Inside the secret world of college admissions.

• Author: Steinberg, Jacques
• Position: Education times - Brief Article

SITTING AT A CARD TABLE ON THE PORCH OF HIS HOME, RALPH Figueroa, an admissions officer at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, reached over to the pile of applications assembled randomly at his feet and scooped up the folder submitted by Jordan Goldman of New York City.

It was the winter of 2000, and Figueroa, like his nine colleagues in the admissions office, was in the thick of winnowing applicants for the Class of 2004 from nearly 7,000 down to the 1,500 or so who would be offered spots at Wesleyan, one of the nation's elite private colleges.

Figueroa quickly noticed that Jordan's SATs were strong--750 verbal and 710 math, for a combined 1460, nearly 100 points above the median of the applicant pool. He also noted that Jordan had mostly A's or A-minuses in a curriculum that Jordan's guidance counselor rated among the most demanding at his sprawling Staten Island public high school. But for Figueroa, the detail that really stood out was contained in the second sentence of one of Jordan's essays, in which he described, almost in passing, his love of X-Men action figures.

As it turned out, Figueroa, who was then 34, still devoured the old X-Men comic books, and even had a college roommate who had written his senior thesis about X-Men. Jordan's fate at Wesleyan wouldn't ultimately hinge on something so trivial, of course, but as Figueroa continued to read, he felt a kinship with the 17-year-old that he had not felt before. And that wouldn't hurt Jordan's chances.

On the seemingly endless shelf of books that promise to reveal the secret formula for gaining access to a top college, no volume could possibly have advised Jordan that an admissions officer considering his file would share this particular interest. And that underscores one of the largely untold truths about the secretive admissions process: It is often far too idiosyncratic and dependent on the personalities of the admissions officers themselves to be simplified or, ultimately, outstrategized. In the end, admissions officers operate according to very few rules.

It might be disconcerting to discover that there really is no way to beat the system--particularly at a place like Wesleyan, where, that year, Figueroa had to effectively turn down three applicants for each one he admitted. But it is also strangely comforting. Maybe you really can be yourself in your college application, confident that there is likely to be someone at the admissions table who might see the world the way you...