Admission (35 page)

She opened the door with her own key and went first to the administrative warren in the back of the building, passing the
abandoned receptionist’s desk. She turned on the lights as she went, bathing the nondescript corridor in harsh fluorescent
illumination that picked up every ding and mark on the walls, passing the silent photocopier in its alcove. Against one wall,
two of the fax machines were lit and humming, neatly depositing pages and pages into their trays. In the cubicles, screen
savers pulsed and danced. The smorgasbord of ill-judged baked goods had been cleared away, only a spattering of crumbs left
behind. On Martha’s desk, a phone purred forlornly, five times, six times, then went silent. It was all, in fact, very silent.

She hoisted her bags onto the counter below the staff mailboxes and began to lift out handfuls of files. There were a few
she’d flagged to remove at this point, and she went hunting for them now, quickly locating the fluorescent pink Post-it notes
on their covers. These were folders she had questions about for one reason or another, small items she might already have
dealt with if Susannah were not such a Luddite, who refused to own a computer. Because she was, however, and because she did
not, and because Portia had declined to drive into Hanover to undertake this sensitive business on some public terminal in
Baker Library, she had merely flagged the files to come back to.

One of these was a boy from a private day school near Boston, whose guidance counselor—a woman Portia had met when she’d visited
the school last spring—had declined to answer two notable questions on the secondary school report: “Has the applicant ever
been found responsible for a disciplinary violation at your school, whether related to academic misconduct or behavioral misconduct,
that resulted in the applicant’s probation, suspension, removal, dismissal, or expulsion from your institution? To your knowledge,
has the applicant ever been convicted of a misdemeanor, felony, or other crime?” Almost always, the answer to these questions
was no. Sometimes it was yes, and sometimes that was not in itself the kiss of death. There were kids who’d made mistakes
and grown from them. There were victims of excessive “zero tolerance” school rules, suspended for carrying a loaded water
pistol or pointing a finger and declaring, “Bang.” There was even the occasional Jean Valjean crime of necessity. (She had
never forgotten the boy from Oregon who had shoplifted liver for his family. Liver! If only he had been a stronger student.)
But she could not remember a single instance in which the guidance counselor had declined to answer the questions. It could,
of course, be an oversight—a typo. But at this school? With tuition upward of twenty-five grand a year and a student parking
lot crowded with Lexus coupés and BMWs? Portia suspected not.

Another worrying application was from a Rhode Island girl whose complex, mellifluous essay was somewhat at odds with her low
English grades and poor score on the writing section of the SAT, not to mention the fact that the favorite book listed in
the “Few Details” section was Pride and Priviledge by “Jane Austin.” Portia, accordingly, wanted to check the girl’s tribute
to Fannie Lou Hamer against their data bank of essays for sale. (These were gleaned mainly from Internet sources—where they
were billed as teaching tools and slathered with disclaimers—but supplemented by an Iowa entrepreneur with an essayist-for-hire
business. This unpleasant individual had decided to publish his expertise in book form and closed up shop by mailing his entire
backlist of custom essays to every college his clients had ever attended, plus
People
magazine.) Of course, the Rhode Island girl might simply have risen to the challenge of her essay, taking her time, thinking
through her points, and checking her sentences carefully to avoid grammatical errors, but there was something in the ease
of the language that worried Portia. Correctness, after all, was achievable with sweat, but in her experience it was nearly
impossible to drill grace into prose.

There was also a boy from Boston Latin who had furnished a list of Princeton philosophers he wanted to work with and an essay
of such dense philosophical prose that Portia had had no idea what he was talking about. (In fact, she could have sworn, when
she’d read it at Susannah’s kitchen table days earlier, that it had something to do with zombies. What next? she’d thought.
Mummies and vampires?) She had decided to send the essay to David and ask him to sort it out. Philosophers seemed to have
a knack for recognizing their own kind as well as the impostors in their midst.

Finally, there was the Connecticut boy whose long list of school government offices, dramatic roles, community service projects,
and baseball positions had ended with the words “National Judo Champion.” It might, of course, be true, but in Portia’s previous
dealings with bona fide national judo champions (and not a few had indeed applied to Princeton), this accomplishment did tend
to be noted in recommendations and to require enough practice time to preclude student government, drama, and varsity baseball.
National judo champions also had a tendency to write about being national judo champions. They solicited their coaches for
references and supplied newspaper reports attesting to the fact that they were… well… national judo champions. It would easily
be settled by Google, Portia thought, finding the file at the very bottom of the stack and setting it aside. Why anyone would
bother to lie in the age of Google was baffling.

“We are trusting skeptics,” her first dean of admissions had told her years before. “We believe what they tell us, but they’d
better be telling us the truth.” This was Harrold McHenry, the soon-to-be former Dean of Admissions at Dartmouth, who had
hauled her aboard the profession in the spring of her final Dartmouth year. Harrold’s sense of fair play—fair play he sweetly
assumed everyone else likewise embraced—had been one of his most endearing qualities. He had a horror of the so-called new
rules of admissions, the outsmarting and end runs and decoding now rampant out there, the snake-oil salesmen promising to
package and sell your kid to his or her school of choice. For as long as he could (and longer, perhaps, than he should have),
Harrold stubbornly regarded each application as an open, invigorating conversation between his staff and the applicant, in
which there could be no dissembling on either side. He expected total candor from each applicant and maintained that expectation
even after little wildfires of scandal broke through the industry in the 1990s—kids getting other kids to take their SATs
for them, applicants who wrote their own recommendations, people pretending to be Rothschilds and ranch hands. These events
had been personally wounding to Harrold, but he had stayed the course, doing his best to ride the new waves, trying to maintain
his personal honor code.

There was something a little haunting about this terribly ordinary room, Portia decided. She tried, for a moment, to see it
not as the generic office it absolutely was, but as the epicenter of so much fervent speculation, by students, teachers, counselors,
and parents. To them, this utilitarian space was the holding pen where their child and all his or her antagonists were gathered,
vetted, directed, shunted into narrower and narrower corridors leading to smaller and smaller vestibules, where they were
commanded to wait in mute distress, face-to-face with their most closely matched fellow aspirants: wrestlers here, legacies
there, Pakistanis to the right, woodwinds, novelists, witheringly brilliant mathematicians, faculty kids, staff kids, movie
star kids, movie stars, ordinary decent kids, good debaters, great debaters, boys who wanted to be Brian Greene, girls who
wanted to be Stephen Sondheim, or Meg Whitman, or Quentin Tarantino. There was, for instance, one tiny chamber in which the
diver from Wisconsin sat knee to bandaged knee with the diver from Maine, the lounge where the girls from MIT’s Women’s Technology
Program were briefly, uncomfortably, reunited, the claustrophobic cubicle where the classically trained soprano from Florida
eyed the classically trained soprano from Los Angeles and the classically trained soprano from Cleveland. That it didn’t actually
work like this was not even relevant, because Portia understood the symbolic power of this place, banal as it was. That power
was even greater, she suspected, than the symbolic power of their individual offices upstairs, the conference rooms, even
Clarence’s comfortable lair with its nonworking fireplace and Asher Durand.

She had been inside the machine for so long that she sometimes forgot how this—this applying to college thing—had looked from
the outside, but it did come back, vividly back, when she tried to remember. It had been like watching a mass of seemingly
identical sheep cram themselves into a great black building with no windows, knocking against one another, stepping on one
another’s hooves and over their panicked bodies when they fell. At the other end of the building, only a thin line of sheep
trickled out into bountiful fields. And who were these sheep, which looked to all intents and purposes exactly like every
sheep who had crowded in? What made them special? Why should they get the meadow when those others were barred? What happened
inside that box was a mystery, a secret shielded from the light. She remembered how the class ahead of her in high school
had been sorted, with the most cerebral Latin geek shut out from every college he’d applied to while the class’s drug dealer
of choice had his pick of Harvard and Brown, how the valedictorian who was also the student body president retreated in humiliation
to his safety school while the dull-as-dishwater football player trotted off to Cornell. Who were these people in the admissions
offices of Swarthmore and Williams, and what could they have been thinking when they accepted Camilla Weldon, Portia’s soccer
teammate and the most superficial girl she had ever met, but passed over Jordana Miles, who wrote her own column in the school
newspaper and had actually published three short articles in
Seventeen
magazine? But there was perhaps no mystery as baffling as that of her own admission to Dartmouth.

She had been a worried high school senior lacking in… well, anything special, really. A pretty good student, pretty good soccer
player, pretty good writer, and all around nice person, Portia knew exactly what would happen to her own college application
if it arrived, through some warp of time and space, in this room today. With her strong GPA and merely quite good scores,
busy athletic schedule, and character-building volunteer efforts, Portia Nathan’s application would have left this room with
a fatal designation of Academic 3/Non-Academic 4, meaning that in the real world her scholastic skills were solid, but in
Princeton’s supercharged applicant pool they were unremarkable, and that although she had been busy within her school community,
she had not been a leader within that community (NonAc 3) or distinguished herself at the state level (NonAc 2), let alone
accomplished something on a national or international scale (NonAc 1). NonAc 1’s, of course, were rather thin on the ground,
even in Princeton’s applicant pool. They were Olympic athletes, authors of legitimately published books, Siemens prizewinners,
working film or Broadway actors, International Tchaikovsky Competition violinists, and, yes, national judo champions, and
they tended to be easy admits, provided they were strong students, which they usually were. But Portia’s application would
have landed in the great moving tide of similar applications: great kids, smart kids, hardworking kids who would certainly
do great at whatever college they ended up going to, which almost certainly wasn’t going to be Princeton.

The secret of her own mediocrity was quite likely similarly held by men and women all over the industry. To wade through these
best and brightest seventeen-year-olds was to be, at once, deeply reassured by the goodness and potential of the American
near-adult population and deeply humbled by one’s own relative shortcomings. These students were absolutely going to make
scientific discoveries, solve human problems, produce important works of art and scholarship, and generally—as so many of
them pointed out—give back to their communities and make the world a better place. She, on the other hand, was fit only to
make life-altering decisions on their behalf. And how could that make sense?

A room like this, she thought, finally gathering up her several files and the three empty canvas bags, had secrets everywhere.
Every file drawer—and there were hundreds of them—was crammed with files that were crammed with secrets that were ardently
protected by office protocol. (Clarence, in fact, was such a stickler for the privacy of the process that he asked admissions
officers not to discuss applicants in the upstairs corridors.) But much mischief could be accomplished here, if one were so
inclined, and when you thought about it—as Portia did now—wasn’t it sort of surprising that mischief didn’t get done all the
time? This office, after all, employed a number of undergraduates at the height of the season, who sat for hours at a time
in this room, slitting open the incoming envelopes and filing, filing, filing each filament of information into the thousands
and thousands of separate folders. Part-time application readers from the town and university community were similarly hired
during the most intense months to carefully read applications and write a first reader report. People wandered in and out,
delivering food or picking up the shredded documents for recycling. Sometimes, when the receptionist was on break or in the
bathroom, prospective students and their families had even stumbled inside, stopping in shock when they realized where they
were and what they were seeing. Automated though it was, the system seemed rife with the potential for human influence—accidental
or outright sabotage—yet you never heard of it happening. Did it happen? she wondered, closing the office door behind her
and hearing the lock click. Was there some secret tradition of midnight fixing, unexplored by the ax-grinding journalists
who seemed so fixated on the notion of admission for sale to big donors? Had there ever been an administrative assistant intent
on sneaking in his or her cousin’s child with a few covert taps of the keyboard? Or a Princeton undergraduate secretly fixing
things for a friend from home? How about an idealistic admissions officer who couldn’t bear to let some favorite applicant
go? It was odd, Portia thought, that these questions had never occurred to her, that she had for years placed a mindless trust
in the system and its practitioners, from Clarence on down to the student interns and outside readers, when any of them, probably,
could find some way to tamper with the works. If they wanted. And who among them had never wanted?