Some Thoughts on College Admissions

When crankjewishguy (CJG) applied to college sometime in the middle part of the last century, he was asked some interesting questions. This was in the day when you visited most of the colleges you were applying to and had an interview with a member of the admissions committee. At one Ivy League school, CJG won't say which one except to note that its name is the same as the color as some of his shoes, he was asked what he thought of life insurance and life insurance salesmen. As a callow 17-year-old CJG was non-plused by this questions and it's only with the benefit of decades of hindsight that he realizes that this was a trick question designed to test how well he handled a curveball. Not very well apparently because he didn't get into that college on a hill and had to settle for another college where they don't teach life insurance. But at the college he did attend, the dean of admissions was known to have someone from maintenance seal the window in his office and then ask prospective students to open it so he could gauge how they handled the dilemma.

If you have college-age kids, or are going through the college application process now, you know it's become much more sophisticated and anxiety producing than in CJG's day. It's also become much less personal. The college interview is a relic, except for the alumni interview, most of which, from CJG's observation, take place in Starbucks. They are easy to spot: it's usually a strained conversation in which a nervous kid is asked whether he or she has any questions for the interviewer whereupon the kid pulls out a few painfully obvious questions about what the person studied, whether they liked the school, and so forth, as if the experience there in 2012 will be the same as it was in 1968. This is usually the signal for the alum to spill his or her life story to a kid forty years their junior who is listening, sort of, but only because he or she desperately wants in.

Once they have your SAT scores, if they require them -- and who scores high and doesn't send them in -- and your grades, it seems to CJG that the modern application could be boiled down to a few simple questions:

1. Do you have a name? If so, write it here: _________________________

2. Have you ever read a book?

3. Do you know what a book is?

4. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest, how badly do you want to come to college here?

5. Can your parents muster $200,000 over the next four years?

That about covers it, CJG thinks, and we'd all save a whole lot of time.