|
In the Spring of 2001,
Prism magazine, a student-run publication of
Amherst College, asked the Admission Office for an essay or
response to several controversies surrounding student
recruitment and the place of athletics in College admission
policies. My fellow deans picked me. This essay was edited
and approved by my fellow deans and ran in the spring
issue.
The Merry Winnower
I'm a Dean of Admission at Amherst
College. It's a little unusual for a 23-year-old. Women tend
to be very impressed by it. Particularly my mom.
Of course, I'm not the full Dean of
Admission. My actual title is the Eugene S. Wilson Graduate
Fellow. The joke title is "Green Dean." I go with that.
First of all, I don't mind diminutives. Secondly, I think
Green Dean sounds a lot better than anything with the name
"Eugene" in it.
Real deans tend to be married
forty-somethings with kids and families. At Amherst, a
surprising number of them have graduate degrees from
Harvard. Green Deans, on the other hand, are recent
graduates of Amherst College. This year there are three: Guy
Johnson '99, Ruby Afram '00, and me. We're the "evolutionary
link" between student and administrator. We walk the line
between the dignified and the irreverent, sort of like
people who eat Frosted Mini-Wheats. Our administrator genes
make us go to high schools and recruit applicants to
Amherst. Our student genes make us play elaborate pranks on
our co-workers with an electric chicken that sings when
bumped or nudged.
I took this job because I've always
had a strange but very positive relationship with the
Admission Office. It seemed to me that the deans had bent a
lot of rules to let me into the College in the first place.
I felt satisfied with my education, and I felt a sense of
duty to repay the favor. I also heard they'd fly me to
places for free.
Is it what I expected? It's hard to
say. The job has "seasons" to it, and I was surprised at how
varied and distinct those seasons are. Summer is learning
the job and playing video games. Fall is traveling to
distant cities and missing all your appointments because
streets in Denver change names every few blocks. Winter is
reading applications. Spring, well, I'm not sure, but I
think we get to fly on planes again, so I'm excited.
The job doesn't pay much, but there
are some nice perks. I get to stay in nice hotels when I
travel. I can eat anything I want at any restaurant in town.
They rent me nice cars and I even get snazzy business cards.
The only downside is coming home. Suddenly, I'm a dirt-poor
college graduate again. I share a house with five people,
take my girlfriend out to Bueno or Antonio's once a week,
and can only drive when it's sunny because my car has no
heat.
The best perk, though, is the
sneezing. See, I give a lot of speeches to groups of nervous
students and their terrified parents. They are terrified of
college, and they are terrified of me. Sometimes, when I'm
feeling obnoxious, I'll pretend to sneeze. Invariably, 8 out
of 10 people will say, "Bless You!'' How many of you get an
80 percent "Bless You" response when you sneeze? I've always
wanted to turn to a kid and say, "Hey! I didn't hear a
'Bless You' from you! What's your name?" Except the kid
would probably die or have a seizure or something, and I'd
feel terribly guilty.
In spite of the perks, there is
some guilt in my job. Amherst admits only 18 percent of its
applicants. We have 5300 applicants this year, so we'll
admit about 850 to fill 420 spots (some of our accepted
applicants will go to Williams or the Ivies, of course). My
point is, we say "no" a lot. That's all well and good for
you; if you're reading this, you were probably in that 18
percent and you can count yourself a scholar among scholars.
I assure you, however, that part of it was just dumb luck.
Right now, I've got stacks of rejected applications on my
desk. Here's a valedictorian with 1580 SAT's. She was a
straight-A student until this year. Her parents are
divorcing, and now she's a B student, so we won't take her.
It's not her fault, but why should we waste a "yes" on her
when we can give her slot to this other straight-A student?
There are so many extremely qualified applicants that even
the slightest imperfection can kill a file. We'll reject 200
valedictorians this year, easily. At least a handful of 1600
SAT's won't make the cut.
The international applicants are
the saddest cases. Most have fabulous academic credentials,
but since they don't pay US taxes, Uncle Sam won't give them
student loans. We're not need-blind for these students, so
we basically give scholarships to a handful of needy
refugees, and then we accept the rich geniuses. Poor or
middle-class geniuses get rejected.
Working this job gives me a real
sense of the broad disparities in American education. One
kid exhausted the options at his meager high school, so he
spent senior year taking classes at a very prestigious local
college. He only went to high school for gym class, health,
and Advanced Placement English. His guidance counselor said
that since he was taking only one AP class senior year, he
was not challenging himself. This kid gets A+'s in
college-level Linear Algebra, and he gets penalized for
passing up AP Calculus. Unbelievable.
My most memorable experience this
year happened on the road. I was traveling in Philadelphia,
my home territory. I made a point of stopping in the small
city of Liston. I've changed the name for the privacy of the
students. Liston is predominately African-American and
overwhelmingly poor. I called Liston High School and was
surprised to learn that they had recently created a small
"magnet" honors school. I made an appointment and
idealistically &emdash; perhaps condescendingly &emdash;
looked forward to finding diamonds in the rough.
Driving through the streets of
Liston, even at noon, filled me dread. I was the only white
guy in sight. My rental was the only new car. I drove
through blocks where plywood windows outnumbered glass
ones.
LHS is a gargantuan, monolithic
high school with 2500 students. Small windows. Metal
detectors. Armed security guards. Barbed wire. The only
difference between it and a prison is that prisons don't
dismiss the inmates at 3 p.m. The guidance counselor's
office had maybe ten college posters in it, none from more
than 25 miles away. The shelves for "armed forces" and
"trade schools" were much fuller than the shelf labeled
"colleges." The guidance counselor was a sweet, matronly
lady. She told me that the "magnet" high school, for the top
200 students, was in the old administration building across
the street. I should feel free to head over there.
My spirits sank; it's customary for
the counselor to have interested students waiting to see me
in the guidance office. Was I supposed to wander the halls
and tack up some business cards? Resigned, I walked across
the street. A short Asian woman, who looked as out-of-place
as I felt, approached me. A history teacher, she greeted me
and pointed me towards an unused classroom, where I was to
make my presentation to whomever showed up.
Pretty much the whole world showed
up. There were 55 students in a classroom designed for 30.
They were loud. They were rowdy. They were unsophisticated.
They were wonderful. It turns out that I was the first
college representative to visit them that year. All the
others just visited the regular high school looking for
nursing students or auto mechanics. All the pent-up college
curiosity that they had burst out in that session. As loud
as they were, most of their comments and questions were
serious ones about college. I told them about the open
curriculum. I told them our average class size was 19
students. I told them they could take classes at the Five
Colleges. One hundred percent financial aid for needy
students. Free cable. Cheesy potato soup. The works. I told
them that, should they wish to visit the campus, we would
mail them complimentary train tickets for Students of Color
Open House.
The highlight of the whole
presentation came from this kid who looked like a gangster
straight from Central Casting. He asked me to clarify my
comments about no credit for AP tests. He had already scored
a perfect five on the BC Calculus exam. Math was his
favorite subject, and he wanted to skip the introductory
classes. Plywood on the windows, and there are kids out
there getting fives in AP Calculus. God bless America. They
took every single book, card, brochure and catalog I had. I
left the school walking on air. We were going to get 55
applicants from this school, and I was going to fight for
them.
We received a grand total of one
application from Liston Magnet High School this year. She
had a combined SAT score of 840. Verbal score was 360. B's
and C's for most of her classes. She was in the top third of
her honors high school with those credentials. I rejected
her. Can you imagine what Austin Sarat or "Chick" Chickering
would say when he read her first paper? It would have been
grossly unfair to accept a student like her. My greatest
success was my greatest failure.
I haven't yet addressed the areas
of greatest concern. In recent years there have been a fair
number of controversies either pertaining to or centered
around our admission policies. The rumor mill paints us in
dark tones of casuistry and caprice. The reader no doubt
wants to know the secrets.
Well, let me explain. We are
willing to accept any varsity athlete with an SAT score of
at least 900. For football players, we'll take anyone with a
pulse. All of our financial aid is based on need; if we need
a cello player, she gets financial aid. We gladly allow
alumni to purchase space for their dumb kids. We pass over
exceptional Caucasian students and give egregiously
off-kilter preference to this week's current flavor of
disadvantaged minority. And we go out of our way to accept
only the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor,
because we think that class warfare makes for a very amusing
spectacle.
Crap. You know it's crap, too. Or
you should know it, seeing with objective eyes. Yes, we give
preference to athletes. We also give preference to artists.
Such people have talent, and we want our student body to
have many talents. Yes, we give preference to alumni; most
of you are on financial aid, graciously paid for by alumni's
annual donations. And, remember, you'll have kids someday,
too. We give preference to people who have had horrible
childhoods so that their stories will educate you as to your
own great fortune. You want evidence of preference? It's all
over the place; no point in denying that the elephant is in
the kitchen. One should not infer, however, that we're
giving away the store.
We are accepting 18 percent of our
applicants. Selectivity brings with it a certain luxury: the
luxury to pick and choose only the very best. This is a
school where one in three was a National Merit
Semi-Finalist. One in five was a valedictorian. Three in
five were varsity athletes in high school. We are full to
bursting with class presidents, yearbook editors, debate
captains, concert pianists and Eagle Scouts. Face it:
Amherst College is as close as you'll get on this earth to
an ideal society. It is far from an ideal society, I know,
but I think that that says a lot more about this earth than
it does about Amherst College.
Yes, there is bigotry here. There
is racism and sexism and elitism. There is arrogance and a
sense of entitlement. There is apathy and cynicism and
torpor. We accepted you all, not always knowing your faults,
but agreeing in good faith to take the bad along with the
good. Maybe our admission criteria are flawed; surely they
are not perfect. Believe it or not, we welcome most of the
criticism the students level at our office. Debate is
healthy, educational and necessary. We know this. You see,
we're intellectuals, too. Quite a few of us are Amherst
graduates, after all.
It has been a thrilling novitiate,
but I think one year is enough. I do love my job, but I
think that's why I'm leaving it. It saddens me to reject
deserving students. It breaks my heart to see bright kids
hobbled by uncaring teachers and underfunded schools. Cream
rises; most bright kids will succeed with or without an
Amherst education, but I can't help but feel that Amherst
would have been a great help to so many of the people I've
rejected.
I got what I wanted out of this
job; it has been a great transition from college, I learned
about the idealism behind the instruction, and I learned a
lot about myself. All that, and free plane tickets,
too.
| 