What do you think?
Rate this book
Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions
From award-winning higher education journalist and New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Selingo comes a revealing look from inside the admissions office—one that identifies surprising strategies that will aid in the college search.
Getting into a top-ranked college has never seemed more impossible, with acceptance rates at some elite universities dipping into the single digits. In Who Gets In and Why, journalist and higher education expert Jeffrey Selingo dispels entrenched notions of how to compete and win at the admissions game, and reveals that teenagers and parents have much to gain by broadening their notion of what qualifies as a “good college.� Hint: it’s not all about the sticker on the car window.
Selingo, who was embedded in three different admissions offices—a selective private university, a leading liberal arts college, and a flagship public campus—closely observed gatekeepers as they made their often agonizing and sometimes life-changing decisions. He also followed select students and their parents, and he traveled around the country meeting with high school counselors, marketers, behind-the-scenes consultants, and college rankers.
While many have long believed that admissions is merit-based, rewarding the best students, Who Gets In and Why presents a more complicated truth, showing that “who gets in� is frequently more about the college’s agenda than the applicant. In a world where thousands of equally qualified students vie for a fixed number of spots at elite institutions, admissions officers often make split-second decisions based on a variety of factors—like diversity, money, and, ultimately, whether a student will enroll if accepted.
One of the most insightful books ever about “getting in� and what higher education has become, Who Gets In and Why not only provides an usually intimate look at how admissions decisions get made, but guides prospective students on how to honestly assess their strengths and match with the schools that will best serve their interests.
Getting into a top-ranked college has never seemed more impossible, with acceptance rates at some elite universities dipping into the single digits. In Who Gets In and Why, journalist and higher education expert Jeffrey Selingo dispels entrenched notions of how to compete and win at the admissions game, and reveals that teenagers and parents have much to gain by broadening their notion of what qualifies as a “good college.� Hint: it’s not all about the sticker on the car window.
Selingo, who was embedded in three different admissions offices—a selective private university, a leading liberal arts college, and a flagship public campus—closely observed gatekeepers as they made their often agonizing and sometimes life-changing decisions. He also followed select students and their parents, and he traveled around the country meeting with high school counselors, marketers, behind-the-scenes consultants, and college rankers.
While many have long believed that admissions is merit-based, rewarding the best students, Who Gets In and Why presents a more complicated truth, showing that “who gets in� is frequently more about the college’s agenda than the applicant. In a world where thousands of equally qualified students vie for a fixed number of spots at elite institutions, admissions officers often make split-second decisions based on a variety of factors—like diversity, money, and, ultimately, whether a student will enroll if accepted.
One of the most insightful books ever about “getting in� and what higher education has become, Who Gets In and Why not only provides an usually intimate look at how admissions decisions get made, but guides prospective students on how to honestly assess their strengths and match with the schools that will best serve their interests.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2020
989 people are currently reading
4,203 people want to read
About the author
Jeffrey J. Selingo
9Ìýbooks66ÌýfollowersJeff Selingo is the leading authority on higher education worldwide and editorial director of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He speaks on the topic often and appears regularly as an expert on radio and TV, including NPR, PBS, ABC, and CBS.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 509 reviews
November 3, 2020
Disclosure: I'm a college admissions counselor with 20+ years of experience in boarding and day schools, pro bono work with community based organizations, and private international clientele, based in Greenwich, CT, Carmel, CA, and Palm Beach, FL. My intention here is to critique this book and fill in some critical information Selingo omits for the likely reader, whom I assume to be those interested in the college admissions process.
There are a few points from this book I wish everyone would take in:
"'Most of the real screening' for selective universities is 'rooted in the home and school environment of children from infancy on,'" --MIT Admissions Director B. Alden Thresher.
"Colleges are a business [you have very little control over] and admissions is its chief revenue source,"--Dean of Admissions, Tulane
It's incontestable that athletes receive systematic preferential treatment in admissions. "Nearly 8 million kids played high school sports in 2019. But only 495,000 of them ended up competing in college, and many fewer--just 150,000 or about 2% received scholarships, according to the NCAA" (150). Most of those scholarships are less than the value of "a very used car." Parents realize too late "the return on their investment in sports was no better than the discount tuition coupons colleges hand out to nearly everyone, whether they're athletes or not" (151).
_________________
Selingo is the former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and has been journalist specializing in higher education for two decades. Hence, this book is a journalistic take on admissions, not a guide. Families who want to understand the process and procedure of college admissions are far better served by the truly superlative 2019 book by the Director of Admissions of Georgia Tech and a high school college admissions counselor, . Experienced counselors who keep up with the field will not find much here they didn't already know, but families are likely to learn some new information.
Selingo recounts a bit of the history of the elements essential to understanding the institutional procedures relating to enrollment management, marketing tactics, rankings, equity, and affirmative action. It astonishes me how many families not only do not understand that the marketing materials in the mailbox are not offers of admission, but argue with me about it, "No! They want her!" No, they want her to apply, but she hasn't got a chance there with ordinary activities, a mediocre GPA and SAT score.
Selingo features three students, two of whom are "drivers," highly motivated information seekers regarding the admissions process, and one of whom is a "passenger," "along for the ride" (52). He also embeds himself in three university admissions offices (UW, Emory, Davidson) all "sellers," with brand names that tend to attract full-pay students, rather than "buyers," who don't, but we learn surprisingly few details because the process is truly "a cryptic recipe wrapped in what is supposed to look like a mathematical formula" (140), with similarities and differences in each university's process.
Application readers rate applicants on different scales in certain categories:
� Emory: 1-5; curriculum, extracurricular activities, recommendations, intellectual curiosity
� Davidson: 1-10; grades, rigor of classes, academic caliber of high school, recommendations, written materials from applicant, and personal characteristics
� UW: 1-9; academics, personal, overall
Those personal characteristics scores are the way that affirmative action can come in, first generation college attendee, socioeconomic profile, hardships, as the handbook for readers states: "overcoming a significant educational disadvantage, tenacity, insight, originality, concern for others, or coming from a high school that has sent few students to UW" (100).
Some truisms:
� It is not the student who needs to be well-rounded, but the incoming class.
� Quirkiness or unusual hobbies, like bee-keeping, Bharatnatyam style dance, or starting a botany club all serve applicants well. They make for a more interesting class.
� The process is necessarily opaque and intuitive. If the crew team needs a coxswain or the band an oboist, the student who meets the institutional need will be admitted, other elements being equal.
� GPA will be recalculated according to a university's own formula. Some, like Emory and UC, do not count 9th grade. "Spiky grades" with ups and downs are a distinctive negative.
� Admissions/enrollment management increasingly resembles Moneyball, with sophisticated algorithms indicating "who was most interested in the school, who would enroll if accepted, and even how much financial aid it would take to attract them" (122).
� The average college accepts 6/10 applicants; only 46 accept fewer than 20%.
� If admissions officers are skeptical of some claim, they are more likely to defer admission (wait list).
� There are no hard and fast rules. Nuance, finessing, and institutional needs you have no way of knowing are crucial parts of the process.
Selingo only briefly mentions the best tool going: the Common Data Set. In your favorite search engine, type the name of the university to which you plan to apply and "Common Data Set." The CDS is VERY revealing. In section B, you learn how many students who started at X Univ. actually completed a degree in 4 or 6 years. (Average is 60%). In some colleges, fewer than 1 in 3 students who start there finish there. That is a strong sign of unhappy students! Do not apply there.
Section C reveals the percentage of students with certain GPA and SAT/ACT scores, so you can know where you stand with yours. In Section C7, the university lists the criteria it considers important in admissions decisions. Look at the last category: interest. Some, like Berry in Georgia, actually want you to email them every week with updates(!); others (most of the "sellers") already know you're interested; you don't have to prove it. Where it does matter, students should be engaging weekly with the college's social media and website (they log the IP address), emailing the admissions counselor for their region, meeting with them when they visit the school; that person may read your application. This can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection and financial aid or not.
Other colleges don't care about community service but value work. You won't know what they want unless you look. This helps you to craft your essay accordingly AND know about the university culture.
In C21, see how many applicants are accepted in the Early Action or Early Decision pool. Selingo devotes a great deal of attention to EA and ED. ED is not a good plan for anyone who needs to compare financial packages, because a decision will be due before other decisions are returned. Also keep in mind that ED and EA admit rates will be higher because of the composition of that pool: nearly all of the recruited athletes, full-pay students, and low-income, first-generation students who are part of programs like QuestBridge and Posse.
Section G shows the cost to attend. Section H2 provides the number of students who apply and receive need-based aid and what the average amount is. Usually the university "discount rate" is just under 50%. Would you be more likely to buy a car for $5000 or a car that is usually $10,000, discounted to $5000? They know that about you. That's why they give you a SALE! price and make you feel special. Psychology and Marketing 101.
Section J lists the number of degrees conferred in each major, so you know how popular your prospective major is. Some universities admit by major; find out which of yours do. Major matters in another way. Use JobSearchIntelligence.com and universities' institutional research reports on student outcomes data (ask for it if you can't find it) to learn starting salaries for specific majors. At this writing, Bio and Chem majors' starting salaries are around $20,000. So much for lucrative STEM fields.
Back to athletics. In addition to the quote at the top of this review, there's more. "Because they field dozen of sports with attention paid to making sure each roster is full, selective colleges like Amherst or Harvard find themselves with fewer spots for nonathletes" (155). The fastest growing high school sports for boys: fencing, volleyball and lacrosse; girls: lacrosse, fencing, and rifle. The former Dean of Admissions at Princeton confessed that "no hook was stronger in assisting the prospect of an applicant than athletics" (157). And make no mistake, athletes are mostly white and wealthy, major in econ, poli sci, and history, and rank in the bottom 1/3 of their class.
Selingo clarifies another point: people do not understand that the high school matters. Read this article: The Frog Pond Revisited: High School Academic Context, Class. Rank, and Elite College Admission by Thomas J. Espenshade et al. It is difficult for a high school to establish a record with a college. 18% of high schools are responsible for 75% of applications and 80% of admitted students. Selingo doesn't go into the details of how high schools are evaluated beyond stating that officers review the list of students' universities acceptances, but I will.
