Even for the Best and Brightest, Finding a College Takes Its Toll

“I’m going the safe route,” 16-year-old Hemant Keny said. “I’m expecting to get rejected.”

Keny, a senior at Whitney High School in Cerritos, is girding himself for rejection, not by a heartless girl, but by Princeton University.

Like 22,000 other seniors in Los Angeles County, Keny is in the final throes of the college application process, as grueling a high-school rite of passage as the first heavy date. As Danny Smith, a senior at the Harvard School in North Hollywood, put it, “It’s hell.”

The process is particularly purgatorial for students like Keny who are applying to the country’s most selective campuses.

No Shoo-In

Keny has a near-perfect 3.9 grade-point average, which he modestly describes as pretty good. His combined score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which measures verbal and mathematical skill, is 1470, out of a possible 1600, which puts Keny in the top 1% of SAT-takers nationwide.

But Keny knows that he is no shoo-in at Princeton, which accepts only one in six applicants and often turns down student body presidents whose records are unmarred by a single B.

For Keny and the others, applying to college is a collaborative process that involves the students, their families and, to widely varying degrees, their schools.

November and December are months of angst -ridden activity, as students flagellate themselves for academic and extracurricular sins and omissions, nervously chat up their teachers with an eye to glowing letters of recommendation and stay up all night filling out the complicated applications typical of first-rate colleges.

Juniors, even sophomores, can enjoy their winter break, but for seniors there are essays to write and interviews to sweat through, as well as nails to be bitten and sleep to be lost.

Waiting for Letters

By Jan. 1, the deadline for the Ivy League schools, it will be all over but the worst part--waiting for April 15, when most colleges send out their letters of acceptance and rejection.

“There’s a lot of tension at the school right now,” said Vanna R. Cairns, director of college counseling at private, all-boys Harvard School.

Counselors urged the current seniors and their parents to start thinking about college three years ago, when they were sophomores. But the big push began this fall when Cairns advised the incoming seniors that they were all taking a course that did not appear on their class schedules, College 101, a course that is no less real for being fictive.

According to Cairns, 100% of Harvard’s senior class typically goes on to college. Last year, 25% of the senior class members were accepted at Ivy League schools. Thirty-one members of that class of 121 applied to Harvard University. Seven hit the academic jackpot and were accepted.

Where to Apply

(As Cairns noted, the school has no affiliation with Harvard University, except to share its name. The current president of Harvard University, Derek C. Bok, also happens to be an alumnus of the Harvard School, Class of ‘47).

The first assignment in College 101, wherever seniors take it, is to determine where to apply.

“We want them to look as critically at the colleges as the colleges are looking at them,” Cairns said. “They are in a position to do that,” she said of her 134 seniors, more than half of whom received National Merit Scholarship recognition (half are semifinalists, half recipients of letters of commendation).

At Harvard School, students are required during their junior year to do research on eight campuses that interest them, making use of the school’s library of catalogues and other application aids, including a computerized college-search program.

Pitch From Recruiters

As seniors they are expected to refine that interest and determine which schools best fit their abilities, interests and learning styles.

Recruiters from about 100 colleges and universities visit the school each year to pitch their campuses to a student body they know to be high powered academically and largely able to afford the staggering cost of a private college education (currently more than $18,000 a year at such schools as Stanford and the Ivies). Recruiters also visit the other distinguished private and public high schools in metropolitan Los Angeles.

For students who can afford it, visiting a campus is often the crucial event in determining the college or colleges of choice, counselors and students say. Local counselors sometimes advise students to make these trips in winter, when the climate and isolation of many out-of-state campuses can come as a shock to young Southern Californians.

Whitney’s Hemant Keny flew east last summer with his parents and three siblings to compare campuses. During that trip, Princeton impressed the Kenys more than Harvard, Brown or Georgetown, which they also toured.

Harvard School senior Will Silva took a similar tour of Southeastern campuses last Memorial Day weekend and fell in love with Duke University. Duke charmed Silva with its architecture, its gardens and its atmosphere, which he described as “Eastern but without the stuffiness of the Northeastern schools.”

