The following winter, the mailroom at the back of the Wesleyan admissions office filled with more applications for the Class of 2005 than it had for the Class of 2004, breaking through what had once been the unimaginable psychological barrier of seven thousand. Many of Wesleyan’s competitors also received more mail in that winter of 2001. While the piles of envelopes weren’t collecting at the same rate as during the frenzy of the late 1990s, Wesleyan and its competitors still anticipated growing in popularity for another decade, at which point enrollment at high schools across the country was projected to begin leveling off and to eventually drop. But early in the new century, there were already indications that applications to elite colleges might continue to rise even as the number of high school graduates decreased. Neither the slowing economy of 2001—which shrank colleges’ bank accounts, as well as parents’—nor the terrorist attacks of September 11 were powerful enough factors to deter record numbers of American teenagers from seeking to attend marquee colleges. The opportunity to compete for the privilege of receiving such an education remained too enticing.
In the spring of 2002, two years after the Class of 2004 had been admitted, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Kenyon and Vassar, among other institutions, reported yet again shattering the previous year’s total number of applications. Columbia and NYU were among the few highly selective universities that experienced decreases, but those losses were thought to be largely attributable to the skittishness of some high school seniors to relocate to New York City so soon after the collapse of the World Trade Center. That, however, did not explain why Wesleyan, situated one hundred miles north of Manhattan, received about five hundred fewer applications for the Class of 2006 than it had for the Class of 2005—its first drop in four years.
As concerned as she was curious, Nancy placed phone calls that spring to a number of guidance counselors and quickly calculated that about half of the loss could be traced to those public and private high schools like Harvard-Westlake that had been Wesleyan’s most reliable feeders. The counselors reported to Nancy that some seniors who might have been expected to apply to Wesleyan in past years had decided on their own not to even try that year because they had learned how competitive the university had become—and because they feared that their SAT scores or grades might not be up to par. In previous years, other premier colleges had experienced similar plateaus for similar reasons. And yet while Wesleyan had not received applications that winter from some of the lower performing seniors at its top feeder schools, it had continued to draw the highest rated applicants. Indeed, the median SAT scores of its applicant pool for the Class of 2006 were actually higher than in any other year.
The drop in applications, however much it may have eased the reading workload in the admissions office, did not dissuade Nancy from continuing to pursue a change in policy that she had instituted in the fall of 2000, as the Class of 2004 had taken its place on campus and she had approached her one-year anniversary as dean of admission and financial aid. Nancy decided then that the crush of applications for the Class of 2004 had pushed her and her nine-member staff to the breaking point. With the fresh perspective of an outsider who now had a sense of how Wesleyan worked, she decided that the procedures that had served the university so well in the past would have to be amended. Wesleyan, for example, had long taken great pride in the notion that the dean—or, in the case of the past year, the new dean working with an interim director—had made the final decision on every applicant whose case was not voted on by the committee. That meant judging nearly six thousand applications, and she and Greg had made most of those calls in the span of just a few weeks at the end of the reading season. Now that Nancy had a year’s experience under her belt, she would be on her own.
To apportion that burden, Nancy initiated a new policy: beginning with the selection of the Class of 2005, the four members of her staff with the most seniority—including Ralph—would be responsible for recommending a final decision on each application submitted from within their geographic regions. The senior officer would have to consult the junior officer in the region—in Ralph’s case, that was Rod—but the final recommendation was the senior officer’s, including whether he or she felt the committee should be consulted. While an officer chosen at random would still read each application first, and Nancy would review all the decisions, she would change a decision only in the most extraordinary circumstances. (One reason Nancy might intervene would be if she perceived that the students in one region were being held to a different standard than those in another.) The sheer number of applications that Wesleyan was receiving dictated that the dean could no longer give each application the same scrutiny she had in the past. And because Wesleyan spent so much time and money trying to woo more applicants every year, the admissions office was at least partly responsible for putting in motion the events that forced the change.
There was no way to predict in advance whether a particular applicant would benefit or suffer as a result of the new policy, as compared to the old. But now more than ever, an applicant’s fate at Wesleyan hinged on the personality, interests and judgment of the senior admissions officer assigned to his or her high school. Had the new system been in place when Becca Jannol applied to Wesleyan, for example, she probably would have been admitted in the main round, since her champion, Ralph Figueroa, would have had the power to make it happen.
But with new opportunities to say yes, Ralph also had more authority to say no, and to recommend that someone who might have been accepted by the committee under the old system now never made it past the front gate. Indeed, the number of applicants referred to the committee round in the selection of the Class of 2005 was lower than the previous year. Like his colleagues, Ralph relished the new responsibility. Because he was more familiar with his territory than Nancy and more likely to have met the applicants, he felt he was in a better position to make such calls.
In fall 2001, Nancy oversaw the adoption of another new policy, when President Bennet, along with his counterparts at Amherst and Williams (the so-called Little Three), agreed to decrease the number of students in their freshman classes who were admitted primarily for athletic ability. (As if describing an arms-control agreement between the Americans and Russians, a New York Times editorial reported that the reduction would be as much as 20 percent.) In addition, Wesleyan committed to improve the academic quality of all student athletes admitted to future freshman classes. Both initiatives were intended to address the increasing gap in the academic credentials of athletes and nonathletes. The admissions process, though, would remain the same: all student athletes would continue to be run through the same gantlet as nonathletes. Each application would be read by at least two admissions officers, and the various strengths and weaknesses of each would be weighed, often in the committee round.
There would be other, more noticeable changes inside the cozy house that was home to the admissions office. Bozoma Arthur and Lyllah Martin, each having graduated from Wesleyan a little over a year earlier, decided to leave their jobs in the summer of 2000, before the freshmen whom they had helped select had even arrived on campus. Lyllah moved only a few miles north, to Trinity College, where she enrolled in a master’s program in public policy. Bozoma, by contrast, had decided to move to an advertising agency owned by Spike Lee in New York City. She had achieved her personal goal of experiencing how the whole process worked, so much so that after participating in the rapid-fire debates and votes of the committee round, she had been tempted to ask her veteran colleagues if they had argued over her own case five years earlier. But she decided she didn’t want to know. And now it was time to move on.
