New College Try Dictates a Head Start : Education: With competition stiff for admission to top schools, applicants’ preparation may begin in kindergarten. It’s also led to private counselors, secrecy, deceit, back-stabbing and stress.

When a Radcliffe graduate stopped by the college a few years ago to open an early file for her child, admissions officials took it in stride. Like others before her, the woman said she was eager to put her offspring on an early track to her alma mater.

But when the officials asked for the age of the future applicant, the answer left them stunned. The child hadn’t been born yet--but the woman was pregnant and wanted to plan ahead.

For parents and students weathering the college application season--acceptance letters arrive next month--such foresight reflects a desperate effort to gain an edge in the increasingly hardball admissions process.

The pool of post-baby-boomer applicants is shrinking annually, making college admittance statistically easier than in previous years. Even so, many parents who succeeded during the 1980s in a high-achiever lifestyle are determined to fight for their young to have an elite education.

“It’s a sign of the times,” observes Maurice Salter, former head of the UC Irvine grants program, who works as a private counselor for college-bound students .

Business people understand that they don’t develop the qualities connected to success when they enter the workplace. “There’s a building process that launches you into that success-oriented scenario. That’s the big change in this generation of parents.”

Sue Guy, a counselor at Mission Viejo High School, has noticed an increasing number of students applying to prestige universities in recent years.

“I’d say there is some pressure from parents to go for the big-name schools but also the kids put pressure on themselves,” she said. “But I’m sure they pick that up from the parents.”

Granted, not all parents push their children to excel at all costs. But for many ultra-achiever parents who are urging their offspring into upper-echelon institutions, the choice is largely a matter of prestige.

“They’d give their right arms to get their children into one of a dozen of the big-name schools,” Fred Hargadon, Princeton University’s admissions dean, says of the top competitive crust.

Adds Salter: “I’ve seen friends betray friends. The deal is the deal, and everybody wants to make a better deal than the next person made.”

Hargadon, who headed Stanford University’s undergraduate admissions for 15 years, says parents sometimes have appeared in his office with tattered copies of U.S. News & World Report, which annually ranks the country’s colleges and universities. They follow the ratings, he says, “for the same reason that they buy BMWs and live at a particular address.”

“We’re talking about the cocktail-party circuit,” says Katherine Kendall, a private student counselor in Beverly Hills. “A lot of parents are concerned that their children apply to schools that are prestigious enough for them to talk about.”

Moreover, “lots of people are bound and determined to buy their way into these big-name institutions,” Kendall says, adding that some of her power-playing clients offer large sums of money to school scholarship funds and donations of university facilities.

Aided by their elders, some ambitious students have caught on to the trick of distinguishing themselves from the pack. At times, they’ve dreamed up wildly unorthodox ploys:

* Leaving no stone unturned in his application proceedings, one aspiring Harvard man sent in a load of cardboard cartons filled with all of his corrected papers from kindergarten through high school.

* In an attempt to woo Stanford’s admissions committee, an artistic applicant sent committee members a 6-by-8-foot group portrait painted in oils.

* Printers’ offspring have submitted mock-ups of Time magazine, featuring their pictures on the cover and articles reporting on their accomplishments.

* And would-be freshmen from California’s Napa and Sonoma valleys have regaled admissions officers with cases of wine, and youths from the Midwest have made earnest petitions with ears of corn.

“I’ve heard of that,” said Mission Viejo High School’s Guy with a laugh. “Our kids, I think, are pretty sensible. They try to shine academically, and as far as contributions to the school and commmunity.”

Guy said she has heard of some universities that like to see something “unusual” after reading 4,000 essays. “On the other hand,” she said, “you’re taking a risk that they won’t take it in the way you intended it.”

Bob Werley, head counselor at Corona del Mar High School, hasn’t noticed such creative tactics from students applying to prestige colleges.

“I don’t think many schools would be too impressed with that,” he said. “They’re looking at GPA and test scores and course content and curriculum.”

Werley recommends a more straight-forward approach.

“If they’re writing an essay that would be one way to impress them,” he said. “The other way--and I’d certainly encourage it--is if they can talk to the admissions officer. If they can sell themselves that way, that’s to their credit.”

Like Werley, Guy also prefers the straight-forward approach.

“That’s usually what I recommend,” she said. “Maybe I’m a bit conservative, but I really prefer to see them shine through on their academics and their personal qualities and talent and contributions.”

In extreme cases, the children are given little or no choice in the schools they apply to, leaving the matchmaking to Mom and Pop.

In one vignette that seemed to step from the pages of the New Yorker, Hargadon recently overheard one applicant’s mother asking another in the waiting room, “Was Princeton your first choice?”

And a few aspirants, he adds, have slipped notes into their applications that plead “I really don’t want to come to Princeton.”

But when it comes to advertising their means of advancement, both students and their elders are uncannily closemouthed.

“I work in anonymity,” Salter says. “Clients often don’t tell the schools they are working with me. And they don’t boast about it at cocktail parties.”

