Road To College | BOOK EXCERPT

An Excerpt from What It Really Takes to Get Into the Ivy League and Other Highly Selective Colleges

A sage like colleague of mine had a knack for reading an audience and sensing a tense atmosphere when he was about to give a presentation on admissions to Harvard College. He lightened the mood by drawing a long line above a short line on the nearest board or easel and began:

Imagine that the long line is all that is known about the admissions process.
Then the short line is all that is understood about the admissions process.

Imagine that the long line is all that is understood about the admissions process.
Then the short line is all that I understand about the admissions process.

The long line is all that I understand about the process.
The short line is all that I'll be able to tell you about the process.

The long line is what I will tell you about the process.
The short line is what you will comprehend about the process.

The long line is admission to Harvard.
The short line is your chance of getting admitted.

Every time he began a presentation this way, the audience responded with a hearty laugh and a relieved sigh.

The level of uncertainty about the application process generates a tremendous amount of anxiety in parents and students alike. The story has been my colleague's way of explaining to the audience that it's hard to get admitted to the most selective schools in America , but one should not let what is not understood and what cannot be controlled limit a person's dreams of attending a selective college.

Because the selective schools' admissions process is so competitive and intimidating, trepidation leads some students and parents to focus on the process rather than on the things they can control. Other parents and students choose to approach the process with an epic intensity that causes them to lose perspective on the college experience itself, and to redirect their energies to getting accepted by a prestigious university instead of finding the right school to attend.

My colleague's usual opening presentation is more than an icebreaking story. It represents the competitiveness in the application process at the most selective colleges. It's difficult for even strong students to gain admission to these institutions, and there are many more factors to understand than you might expect. But the complexity does not preclude preparing effectively for the parts of the process that remain in your control. Like the long line and short line metaphor, this book will help you better understand the selective college admissions process, and in turn, it will give you the tools you need to more effectively prepare for it.

Though it's tough to be admitted to the top schools, it's not impossible. In fact, when you consider the caliber of education they provide, some of the top colleges and universities offer admission to a relatively high percentage of the total applicant pool. Table 1-1 lists the admission rates of Ivy League and other top national universities.

Ivy League Schools	Admit Rate for Class of 2003 Applicants	Selective Schools with Admit Rate < 25%	Admit Rate for Class of 2003 Applicants
Harvard	11%	Harvard	11%
Princeton	11%	Princeton	11%
Columbia	14%	U.S. Military Academy	13%
Yale	16%	Columbia	14%
Brown	17%	Stanford	15%
Dartmouth	21%	U.S. Naval Academy	15%
University of Pennsylvania	26%	Yale	16%
Cornell	33%	Brown	17%
		California Institute of Technology	18%
		MIT	19%
		Amherst	19%
		U.S. Air Force Academy	20%
		Dartmouth	21%
		Swarthmore	22%
		Georgetown	23%
		Williams	23%

Source: " America 's Best Colleges, 2001 Edition," US News & World Report. This data was provided to the magazine by the institutions and represents the acceptance rates for the college graduating class of 2003.

You can see that some of the top institutions in the country admit one out of every three or four applicants. There are other notable elite institutions and an amazing group of terrific schools not listed in the chart with higher acceptance rates, and this is encouraging news. At the same time, these numbers reflect the fact that many students receive multiple letters of acceptances to these universities, thereby diminishing the total number of unique students who receive admissions offers to selective institutions.

The Ivy League admissions data for the high school graduating class of 2001 reveals that approximately 130,000 applications were received and about 24,000 letters of acceptance were delivered, a collective acceptance rate of approximately 18 percent. While some students will receive multiple letters of acceptance, upward of 16,000 individuals will be offered admissions to at least one Ivy school annually.

Admission to highly selective colleges is a competitive process, and unfortunately, too many students in the past few years have taken an analytical approach to solving the competitive challenges of selective admissions. Certainly, there is value in doing research into admissions standards, but I wonder about those to whom understanding the process becomes the end in itself. Avoid getting caught up in attempting to uncover what admissions officers expect in an application. Getting tangled deep in the weeds of the nuances of the admissions process will most likely lead to overlooking the real opportunities to affect change and develop the candidate's natural talents, which in fact is the key to strengthening an admissions case.

Getting into highly selective colleges depends, of course, on the competition and the number of applicants in any pool of candidates. The larger the applicant pool and the stronger the candidates who are applying, the more difficult it will be. Admitting students to the most selective universities is far from a formulaic science, and as a process managed by people, it has an unmistakably human element. To better understand the value of a process that is considered more art than science, it is important to understand the roles and missions of Ivy League institutions.

We live in a world that for the most part wants a standardized and tangible structure of judgment, with standards that align clearly defined inputs in order to yield a specific output or result. When it comes to colleges and universities, that output is a letter of admission. But the myriad factors to be weighed during the process makes it nearly impossible to develop a formula that can account for the evaluation of the various skills and the potentials of highly qualified individuals. That is the goal of the admissions committee's decision-making process, which, as noted above, guides its judgment with educational and philosophical missions of the school. And since there are more highly qualified candidates in selective college applicant pools than openings, meeting these goals each year has become ever more challenging.