� What's the median SAT [or ACT] score? From personal experience, I can attest to the difference in high schools with a median of 1020 and 1480.
� What's the highest math? If it's pre-calculus, that's a world of difference from Multivariable Calculus, Differential Equations, and Theoretical Math.
� What % go to a 4 year college?
Obviously, a GPA in one high school does not reflect the same rigor as the same GPA in another, and 40% of all American high school students graduate with an A average in 1998; half do today. That's why we need standardized testing. Unfortunately, Selingo repeats the fallacy that "test results are closely correlated with family income," but we know that is not true. Impoverished Asians, for example, score higher than the top quintiles of other ethnic groups. Standardized testing was found in many studies conducted by UC researchers to help discover minority students they wouldn't have found otherwise.
Here's a principal point: Parents need to be parents and say no. Too many times, students' emotional desire to leave the state ("I gotta get out of _____") results in attendance of a lesser ranked university at twice the price, incurring high student loan debt. They can leave the state once they earn the degree; don't give in! Even massive universities like UCLA can offer a small college feel due to discussion groups, but with vast opportunities. In the past five years, most of my students who have elected to attend small colleges and even medium sized universities (4000-7000 undergraduates) with excellent reputations have wound up transferring to larger ones and are delighted with the difference. That's unexpected, but true. Selingo doesn't mention return on investment, which is too extensive a topic to deal with here, but in a nutshell, if the prospective career is not a particularly lucrative one, it is logical to consider only inexpensive options.
Regarding elite institutions, "At a top-ranked school, you'll step into a river of valedictorians, calculus geeks, and National Merit Scholars. They'll pull you along, or...wash you out." Selingo writes that parents believe the relationships students form "will give their teenagers entrée into society's highest echelons" (249), but it does not work that way. Please read at least my review of Paying for the Party, but the book is well worth your attention. /review/show... Your middle class kid is not going to be going on all expense paid weekend skiing trips in Gstaad with the billionaire's kid. Do you honestly think salaries are higher in some fields for grads from highly selective schools just because they went to that school? Money in money out. Those universities and those elite professional services companies accept most of their students from the highest socioeconomic quintile; the students have connections. They attended the "right" preschools, primary schools, summer camps, boarding schools, etc. [See first quote above]. It's not that students from lowest quintiles will be admitted to the country club set. That's quite rare. Read my review of The Privileged Poor to see how that works out. /review/show... Or, if you're up for a scarier scenario, screen the film or re-read Patricia Highsmith's thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley.That's about right.
A final note, focus on finding an affordable, financially solvent university where students graduate on time, have access to faculty, advising, and internships, and a suitable major, possibly with a desired concentration.
It's surprising that Selingo doesn't address the solvency issue. It is expected that 20% of private colleges will go under in the next few years; there are hundreds that have already closed. See for example the Forbes article "Dawn Of The Dead: For Hundreds Of The Nation’s Private Colleges, It’s Merge Or Perish" to gauge the financial health of a college before COVID. Be assured that their financial situation has only declined. Many had to return the funds paid for room and board when students were sent home, but still had to pay for maintenance and other contracts.
In summary, this is an okay book from a higher education journalist. If you want inside information and a usable guide, see
There are a few points from this book I wish everyone would take in:
"'Most of the real screening' for selective universities is 'rooted in the home and school environment of children from infancy on,'" --MIT Admissions Director B. Alden Thresher.
"Colleges are a business [you have very little control over] and admissions is its chief revenue source,"--Dean of Admissions, Tulane
It's incontestable that athletes receive systematic preferential treatment in admissions. "Nearly 8 million kids played high school sports in 2019. But only 495,000 of them ended up competing in college, and many fewer--just 150,000 or about 2% received scholarships, according to the NCAA" (150). Most of those scholarships are less than the value of "a very used car." Parents realize too late "the return on their investment in sports was no better than the discount tuition coupons colleges hand out to nearly everyone, whether they're athletes or not" (151).
_________________
Selingo is the former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and has been journalist specializing in higher education for two decades. Hence, this book is a journalistic take on admissions, not a guide. Families who want to understand the process and procedure of college admissions are far better served by the truly superlative 2019 book by the Director of Admissions of Georgia Tech and a high school college admissions counselor, . Experienced counselors who keep up with the field will not find much here they didn't already know, but families are likely to learn some new information.
Selingo recounts a bit of the history of the elements essential to understanding the institutional procedures relating to enrollment management, marketing tactics, rankings, equity, and affirmative action. It astonishes me how many families not only do not understand that the marketing materials in the mailbox are not offers of admission, but argue with me about it, "No! They want her!" No, they want her to apply, but she hasn't got a chance there with ordinary activities, a mediocre GPA and SAT score.
Selingo features three students, two of whom are "drivers," highly motivated information seekers regarding the admissions process, and one of whom is a "passenger," "along for the ride" (52). He also embeds himself in three university admissions offices (UW, Emory, Davidson) all "sellers," with brand names that tend to attract full-pay students, rather than "buyers," who don't, but we learn surprisingly few details because the process is truly "a cryptic recipe wrapped in what is supposed to look like a mathematical formula" (140), with similarities and differences in each university's process.
Application readers rate applicants on different scales in certain categories:
� Emory: 1-5; curriculum, extracurricular activities, recommendations, intellectual curiosity
� Davidson: 1-10; grades, rigor of classes, academic caliber of high school, recommendations, written materials from applicant, and personal characteristics
� UW: 1-9; academics, personal, overall
Those personal characteristics scores are the way that affirmative action can come in, first generation college attendee, socioeconomic profile, hardships, as the handbook for readers states: "overcoming a significant educational disadvantage, tenacity, insight, originality, concern for others, or coming from a high school that has sent few students to UW" (100).
Some truisms:
� It is not the student who needs to be well-rounded, but the incoming class.
� Quirkiness or unusual hobbies, like bee-keeping, Bharatnatyam style dance, or starting a botany club all serve applicants well. They make for a more interesting class.
� The process is necessarily opaque and intuitive. If the crew team needs a coxswain or the band an oboist, the student who meets the institutional need will be admitted, other elements being equal.
� GPA will be recalculated according to a university's own formula. Some, like Emory and UC, do not count 9th grade. "Spiky grades" with ups and downs are a distinctive negative.
� Admissions/enrollment management increasingly resembles Moneyball, with sophisticated algorithms indicating "who was most interested in the school, who would enroll if accepted, and even how much financial aid it would take to attract them" (122).
� The average college accepts 6/10 applicants; only 46 accept fewer than 20%.
� If admissions officers are skeptical of some claim, they are more likely to defer admission (wait list).
� There are no hard and fast rules. Nuance, finessing, and institutional needs you have no way of knowing are crucial parts of the process.
Selingo only briefly mentions the best tool going: the Common Data Set. In your favorite search engine, type the name of the university to which you plan to apply and "Common Data Set." The CDS is VERY revealing. In section B, you learn how many students who started at X Univ. actually completed a degree in 4 or 6 years. (Average is 60%). In some colleges, fewer than 1 in 3 students who start there finish there. That is a strong sign of unhappy students! Do not apply there.
Section C reveals the percentage of students with certain GPA and SAT/ACT scores, so you can know where you stand with yours. In Section C7, the university lists the criteria it considers important in admissions decisions. Look at the last category: interest. Some, like Berry in Georgia, actually want you to email them every week with updates(!); others (most of the "sellers") already know you're interested; you don't have to prove it. Where it does matter, students should be engaging weekly with the college's social media and website (they log the IP address), emailing the admissions counselor for their region, meeting with them when they visit the school; that person may read your application. This can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection and financial aid or not.
Other colleges don't care about community service but value work. You won't know what they want unless you look. This helps you to craft your essay accordingly AND know about the university culture.
In C21, see how many applicants are accepted in the Early Action or Early Decision pool. Selingo devotes a great deal of attention to EA and ED. ED is not a good plan for anyone who needs to compare financial packages, because a decision will be due before other decisions are returned. Also keep in mind that ED and EA admit rates will be higher because of the composition of that pool: nearly all of the recruited athletes, full-pay students, and low-income, first-generation students who are part of programs like QuestBridge and Posse.
Section G shows the cost to attend. Section H2 provides the number of students who apply and receive need-based aid and what the average amount is. Usually the university "discount rate" is just under 50%. Would you be more likely to buy a car for $5000 or a car that is usually $10,000, discounted to $5000? They know that about you. That's why they give you a SALE! price and make you feel special. Psychology and Marketing 101.
Section J lists the number of degrees conferred in each major, so you know how popular your prospective major is. Some universities admit by major; find out which of yours do. Major matters in another way. Use JobSearchIntelligence.com and universities' institutional research reports on student outcomes data (ask for it if you can't find it) to learn starting salaries for specific majors. At this writing, Bio and Chem majors' starting salaries are around $20,000. So much for lucrative STEM fields.
Back to athletics. In addition to the quote at the top of this review, there's more. "Because they field dozen of sports with attention paid to making sure each roster is full, selective colleges like Amherst or Harvard find themselves with fewer spots for nonathletes" (155). The fastest growing high school sports for boys: fencing, volleyball and lacrosse; girls: lacrosse, fencing, and rifle. The former Dean of Admissions at Princeton confessed that "no hook was stronger in assisting the prospect of an applicant than athletics" (157). And make no mistake, athletes are mostly white and wealthy, major in econ, poli sci, and history, and rank in the bottom 1/3 of their class.
Selingo clarifies another point: people do not understand that the high school matters. Read this article: The Frog Pond Revisited: High School Academic Context, Class. Rank, and Elite College Admission by Thomas J. Espenshade et al. It is difficult for a high school to establish a record with a college. 18% of high schools are responsible for 75% of applications and 80% of admitted students. Selingo doesn't go into the details of how high schools are evaluated beyond stating that officers review the list of students' universities acceptances, but I will.
� What's the median SAT [or ACT] score? From personal experience, I can attest to the difference in high schools with a median of 1020 and 1480.
� What's the highest math? If it's pre-calculus, that's a world of difference from Multivariable Calculus, Differential Equations, and Theoretical Math.