Georgetown Noisy

On the same trip he eliminated several schools from his original wish list, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (“too large”) and the College of William and Mary (“too quaint”). He also discovered something about Georgetown University that appeared nowhere in its catalogue and recruiting materials. The campus is noisy because of the planes flying in and out of Washington’s National Airport.

Christopher Barnes, who is a senior at Whitney, was disillusioned by a visit to the University of California, Berkeley, regarded by many as the premier school in the UC system.

“My parents took me to Berkeley to discourage me from going there,” Barnes said. “They told me it was too dirty and too metropolitan for my taste, and they were pretty much right.”

In contrast to Berkeley, where “everything was all throbbing,” Barnes found the suburban tranquility of Stanford University much more to his liking.

Whitney senior Andy Hsieh had similar feelings. “I like Stanford,” Hsieh said. “It reminds me of Cerritos.”

Can’t See Faculty

He, too, had reservations after visiting Berkeley. “They hold the history lectures at Berkeley in auditoriums,” he said. “Unless you have very good eyesight, you can’t see the facial features of the faculty.”

Guidance counselors report that there are trends in favored colleges that are every bit as baffling as other fads.

“Schools get to be popular for who knows what reason? Maybe someone wears a Duke sweat shirt on the Cosby show,” Cairns said.

Middlebury College in Vermont is inexplicably hot this year with Harvard School students, she noted.

At San Marino High School, as at most competitive high schools in Los Angeles County, the nine campuses of the University of California make up the single most sought-after school, followed by the University of Southern California, the 19-campus California State University, Stanford and the Ivies.

Least Mobile Students

College-bound Californians are among the least mobile in the country when it comes to going away to school--93% enter institutions within the state, according to the National Center for Education Statistics in Washington. (Arizona, North Carolina, Texas and Utah, with 95%, and Mississippi, 94%, retain a higher percentage of their college-bound students. Alaska and New Jersey retain the lowest percentage--44% and 60%, respectively.)

But San Marino High School administrator Charles Johnson has observed a surge in recent years of applications to church-affiliated Brigham Young University in Utah.

That may reflect nothing more than the presence of several large Mormon families in the district, he said. More puzzling is the recent increase in applications to Fort Lewis College, a Colorado school the guidance counselors had never heard of until recently.

At La Canada High School, where 92% of the seniors are college-bound, Tufts University in Massachusetts, Macalester College in Minnesota and Oberlin College in Ohio have been turning up on the lists of schools to which students are applying, guidance counselor Clover Moffat said.

Some observers point to the proliferation of private guidance counselors as evidence that students and their families are more anxious than ever about getting into good schools.

Several Colleges Contacted

The fears of college-seekers are also reflected in the record numbers of applications to the best schools, even as the number of college-age students declines.

“We’re finding that students are applying to more schools,” San Marino’s Johnson said.

The typical top San Marino student now applies to six to 10 colleges, whereas the comparable student of a few years ago sent out four to seven applications, he said. The students are applying more places, they say, because they know their chances of getting into any one prestigious school are so slim.

“I don’t really expect to get into Stanford,” said Britt Goodrich, a bright, active senior at La Canada. “It would be a miracle.”

Last year, according to Stanford dean of undergraduate admissions Jean Fetter, the university had 16,138 applicants, of whom 16% were accepted. All of them, Fetter said, demonstrated academic excellence and evidence of achievement outside the classroom.

Perfect SAT Scores

Two-thirds of the students at California Institute of Technology scored a perfect 800 on the advanced mathematics achievement test administered by the Educational Testing Service.

Admissions officers, Fetter noted, are unmoved by the boxes of candy and tins of homemade cookies that sometimes accompany applications.

Goodrich, who wants to major in business, said that her parents have not put any undue pressure on her during the application process, although, she said, “They’d love for me to go to Stanford. They’ve told me, ‘If you get in, that’s wonderful. And if you get in, you better go there.’ ”

Goodrich is also applying to the University of Wisconsin, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wellesley College in Massachusetts and William and Mary.

If all else fails, she will go to Pepperdine University, her “safe school” in the sense that applicants with her qualifications can usually count on admission.

Fallbacks Important

Safe schools, also known as fallbacks and sure things, are more important than ever for students, given the extreme selectivity of the top colleges and universities.

Most counselors urge students to have not one but two such schools on their lists so they will have a choice to make in the spring. Counselors also remind students that these should be schools they would actually like to go to.

But even a sure thing doesn’t always allay a youngster’s anxiety.

Jody Compton is a senior at Whitney, the academic magnet high school for the ABC Unified School District. Because she wants to teach elementary school, Compton has applied to California State University at Fullerton and at Chico, relatively non-competitive schools with strong education departments.

Applying down, in a sense, has not made Compton any less nervous as she waits for Cal State to determine her future.

‘What If I Don’t Get In?’

“What if I don’t get in?” she groaned recently to classmates sweating out admissions to Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “My first choice is your fallback school!”

The possibility, even the likelihood, of rejection makes the application process an act of adolescent courage.

One year seniors at Harvard School gallantly wallpapered the walls of their lounge with rejection notices. Sometimes denial is the only way to deal with the hurt of being turned down by a school loved not wisely but too well.

As Harvard School senior Jeff Salzman said, “If you get rejected by a place, you’ve got to take the view that if they don’t want you, you don’t want them. But it can be hard.”

Parents’ Alma Mater

Salzman, who has B average, knows just how hard it can be. He is waiting to see if he will be accepted by his first choice, the University of Michigan, alma mater of both his parents and his two older sisters.

Counselors try to dissuade students who don’t have the essentials--top grades, high test scores and impressive “brag sheets” of extracurricular activities--from even applying to Stanford or Yale.

“We don’t want to set up a kid for discouragement,” explained San Marino’s Johnson.

They also warn even the best-qualified students that getting into a highly selective college is something of a crap shoot. As Johnson noted, “Sometimes our No. 1 student won’t be accepted and they’ll take our No. 4.”

The worst part of the application process, many students say, is writing the personal essays that many schools require.

‘They’re Not That Old.’

“A lot of them find it difficult to write about themselves,” said Adele Heuer, a guidance administrator at Whitney. “It requires them to sit down and evaluate themselves. It embarrasses them. They’re not that old. “

At Palos Verdes High School seniors are encouraged to have their draft essays critiqued by the school’s writing aides, part-time personnel who can counsel students on how to improve their appeals for admission, according to guidance department chairman Dick Pearce.

Other schools advise students to show their rough drafts to friends, parents, counselors or teachers. Some students, particularly at high schools such as San Marino where the counseling staff has been reduced for fiscal reasons, turn to professional college advisers for help with their essays.

This year Harvard School held a three-part essay workshop for seniors. Counselor John Thomas West, who conducted the workshop, thinks the essay is uniquely important to a student’s application.

“It’s the only part of the application that the student can control that can provide that tilt that makes an admissions officer say yes instead of no,” West said.

Marketing Game Plan

Students were advised to write their application essays after developing a marketing game plan for themselves, an idea, West said, that admittedly sounds a little crass but is a realistic approach to the fierce competition for places at prestigious colleges.

The seniors wrote and rewrote essays that ranged from the standard “tell-us-about-yourself essay” to the particularly challenging “show-us-your-imaginative-side essay,” West said.

They were reminded that perfect diction, punctuation and spelling were required. If the first few lines of an applicant’s essay contain errors, West warned, there is no reason for an admissions officer to read farther.

“You’ve already answered the question,” he said. “You can’t write.”

Choosing Ideas

Students were encouraged to find an idea and develop it well, in the manner of such skilled personal essayists as George Orwell and Joan Didion.

In choosing ideas, the students were reminded of their marketing game plans. “You can’t sell what you don’t have, and you can’t sell what they don’t want,” West said.

Students were also warned that applicants often forget who their audience is: “a beleaguered college admissions officer who wants to be able to tell from the first paragraph that they know how to write and that they are interesting, thoughtful people who can fit into and add something to his college’s environment.”

