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I was an admissions officer at Princeton 4 years ago when this came out. It caused a bit of a stir in the office. Here's the best bit, in my opinion: "But a

I was an admissions officer at Princeton 4 years ago when this came out. It caused a bit of a stir in the office. Here's the best bit, in my opinion: "But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience."

unalone 18y ago
Would you agree with the things that Gladwell says? Are the admissions processes that Byzantine?
- brandnewlow 18y ago
  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 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.
  - brandnewlow 18y ago
    One more thing. And this is the idea that helped explain how this stuff worked. If a school's admitting X kids, you have to completely forget about that number. That number is meaningless. There's a certain percentage of X that's just spoken for. There are kids you have to admit to keep the school running and to meet all its institutional needs. Once you figure out how many kids that is, subtract that from the number of kids you're supposedly admitting. THAT number is your actual class size, the number of kids who get admitted by the full process, being pitted against one another. I found my job made a lot more sense once I told myself I was working to admit X-Y kids rather than just X kids. So when you hear about how low the admission rates are, realize that in reality, they're significantly lower due to so many spots being claimed in each class by legacies, minorities, athletes, geniuses, politicians kids, potential big donors etc. These kids don't face the same process as everyone else.
    - wallflower 18y ago
      I'd be curious what you think about some NYC Upper East Side parents who think getting into the right pre-school determines the fate of their progeny for getting into an Ivy League..
      - brandnewlow 18y ago
        It's all relative. Those kids are competing against eachother, not me from podunk Michigan. So it's an arms race. If the kid across the street goes to fancy pre-school, he's going to get advantages you'll miss out on that will put him ahead of the game. I just read Gladwell's "Outliers" this week and he talks at length about this very thing. Here's how he puts it. If you're in Canada and you were born just days after the cut-off for age group hockey, then when you're 10, you'll be 6-7 months older than a lot of the other kids on your team. That makes a big difference at that age. So you'll make the traveling team and the younger kids won't. On the traveling team, you get better coaches, better equipment, better opponents. So the gap between you and those other kids gets A LOT wider. Five years later, you're maybe looking at the NHL while those other kids are sitting in the stands, because you got access to the better coaches, because you were born 6 months before them. That's why the parents want to get their kids into the fancy pre-schools. Outliers is an excellent book. Much, much better than "Blink," which I thought was kind of boring.
ajju 18y ago
Do you know if this is this also true for gradschool admissions? (even business schools?)
- brandnewlow 18y ago
  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%!!!!!
  - ajju 18y ago
    Thanks for your answer. I do know a little bit about gradschool admisions in computer science and you're right, there's a lot more faculty involvement but I know nothing about more popular programs like the MBA. So I should have phrased my question better. What I meant to ask was whether in popular graduate programs such as the MBA, factors such as being the kid of a potential donor or a politician carry equally high weightage as they do in undergraduate admissions. Based, anecdotally, on George Bush having gone to Yale, it would seem that they do.
    - brandnewlow 18y ago
      I would assume they do, but have no evidence or experience to suggest so. Again, admitting really rich, prominent kids is something that just has to be done to keep the school afloat. If all you have is a bunch of eggheads, then you're an egghead school. For better or worse, eggheads don't run the world. Elite colleges can't ignore kids who might go on to run the free world someday.

unalone 18y ago

Would you agree with the things that Gladwell says? Are the admissions processes that Byzantine?

brandnewlow 18y ago
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 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.
- brandnewlow 18y ago
  One more thing. And this is the idea that helped explain how this stuff worked. If a school's admitting X kids, you have to completely forget about that number. That number is meaningless. There's a certain percentage of X that's just spoken for. There are kids you have to admit to keep the school running and to meet all its institutional needs. Once you figure out how many kids that is, subtract that from the number of kids you're supposedly admitting. THAT number is your actual class size, the number of kids who get admitted by the full process, being pitted against one another. I found my job made a lot more sense once I told myself I was working to admit X-Y kids rather than just X kids. So when you hear about how low the admission rates are, realize that in reality, they're significantly lower due to so many spots being claimed in each class by legacies, minorities, athletes, geniuses, politicians kids, potential big donors etc. These kids don't face the same process as everyone else.
  - wallflower 18y ago
    I'd be curious what you think about some NYC Upper East Side parents who think getting into the right pre-school determines the fate of their progeny for getting into an Ivy League..
    - brandnewlow 18y ago
      It's all relative. Those kids are competing against eachother, not me from podunk Michigan. So it's an arms race. If the kid across the street goes to fancy pre-school, he's going to get advantages you'll miss out on that will put him ahead of the game. I just read Gladwell's "Outliers" this week and he talks at length about this very thing. Here's how he puts it. If you're in Canada and you were born just days after the cut-off for age group hockey, then when you're 10, you'll be 6-7 months older than a lot of the other kids on your team. That makes a big difference at that age. So you'll make the traveling team and the younger kids won't. On the traveling team, you get better coaches, better equipment, better opponents. So the gap between you and those other kids gets A LOT wider. Five years later, you're maybe looking at the NHL while those other kids are sitting in the stands, because you got access to the better coaches, because you were born 6 months before them. That's why the parents want to get their kids into the fancy pre-schools. Outliers is an excellent book. Much, much better than "Blink," which I thought was kind of boring.

ajju 18y ago

Do you know if this is this also true for gradschool admissions? (even business schools?)

brandnewlow 18y ago
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%!!!!!
- ajju 18y ago
  Thanks for your answer. I do know a little bit about gradschool admisions in computer science and you're right, there's a lot more faculty involvement but I know nothing about more popular programs like the MBA. So I should have phrased my question better. What I meant to ask was whether in popular graduate programs such as the MBA, factors such as being the kid of a potential donor or a politician carry equally high weightage as they do in undergraduate admissions. Based, anecdotally, on George Bush having gone to Yale, it would seem that they do.
  - brandnewlow 18y ago
    I would assume they do, but have no evidence or experience to suggest so. Again, admitting really rich, prominent kids is something that just has to be done to keep the school afloat. If all you have is a bunch of eggheads, then you're an egghead school. For better or worse, eggheads don't run the world. Elite colleges can't ignore kids who might go on to run the free world someday.