� What % go to a 4 year college?
Obviously, a GPA in one high school does not reflect the same rigor as the same GPA in another, and 40% of all American high school students graduate with an A average in 1998; half do today. That's why we need standardized testing. Unfortunately, Selingo repeats the fallacy that "test results are closely correlated with family income," but we know that is not true. Impoverished Asians, for example, score higher than the top quintiles of other ethnic groups. Standardized testing was found in many studies conducted by UC researchers to help discover minority students they wouldn't have found otherwise.
Here's a principal point: Parents need to be parents and say no. Too many times, students' emotional desire to leave the state ("I gotta get out of _____") results in attendance of a lesser ranked university at twice the price, incurring high student loan debt. They can leave the state once they earn the degree; don't give in! Even massive universities like UCLA can offer a small college feel due to discussion groups, but with vast opportunities. In the past five years, most of my students who have elected to attend small colleges and even medium sized universities (4000-7000 undergraduates) with excellent reputations have wound up transferring to larger ones and are delighted with the difference. That's unexpected, but true. Selingo doesn't mention return on investment, which is too extensive a topic to deal with here, but in a nutshell, if the prospective career is not a particularly lucrative one, it is logical to consider only inexpensive options.
Regarding elite institutions, "At a top-ranked school, you'll step into a river of valedictorians, calculus geeks, and National Merit Scholars. They'll pull you along, or...wash you out." Selingo writes that parents believe the relationships students form "will give their teenagers entrée into society's highest echelons" (249), but it does not work that way. Please read at least my review of Paying for the Party, but the book is well worth your attention. /review/show... Your middle class kid is not going to be going on all expense paid weekend skiing trips in Gstaad with the billionaire's kid. Do you honestly think salaries are higher in some fields for grads from highly selective schools just because they went to that school? Money in money out. Those universities and those elite professional services companies accept most of their students from the highest socioeconomic quintile; the students have connections. They attended the "right" preschools, primary schools, summer camps, boarding schools, etc. [See first quote above]. It's not that students from lowest quintiles will be admitted to the country club set. That's quite rare. Read my review of The Privileged Poor to see how that works out. /review/show... Or, if you're up for a scarier scenario, screen the film or re-read Patricia Highsmith's thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley.That's about right.
A final note, focus on finding an affordable, financially solvent university where students graduate on time, have access to faculty, advising, and internships, and a suitable major, possibly with a desired concentration.
It's surprising that Selingo doesn't address the solvency issue. It is expected that 20% of private colleges will go under in the next few years; there are hundreds that have already closed. See for example the Forbes article "Dawn Of The Dead: For Hundreds Of The Nation’s Private Colleges, It’s Merge Or Perish" to gauge the financial health of a college before COVID. Be assured that their financial situation has only declined. Many had to return the funds paid for room and board when students were sent home, but still had to pay for maintenance and other contracts.
In summary, this is an okay book from a higher education journalist. If you want inside information and a usable guide, see
January 11, 2024
Jeffery Selingo, a journalist who covers higher education, shows the complexity of college admissions at top tier schools. He takes you inside the process for both the universities and the students. He shows how the system has grown and changed over the past 20-30 years.
For 20% of the college bound students (and their parents) it starts with the belief that a highly rated (“name brand�) school is the foundation for a successful future. You see how this belief can overtake the lives of teens who study ratings lists and define their “dream schools�. They spend their high school years preparing for the 12 or so applications they will make.
You see, the other side. Schools, once slow to market themselves are now promoted like other luxury or lifestyle products. The marketing push aims at getting a large number of applications which leads to high rejection rates thereby demonstrating exclusivity.
Selingo describes the institutional needs such as the ability to field teams in many sports (an admissions niche recently and famously exploited) and balancing the ethnicity, geography and gender (the trend is to lower male application rates), and those with the ability to self fund.
There is data on each admission criteria: grades, SAT/ACT, AP, athletics, activities, letters of reference, legacies, “evidence of intellectual curiosity�, perceptions about the student’s high school and financial need. Applicants know the criteria, but not how the elements are judged or weighted. Having sat in on 3 admissions department acceptance sessions, Selingo shows how these play out when decisions are made. There is data on Early Decision and Early Admission and how these programs provide applicants with a slight admissions edge, and a lot of stress.
The chapter on the role of financial aid was the most enlightening, since I knew nothing about it beforehand. Most students (and their parents) don’t know what the school will actually cost until after acceptance. Then, the information can be vague. Most students who need financial aid, until they get the package, believe the aid will be generous and are disappointed with the actual amount. Schools hire consulting firms to help them maximize their use of their student aid funds.
While there is sensitivity to the needs of the low income and minority students, almost every aspect of the process favors the well off. Even athletics does not translate to minority acceptance as one might think it would. High schools are evaluated as well as students. AP and IB courses are not equally available to all students. Legacies at Harvard had a 43% acceptance rate compared to 4% for everyone else. The self funded student has an advantage when the cost calculus is made.
The book ends with some speculation on the future of all of this. Selingo doesn’t envision a drop off in the overwhelming number of applicants for the top schools but he foresees lower birth rates will force the closing of lower tier schools. One topic not covered is the role of self funded foreign students, who may take those empty seats.
A trend, soon to grow with the parallel trend of free community college education, is transferring after two inexpensive years to a more expensive school. For the elite schools, accepting these transfers might be a way to stretch their financial aid funds. He discusses the trend of fewer male applicants and how the same factors impact potential female applicants.
The book ends on an analysis of how much a top school education is worth. The research is inconclusive.
I highly recommend this for those teens and families about to embark on admission to one of the highly competitive schools.
Now, for an on topic personal experience. In the mid 1980's I was in the University of Chicago's evening MBA program. Most evening students were early in their careers, working for big corporations. The MBA day program was for full time students mostly fresh from undergraduate programs. In that time it was believed that the U of C admissions were exclusively based on grades and GMAT scores.
When almost ½ my accounting class failed the midterm, the prof read the names and scores of the day students who took the same test: Asian name after Asian name with a score in the 90’s. I had to miss two of my evening classes and was able to make them up in the day classes. All the students were Asian males but one. When I entered the classroom the students were quietly chatting� and not in English. They didn’t just outscore our evening class � they did it in a second language! If the rumored grade and GMAT policy were operative, this meant a huge difference in the applicant pool of the older evening students (by about 10 years) and the younger day students.
When I told another evening student about this, he said that U of C business school was changing its admission criteria because if this continued U of C alums would no longer have the CEO positions at Sears, Cargill, Caterpillar, 3M and the other big mid-western companies.
Selingo has many quotes of admissions officers talking about "shaping a class". or "admitting a class and not an individual". Over the years, the U of C Business School (now Booth School of Business) alum magazine reflects an admissions change (or a change in the profile of high scoring students). If my colleague had it right, these "new" alums may not be what the admissions staff had in mind. The glossy alum magazine has only a few stories about alums leading giant companies or advising international bankers. The new, policy seems to have yielded a diverse cadre of entrepreneurs with interesting careers in the environment, media, sports, health care � areas that were not much represented the 1980’s classes.
For 20% of the college bound students (and their parents) it starts with the belief that a highly rated (“name brand�) school is the foundation for a successful future. You see how this belief can overtake the lives of teens who study ratings lists and define their “dream schools�. They spend their high school years preparing for the 12 or so applications they will make.
You see, the other side. Schools, once slow to market themselves are now promoted like other luxury or lifestyle products. The marketing push aims at getting a large number of applications which leads to high rejection rates thereby demonstrating exclusivity.
Selingo describes the institutional needs such as the ability to field teams in many sports (an admissions niche recently and famously exploited) and balancing the ethnicity, geography and gender (the trend is to lower male application rates), and those with the ability to self fund.
There is data on each admission criteria: grades, SAT/ACT, AP, athletics, activities, letters of reference, legacies, “evidence of intellectual curiosity�, perceptions about the student’s high school and financial need. Applicants know the criteria, but not how the elements are judged or weighted. Having sat in on 3 admissions department acceptance sessions, Selingo shows how these play out when decisions are made. There is data on Early Decision and Early Admission and how these programs provide applicants with a slight admissions edge, and a lot of stress.
The chapter on the role of financial aid was the most enlightening, since I knew nothing about it beforehand. Most students (and their parents) don’t know what the school will actually cost until after acceptance. Then, the information can be vague. Most students who need financial aid, until they get the package, believe the aid will be generous and are disappointed with the actual amount. Schools hire consulting firms to help them maximize their use of their student aid funds.
While there is sensitivity to the needs of the low income and minority students, almost every aspect of the process favors the well off. Even athletics does not translate to minority acceptance as one might think it would. High schools are evaluated as well as students. AP and IB courses are not equally available to all students. Legacies at Harvard had a 43% acceptance rate compared to 4% for everyone else. The self funded student has an advantage when the cost calculus is made.
The book ends with some speculation on the future of all of this. Selingo doesn’t envision a drop off in the overwhelming number of applicants for the top schools but he foresees lower birth rates will force the closing of lower tier schools. One topic not covered is the role of self funded foreign students, who may take those empty seats.
A trend, soon to grow with the parallel trend of free community college education, is transferring after two inexpensive years to a more expensive school. For the elite schools, accepting these transfers might be a way to stretch their financial aid funds. He discusses the trend of fewer male applicants and how the same factors impact potential female applicants.
The book ends on an analysis of how much a top school education is worth. The research is inconclusive.
I highly recommend this for those teens and families about to embark on admission to one of the highly competitive schools.
Now, for an on topic personal experience. In the mid 1980's I was in the University of Chicago's evening MBA program. Most evening students were early in their careers, working for big corporations. The MBA day program was for full time students mostly fresh from undergraduate programs. In that time it was believed that the U of C admissions were exclusively based on grades and GMAT scores.
When almost ½ my accounting class failed the midterm, the prof read the names and scores of the day students who took the same test: Asian name after Asian name with a score in the 90’s. I had to miss two of my evening classes and was able to make them up in the day classes. All the students were Asian males but one. When I entered the classroom the students were quietly chatting� and not in English. They didn’t just outscore our evening class � they did it in a second language! If the rumored grade and GMAT policy were operative, this meant a huge difference in the applicant pool of the older evening students (by about 10 years) and the younger day students.
