Admit It - You've Got Problems

I've been fascinated by college admissions since I had a long conversation with my admissions counselor at Macalester College about the then-recent invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's army. What on earth, I wondered, having just wandered down from the woods, did that have to do with getting into college?

Turned out, quite a lot. That conversation - that interview - was probably instrumental in my getting a ton of financial aid from Mac, which in turn enabled me to go to a school that thinks of itself as elite and that certainly instilled in me a sense of being privileged and capable, if not exactly elite.

Getting into grad school at Northwestern and getting an even better package of aid gave me another good personal experience with being the admitted. Not long after that, I gathered Case #3 by serving as a de-facto admissions officer at an online university where admissions standards were constantly eroding under the wave action of moneymaking. Unlike Cases #1 and #2, this one sucked, and I'm thankful to be forgetting big chunks of it.

This New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell brought everything back, from Mac to Northwestern to that online school. As a historian might, Gladwell uses Harvard to show how higher-ed admissions - the world of SATs, entrance essays, interviews, AP classes, and so forth - has developed over more than a century into a system which, at least at the elite level, values character as much or more than intelligence. It's a fascinating and disturbing tale which made me feel much better about not even having tried to get into the Ivies. Mac worked out just fine...