It is, by design, a black box process.

Colleges live and die by who they admit. The elite admission process is designed to give them the largest selection pool possible and total control over who gets in out of it. They hold all cards and will never give that up.

There are great advantages to this. If you need 5 viola players one year. You can take 5 viola players. No sweat. Those five kids will never find out that's why they got in, but that might have been the case. Certainly, these are awesome kids. But in a pool of 12,000 awesome kids, sometimes the viola swings the committee's vote.

If you need some kids from Western Michigan, you can take some kids from Western Michigan. Maybe there's a donor there. Or an influential alum who's mad that no one from that part of the state has been admitted in years. Who knows? These kids are jokingly called "area adds." Again, these are great kids. But their point of origin and perspective on it might just be the thing that swings the vote in a sea of 12,000 awesome kids. I'm fairly certain that's why I was admitted and I only think this because I spent two years admitting thousands of kids. I was a strong applicant able to talk interestingly about my origins. My grades and scores sure didn't show the firepower that the kids out east had, but they've gotta take someone from podunk Michigan now and then.

The top colleges are skeptical of all the standardized tests and most of the high school curriculums. This is both because of arrogance but also because they have data that the public doesn't. Every year we'd get a very sophisticated, confidential briefing from the folks at one of the big companies that showed the latest trends in their data. This was always somewhat shocking and fascinating, too. I can't say much about it other than this: the kids you think would do well on the tests do incredibly well. The kids you think will do badly, do very, very badly. Across the board. Everywhere. No matter what.

The things that I couldn't handle, personally, were the minority admissions and the elite prep school admissions. This is not because anything particularly underhanded or amoral or unethical was happening, but because the debates and arguments about how these cases should be handled simply required intellectual bandwidth that I didn't have. I couldn't plot a course that would carry me through how to deal with these kids and didn't much feel like making the effort it seemed I'd have to make to do so. There were times when it just seemed so unfair to admit a student with crummy grades and crummy test scores (relative to our applicant pool) because of her racial background. But there were other times when I was so impressed by other qualities in a student's application that I fought for them harder than anyone.

I visited some scary high schools in Philadelphia one year and met a kid who'd been corresponding with the foremost authority on Bram Stoker's Dracula via e-mail, on his own. I told him I wrote my senior thesis about the novel and his face lit up. I think mine did a bit, too. It's not often you get to talk about your specialty with someone else.

This was an African American student at an inner city school. All the teachers had been telling me all day that he was "the one" I needed to talk to, because it was so ridiculously apparent to them that he was sincerely, legitimately, maybe desperately trying to transcend his circumstances. And now he's able to talk about the plot structure of Dracula with someone.

Sure enough, his credentials were average for the applicant pool, but he was as easy a case as any. To speak to the audience here, he was hacking his social circumstances and we were interested in that.

So yes, it's very byzantine. It's a mess. You'd read applications for 7 days a week for 4 months all winter, annotating them, scribbling in the margins, knowing that very, very few of these kids were getting in.

Then you block out a whole month of sitting around a table eating catered food, sweeping across whole states worth of applicants in 15-hour days, debating, discussing, arguing, fighting over kid after kid after kid in committees of 5-6 people. I always enjoyed that part, but we had one officer who would cry at some point almost every day during committee. She believed we were slamming the door on a lot of these kids.

Personally, I believe they'll do fine wherever they end up if they/re as good as they say are. It'd be great to dump a bunch of resources on them so they can live "the life" for 4 years, but you can't celebrate every kid.

P.S. While I've got the floor and your ears about college admissions, I run the web's only independent directory of College Admissions Consultants at http://CollegeConsultantReviews.com. I created this many moons ago and there's a lot of interest in it from consultants who find it appearing for searches for their names. I think there's a business in there somewhere but don't have the time or technical skills to build the killer directory site that would be needed. Hit me up if you're interested.