The most surprising departure, though, was Rod’s. He had stayed on at Wesleyan a second year, participating in the selection of the Class of 2005 and again playing a critical role in flagging Asian American applicants whom he thought worthy of consideration. And then he had decided he had had enough. At age twenty-seven, he was eager to do something different with his life, having spent the previous three years as an admissions officer at Hampshire and feeling burnt out after all that reading and agonizing. After much contemplation—all of it transpiring in the dead of night, of course—he decided that he had found his next calling: he would become a flight attendant for a commercial airline.
Rod had always loved to fly but had never thought he had the right stuff to become a pilot, even if he had managed to graduate from the University of Rochester, with its heavy emphasis on the sciences. Early in 2001, at the outset of the reading season and nine months before the terrorist attacks would decimate the airline industry, he was one of fifteen thousand people who sent off applications to United Airlines seeking these positions. Soon, he received word that he had made the first cut: he had been invited to the airline’s Chicago headquarters for an interview.
No one at United could understand why someone would give up an annual salary of $37,000 for one that would barely break $20,000, at least initially. But United was impressed and agreed to put Rod through the final round of the application process. While the airline didn’t ask its applicants to write an essay, he had to undergo a battery of psychological tests and participate in several team-building exercises. In April, just as the applicants for the Class of 2005 were receiving their decisions from Wesleyan, Rod went to his own mailbox and saw that he had received an envelope from United. It was thin. “My first reject letter in a long time,” he commented. Ultimately, United had been able to place fewer than 350 applicants in its flight attendant training program. “Some of these people were unemployed and truly wanted to be in the air,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t take the place away from them.”
Not long after he heard from United, Rod saw a posting on a bulletin board at Wesleyan from Brown University, which was seeking an assistant director of financial aid. The job had two main attractions to him. Not only would it be a change of pace—he would be helping to give away $7 million annually to people who had already been accepted to Brown—but he would also be able to move in with his boyfriend, who worked for an environmental laboratory in Rhode Island. Rod was offered the job but then grew conflicted over whether to leave Wesleyan. What ultimately made the difference, he said, were his ongoing concerns about how the school considered Asian American applicants. “The pressure to admit those kids just isn’t there,” Rod said, after eventually moving to Providence. “There were way too many Asian American kids from Andover and Exeter and Stuyvesant who were on our waiting list at Wes and should have gotten in.” While the Class of 2005 was 11 percent black, and 11 percent Asian or Asian American, a higher percentage of blacks who had applied had been accepted than Asians. When told of Rod’s comments, Ralph said that his former colleague’s concern was justified.
“It’s not an institutional thing,” Ralph explained. “It’s each individual admissions officer having a little less sympathy toward the Asian American experience. Society makes us feel that Asian students aren’t quite as disadvantaged. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not.” He said that everyone was aware of Rod’s dissatisfaction, and that one of Rod’s successors, a first-generation American whose parents were from India, had immediately taken up where Rod had left off. After the officers had completed the early-decision process for the Class of 2006, Rod’s successor had reviewed the data and persuaded Nancy to admit several Asian American applicants who had initially been denied, Ralph said.
While Rod had pushed Ralph and his colleagues to include Asian Americans more prominently in their definition of affirmative action, the will of the rest of the nation on race-conscious admissions—or at least the will of its judiciary branch—grew more muddled. In the months after the Class of 2004 was admitted, federal judges in several states issued contradictory rulings about the constitutionality of affirmative action policies in university admissions offices. The most striking of them were in Michigan. In 2000, one federal judge, citing Justice Powell’s argument in Bakke, upheld an undergraduate policy at the University of Michigan that automatically added 20 points—on a 150-point scale—to the scoring of applications of black and Hispanic applicants, as well as the applications of white applicants from poor backgrounds. Because of Michigan’s size, these numbers were far more important than the ratings of 1 to 9 at Wesleyan, which merely served as guideposts as the admissions officers thought about their decisions. Michigan, by contrast, had a rough-cut score for admission, and the extra 20 points often brought many students over the line and into Ann Arbor. But in 2001, another federal judge, also citing Bakke, ruled that the University of Michigan Law School had violated the Constitution by targeting a “critical mass” of minorities for its incoming class, much as Wesleyan had done in seeking to ensure that the percentage of minorities in its freshman class did not diminish from year to year. In May 2002, a federal appeals court reversed the lower court ruling and upheld the law school policy. By then, constitutional scholars were arguing that the Michigan cases—and the overall confusion about affirmative action—could be reconciled only by the Supreme Court.
In late 2002, the Court agreed to hear the two Michigan cases, raising immediate questions about whether it intended to reverse Bakke, or at least impose some restrictions on how Michigan and other public universities admit their freshman classes. The Court’s ruling was also expected to have an impact on private colleges like Wesleyan, because nearly all private colleges accept some income from the federal government. Ralph was watching the national developments like an anxious sentry, for if it was the will of the Supreme Court that Justice Powell had been mistaken about considering race “a plus” in admitting a class, then Ralph was sure that Wesleyan would have to change its policies.
“It’s not a fight anyone wants to be in,” Ralph said. “We’d have to go back and look at how we talk about race, how we talk about diversity. Could we talk in the same way? Could we even think the same way we used to think?” For example, Rice University in Houston, responding to a 1996 court decision that barred colleges in Texas from practicing affirmative action, developed a new vocabulary for its deliberations. It prohibited the members of its admissions committee from saying or writing words like “minority” or “Hispanic,” and instead encouraged applicants to use their essays to discuss their “cultural traditions.” After an initial dip in minority admissions, the university welcomed a near-record number of black, Hispanic, and Asian American students in the fall of 2002.
