Harvard Schmarvard

...Anyone who thinks this leaves the high-rent neighborhood college hot list unscathed should gather a group of nervous mothers on the Upper West Side and carefully watch their faces as some are told their children have been admitted to Vassar and Wellesley, and others hear they must accept Rice or Bowdoin instead...

...Duke: 29 percent 14...

...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...

...Last year I lost control of myself when one Harvard applicant, a pleasant youngster with a splendid business career ahead of him, told me he had not taken any Advanced Placement courses despite the fact that his high school had one of the strongest AP programs in the country...

...Nonetheless, Ivy League students have an unappealing tendency to assume they will one day rule the world...

...I was the unchallengeable arbiter of who got into Harvard and who did not...

...The implication of Labaree’s book is that teachers should celebrate the romance of freedom and the need for all to appreciate the fabric of democracy...

...I held the key to the gate...

...But the executive editor to whom we all report has two degrees from Ohio State...

...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...

...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...

...I attended a California suburban high school that rarely sent graduates to the Ivy League...

...She is particularly impatient with admissions officers who do not pay proper respect to applicants from the best prep schools or those with parents who run their own companies...

...I arranged for him to see another, hopefully less biased, interviewer...

...Wherever you go, the place is going to have what you need...

...Add to this problem the above factors and you can understand why oftentimes subtle points are overlooked even though they can be crucial to understanding a student’s academic potential...

...If only she had resisted the temptation to devote 30 pages to what the book jacket calls a “trade secret,” the Academic Index used by Dartmouth and a few other schools to measure academic strength...

...There are ways to tie productive learning tighter to worthy credentials...

...I suspect when she was still an admissions officer she gave, or at least was tempted to give, the short speech I deliver to Harvard applicants several times a year: This can be an irrational process, like being struck by lightning...

...Then I mail the result to Cambridge...

...My mother, a UCLA graduate, was not happy about my going to Harvard, which she thought grew out of snob appeal...

...He thinks the system puts too much emphasis on this last ingredient: From the perspective of social mobility . . . the value of education is not intrinsic but extrinsic...

...MIT: 27 percent 13...

...I cannot wait to use some of this language the next time one of my non-Ivy editors fails to appreciate a point in my always subtle news stories...

...The primary aim is to exchange one’s education for something more substantial-namely a job, which will provide the holder with a comfortable standard of living, financial security, social power, and cultural prestige...

...Flip through the Almanac of American Politics and note the alma maters of the political elite...

...Here are the colleges attended by the first 25 governors listed: Auburn, Yale, Harvard, Ouachita Baptist, Yale, Yale, Villanova, Ohio State, Florida, Georgia, Berkeley, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas Wesleyan, Kentucky, LSU, Dartmouth, Florida State, Harvard, mchigan State, Williams, Purdue, George Washington...

...The assistant managing editor for metropolitan news, who has the most reporters and more say than anyone over what I do, studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo...

...But Hernandez slips, just this once, and reveals that other schools, astonishingly less fashionable, are just as selective as the magic eight...

...Among the likeliest successors to the managing editor, a Yale man, are graduates of WisconsinMilwaukee, Florida, and Occidental...

...Many of them, even those with I500 SAT scores, are far more interested in attending their state’s best public university...

...This emerging independence of educational exchange value from its connection to usable knowledge is the most persuasive explanation for many of the most highly visible characteristics of contemporary educational life-such as overcredentialing (the chronic overproduction of advanced degrees relative to the occupational need for advanced skills) and credential inflation (the rising level of educational attainment required for jobs whose skill requirements are largely unchanged...

...Applicants to the college, sometimes as many as a dozen each year, come to my home...

...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...

...He describes three goals of public education: democratic equality (knowing enough to vote), social efficiency (knowing enough to get a job) and social mobility (knowing enough to get a really good job...

...Bowdoin: 30 percent Amherst, Williams, Stanford, Georgetown, and Duke have long been accepted as Ivy equivalents among those high school students and parents who care about such things...

...But it has been difficult for me to forget my unbidden resentment that someone would dare to try to get by me without the proper pass...

...Michele A. Hernandez, a defrocked Dartmouth admissions officer, inadvertently reveals this littlenoticed resistance to the green doors and sherry in the common room at the very beginning of her book, A Is For Admission...

...These are not yet seen as an alternative to the SAT I, but allied with the SAT I1 they could be...

...senators, starting in the back and going forward: George Washington, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Harvard, American, Washington State, Dartmouth, Wisconsin, Washington & Lee, Yale, St...

...Many] are not expert readers . . . and most of them are not scholars or intellectuals...

...But that cuts out all the still independent women’s colleges, the remnants of the prestigious Seven Sisters...

...I doubt it, but that does not mean there are not many who want to believe...

...What I am trying to say without shocking too much,” she says, “is that the very best of applicants will often be brighter than many of those who will be evaluating them,” Credentials are everything to Hernandez...

...I talk to each of them for about an hour...

...The Washington Post has a reputation for elitist hiring...

...As wellread as Hernandez seems to think she is, she gives no sign of ever having heard of Howard Gardner or any other research on forms of intelligence unrelated to English mid-terms...

...That faith erodes only gradually as they see the widening gap between their expectations and their lives...

...Ivies fill newsroom slots far out of proportion to our share of the American population...

...Class Struggle, his book on how elite public high schools both help and hurt their students, is due out in March...

...The commercial hopes for the book are very high and that sometimes leads authors to promise too much...

...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 I1 defining themselves not by the old standard of whether they went to college, but where...

...Venture outside the northeastern megalopolis or beyond the pricier parts of the Los Angeles basin and Chicago’s North Shore and you find the number of young people seeking Ivy admission substantially reduced...

