Educator Strikes a Light Note in His Advice on Choosing a College

As they begin the frustrating search for colleges, high school students and their parents can seek advice from Richard Moll, a former college admissions director who has packaged some 30 years of experience into a mini-musical he calls “Playing the Selective College Admissions Game.”

Perhaps the first performer to devote his songwriting to matching students and appropriate colleges, Moll is a former director of admissions at Vassar College, Bowdoin College and UC-Santa Cruz.

Moll began advising groups of parents and students in the mid-1970s, about the time that Viking published his book “Playing the Selective College Admissions Game.”

Recently, however, he added seven songs to his presentation and has booked a 31-campus tour for the fall. Critics and reporters have compared Moll to Mark Russell, the musical political satirist.

“I am delighted at the comparison,” Moll says. “Would that I could appear at the White House as regularly as he does.”

Man of Many Hats

Moll divides his time between writing--he is finishing his third book, “The Lure of the Law and the Life Thereafter”--serving as an admissions consultant to various colleges and presenting his series of lecture-concerts around the United States.

The lecture-concert has many light-hearted moments, although Moll describes it as primarily serious. The process of selecting colleges, which is often the process of sorting through dreams, carries many scary possibilities.

“Although the surface topic is getting into college, the heart of the matter of college admissions is that this is the first time a young person has been forced to become seriously introspective,” Moll says. “Helping people with that is one reason I get excited about these presentations.”

He tries to remind his audiences what criteria they should use in judging schools. As a negative example, he mentions the motivation behind his own failed attempt to get into Princeton.

“Indianapolis is a Princeton town,” he says. “When I was growing up, all the classy men went there, and I wanted to be one of them.”

Moll dedicates his lecture-concert to parents, especially to the unsung mothers he says tend to do most of the investigative work into colleges. He believes that the anxiety of the applicants and of their parents has definitely increased over the 30 years he has observed the college admissions game.

Emphasis on Wealth

“I can only guess it’s because young people have become so conservative that they think only a prestigious school can ensure them fame and wealth,” Moll says. “Wealth means more today, I regret to say, than it did to previous generations.”

A native of Indianapolis, Moll majored in history at Duke University, and then graduated from Yale Divinity School. Deciding that he would rather become a counselor than a minister-- ‘I was a tad too liberal for the Methodist ministry”--he began working as an admissions counselor at Yale in 1957.

“College admissions counselors deal with people coming of age,” he says. “A college interview is a wonderful excuse for a counseling session. At least it was in the days before the college admissions business changed from ‘telling’ to ‘selling.’ ”

Moll devoted much of his energy to improving the images of the colleges for which he worked. His mission was to attract more students.

“Each of those colleges needed an image adjustment. Applicants wanted to know, ‘Could a young man be happy at Vassar?’ They wanted to know, ‘Is there anyone at Santa Cruz who was center, or to the right of center?’

“When Bowdoin made SAT scores optional for admission--proof that it had become progressive--it was time for me to move on. And I knew it was time to go when Vassar became 40% male. I like the Studs Terkel career approach: ‘Try everything.’ ”