Maybe Now You’ll Get Into Harvard

By Weston Sager | Sunday, August 5, 2007

BOOK REVIEW

Acing the College Admission: How to Maximize Your Chances for Admission to the College of Your Choice
Michelle A. Hernandez
Ballantine Books, 2007

With thousands of high school students vying for a few precious acceptances at elite colleges and universities across the country, high school seniors are becoming increasingly desperate to differentiate themselves from a sea of other qualified applicants. However, it is often unclear how an applicant should present himself. College admissions is a notoriously mysterious phenomenon, and often seems purely random, particularly amongst the elite Ivy League schools. In an attempt to bring some clarity to the baffling college admissions process, many authors from all corners of the academic world have written instructional guides focusing on how to earn an elusive acceptance letter from an Ivy League or comparable school. Adding to this glut of admissions advice—including her own previous best-seller, A is For Admissions—is Dr. Michele Hernandez ’89 verbosely titled Acing the College Application: How to Maximize Your Chance for Admission to the College of Your Choice; in it, former assistant Director of Admissions for the College Hernandez attempts to provide fresh advice for students seeking admission into an elite college or university.

Much like the students who wish to prove themselves in their college application, Hernandez desperately tries to make her advice stand out from similar advice contained within other books of its kind. She touts that her tenure as the assistant Director of Admissions at Dartmouth College for four years gives her the inside scoop that other college guides lack; and while her mole status may attract many an eager high school senior to buy this book, her advice is not the be-all-end-all that she claims it is.

While she never says so explicitly, this book is undeniably geared towards your run-of-the-mill overachieving Caucasian suburbanite. Because of institutionalized affirmative action based on ethnicity and, to a degree, income, the prototypical rich white kid has one of the hardest paths en route to an Ivy League or comparable school. Under these now firmly engrained admissions criteria, a poor or ethnically diverse candidate will have the admissions advantage over a wealthy or ethnically bland candidate with a comparable academic record. Similarly, an exceptional student athlete with commendable test scores will be a more sought after commodity than a non-athlete candidate with superior academic standing. Legacies and famous people can also slip into such an elite school because of their investment potential for the college (see Brooke Shields’s tenure at Princeton). It is the overachieving upper-middle class white or Asian student (or, as they say in admissions-speak, the “nontagged applicant”) who has the hardest time differentiating himself from the crowded field of similarly qualified students, and this is precisely the demographic to which Hernandez writes.

While Hernandez encourages all students who are applying to the “selective or highly selective category” of colleges to read her book, she makes perfectly clear that if a student does not have the appropriate qualifications for a first-tier school, this book is not going to help. Hernandez writes frankly about the admissions process, which may be just the dosage of reality that many starry-eyed high school seniors need before blithely applying to Harvard with a 3.5 GPA and middling SAT scores. This book is for academic heavy-hitters with a slew of extracurricular activities only. Without a foundation of exceptional accomplishments, Hernandez affirms that a student doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting into an elite college.

Even though an admissions officer might encourage a student to apply to their school during a campus visit, this does not necessarily mean that the student has a good chance of getting into the school. In fact, admissions officers often tell underwhelming students to apply, just to improve the school’s admissions statistics. These “one-reader rejects” are fodder for the admissions office, and help to lower the college’s acceptance rate, which boosts its overall ranking.

Assuming that a student is coming from an overachieving background, Hernandez provides sensible advice. Hernandez focuses on the Common Application, the basic college application that is now accepted at over 300 undergraduate institutions nationwide. The “Common App,” as it is known among students and guidance counselors, is now the only application accepted for such elite schools as Harvard, Middlebury, and Dartmouth (even though most of these schools require a supplemental application in addition to the Common App). Due to the prevalence of the Common App at many first tier colleges, Hernandez devotes the vast majority of this book to examining the application from every conceivable angle.

So what is the admissions office looking for according to Hernandez? Two words that anyone familiar with applying to college will be intimately familiar with: initiative and passion, or: a hook. Hernandez explains that twenty or so years ago colleges accepted the archetypal well-rounded student, one who was bright, athletic, and sociable. Since the nineties, the era of the “creative loner,” admissions offices now look for odd-ball applicants.

The well-rounded student body has dizzyingly taken the place of a student body comprised of well-rounded students. Those applicants with a singular “passion” and the “initiative” to string one particular activity through his corpus of extracurriculars will have the advantage over a student who dabbles in a diverse range of activities but fails to specialize in any one thing. But this raises a question: why is a liberal arts institution, such as Dartmouth, which prides itself on a diverse, well-rounded education, accepting students who have already pigeon-holed themselves into one or two major activities?

The answer lies in bragging-rights. An elite college loves to boast about the exceptional individuals in its student body. When a college describes its freshman class, they will cover the basic statistics, such as the number of valedictorians and the average SAT score, but they will also mention the class’ stand-out students, ones that are the best in their respective fields. The more exceptional students a college accepts, the better the college’s reputation. So, if you are a high school student interested in getting into an Ivy League school, pick an activity (the stranger the better) and devote your life to it. Dartmouth could really use a world-class curler.