But for all the concerns in the admissions offices of liberal arts colleges that a conservative court might roll back affirmative action, Ralph was more optimistic. He was hoping that the current justices would endorse Justice Powell’s doctrine in a way that the justice’s colleagues never had, at least not publicly. “The court could confirm that in the field of higher education, diversity does constitute a compelling state interest,” he explained. “That would be all you’d need. Boom. What an effect that would have.”
Affirmative action was hardly the only aspect of selective college admissions that was under fire in 2000 and 2001. So were colleges’ reliance on the SAT, early-notification programs and even the rankings of U.S. News & World Report. Perhaps not since the 1960s were so many different questions being raised about how selective colleges were deciding who would gain access to their campuses.
The most dramatic challenge was being mounted from within the University of California, among the largest and most influential public college systems in the nation. The university president, Richard Atkinson, proposed in 2000 that the university trustees no longer require the main SAT exam as a condition of admission. Dr. Atkinson complained that the exams, with their emphasis on problem-solving over achievement, were not an appropriate measure for college admission. Moreover, he lamented that the anxiety surrounding the tests, and their outsized role in teenage life, were disrupting the high school experience. While more than a few teenagers and parents had been making such arguments for years, only to have them fall on deaf ears, Dr. Atkinson was easily the most prominent and powerful educator to challenge the status quo. It was a stunning setback for an exam whose use had grown unchecked and largely unquestioned for more than a half century. In response, the College Board began to draft plans to add an essay section to the main SAT exam, to broaden what it measured.
As he watched California wrestle with its policies regarding the SAT, Ralph was less concerned than he was about affirmative action. Like its other Ivy League brethren, Harvard, whose influence among smaller private colleges was comparable to California’s among public universities, had not wavered in its basic endorsement of the exams. Like Wesleyan, it believed that at a time when it was more difficult than ever to compare the A of a student at one school to the A of a student at another, the SAT offered the prospect of a common yardstick, however imperfect. Still, Ralph could sympathize with the plight of the public universities: while Wesleyan had the time and resources to put a student’s SAT score in context, the big public universities often had to choose many of their students by feeding a combination of grades and test scores into a computer. For the foreseeable future, though, the SAT would continue to be a reality, at least for anyone who had set his or her sights on Wesleyan or most of the nation’s other highly selective private colleges. Ralph himself continued to support its use.
The assault on early-notification programs was joined, less than thirty miles southwest of Middletown, in New Haven. In an interview with The New York Times in late 2001, Yale’s president Richard Levin said that his school would be willing to consider giving up its binding early-decision program—like Wesleyan, it accepted more than a third of its incoming freshman class before April—provided other highly selective colleges joined him in laying down their arms. Just as others worried about the damage that the SAT was doing to teenagers, Levin said he was concerned that an increasing number of applicants felt pressure to make a binding commitment to their first-choice college in the fall, rather than preserving their options for the spring. To Ralph, the gesture seemed disingenuous and unlikely to go far. Less than ten years earlier, Yale, which had one of the last nonbinding early-notification programs in the country, decided it would change its policy and compel all applicants admitted early to attend.
None of Levin’s counterparts in the Ivy League rushed to endorse this proposal that early notification be eliminated entirely. In November 2002, Levin acted unilaterally: he announced that Yale would continue to permit students to apply early, but would no longer require them to enroll if accepted. Hours later, Stanford announced that it was adopting a similar policy. But even if the other Ivy presidents eventually decided to pull the plug on such programs, Ralph was sure that Wesleyan would not. While Yale and Stanford could always be certain that many of the best college applicants in the country would still apply in the winter if they were not permitted to do so in the fall, Wesleyan, with a reputation that was not as prestigious as that of the Ivies, could not be so confident. “I agree philosophically with Mr. Levin,” Ralph said. “I think early decision is too prevalent and I think the potential for harm is as great as the potential for good. But we need to have that base in the class.”
As critics raised concerns in 2000 and 2001 about the many perceived shortcomings of selective college admissions, Ralph joined the chorus on only one: he said he would be willing to bar Wesleyan from providing data to U.S. News & World Report for its annual fall rankings. But this was Wesleyan’s call, not his. In September 2001, as the members of the Class of 2005 took their seats at Wesleyan, Amy Graham, who had worked as a research director for U.S. News, co-authored an article in The Washington Monthly in which she questioned what such rankings really measured. She wondered, for example, what students’ high school SAT scores really indicated about the quality of their colleges. Ralph, reading the article at his desk in the admissions office, nodded in concurrence. “It’s just ridiculous how much weight is put on something that is manipulated constantly,” he said. “Not only do all the colleges play, they play by different rules. They manipulate the data they submit. They lobby U.S. News.” Still, he knew as well as anyone that Wesleyan could ill afford to lose the marketing boost that U.S. News provided. While it had long ago conceded the race to Amherst (number 1 on the liberal arts list in 2001) and Williams (number 3), Wesleyan could count on receiving dozens, if not hundreds, of applications later that fall as a result of its ranking: a respectable number 11. The magazine put Wesleyan in a tie with Grinnell and ranked it ahead of such formidable competition as Vassar (tied for 14), Bryn Mawr (tied for 17), Bates (tied for 22) and Barnard (tied for 28). Those rankings had been based, in large part, on the profile of the Class of 2004. Despite his reservations, Ralph, who had invested so much in assembling that class, felt no small amount of pride that Wesleyan had beaten out those other schools.
So did Jordan Goldman, whose high SAT scores had contributed, however minimally, to Wesleyan’s high standing in that fall’s survey. Once arriving on the Wesleyan campus, Jordan had had little trouble putting Brown out of his thoughts. For one thing, his roommate—in the dorm with the clothing-optional policy—told him something on the first day that Jordan found astonishing: he had been accepted to Brown and Wesleyan, but had chosen Wesleyan. Jordan’s roommate liked the fact that Wesleyan was more intimate and low-key. The same day, Jordan met a girl on the same floor who had been accepted to Princeton but chose Wesleyan for similar reasons. “It makes me feel good that other kids realized Wesleyan’s just as good as other schools, if not better,” Jordan said at the time. “It validates me.”
