In his new book, “The Battle for Room 314,” Ed Boland chronicles his year as a teacher in a low-income New York City school.
It was the polar opposite of his previous experience — assistant
director of admissions for Yale University. As the class of 2016 eagerly
awaits letters from colleges, Boland reveals what really goes on behind
the scenes in this excerpt.
Working as a gatekeeper at Yale gave me lasting insight into the formation of the American elite.
My colleagues and I were sent to scour the country looking for the
best and the brightest young minds. In the fall, I went everywhere, from
Charleston, W.Va., to Kokomo, Ind., to Montreal, to the Upper East Side
of Manhattan.
I was welcomed with varying degrees of energy and enthusiasm. In
Ohio, an eager headmaster at a boarding school took me to a nice lunch
and toured me around the campus in his convertible with the top down. At
a large public school outside Detroit, I sat outside the cafeteria at a
sticky table chatting with a representative from a local cosmetology
school. Largely ignored by the students, we passed the time talking
about the challenges of having very fine hair.
Brilliance and stunts
After the recruitment season wrapped up, the admissions staff
returned in the late fall to New Haven and started the early-decision
process. We would spend hour after hour poring over huge stacks of
applications and green-bar computer reports.
We parsed transcripts and called guidance counselors with questions
like: “So far, there seem to be three students ranked number one in your
school who have applied to Yale. How do you account for that?” As a
first step, two staff members read each application and assigned it an
overall ranking of 1 (TAKE THIS KID!) to 4 (NO WAY!).
The applicants were an impressive lot. A girl wrote a brilliant
feminist essay — worthy of Harper’s, really — about gender and
socialization, revealing that she was a phantom serial farter in public
and yet no one ever suspected because of her gender.
An aspiring art major sent in a dazzling, poster-size pen-and-ink
drawing of himself suspended high over the campus on a pair of gymnastic
rings, his body forming a perfect Y for Yale. A Vietnamese refugee
wrote about finding solace in a school in Nebraska after a near-death
experience as a “boat person” when she was 6 years old. They all waltzed into the freshman class.
Being too clever could backfire.
A self-saboteur from Chicago wrote her essay about her fear of going
to the dentist — in backward letters, colored pen, and a spiral “Yellow
Brick Road” pattern; not the kind of thing you want to tackle in a
mirror at midnight.
‘An overeager Eagle Scout on the wait
list pitched a tent on the lawn of the Admissions Office to show how
ardently he was interested. I am sure he enjoyed Haverford.’ - Ed Boland
Having the president of Stanford write you a letter of recommendation
to Yale might seem like a good idea, but it resulted in a note from the
dean that said, “If he’s so enamored of the kid, let Stanford use a
spot on him.”
It was the kiss of death when the daughter of a prominent alum from
Columbus, Ohio, “discovered” she was one-sixteenth American Indian and
checked the box for Native American.
And then there were the athletes. After fierce pressure from the
athletic department, I had to admit a highly sought-after French
Canadian hockey recruit. He had crappy grades, dismal scores, and his
essay consisted of one sentence scribbled hastily in pencil: “I want to
bée a great hockey player.” To add insult to injury, he decided to go to
Boston University.
‘Reject the state!’
After the preliminary votes were cast, the Admissions Committee was
convened. Composed of faculty members, deans, and the most senior
admissions representatives, they served as judge, jury and executioner
for the nearly 14,000 applicants.
Because competition was fierce and time short, you had to make your
notes about the kids you were advocating for pithy and almost
Zagat-guide-esque:
“Another hothouse flower with a perfect GPA, pass!”
“Virtuoso bassoonist and published poet at 17, an Eli to the core.”
“Milquetoast, yes, but brilliant milquetoast.”
“AP English teacher (Yale Class of ’79) says she is the most original
thinker she ever taught, not just a ‘rara avis’ but ‘rarisima avis.’ ”
Any member of the committee could challenge you to back up your
recommendation on any candidate in your region. After you made your case
and answered their questions, the committee of eight or so would decide
a candidate’s fate on a wacky voting machine, rumored to have been
specially designed by some nerdy electrical-engineering major. It had
small electric consoles from which members would anonymously flip a
switch to light up either a thumbs-up green light, thumbs-down red
light, or wait list white light. Any applicant with more than a total of
two reject and/or wait-list votes was automatically denied.
Because we had to get through about 300 applications in each two-hour committee session, we developed shortcuts.
You could look down at the names of four or five kids from one school
who were terribly smart but not exceptional and say, “Reject the entire
high school”; sometimes you could go further and say, “Reject the
page,” and send 20 kids on a single page of computer paper packing; or,
most famously, “Reject the state,” when it came to sparsely populated
places like North Dakota or Wyoming.
Deciding which 14 percent of the applicants would get the golden
ticket was really tough work. Once the children of alumni, recruited
athletes, underrepresented minorities or regions and students interested
in underenrolled majors were considered, there wasn’t much room for
your generic genius. (By today’s standards, 14 percent doesn’t seem so
brutal. In 2014, Yale got nearly 31,000 applicants and accepted a mere
6.3 percent of them.)
Fingerprints of privilege
The great majority of students we admitted were truly brilliant and
had busted their tails to get there. But the fingerprints of privilege
were still present. You had to look a little harder to see them and
resolve not to let them unfairly influence you. Yale University’s campus in New Haven, Conn.Photo: Shutterstock
It was immediately obvious that kids from elite feeder schools had
been coached for years on their interviews, essays, and every
conceivable form of standardized testing. Many of their college
counselors had worked in elite admissions offices; their tutors had
Ph.D.s. They knew prominent alums who would write recommendations on
thick, creamy bond paper.
