A Is for Admission: The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1997 by Jay Mathews

I have volunteered as a Harvard alumni interviewer for the past 15 years. Applicants to the college, sometimes as many as a dozen each year, come to my home. I talk to each of them for about an hour. I write a one- or two-page report on their intellectual and personal strengths. I rate each one on Harvard's 1 (future Nobel laureate) to 6 (potential embezzler) scale, choosing numbers (usually 2s or 3s) to describe their academic, extra-curricular, personal, and overall qualities. Then I mail the result to Cambridge.

I have many comforting explanations doing this. I say that chatting with bright high school seniors is a fine way to stay in touch with succeeding generations. I feel some obligation to Harvard, not so much for the education it provided but because the student newspaper, and the woman I fell in love with there, changed my life. My wife is also an interviewer, and I enjoy sharing that interest with her.

But I have no doubt the most important reason I interview for Harvard is the thrill I get from helping sort what I think of, with less and less justification, as the American elite. It is not pleasant for the child of egalitarian parents to confess a love for preserving the pecking order, but it is clear I have those feelings.

I may be more susceptible to this infatuation with illusions of the meritocracy since, at 52, I represent that large chunk of the middle class that grew up after World War II defining themselves not by the old standard of whether they went to college, but where. I attended a California suburban high school that rarely sent graduates to the Ivy League. My mother, a UCLA graduate, was not happy about my going to Harvard, which she thought grew out of snob appeal. I now think she was right, but that has not stopped me from placing my own children in public and private high schools where a mother who did not want her boy to go to Harvard would be greeted with a tactfulness usually reserved for the elderly or the ill.

As a journalist, I have heard enough life stories to know that Ivy League matriculation has little if anything to do with how close people come to their dreams of power, wealth, love, and fulfillment. Character traits and financial resources bestowed long before they take the SAT seem to dictate most choices. A 17-year-old who yearns to be a dentist in New Jersey seems, at least to me, to be as likely to reach that goal if she attends Yale or Cal State L.A.

Nonetheless, Ivy League students have an unappealing tendency to assume they will one day rule the world. That faith erodes only gradually as they see the widening gap between their expectations and their lives. Emotional illness, alcoholism, bad marriages, bad luck, ennui -- the red-bound class reports I receive every five years from Cambridge are full of accounts of dreams abandoned or severely revised.

At my office, the limits of the Ivy mystique are evident. The Washington Post has a reputation for elitist hiring. Ivies fill newsroom slots far out of proportion to our share of the American population. But the executive editor to whom we all report has two degrees from Ohio State. Among the likeliest successors to the managing editor, a Yale man, are graduates of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Florida, and Occidental. The assistant managing editor for metropolitan news, who has the most reporters and more say than anyone over what I do, studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The publisher went to Harvard but that is unlikely to have had much to do with his success.

Flip through the Almanac of American Politics and note the alma maters of the political elite. Here are the colleges attended by the first 25 governors listed: Auburn, Yale, Harvard, Ouachita Baptist, Yale, Yale, Villanova, Ohio State, Florida, Georgia, Berkeley, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas Wesleyan, Kentucky, LSU, Dartmouth, Florida State, Harvard, Michigan State, Williams, Purdue, George Washington. Let us try U.S. senators, starting in the back and going forward: George Washington, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Harvard, American, Washington State, Dartmouth, Wisconsin, Washington & Lee, Yale, St. Michael's, Utah, BYU, Texas, Georgia, Princeton, Memphis State, South Dakota, South Dakota State, the Citadel, Clemson, West Point, Yale, Penn State.

Venture outside the northeastern megalopolis or beyond the pricier parts of the Los Angeles basin and Chicago's North Shore and you find the number of young people seeking Ivy admission substantially reduced. Many of them, even those with 1500 SAT scores, are far more interested in attending their state's best public university.

Michele A. Hernandez, a defrocked Dartmouth admissions officer, inadvertently reveals this little-noticed resistance to the green doors and sherry in the common room at the very beginning of her book, A Is For Admission. Every other page bears the unmistakable message that your life may be over if you are denied admission to Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, or Yale. But Hernandez slips, just this once, and reveals that other schools, astonishingly less fashionable, are just as selective as the magic eight. If the Ivy League were actually defined, as it. is in the public imagination, as those schools most likely to reject your children, the list would be different. Here is Hernandez's compilation of the most selective schools, using acceptance percentages culled from Peterson's Guide to Four-Year Colleges 1997: