Synopses & Reviews
From the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2000,
New York Times education reporter Jacques Steinberg was given unparalleled access to an entire admissions season at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In that time, he discovered just how difficult it could be to winnow down a list of nearly seven thousand applicants to seven hundred freshmen for the class of 2004.
Steinberg follows an admissions officer and his eight counterparts through the daunting task of recruiting students nationwide, reading through each of their applications, and meeting behind closed doors for a week in March to finalize the incoming class.
He also recounts the personal experiences of a half dozen high school seniors of various ethnic and economic backgrounds as they struggle through the often byzantine selection process. Find out why:
* high SATs and many extracurricular activities are not always critical
* a student's "story" can either be helpful or detrimental
* one student with a 1480 SAT score and high grades can face stiff competition from another three thousand miles away whose board score is 900 and who has a handful of Ds on her report card
* an officer peering into the application pool is often most excited to see a reflection of him- or herself staring back
About the Author
Jacques Steinberg has been a staff reporter for The New York Times for more than ten years and currently is a national education correspondent. In 1998, he was awarded the grand prize of the Education Writers Association for his nine-part series on a third-grade classroom on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Table of Contents
Introduction ix
ONE
The Tortilla Test 1
TWO
Don't Send Me Poems 27
THREE
Istanbul (Not Constantinople) 55
FOUR
Considered Without Prejudice 89
FIVE
Read Faster, Say No 119
SIX
Thundercats and X-Men 149
SEVEN
Nothing to Do with the Dope 173
EIGHT
Things Seem to Have Gone Well 199
NINE
420-ed 219
TEN
Unnamed Gorgeous Small Liberal Arts School 235
Epilogue 263
Acknowledgments 285
Selected Bibliography 289