From Rejection to ADMISSION

Perhaps my college admissions fixation dates all the way back to my own application-induced trauma of 1978-9. Perhaps I never quite got over that rejection letter from Yale. Now, with thirty years of water under this particular bridge and a daughter in high school who is just embarking upon the same ordeal, I can hear the drumbeats of anxiety starting to grow louder again. It’s quite possible those drumbeats never actually went away.

A few years ago, I asked the Dean of Admissions at Princeton (where my husband is a professor) if she would hire me as an outside reader, explaining that I was interested in admissions as the backdrop for a novel. Outside readers, at Princeton and elsewhere, are trained to read applications and provide evaluations of credentials, essays and recommendations. While I did not take part in activities that are the sole domain of admissions officers (such as school visits, contact with applicants and high school counselors, and – most significantly – decisions on admission), working as an outside reader provided me with a fascinating glimpse into the complex and difficult and careful way schools like Princeton assemble an incoming class from many thousands of qualified applicants.

It was as I read those hundreds of applications, over the two years I worked for Princeton’s Office of Admission, that the plot and characters of ADMISSION began to come to me, but it took an interview with Bob Clagett, Dean of Admissions at Middlebury College, to give me my first real insight into the character who would become Portia. Was there, I asked Dean Clagett, a personality type you tend to see in people who chose to work in college admissions? I’m not sure what I expected. Judgmental? Bossy? Sadistic? But whatever it was, his actual answer was utterly arresting. He said: “We’re all such do-gooders.”

So many things fascinate me about this process. There’s the fact that it is constantly changing, shifting to meet the shifting demands of a shifting society. There’s the fraught, problematic concept of fairness, and how institutions struggle with that. There’s the inescapable challenge of the fact that when you work as an admissions officer at a highly competitive college, virtually everyone you meet is angry at you. And there’s the intellectual hurdle of working in a field where so many of our cultural obsessions (immigration and assimilation, notions of “success”, tradition, diversity, even that supposed oxymoron “American class”) are jostling for attention.

Researching and writing ADMISSION has allowed me to think about so many of the things I’m preoccupied with anyway that it was a particular pleasure for me. I never lost my sympathy for the kids who are fated to suffer this particularly gruesome American rite of passage, nor for their parents (who suffer alongside them, as they hardly need to be reminded!), nor for the mainly decent, hardworking and – yes! –quite often do-gooder men and women cursed with making these decisions. Aren’t we glad we don’t have to do their jobs?