On the student level, Debbie Duenes, who graduates this year from an advanced academic program at Long Beach Polytechnic High School, concedes:

“The college application process was really competitive. No one would tell anybody what they were writing their essays on or where they were applying. If you told someone about a school they didn’t know about, then maybe they would apply and be your competition.”

Meanwhile, in frantic telephone calls to The Times, one member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni Council launched an aggressive campaign to keep mention of an early-acceptance candidate out of the newspaper. Parents of Stanford and Ivy League hopefuls also declined to be interviewed, indicating fear that any statements might negatively influence 11th-hour admissions decisions.

But if nervousness runs rampant, that is perhaps because top applicants tend to cluster at the same few colleges. This year 3,000 students with perfect 4.0 grade averages are contending for only 2,700 spots at Stanford, for example. In the overburdened UC system, which sent out acceptance letters this month, UC Berkeley admitted 8,200 of 20,000 applicants (although it counts on only a 40% acceptance rate), and UCLA took 9,500 of 22,300 aspirants.

To compete, students are scoring higher on their SATs, applying to more colleges (up to a dozen, compared to three to five several years ago, taking more advanced placement courses and spending their summers in worthy community activities, from volunteering in Skid Row soup kitchens to maintaining hiking trails in the Soviet Union.

“It’s a dramatic difference,” UCLA’s director of undergraduate admissions, Rae Lee Siporin, says.

In the academic arena itself, the rivalry for achievements is taking on a gladiatorial ferocity.

Top institutions aggressively court the country’s most desirable college candidates. According to the Independent Educational Consultants Assn., sought-after students are targeted by up to 100 direct-mail brochures. Alumni interviews serve to woo as well as to screen applicants.

Still, to get a head start, some parents--like the eager Radcliffe graduate--chart a virtual cradle-to-college course for their children. Dr. Carl Salzman, a physician now living in San Diego, enrolled two sons at Palm Springs’ private Palm Valley School, where they passed kindergarten interviews that included tests in reading and tying shoelaces.

“You’re on track to do all your applications,” says Salzman, whose second son is now in the college admissions process. “This is a watermark to see just how well he will stack up.”

Some parents pay fees that can top $2,000 for private college counseling services that include coaching students for admissions interviews and advice on application essays. In affluent high schools, writing college application essays is part of the senior year project.

For admissions deans, the counseling phenomenon presents a real conundrum: Although they acknowledge that high-caliber professionals have become an accepted part of the preparation process and offer useful services, they worry about the “packaging” of applicants.

“It’s very difficult to know who’s preparing the application,” says William Fitzsimmons, dean of undergraduate admissions at Harvard University.

“What it boils down to is advantaged students getting just one more advantage,” Stanford’s admissions dean, Jean Fetter, observes. “But they can’t affect a transcript--and that’s our first point of call.”

Respected counselors say they discourage artifice. If a young man normally wears an earring in one ear, for example, Salter says he tells him to wear it during his admissions interview.

“The college will know who it’s getting, and the student will know what kind of college he’s applying to,” he says.

Howard Fredman, a Princeton alumnus who has been interviewing prospective freshmen in the Los Angeles area for 10 years, says a packaged candidate is relatively easy to spot.

“He’ll ask about the Slavic language department,” he says. “But you don’t get the impression that the kid really cares about Slavic languages. He’s been told the questions to ask, but nobody has told him to listen to the answers.”

The brightest student he’s ever encountered, Fredman says, forgot his interview appointment and showed up the following evening in stained jeans and a rumpled shirt.

The young man, he discovered, was ranked first in his class at North Hollywood High School, had perfect SATs, achievement test and advance placement course scores. And shortly thereafter, the student won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search for developing a formula to measure the distance between black holes in the universe.

“I turned much more to a sales approach,” Fredman recalls.

Pernicious tactics, though rarer, are nonetheless part of the pattern for some applicants. Kendall reports that after UC Berkeley announced it would offer a program for children with learning disabilities, “within a week following that announcement I had five parents call me and ask how they could make their kids dyslexic so they could get them in the back door.”

Other strategies include applications in under-enrolled majors and claims to minority status that can stretch to the far reaches of a family tree.

Debbie Duenes, whose paternal grandfather was born in Spain, applied to four UC colleges as Latino. When she was accepted at Berkeley, her first choice, while many of her classmates were not, she says she encountered malicious comments. In fact, the day after Berkeley’s letters were received, says Duenes’ mother, Erica Gilman, Debbie telephoned her: “There was so much tension in the school, she wanted to come home.”

Such strategies, even when successful, can leave more permanent scars as well. “Students can become very cynical and feel manipulated by their parents. They may go through life feeling a lack of legitimacy,” Fitzsimmons says.

“You see a lot of people burning out at an early age,” adds Fetter. “They try so hard to be what they think colleges are looking for.”

Times Staff Writer Dennis Mc Lellan contributed to this report .