When I told another evening student about this, he said that U of C business school was changing its admission criteria because if this continued U of C alums would no longer have the CEO positions at Sears, Cargill, Caterpillar, 3M and the other big mid-western companies.
Selingo has many quotes of admissions officers talking about "shaping a class". or "admitting a class and not an individual". Over the years, the U of C Business School (now Booth School of Business) alum magazine reflects an admissions change (or a change in the profile of high scoring students). If my colleague had it right, these "new" alums may not be what the admissions staff had in mind. The glossy alum magazine has only a few stories about alums leading giant companies or advising international bankers. The new, policy seems to have yielded a diverse cadre of entrepreneurs with interesting careers in the environment, media, sports, health care � areas that were not much represented the 1980’s classes.
July 28, 2022
There's a lot of pressure on the college years. It's the best four years of your life, where you meet valuable friends and partners and make the relationships that'll impact the rest of your life. You'll learn ancient wisdom, postmodern theory, difficult math, and the latest scientific break-throughs. We expect a lot from colleges, especially elite ones. They should admit the best students, without compromising the diversity that is America's strength. The system should be fair, but also allow for human imperfection and holistic assessment. Oh, but what we really want is the assurance that our Precious Child Will Go To The College of Their Dreams, and all those other loud, ugly, stupid teenagers won't knock them out of a slot at Harvard.
The decision about where to go to college is one of the most consequential in a person's life. And that admission decision will be made in less than eight minutes by two poorly paid bureaucrats.
Excuse me. This is the part where if I were closer to the admission process than a decade in any direction I would start laughing until I became the JONKLER.
Selingo is a journalist and editor with the Chronicle of Higher Education (my source for all the news fit for a Vice-Chancellor of Innovation Practices), and he combines his deep knowledge of the field with an insider's study at three schools: University of Washington, Davidson, and Emory. Admissions is a fraught topic, with the Varsity Blues cheating scandal where wealthy B-list celebrities hired a con artist to gin up athletic admits for their fail children, and the ongoing saga of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which argues that Harvard is discriminating against highly qualified Asian-American applicants in favor of white legacies (something like a third of Harvard is a legacy admit).
Selingo categorizes colleges into sellers, the big name-brand schools that you've heard of, and buyers, which are everybody else. Sellers get too many applicants and have to be incredibly selective, while buyers get too few and have to figure out to fill their classes. There's a similar divide in applicants, with drivers applying to over ten schools, having high parental involvement, and a whole industry of college counseling against passengers, who don't understand the unspoken rules of the game and apply to just a few schools, often with mediocre grades and test scores.
Most of the anxiety is on the part of drivers trying to get into seller schools, and the simple fact that there are too many straight-A students with perfect SATs for all the spaces at Harvard and Stanford. What is mixed good news is that colleges attempt to weigh students against the opportunities available to them at high school, and also that all that high school CV building pays off. The kid from an inner city or rural high school with minimal extracurriculars and APs has a chance to catch the eye of an admissions officer where that exact same file from a wealthy suburban school district would get an instant rejection. Conversely, while you can't buy a seat at an Ivy League school, all that prep does work, and something like just 20% of high schools supply most of the students to elite colleges.
The most important part of the application is the high school transcript. The good news is that 9th grade doesn't really matter, but colleges want to see students taking a hard course load and doing well at it. Take as much calculus as you can, and don't neglect physics and chemistry if you're pre-med. Poor grades or an easy cruising course load can sink an application.
There are a few side doors. Athletics can be one, since coaches have limited discretion to offer slots to otherwise qualified candidates. Amherst (1,855 students) has more college athletes than University of Alabama (31,670 undergraduates, and football as religion). Contrary to what March Madness and Bowl Season would have you believe, student athletes are overwhelmingly rich white kids in sports that no one watches. The impact of student athletics is mixed, some studies say that they have lower grades and are otherwise uninvolved with campus life, while others say athletics is valuable. As a chubby nerd myself, I'd say cancel them all and let god sort it out, but they jocks may disagree.
For the data driven, college rankings like those produced by US News and World Reports are key, but the rankings have introduced their own perverse incentives. Selectivity, the percentage of students who apply that are admitted, and yield, the percentage admitted that say yes, are key parts of most metrics. So colleges attempt to lock in students with early decision, which requires a student to agree to attend a college in December before most applications close. This boosts yields, and helps the college increase selectivity for the general admission cohort. While admissions officers interviewed talk an idealistic game about shaping the class and holistic diversity, at the end of the day a college is a business, and the goal is to figure out who can pay increasingly steep tuition. One secret that Selingo reveals is that for the typical upper-middle class student, merit financial aid is available, but likely only at a "buyer" school, and not the "sellers" that they've applied to.
But the part that makes me want to start injecting Joker venom into random passersby and taunting the Dark Knight is that college is likely the most expensive purchase that a person will make, with the exception of buying a home, and it's done on almost no information! We check reviews when we buy a phone or car, we get houses inspected, but 18 year-olds sign up for hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive educational debt based on gut feeling and reputation. It is essentially impossible to figure out what college costs, until you're well into April and the end of the decision period. Bad ideas driven by college marketing and teenage emotions, like a desire for distance from family or a classic red brick campus experience, may blind families to better and cheaper schools.
The hard truth is that most colleges will be just fine for most students. Systematic surveys show that while high school grades and SATs are a decent predictor of life-time earnings, where you go to college has no effect. The true elite, Fortune 500 CEOs, bankable talent, national politicians, have their own networks of privilege and influence which overlap with elite universities, but which can't be cracked simply by going to Yale. And as much as these schools compete on US News and World Reports rankings, undergraduate education is a tertiary concern, after the endowment, research, and the professional graduate schools. What you do as a student, an attitude of flexible exploration while also committing to a mastering a distinct field of knowledge, matters far more than where you do it.
Just for the love of all that is holy turn you assignments in.
The decision about where to go to college is one of the most consequential in a person's life. And that admission decision will be made in less than eight minutes by two poorly paid bureaucrats.
Excuse me. This is the part where if I were closer to the admission process than a decade in any direction I would start laughing until I became the JONKLER.
Selingo is a journalist and editor with the Chronicle of Higher Education (my source for all the news fit for a Vice-Chancellor of Innovation Practices), and he combines his deep knowledge of the field with an insider's study at three schools: University of Washington, Davidson, and Emory. Admissions is a fraught topic, with the Varsity Blues cheating scandal where wealthy B-list celebrities hired a con artist to gin up athletic admits for their fail children, and the ongoing saga of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which argues that Harvard is discriminating against highly qualified Asian-American applicants in favor of white legacies (something like a third of Harvard is a legacy admit).
Selingo categorizes colleges into sellers, the big name-brand schools that you've heard of, and buyers, which are everybody else. Sellers get too many applicants and have to be incredibly selective, while buyers get too few and have to figure out to fill their classes. There's a similar divide in applicants, with drivers applying to over ten schools, having high parental involvement, and a whole industry of college counseling against passengers, who don't understand the unspoken rules of the game and apply to just a few schools, often with mediocre grades and test scores.
Most of the anxiety is on the part of drivers trying to get into seller schools, and the simple fact that there are too many straight-A students with perfect SATs for all the spaces at Harvard and Stanford. What is mixed good news is that colleges attempt to weigh students against the opportunities available to them at high school, and also that all that high school CV building pays off. The kid from an inner city or rural high school with minimal extracurriculars and APs has a chance to catch the eye of an admissions officer where that exact same file from a wealthy suburban school district would get an instant rejection. Conversely, while you can't buy a seat at an Ivy League school, all that prep does work, and something like just 20% of high schools supply most of the students to elite colleges.
The most important part of the application is the high school transcript. The good news is that 9th grade doesn't really matter, but colleges want to see students taking a hard course load and doing well at it. Take as much calculus as you can, and don't neglect physics and chemistry if you're pre-med. Poor grades or an easy cruising course load can sink an application.
There are a few side doors. Athletics can be one, since coaches have limited discretion to offer slots to otherwise qualified candidates. Amherst (1,855 students) has more college athletes than University of Alabama (31,670 undergraduates, and football as religion). Contrary to what March Madness and Bowl Season would have you believe, student athletes are overwhelmingly rich white kids in sports that no one watches. The impact of student athletics is mixed, some studies say that they have lower grades and are otherwise uninvolved with campus life, while others say athletics is valuable. As a chubby nerd myself, I'd say cancel them all and let god sort it out, but they jocks may disagree.
For the data driven, college rankings like those produced by US News and World Reports are key, but the rankings have introduced their own perverse incentives. Selectivity, the percentage of students who apply that are admitted, and yield, the percentage admitted that say yes, are key parts of most metrics. So colleges attempt to lock in students with early decision, which requires a student to agree to attend a college in December before most applications close. This boosts yields, and helps the college increase selectivity for the general admission cohort. While admissions officers interviewed talk an idealistic game about shaping the class and holistic diversity, at the end of the day a college is a business, and the goal is to figure out who can pay increasingly steep tuition. One secret that Selingo reveals is that for the typical upper-middle class student, merit financial aid is available, but likely only at a "buyer" school, and not the "sellers" that they've applied to.
But the part that makes me want to start injecting Joker venom into random passersby and taunting the Dark Knight is that college is likely the most expensive purchase that a person will make, with the exception of buying a home, and it's done on almost no information! We check reviews when we buy a phone or car, we get houses inspected, but 18 year-olds sign up for hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive educational debt based on gut feeling and reputation. It is essentially impossible to figure out what college costs, until you're well into April and the end of the decision period. Bad ideas driven by college marketing and teenage emotions, like a desire for distance from family or a classic red brick campus experience, may blind families to better and cheaper schools.
The hard truth is that most colleges will be just fine for most students. Systematic surveys show that while high school grades and SATs are a decent predictor of life-time earnings, where you go to college has no effect. The true elite, Fortune 500 CEOs, bankable talent, national politicians, have their own networks of privilege and influence which overlap with elite universities, but which can't be cracked simply by going to Yale. And as much as these schools compete on US News and World Reports rankings, undergraduate education is a tertiary concern, after the endowment, research, and the professional graduate schools. What you do as a student, an attitude of flexible exploration while also committing to a mastering a distinct field of knowledge, matters far more than where you do it.
Just for the love of all that is holy turn you assignments in.
July 14, 2021
Honestly, the rating may be generous because there's a fair amount of good information here on the application process. This book is both an advice book on admissions, a look into the world and history of admissions, and a description of what Selingo thinks should be fixed in admissions. Now for people who are/were entrenched in the admissions process, very little in this book in new. The fact that people were surprised by the fraud athletics scandal shows that most people, however, are not that familiar with the process. The author goes into the admissions rooms of Davidson, U of Washington, and Emory to get the "inside scoop" on how applications are read. Rec letters should be personal, activities should be unified and show achievement, a hard high school curriculm looks better than straight A+s. All these things are good advice, though an article on PrepScholar or some other admissions consulting site could tell it to you in much fewer characters. There's also a bunch of more general admissions news and history that he describes that was new and interesting I guess.
My big issue with this book was all the other stuff outside the admissions room. He periodically discusses the admissions journeys of three students: the daughter of university professors who looks at name brands and distance from home (bad Selingo says), the football player from a rural single parent home looking to apply to colleges without much guidance, and the driven West Coaster who wants to go East but has financial impediments. Selingo fell into the same trap that Jacques Steinberg fell into with The Gatekeepers: they showed little understanding for what the high schoolers and parents went through an wanted. You can't act as if it's completely irrational for some people to want to move far away from home or for others to want to stay very close to home. You can't act as if campus culture and location shouldn't be a factor in your college search because 4 years of your life are going to revolve around this place. You can't act as if parents are misguided for wanting their kids to attend Harvard. That missing understanding permeates the book and ruins it because this process is not just one of finding the best value education, though that of course is a factor. No one attends Harvard (or other name brand schools) for the phenomenal education (though you might get one at some) so much as for the connections and opportunities connected to Harvard. Certain industries, particularly those on Wall Street, will only look at those from specific schools for top entry positions. Selingo acknowledges this point but brushes over it, though for the majority of kids applying to, say, the business schools at these places, Wall Street is their goal.
It's odd for him to be saying focus less on the SAT and testing when the admissions officer say they notice if there's a discrepancy between grades and the SAT score. If you have phenomenal grades at a standard suburban school, that should translate to at least a good SAT score. If it doesn't, it shows an issue. Test-optional (pre COVID) only applied to very specific circumstances, despite what official office of admissions sites said.
It's also a little rich for someone on a college's board of directors to be writing a list of recommendations for how universities and the government should be doing better. Let me know when Ithaca announces it will only look at the first few activities listed. Most top colleges already have an essay asking you to discuss a meaningful activity, so that recommendation is kind of redundant.
tl;dr You can feel that he hasn't gone through the admissions process recently because the book is so aloof from the emotions and personal factors of the process. I still would recommend this to people who know little about admissions.
My big issue with this book was all the other stuff outside the admissions room. He periodically discusses the admissions journeys of three students: the daughter of university professors who looks at name brands and distance from home (bad Selingo says), the football player from a rural single parent home looking to apply to colleges without much guidance, and the driven West Coaster who wants to go East but has financial impediments. Selingo fell into the same trap that Jacques Steinberg fell into with The Gatekeepers: they showed little understanding for what the high schoolers and parents went through an wanted. You can't act as if it's completely irrational for some people to want to move far away from home or for others to want to stay very close to home. You can't act as if campus culture and location shouldn't be a factor in your college search because 4 years of your life are going to revolve around this place. You can't act as if parents are misguided for wanting their kids to attend Harvard. That missing understanding permeates the book and ruins it because this process is not just one of finding the best value education, though that of course is a factor. No one attends Harvard (or other name brand schools) for the phenomenal education (though you might get one at some) so much as for the connections and opportunities connected to Harvard. Certain industries, particularly those on Wall Street, will only look at those from specific schools for top entry positions. Selingo acknowledges this point but brushes over it, though for the majority of kids applying to, say, the business schools at these places, Wall Street is their goal.
It's odd for him to be saying focus less on the SAT and testing when the admissions officer say they notice if there's a discrepancy between grades and the SAT score. If you have phenomenal grades at a standard suburban school, that should translate to at least a good SAT score. If it doesn't, it shows an issue. Test-optional (pre COVID) only applied to very specific circumstances, despite what official office of admissions sites said.
It's also a little rich for someone on a college's board of directors to be writing a list of recommendations for how universities and the government should be doing better. Let me know when Ithaca announces it will only look at the first few activities listed. Most top colleges already have an essay asking you to discuss a meaningful activity, so that recommendation is kind of redundant.
tl;dr You can feel that he hasn't gone through the admissions process recently because the book is so aloof from the emotions and personal factors of the process. I still would recommend this to people who know little about admissions.
December 15, 2020
I'm a graduate of a fancy-pants university, as is my husband, and I'm pretty sure we're going to encourage our children not to take that route, because we are not millionaires. In that sense, this book was sort of preaching to the choir. Still, I'm amazed at how much the admissions process has changed over the past 20 years. When I was a teen, the normal expectation was to apply to 5 or 6 colleges; I applied to 4 and was accepted to all. Now this author is saying to limit yourself to 10-12 options, broken out into the "likely, target, and reach" categories. He makes very little mention of the Common Application other than to say that it makes it much easier for kids to submit a bunch of generic applications. When I was applying, none of my choices took it (in fact, I filled out all of my applications with pen and paper), and I honestly think it's something that the most selective colleges should stop accepting, though they'd probably receive far fewer applications.
Anyway, currently wealthy white male athletes seem to get the biggest leg up in college admissions, where white and Asian females with high test scores and no standout athletic ability are at the greatest comparative disadvantage.
He does run the numbers for people who have put their kids in travel team sports with the hope of getting an athletic scholarship to college. The upshot? Don't participate with the hope of getting dollars, but do participate if it's a niche sport like sailing, lacrosse, fencing, polo, or squash and you have Ivy League dreams.
There are just a couple mentions of Covid in this book because it was mostly written in 2019, but I am hoping that the current situation makes people reevaluate the value proposition of college. $200-$300K+ for an undergraduate degree is nuts. The Expected Family Contribution from the FAFSA is a lot more than most middle and upper-middle class families expect, and the top schools are not always generous with aid because they have plenty of applicants who are willing to pay full price for a spot (and many of them consider ability to pay as part of the application review). That said, he also points out that state flagships are not necessarily always cheaper than selective schools after aid is considered, and he describes how terribly confusing a lot of financial aid offers from colleges are.
In the end, Selingo points out that it's not where you go but how you utilize the opportunity to your best advantage as a student. True in all things, I suppose.
Anyway, currently wealthy white male athletes seem to get the biggest leg up in college admissions, where white and Asian females with high test scores and no standout athletic ability are at the greatest comparative disadvantage.
He does run the numbers for people who have put their kids in travel team sports with the hope of getting an athletic scholarship to college. The upshot? Don't participate with the hope of getting dollars, but do participate if it's a niche sport like sailing, lacrosse, fencing, polo, or squash and you have Ivy League dreams.
There are just a couple mentions of Covid in this book because it was mostly written in 2019, but I am hoping that the current situation makes people reevaluate the value proposition of college. $200-$300K+ for an undergraduate degree is nuts. The Expected Family Contribution from the FAFSA is a lot more than most middle and upper-middle class families expect, and the top schools are not always generous with aid because they have plenty of applicants who are willing to pay full price for a spot (and many of them consider ability to pay as part of the application review). That said, he also points out that state flagships are not necessarily always cheaper than selective schools after aid is considered, and he describes how terribly confusing a lot of financial aid offers from colleges are.
In the end, Selingo points out that it's not where you go but how you utilize the opportunity to your best advantage as a student. True in all things, I suppose.
August 2, 2021
Neither I nor my immigrant parents knew much about the US college admissions process when I went through it mumblemumble years ago as a Canadian public school kid. To be honest, I might not have applied internationally at all* had it not been for my best friend at the time, a supremely ambitious and well-organized dynamo of a girl who pulled me along in her wake. She's what Selingo would call a "driver."
I picked six schools from a paper copy of US News & World Report, all sight unseen. I got into two of them, Penn and Michigan. I went to Penn, as did my best friend in a happy coincidence.
A lot of things worked in my favor. I'm a good standardized test-taker. (My dad often lamented the junk fiction I devoured in my spare time but it nevertheless gave me the effortless vocabulary of a reader.) My public high school offered excellent academic options, including the full IB diploma. My school had also sent two very bright students to Penn the previous year. My parents could afford to pay full freight. Possible demerits included being female (apparently overrepresented), being Asian (likewise) and having ho-hum extracurriculars.
Did I have a worthwhile experience at Penn? Absolutely. I met some really interesting, really smart people; I got to choose from an inches-thick course catalogue taught by top scholars in their fields; I did two great summer abroad programs. It was a nurturing yet demanding place to learn. It broadened my sense of the world, and what might be possible for me in it. Knowing what I know about my life now, I would absolutely choose to go again. But if you ran me through the admissions process again, who knows if I would've gotten in?
Because my sense then, borne out by this book, was that there is a pretty big randomness factor in the admissions game, assuming you're in range on the basic stats. The process felt grueling and it did yield a student body full of kids who wanted to be CEOs and senators and change the world, and future EGOTer John Legend was in there too. But I also met classmates who didn't know how to find a book in a library, who could barely spell, who had never left the state of Pennsylvania. I heard a rumor that some 20% of my freshman class ended up on academic probation after our first year. That's a D-average.**
In the end, does it matter? Well, I'm sure it gave me a leg up on grad school applications. I got into four of six top tier schools that time around. Your education stays on your resumé forever and occasionally it will impress a stranger - as it did in my last job interview. Penn alum are highly represented in the corporate, financial and legal spheres, especially on the east coast. I ran into them all the time (though I don't recall any instances of particular advantage).
There was a third girl who got into Penn from my high school class; her parents couldn't afford for her to go so she went to university locally. She's a hobo now. Kidding - she went on to medical school and is by all accounts doing great.
