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

• Author: Mathews, Jay

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...