True to their word, Ralph and Rod, who had been so taken by Jordan’s e-mail opus the previous spring, found Jordan a work-study job in the admissions office. He could not have been more qualified for his assignment: he was responsible for monitoring the e-mails posted on the electronic bulletin board by applicants for the following year’s class. Ralph and Rod even sent out Jordan’s message again that year, as if it were a rerun of a Charlie Brown Christmas special that had gotten high ratings the first time it was shown. Jordan became such a big booster of Wesleyan that Ralph recommended him for a job in Barbara-Jan’s fund-raising operation. Jordan was now responsible for training teams of Wesleyan athletes to make phone calls to alumni asking them for donations.
When he had visited Wesleyan as a prospective freshman, Jordan had been impressed that the college permitted so many students to speak their minds on so many issues. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, he would marvel at how the entire campus was seemingly caught up in trying to make sense of the attacks and to evaluate the merits of the American response. As they had at the height of the Vietnam War, Wesleyan students and faculty staged candlelight vigils on Foss Hill, teach-ins at the student center and marches past the nineteenth-century brownstone buildings on College Row. The graffiti artists were out in force, too—armed with colored chalk, rather than paint, as always.
As he watched some of those protests from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the admissions office that fall, Ralph would be struck by one thought related to his job: he was disappointed that so few applicants for the Class of 2006, at least those applying for early decision, had chosen to write about their views of September 11. Still, he knew exactly why that was the case. They were trying to outthink the admissions process, just as he had always warned them not to do. They were sure that everyone would write about 9/11 and that their essays would all blend together, giving no one an edge. But Ralph, who was usually on the lookout for essays that were unique, felt that many applicants had erred by writing about other matters. “They missed the point,” Ralph said. “It’s probably the most important event of their lifetimes. I want to know what they thought about it.”
As he had hoped, Jordan received plenty of opportunities to write essays and short stories at Wesleyan and to have them critiqued. He even applied to teach his own English seminar during his freshman spring. He called the course “Experimental Fiction,” and among the novels in his syllabus was The Wanderers, by Richard Price. Wesleyan, always progressive, permitted students to apply to teach courses that would be offered pass/fail. Jordan’s was accepted—the first by a freshman that anyone could remember—and he proved to be a tough teacher, assigning three hundred pages of reading and a ten-page paper every week. As a backstop, a creative writing professor reviewed all of his grades. In the end, all twelve students passed, including Jordan’s roommate.
By the middle of his sophomore year, Jordan said he could not imagine himself anywhere but at Wesleyan. But when he learned that Wesleyan had a one-year study-abroad program at Oxford, he felt he had to apply. He relished the prospect of living in England and experiencing Oxford’s tutorial system, in which, for example, he might spend a week reading everything Mark Twain had ever written and then meet with a professor to discuss it for three hours. But there was, of course, another reason. As happy and challenged as he was at Wesleyan—and there was every indication that those sentiments were genuine—Jordan had never stopped thinking about how he might improve his résumé, for he still worried about how book editors or graduate schools would judge the name “Wesleyan.” Around the time that he applied for the Oxford program, he had seen a book written by a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania whose author’s note made reference to the year he had spent at Oxford. Jordan was certain that such a distinction would help his own author’s note someday. In late winter of 2002, Jordan learned he had been accepted to the program. In October, he would be on his way to England.
Although they didn’t get to know each other, beyond saying a casual hello once in a while, Jordan Goldman and Migizi Pensoneau were among the 150 students who had ended up in the same film class, “History of World Cinema, World War II to the Present,” in the fall of their freshman year. Perhaps feeling inspired by the course, Mig had decided to decorate his first-floor dorm room, a single, with black-and-white photos of some of his favorite film stars: Greta Garbo, Vincent Price, the Marx Brothers, Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. He found the photos, along with the fuzzy lion slippers that a young cousin had given him, comforting, and throughout that fall, he had needed a little comforting.
Ralph had certainly been honest: Mig had yet to meet another Native American student or even a faculty member at Wesleyan. For the first time in his life, he was the only person for miles who knew firsthand that a pipe was a sacred religious object and not something smoked by some movie-western Indian to celebrate peace. Mig found he missed little things, like hearing snippets of Ojibwa (his mother’s language) or Lakota (his stepfather’s). “I’d really like to have other native kids here,” Mig admitted on a Sunday morning that fall. He was wearing a sleeveless white tank top that revealed a tattoo of an eagle—the translation of his name, in Ojibwa—that he had gotten the day before leaving Minnesota for Middletown. “As far as my religion, my spirituality, I can’t relate to these guys,” he said, gesturing down a dank dorm hallway that looked like a motel. Ralph had told him that, at least initially, that’s how he should expect to feel.
But before long, another part of Ralph’s pitch to Mig at NAPS had also come to pass. There were indeed so many people from so many different backgrounds at Wesleyan that Mig didn’t feel like an outsider for long. He knew that there were people in his class from nearly every state and more than two dozen foreign countries, and soon found that he enjoyed learning about the disparate lives of his classmates. He even discovered someone he “could really relate to” in conversations about religion: another freshman, named Benny, who lived next door, was an Orthodox Jew. “He doesn’t break Shabbat,” Mig said, smiling as he used a word for the Jewish Sabbath, which he heard for the first time only several weeks earlier. Mig, who was often tempted to drink alcohol but who said he was prohibited by his religion from doing so, said he drew strength from his Jewish friend’s discipline.
Having turned his C’s and D’s in Bemidji into A’s and B’s at NAPS, Mig vowed throughout his freshman year at Wesleyan that he would not fall back on old habits. “I feel really grateful,” he said at one point. “I feel like I owe a lot to a lot of people. I don’t want to let anyone down. I always keep in mind that being here isn’t enough.” During the fall semester, he had managed a B in a drama class and a C in that movie course. “Not exactly up to par,” he had to concede, but he succeeded in passing both. He was less successful in physics, which he failed, but it was just one course. In the spring, though, he wound up failing another: Greek drama, which surprised him. Mig put none of the blame on Wesleyan. A dean had reached out to him, and he had met with her, but he had ultimately just given up. “The support was there,” he said, “I just wasn’t.” He was at a loss to explain why. As was the case in high school in Minnesota, he felt certain he was intelligent enough to understand the work. He just lacked the desire.
