Although a half inch of snow had fallen before dawn on the first Thursday in February, the slick roads posed no threat to Ralph Figueroa’s commute that morning. After pouring Diet Pepsi into a sixteen-ounce plastic cup, Ralph stepped from the kitchen into the den of the fifty-year-old, redbrick three-bedroom Cape that he and Natalie had purchased a year earlier. It was the first home they had owned. Ralph moved briskly past all the distractions that might slow his journey: the olive-and-white striped couch, the upright piano decorated with family photos and the television stacked high with videotapes like The Truman Show and The Usual Suspects. Finally, he reached his destination: the adjacent enclosed porch.
The heat on the porch was turned off, which was the way Ralph liked it, for he would need to stay alert. The Diet Pepsi would help, and he would refill his cup throughout the day. But he was careful to avoid the Pepsi that had caffeine, which made him jittery, and chose instead to keep himself awake by shivering. It was certainly cold enough on the porch to wear a ski jacket, but Ralph was dressed only in sneakers, crisp tan chinos, a white T-shirt and a light-green V-neck sweater. Although Ralph wouldn’t be seeing any colleagues or students that morning, he was one of those people who couldn’t imagine not being freshly shaved.
For the last five weeks, the porch had been Ralph’s office, and it would remain so for the next five. Eschewing even the most basic comfort, he had selected a folding blue metal party chair in which to sit. As a desk, he had commandeered a simple plastic-topped card table with retractable legs. Surrounding the table, in neat piles, were stacks of manila folders that rose knee high. This was his quarry.
On this bright winter morning, Ralph was midway through a grueling reading season. As expected, applications for the Class of 2004 at Wesleyan had broken the record set only a year earlier: a total of 6862 applicants had sought admission to the incoming freshman class, which represented an increase of 460 applicants, or 7 percent, over the previous year. The winner of the contest to guess the greatest amount of mail that would arrive in a single day was Lisa LaBreque, a student who worked in the office. She had correctly predicted that 31 bins full of mail would arrive on January 4. Each bin held at least 30 applications, for a one-day total of more than 900. (To get a sense of how much paper that represented, consider that it took one person an entire day to empty and sort the contents of only one bin.)
Wesleyan’s admissions office wasn’t the only one that was buried in mail that winter. Several dozen other colleges had received record numbers of applications in early January of 2000, including Harvard and Columbia, where applications were up 3 percent over the previous year; Middlebury, which was up 6 percent; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was up a remarkable 16 percent. Ralph, like his colleagues at those other institutions, had devoted a considerable amount of time to soliciting those applications. Now, though, someone had to read them all.
The first of the two readers of every Wesleyan application was chosen at random and was almost always an admissions officer, though occasionally a senior or former admissions officer would be recruited, just to give the staff a break. The second reader was always the admissions officer who was responsible for the state from which the application had been received. At this point in the year, Ralph was still reading files that had been routed to him at random. All told, he would read close to fifteen hundred applications that winter, devoting at least twenty minutes to each, and sometimes more than an hour. On average, he would spend upward of twelve hours a day, six days a week, just reading, thinking and recording his impressions. If he was diligent, and the choices were fairly straightforward, he could process as many as thirty applications in a day. But more often than not, he became bogged down.
The meetings of the committee might provide the most compelling theater of the admissions process, but the fate of most applicants to top American colleges was written, at least in draft form, in isolated moments like these. The toughest calls were usually made when an admissions officer had to decide, for example, whether a student’s race and socioeconomic background should be taken into account in assessing a poor performance in school or on a test. Such calculations required intense concentration. After reading each file, Ralph would have to circle one of four choices on a ballot attached to the applicant’s file as his preliminary vote on the student. “Admit” meant he felt unequivocally that the applicant should be accepted. If he had some reservations, but still believed the applicant should be admitted, he could choose “admit minus.” “Deny” indicated that he was convinced that the applicant should be rejected. Finally, there was “deny plus,” which meant that Ralph was fairly convinced that rejection was the proper course, though he did not consider the applicant without merit.
Wesleyan had received so many applications that Ralph knew that, on average, he had to say no to three candidates for each one he accepted, while knowing full well that most were capable of doing the work at Wesleyan and would likely thrive there. Watching her husband fall behind in his reading as he struggled to reject so many good students, Natalie, the realist in the family, would continually try to urge Ralph forward with the following mantra: “Read faster, say no.” Even when she was away at work, he could hear her voice inside his head. If only it were easier to follow her advice.
For the two and a half months from early January to mid-March, when the committee convened for the last time, Ralph was a virtual hermit. He spoke to almost no one and ventured out only to get a quick bite of lunch or to pick up more files. Occasionally, he would take a rare break to play saxophone in the Middletown Symphonic Band, which was considerably more buttoned-down than the Stanford Marching Band. On Sundays, he played hand bells at his church, South Congregational, an affiliate of the United Church of Christ. No one who knew him, or who knew someone else engaged in the same line of work, would have been surprised to learn that he had taken down the Christmas decorations on February 2. Ralph, at least, had the advantage of being able to read uninterrupted. For those colleagues like Terri Overton or Chris Lanser, who had school-age children, reading that began in the morning had often to be suspended in the midafternoon, and picked up again only after the children had gone to bed.
That Ralph and Natalie had yet to start a family didn’t necessarily make their lives any easier than those of Ralph’s colleagues. Ralph was traveling for more than a month each fall. And in the winter, their friends had long since learned not to bother asking them to go out as a couple. By the end of February, Natalie’s serenity would start to wear thin. “I get a little short-tempered,” she acknowledged, “because I’m doing all the cooking and all the cleaning and all the shopping.” But she never wavered in her support of Ralph, for she knew his family’s story and how much it meant to him to be carrying on his mother’s legacy of shepherding students into college.
For the Figueroas, there was one silver lining within the dark clouds of the reading season. Ralph’s favorite section of each application was the essay. Ever since he had worked at Occidental, he had set aside the best-written and most heartfelt among them to photocopy for his personal file. This was the file that he would consult whenever he spoke at schools like Harvard-Westlake about all the different ways that students had succeeded in capturing his attention through their writing. Ralph would also read them aloud to Natalie as they sat in rocking chairs in the living room, a fire in the fireplace, between ten and eleven each night. Sometimes, they would cry together at the depth of feeling some of those pieces expressed. But it was always a long day’s journey to reach that night.
On this February morning, Ralph got started just after nine A.M., as he always did. Almost immediately, he came across an essay that he knew he wanted to share with Natalie. An applicant from upstate New York had answered the first essay question—a query about the high school activity that had meant the most to her—by describing how she had come to love the clarinet. But, she wrote, she had taken up the clarinet only after being disqualified on the instrument that was her first love. “I was flatly told that I could not play the saxophone because my fingers were too short,” she explained. “Imagine that, my dreams shot down because of a biological trait completely out of my control!” As he read, Ralph paused for a moment to consider how lucky he had been to have fingers long enough to play the sax. But it was the student’s answer to the general essay question—in which she was asked to write up to five hundred words on the subject of her choice—that caught Ralph’s eye:
In fifth grade, my handmade rocket maintained a strictly terrestrial existence. In sixth grade I inadvertently murdered my prenatal baby chick. I was not what you would call a science-oriented child. But life has its twists and hairpin turns.
Four years ago I was chosen to take Regents Biology early, as an eighth grader. That year, I came to see biology as a totally new realm of limitless corners to explore. I was enthralled by genetics and cloning, xylem and phloem, neurons and synapses, mitosis and meiosis, photosynthesis and respiration…you name it. While other girls shirked from the task of dissecting a fetal pig, I dug right in. And now I find science worming its way into my future aspirations. Science research currently tops the list.
Ralph believed that the applicant’s humility was genuine and could tell that her essay was true to her transcript and résumé. She had not only gone on to take the hardest science courses available to her, including an offering at a local college, but had assisted a cancer researcher at a laboratory near her home the previous summer.
This was an easy call. Ralph circled “ADMIT” on the workcard, the form that served as the official record attached to each applicant’s file. But after casting his preliminary vote, he did something he almost never did, and placed an X through the section on the card that would ordinarily be filled out by the second reader. He wanted this file to go directly to Nancy and Greg for an expedited verdict. Why waste someone else’s time on an applicant who was so obviously qualified, particularly this season? If Nancy or Greg disagreed with his assessment, they could always reassign it to another reader. Before sending the packet on, Ralph separated the essay and put it in the file that he would photocopy.
A few applications later, Ralph came across an essay from a student that would also leave an impression, though probably not the one that the applicant had intended. The applicant had chosen to tell the saga of his extended family, and the pride he felt “in being a part of something unique.” The piece continued:
How did this pride come about? It came from those trips to my grandmother’s house where we made the pasta fresh. Yeah, you heard me right, fresh. Not out of a box. We as a family also consider it a sin to put Ragu on our table. It’s impossible to completely describe the atmosphere of my grandmother’s house. The feel of linoleum floors under my feet and some type of Italian cooking teasing my nostrils and causing my mouth to salivate are just a start.
The indescribable aspect is the history that resonates through that house. For instance, the stories of how my Uncle Mike cut off his index finger with a bit saw and had to have my grandfather drive him to the hospital. It was stories like this that not only made me a good listener, but an entertaining storyteller.
The applicant went on to describe his attitude toward women. “The first rule,” he wrote, “is if you’re wise to your mother, it’s a slap upside the head. If you’re wise to your grandmother, it’s a slap upside your head.” The essay continued for another hundred words, but by this point, Ralph had pretty much decided how he would vote. This, he concluded, was not the work of the next head writer of The Sopranos. Perhaps on another day, or even an hour later, he might have found the essay as funny as he had Migizi Pensoneau’s opening remark to him in New Mexico. But timing was everything. At this moment, Ralph’s response was clinically dispassionate: “A very disorganized description of various aspects of his family,” he wrote on the workcard, and also noted that the essay needed “major editing.” Those impressions would accompany the student’s file through the remainder of its journey through the admissions office.
Ralph had also seen that despite a respectable SAT score of 1300, this student had taken no honors or Advanced Placement courses. He knew that this particular high school had plenty of honors and AP offerings, which the school itself had said in the description that it had enclosed with the student’s transcript. Also soiling this applicant’s record were several C’s and a D.
This, too, was an easy call, and Ralph circled his choice: “DENY.” Unless someone disagreed with him—and made an argument persuasive enough to reroute this applicant to the committee—the student would not be admitted to Wesleyan.
These were not the only cases that day that Ralph considered relatively cut and dry. But as he worked from morning until deep into the night, two other applicants in particular would occupy his thoughts, even after he had set their folders aside. In these two instances, Ralph would second-guess himself as he struggled to make a recommendation, his ambivalence evident in the crossings-out he would leave behind on their workcards.
One applicant was Tiffany Wang, an Asian American woman from the affluent community of Palo Alto, about twenty-five miles south of San Francisco. Tiffany’s scores on the PSAT—the dry run in the junior year before the SAT—had been high enough to earn her a coveted designation as a National Merit Semifinalist, just as Julianna Bentes of Harvard-Westlake had been. Fewer than 2 percent of the students who took the PSAT would reach that pinnacle, which some colleges or corporations rewarded with a merit scholarship of as much as $10,000 annually. Tiffany’s SAT showing had demonstrated that her earlier performance was not a fluke. She had a combined score of 1470—750 on the verbal portion of the exam and a 720 on the math—well above the median score of 1360 of the full applicant pool at Wesleyan. The verbal score in particular was no mean feat, considering that Tiffany had indicated on her application that her parents, both natives of Taiwan, spoke primarily Chinese at home. She had learned English as a second language. After spending nearly an hour deliberating her case, Ralph would wish that the rest of her accomplishments had been as impressive.
Ralph spent nearly as much time that day pondering another applicant whose primary language had likewise not been English. Agueda Ramirez—who indicated on her application that she preferred to be called “Aggie”—wrote that Spanish was the main language spoken in her family’s apartment in Washington Heights, in the northern part of Manhattan in New York City. Neither of her parents, who were natives of the Dominican Republic, had graduated from high school, though Aggie herself had managed to get a scholarship to what appeared to be a fancy girls’ boarding school outside of Baltimore called Oldfields.
Ralph didn’t know the school, but he could tell that, at least academically, Aggie’s four-year stay there had been a rocky one, especially in recent months. At the midpoint in her senior year, she had earned C’s in physics, international politics and a course she should have aced: Advanced Placement Spanish. She also had a D in English literature, another Advanced Placement course, and her only midyear B was in ceramics. That performance was consistent with an SAT score that had not broken 1100. Her best score on the verbal portion of the exam was 550, while her best score on the math was 540. Still, as with Tiffany, Ralph agonized over what to do about Aggie, for there was a lot to be said for the rest of her application, most notably that a fish swimming so far from her home waters had succeeded in being elected president of the student body her senior year.
Tiffany and Aggie were not pitted directly against each other; how Ralph decided one case would not necessarily affect the other. He could have recommended admitting, or denying, both. But his ultimate reaction to each would be strikingly different, and how he decided to vote would reveal much about his perspective on merit, as well as the various perspectives of his colleagues at Wesleyan and elsewhere.
In addition to her excellent SAT scores, Tiffany had impressed Ralph with her essay. Given several choices of what to write, she had underlined the question that directed her to “evaluate a significant experience, achievement or risk that you have taken and its impact on you.” She had begun her response as follows:
It’s not abnormal to keep the bedroom door closed when doing homework or reading—many people do it in the hopes of avoiding nosy parents or pesky younger siblings. I close my door, however, not to obtain privacy but to keep the guai, or keeper of bad luck, from casting his destructive spells. My doorway faces the stairs, after all, and who knows what kind of evil resides there. Leaving the door open while trying to do work would definitely be inviting in that evil.
To say that my parents are superstitious would be an under-statement; they believe that our entire lives can be influenced by the air that flows through the house, or as the Chinese call it, Feng Shui.
Tiffany wrote that the concept of Feng Shui had always baffled her, especially after her family moved from Taiwan to California in the mid-1990s. When her father proceeded to have a bad year in business and her sister broke her left ankle playing basketball, the family enlisted the services of a well-known laoshi, or geomancer, who diagnosed the problem: the family’s new home in Palo Alto faced a courtyard and busy street, where, he concluded, “all the bad spirits were gathered.” When Tiffany challenged such beliefs, she was branded butinghwa, or disobedient.
But as she grew into her late teens, she recounted, a funny thing happened: she began to see why her parents saw the world the way that they did. She wrote:
Growing up in a society where everyone believed the fantastical (or the truth, depending on one’s point of view), they hardly had any say in the matter. I realized that perhaps that explained my stubborn resistance to their beliefs—that I didn’t want to be subjected to the same pressures to believe that they had. It wasn’t as if my parents were forcing me to believe anything I didn’t want to. In fact, was I being downright selfish by not letting them carry out the traditions that they had honored since childhood? I suddenly became aware of how inconsiderate and unreasonable I must have seemed.
The change in Tiffany’s mindset was evident to her parents when she enthusiastically agreed to move to a house that the laoshi had located. She concluded:
No doubt they had been ready to fight another battle of words. To my surprise, however, while I had been taking a step into their lives, they had evidently done the same with mine. The house we were moving to was only about two blocks down the road—I wouldn’t have to change schools or even my daily route of getting there. It was apparent that we had unwittingly come to a compromise—and both sides had come out satisfied. I was genuinely glad that my parents had found a house in which they could be comfortable and with the fact that they had considered what I felt instead of just viewing me as the butinghwa daughter.
So we moved into our new house, which I have to admit, I became fond of immediately. It was capacious but cozy, and with it came a backyard with gigantic trees that offered shade, and a hammock that offered respite. I didn’t overlook the touches added by feng shui, of course—how our front door did not face the same direction as our garage, and how all the bedposts had to be placed as far away from the door as possible, among other things. I ended up with the bedroom next to the staircase, which alarmed my dad at first, but finally he just advised me to close the door when I was using the desk. So that’s what I’ve been doing for about four years now, and though I would never admit to anyone, if I was ever in another room facing a staircase, I’d probably close the door too…just in case.
Although Ralph didn’t set Tiffany’s essay aside for Natalie, or for his “greatest hits file,” he was sufficiently impressed to write on the workcard attached to her file: “Nicely done—learning to compromise w/parents over cultural ideas—well written.” As the first reader, Ralph was responsible for boiling down everything in the file, so that his colleagues, who would likely be pressed for time, would get the gist. With this he was sending a signal to Greg or Nancy, or to the committee, when it considered Tiffany’s case, like the blurb on the billboard for a Broadway show. Everyone would recognize it as high praise, coming from Ralph. On the workcard, he also added a one-line summary of the evaluation that Tiffany’s guidance counselor had written: “Independent spirit and original thinker. Conscientious, thoughtful, involved.”
Still, much of the rest of Tiffany’s application threatened to undermine whatever distinction she had achieved with her high test scores and obvious skills as a writer. One of Tiffany’s teachers had echoed the counselor’s description of her as “conscientious” but had then remarked:
There were times, I must admit, that I thought Tiffany might have taken a stronger interest in mastering the material in our course. When I saw that Tiffany was a National Merit Semifinalist, I was a bit surprised. While clearly bright and competent, I had seen in Tiffany neither an exceptional skill for testing nor a particular affinity for the subject.
In his one-line summary of the teacher’s evaluation, Ralph included the phrase: “Surprised she’s NMSF.” That criticism wouldn’t help, nor would Ralph’s observation, lifted from the counselor’s evaluation, that Tiffany had taken a “very demanding” program of courses at her school—but not “the most demanding.” On its face, the description seemed unfair: Tiffany had taken six Advanced Placement, college-level courses—more than most other Wesleyan applicants. But Gunn High School, in the heart of Silicon Valley, had an especially rigorous curriculum. How else to explain that twenty-two other members of Tiffany’s graduating class—a full 6 percent—were National Merit Semifinalists? Most schools were lucky to have one or two. Whether fairly or not, Tiffany would be competing with her classmates who had applied to Wesleyan.
Ralph was more concerned about the counselor’s evaluation of Tiffany’s program—that it could have been harder—than he was about her actual grades. But those, too, gave pause, for while she had more A’s than B’s, she had also received C’s in science and algebra as a freshman, and in an Advanced Placement statistics course as a junior.
Ralph’s ambivalence about Tiffany was reflected, finally, in the ratings he assigned to her. On the workcard, he was responsible for rating a candidate on a scale of 1 to 9 in three academic categories—academic achievement, intellectual curiosity, commitment—as well as two nonacademic categories: personal and extracurricular. Little wonder he often felt like an Olympic judge, displaying his numbered cards as if Tiffany had just attempted a triple axel.
Under “academic achievement,” Ralph wrote down a 5. The cheat sheet that he and his colleagues consulted defined such an applicant as carrying only a “solid academic” load—as opposed to “an excellent academic record in demanding curriculum” (a 6 or 7), or “flawless academic record in most demanding curriculum” (an 8 or 9). Though these numbers were intended only as guidelines, the other admissions officers at Wesleyan would be expecting to see at least a 7 in this category to consider any candidate seriously for admission—unless there was a mitigating circumstance.
But Tiffany rebounded by getting a 7 from Ralph in the important category of “intellectual curiosity,” for he believed she had met the criterion of showing “strong interest” in research and independent projects, according to the definition on the cheat sheet. And she drew a pair of 7’s for academic commitment, which denoted she “goes well beyond required assignments,” and in the extracurricular category, where Ralph had noted that she had spent four years doing community service and four years playing basketball and running track. (There was no indication, however, that she wanted to be evaluated by Wesleyan’s coaches.) She had also spent two years picking up drunken revelers on Saturday nights (as part of a safe-rides program organized by her church) and two years working for a human rights club she had founded. That met the criteria for a 7, Ralph thought (“leadership in several clubs or organizations”) but not an 8 or 9 (“talents, accomplishments have unusual depth and passion”). In the “personal” category, Ralph rated Tiffany a 6, meaning she was “likely to be a leader in some areas” but not necessarily a “memorable personal presence” (the criteria for an 8 or 9).
In an attempt to come to some conclusion on a candidate, the officers were expected to condense their academic ratings into a single number. This didn’t have to be a straight average of the rankings in the component categories, but was more a back-of-the-envelope calculation of a student’s performance in high school as measured against his or her ability. This was also the one rating where, for the first time, Ralph could factor in Tiffany’s high SAT scores. After spending considerable time staring out the window, he wrote down a 6. Considering her SAT performance, he concluded, she clearly had the ability to have taken tougher courses and to have performed with more distinction. She simply wasn’t meeting her potential. Again, the committee would generally expect to see an overall academic rating of at least 7 to consider her for admission.
Ralph was also expected to summarize all of his impressions of Tiffany outside the classroom into one rating. If there were any extraordinary personal circumstances that she had overcome—or that had kept her back—this was the number that was supposed to reflect them. Here, Ralph assigned her a 7, which implied, finally, that Tiffany seemed more impressive as a person than she did as a student.
Now came the hardest part: a one-line description encompassing all the reader’s thoughts on the applicant and a comprehensive vote. “Very mixed performance, up and down,” he wrote first, knowing it wasn’t an auspicious introduction to Tiffany. He also knew, however, that despite her performance, Wesleyan considered Tiffany a “priority” applicant in two categories.
First, she was from California, and Wesleyan was always trying to expand its geographic range. The prior year’s class had, as always, been heavily dominated (67 percent) by students from the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states. The more the class reflected the diversity of the nation, Wesleyan believed, the richer the experience for all its students. Ralph agreed with this reasoning and wrote “Geo” on his summary line, for geography. In the parlance of the admissions trade, Tiffany’s home state would give her “a push.”
She also had the advantage of being Asian American. Besides seeking to be geographically representative of the United States as a whole, Wesleyan, like so many colleges, also wanted to reflect the ethnic and racial composition of the country. Wesleyan considered this balance crucial to the education of minority students and nonminority students as well; each, ideally, would learn from the other. But sometimes, to forge that balance, the standards to which a white applicant was held were eased for a nonwhite applicant. (Among the exceptions to the practice was the University of California, which, in the mid-1990s, had been the first public institution to bar its admissions officers from considering race as a factor in admissions.) Ralph concurred with Wesleyan’s policy, in principle, particularly when he was considering a black or Hispanic applicant. But having grown up in California, where he knew many second-and third-generation Asian Americans who were living quite comfortably, he wasn’t always vigilant in adhering to the philosophy of Wesleyan, which, like some other eastern colleges, usually considered Asian American applicants a minority.
Merely checking the Asian American box on an application—and yes, the admissions office almost always took an applicant at his or her word—was supposed to give a candidate an advantage, however slight, at Wesleyan and most other eastern and midwestern colleges. Thirty-five percent of the applicants to the prior year’s class at Wesleyan who had identified themselves as Asian American had been admitted, compared to 29 percent of the applicant pool as a whole. Though Wesleyan had no established ceiling on the number of minority students it admitted, it did have a floor: Ralph and his colleagues were expected to admit at least as many Asian American applicants—as well as black and Hispanic applicants—as they had the year before. Any falling-off would be duly noted in the college guidebooks, which might in turn discourage future minority applications. Moreover, some of Wesleyan’s Asian American alumni were quite vocal about bringing any perceived slight to the attention of the university president himself.
With all this in mind, Ralph wrote the abbreviation “DIV”—for “diversity”—in his summary of Tiffany, as a signal that he had noted her ethnicity. But as he prepared to cast his preliminary vote, he couldn’t get past the issue of the girl’s potential. Unlike so many minority applicants, Tiffany had grown up with many advantages. Her parents were both college graduates, and her father was apparently a successful businessman. She attended one of the better public high schools in the country, and while her high SAT scores at least suggested that she was exceptionally bright, her performance in school—the rigor of her curriculum, her grades—suggested she was dogging it. She seemed distracted.
Tiffany would likely make an important cultural contribution to Wesleyan. Surely her classmates would learn, as Ralph had, from her experiences with things like feng shui. And that was part of what affirmative action was intended to accomplish. But Ralph believed Tiffany’s potential contribution to the incoming class was far outweighed by the level of her schoolwork thus far. “Very strong scores, but hasn’t performed well,” he wrote, in conclusion.
Ralph felt fairly sure that Tiffany did not merit a place in the incoming class, given the strength of the applicant pool; there would undoubtedly be other, better-qualified Asian American applicants. And so, he circled “DENY PLUS” on the workcard. A student given this designation was defined, on his cheat sheet, as “capable, but not compelling without significant push.” That, in a phrase, was Tiffany.
If another reader disagreed with that assessment and thought the girl deserved a better fate, then Greg or Nancy could overrule Ralph, or they could bring Tiffany’s case before the committee of the whole. But if it were up to Ralph, she would be turned away. As a final note, he scribbled “v. confusing” next to his decision. He then set Tiffany’s file aside and took a rare break, a quick trip to the bathroom, after which he would take up the case of Aggie Ramirez, whom he would find equally perplexing.
Ralph had been privy to only a few details of Tiffany Wang’s young life, all of them provided by her and her teachers in her application. She hadn’t traveled to the Wesleyan campus for an interview, and he hadn’t visited her high school in northern California. But he hadn’t needed to meet Tiffany to conclude that in some critical respects, she was slacking off. Had they met, Tiffany would have told Ralph that his analysis was correct. She certainly liked to have fun and she liked to hang out. But she had at least one other extracurricular activity that she hadn’t mentioned in her college application. Had she done so, Ralph, at least, might have rated her more favorably.
Tiffany’s family, as they were described in her essay, had seemed to provide an ideal incubator for achievement, at least early on. Her parents, both born and raised in Taiwan, forbade their three daughters not only from watching television during the week but also from dating. Nothing was to distract the girls from their work—especially Tiffany, whom her father considered the most gifted. Bryn Mawr was good enough for her older sister, Katherine, who enrolled there two years before Tiffany applied to college. But to Herbert Wang, who had moved to the United States to study engineering at Columbia University, his middle daughter was destined for greater things, and it was he who pushed her to apply to Yale, for example. But while so many children rose to the challenge of such rules and expectations, so many others, including Tiffany, only chafed or wilted in the face of them.
Her own rebellion began during her freshman year of high school. One night after midnight, with her parents and sisters asleep, she slipped out of the family’s town house to rendezvous with friends. Intoxicated by how easy her escape had been, she increased the frequency of her nocturnal excursions from once a month to two or three times a week. Her friends decided to make her departures easier by buying her a rope ladder, one that she could hide in her room. In her college essay she mentioned how the trees in her backyard provided her “solace.” But they also provided her cover, and neither she nor her friends were ever caught, she said. Before long, she had multiple piercings atop her left ear, another in her belly button, and a butterfly tattooed on her hip.
Sometimes, Tiffany and her friends would gather in a parking lot or a park to sip orange juice and vodka, but mostly, she said, they just talked. What they didn’t do much, together or apart, was study. “Every year, I’d say to myself, I’m going to do really well,” Tiffany recalled. And sometimes she would make a genuine effort, raising her average from a B minus late in her freshman year to an A minus for her entire sophomore year, for example. But by the end of junior year, a critical time for any college applicant, she was hovering at a B minus again. She was regularly skipping classes, and her absences were taking their toll. Echoing concerns that Ralph would later express, Herbert Wang would lament that she was squandering her gifts. She knew he was right. Maybe it was all the pressure that she felt her father was putting on her; maybe it was all coming from inside of her—she was as puzzled as everyone else as to why she wasn’t doing better.
Her activities suffered as well. During her freshman and sophomore years at Gunn, Tiffany, who was almost five-nine, played forward on the girls’ junior varsity basketball team. She scored, on average, a respectable eight points a game and enjoyed playing. But during her junior year, she stopped going to the team’s three-hour daily practices, even after an ankle injury she sustained early in the season had fully healed. She no longer cared about basketball, and her only passion, it seemed, was the Human Rights and Cultural Awareness Club, which she and several friends founded her sophomore year.
Tiffany had listed the club on her college application but without a description. That would turn out to be a misstep, though she could not have possibly known it at the time. As a result of her omission, Ralph had not known what to make of the club and had paid it little heed. In fact, Tiffany herself had had trouble deciding how much stock to put in the club’s work. In an interview after her senior year, she acknowledged that she had founded the club, at least in part, as a “way to pad my résumé.” One of her cousins had started a human rights club at her high school, and she had told Tiffany that it had boosted her application—helping her, she believed, get into Harvard. Gunn already had a Beatlemania club and a Yo Yo Club, so why not a human rights group? But as it turned out, the club actually became a serious enterprise, even if the term “human rights” didn’t quite capture its mission.
During the hour or so a week that they met, Tiffany and the fourteen other members did work that was actually hard to classify: they wrote letters of encouragement and support to inmates on death row. It was Tiffany who had gotten the idea, after stumbling upon a website that asked for volunteers to write to convicted killers. The organizers of the site wanted the inmates to know that no matter how heinous their crimes, someone still cared about them. At the time, Tiffany was a fourteen-year-old eighth-grader, and the site stipulated that any correspondent had to be over eighteen. But she was too curious and sent postcards to four of the listed inmates, which the organizers passed along to them. Tiffany had written something along the lines of: “Don’t give up hope”; she said she opposed the death penalty and believed that “everyone deserves a second chance,” even those “who killed someone,” going on to explain that her “soft heart” had been borne of her faith. Though her parents were not religious, she and her sisters had attended a Protestant school in Taiwan and had ultimately found Christ on their own. Though only in elementary school, they had soon begun attending church, a practice they had continued in California. The lessons she learned about forgiveness had resonated with her.
To Tiffany’s surprise, three of the inmates responded, their letters forwarded to her by the site organizers. Before long, she was corresponding directly with one of them. He said he was in his fifties and then told her seemingly everything about himself, from the name of his former cat to the most recent meal he ate. He didn’t reveal exactly what he had done to wind up on death row in Texas, and Tiffany didn’t want to know the details. But he did say that he regretted his actions “twenty-four hours a day, every day of his life” and had been largely abandoned by his family. “From what I know of him,” Tiffany said later, “he’s not a bad person now. Maybe he’s changed.”
Tiffany began writing to her inmate once a month, and he wrote back three letters for each one that he received. Often he played the role of teacher, writing about his impressions of Ulysses, for example, in sentences so cogent and thoughtful that they read like Cliffs Notes, Tiffany recalled. He was obviously intelligent. Her mother, though, was deeply unnerved by her daughter’s correspondent and urged her to cut him off. But Tiffany never feared for her safety. “He’s on death row,” she reminded her. “He’s an old man.” Tiffany encouraged her friends to engage in similar correspondence, and a club was born.
But they didn’t just send letters to the inmates. By now Tiffany was “determined to do something to protest this horrible system that offered no second chance.” She joined a statewide organization opposed to the death penalty and began writing to senators and congressmen. She even contemplated a career in politics. All the while, she never stopped corresponding with her new friend. When she mentioned to him that she was having difficulty finding a topic for a fifteen-page psychology project junior year, he suggested several ideas, one of which she ultimately chose. The topic was narcissism, and her paper received an A.
As she struggled through the college admissions process, her inmate offered only encouragement. “He was like, ‘You can get into any of those schools,’” she remembered him saying, as she told him about her applications to Yale, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley and Wesleyan, among others, each recommended to her by friends or family. “I don’t think I told him my SAT’s. I think he just assumed I was smart.”
Tiffany had flirted with the idea of writing about the convict in her college essays and had even composed a draft that began with the declaration that “a person shunned by people around the nation” had become a “hero to me.” But she decided that discussing her experiences and the evolution of her position on the death penalty would be “too personal,” and instead chose to focus on her parents and how she had come to respect their beliefs and traditions. That was safer ground, Tiffany thought.
While she was probably right on that count—a lot of people would have found it difficult to summon sympathy for convicted killers—her correspondence was not only unique but revealed a great deal about who she was and what she cared about. And as Ralph made clear in his chats at Harvard-Westlake, the odds were good that at least one person on an admissions committee somewhere would share an applicant’s view of the world.
In Tiffany’s case, by sheer luck of the draw, that person would have been Ralph Figueroa, who, as it turned out, was opposed to the death penalty. Lots of people at Wesleyan were, of course, but unlike many of them, he had actually acted on his beliefs. While at UCLA Law, he had taken a criminal law course with a former United States Attorney who had described his own fierce opposition to putting anyone to death. Ralph couldn’t believe that a prosecutor would take such a position and was so influenced by what he learned in the course that he applied for a summer fellowship at the Southern Poverty Law Center, specifically to work with those lawyers at the advocacy group trying to spare the lives of death row inmates. Although he hadn’t gotten the job, an activist was born.
When told by an outsider, long after the selection of the Class of 2004 was completed, about Tiffany’s strong opposition to the death penalty and the campaign she had undertaken, Ralph was visibly moved. “I probably wouldn’t have changed my mind on her,” he said. “But who knows? It would have definitely struck a chord.” Because Tiffany Wang had decided not to mention in her application the work that was her passion, neither she nor Ralph would ever know for certain.
As he had for Tiffany, Ralph had picked up Aggie Ramirez’s folder from the random pile that had been set aside for him as a first reader. Like Tiffany, Aggie had described herself as a child of immigrants. In a section of the application that was optional, she had checked the box next to “HISPANIC, LATINO” and had typed “Dominican Rep” in the space allocated for “COUNTRY.”
Unfortunately, Tiffany and Aggie also shared a propensity for erratic grades.
Prior to her senior year, Aggie had actually done admirably. She received an A minus in sophomore English, which was an honors course, and in a junior-year anatomy lab. And she had a B plus in math during each of her first three years at Oldfields, including in algebra as a freshman and sophomore, and in precalculus as a junior. Most of her other grades were either B or B minus.
But her final year had begun disastrously, and her guidance counselor had sent along a letter contending that Aggie’s midyear senior grades—those C’s in physics, international politics and Advanced Placement Spanish, and that D in Advanced Placement English literature—did not reflect how much better she had performed during the second half of the fall semester, versus the first. In fact, she had actually pulled her grades up to reach those C’s and that D.
On the workcard, Ralph paraphrased what the counselor had written—“Note from GC saying 2nd Quarter grade in English was 80, Spanish was 84; so 1st Q was what brought her down.”—followed by his own one-word editorial response: “Hmm.” He hadn’t read far enough into the file yet to decide whether he was willing to accept this analysis.
The counselor went on to suggest that it was Aggie’s overcommitment to extracurricular activities during senior fall that had caused her crash, and it was obvious to Ralph that the girl was doing a lot—probably too much. In each of her first three years, Aggie had sung soprano in two vocal groups, played goalie on the junior varsity field hockey team and volunteered as a Big Sister. During her senior fall she not only undertook all those activities, but became a dorm proctor and was elected president of the student council.
Setting aside her grades for the moment, Ralph was impressed that Aggie had succeeded in becoming a leader at Oldfields, however much it may have detracted from her schoolwork. In the description of itself that the school had enclosed in Aggie’s file, it noted that the student body at Oldfields was 88 percent white. With an annual tuition of nearly $30,000, the school drew many of the forty-five girls it admitted each year from well-mined pockets of wealthy families in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, as well as from around the world. Among its distinguished alumnae was Wallis Warfield, a Baltimorean who graduated from Oldfields in the early 1900s and who, as a divorcée two decades later, began a romantic relationship with King Edward VIII of England that forced him to abdicate. Founded at the end of the Civil War in a clapboard farmhouse that still served as the main administration building at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Oldfields occupied only a small corner of a two-hundred-acre forest dense with elm and oak, azalea and forsythia. Surrounded by rolling “old fields” on the Maryland–Pennsylvania border—the center of the world for enthusiasts of the equestrian sport of steeplechase—the school offered its students a unique perk: for an additional $10,000 a year, they could bring their horses with them from home and board them at the school. One of out of every three girls at Oldfields took the school up on its offer and brought along her mount. Aggie, whose education was almost entirely subsidized by the school, was not among them.
Oldfields had long committed itself to educating young women with a range of educational abilities—some went on to Harvard, others to community college. But because of its remote location it had to work harder than many boarding schools to diversify its ranks, which it considered part of its mission. Aggie had been recommended to Oldfields by a New York–based organization called Prep for Prep, which, for two decades, had been sending poor minority students from New York City to prep schools throughout the metropolitan New York region and beyond.
While Aggie was not the first student sent by Prep for Prep to Oldfields, she was the first to be chosen to serve as president. By all accounts, she had won over her classmates by her obvious and infectious exuberance. Picking up early on her classmates’ musical choices, Aggie, whose own taste generally ran to hip-hop, began memorizing the lyrics to songs by the country stars Garth Brooks, the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain. She surprised even herself by genuinely starting to love these artists, whom her friends at home had never heard of. At a school where the girls were divided up each year into green and white teams for an annual academic and athletic competition that was similar to a color war, it was Aggie who usually coaxed her classmates into painting their faces and singing ridiculous cheers at the top of their lungs. Whenever the school mounted a musical production, whether Damn Yankees or Anything Goes, Aggie, who stood not much taller than five feet and was a bit heavyset, could nonetheless be counted on to land one of the leads.
That was the easy part of fitting in. What was harder for Aggie, who was dark-skinned and often presumed to be African American, was that several of her classmates had seen fit to decorate their rooms with Confederate flags. “It makes me more sad than anything,” she commented. “But I don’t think it offends me. The explanation I was given by kids who have them is that it’s their way of showing their Southern pride. I know they’re not racists, even if they do need to be more sensitive.” Aggie would say later, with her own pride obvious: “Some of those kids with flags became my good friends.”
During her senior year, she encountered one of the few instances of overt racism that she would experience at Oldfields. On a cork bulletin board inside a dormitory, someone had posted a note that said something like: “Latinos leave, get out of here all of you.” As one of the few young women of Hispanic background at the school at the time, Aggie knew that the note was intended at least partly for her. But instead of just letting the remark pass, Aggie convened a campuswide forum in the school auditorium, a cavernous, 150-year-old white building crossed by old wood beams. (It was formally known as the David Niven Theater; the actor’s granddaughter was an Oldfields student and her family had been instrumental in the building’s recent renovation.) Aggie usually led the campus through its regular morning meeting there, but she used this opportunity to address the issue of racism square on. “This is very hurtful,” she told her schoolmates. “I think it’s important that you remember that the person you chose to lead you is also a Latina.” Most of the students were too stunned to speak. Though the note writer was never caught, Aggie said that she never struck again.
Aggie had chosen to leave many of these details out of her college application, simply because there wasn’t the space. But as he sat reading it on his porch, Ralph was certain that he had been able to fill in enough of the outlines to get a good picture of who Aggie was. For as the main topic of her essay, Aggie had reflected on someone whom she, too, had never met: Gary Simons, the founder of Prep for Prep, the organization that had brought her to Oldfields:
I wanted an education so that I could become rich and famous, and so that I could get away from Washington Heights, my neighborhood. My thirst for wealth stemmed from my family’s low socio-economic background. I would always dream of living and owning a house with a basement, a backyard, and a swimming pool. I always thought that would be so much better than the old, small, stuffy, broken down apartment that my family lived in, but never owned.
My longing for fame was brought on by my frustration with the youth of my neighborhood. I was saddened and angered by the girls my age, who were having multiple babies, by multiple men, without having the resources to care for these kids, and the young men who neglected their kids and dropped out of school to sell drugs. My anger did not allow me to befriend any of the kids in my neighborhood, and as a result I did not have many friends. I felt that fame gained through education would eventually end my loneliness.
The society of New York’s Washington Heights depressed me. Here I was living in a place largely populated by immigrants from the Dominican Republic. These people, like my parents, came in search of a better life, for themselves and their children, yet they seemed to be getting nowhere fast. The government often discriminated against them and to make things worse, their kids got involved with the wrong crowds, causing their immigration to be in vain. I was determined not to let that happen to me, and the only way was through education.
But as she went on to explain, she came to recognize that her initial motives for seeking an education had been “shallow,” an understanding that came to her only after becoming involved in Prep for Prep. She concluded:
Through the leadership training that I have received, I have come to realize that I can use my education to obtain leadership positions that will help to end a lot of the misery that originally drove me to crave an education. Whether I obtain wealth and fame by educating myself is irrelevant now.
On Aggie’s workcard, Ralph wrote of her essay: “Well organized, strong voice. Basic, but clear and competent.” What he was thinking, however, was much more personal. Aggie, at least in her essay, reminded Ralph of a lot of the Mexican Americans girls he had met growing up in California, the kids whom his mother had to practically kick in the rear to get them to apply to college, because they were getting no guidance at home.
It should be noted here that in gazing into the admissions pool, and being excited to see a familiar reflection staring back, Ralph was hardly alone. For example, Nancy Meislahn, the new dean, sometimes had a soft spot for applicants who had attended small rural high schools, who had taken all the tough courses at those schools and who had then graduated at the top of their classes. Nancy, who had grown up in the tiny upstate New York community of Wayland in Steuben County, would have fit that description perfectly. Terri Overton, the veteran admissions officer who came to Wesleyan via the Peace Corps, was often attracted to Midwesterners who had solid grades but who weren’t savvy enough to rack up a list of extracurricular activities as long as a rap sheet, just because they thought the colleges were watching. Terri herself had not had the benefit of sophisticated advice about how to apply to college and had ended up as a freshman at Cornell only by following the example of a schoolmate who was a few years older. She was also a former cheerleader, and it had been a long-running joke in the office that she was sometimes willing to cut some slack to any cheerleader who was applying to Wesleyan.
That isn’t to imply that the Wesleyan admissions officers pulled only students like themselves into Wesleyan. But like their counterparts at other schools, they inevitably had their pet interests and causes. And in the end, the diversity of interests and backgrounds of the committee members helped ensure the diversity of the incoming class. Who else but Ralph would keep a keen eye out for the rare applicant who listed handbells as a musical interest?
Mindful of his colleagues who would be reading her file next, Ralph cut Aggie a small break on the next line of his evaluation of her. The girl had written a single paragraph as an addendum to her application, which was, technically, the sort of extraneous material that Ralph was free to overlook. But in this case he was inclined to let her have her say. She wrote that she was “aware that Wesleyan really looks at a student’s transcript” and acknowledged that “my past semester grades would be classified as unbecoming of a Wesleyan student.” She explained that she had “felt it necessary to join almost all the activities offered at Oldfields” but had cut back after her grades suffered. Ralph decided to paraphrase Aggie’s appeal, on the workcard, as follows: “Explanation of poor grades—She says joining too many EC’s, not learning to prioritize.” Ralph didn’t know how this defense would play, but he wanted Aggie to be able to make her own case to the committee, if it came to that.
Returning to the main application, he also noted on the workcard that Aggie’s counselor had written of her: “When prepared, she does well.” It was almost a backhanded compliment, a line that raised as many questions as it answered, but Ralph’s job here was to summarize. He also included a quotation from Aggie’s counselor that she was “a work in progress.” Again, that could be interpreted as praise or criticism, depending on the reader.
Now it was time for Ralph to rate Aggie. As in the case of Tiffany, it would not be an easy task.
In academic achievement, the first category, Ralph wrote down a 4, which indicated that a candidate had “fair to good recommendations” and “some weaknesses apparent in application.” It also meant that Aggie, who had taken only two Advanced Placement courses, had come nowhere near to taking full advantage of what her school offered. Ralph also assigned her a 4 for academic commitment, meaning she was “inconsistent or uneven in some areas.” He gave her a 5 for intellectual curiosity, though, because several teachers had described Aggie as conscientious, which was precisely what the category was designed to measure.
Those ratings, which were low, would be available to the next reader, as well as to Nancy or Greg. But if Aggie’s case went before the committee, Ralph’s other colleagues would be informed only of his overall academic rating, which represented a rough average of those other numbers, along with a general sense of whether the applicant’s SAT score was high or low. He began to contemplate that critical number.
When calculating that overall academic rating, Ralph was supposed to be as objective as possible. This was not the place to cut Aggie some slack because she did not have the cultural or economic advantages of other applicants. He could factor such life circumstances into the personal rating, which would come next, and it would be up to future readers to weigh the academic performance in light of the personal circumstances. For the moment, what was relevant for the purpose of this rating was that Aggie’s combined SAT score of 1090—a 550 verbal, 540 math—was more than 200 points below the median of those students applying to Wesleyan for the incoming class. Ralph stared out the window for what seemed like an eternity. Turning back to the card table, he knew what he had to write: putting his green ballpoint pen to paper, he marked Aggie’s overall academic rating as a 3. This would likely decide her fate. She would almost surely be rejected with a number that low. Few who applied to Wesleyan that year would receive a lower rating.
The personal rating came much more easily, given all of Aggie’s extracurricular activities and the fact that she had been elected president of the student body. For the first time, he was permitted to award her points for having overcome a tough background. Ralph quickly scribbled an 8, a near-perfect score. Nonetheless, it was unlikely to save her, so low was her academic rating.
But as he weighed his vote, and what he would write in that final line to summarize Aggie, Ralph started to second-guess himself, as he worried about that 3. While he truly believed that the girl’s academic performance thus far merited no more than a 3, he decided to cut her another break. Bearing down heavily with his pen, Ralph began to write over the number 3 until he had turned it into a 4.
A moment later, he explained why he had revised his assessment. “She’s definitely a 3, and I know I said I try to be objective with that number. But I couldn’t do it. I was thinking about what I’d argue before the committee. I can hear a dean saying, ‘I can’t support a 3.’ But a 4, that could make a little stronger base to make an argument.” Had Aggie been white or even Asian American, Ralph had to concede, she’d have gotten a 3 from him. As a Hispanic, she was still supposed to get a 3. He was ambivalent about what he had done, but he also knew his wouldn’t be the last word. At least two other people would consider Aggie’s file. They were welcome to rate her differently.
Now, though, it was time for Ralph to register a preliminary vote. If his final summary had been a baseball box score, Aggie would appear to be winning one inning, only to be losing the next, with the outcome of the game not known until the last inning. “Impressive leader, person,” Ralph scribbled on the line set aside for his final evaluation. That was a good start. “But,” he added, again quoting her guidance counselor, “still ‘a work in progress’ on academics.” Early in her bid for admission to Wesleyan University, Aggie Ramirez was falling behind.
But Ralph next wrote the words, “clear priority,” which was like hitting a bases-clearing double. This was a euphemism for Aggie’s having a desirable ethnic background, and it would be worth a lot.
Of the nearly seven thousand applicants for the Class of 2004, only about 5 percent were Hispanic, according to Greg Pyke’s most recent figures. Yet, if the previous year’s class was any guide, roughly 50 percent of this year’s Hispanic applicants would be admitted to Wesleyan. (In contrast, those who applied who were white would have an acceptance rate of only about 30 percent.) That, in part, was how diversity was achieved, at Wesleyan and so many other colleges. Part of the description of the job Ralph had accepted at Wesleyan stipulated that he was to be on the alert for qualified Hispanic applicants. By writing “clear priority” on the file of Aggie Ramirez, Ralph Figueroa was doing his job.
He next noted on his summary line the abbreviation “NCP”—“non-college parents.” This would instantly be understood by his colleagues as a partial explanation for Aggie’s low SAT scores and perhaps even her low academic rating. From everything he had read about her, Ralph assumed that Aggie hadn’t gotten the sort of academic enrichment at home that an applicant like Tiffany Wang had. That Aggie had had the benefit of attending Oldfields for the previous two years would not have been enough time for her to make up that deficit, as Ralph saw it; the damage had been done early.