[*At the time, Canadian universities basically just asked for your mailing address and GPA, and I knew before I applied that I'd get in based on the previous year's grade cutoffs. University of Toronto, McGill and UBC "enroll nearly 150,000 undergraduates. That's more students than the top twenty-five US universities in the US News & World Report rankings combined."]
[**Three of the Trump kids are Penn grads, and they have all donated money to the school. Daddy is said to have donated $1.4 million. I may smugly tell myself that I'm smarter than any of them but the truth is that they're more valuable as alum to Penn and, if you can stand to befriend them, more valuable for connections as well. That's just how it rolls.
Son-in-law Jared Kushner warranted his own paragraph in the book as "perhaps the most famous case of preference for a big-money donor": "Kushner's father donated $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998, and also met with the university's president. Soon afterward, Jared was accepted on what administrators at his high school described as a less-than-stellar academic record." Nice burn, vice principal.
I'm sure Jivanka will be reaching deep into their pockets when their own spawn are college bound. It's tradition, y'know.]
I picked six schools from a paper copy of US News & World Report, all sight unseen. I got into two of them, Penn and Michigan. I went to Penn, as did my best friend in a happy coincidence.
A lot of things worked in my favor. I'm a good standardized test-taker. (My dad often lamented the junk fiction I devoured in my spare time but it nevertheless gave me the effortless vocabulary of a reader.) My public high school offered excellent academic options, including the full IB diploma. My school had also sent two very bright students to Penn the previous year. My parents could afford to pay full freight. Possible demerits included being female (apparently overrepresented), being Asian (likewise) and having ho-hum extracurriculars.
Did I have a worthwhile experience at Penn? Absolutely. I met some really interesting, really smart people; I got to choose from an inches-thick course catalogue taught by top scholars in their fields; I did two great summer abroad programs. It was a nurturing yet demanding place to learn. It broadened my sense of the world, and what might be possible for me in it. Knowing what I know about my life now, I would absolutely choose to go again. But if you ran me through the admissions process again, who knows if I would've gotten in?
Because my sense then, borne out by this book, was that there is a pretty big randomness factor in the admissions game, assuming you're in range on the basic stats. The process felt grueling and it did yield a student body full of kids who wanted to be CEOs and senators and change the world, and future EGOTer John Legend was in there too. But I also met classmates who didn't know how to find a book in a library, who could barely spell, who had never left the state of Pennsylvania. I heard a rumor that some 20% of my freshman class ended up on academic probation after our first year. That's a D-average.**
In the end, does it matter? Well, I'm sure it gave me a leg up on grad school applications. I got into four of six top tier schools that time around. Your education stays on your resumé forever and occasionally it will impress a stranger - as it did in my last job interview. Penn alum are highly represented in the corporate, financial and legal spheres, especially on the east coast. I ran into them all the time (though I don't recall any instances of particular advantage).
There was a third girl who got into Penn from my high school class; her parents couldn't afford for her to go so she went to university locally. She's a hobo now. Kidding - she went on to medical school and is by all accounts doing great.
[*At the time, Canadian universities basically just asked for your mailing address and GPA, and I knew before I applied that I'd get in based on the previous year's grade cutoffs. University of Toronto, McGill and UBC "enroll nearly 150,000 undergraduates. That's more students than the top twenty-five US universities in the US News & World Report rankings combined."]
[**Three of the Trump kids are Penn grads, and they have all donated money to the school. Daddy is said to have donated $1.4 million. I may smugly tell myself that I'm smarter than any of them but the truth is that they're more valuable as alum to Penn and, if you can stand to befriend them, more valuable for connections as well. That's just how it rolls.
Son-in-law Jared Kushner warranted his own paragraph in the book as "perhaps the most famous case of preference for a big-money donor": "Kushner's father donated $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998, and also met with the university's president. Soon afterward, Jared was accepted on what administrators at his high school described as a less-than-stellar academic record." Nice burn, vice principal.
I'm sure Jivanka will be reaching deep into their pockets when their own spawn are college bound. It's tradition, y'know.]
October 21, 2020
Chicken soup for the elite soul. Salingo falls for the same trap many in the media fall for by writing only about elite institutions and upper middle class problems. Although he claims that students should focus more.on best fits and not worry about trying to get into the best schools his examples all come from to 10% schools. He makes it sound like slumming it constitutes going to UCLA. But what about the vast majority of students who contemplate going to regional comprehensives? What about students with B averages or less and SATs below 1200? If that is you this book will be.meaningless. Salingo talks about hobnobbing with coastal elites from ivy league schools and it shows.
That being said, if you are gunning for a top 10% school this book may be beneficial. If you are looking for social policies that address the perrwnial crsis in higher ed this book is only helpful if you care how the elite schools sort their applicants. For the masses he has nothing. He contributes nothing to that conversation. So if you get invited to a book group on the upper west or whatever side of Manhattan then by all means suggest this book. But for the average Joe six-pack this is not the one.
That being said, if you are gunning for a top 10% school this book may be beneficial. If you are looking for social policies that address the perrwnial crsis in higher ed this book is only helpful if you care how the elite schools sort their applicants. For the masses he has nothing. He contributes nothing to that conversation. So if you get invited to a book group on the upper west or whatever side of Manhattan then by all means suggest this book. But for the average Joe six-pack this is not the one.
January 1, 2021
All we college-educated parents know things have changed since we went to university or college in the 80s or 90s, but we know very little about just how vast that change is - even if we recently went through a college search with our kids or are in the midst of one This books discusses the changes over the past 30-40 years in depth, and discusses how and why changes are only accelerating at warp speed in the last 10 years.
This book also provides very specific tips throughout the book on steps your kids and you can take NOW to have a better college search experience, and what expectations are versus what they should be. The author spent over a year with the admissions offices of three highly selective to selective schools, and discusses what he saw in depth.
Takeaways: it’s a numbers game. In any way you look at it, it’s a numbers game.
Your kid might be absolutely amazing (and probably truly is), but that won’t necessarily get them into a top school. The decision whether or not to admit an individual student reflects far more on the school than on that student. Every school is looking for something different, and what they need when your kid’s application is being reviewed may not be an otherwise great candidate. A school may need a third base player for the softball team. Your kid with the same grades and extracurricular involvement who plays first chair cello in the CYSO may not get in. On the flip side, the third base position may be filled already a talented rising sophomore, so then the cello player may have an edge that year.
Schools can roughly be divided into “buyers� and sellers.� Buyers attract the top of the top in terms of students, have tiny acceptance rates, and can be extremely choosy. Merit aid, as stated above, is small. They are the “prestige� schools all the kids want to go to and all parents want their kids to attend. Sellers need to attract good students with strong academics and test scores. They will offer more merit aid and try to sweeten the deal. Don’t be afraid to look at schools that aren’t at the top, but still offer a fantastic education for YOUR student.
Early decision admissions are far more generous in percentages than regular decision admissions, BUT they can truly effect finances. Offering a space to an ED kid means the school has a guaranteed student - so their acceptance is binding. The school can offer less in financial aid to that student. Merit aid at a top college or university is truly reserved for the very upper echelon of applicants, and there is little of it. Financial aid will usually mirror the FAFSA, so if money is a factor, look at schools that will offer more merit aid to reduce the price tag. The price tag: there is virtually no way of knowing before a student is accepted and receives their aid package of knowing what the price range will actually be. This is a HUGE issue, and not one that seems solvable in the near future. However, needs blind schools and schools with enormous endowments do a better job of meeting actual financial need than others. Sometimes FA packages can be adjusted.
With top schools, especially top small ones, being a top athlete is an absolute edge in admissions. The caveat is, however, that very, very few of those athletes get any athletic scholarship money at all. Usually it’s used for a handful of students. Often it’s a $1,000-$2,000 break in tuition. When you hear “my kid got a scholarship in X to go to Y,� remember that it is rarely a large scholarship. If you’re keeping your kids in youth spirits for the scholarships, think again. That money you spend on private coaches and extra training, etc., is probably better spent saving for their future college expenses. If you are using it to boost their chances of admission to top colleges, or because they truly love the sport, then it may be well-spent.
Extracurriculars: they should do what they love and really focus on what interests them. A couple of in-depth activities are far better than place fillers of 8 or 10 clubs.
Essays: be honest. Be truthful. The schools want to see an authentic voice more than platitudes. The “why do you want to go here?� essay means more than you think. Really pinpoint WHY for a particular school.
If your high school has college visitors, and you can’t go to the school for an in-person visit, attend those sessions with the colleges you want!!!
To get into a great college later, the race really starts in 8th grade, when your kid’s track in high school classes are determined. And there is NO guarantee that they’ll get into their top choices. Every kid needs to have parents who are realistic about their kids� chances and helps them with their expectations.
There is no one perfect fit college for any kid. If your kid is at or near the top of the academic food chain, they should be able to craft a meaningful, exciting college experience wherever they land.
This book also provides very specific tips throughout the book on steps your kids and you can take NOW to have a better college search experience, and what expectations are versus what they should be. The author spent over a year with the admissions offices of three highly selective to selective schools, and discusses what he saw in depth.
Takeaways: it’s a numbers game. In any way you look at it, it’s a numbers game.
Your kid might be absolutely amazing (and probably truly is), but that won’t necessarily get them into a top school. The decision whether or not to admit an individual student reflects far more on the school than on that student. Every school is looking for something different, and what they need when your kid’s application is being reviewed may not be an otherwise great candidate. A school may need a third base player for the softball team. Your kid with the same grades and extracurricular involvement who plays first chair cello in the CYSO may not get in. On the flip side, the third base position may be filled already a talented rising sophomore, so then the cello player may have an edge that year.
Schools can roughly be divided into “buyers� and sellers.� Buyers attract the top of the top in terms of students, have tiny acceptance rates, and can be extremely choosy. Merit aid, as stated above, is small. They are the “prestige� schools all the kids want to go to and all parents want their kids to attend. Sellers need to attract good students with strong academics and test scores. They will offer more merit aid and try to sweeten the deal. Don’t be afraid to look at schools that aren’t at the top, but still offer a fantastic education for YOUR student.
Early decision admissions are far more generous in percentages than regular decision admissions, BUT they can truly effect finances. Offering a space to an ED kid means the school has a guaranteed student - so their acceptance is binding. The school can offer less in financial aid to that student. Merit aid at a top college or university is truly reserved for the very upper echelon of applicants, and there is little of it. Financial aid will usually mirror the FAFSA, so if money is a factor, look at schools that will offer more merit aid to reduce the price tag. The price tag: there is virtually no way of knowing before a student is accepted and receives their aid package of knowing what the price range will actually be. This is a HUGE issue, and not one that seems solvable in the near future. However, needs blind schools and schools with enormous endowments do a better job of meeting actual financial need than others. Sometimes FA packages can be adjusted.
With top schools, especially top small ones, being a top athlete is an absolute edge in admissions. The caveat is, however, that very, very few of those athletes get any athletic scholarship money at all. Usually it’s used for a handful of students. Often it’s a $1,000-$2,000 break in tuition. When you hear “my kid got a scholarship in X to go to Y,� remember that it is rarely a large scholarship. If you’re keeping your kids in youth spirits for the scholarships, think again. That money you spend on private coaches and extra training, etc., is probably better spent saving for their future college expenses. If you are using it to boost their chances of admission to top colleges, or because they truly love the sport, then it may be well-spent.
Extracurriculars: they should do what they love and really focus on what interests them. A couple of in-depth activities are far better than place fillers of 8 or 10 clubs.
Essays: be honest. Be truthful. The schools want to see an authentic voice more than platitudes. The “why do you want to go here?� essay means more than you think. Really pinpoint WHY for a particular school.
If your high school has college visitors, and you can’t go to the school for an in-person visit, attend those sessions with the colleges you want!!!
To get into a great college later, the race really starts in 8th grade, when your kid’s track in high school classes are determined. And there is NO guarantee that they’ll get into their top choices. Every kid needs to have parents who are realistic about their kids� chances and helps them with their expectations.
There is no one perfect fit college for any kid. If your kid is at or near the top of the academic food chain, they should be able to craft a meaningful, exciting college experience wherever they land.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 1, 2022
In the United States, there is a great game played by millions of highschool graduates and their parents every year, which is the college (higher education) application. In Who Gets in And Why, Jeffery Sellngo offers insider observations.
In short, Higher Education in the United States is a multi-billion dollar industry. The universities and colleges are business entities and their main goal is to make money. They give your sons and daughters an education, but that’s the means not the goal. It's a sad truth.
The author divides the colleges into two camps: sellers and buyers. Top elite universities and liberal art colleges are sellers where applicants fight to get in. The rest are on the buyers� spectrum, who offer all kinds of incentives for applicants to enroll. Top universities offer need-based financial aid when they need to fill the diversity quota, but there is no guarantee that you will get it even if you have the best test scores and your family is poor. The true name for merit-based financial aid is education coupon, and sellers rarely offer them.
A lot of insider tips. That the rules are set by the universities and colleges, not the parents and students. Early Decision is a mini-game that universities invented to benefit themselves. High test scores are no guarantee. The author offered some tips:
� AP/IB class strength and numbers matter
� GPA matters, the student’s ranking within a school matters
� High schools matter, but they can aid or add an extra barrier to the application
� Zip Codes matter (meaning: can the parents afford the price?)
� Personal essays and recommendations matter. Are there any shining details about the student that distinguish them from the rest?
Why are the admission officers in the elite universities so obsessed with the so-called leadership potentials?
In the end, the author tried to argue that elite American universities may not be worth the money.
In short, Higher Education in the United States is a multi-billion dollar industry. The universities and colleges are business entities and their main goal is to make money. They give your sons and daughters an education, but that’s the means not the goal. It's a sad truth.
The author divides the colleges into two camps: sellers and buyers. Top elite universities and liberal art colleges are sellers where applicants fight to get in. The rest are on the buyers� spectrum, who offer all kinds of incentives for applicants to enroll. Top universities offer need-based financial aid when they need to fill the diversity quota, but there is no guarantee that you will get it even if you have the best test scores and your family is poor. The true name for merit-based financial aid is education coupon, and sellers rarely offer them.
A lot of insider tips. That the rules are set by the universities and colleges, not the parents and students. Early Decision is a mini-game that universities invented to benefit themselves. High test scores are no guarantee. The author offered some tips:
� AP/IB class strength and numbers matter
� GPA matters, the student’s ranking within a school matters
� High schools matter, but they can aid or add an extra barrier to the application
� Zip Codes matter (meaning: can the parents afford the price?)
� Personal essays and recommendations matter. Are there any shining details about the student that distinguish them from the rest?
Why are the admission officers in the elite universities so obsessed with the so-called leadership potentials?
In the end, the author tried to argue that elite American universities may not be worth the money.
March 7, 2021
Fascinating. I'll admit, perhaps this is more fascinating to me because I have an 11th grader and a 12th grader in my family right now.
Mr. Selingo spent a year observing the admissions decisions at three universities and also following several high school students as they navigated the college choice and admissions process. His book is well organized and very readable.
My takeaways:
- Know how much college will cost before you start applying. Going through the application process and getting emotionally attached to a school and then realizing it isn't a realistic option for you financially can be heartbreaking. (And so much about the whole process is already stressful and upsetting.)
- Employers care less about where you went to school and more about what you studied, so pick a school that fits your personality and interests and financial situation, rather than picking based on the school's prestige.
- Being good at a sport CAN get you into college, but it isn't likely to get you a scholarship.
- Lots of kids have great grades and high ACT/SAT test scores. It's very difficult to distinguish between all the applicants. To some degree, whether you get into a particular school is the luck of the draw.
Mr. Selingo spent a year observing the admissions decisions at three universities and also following several high school students as they navigated the college choice and admissions process. His book is well organized and very readable.
My takeaways:
- Know how much college will cost before you start applying. Going through the application process and getting emotionally attached to a school and then realizing it isn't a realistic option for you financially can be heartbreaking. (And so much about the whole process is already stressful and upsetting.)
- Employers care less about where you went to school and more about what you studied, so pick a school that fits your personality and interests and financial situation, rather than picking based on the school's prestige.
- Being good at a sport CAN get you into college, but it isn't likely to get you a scholarship.
- Lots of kids have great grades and high ACT/SAT test scores. It's very difficult to distinguish between all the applicants. To some degree, whether you get into a particular school is the luck of the draw.
May 21, 2021
Well written and well researched book about modern day college admissions and college costs, I learned a lot and actually liked reading this book, despite it seemingly being written to gently crush the dreams of middle class parents with hopes of sending their offspring to top ranked schools. By observing the gate keeping process in 3 different types of colleges and following 3 students in their college search and application process, Selingo does a fantastic job pointing out the pitfalls of the process (not looking at costs up front, obsessing about a school's ranking and brand name), while also peppering in tricks that could help in gaining admission at a favorite school (regularly spend time interacting with the school's website, attend ALL visits from recruiters, make sure the recommendations and essays on the application have a theme and aren't generic). The book was good, and exactly what I expected in the best way. 4 stars.
December 9, 2020
A really interesting read, though Selingo is only dealing with the most elite schools. None of my kids aspires to attend one of these, and after reading this book, I can't begin to say how grateful I am for that.
What a mess our higher education system in the U.S. has become, with all the power shifting to the "seller" schools in the race to garner more and more applications just for the purpose of rejecting them and making their schools more exclusive. I think I am equal parts fascinated and disgusted by the inner workings of admissions offices and truly saddened that so many students spend their high school years striving to be the perfect candidate, just to be rejected by their dream school and to feel that they've failed somehow.
What a mess our higher education system in the U.S. has become, with all the power shifting to the "seller" schools in the race to garner more and more applications just for the purpose of rejecting them and making their schools more exclusive. I think I am equal parts fascinated and disgusted by the inner workings of admissions offices and truly saddened that so many students spend their high school years striving to be the perfect candidate, just to be rejected by their dream school and to feel that they've failed somehow.
February 5, 2021
Fantastic read I would suggest to all parents! So easy to be pulled into the idea that success in life is dependent on the college your child goes to...this is what our current culture believes! So much insightful information about how the admission process works and what’s really important. I do believe all of my children will be super successful because of who they are, not the college they go to 💗
May 20, 2022
Excellent read. Helped me understand the elusive admissions process and realize how subjective it is and how an acceptance vs denial often has nothing to do with the student and instead who the college is looking for.
January 4, 2021
Well, that was massively depressing.
May 2, 2022
Read 4 work but was actually lots of fun! Well written n good insight. Mwah!
May 9, 2022
Well, alright then. I'll just settle down about it all. Even as someone who worked in Admissions at a high end private university (albeit 20 years ago) I found this book so eye opening, informative, maddening and somewhat freeing. It made me feel like our system of higher educations is whacked out, which also strangely seemed to take the pressure off. My kids will be fine no matter where they go to school (assuming post secondary education is in their plans at all.) I only wish all parents of teenagers who feel the tension, worry, etc., around the process of applying, deciding on and even attending college for the kids could read this and hopefully take the pressure off. I think 99% of the pressure comes from the community my family lives in--and I will do my hardest to push against that pressure while not being completely laissez faire about the whole process. I will try to be a help to my children, but also try to be a soft landing and pressure valve release to help them take a deep breath and realize it will all be okay.
October 20, 2020
I really did not learn much from this book. It was an interesting summary but I think he relied way too much on anecdotes and not enough on statistics. I especially found annoying the fact that he makes it clear many times that he has had a successful career "even though he didn't go to an elite school". It made him, and the book, seem very defensive. Plus, he was from a different era. We are now in the era of meritocracy, which has been proven to place yet more emphasis (for better or worse) on the type of school attended than even just 20 years ago. Finally, it was written before but published after Covid. He adds a few comments to address that, but admissions issues are already pretty different. Even though he tried to discuss that a bit, there are many new unknowns that I anticipate will change some of his conclusions -- so I expect to see another book soon, but it will also be in large part based on anecdotes...
March 26, 2021
For non-Americans, you really only have to read the first and last chapter.