Because of his grades, Mig would have to leave Wesleyan, at least for a semester, at which point he would be permitted to apply for readmission. He would miss his new friends—and there were many more besides his Jewish neighbor—but he found himself wanting to return to Bemidji, the northern Minnesota town he had worked so hard to escape three years earlier. He had always taken the presence of so many Native Americans in Bemidji for granted, and hadn’t missed them at NAPS. But now he couldn’t wait to hear familiar voices. “I just realized how much of it was a part of me,” he said, speaking by phone from home the following Christmas.
Mig never told Ralph that he was in academic trouble, or that he wasn’t returning to Wesleyan. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed, Mig explained; it just never occurred to him. During his freshman fall and spring, he had occasionally seen Ralph on campus, and they had waved to each other or said hello. Ralph had invited Mig to at least one party at his home, one that Jordan had wound up attending. But Mig hadn’t shown up, and Ralph had decided not to push him. “A lot of it has to be done by him,” Ralph said.
At some point in the fall of 2001, which would have been the beginning of Mig’s sophomore year, Ralph decided to look up Mig’s phone number on the campus website, but the computer kept informing him that no listing for the name “Pensoneau” was available. Ralph had no idea what had happened to Mig and scribbled himself a note to call the registrar, but he never did. When he traveled to NAPS again that fall on a recruiting trip, he didn’t mention Mig. “I knew I couldn’t find him,” Ralph said. “I think they didn’t know at NAPS he had left.”
When I ran into the same problem with the website at around the same time, I called Mig’s mother, and Mig eventually called back. I then spoke to Ralph, who said he certainly knew it had been risky to bring Mig to Wesleyan, and he had acknowledged as much to Mig and to his colleagues in the admissions office. Ralph remembered hearing that one of the first Hispanic students who had attended Wesleyan, someone who had even founded a Hispanic student organization there in the 1960s, wound up transferring elsewhere to graduate. But because he spent so much time away from the school itself, either traveling to meet applicants or reading their applications, Ralph had to set boundaries for what he could do for a freshman, no matter how great his needs. He did not have the time to hold Mig’s hand, nor would Mig have necessarily wanted him to. “It does highlight an underlying frustration of the job,” Ralph said. “Once they get here, we kind of have to hand them over to somebody else. Sometimes the university does a good job picking up where we left off. Sometimes it doesn’t.” Knowing how this case had turned out, Ralph said he would have still recruited Mig, if given the chance. “It’s a shot worth taking,” Ralph said, just after Christmas.
Several weeks later, in January 2002, Mig called me to say he had news. He had enrolled in several classes at Bemidji State, including one in physics, and he had already been in touch with a dean at Wesleyan. Mig told her he wanted to come back in the fall, and she indicated that Wesleyan would have him, as long as he did well in his classes at Bemidji. He might have to take some extra credits at Wesleyan, too, but Wesleyan would help him on that score. Feeling suddenly refreshed, Mig said, “I’m confident I’ll do a lot better.”
By late spring, Mig had completed his courses at Bemidji. He said he knew already that he had passed, but was awaiting his final grades before contacting Wesleyan to request his reinstatement. (His alma mater, the Native American Preparatory School, had not fared as well. That same spring, as it completed its sixth year of operation, the school shuttered its doors, a victim, according to an article in the Albuquerque Journal, of insufficient fund-raising, administrative turnover and lingering concerns among some Native Americans that its philosophy, however well intentioned, had been set down primarily by non-Natives.)
Ralph’s response to Mig’s plans was measured, but hopeful. “There is still potential,” he observed. “The fact that he hasn’t given up is important. It’s not over.” Wesleyan might well succeed in recruiting and graduating its first Native American student in years.
Mig learned early that summer that he had been readmitted to Wesleyan. But there was a glitch: his girlfriend, Neanah, whom he had met at Bemidji State and who had attempted to transfer along with him, was rejected. And so he declined Wesleyan’s offer. “Who knows why I didn’t do well there?” he said later. “It was more me, and not Wes. Maybe it was a bit of a culture shock. But I don’t regret going there at all. I made some of the best friends of my life there.”
Mig and Neanah decided to relocate to Los Angeles, where Mig intended to enroll in a film studies program offered through Universal Studios. But those plans, too, went awry when Mig’s father, Bill, died unexpectedly in July in St. Paul. He was fifty-six. His obituary noted that he had received a master’s degree from Harvard, and had taught at Harvard and UCLA. Later that summer, Mig went ahead with his move, settling in a rented, two-bedroom apartment near the beach in Van Nuys. But he found he was too distracted by the loss of his father to concentrate on any formal film program. Instead, he spent much of the next year living off his savings and working on various screenplays that had long been in his head.
By early 2003, Mig found himself craving a more disciplined life in an academic setting. And so, for the third time in four years, he applied to college. This time, he and Neanah set their sights on two institutions in New Mexico, not far from the old campus of the Native American Prep School: the College of Sante Fe and the Institute for American Indian Arts. Not surprisingly, he professed no anxiety as he awaited their replies. “I’m taking it all in stride,” he said.
Early in her freshman year at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Aggie Ramirez was wrestling with her own issues. She was burned out. In Aggie’s case, grades were not the main problem. Oldfields, where she had had a rocky senior fall with that D and those C’s, had actually prepared her quite well for Muhlenberg, she felt. She took an introduction to sociology course that focused a lot on race and ethnicity, and took its lessons to heart. “Now I know the difference between race and ethnic groups,” Aggie said at the time. “Like I’m part of the black race and white race, and my ethnic groups are Latino. That’s pretty neat that I fit.”
