The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College - Softcover

Steinberg, Jacques

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142003085 ISBN 13: 9780142003084

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

In the fall of 1999, New York Times education reporter Jacques Steinberg was given an unprecedented opportunity to observe the admissions process at prestigious Wesleyan University. Over the course of nearly a year, Steinberg accompanied admissions officer Ralph Figueroa on a tour to assess and recruit the most promising students in the country. The Gatekeepers follows a diverse group of prospective students as they compete for places in the nation's most elite colleges. The first book to reveal the college admission process in such behind-the-scenes detail, The Gatekeepers will be required reading for every parent of a high school-age child and for every student facing the arduous and anxious task of applying to college.

"[The Gatekeepers] provides the deep insight that is missing from the myriad how-to books on admissions that try to identify the formula for getting into the best colleges...I really didn't want the book to end." —The New York Times

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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One

The Tortilla Test

The lime-green Saturn raced along the winding roads of northern New Jersey, past trees strung with leaves that glowed tangerine, gold and maroon. But the driver was too preoccupied to notice the glorious foliage, his eyes continually darting to the passenger seat. There he had laid out travel directions printed from the Internet, along with a well-worn road atlas pocked with green asterisks spread across a half dozen states. Each designated a community that he had visited previously.

On that bracing morning in early November of 1999, Ralph Figueroa was beginning his fifth year as an admissions officer at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, one of the nation's premier liberal arts colleges. But from the vantage point of a passing driver, Ralph was just another motorist wearing a gray wool suit, white starched shirt and deep red tie. He sat hunched over the wheel of a rental car that was too small to contain his body, which unfolded to more than six feet and weighed well over two hundred pounds. With his thick, blown-back black hair, which he had neatly arranged at a Courtyard by Marriott just after daybreak, Ralph looked like someone on his way to sell a $350 vacuum cleaner, rather than the product of a $35,000-a-year education that came with the unwritten guarantee of a happy and meaningful life.

At ten-thirty, a few minutes early as usual, Ralph pulled up in front of Northern Valley Regional High School in Demarest, a boxy, tan-brick public school that looked nothing like the private Tudor-style academy that he had left a half hour before. This was his second sales call of the day, and one of four visits that he had scheduled within a fifty-mile radius. He had allotted just six hours for the day's work, so he would have to speak quickly. As he moved purposefully past green-tiled walls and gray lockers on the way to the guidance office, he fumbled to pin on a plastic badge embossed with his name and that of Wesleyan in big letters.

The popular image of university admissions officers is not unlike that of Hollywood studio executives. Both are assumed to spend most days sitting imperiously behind desks well out of reach of the general public, from which they deign to approve only a fraction of the endless series of pitches that are presented to them in rapid-fire succession. But to the handful of seniors and juniors who sat around a conference table that autumn morning listening to this smiling emissary on leave from his ivory tower, the message was unmistakable: Wesleyan Wants You! The university's gates, it seemed, had been flung wide open. And here, before their very eyes, was one of the gatekeepers who could escort them in.

From his seat beneath a giant map of the United States that a guidance counselor had labeled "College Acceptances"-so far, it had only one pin pushed into it, in the vicinity of Wilkes University in the Pocono Mountains-Ralph belied the familiar notion of admissions officer as intimidator. His voice was as soothing as a pediatrician's. He urged them to call him Ralph, not Rafael, his given name, and certainly not Mr. Figueroa.

The pitch Ralph delivered to his small audience seemed to promise that Wesleyan could fulfill virtually anyone's fantasy of higher education, if only the students would give the university the chance. And just to make sure that the students kept a vivid snapshot of the Connecticut campus projected on the screens in their minds, the university had sent along piles of posters of a Wesleyan landmark, Foss Hill, photographed on a fall day as beautiful as this one.

Even a devoted alumnus might not have noticed that the creaky football bleachers had been digitally removed, as had the many patches of brown dead turf. Instead, the late-fall grounds had the freshly tended appearance of the infield at Fenway Park. While the poster made a good first impression, some applicants would be disappointed when they saw the real thing. The curriculum, as described by Ralph, sometimes received a similar gloss.

"One of the first things to remember about the university is that there are no requirements," Ralph told the assembled group, tantalizing them with the prospect of never again having to take a dreaded subject like math or chemistry. "Wesleyan stresses a real-world approach."

Moreover, Ralph explained, while other institutions had begun only recently to appreciate and celebrate the differences among students, "We started our focus on diversity in 1965."

"That's the year I was born," he said, before adding that thirty-four years was indeed "a long time ago."

Almost immediately, the students' hands shot up. Would there be opportunities at Wesleyan to perform in a musical? one girl asked.

"Wesleyan does a lot of theater," Ralph responded. He mentioned that a first-string quarterback had played the lead in a recent production of Sweeney Todd, and that Wesleyan had a disproportionate share of alumni working in Hollywood. They included the writer of Batman Forever, the director of American Pie and the actor William Christopher, who, Ralph assured his listeners, would be well known to their parents as Father Mulcahy on M*A*S*H.

Just then a girl interrupted: Was the biology department any good?

"The physical sciences faculty does more research than just about any other liberal arts college," Ralph said. "Haverford beat us," he added. "But don't tell anyone."

Was there enough time for students at Wesleyan to study and to play sports?

"We want students to be scholar-athletes," Ralph said. Nearly two-thirds of Wesleyan undergraduates played an intramural or team sport. "The only thing that students do more of than sports at Wesleyan is community service."

How's the food?

One of the high school seniors, who had already visited a friend on the Wesleyan campus, answered before Ralph could. "There's always free frozen yogurt in the cafeteria," she said, describing the unique donation of a wealthy alumnus with a sweet tooth.

"Ice cream, too," Ralph added, sounding like Willie Wonka beckoning kids to the chocolate factory.

How fast are the Internet connections?

"Very fast," Ralph said.

Were there cable television jacks in the dorm rooms?

Ralph smiled. "There actually are," he said.

Only two questions drew answers that dimmed the Technicolor portrait that Ralph was painting that morning. But, then, an admissions officer from almost any other college would have had to give the same responses, if he or she was being honest.

One was posed by a serious-looking boy, who inquired: "Do you have any Nobel Prize winners on the faculty?"

"We don't have any Nobels," Ralph admitted, momentarily taken aback. "But we do have professors who have won Guggenheim and MacArthur and other grants."

The boy had been advised by his father, a Yale-educated ophthalmologist, to ask Ralph this question, and was obviously unimpressed.

The other tough question was a follow-up to Ralph's earlier point about diversity.
"Do the races mix?" he was asked.

"Yes and no," Ralph answered. Wesleyan had acquired nicknames like "PCU" and
"Diversity U" by attracting and admitting more black and Hispanic students than nearly any other top school, Ralph told his audience. "People think it's a place where students are holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya.' "

But, he had to acknowledge, "There is a tension. It's a process to address these issues and forge a community. Students will mix together one moment, only to segregate afterward."

And then, nearly an hour after his sales call had begun, it was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0142003085
• ISBN 13: 9780142003084
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland