Jordan Goldman turned on the computer at the small wooden desk in his bedroom. It was Monday, April 17, and he had just returned from a fact-finding mission to Wesleyan and Vassar. In only two weeks, his responses to the offers of acceptance that he received from those two colleges—as well as a half dozen others—were due. As a first step, he began to compose an e-mail message. On the recipient’s line he typed: “ADMITTED STUDENT LISTSERV.” He wanted to transmit his thoughts to as large an audience as possible: all the other applicants who had been offered acceptance into the Class of 2004 at Wesleyan.
To help ease the decisions of those students, Wesleyan had established an electronic bulletin board, or Listserv, so that they could communicate with one another directly, via mass e-mail. Each posting was automatically sent to every other applicant who had registered on the Wesleyan website. In the two weeks since the school had mailed out its acceptances, the bulletin board had already received more than two thousand postings. By summer’s end, the number would reach nearly seven thousand.
Some applicants asked straightforward questions, such as whether dogs were permitted in dorm rooms. (No, someone responded, Wesleyan only allowed animals that were in cages.) Others asked if Wesleyan fostered a tolerant environment for gay students. (An overwhelming yes was the general consensus.) The questions were answered by fellow applicants and current Wesleyan students, as well as by Ralph and his colleague Rod Bugarin, who were assigned by the admissions office to monitor the postings.
But most applicants who logged on to the bulletin board did so to announce where they had decided to attend college. “Don’t attack me, I’m going to Vassar,” someone had written early one morning. Around the same time, another correspondent proclaimed: “Ladies and gentlemen, it is now official. I’ll be moving to beautiful Middletown come this August. I’m soooooooo excited. I filled out all of my rejecting school forms today (so now there’s no going back).”
Jordan had been monitoring these postings closely, and he concluded that the Listserv offered the perfect forum to broadcast his decision. There was only one problem: as he sat down to write, he had yet to decide what he wanted to say. Like so many other writers, he did his best thinking when he was typing, and so he started to hash out his dilemma on the fifteen-inch screen in front of him. He began:
College.
This decision is, I have to say, hands-down, the single most intimidating, scary-assed dilemma I’ve ever been faced with. And I’ve been doing quite a lot of deliberation these past few days….
I went to WesFest. And was impressed by a helluva lot of things I saw there—but, to be honest, let down by a few things too.
So I did what any reasonable guy would do. I visited some other college campuses. To get a well-rounded perspective, to make sure I wasn’t being overly influenced by any one factor or another. And to get a clearer view of Wesleyan in light of these other schools.
Jordan identified the other schools vying for his acceptance as follows: Big City U., Ivy U. and Unnamed Gorgeous Small Liberal Arts School. He would later explain that he had obscured the names of his choices publicly because he did not want to risk alienating a graduate school to which he might someday apply, which was certainly consistent with how Jordan approached life, his mind always racing a step ahead. But he had other motivations for cloaking his choices, as well.
After finishing his introduction, Jordan raised the question of whether he should attend Big City U. Unbeknownst to Jordan’s readers, Big City U. was an amalgam of two universities that had admitted him: Boston University (which had accepted him into its honors program) and New York University (which had accepted him into its prestigious Tisch School of the Arts). In his mass e-mail message, Jordan wrote:
Big City U. was good, but lacked a campus feeling completely, which is something that I feel is pretty important…. Move wherever you want, live wherever you want. But you have few times in your life to learn from PEOPLE, to be in a position where everyone is so uniformly intelligent.
Jordan had ultimately decided that he didn’t want to go to college in a city, and by the time he sat down to write his message had indeed ruled out NYU and BU. His choices were narrowing.
Returning to his e-mail, he next tackled the question of whether he should attend Ivy U. At this point, a narrative that was otherwise grounded in reality drifted into territory that was closer to fiction. Jordan had, of course, been rejected by the only Ivy League colleges to which he had applied, Brown and Penn. Asked later to reveal the identity of Ivy U., he answered that it, too, was a combination of two colleges: Brown and Johns Hopkins. Jordan said he was well aware that unlike Brown, Hopkins was not part of the Ivy League football conference. But he considered this a technicality: Hopkins, which had accepted him, was widely believed by many observers to be on par with the Ivies, at least academically. Jordan said he had even read somewhere that Hopkins had once been invited to be “the ninth Ivy,” but that it had refused, preferring to remain in its own football conference. Thus, Jordan reasoned, it wasn’t much of a stretch to label Hopkins as Ivy U. (Asked later if Hopkins had ever received an offer to join the Ivy League, a university spokesman said it had not.)
But Jordan had more pressing reasons for wanting to introduce the notion of “Ivy U.” into his e-mail. First, he had been careful not to reveal any of his acceptances or rejections to the students he met at WesFest, having been too embarrassed. With this e-mail he could begin to stoke the myth that he had indeed been accepted by at least one Ivy. Like those of the exalted top 20 students at his high school, the opinions of the prefrosh whom he had met at Wesleyan meant a lot to him, whether he would be attending college with them or not. They’d surely be impressed that he was weighing an Ivy League acceptance.
But by inventing Ivy U., Jordan was ultimately giving himself a much-needed opportunity to work through the pain of having been rejected. Like a man whose girlfriend had turned down his proposal of marriage, he wanted to enumerate all the reasons why he never should have fallen in love with Brown or Penn in the first place:
I went to visit Ivy U., good faculty, good rep. First thing I noticed, though, was that the kids were unbelievably pretentious. A lot of them had come from extremely rich families, took their acceptances into the ivys as a given, not something they’d worked for, deserved.
It seemed they weren’t there because they chose the school, but because their parents told them to go there, it had a good name, because they didn’t really think things through, but Ivy U.’s prestige made the choice for them. Like they hadn’t looked into the school at all, instead looking only at name and how highly it was listed at US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT….
It’s funny, if you stripped an ivy of its name and prestige, and took a bunch of kids over to see it, they wouldn’t be nearly as enthusiastic about going there. Most of the ivys have huge classes, irrelevant work, no personal attention, huge core curriculums (which I’m extremely against)—and yet people flock there because of the bumper sticker that they get to put on their car….
Sense any resentment? In my school alone, the three most brilliant kids I’ve ever met—honestly, mind-blowing brilliant—all got turned down from the Ivys in favor of these two girls that stay up all night, every night, memorizing textbooks word for word…. Yeah, they both got into princeton, brown, upenn, yale and columbia—and from what I’ve heard, this isn’t the exception, it’s the norm. So while schools like Wes accept kids that would be a fit to their philosophy, reputation-minded ivys admit SAT scores rather than people….
To anyone who really knew Jordan, most of these thoughts—with the exception of his genuine envy of his high school classmates—represented a 180-degree turn from what he had been saying in the months leading up to his rejection from Brown. He, of course, had been one of the very people who “flock” to schools like Brown “because of the bumper sticker that they get to put on their car,” and no one read the U.S. News rankings more closely.
In order to accept Brown’s rejection, Jordan decided, he would have to reject Brown, even if it was after the fact. Around the country, countless other high school seniors were having similar conversations with themselves at the same time. Just as a record number of applicants had reached for the Ivies that fall and winter, a record number had been turned down in the spring. Jordan may not have been completely honest with his readers, but he was beginning to level with himself, taking the first real steps toward realizing how empty his reasons for attending Brown had been. He was just too emotional at this point to share that particular insight with a wider audience.
Whether the decision was his or Brown’s, the end result was the same: as he wrote to the electronic bulletin board, he wouldn’t be attending Ivy U. (His actual decision for turning down Hopkins, which he did not visit, had little to do with the preceding analysis. He had been skeptical about the strength of its writing program and had read in one of the guidebooks that Hopkins students were often conservative in their politics.)
Jordan now told his readers that his decision had come down to a choice between Wesleyan and only one other college: Unnamed Gorgeous Small Liberal Arts School or, as he referred to it on subsequent reference, UGSLAS. This part, by all accounts, was true, and the unnamed school was Vassar. Jordan admitted in his message that, after WesFest, he “didn’t leave Wesleyan falling head-over-heels-I-can-see-my-own-ass in love.” With an open mind, he wrote, he had next traveled to UGSLAS with his best friend, who had been admitted early. Here was Jordan’s report of his trip to Poughkeepsie in early April:
Let me start by saying that the U.G.S.L.A.S. campus is amazingly, extraordinarily, mind-blowingly beautiful…. You see this sprawling, classic, tree-lined campus and old buildings, and the classic architecture and you say: “Now THIS is college.”
No kidding, I’ve visited half the ivys and about 20 other schools. U.G.S.L.A.S. was, hands down, the nicest campus I’ve yet to see…. I went to its dining hall, and when I say gourmet style food, it doesn’t even do the stuff justice. It was amazing.
So at that point, I’m sold by the aesthetics. I’m saying hey, rep-wise it’s solid, and the place is beautiful, and my parents will be happy, and my friends will come visit and be envious…and huuuuuuuge dorm rooms, bigger than my room at home, no joke….
“My decision’s been made,” he wrote, “off to U.G.S.L.A.S. I go.” And indeed he was. Jordan had picked Vassar over Wesleyan.
His decision, he wrote, had lasted for all of ten minutes.
At Vassar, Jordan had ended his visit by meeting with an English professor, and something about her had just rubbed him the wrong way. “She talked to the air above my head,” he wrote, and hadn’t made any attempt to get to know him. And, at least as he recounted it, she told him that he “couldn’t possibly have the talent, or understanding, to write well as a freshman.” That, she explained, was why certain English classes were reserved only for sophomores, juniors and seniors.
At this point in his visit to Vassar, Jordan wrote, he recalled that “at Wesleyan, almost all courses are open to frosh.” He also began to think about how kindly he had been treated by the creative writing professor at Wesleyan, who had set aside time to talk to him. “I don’t know,” he wrote, “I guess I just felt at Wes, the faculty really listened to me.” He also recalled for his readers how impressed he had been that “free expression”—in the form of those posters and sidewalk scrawls he had seen around campus, many poking fun at the university president—had been allowed during WesFest.
By now, Jordan’s e-mail had run to its eighth printed page, which he was determined would be his last. He concluded:
My visits to other campuses helped me to get a perspective on the things about Wes that I really loved. And sometimes…the things you really loved ARE subtle, almost so subtle that they don’t even register—sometimes it’s best when a school doesn’t slap you so hard it leaves a mark…. The quality of students, teachers, etc.—that’s what stays with you….
When I left Wes, I said, “if this place was on a better campus, a nicer town, I’d go here in a second.”
And now—I’ve realized that the campus and town parts aren’t so important after all.
But that I’d go there in a second??? Yeah, that part still stands:)
—Jordan Goldman
It was nearly seven P.M. and he had been at his computer for more than three hours. Scrolling back up to the subject line of his message, he now wrote: “you MUST read—why wesleyan is ABSOLUTELY the school for you.” However messy the process, however much it had been out of his hands, he had made his decision. So that no one missed it, he scrolled back down to the first page of his text and inserted two sentences: “Wesleyan is my clear first choice. I’ll give ya a breakdown of why.” And then, he pushed SEND.
Jordan slept well that night, the best he had in a while. When he awoke, he shared his e-mail message with his mother. Now, for the first time in memory, she and Jordan’s stepfather could truly relax again, at least until Jordan began preparing to leave the nest. Melanie hugged her only son and told him that she was pleased with his choice. She had liked Wesleyan a lot, and still remembered how thoughtful the admissions staff had been to her mother, and how much the family had enjoyed drinking those cute bottles of mineral water with the Wesleyan label. But she would have been happy wherever Jordan chose to go. Yes, Wesleyan’s $35,000 tuition and fees—minus the $5,000 annual scholarship he had received—would be impossible to afford on a teacher’s salary. But not only would her husband (a floor-covering salesman) and her ex (Jordan’s father) be chipping in, so would other relatives.
Jordan’s uncle Jay endorsed his nephew’s choice as well, telling Jordan that, based on what he had heard in the business world, Wesleyan was by far the best of his options. “Any employer will instantly know what Wesleyan is,” Jay asserted, as Jordan later recalled. Jordan’s father had counseled Jordan from his home in Florida to ignore the relative prestige of his choices and consider the best deal. Not only was NYU offering a big scholarship, but so were BU and Emerson. But when Jordan called his dad to tell him his decision, his father said he was happy and proud.
On the morning after he had sent off his message, Jordan felt a sense of peace, though he realized he still wasn’t “bouncing off the walls excited.” While he had no intention of revisiting his decision, he had to admit that he still had reservations about Wesleyan. His lingering regrets began to melt away when he logged on to America Online and checked the mailbox on his account. He was stunned to see more than a dozen responses to what he had written. Like his own message, all of the responses had been e-mailed to everyone else on the bulletin board.
Among the first responses had been one posted by Rod Bugarin, whom Jordan had never met. Rod wrote that he had returned to his office at about nine P.M. on Monday, after a thirty-minute swim, to find Jordan’s opus. He began his response by assuring Jordan of “guaranteed employment at the Wesleyan admissions office,” and then predicted the course of the rest of Jordan’s freshman year:
Jordan will replace our fabled cardinal as the University’s Mascot…and will be leading you all in singing our Fight Song during orientation…He will be the first student to become a senior interviewer in his freshman year.
Jordan, just see Ralph/me when you come back to campus. We’ll make sure that your room will be decorated and that we’ll be ready to bottle your fragrance so we can market it to every intellectual/creative/independent/athletic/way-cool student in the country…
Rod signed off by writing: “Welcome to the family, Jordan. I know Wesleyan will be great because you are in the student body.”
A fellow applicant wrote that she had been “trying to decide between Amherst and Wesleyan” and was “leaning toward Amherst.” But then she read Jordan’s posting. “To tell you the truth,” she wrote, “my biggest qualm to saying no to Amherst is that the school is generally considered to be more ‘prestigious’ than Wesleyan, with better academics and what-not. But after reading your letter I am so much more sure that I am going to choose Wesleyan.” Another woman who had already been accepted to Wesleyan early decision wrote that she had been “having second thoughts” about having applied only to Wesleyan. But, she reported, Jordan’s message had “stopped them in their place and reminded me why I wanted to go to Wesleyan in the first place.”
Ralph hadn’t gotten a chance to read his e-mail until late the following morning, and it was only after he got to the bottom of Jordan’s message and saw his name that he finally made the connection: this was one of the kids he had met in the cafeteria during WesFest. Ralph then logged on to the admissions office database to see which admissions officer had read Jordan’s application, and discovered not only that it had been he, but that he had been so impressed that he had crossed out the space for the second reader. Now Ralph remembered: this was the kid from Staten Island who wrote about X-Men and his friend in the wheelchair. I’m glad I liked him so much, Ralph thought to himself. He then posted his own response to the electronic bulletin board, which he titled, “The Book of Jordan,” and in which he wrote: “OK, Jordan is my absolute favorite. No one else need apply. That’s it. Amen.” He signed his missive: “Ralph, the awestruck.”
Ralph then sent a copy of Jordan’s message to all of his colleagues in the admissions office, several of whom replied, privately, to express their suspicions that the boy was an invention of Ralph’s imagination. No one in the office could recall a better case having been articulated for Wesleyan. Ralph was grateful that whatever else he accomplished that year, he would always be known as the guy who had brought Jordan Goldman to Wesleyan.
Jordan’s remark had struck an obvious chord in such a competitive year, and as his e-mail raced across the campus—even President Bennet was sent a copy—he became a Wesleyan folk hero, five months before he would even matriculate. Not a bad introduction for a guy still carrying a bit of a torch for Brown.
Whatever doubts Jordan had been feeling, though, were allayed by the reaction his words had touched off. A week before his decision was due, he mailed off a $250 deposit and his official response to Wesleyan: a form that had “YES” preprinted in large type at the top. Jordan then went out to his mother’s car and pressed a clear Wesleyan decal against the inside of the back window.
Three days after Jordan posted his message, Julianna Bentes and her mother left Wesleyan for the short drive south to New Haven. With memories of the unsettling club visit still rattling in her head, Julianna was waiting under a long gothic archway for her host, a Yale freshman, to pick her up, when she noticed a statue of a former president of the university, bathed in a ray of sunlight so bright it appeared to be emanating from a celestial source. “The entire courtyard was golden,” she recalled. “It was just short of voices crying out to me from the sky.” The moment seemed to be such a divine portent that she actually started to laugh out loud.
That night, Julianna, one of the most heavily recruited applicants to American colleges that year, experienced another heavenly vision. The moon was out as she gazed into a granite-topped fountain commemorating the number of women who had been enrolled at Yale throughout its history. The fountain had been designed by Maya Lin, herself a Yale alumna, who had also designed the Vietnam veterans’ memorial in Washington. Julianna saw that there was a stream of water tracing the institution’s history of coeducation. As she looked into the fountain, she realized that there was just enough moonlight for her to see her own reflection staring back. “This was beyond laughing out loud,” Julianna recalled. “I could actually see myself there.”
After she awoke the next morning in the third-floor dorm room where she had been staying, Julianna sat alone on a couch for ten minutes, looking at the wood floors and the paneling and the cozy fireplace. Outside the window an oversized magnolia tree was in full bloom. For all the disparate locations that her college search had taken her—from Goucher in Maryland to the University of Chicago, from Kenyon in rural Ohio to Wesleyan—Julianna realized that Yale was “the one place I didn’t want to leave.”
All the students on the New Haven campus seemed to want to meet her and asked if there was anything they could do for her. Her host alone must have introduced her to thirty new friends. Though there were dozens of other applicants visiting at the time, no doubt weighing similar options, Julianna spent two uninterrupted hours with an admissions officer. Sharon would later tell Julianna that almost no applicant could command that kind of face time at such a frenetic point in the admissions process, when applicants’ decisions were due in just ten days. But that was how badly Yale wanted Julianna Bentes.
The officer, who had graduated from Yale in the mid-1990s and had worked there for only a few years, told Julianna that she had begun keeping her own file of favorite essays, in which Julianna’s had now found a place. They spent most of their time discussing Yale’s nationally recognized history department and a theater program that offered Julianna a menu of at least five different dance groups. She didn’t need to hear any more; Yale seemed without a blemish.
As she prepared to depart the next day, Julianna reviewed the itinerary for the final leg of her last college tour. She would take Amtrak three hours north to Boston, to see Harvard, and then another train south from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, to see Swarthmore. From Pennsylvania, she’d hop a flight to Northern California, to visit Stanford.
This, she decided, was a good time to rank her choices thus far. Wesleyan, she now knew, just couldn’t compete with Yale. It wasn’t just that Yale was so architecturally rich—Julianna had left Yale, like so many who came before her and since, feeling as if she was in England—and it wasn’t necessarily that Yale was friendlier and much less “out there” socially than Wesleyan. Yale was also bigger; its freshman class would have more than a thousand students, compared to about seven hundred at Wesleyan. There’d be more people to meet, more classes to take, more organizations to join. That Yale was part of the Ivy League and Wesleyan was not, Julianna insisted, was not the primary factor in her decision. Sharon, who knew her better than almost anyone, was sure that this was true.
Julianna wouldn’t reveal her thinking to Sharon or anyone else for several more days, but from this point forward, she had resolved that Wesleyan was out. And so, for that matter, was Swarthmore, since Julianna imagined it to be similar—in size and location—to Wesleyan. Julianna would now travel to Harvard, and then, instead of enduring a six-hour train ride to Pennsylvania, fly to Stanford a day earlier than planned.
Harvard had always been the only school that her father had wanted her to attend. Having grown up in the Amazon in Brazil, he had heard about Harvard long before he had heard of any other American college. It was the ultimate symbol of the American Dream, and he was thrilled when his only child was admitted. But after visiting Yale and then Harvard Yard, Julianna decided that Harvard just didn’t appeal to her as strongly as had Yale. An admissions officer there had met with her, and, recalling her essay in similarly vivid detail, urged, “I hope you do something with writing.” And there was no denying Harvard’s colonial beauty, with red brick bordering the Charles River and a bonafide quadrangle. But just as at the University of Chicago, there were little things at Harvard that bothered her. No one, for example, seemed to want to get out of the way when she attempted to pass through a crowded doorway. And when Julianna told her host at Harvard that she was uninterested in attending a lecture on Irish history that had been put on her schedule, the host replied: “We have to go.” The students at Harvard, as at the University of Chicago, just seemed so much more uptight than at Yale.
By the time she headed to Logan Airport for her flight to Northern California, Julianna had decided that if she went to school on the East Coast, Yale would be it. Her father would have to understand. But still, two major obstacles lay in Yale’s path. One was out of Yale’s control: Julianna had no idea what she’d think of Stanford, which she had never seen. It certainly had the advantage of being closer to Los Angeles than New Haven, and Julianna had a strong relationship with her parents. But there was a more serious hurdle for Yale, at least as far as Catherine Bentes was concerned: Yale’s offer of financial aid was perhaps the least generous of the thirteen colleges to which her daughter had been admitted.
Sharon had urged Catherine to become well acquainted with the financial aid officers at the colleges that had admitted her daughter, advising her, “No school would want to see Julianna turn them down for financial reasons.” There was sometimes room for bargaining, particularly for the most sought-after applicants.
That had not always been the case. For four decades, Yale had been part of an organization of more than twenty colleges—including the seven other Ivies, and Wesleyan—that met annually to discuss their financial aid offers to the thousands of applicants who had been accepted at more than one member of the organization. The group had wanted to ensure that each institution’s offer was consistent, and that none of them could gain an unfair financial advantage over another. But those meetings came to an abrupt end in 1991, after the Justice Department charged that this particular organization was a cartel that violated federal antitrust law, not unlike that of oil-producing nations that met to fix the price of their product. From that point onward, according to a consent decree that the universities signed with the Justice Department, the free market would reign.
Almost nine years to the day since the signing of that consent decree, Catherine Bentes camped out in the financial aid office at Yale while her daughter surveyed the campus. Catherine, a compact, heavyset woman who concedes she can come on a little strong, had been trying to reach the office by phone for days but had only been able to get a recorded message. When she walked through the actual door, she did not fare any better. Standing behind a counter that reminded her of one at the department of motor vehicles, a financial aid officer motioned her to take a seat in the reception area and promised that someone would be with her momentarily. After an hour passed, and no officer had appeared, Catherine had had enough. “I have one day to see someone,” she blurted out, to no one in particular but loud enough that she could be heard behind the counter. “Someone needs to see me, or you’re not going to want to deal with me when I get really upset!” Within seconds, she later recalled, an officer was standing in front of her and ushering her to the counter.
Catherine was characteristically blunt and told the officer that Stanford and Harvard had given her daughter better financial aid offers, and that money might dictate her daughter’s decision. The tuition and fees at all three institutions were about the same—$36,000—and each had offered Julianna at least $1500 in federal loans. But while Stanford had promised her $8000, and Harvard was offering a more modest but still welcome $5000, Yale had offered no direct aid.
Because Yale’s philosophy was that its scholarships should be set aside for the exclusive benefit of those who needed the money most, Catherine was told that for her to win Julianna a bigger award, she would have to demonstrate extenuating circumstances. Otherwise, the income that the family had reported on its income tax forms the previous year (more than $50,000 but less than $100,000) would be deemed simply too large to justify a need-based scholarship, at least as calculated by Yale.
As it turned out, Catherine informed the officer, she had faxed Yale just such a letter the previous month, laying out the family’s financial difficulties. In the four-page document, Catherine described her chronic health problems and the leaves of absence she was often forced to take from her part-time job. The letter was so long that Catherine had divided it into chapters. Under the heading, “Medical-Dental,” Catherine detailed the money that her husband sent home to Brazil each year. He did so to care for the eighty-seven-year-old aunt who had raised him, who had recently suffered a stroke. Under the heading “Downsizing, Earthquake, Restructuring in California,” Catherine talked about the $10,000 insurance deductible that the family was still struggling to pay off, after an earthquake did $60,000 worth of damage to their small home five years earlier. In her conclusion, she wrote: “We live very simply. We eat at home, dining out very occasionally (4 times per year).” These were the sorts of personal details that Catherine had not included in Julianna’s financial aid forms.
The Yale officer, who had not seen the letter, listened intently as Catherine recounted its contents, and then she asked that she fax the letter again. The officer would make no promises, other than that she would agree to review Julianna’s case. That was all Catherine could ask, and she thanked the officer for her time.
That conversation had taken place on a Friday; on Monday morning the Benteses arrived in Palo Alto. As she took the measure of Stanford’s sprawling campus for the first time—with its stucco-covered walls, Spanish-style roofs and palm trees—Julianna felt as if she had come home. “I was off the East Coast,” she recalled. “I was back in my California sun.” It was Yale versus Stanford. This, Julianna knew, was going to be a tough call.
The history professor whom Stanford had designated as Julianna’s contact person had invited her several days earlier to visit a seminar he was teaching that afternoon. Julianna had initially responded that she’d be at Swarthmore that day, and not arriving at Stanford until Tuesday. The professor had then sent back an e-mail with a coy lament: if she had only been able to attend the class, then she would have been able to meet Chelsea Clinton, who was one of his students. After she had canceled her trip to Swarthmore, Julianna had excitedly written back informing the professor that she would be attending his class after all.
Sure enough, as Julianna took her seat in the fifteen-student seminar, there was Chelsea, sitting across the conference-style table. Julianna could see that the president’s daughter, a junior, was stylishly dressed in a pink top, a black sweater and black capri pants. Julianna was certain that several of the “students” flanking Chelsea were Secret Service agents. Once the class began, Chelsea was among three or four people who carried much of the discussion.
During a break in the nearly two-hour class, Julianna rose to go to the bathroom, as did Chelsea, and the two women struck up a conversation. Chelsea said she assumed that Julianna was a prospective freshman and asked what her choices were. With a week to go before her decision was due, Julianna said that it had come down to Yale and Stanford. Chelsea smiled. Those schools, she said, had been her finalists, too.
Chelsea then told Julianna something that she had not heard before: that virtually until the moment her decision was due, she intended to go to Yale. Julianna already knew that both Bill and Hillary Clinton had been law students at Yale, where they met. Yale was comfortably familiar to the family, but, as Julianna later recalled, Chelsea said that she ultimately gravitated toward the adventure that Stanford represented. Having lived half her life in Arkansas and the other half in Washington, she decided she “wanted to see what it was like on the West Coast.”
At this point, Chelsea asked Julianna where she lived. When Julianna replied Los Angeles, Chelsea had an immediate response: “If I grew up on the West Coast, I’d have probably gone to Yale.” After her mystical experiences in New Haven, Julianna had been on the lookout for one final sign that would seal her decision. She was sure she had just received it, from the daughter of the president of the United States, of all people. Chelsea, who had been dispatched to make the case for Stanford, had instead wound up inadvertently helping one of its top recruits choose Yale. Julianna felt certain that Chelsea was right, that a more dramatic change of scenery might be good for her. If the money could be worked out, she decided, she wanted to go to Yale.
Julianna didn’t have to wait long to hear Yale’s response to her mother’s plea. Soon after the Benteses returned to Los Angeles, they received a fax from the Yale office of financial aid. The letter, which was unsigned, began: “The Undergraduate Financial Aid staff has adjusted your financial aid package”; the annual loans it was offering had remained about the same, $3,500, as had the $1,600 Julianna would earn from a work-study job, but the school, which had initially offered her no direct aid, was now awarding her a scholarship of $6,500. Yale characterized its scholarship as need-based, and the amount was only a little less than what she was being given by Stanford. Whatever Yale’s formulas, the college had managed to adjust them to make its offer even with that of a competitor. And just to complicate matters, Harvard had sent Catherine a fax at around the same time saying that it, too, had raised its scholarship offer—to $6,550 from about $5,000—after hearing Catherine make an appeal similar to the one she had made at Yale. At each institution, the Benteses would now be responsible for providing about $24,000 annually for an education that would otherwise cost $36,000.
Julianna now had her mother’s blessing to pick Yale. While Goucher and Kenyon would have given her a free ride, Catherine agreed with her daughter that Yale would offer a superior education. And while the University of Chicago, which was arguably Yale’s academic equal, would have also completely underwritten Julianna’s education, Catherine knew her daughter didn’t want to go there. Even if the Benteses, like so many parents, had to mortgage their small house again, they would find the money.
Only a year ago, Julianna’s wish list of colleges had included fifty-four names. Now there was only one. The pitched competition for the privilege of educating Julianna Bentes, which had lasted almost as long as a presidential campaign, was finally over.
For all his efforts on behalf of Harvard, Ray Bentes would smile with pride when told of his daughter’s decision. Yale was still a long way from the rubber plantation in the jungle where he had spent much of his childhood. Since they had returned from the East Coast, Ray had heard all the stories from his wife and daughter about their trip. “I very much respected their findings,” he said later. “Harvard was not the best option.” Sharon applauded Julianna’s choice as well—not so much for the decision itself as the way that Julianna had gone about making it. Sharon couldn’t remember another student from Harvard-Westlake who had been accepted at Harvard and Yale and yet still made time to visit Goucher and Kenyon, which registered nowhere near the Ivies on the meter of U.S. News. Julianna had known all along that Yale was among the most prestigious universities in the world, yet she had given every other college the benefit of the doubt.
Around the time that she made her decision, Julianna got an e-mail from Stanford. “So,” that professor asked, “will we see you here in the fall, or did you opt for New Haven?” He had apparently decided that he couldn’t wait for the official word from the Stanford admissions office. Julianna wrote back: “I opted for New Haven, because I need to try to check out the East Coast.” She decided to omit the role that his prized student, Chelsea, had played in the decision, and closed her message by telling the professor: “Thank you so much for all of your help and avail-ability—it made my choice decidedly more difficult.”
Telling the professor had been relatively easy, Julianna thought, but she couldn’t bear the thought of notifying Ralph. It wasn’t just that he was her college counselor’s good friend. She genuinely liked him. “He was a cool person,” Julianna said. “I was always telling myself not to associate the admissions officer with the school.” But that had proved impossible, and Julianna knew she had hung on to Wesleyan so long largely because of her admiration for Ralph.
To her relief, Ralph would hear the news from elsewhere. On April 28, the Friday before Julianna’s decisions were due, Ralph was in the midst of his annual spring visit to Los Angeles. The previous night, he had helped lead a seminar for parents and kids from Harvard-Westlake and four other L.A. prep schools. He presented his audience with several mock applications and asked it to assess them as if it were an admissions committee, voting on whom to accept and why. Afterward, the audience members compared their choices to Ralph’s.
The following afternoon, he was relaxing in Sharon’s office when he couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. As soon as they got a moment alone, Ralph wanted to ask Sharon about Julianna’s college plans. As far as he knew, Wesleyan was still alive, for he had seen Julianna only a few days earlier. As he sat making small talk, he almost jumped when he heard a colleague of Sharon’s ask his very question: “So what’s Julianna doing?” Sharon pretended to cover Ralph’s ears with her hands as she stage-whispered the news: “She’s going to Yale.”
Ralph had a quick response that was just as melodramatic: “Oh…. break…my…heart,” he cried, trying to sound as anguished as Tony in that production of West Side Story all those years ago. Despite their attempts at making light of this news, Sharon could tell that her old friend was crushed. “I felt for him,” she said later. “Julianna had genuinely considered Wesleyan as an option. I knew Ralph had followed her for so long. When you let yourself believe there’s the chance you might get them, and you don’t, it hurts. And then they’re out of your life.”
A few days later, Ralph was feeling better, consoling himself with the fact that Wesleyan had been in the race from Julianna’s last year of middle school until the final week of her college tour. That was remarkable, given her choices, he decided. But he later learned about the club meeting that she had been taken to—an experience that she had reported to neither Ralph nor Sharon—and he immediately buried his head in his hands.
Typical of Wesleyan, with its penchant for openness, the only students who were barred from hosting prospective freshmen were those who were on academic probation. Otherwise, the school made no regular attempt to screen its hosts. Wesleyan’s philosophy was that it wanted its applicants to have an unobstructed view of the campus. Ralph had read about the club in the school newspaper and wasn’t especially bothered by its existence or mission. What had irritated him, he admitted, was that Julianna had wound up getting such a limited glimpse of the Wesleyan experience. “That’s a part of Wesleyan,” he said, “but not all of it.”
Had Julianna not attended the meeting, Ralph acknowledged, she probably would have picked Yale over Wesleyan, anyway. It was hard for Wesleyan to compete with Yale’s prestige, its endowment, its course offerings. But he still regretted that, in the end, Wesleyan had not given Yale as strong a fight as it could have. In any other year, given how important Julianna was to him, he might have at least chatted in advance with the student who hosted her, as he had with the student who gave Mig his tour. For that matter, Ralph could have had a preliminary conversation with the judge who had been assigned to conduct her alumni interview, before there had ever been a disagreement over the date. He would have seen to it that the judge knew to handle her with great care, that Julianna was at the top of Wesleyan’s wish list. As it turned out, Ralph hadn’t even called the judge after he sent Julianna out of his courtroom, and had failed to make sure that his instructions to send a plane ticket to Julianna—“Fly her out”—had been seen in the office and executed. Julianna had received no such offer.
Until recently, this sort of attention to detail would have been a realistic goal. But the assembling of the Class of 2004 had been like no other Ralph could remember. At times, it seemed to Ralph that he and his colleagues were buckling under the strain of the record number of applications. Trying to decide where to direct his attention in those final, critical weeks of March had sometimes made him feel like a trauma surgeon assigned to triage in a M.A.S.H. unit. He was meeting with his colleagues and voting in the final committee round during the day, while trying to finish reading all of those essays late into the night. All the while, he was supposed to be devising and executing strategies to get the best applicants to come to Wesleyan. That Ralph had been patiently tracking Julianna since she was a high school freshman had ultimately counted for little in the last, frenzied days of the admissions season. There had been too many applications, and too few people to read them.
“She definitely deserved to have more attention paid to her,” Ralph said. “Each year we remind ourselves to do more follow-up with the applicants. We know it’s the hardest piece. We drop the ball in many cases. It’s frustrating. It’s aggravating. But you almost have to laugh that Julianna had that experience, despite all your other plans.”
“But for time,” he said. “I would have done more.”
As Julianna celebrated the end of one journey and anticipated the beginning of another, Becca Jannol was still at sea. Although Becca and Julianna had been classmates for four years, they didn’t know each other well, given their different interests. Still, Becca knew by late April that the college plans of Julianna and almost all of the 274 other seniors at Harvard-Westlake were now set. Julianna was one of 14 going to Yale. Another 12 were bound for Harvard, and 11 to Stanford. Of more immediate relevance to Becca was the fact that 5 would soon be on their way to Cornell, while 7 others would be joining Ralph at Wesleyan.
When May 1 arrived, Becca sent in a small deposit to Emory. She did so with little enthusiasm, considering the money an insurance policy that she hoped she would never have to cash. Her father assured her that if Wesleyan or Cornell came through with an offer, he’d happily consider the money a write-off. Becca, knowing she’d have to wait weeks, if not months, for a decision telling her whether she’d be moving to Georgia, Connecticut or New York, had entered a parallel reality that Sharon liked to call “wait-list limbo.”
As Becca began her wait, the responses flowing back to Wesleyan from around the country and the world were slowing to a trickle. By the middle of May, the final tally did not bode well for Becca or the six hundred other applicants who had accepted Wesleyan’s offer to reserve a spot on the waiting list.
In addition to the 300 students admitted to Wesleyan in the early rounds, 431 other applicants who were accepted in the main round in the spring had reserved seats in the Class of 2004. The class now had a total of 731 students, which was about all that Wesleyan could accommodate, and more than had been anticipated. Part of the reason, Wesleyan was sure, was that its competitors in the Ivy League, and at Williams and Amherst, had rejected more applicants than ever this year, as had Wesleyan itself.
For a while it seemed that Wesleyan might not be able to take a single applicant off the waiting list for the incoming class. But then Greg Pyke, the office’s chief statistician, wedged open the front gate again, however slightly. In the past, Greg explained to Nancy, Wesleyan usually lost about ten of its admitted students during the period between May and September. These were usually students who put in a deposit at Wesleyan but ultimately came off the waiting list at a college that they had ranked higher, a process Greg and others liked to call the “summer melt.” Anticipating that ten students who had accepted Wesleyan’s offer would drop out over the summer, Greg and Nancy decided that they would make room in the new class for ten students on the waiting list—ten, out of the six hundred who had expressed interest.
With so few slots available, Greg was relieved that there were no real imbalances in the new class that needed to be corrected, in contrast to previous years. The percentage of men, which had been 44 percent on the eve of the committee hearings, was now 49 percent, certainly close enough to the ideal of 50 percent. The median SAT score—1430 in early March—had since fallen, because some of Wesleyan’s highest-scoring applicants chose to go elsewhere, as had been expected. But the damage was minimal. At 1360, the median SAT score of the Class of 2004 was only 10 points lower than that of the current freshman class. Wesleyan would still look fine in U.S. News, Greg thought.
The percentages of minority students in the Class of 2004 had also held since March. In a virtual mirror of the Class of 2003, the new freshman class was 11 percent African American, 12 percent Asian or Asian American, and 7 percent Latino. Those numbers would play well at high schools with high minority populations, as well as with any observer committed to affirmative action. The new class also had delegates from forty states, the District of Columbia and more than two dozen foreign countries, which gave it the geographic diversity that colleges prized. But as in years past, it was dominated by students from the Mid-Atlantic states (41 percent) and New England (27 percent). These broad statistics would be well received by Wesleyan’s alumni and trustees.
Months before the students would arrive on campus, professors, administrators and coaches in individual departments had been getting a more detailed briefing on the actual individuals themselves. And the admissions office was getting good feedback. The cross-country team had landed a prized distance runner from Washington State, among the fastest ever to attend Wesleyan. Nearly three-quarters of the students in the new class had taken biology, chemistry and physics, which pleased the science faculty. One out of three of the incoming freshmen was either the president of his or her student body, the captain of a sports team or editor of the newspaper. Wesleyan would not suffer for leadership.
In mid-May, Nancy and Greg sent out an e-mail to the admissions officers, asking them to help narrow the choices of those who might come off the waiting list. Working in pairs, they were to identify twelve to fifteen applicants from each of the four main regions of the country, for a total of no more than sixty. These were the applicants whom Nancy and Greg would consider admitting into the class, with the assumption that if fifteen of these sixty were ultimately offered admission to Wesleyan, ten would probably accept.
There were no overriding criteria that would guide the officers’ search, but perhaps more than at any other time during the year, an applicant’s passion for attending Wesleyan would actually count for something as the officers made their wish lists. For that reason, each applicant placed on the waiting list had been given the option to write a page-long essay on why he or she wanted to come to the school.
With the odds against acceptance now staggeringly high, some applicants always took the directive of demonstrating their ardor to the extreme. In 1993, for example, the Wesleyan admissions committee had placed Carter L. Bays, an aspiring playwright from Shaker Heights, Ohio, on the waiting list. He was convinced that the committee had made a terrible mistake in not accepting him immediately, and wrote, “To prove that I am worthy of attending your school and that you are worthy of having me as a student, I’m going to send you a postcard every day until you accept me.”
The first day, a postcard arrived that was titled, “Reason No. 1 why Carter L. Bays belongs at Wesleyan University.” That reason, Carter wrote, was that he had recently won a local playwriting festival. The next day, “Reason No. 2” promised that he would “take full advantage of the millions of volumes in Olin Library.”
