Admissions Confidential: An Insider's Account of the Elite College Selection Process by Rachel Toor. College admissions is a topic much on my mind at the moment, because classes start in a little more than a week, and for the first time, I'll be acting as an advisor to a bunch of incoming freshmen. We've gotten a barrage of emails recently about the qualifications and character of the incoming class, but I'm a little worried about what, exactly, I'll say to them, which will depend in part on where they come from.

With that sort of thing on my mind, this book caught my eye on a recent library run. I wasn't foolish enough to think that it would convey any deep insight into the nature of the students I'll be dealing with (after all, Toor is a former admissions officer, having left after three years, and she's writing about her experiences circa 1999, in a much different setting), but it is tempting to get a look inside the black box of the college admissions process. Things probably don't work the same way at my school, but they're also probably not a whole lot different (indeed, most of what Toor has to say fits with my general impression from things the admissions people tell us...).

Refreshingly, this is not one of those books whose real goal is to tell a student how to game the system and get into a very good college. In fact, it's a brutally honest description of the vagaries of the process:

My experience as an admissions officer at Duke showed me the arbitrariness of the process, from all sides. From the way that kids decided on their "perfect school," the way parents pushed them in their applications, and most especially, the way decisions about applicants were made. The process is brutal, stressful, not always meritocratic, and rarely fair. But overall, it is just human, all too human. Ecce homo.

There's some great stuff here-- anecdotes about pushy guidance counselors, desperate students, irritating parents, and quirky admissions officers. There are excerpts from particularly good essays, some of which were startlingly good, and interesting tidbits about the emphasis put on various aspects of the application by the people who read them, and some damning commentary about the role big donations play in the process. There are also a number of recommendations, not for students trying to game the system, but for administrators or admissions officers who might be seeking to improve the process (something that I like to see, even if I don't agree with the specific recommendations-- I like to know that the author has enough confidence in her opinions to present concrete ideas about how things could be better).