Even Aggie would come to conclude, though, that Wesleyan had probably made the right call on her by not accepting her. In this case, it was Greg Pyke’s instincts, and his concerns that Aggie might not be able to handle the work at Wesleyan, that had been on target. Many of the guidebooks indicated that Wesleyan’s courses were often rigorous, probably more challenging than at a school like Muhlenberg. And Aggie herself had already picked up signs that she was beginning to struggle to do her work at Muhlenberg. A writing class, for example, met at nine A.M., and as an incentive to lure sleepy students, 20 percent of its grade was based on participation. If a student was late, he or she would lose points, and Aggie estimated she had missed at least six classes. Part of the reason was that she was staying up working in the theater at Muhlenberg, just as she had vowed when she had seen the rehearsal for West Side Story on the day she had first visited campus. She was now acting as the property manager on a production of Little Shop of Horrors, a position for which she was a natural. But, while still dreaming of a career as an actress, she was reluctant to step on stage herself. “You have to be free to act,” she said. “I’m not sure if I’m ready.”
One of the reasons Aggie was hesitant to step out on that stage was that Muhlenberg was overwhelmingly white. She had known this going in, of course, and was aware that she had been recruited, at least in part, as someone who might make the school more hospitable for those who followed her. To that end, she joined the executive board of the black students association, which had fewer than twenty members. Because the Hispanic students association, which was even smaller, met at a time that conflicted with her other activities, she passed on joining, for the moment. But she felt very alone. Her friend from New York, who had been her campus tour guide, was there, but Aggie admitted, “I feel like there are very few people I can completely connect with.”
One of the few new friends she had made at Muhlenberg was Melissa Falk, the admissions officer who had been her champion. They had grown close, and Aggie sometimes did her laundry at Melissa’s home, which was near campus, and went out to dinner with her and her husband, also a Muhlenberg alumnus who was working as a lawyer in the district attorney’s office. One night in December of her freshman year, Aggie stunned Melissa and her husband by telling them she would be taking a leave of absence from Muhlenberg after concluding her final exams. She needed a break, and she didn’t know if she’d be back.
“I want to spend some time at home,” Aggie explained, reminding Melissa that she had been away at boarding school for four years, and pushing to get herself into boarding school for many years before that. “I love the opportunities I’ve been given. I’m really grateful. I think I need some time where I’m not living in a community where everyone’s my age.”
Melissa offered words of encouragement and support, urging Aggie to follow her heart, but she could feel the tears welling up in her own eyes as she said them. Aggie kept insisting that her departure had nothing to do with Muhlenberg, but Melissa couldn’t help feeling that her best work over the last year, the wooing of Aggie Ramirez to Muhlenberg, was crumbling before her eyes. Melissa’s “water walker,” as she had so often described Aggie to her colleagues, was sinking.
“If she doesn’t come back, it’s meant to be,” Melissa would recall saying to her husband later that night. “But she got this far here. I can’t imagine she’s going to disappear.”
After returning to Washington Heights for Christmas, Aggie spent a lot of time lying on the couch in her parents’ apartment, eating junk food and watching movies. But soon, feeling lazy, she found part-time work tutoring, and helped an elderly relative clean her home. Before long, Aggie, who had been such a spark plug throughout so much of her young life, was energized. She was rested. Her head felt clear. And she was surprised to discover that she was homesick for Allentown. In what would have been the spring of her freshman year, she returned to Muhlenberg for a visit with only one purpose in mind. She hadn’t called Melissa in advance, so Melissa was startled to pass her on campus that day. Melissa could see that she was in a rush, and Aggie didn’t even stop to say hello, though she did blow Melissa a kiss. A few moments later, Aggie had accomplished her mission: she had registered for fall classes. She was going back to Muhlenberg, and resuming her education.
In the fall of her sophomore year, Aggie did indeed return, and she and Melissa were again spending time together. Melissa was struck by how “recentered” Aggie seemed. She had even refrained from signing on to work on any fall theater productions. “I’m easing myself back in,” Aggie explained; her studies now came first. The year that followed would be among the most successful of Aggie’s academic career. Melissa would decide that Aggie was even more of an inspiration than she had ever imagined when she was lobbying her colleagues for Aggie’s admission. As Mig had learned, one’s education didn’t necessarily proceed in a straight line. There were very often stops and starts, and though many people could get through college in four uninterrupted years, others could not. “Aggie is courageous,” Melissa said that fall. “Another kid, without her strength and resilience, wouldn’t have had the courage to take a break or then to come back.” Melissa had brought a role model to Muhlenberg after all.
Tiffany Wang, whom Ralph had met on paper the same day he met Aggie, found that whatever concerns she had had about dorm life at New York University were quickly overcome. On arriving on campus in the fall of 2000, she was given the keys to a fifteenth-floor double with views of the Empire State and Met Life Buildings. More than ever, she was glad she had not settled for a rural school. The dorm life was far more social than Tiffany had been led to believe, and the late-night chat sessions she hosted in her room—under posters of Brad Pitt and Enriqué Iglesias—were evocative of those late-night escapes from the window of her parents’ home.
Yet Tiffany proved she could be a far more serious student than she had been in high school. She worked hard to earn an A in a tough economics course that fall, and was proud of it. She had recently read an essay by the nature writer and onetime Wesleyan professor Annie Dillard entitled “Living Like Weasels.” Dillard’s piece described a weasel as living “as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.” After reading that passage, Tiffany found herself thinking about “how exactly are we supposed to live life to achieve the greatest satisfaction?” She had no ready answers, but she felt she was beginning to search for a way to give her life meaning, that was clear.
At least at the beginning of her freshman year, Tiffany had not made a great effort to get involved in the NYU campus life. She was still adjusting. A political or business career, and maybe law school, was still on the horizon. And there were certainly opportunities at the school to find kindred spirits in her opposition to the death penalty. But she would give herself time before wading in.