Scholars might be divided over to what degree the SAT measured factors other than aptitude or intelligence, but the position of the Wesleyan admissions committee was fairly clear: it expected students of means, whose parents were educated and usually white, to score higher on the SAT than students whose parents were neither educated nor affluent. From that perspective, Aggie’s 1090 should not really be considered 380 points below Tiffany Wang’s 1470. More than a few white parents would consider that analysis unfair. But the previous fall, Ralph had read Nicholas Lemann’s book The Big Test, which had only served to confirm what he had always suspected: that the SAT was being used in ways for which it had never been intended. Lemann had written that it was originally developed more than a half century earlier as a determinant of merit scholarships at Harvard, not a yardstick against which every college in the country would measure their applicants. If the SAT played a role in college admissions—and Ralph felt that it most certainly should—the scores ought only be considered in the context of a student’s life.
Returning to Aggie’s workcard, Ralph next wrote the word “leadership.” Any applicant who had been president of the student body got a bit of a push at Wesleyan, as at other colleges. But Ralph felt Aggie’s leadership potential was especially striking. She had written in her essay that she eventually intended to return to Washington Heights, which he thought was laudable. “You are talking about communities where there is no encouragement—there is active discouragement—of daughters going to college,” Ralph remarked later. With a good education, Aggie could influence a lot of kids who needed a role model like her.
Ralph ended his summary of Aggie with a question: “Take risk?” His colleagues would have their own opportunity to reach a conclusion, but Ralph knew what his response was. Again putting his green-tipped ballpoint to the workcard, Ralph circled “ADMIT MINUS” by which he was acknowledging Aggie’s flaws but also signaling that hers was a “strong, admissible profile,” according to the definition on the office cheat sheet. He was willing to bet that Aggie would perform at Wesleyan as she had during her first three years at Oldfields, not her fourth. His early preference was to admit her.
Next to his vote on Aggie, Ralph scribbled “discuss,” his signal that he was hoping he could push Aggie’s case into the committee of the whole, where he was looking forward to defending her. But before he would get the chance, Greg Pyke would have his say, for it was he who was responsible for reading all the files of students applying from Maryland schools, including Oldfields. Ralph wondered if Greg would see Aggie as he had. He also wondered whether anyone would see fit to revive the candidacy of Tiffany Wang.
Over the course of the day Ralph would read a total of twenty-three applications, though his goal was thirty. He rarely reached that target, for the choices were too hard. Aggie’s had not been the only case that day for which Ralph had written down a rating, or even circled a vote, only to cross it out moments later and write something else. “I think it’s knowing it’s a record number of applications, and not knowing where the line is going to be,” he said, explaining his equivocating. “I find myself second-guessing myself a lot.”
Ralph had been interrupted by only a few phone calls that day. One had been from his sister Ana, who was writing a freelance article for People en Español on a topic near to Ralph’s heart: General Hospital, the soap opera that he had watched on and off since his senior year in high school. Ralph often taped the show and watched it in the evening, though rarely during reading season. Talking about Luke and Laura with Ana had been a welcome respite.
Another call he had taken was on a more serious matter. It was from Greg Pyke, who functioned not only as the office statistician but also as an occasional prod to slow readers. Greg informed Ralph that midway through the reading season, the committee members, each working diligently at home, had given a first read to nearly four hundred more files than they had by the same date the previous year. That was no small accomplishment, considering that the number of readers had not increased, though the number of applications had. Unfortunately, Greg reported, the officers were falling behind in getting to those applications that they were supposed to consider as second readers. At the pace Ralph was working, he calculated, he would have to read seven days a week for six straight weeks, from now until the committee hearings began in mid-March, to catch up.
Ralph was also struggling with part of Natalie’s advice: “Say no.” Wesleyan intended to offer admission to about eighteen hundred of the sixty-eight hundred students who applied, or 26 percent. If past numbers held, about seven hundred of those eighteen hundred would say yes to Wesleyan, with the remainder of the Class of 2004 drawn from the waiting list, if necessary. On this day alone, Ralph had voted, however tentatively, to admit ten of the twenty-three applicants whose files he had read, or about 43 percent. If he were keeping to the average acceptance rate, he probably should have recommended admitting only six. He would have to be a little tougher tomorrow, and probably the day after that, but how? So many applicants presented good cases for admission.
On this day, in addition to the budding cancer researcher from upstate New York, Ralph had recommended admitting a young Korean American woman from Westchester County, New York. Her SAT scores were near perfect, and she had competed in a national chemistry competition. Like Tiffany Wang, she was a National Merit semifinalist; unlike Tiffany, she had received almost all A’s in the toughest classes her school offered. Ralph also liked the editor of the French magazine of a private school in New York, as well as a boy who volunteered as an ambulance attendant. The boy wrote that he had once saved a man’s life by giving him CPR during a treacherous ride to the hospital, a story that a teacher had alluded to as well in her recommendation. The applicant’s academic credentials were impeccable—he was taking a crushing load of sciences each year—but Ralph had circled “ADMIT MINUS” on his workcard, rather than “ADMIT,” only because he wanted to see if Wesleyan had gotten even better applicants from the boy’s school.
Among the other candidates whom Ralph had recommended taking a pass on were a girl who had devoted her entire essay to her doll collection (“way too much information about Barbie,” he had scribbled) and another girl who was ranked near the middle of the pack of her prep school. He had been a bit alarmed by the report of the Wesleyan senior who interviewed her during a campus visit, which mentioned that the applicant had “disturbed him” by making allusions to “being mean to people and wishing to start over in college.” Nothing else in her application suggested she was worth the trouble, Ralph thought.
As the night approached nine, he figured it was a good time to take a dinner break, if only for a few minutes. As he and Natalie sat at a small wooden table in the kitchen, talking more about her day than his, he told her that he had an essay that he wanted to read to her later—the one about the would-be scientist accidentally killing her prenatal baby chick. After quickly downing a hamburger that Natalie had brought him from Burger King and drinking yet another Diet Pepsi, he went back to work. It was past ten before he put down his pen for the night; thirteen hours after he had first picked it up. Indeed, he had written so much for so long that he had gone through three pens—a green ballpoint, then a purple and finally a blue.
At that point, without getting up from the card table on the porch, Ralph picked up a cordless phone and dialed the number of a young niece in California. He wanted to wish her a happy birthday and to offer her a free plane ticket to the East. He was definitely missing his family back home, and the girl said she’d consider it.
Then, at the time that he would have ordinarily read to Natalie, he decided that the essay about the chick could wait. He needed to get to bed. If the last few nights were any indication, he’d soon be dreaming about reading files and filling out workcards. Just before he went upstairs, he reflected on the applicants whose cases he had considered that day. “They’re out there somewhere,” he said. “They don’t even realize we’re agonizing about them and spending time really worried about their lives and what’s going to happen to them.”
If he awoke during the night with worries about those applicants he had rejected, Ralph said, he would ease his conscience with a soothing thought that had helped him through other such moments: “They’re going to end up in good places. They’re going to have good lives. I don’t have the ability to bring them all to Wesleyan.”