The California College Guide : A primer on making choices--and making arrangements--for a college education. : Admissions Maze

Thousands of applications from high school seniors pass through the admissions offices at universities each year, but only a fraction of those students are accepted by their first choices.

Admissions officers evaluate applicants’ high school grades, test scores and outside activities and select the students they believe are most likely to flourish at their universities.

The Times talked with admissions directors at two of the area’s best-known institutions--one public and one private--about what they look for in prospective students.

Cliff Sjogren is dean of admissions and financial aid at USC.

Q: What advice would you have for students who know they want to go to USC, or parents who know they want their children to be Trojans.

A: We would first and foremost say take a good challenging set of courses in high school and make sure you have competency in the five academic areas (English, science, social science, mathematics and foreign languages). . . . If they do that, the other things are probably going to take care of themselves.

They should pursue areas of interest and not get into things to impress someone. Join clubs or work or volunteer in a hospital . . . whatever interests them. We like students who keep their minds active with different things.

The greatest skill a person can bring to USC is the ability to communicate, and parents can contribute to that. If a youngster has a reading problem, they should start working on that very early. Help them enlarge their vocabularies, stretch their verbal skills. Engage them in conversations that require them to think. The abstract thinking skills students get in mathematics are very important--problem solving, time management . . . all that should be learned in youth. Those are the kinds of things that will help a student not just get admitted, but succeed here at USC and in life.

Q: What kind of student are you looking for--the 4.0 class president, the scholar-athlete, the exceptionally talented? Do the students you accept basically fit the same mold?

A: We don’t believe in the concept of a well-rounded student. But we do want a well-rounded student population at USC.

What we’re really looking for is students who will be academically successful, who have demonstrated excellent high school records and satisfactory (standardized) test scores. Then we like to look at students who can lend something to the university community. And that’s probably the area where we depart somewhat from a lot of the public institutions, where standards are much more rigid.

We look for students with leadership skills, with creativity. We like students who have demonstrated a high level of educational inquisitiveness, educational maturity. We’re interested in students who may have overcome some kind of hardship to be successful, students who have faced incredible odds and somehow persisted. . . . These students tend to impress us, and they’re not always the (straight A) students.

Q: How do you gauge a quality like persistence in an applicant? And how important is that in admissions decisions, compared to more objective measures like grades and SAT scores?

A: High school records and test scores help us to predict bottom line academic success, but as we go about trying to predict success in life and contributions in life, you look at what a student has done with his or her life. We get that kind of thing through the essay and the recommendations, and the other activities a student is involved in.

If a student comes to us with excellent grades from a challenging school and has demonstrated the ability to do the work, test scores are of very little importance. Test scores become more important as the academic record demonstrates flaws, as do essays and recommendations. If a student has a mediocre academic record, first we want to know why.

Q: How much attention can you devote to finding out those ‘whys’ at a school the size of USC? How many applications do you generally get for the freshman class and how do you decide which students to admit?

A: We get about 11,500 applications for the freshman class and have a target for the freshmen class of about 2,800. (USC also has a target of about 1,500 transfer students each year.) We do a lot of personalizing during the admissions process.

Each admissions counselor is assigned a geographic region, so they know the high schools and the counselors. USC recomputes each applicant’s (high school) grade point average, based on the counselors’ knowledge of the quality of the schools--how competitive, how challenging the courses are, what percentage of students go on to college--and taking into consideration the curriculum and whether the student took the toughest courses available. In recomputing, we only look at the basic five academic subjects.

Then we look at the SAT scores and take the best individual scores. The grade point average and SAT scores are placed on a grid and students (who place highly enough) can be admitted on those alone.

But students can also get credit and get bumped over to a higher status (on the grid) for unusual experiences or overcoming hardships or demonstrating an exceptional talent, a student starting writing for the school paper in the ninth grade and then became editor, for example.

Q: What do you think a good essay should include, and how do you guard against students submitting professionally done essays?

A: The essay alone is not going to affect that many students. It probably makes the difference in 5% or 10% of admissions at the most. Because we do individual assessments of each file, we can raise questions when we see something suspicious . . . a student who’s had Cs in English, then comes through with a great essay, for instance. We call the student and the counselor in and usually the student will admit, ‘Yeah, I had a little help.’

In the more sophisticated high schools, writing your college essay is an English assignment in your senior year. Students will go through four drafts until they get it just right. Some other schools, the inner-city schools, won’t have that advantage.

Q: What should the student sitting down to write an application essay keep in mind?

A: Students are too worried about being well-rounded . . . and too afraid of projecting anything they think might reflect negatively. Some students try to build up an activity record to impress admissions officers. I’ve had students sitting across from me and they say, ‘I would have done better in pre-calculus, but I ran for student senate and I was a cheerleader and all those kinds of things because I wanted to be well-rounded.’ Well, there are a lot of students who concentrate only on academics who will contribute very much to the university.

A lot of students have to engage in financial opportunities to help their families. I think it’s super that a kid will go home from school and help out in mom and pop’s shop and forgo athletics and some of the other extracurricular activities.

Q: How big a role do student finances play in admissions decisions?

A: Absolutely none. We meet 100% of a student’s need (through loans, grants or work opportunities). It’s estimated that between 20% and 25% of private schools will meet total need and we’re one of them. Our financial aid packaging has been terrible in the past, but we’ve improved it considerably this year. So students can attend the university without more out-of-pocket expenses than at many public institutions.

Q: But haven’t you lost a lot of potential students because, even though they were admitted and given financial aid, they couldn’t afford to attend USC?

A: Yes. Unfortunately, you have a lot of parents who say, ‘I worked my way through college; my kid can work his way through college.’ Well, it’s awfully hard to do that today. A lot of parents say, ‘We’re not willing to give up that third car or the trip to the Swiss Alps every winter when you can just as well go to the local state school.’ (Attending a private university) does demand some sacrifice of the family.