As she had prepared to leave California for NYU in late summer, Tiffany had sought to bring one familiar aspect of home with her. She had given her inmate pen pal her new address. But as of late October, she had not heard from him, which was not like him. A visitor asked Tiffany, gingerly, if it was possible that the man had been executed. For all her concern that the lives of death row inmates be spared, Tiffany said she had never stopped to think that her pen pal might actually die. “The way he always talks,” she said, “it doesn’t sound like it’s urgent.” Tiffany had never done any research on her pen pal, or his crime, and she said she wasn’t going to start now. She would simply hope for a letter and pray that one arrived. As of late spring 2002, nearly two years later, none had.
By then, Tiffany was in Prague, where she spent the spring semester studying history and politics, which was now her major. “Two of my teachers were senators!” she said in a telephone interview at the time. “One was the former foreign minister.” Her time abroad had also been restorative emotionally. While walking to class on September 11, she had been able to see the World Trade Center burning. “I don’t really like to talk about it,” she said, eight months later. “I don’t want to go down there, even now.”
In contrast to Tiffany, Julianna Bentes arrived on the Yale campus in a rush, eager to dive into the full range of activities that had kept her so busy at Harvard-Westlake. By the fall of her sophomore year, she had become a leader in no fewer than five organizations. She served, for example, as the co-president of the Black Student Alliance, where she took an active role in disseminating a report on the role of slave traders at Yale two centuries earlier. She also became a leader in another group, United Students at Yale, a fledgling organization that patterned itself on a labor union and sought to serve as a student voice on a range of issues. One was the students’ desire that Yale pay a “living wage” to its maintenance staff. Another issue, near to Julianna’s mother’s heart, was that all Yale students on financial aid be permitted to graduate debt free, with no loans to pay back. In reflecting on her mother’s experience at the financial aid office, where she had only achieved her goals by bulldozing her way through the front door, Julianna said: “I can’t help but think of the students who took one look at Yale and said, ‘There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this’ and gave up. The inaccessibility of the financial aid process in general makes it hard for us to make a truly genuine claim of trying to get economic diversity on campus.” Julianna was asked by the group concerned with that topic to deliver the closing remarks at one of its rallies. After much thought, she decided to lead the two hundred or so students gathered in front of Phelps Gate in a chant that she had learned in a dance class many years earlier. “We are one!” she began. “We are one!” At first her voice was soft, and then, slowly, it built to a scream. Later, she was still smiling about the response: “Everyone was pumped.”
After September 11, Julianna, like Jordan, became caught up in the many protests and teach-ins that were organized at Yale. Her position was unequivocal: as terrible a thing as had happened to America at the World Trade Center, the obliteration of Afghanistan was not a just response. “I don’t trust the government when it comes to things like this,” she remarked. On top of all of those activities, as well as a job as the business manager of a dance company, Julianna was coping with the breakup of her parents’ marriage. In the end, her father, born and raised in the Amazon, and her mother, a native of Pasadena, had grown apart. Her mother was even leaving Los Angeles and moving to Northern California, near where her brother lived. On the one hand, Julianna wondered if she would have done better to have stayed on the West Coast, perhaps at Stanford, where she could be nearer to her parents. But she also acknowledged it was easier, being so far from home, to put her parents’ separation out of her head.
Still, the turmoil in her personal life had made concentrating a challenge. She received a B minus in organic chemistry, far below her average at Harvard-Westlake, and was elated, all things considered. “I’ve never been so proud of a B minus in my life,” she insisted. Still, she was wondering if she was cut out to be a pediatric surgeon, which was the career she had in mind when she arrived. She was still keeping an open mind, but she was majoring in history. Of one thing, though, she was certain: the full breadth of her life at Yale was exactly what she had imagined for herself. She was more involved in extracurricular activities than she would have been at the University of Chicago, she said, and more challenged academically than she would have been at Wesleyan. “There’s no other place I’d rather be,” she said.
While Julianna and every other senior from Harvard-Westlake was adjusting to their new campuses in the fall of 2000, Becca Jannol was in Costa Rica, keeping busy until Cornell had a bed available for her in January. For three months, she lived in a rural pueblo, two hours from the nearest supermarket or telephone. She lived with a family, taught English to local schoolchildren, helped build a library—and, as she lay awake at night, reflected on her wild ride through the college admissions process, including her disappointments and triumphs at both Cornell and Wesleyan. She felt ashamed that she had come to care so much about attaining such a prize, considering it now took her half a day just to go into town and get a tube of toothpaste. The goal of obtaining an elite education seemed suddenly empty.
“Obviously the people there didn’t have e-mail, they’d never seen a computer, they rarely talked on the telephone,” Becca said, once back in her parents’ home near Beverly Hills, on the eve of her departure for Cornell. “Their way of life was so conducive to walking slow and talking slow. It’s not like I’m going to burn my clothes and rage against my family. But I’m definitely going to simplify my life.”
Before leaving for Cornell in early January 2001, Becca returned to Harvard-Westlake to visit with younger friends who were now in the throes of the process that had consumed her only a year earlier. “They’re just where I was,” she said afterward. “They’ve lost whatever sense of self they had. They’re saying, ‘I’m not going to get in anywhere. My SAT’s aren’t high enough. So and so already got in early.’”
Asked what advice she had offered them, considering her newfound perspective, Becca said she had put it like this: “Applying to college is about trying to control all these things you couldn’t control even if you tried.” Whenever he visited Harvard-Westlake or any other high school, Ralph always hit that message hard. But now this was one of their own talking. They should all just relax and let the process run its course. Becca was much more blunt when talking to a visitor. “It just seems so stupid now,” she said.
As she flew to Ithaca, she worried that she had lost the ability “to relate to kids my own age.” Once on campus, she was sure that was the case. She was miserable most of her first semester, and it wasn’t simply that more than a thousand of her new classmates had been there for months, and that she was one of only several dozen who were newly arrived. “I really didn’t see the usefulness of my being there,” she recalled. “I hated it.” Where once she had thrown herself into student government at Harvard-Westlake, she spent her free time at Cornell working in a vintage clothing shop. “I’ve lost that passion to do good,” she said. “I’m that typical lazy college student.”