But even with a superlative skill, without a solid academic record, your chances of admittance into an elite college are low. Colleges are primarily looking for what Hernandez describes as “intellectual firepower.” Roughly seventy percent of the application is based on academic performance, which includes a combination of class rank, grade point average, SAT/ACT scores, Advanced Placement scores, and academic awards. Because academics are weighted so heavily in the college application, Hernandez advises incorporating the academic record into every facet of the application. Even in your main essay, Hernandez recommends discussing some sort of academic achievement. Many of the student sample essays she presents are nostalgic about an academic life-changing experience. While often tedious to get through, these essays are (apparently) the type that admissions officers look for.

More irritating is when Hernandez mentions her personal achievements in this book. Perhaps after reading thousands of applications about exceptional students she feels the desire to draw attention to her own achievements to compensate for a perceived inferiority. Though one reason for buying this book is Hernandez’s qualifications as a scholar and an admissions dean, her accomplishments in classics and Aristotelian mathematics have no place within the context of this book.

Apart from these minor asides, Hernandez does a thorough job of advising the reader about every conceivable aspect of the admissions process. As mentioned earlier, the Common App is her focus, and she covers this form in exacting detail. Additionally, Hernandez discusses strategies for both the on-campus interview and the alumni interview, what to do if put on the waitlist, and how to handle an oddball essay topic (like those famously posed by University of Chicago). For the latter, the sample essay she provides is easily the most entertaining essay in the book, wherein the student describes why he would be a good fit for the University of Chicago… mathematically.

Where this book is superior to others of its kind is that it acknowledges that the application can look almost too good. Hernandez, as both an admissions dean and a private college counselor, knows that the admissions office wants to see a clean application free of typographical errors, but they also do not want to read over an application that appears lifeless (or, even worse, appears to have been created by a college counselor like Hernandez). Thus, she recommends filling out portions of the application with the student’s own handwriting, even if there are splotches of white-out on the page. This way, the application looks to have been filled out by the student, rather than by his parent’s secretary.

As one would expect, the vast majority of this book revolves around putting together a college application, but Hernandez provides insightful commentary on the flaws of the college admissions process. Interestingly, Hernandez does not have a problem with the concept of applying “Early Action” as it stands right now—that is, applying one month early to a college, and hearing back from the school in December rather than April. Oftentimes, you can only apply to one school; and to schools that offer “Early Decision,” if accepted, the student must matriculate. She understands that many colleges use early acceptance to guarantee that they have the appropriate SAT scores and number of valedictorians to ensure a favorable ranking in college guides such as U.S. News and World Report.

Her problem lies with the regular decision process. Students typically file eight to ten applications, with each application going to a different college. Colleges have to sort through these applications and pick the best students for their institution while deferring the less-qualified students to be picked up by other schools, but this is not as easy as it sounds. If every admissions office accepted the top students in each applicant pool, then a second-tier school (or even a lower first-tier school) would have the identical student overlap with Harvard or Dartmouth. Because most students won’t choose a second-tier school over an Ivy League school, the majority of those top-notch acceptances would not enroll in the second tier school. Thus, many overqualified students are rejected from these not-quite-elite colleges because the admissions office knows that it is likely they will not enroll at their institution.

Instead of the status quo, Hernandez proposes a tiered system of applications, wherein a student would submit one application with a list of schools in order of preference. The student would submit his application directly to his top-choice school, and then this application would be examined one-by-one according to the list the student provided. If the first-choice school accepted the student, the process would end and he would enroll there. If that school found the student unfit for admission, the application would be passed down through the admissions office to the student’s second choice and so on.

While this institutional change would streamline the system for admissions offices across the country, it would also make the student’s life a bit more complicated. Often times, students have a hard time deciding what school to go to until late in their senior year, and wait until they receive their acceptance letters before reaching a decision. Additionally, a student submitting his application to a college might be at a disadvantage if that college is lower on his list than another, similarly qualified candidate. This might lead to altering the preference list strategically, and may not accurately reflect the student’s true preferences. Also, the “why paragraph,” which asks a student why he would be a good match for the school, would have to be eliminated from all college applications for obvious reasons. This would lead to the possibility of accepting students that know next to nothing about the school. Not to mention, students would not be able to compare financial aid or scholarship packages—sometimes, a student will be accepted to an Ivy League school who offers him a modest financial aid package, but will choose a second or third tier school above the Ivy League because the second or third tier school offers to pay the student’s full (or near full) tuition. Still, a process such as the one Hernandez proposes would be innovative, and anything to demystify or neaten college admissions would be a welcomed change.

Luckily for most of us, we no longer have to worry about the archaic world of college admissions. Most real-world jobs are largely devoid of the nonsense on which college admissions is based upon. However, many people still have to trudge through the charade of college admissions in order to enter the gates of an academic institution such as throughout the process regardless of what may happen to you, make sure to list all of your achievements truthfully, etc. Hernandez is right when she says that trying to “summarize everything important that you’ve done in the first seventeen years or so into just a few pages” is challenging, particularly for those “nontagged applicants” who are qualified for an elite school, but need an extra boost to separate themselves from the pack. Using Hernandez’s book as a reference guide would be valuable for a prospective college student due to its insider perspective and thoroughness of advice. However, if one decides to use reference books such as these when submitting an application, it would be wise to cross-reference with other books of this genre in order to get the best advice possible, for while Hernandez may have been an admissions dean, her experience does not reflect the entirety of the college admissions sphere.

Maybe Now You’ll Get Into Harvard

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