reshuffling of the admissions decisions on that list.
This is another topic worthy of its own post, but Selingo’s book makes it clear through its examples, that the major you indicate on your application factors into the admissions decision. One of the big whoppers that colleges like to tell is that they accept applicants without regard for their indicated major. This isn’t all colleges, because many do require students to choose a school. But for those that don’t, applying as a biology major can mean a much different outcome than applying as a religious studies major. Selingo has more than one example of admissions officers considering an applicant’s admissibility based on their major. It confirms what we've known, which is that blindly choosing a popular major during the application process, especially if your background does not indicate you’ve had a real passion for that major, can definitely hurt your admissions chances. This is unfortunate given that so many kids change their major once they get to college. And while we don’t recommend that everyone start applying to be a medieval languages major in order to get into a top school, we do suggest thinking critically about what you’ve proven good at in high school when applying to highly selective colleges.
As for the rest of the book, if you are interested in the history of the college recruitment process or how certain colleges have worked to game the US News Rankings, you’ll find interesting stories of this in this book. We recommend it to those going through the college admissions process, just not as forcefully as we recommend Paul Tough’s book, which we also recently reviewed.