That was not entirely true, though. That spring, she summoned her courage and submitted yet another application to Cornell. She was one of a hundred freshmen who applied for an honors program that would release them from all of Cornell’s graduation requirements—except the swimming test, which was still mandatory—so that they might have as much time as possible to nurture a special project. The applicants needed to have more A’s than B’s, and to craft a proposal that the honors committee found interesting. Becca’s idea, drawn on her experience in Costa Rica, was that she would study agricultural, economic and social development in Latin America.
In June of her truncated freshman year, Becca received word of the committee’s decision: she was one of forty people who had been accepted. The bearer of those good tidings was again Ken Gabard, who was not only her admissions officer and class dean but also the director of the program. “Rebecca,” he told her, “you’re a success story.”
After the fall of 2001, in which her work on her honors courses made her feel as if she had found a place for herself at Cornell, she flew to Costa Rica once again—this time to do fieldwork as a Cornell student. When classes ended the following spring, she traveled to Rome for a month with twenty other Cornell students and two professors. “I am here to write and draw,” she reported in an e-mail message, “This morning I got a great tan sketching at the Forum and in an hour I’m off to the Keats-Shelley House. Not bad.”
She spent the fall of 2002 back in Ithaca, “falling in love with my friends” but also refining the focus of her work in the honors program. As part of her research, Becca set off in January 2003 for six months of study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. In an e-mail message on the eve of her trip, she was exuberant as she contemplated the academic adventure that lay ahead. “It’s a beautiful feeling,” she wrote, “when you can have an opinion and firmly support it, while at the same time remain open-minded because there’s still so much to learn.”
Around that same time, unbeknownst to any of his colleagues, Ralph Figueroa was thinking about making a big change in his life, as well. He was considering leaving Wesleyan. He had recently been reflecting on the last few years and had calculated that he would be marking his seven-year anniversary at Wesleyan during the summer of 2002. “The seven-year itch,” he said, “is as real in admissions as in a marriage.” Unlike Rod, Ralph had no particular dissatisfaction. He felt appreciated at Wesleyan, as well as respected by his colleagues. Disagreements like the one over Becca had been extremely rare, and everyone had moved on soon afterward. But for all his one-liners and practical jokes, Ralph sometimes had an air of melancholy about him. Lately, he had thought that he was a bit homesick, having been away from the West Coast for so long. His parents and most of his siblings still lived in California, and they remained a close-knit family. At one point a few years earlier, he had even applied for the dean of admissions job at his alma mater, Stanford. He assumed he wouldn’t get it—he was only in his midthirties, which was young for so important a job at a big university—and indeed he hadn’t, losing out to a woman who was then the dean of admissions at Swarthmore. He figured the experience of putting his name forward couldn’t hurt, and it hadn’t. He had also applied for the dean’s job at Colorado College, but had been turned down for that, as well.
Now, in early 2002, Ralph had been encouraged by an acquaintance to apply for another position, this time as a college counselor at a private school in New Mexico, Albuquerque Academy. If he got it, he would be the director of college guidance and he would also be closer to his parents, only a day’s drive from Los Angeles. And, like Sharon, he would be able to take everything he had learned on the admissions level and use it to counsel high school students. When Ralph discovered in the course of his interview that nearly a third of the students were on scholarship, and many of them were Mexican American, he couldn’t help but see the parallel to his mother’s work with Expanded Horizons. There was a chance that his life was about to come full circle. As of late January 2002, he had not yet gotten a sense of how the school’s search was going. He was an applicant now; he could do nothing but wait. But even if he got the job, there was still the possibility that Natalie would balk at the move. She was very much enjoying teaching high school in Connecticut and was reluctant to leave.
In early March, Ralph received the offer from Albuquerque. He was told he would get a substantial raise (his current Wesleyan salary was $43,000), have a two-person staff (for a senior class of 150) and control a travel budget of $20,000 annually. Cool! Ralph thought. The ball was now in his wife’s court. As much as she liked her work, Natalie began to think about how nice it would be to live closer to her own mother and sister, who were also in California. And she could tell that her husband was burned out. “It’s a very demanding job,” Ralph said at the time. “I’m starting to feel like I’m not being challenged.” And so Natalie said yes, and they spent the spring making preparations to pack up their home and relocate to New Mexico in late June.
Nancy had known that Ralph was being interviewed for the New Mexico post, and when he told her that he was leaving Wesleyan, she hugged him and told him that his would be big shoes to fill. “I’ll definitely miss the place and the people,” Ralph told her. “I don’t think I was that eager to switch schools. It’s the opportunity.”
Once arriving in New Mexico, Ralph and Natalie would have little time to unpack their belongings. On July 20, they were due in Los Angeles for a wedding. Nearly two decades after Raucous Ralph had first met Scared Sharon at Stanford, she was getting married. After becoming engaged, Sharon had called Ralph to ask him to participate in the ceremony. She wanted him to read aloud from the New Testament, as she had at his.
The wedding was to be held on the Occidental campus, where the groom, Vince Cuseo, was the dean of admissions. Ralph’s sister Dina, still rising up the ranks in the admissions office at Caltech, was going to be there, too. Suddenly, this was sounding more like a NACAC convention than a wedding. But it seemed a fitting ceremony for Sharon, who was the Kevin Bacon of the admissions world, with only one or two degrees of separation from seemingly every guidance counselor and college dean in the country. Vince had not arrived at Occidental until after Sharon and Ralph had left for other jobs. But Ralph’s career, like Sharon’s, had crossed paths with Vince’s at least once before. When Ralph traveled to Grinnell in 1994, it was Vince who was the dean of admissions, and who conducted Ralph’s interview. Ralph had not liked Grinnell much at all, of course; there had been too many farms. But now, as he prepared to marry off his close friend, he was seized by a fresh thought: Grinnell, or at least its former dean, had finally passed The Tortilla Test.