Before long, Judy Goodale, the office manager, and Charlotte Lazor, the office’s longtime systems manager, were racing each other to the mailbox to retrieve Carter’s latest note. Each wanted to be the first to read aloud that Carter was “an excellent singer” or that he could “chew gum and ride a bike at the same time.” They then decorated their bulletin boards with the photographs on the opposite side of the card, as if the cards had been sent by a daffy uncle on vacation. There was one with a collection of dogs playing poker, another with a svelte Elvis, and a third that displayed a replica of Stonehenge made out of toothpicks. Without fail, a card arrived every day for nearly a month.
When the deans asked Judy to send up the workcards of those applicants whom they would consider accepting off the waiting list that year, she and Charlotte decided to cast a rare vote: they put Carter’s card on the very top. “He was our personal case,” Charlotte recalled. When an admissions officer telephoned Carter a few days later to notify him that he had indeed been accepted, she added that she was calling over the objection of the assistants in the office, who had begged her to delay the call, wanting more mail. That day, Carter dashed off a final postcard containing only a two-word message: “Thank you.”
But the relationship didn’t end there. Once enrolled at Wesleyan, Carter became a regular contributor to the student newspaper, and Judy and Charlotte clipped his articles like proud parents. Though they were eager to meet him, they could never summon the courage to invite him for a visit to the office. But they never forgot him. After Carter graduated, they logged on to the alumni database to learn of his first job out of college and were hardly surprised at what flashed on the computer screen: “Staff Writer, The Late Show with David Letterman.” Applying to Wesleyan, as it turned out, had prepared Carter L. Bays well for his chief responsibility on the Letterman show: writing the on-air responses to Dave’s viewer mail. “It was almost poetic,” Charlotte said.
Greg was quick to caution that for every applicant who succeeded by mounting a “stupid applicant trick” like Carter’s, hundreds of others failed. As usual, boxes of candy and fresh-baked cookies descended on the back office of the admissions building in the spring of 2000 from those seeking to move up the waiting list for the Class of 2004. But while those offerings were eagerly consumed, they never seemed to gain the sender any sway. The life-size doll that was an apparent dead-ringer for one applicant was promptly shipped off to a local nursery school, while the glitter that filled some envelopes only served to irritate those in the office who made the mistake of opening the letters over their computer keyboards.
Toward the end of May, Ralph and Rod met in a conference room to assemble their waiting list nominees. The men shared responsibility for the West and for the State of New Jersey, and they would make their picks together. The general understanding was that no applicant from their regions would be sent to Nancy’s desk unless they had each signed off on him or her.
To Rod’s surprise, the meeting was brief: Ralph just sat back as Rod made almost all the picks himself, and merely said, “Whatever you want.” Ralph did make a few recommendations but did not even bother to suggest Becca Jannol. “I knew it was a longshot,” Ralph acknowledged, “and that Rod would say no,” for he had been one of the eight officers who had voted against Becca in that heated committee hearing in which the issue of the brownie had been raised. When the pair had finalized their choices, Ralph offered to deliver the pile of a dozen or so ballots to Nancy, which Rod said would be fine; he was happy to be done with it.
It was only after Ralph had made a stop at his own office that he made one final selection of his own. Flipping through a stack of files on his desk, he located Becca’s application and laid her workcard on the bottom of the group that he and Rod had compiled. “I didn’t want Rod to see,” Ralph admitted later. It was an almost Machiavellian maneuver, the type of thing that Ralph would almost never undertake, but he reasoned that he was justified because he had worked in the Wesleyan admissions office four years longer than Rod, who was still in his first year, and because he was considered the senior dean for the region. Whatever the ground rules were that he and Rod had agreed upon, Ralph figured he had earned a wildcard of his own. He was determined that Becca receive one final look, for she was simply too good a candidate. In time, Rod would probably understand. And if Becca wasn’t taken off the waiting list, Rod would probably never discover what Ralph had done.
The following morning, as he prepared to deposit their recommendations in Nancy’s office, Ralph made two other changes: he moved Becca’s card from the bottom of the pile to the top. To Greg and Nancy, Becca would now appear to be Ralph and Rod’s lead nominee. Ralph then attached a bright yellow Post-it to Becca’s workcard that couldn’t be missed: “Still very, very interested. Lots of support from everybody at school.” And in case anyone had forgotten, Ralph added: “Great leader.”
Nancy and Greg announced their picks to the staff, via e-mail, a few days later. One lucky winner was a prep school student whose uneven grades had troubled Ralph but whose poetry had ultimately won over Greg. Another had made no strong impression in the main round but had ultimately come to the attention of President Bennet, though he, as usual, had made no request to the committee for special treatment.
Ralph saw that there were five other names on the list, but Becca’s was not one of them. It was over. Ralph felt sorry for Becca, but he had no regrets about how he had handled her case. “I did everything I could, and then some,” he said later. He didn’t even bother to call Sharon, for he had already made it clear to her how tough the odds had been.
But then, a few weeks later, a funny thing happened. Though the Class of 2004 was now effectively closed, Greg and Nancy had waited before officially disbanding the waiting list. Sometimes, the summer melt was so intense that students were taken off the waiting list as late as August. In the middle of June of 2000, Greg Pyke, ever the number cruncher, had noticed a statistical anomaly in the Class of 2004. Usually, about fifteen students a year who had been accepted into a particular class had asked to defer their enrollment at Wesleyan until the following year’s class. The idea of taking a year off between high school and college was becoming increasingly attractive, particularly as the pressure to get into college grew. As Wesleyan decided in March of 2000 how many students it could admit to the Class of 2004, it had always assumed that, once again, fifteen students would elect to start a year late, and it adjusted its offers accordingly. It also assumed that when it began its search for the Class of 2005, beginning in the fall, the class would already have fifteen students committed to it. But, as it turned out, only five applicants who were accepted for the Class of 2004 had asked Wesleyan to put off their enrollment a year. That, Greg reasoned, left room for another ten applicants to be accepted now for the Class of 2005, a year early. After all, Wesleyan had already set aside those early seats.
Wesleyan had never initiated such an offer before, leaving it to the applicants themselves to sort out whether they wanted to put off college for a year. But Greg and Nancy had regretted that there were so many good applicants who remained on the waiting list for the Class of 2004, and this would be a way to get a few of them to Wesleyan after all.
Toward the end of June, Ralph received an e-mail message explaining their surprise decision to start stocking the Class of 2005 more than a year in advance. “In part,” Nancy wrote to her colleagues, “this is to address a small number of political cases—alumni/trustee interest, school relations, etc.—that we were unable (unwilling?) to include in the small group we took a couple of weeks ago.”
One applicant who had been designated to receive an offer of this early-early acceptance was a student at a top New York City prep school. A powerful alumnus knew the applicant well and had expressed regret that there had been no room for him at Wesleyan in the Class of 2004. Barbara-Jan, as Wesleyan’s chief fund-raiser, had passed that complaint on to Nancy, who had been receptive. Another applicant now being offered admission to the following year’s freshman class had written movingly of herself as both an observant Jew and a practicing Buddhist. No one who read her file had been able to forget her, but it didn’t hurt that her father and sister were Wesleyan alumni. Now, long after the game seemed over, she had won admission to Wesleyan.