The letters arrived daily from white-shoe law firms, governors’
mansions, and — in yet another shock to my blue-collar brain — vacation
homes with proper names on engraved stationery: “The Manse, Little
Compton, Rhode Island” or “Coral House, Hamilton, Bermuda.”
As I tried to sort out fair from foul, Suzie, a perennial champion of
the underdog, gave me advice I will never forget: “It’s very easy to
throw the prize at the kids who finish the race first, but always look
at the incline they faced. That will tell you much more.”
Once the more clear-cut cases had been decided, things got fuzzy,
political, and sometimes unfair. It wasn’t news to me that the process
wasn’t entirely meritocratic. It wasn’t news to me that people were
willing to use any and every angle to game the process.
But it was a revelation about exactly what forms those advantages
would take and how they were displayed: sometimes furtively, sometimes
brazenly.
Old and new
One trip took me to an overstuffed wing chair in the august lounge of
the Yale Club of New York. The school’s motto, “Lux et Veritas,” was
stitched into the carpet, embossed on my coaster, and emblazoned on the
jacket of the old waiter who had grudgingly brought me iced tea.
I was waiting for Hal Buckley and Francis Alcock, the two Old Blues
who headed the local volunteer alumni group that conducted the alumni
interviews required of all applicants. I had been forewarned by the
dean of admissions that the New York group was chafing at the recent
difficulty many of the Manhattan prep schools had had in getting
students accepted to Yale, many of them children of alumni. Most of the
schools had been feeders to Yale for nearly a century; one even predated
the university’s founding in 1701 by 70 years.
I had talked to them by phone but had never met them in person.
Retired Wall Streeters, they were both old, smart, white and
pedigreed. With matching sets of wiry gray eyebrows, they could have
been twins. We exchanged some initial pleasantries, and then I braced
myself for the onslaught.
“We used to hold our receptions for admitted students here, but your
Admissions Office says it’s too stuffy and we’d scare off kids who
aren’t from typical Yale backgrounds. Have you ever heard such twaddle
in your life?” said Hal, the crankier of the two.
I scanned the room — a gorgeous mausoleum, majestic but imposing as
hell, filled with mean-looking old men who appeared ready to lower their
Wall Street Journals and scream, “Get off my lawn!” in raspy unison.
“Why, it’s such a striking space. Who wouldn’t like it here?” I was trying to get on their good side.
“I just hope we have a better record in getting some kids in,
because last year was, quite frankly, a debacle. A travesty, really,”
said Hal.
“I assure you I’ll do my best to advocate for New York,” I said with
conviction, at the same time trying to suppress the images in my head of
Statler and Waldorf, the pair of grumpy-old-men Muppets in the balcony.
Francis, who was somewhat friendlier, added, “We have a great crop of
kids from Manhattan this year. Let’s see. We’ve already discussed that
Westinghouse Science Competition finalist from Stuyvesant, the Latvian
fencer from the Trinity School, and the daughter of the dean at Columbia
Law School whose father is a close friend of the president of the
university.”
“Yes, I saw your write-ups on all of them in the office. Very thorough. Thank you.”
Francis leaned in and peered at me over the tops of his tortoiseshell
glasses. “Over the weekend, we interviewed an extraordinary young woman
from Miss Bartlett’s School. She has real Yale polish. Great
intellectual curiosity.”
I checked the rumblings of a groan in my throat.
He continued. “But she lives in the South Bronx. From a very poor
Puerto Rican family. Raised by a single, unemployed mother with three
other children. She would be the first in her family to college.
“Her name is” — here he slowed down as if he were ordering a
difficult-to-pronounce dish in a foreign restaurant — “E-mman-u-el-a
Gut-i-err-ez.” It was sweet how respectful of her name he was trying to
be.
“Really?” I perked up. I knew from my experience at Fordham how rare a profile like hers was.
I realized that I had judged these guys wrong. They weren’t just trying to safeguard spots for the kids of their alumni buddies.
They ran through some more names, handed over a new stack of
interview reports, and slapped me on the back as I got in the elevator.
Francis smiled. “Good luck in committee, Ed. Keep your shirts starched and your powder dry.”
“And get our kids in,” I heard from Hal as the door clanked shut.
A hard miss
I returned to New Haven a few days later and pulled Emmanuela’s
application out of a teetering pile. Her grades were strong and her
Latin teacher had written a glowing recommendation, but she wasn’t at
the very top of her class. She was a first-rate debater, though, and had
founded the school’s Afro-Latina Alliance.
When I presented her in committee, there was a long debate about her
merits and careful consideration of the dozen or so other applicants
from her school, each of whom could likely excel at Yale.
In the end, Emmanuela was muscled out of the running by some
superstars in her class and put on the wait list. The alums were
furious. I got a testy voice mail from Hal the day after the decision
letters went out. “For Pete’s sake, your office is sending us mixed
messages. You tell us to find gems like Emmanuela with atypical
backgrounds, but then you don’t accept them. What gives?”
Years later, I learned that Emmanuela graduated from Columbia, where
she did impressive work organizing Harlem tenants against a local
slumlord.
After graduation, she wanted to improve the lot of low-wage earners
like her mother, and she became a widely respected union organizer and
leader for health-care workers. In 2013, she ran for lieutenant governor
of New Jersey on the Democratic ticket. We had missed a true gem.
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