November 9, 2020
This book was excellent! This was such good investigative journalism and taught me so much more about a topic I already knew a lot about. All of his suggestions to reform American higher education are thoughtful and nuanced. My favorite part was when he compared Harvard to a Canada Goose Jacket; my least favorite part was that Brown was mentioned only once. Five stars
October 15, 2021
Good in-depth discussion of how the admissions process works. More importantly, the author provides great perspective on the process of finding a college, with essential discussion of financial aid and merit aid � providing the tools to find out who offers it and who doesn’t.
November 29, 2023
I wish there wad a bit more intl student representation because that’s an entirely different breed. Other than that, amazing work Jeff!
March 10, 2024
Meh. I was really hoping for more. Wished it could help with providing the secret sauce for my daughter journey from HS to college, but it didn't.
April 29, 2021
Full review at:
I don’t usually read horror books, but I made an exception for this one: Who Gets In And Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey Selingo. I have two high school juniors and am already mired in the fun process of watching my daughters try to get into college. Who Gets In And Why is an in-depth look at how we got to this point in time, where the most selective schools in the country admit increasingly fewer percentages of their applicants, less selective schools are left spending money on marketing campaigns to attract talented applicants, and no one really has any idea how much it all is going to cost. Who Gets In And Why was written after the Varsity Blues scandal, but before covid (other than the introduction), so Selingo doesn’t even cover the horror show that was the 2020-2021 admissions season.
My main takeaway from Who Gets In And Why is just how subjective and capricious the college admissions process is. Selingo goes behind the scenes at three admissions offices � Emory, Davidson and The University of Washington, watching them evaluate candidates and make increasingly more difficult decisions as the regular season deadline approaches. What matters most � scores? grades? ability to pay full price? athletics? legacies? The answer � it depends. Sometimes a school needs to fill a gap or balance out a class. Sometimes they are overextended on financial aid and need more people paying full freight. Sometimes a less rigorous curriculum from a school with fewer resources can outweigh a student with a perfect GPA and many AP classes on the transcript. There is simply no magic formula. And that is incredibly frustrating for kids who have worked hard for four years and expected to get into their dream schools.
Another takeaway from Selingo is that there are a lot of schools out there that are just a tier or two below the most selective schools that deliver an excellent education, and that students would be smart to expand their lists beyond the brand names their parents have always talked about. There are also ways to lessen the financial burden on students and their families if they pursue “seller� schools instead of “buyer� schools, where financial aid is harder to get.
I didn’t come away from Who Gets In And Why with a clear sense of how to achieve success in college admissions. In fact, if anything, the book made the process seem even murkier. So maybe the best advice is just to stay calm. don’t get overly invested in any one school, keep a very open mind and try to enjoy high school. (Good luck with that!)
I don’t usually read horror books, but I made an exception for this one: Who Gets In And Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey Selingo. I have two high school juniors and am already mired in the fun process of watching my daughters try to get into college. Who Gets In And Why is an in-depth look at how we got to this point in time, where the most selective schools in the country admit increasingly fewer percentages of their applicants, less selective schools are left spending money on marketing campaigns to attract talented applicants, and no one really has any idea how much it all is going to cost. Who Gets In And Why was written after the Varsity Blues scandal, but before covid (other than the introduction), so Selingo doesn’t even cover the horror show that was the 2020-2021 admissions season.
My main takeaway from Who Gets In And Why is just how subjective and capricious the college admissions process is. Selingo goes behind the scenes at three admissions offices � Emory, Davidson and The University of Washington, watching them evaluate candidates and make increasingly more difficult decisions as the regular season deadline approaches. What matters most � scores? grades? ability to pay full price? athletics? legacies? The answer � it depends. Sometimes a school needs to fill a gap or balance out a class. Sometimes they are overextended on financial aid and need more people paying full freight. Sometimes a less rigorous curriculum from a school with fewer resources can outweigh a student with a perfect GPA and many AP classes on the transcript. There is simply no magic formula. And that is incredibly frustrating for kids who have worked hard for four years and expected to get into their dream schools.
Another takeaway from Selingo is that there are a lot of schools out there that are just a tier or two below the most selective schools that deliver an excellent education, and that students would be smart to expand their lists beyond the brand names their parents have always talked about. There are also ways to lessen the financial burden on students and their families if they pursue “seller� schools instead of “buyer� schools, where financial aid is harder to get.
I didn’t come away from Who Gets In And Why with a clear sense of how to achieve success in college admissions. In fact, if anything, the book made the process seem even murkier. So maybe the best advice is just to stay calm. don’t get overly invested in any one school, keep a very open mind and try to enjoy high school. (Good luck with that!)
May 7, 2020
My children have been out of college for a while now but I still find the whole college admissions process to be fascinating.Ìý As a sociology major, I feel that there are great research projects to be done on the subject.
About twenty years ago, an author named Steinberg published a book called The Gatekeepers.Ìý Who Gets In and Why strikes me very much as an updated look at the issues addressed in that earlier title.Ìý
What readers will learn is that college admissions is a complex entity.Ìý Those who are naive may think admissions is all about rewarding the best or most hardworking students but that is not really the case.Ìý There are so many facets of the school's own agendas that influence who does or does not get the coveted "yes" letter.Ìý Readers need only think of Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman to know just how true that is.
In this book, Mr. Selingo looks at the process from the perspectives of three different types of institutions, a private and a public university and also a liberal arts college.Ìý The result makes for a fascinating read.
College admissions will no doubt be affected by the Corona virus with questions about what will happen to campus life and more.Ìý Nonetheless this book provides a keen insight into what has been happening in higher education.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this title in exchange for an honest review.
About twenty years ago, an author named Steinberg published a book called The Gatekeepers.Ìý Who Gets In and Why strikes me very much as an updated look at the issues addressed in that earlier title.Ìý
What readers will learn is that college admissions is a complex entity.Ìý Those who are naive may think admissions is all about rewarding the best or most hardworking students but that is not really the case.Ìý There are so many facets of the school's own agendas that influence who does or does not get the coveted "yes" letter.Ìý Readers need only think of Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman to know just how true that is.
In this book, Mr. Selingo looks at the process from the perspectives of three different types of institutions, a private and a public university and also a liberal arts college.Ìý The result makes for a fascinating read.
College admissions will no doubt be affected by the Corona virus with questions about what will happen to campus life and more.Ìý Nonetheless this book provides a keen insight into what has been happening in higher education.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this title in exchange for an honest review.
June 26, 2021
I’m a grandfather of ten grandchildren- three of the ten are ready for college in the next year and will be beginning the application process. To help them get oriented and get the latest particulars in the admission process, I picked up Jeffrey Selingo’s book. I was looking for up-to-date information about what the process is like and get some practical advice about applying for college. With someone who graduate college I’m the 60’s the admission process is totally different.
Mr Selingo’s book did not disappoint in this area. He carefully explained the convoluted process that is definitely not uniform in any manner. What most appealed to me was his honesty in helping the regular good student looking for a good education and offered them comfort and compassion that they do not have to shoot for the stars and aim for the “seller� colleges that have a high declination rates and are extremely expensive. He makes the ordinary students with no “legacy benefit � to see reality and apply for the college that will offer the student a great education at an affordable costs. Great bool for those students and parents who in it about to enter process. Mr. Selingo has both feet on the ground and offers sound advice and a realistic viewpoint of the college admissions process.
Mr Selingo’s book did not disappoint in this area. He carefully explained the convoluted process that is definitely not uniform in any manner. What most appealed to me was his honesty in helping the regular good student looking for a good education and offered them comfort and compassion that they do not have to shoot for the stars and aim for the “seller� colleges that have a high declination rates and are extremely expensive. He makes the ordinary students with no “legacy benefit � to see reality and apply for the college that will offer the student a great education at an affordable costs. Great bool for those students and parents who in it about to enter process. Mr. Selingo has both feet on the ground and offers sound advice and a realistic viewpoint of the college admissions process.
August 30, 2022
Selingo delves into the multi-billion dollar industry of the college admission process. There are some interesting tidbits on the origins of direct marketing and how the college viewbook came into being. Also, it's quite clear that the colleges hold the upper hand over the admission process vs the applicant, but it's honestly like a game of poker and each person is trying to guess the other person's hand. The author goes to University of Washington, Davidson College and Emory University to get some insights into how the admissions process works at these respective schools. What things are valued in a application. Factors such as cost and mouse clicks have a more important role than I realized. One thing is quite clear though, choosing a college isn't easy and more often than not, you will change your mind at least once. Important to enjoy the process and know there is a fair amount of unpredictability in the process and to embrace this. Overall though, I didn't love this book, and certainly not as an audiobook. I'm also glad I've completed college and don't have to deal with this process again because I'm not so sure I'd get in to certain schools now! :) 3 stars
December 28, 2023
This is a departure from my usual fare, and my review will only matter to you if you're about to go through the college admissions process. If you are, I highly recommend picking this up (preferably by the beginning of your child's Junior year). Regardless of what type of student you have, the insights Selingo shares about what goes on behind closed doors in admissions will help you - not only to figure out how your student can optimize their applications, but also how to be less insane about the process, and how to potentially avoid putting yourself in mountains of debt, by widening your funnel. For me, right now, this was an absolute page turner and my head is exploding a little bit, but I feel so much better prepared.
September 12, 2023
Read this for the second time � but this time with hindsight. (I just sent my first child off to his first year of college.) This book was validating that we aren’t crazy � college applications are absolutely bananas now compared to years past. It gave an interesting peek behind the curtain of the business of higher ed. There are so many various levers students can pull to have power in the process and ways to approach this game. I enjoyed it, even the second time around. I’d love the author to update with how Covid has impacted admissions (especially re: standardized testing being optional) and SCOTUS� affirmative action ruling.
March 7, 2021
This is a worthwhile read for parents with kids from middle school through high school. There are no magic bullets in here but a thoughtful take on all the different things your kid will be judged on, and that each application's fate is decided in about 7 minutes. Just a good refresher for this time of life and I liked the advocacy for expanding your list of possible schools in order to take back some of the power the elite schools have today because they are using it in ways that don't necessarily help a student make the right choice for them.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 509 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.