The results, West said, were a number of successful applications. Among them: an essay written by a student artist who has been accepted early at Williams College in Massachusetts. “He was so committed to art,” West said, “that he was able to write, with conviction, ‘Art is my religion,’ and back it up.” Another student has been admitted to Yale on the basis of an application that included, instead of the requested essay, a poem the student wrote about an evocative photo he had taken, also included in the application.

Preparing for Interviews

The Ivy League schools and California Institute of Technology are among the schools that try to interview all prospective students.

Counselors try to prepare students for these unsettling sessions with such practical advice as: Don’t ask questions that indicate that you haven’t read the college catalogue, and give yourself enough time to get to the interview, instead of arriving late and breathless.

“The most difficult part was knocking on her door, but once I got in it was fine,” La Canada senior Camilla Lieske recalled of her interview at the Pasadena home of a Bryn Mawr College alumna. “I think it went really well,” she said.

Lieske, who has a 3.96 grade-point average, has also applied to Harvard “to see if I could get in to an Ivy League school.”

Cookies Helped

Lieske’s older brother, who goes to Caltech, had counseled her to relax, which she found easy to do after the interviewer offered her a plate of lemon cookies and a Diet 7-Up.

“She advised me about scholarships,” Lieske said of the interviewer.

Not all interviews go that well. And the gaffes are not always made by the applicant. One local senior was shocked during an interview when the representative of a prestigious Northeastern school--an older alumnus--referred to him as “colored.”

“My parents told me they used to call black people ‘colored’!” the senior said afterward, still hardly able to believe it.

Like the students’ essays, interviews give students the opportunity to demonstrate some spark, some evidence of individual accomplishment or potential or character that distinguishes them from all the other bright, assiduous students who are applying.

Pointed Students

Different schools want different things, but most competitive schools seem to favor the top-notch student who is not so much well-rounded as pointed, significantly distinguished in, say, athletics or drama.

Students may have more than one point, of course. San Marino High recently sent a young woman to Yale who was both a Tournament of Roses princess and a first-rank harpist.

Some schools seek very specific gifts among their applicants. Caltech in Pasadena, which probably offers the most rigorous training in science and engineering in the country, wants prospective students who have had considerable scientific experience before they enter.

Unlike Stanford and other schools that rely on professional admissions staff, Caltech’s student recruiting is done mostly by faculty. According to Director of Admissions Stirling L. Huntley, interviewers look for evidence of scientific creativity and perseverance, rather than proof that an applicant has had access to sophisticated equipment.

Bought Cobra

Huntley recalled a successful applicant from the American School in Taipei, Taiwan.

“The school didn’t have very good lab facilities,” Huntley said, “so the student went down to Snake Alley in his community and bought a cobra and did experiments on the toxicity of cobra venom.”

Huntley told of another applicant who had tried to reproduce the atmosphere of various planets other than Earth. In experiments in his cellar he had passed an electric current through the simulated atmospheres in a long-shot attempt to create life.

“He told me his mother was very distressed about his playing God in the basement,” Huntley recalled, with a laugh. “We lost him to Princeton,” he added, ruefully.

While the student no doubt suffers the most during the application process, it is often traumatic for the whole family, counselors say.

Applicant Parents

Anne Salzman, who counsels worried seniors and their families at the private Guidance Center in Santa Monica, said that parents sometimes become too involved in the process. “Many parents are applying to college,” she said.

Salzman tries to ease the potential blow of rejection by reminding parents and students alike that their lives are not over if the children don’t get into Harvard or UCLA.

“There are an awful lot of kids who start at Santa Monica College and end up going wherever they want to,” she said.

Nevertheless, parents suffer. Marilyn Silva, mother of Will, was half sick with worry when his interview at Duke ran into a second hour. And his very enthusiasm for Duke made her uneasy. “He wanted Duke so badly I found myself cautioning him,” she recalled. “ ‘You know that’s a reach school, William. It’s not a sure thing.’ ”

Most of the seniors interviewed for this story will not know whether they got into the colleges of their choice until mid-April. Will Silva, however, received a letter of acceptance and will be going to Duke.