...You are lucky to be living in a country with the strongest and most open system of higher education in the world...

...Hernandez also provides good advice on what high school courses to take, how to handle the application essay and what to do about extracurricular activities...

...But fice and Bowdoin, despite their academic strength, are not big brand names in Scarsdale and La Jolla...

...They are tests that measure real, high-level learning, and Hernandez is right when she says that colleges are paying more attention to them...

...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...

...The publisher went to Harvard but that is unlikely to have had much to do with his success...

...I have many comforting explanations for doing this...

...When I realized what I had done, I apologized and tried to reassure him that he still had many good choices ahead of him...

...Most unfortunately, despite a few mild warnings against parental interference and paranoia, Hernandez bows to the sanctity of the sorting process with a fervor that makes brain surgeons with Harvard Med School degrees sound like a 19th century prairie populists...

...It is useful to know that achievement tests (what are called the SAT I1 these days) are important, but Hernandez’s murky analysis of the AI, with mathematical formulae and footnotes, reveals little more than that students with mediocre grades and scores are not likely to get in...

...Labaree does a chemical analysis of the fuel that drives American high schools, particularly the Ivyenvy that leads bright young people to forgo the pleasures of a Sunday afternoon for an hour’s chat in my living room...

...To be honest, she is right in tune with us alumni interviewers who enjoy assessing and influencing academic success-a form of resum6 worship that David F. Labaree addresses in his book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning...

...Hernandez says in her introduction that “reading this book . . . will greatly improve your chances of being accepted at an Ivy League or other highly selective college...

...Scrapping the SAT I would be a good start...

...The majority of this group did not graduate from any highly selective college, let alone an Ivy League one...

...My favorite moment is her nose-in-the-air assessment of other Ivy League admissions officers: They may consist of graduate students...

...Some applicants will likely ease their suffering by knowing that a polite call from them to an admissions officer can help when they are on the wait list, while a call from their parents or a private admissions consultant to that same admissions officer can ruin them...

...Every other page bears the unmistakable message that your life may be over if you are denied admission to Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, or Yale...

...Cambridge picks some kids for reasons that elude me and rejects some that I think are wonderful...

...I feel some obligation to Harvard, not so much for the education it provided but because the student newspaper, JAY MATTHEWS is an education reporter for The washington Post...

...Rice: 26 percent 12...

...Sadly, the analysis fails to provide any clue as to how to make schools better...

...At my office, the limits of the Ivy mystique are evident...

...Harvard Schmarvard Getting into the Ivy League is neither as hard-nor as important-as the meritocratic elites make it out to be by Jay Matthews I HAVE VOLUNTEERED AS A HARvard alumni interviewer for the past 15 years...

...If you cannot motivate high school students with the prospect of good jobs or prestigious titles or at least envious looks from old schoolyard adversaries, what can you use...

...Notice that two genuine Ivies, Penn (33 percent) and Cornell (34 percent) do not reach this level of exclusivity...

...You just have to be ready to grab it when you get there...

...My, my...

...I told him I was very sorry to hear that...

...Perhaps Hernandez’s editor at Warner Books squelched any urge she might have had to add this disclaimer...

...I said I could not see how anyone could expect admission to Harvard, or any of the other Ivies to which he had applied, without rislung at least one demonstrably challenging high school course...

...Williams: 26 percent 11...

...My wife is also an interviewer, and I enjoy sharing that interest with her...

...spouses of professors and college staff...

...I write a one- or two-page report on their intellectual and personal strengths...

...Growing numbers of American high schools are introducing and expanding Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs...

...Such welcome developments can still be distorted by us sorters...

...You should realize that with your fine record you are going to get into a splendid college...

...I hope I have matured since, but I cannot be sure...

...and career administrators...

...I said I thought he had been poorly advised...

...Let us try U.S...

...Here is Hernandez’s compilation of the most selective schools, using acceptance percentages culled from Peterson’s Guide to Four-Ear Colleges 1997: 1. Harvard: 12 percent 2. Princeton: 14 percent 3. Amherst: 19 percent 4. Stanford: 19 percent 5. Yale: 20 percent 6. Brown: 21 percent 7 Georgetown: 22 percent 8. Dartmouth: 22 percent 9. Columbia: 23 percent 10...

...and the woman I fell in love with there, changed my life...

...former teachers...

...Michael’s, Utah, BYU, Texas, Georgia, Princeton, Memphis State, South Dakota, South Dakota State, the Citadel, Clemson, West Point, Yale, Penn State...

...It will not hurt to read the book...

...Emotional illness, alcoholism, bad marriages, bad luck, ennui-the red-bound class reports I receive every five years from Cambridge are full of accounts of dreams abandoned or severely revised...

...I say that chatting with bright high school seniors is a fine way to stay in touch with succeeding generations...

...There was nothing he could say...

...It seems silly to rely so much on a test of vocabulary and arithmetic, mostly learned before students reach high school, as a measure of readiness for college...

...Character traits and financial resources bestowed long before they take the SAT seem to dictate most choices...

...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...

...Hernandez defines highly selective schools as any that accept 35 percent or less of their applicants, just enough to include all the Ivies...

...If the Ivy League were actually defined, as it is in the public imagination, as those schools most likely to reject your children, the list would be different...

...I am not certain why Hernandez does not pursue the notion that American teenagers are not quite as enamored of the Ivy League and its clones as she and her publishers are...

...It might be amusing to watch a Fairfax County high school history teacher of my acquaintance, afflicted with a class composed almost entirely of hormone-addled boys, explain to his students that if they did not do their homework they would lose a civilizing sense of their place in a democratic society...