Becca Jannol had no family connections to Wesleyan, but she did fall into the category that Nancy’s e-mail described as “school relations.” Ralph was stunned to learn from Nancy’s message that Becca was being invited to join the Class of 2005 as well. Nancy had remembered that Sharon, her friend from that conference years earlier, had been especially disappointed with the way Becca’s application had been treated. And Nancy still recalled being impressed with Becca. Ralph hadn’t needed to remind her, and indeed, she hadn’t even given him the opportunity to; this was her pick. Ralph felt as if he had received a Christmas present in the middle of summer. What a perfect way to end this, he thought.
Because time was short, an assistant from the admissions office had already been dispatched to call Becca at home to gauge her interest, before Ralph would ever have the chance to pick up the phone. Becca’s answer was polite, and swift: the call from Wesleyan had come too late.
Several days earlier, Becca had been sitting in a small audio-visual studio at Harvard-Westlake, editing a short film, when the phone rang. “It’s for you,” her teacher told her. The voice on the line was Sharon’s.
“He called!” she said.
Sharon didn’t even have to say Ken Gabard’s name. At least twice a day for the past few weeks, Becca had been asking Sharon if she had received any word from their favorite admissions officer at Cornell. And now, finally, Sharon had.
Sharon told Becca that she had been accepted into the Class of 2004 at Cornell, in the School of Arts and Sciences. But there was a catch: as Ken had predicted during her visit to Cornell, there was not enough housing left on campus for Becca to start in the fall. But she and about sixty other candidates were being invited to join the Class of 2004 in January, for the second semester. He had pushed for Becca and his colleagues were receptive. Her response was instantaneous.
“Wuh-hoo!” she said to her college counselor. “This is awesome!”
Anyone eavesdropping would have been hard-pressed to tell who was more excited, Sharon or Becca. Becca’s application had been among the toughest that Sharon had ever shepherded. But her initial strategy had won out, even if it took a few extra weeks to do so. Sharon had advised Becca to apply to Wesleyan, and later to Cornell, in part because she was confident that Becca would find a sympathetic reader and a champion at each school, which is precisely what had happened.
While the admissions committee at Wesleyan had reached a consensus, at least initially, to reject Becca resoundingly, she had faced no such committee at Cornell, a factor that had helped her. Instead, Cornell paired an admissions officer with a faculty member and assigned the pair responsibility for making the call on everyone who had applied to Cornell from a particular geographic region. That could work against a candidate, of course, for if he or she failed to win over the first two readers of his or her application, there was little recourse, as there was at Wesleyan. But if those two readers liked an applicant, and there was room in the class, he or she was in.
When he had first read Becca’s application in late winter, Ken had reacted to the story of the pot brownie as Ralph had. “The way we’ve always approached stuff like that,” Ken explained later, “is that if the student has faced up to the problem, writes to us about it, and the school supports her application, then as far as we’re concerned she’s fine.” Drawing on the letter from Becca’s dean, Mr. Sal, Ken concluded that Becca had grown from the experience. The professor who was reading alongside Ken—they were sitting together at a desk in Ken’s office—concurred. “We felt she redeemed herself,” Ken said.
Moreover, Ken and the professor agreed that if they had rejected Becca based on an ultimately harmless brush with drugs, they would be nothing if not hypocritical. “We all have been young,” Ken said. “We all have made mistakes. It’s not something that should ruin your life.” That Becca had narrowly missed admission to Cornell during the main round was more a factor of her SAT scores. Of the 1000 Californians who applied in the main round for admission to the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell, Ken could make offers to about only 270, and he felt there were too many other applicants from California who had scored better than Becca. But once he received permission from Cornell, in late spring, to offer about 10 more Californians a chance to start at midyear, he made sure he could find room for her.
After hearing this good news from her college counselor, Becca told Sharon immediately that she wanted to accept Ken’s offer. Even if Wesleyan admitted her over the summer—which, of course, it subsequently would—she preferred to go to Cornell. In contrast to Julianna’s case, Sharon felt no disappointment for Ralph in losing this candidate. Wesleyan had had its chance to land Becca in April and had passed on her. That wasn’t Ralph’s fault, but he would surely understand that the girl’s feelings for Wesleyan had changed in the interim. “I love the fact that Becca ended up someplace that didn’t appear on her list until mid-December,” Sharon said later.
As the euphoria of Sharon’s call faded, Becca grew a bit anxious, as did her parents, who were concerned about how she would fare, socially and academically, by arriving on the Cornell campus three months after almost everyone in her class. Becca began to daydream about working on a sheep farm in New Zealand and perhaps, if there was time, trekking in Nepal, before departing for Cornell in January. She reasoned that her father, a successful lawyer, could afford it, and she had earned it. But he vetoed her initial choices, explaining that he wanted her to go easy on the expenses and confine herself to the Western Hemisphere.
Becca ultimately decided she would spend the summer and fall in Costa Rica, living with a rural family and teaching English. And to prove to her father that she was aware of the dent she was putting in his wallet, she sent a mass mailing to “family, friends and potential sponsors.” After disclosing her plans, she asked that “those interested in supporting me” send a donation to her home address. Even Sharon received a copy. Becca had meant the line as a joke, but the letter prompted a flurry of phone calls to her father to see if she was serious. No, he explained, this was his treat; he couldn’t be prouder of his daughter.
Until recently Becca had never imagined having an Ivy League name attached to her own, and she was amazed at how good it made her feel. She was now, officially, the “best of the best,” she said. And no matter what she chose to do in life, she felt certain that Cornell would surely open doors for her that Emory or UC Santa Cruz or even Wesleyan might not. Still, as she prepared to embark on her Costa Rican adventure, her excitement was tempered by two competing emotions. One was an uncharacteristically smoldering anger. She felt her college application had taken an unnecessary pounding, at Wesleyan and elsewhere, and her self-esteem had suffered as a result. “I’m sorry so many kids have to go through this process,” she said. “It makes you feel really bad about yourself at times.” There had to be a better way, she said, but she was hard-pressed to suggest one.
Becca was also experiencing a sense of loss, for after months of imagining Ralph as the white knight who would come to her rescue, she now found it difficult even to think about him. It wasn’t that she was ungrateful for his efforts; to the contrary, she was contemplating what she’d be missing. Students who had gone on to Wesleyan from Harvard-Westlake in previous years told her that Ralph made them feel like part of his family. He and his wife even opened their home to the students he had brought to campus. Ralph not only felt responsible for their well-being but enjoyed their company.
“My only regret about not going to that school,” Becca finally decided, “is that I don’t get to hang out with Ralph.”