Ivy League’s Secrets of Admission Revealed

So you want to get into the Ivy League?

First, don’t let your mother write your application essay. Don’t bother to have your parents’ influential friend lobby the admissions director.

Do donate a million-dollar building to the campus if you can; don’t annoy admissions officers with tales of your privileged background, a former admissions officer at Dartmouth says.

“Why has no one written this kind of book about Ivy League admissions before?” Michele A. Hernandez asks in the introduction to “A Is for Admission: The Insider’s Guide to Getting Into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges,” published by Warner Books ($24).

Her answer: “You need to be leaving this job to write the inside story, because you probably won’t be appreciated in admissions circles.”

Hernandez analyzes the way applications and interviews are treated at the most selective schools in the United States.

No surprise here: Grades count. Selective colleges give much more weight to academic rankings than to personal or extracurricular rankings, Hernandez says.

She explains in meticulous detail the Academic Index, or A1, which she describes as “one of the central mysteries of the Ivy League admissions process.”

The A1 is a formula that combines average student test scores such as the SAT and high school rank in class. These figures are represented on a scale of 1 to 240, with 240 the highest.

“No matter how many books you have read on admissions, you will not see a reference to this index, because it has always been a kind of trade secret,” she writes.

But grades are not everything, even in the Ivy League. If you’re a little slow in calculus, it definitely helps to play up any concert appearances at Carnegie Hall, published books or science awards in your background.

Sports are also important.

“Coaches face the extremely difficult task of finding top athletes whose academics put them into an acceptable range,” Hernandez writes. “In some sports, that is nearly impossible.”

There’s also the essay: not a critical factor on its own, but still a way for applicants to either bore or thrill the admissions officer wading through their file. Hernandez’s advice is to write something extraordinary--and write it yourself.

“I’d much rather read a slightly rougher essay that had real feeling in it than a dry but perfectly crafted one,” she said.

If you’re a legacy--that is, if one of your parents attended the college--your chances are better, but admission is by no means guaranteed. At Dartmouth, the overall acceptance rate is 20%; the acceptance of legacies is double that. But Dartmouth, Princeton and other selective colleges still reject 60% of legacy applications, she said.

Offering to build a new science complex at the school you like definitely helps. But smaller efforts won’t have much impact on admissions.

“Sending in your yearly donation of $1,000 to your alma mater will not give your child a greater chance,” she writes.

In the end, fewer than one in 100 incoming freshmen get in because of their parents, she said.

Hernandez has no problem with these special cases, but she does take issue with the quality of work in admissions offices, which she said are made up of talented young graduates and “lifers,” people who generally “did not graduate from any highly selective college, let alone an Ivy League one.”

So don’t be too subtle about your accomplishments, or they might be missed.

“The very best of applicants will often be brighter than many of those who will be evaluating them,” she writes.

Not to mention wealthier. Hernandez also advises playing down your father’s position as a banker or your mother’s job as a law partner. “During my years in admissions, I was sometimes surprised by the bias Ivy officers held against privileged students, especially those who went to fancy private high schools,” she writes.

Hernandez is right: She probably wouldn’t get her old job back after writing this book.

“It’s a very glib, superficial view of what it is that goes on,” said Karl Furstenberg, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions and financial aid. “I think there are a lot of people out there making a lot of money” on college admissions books, Furstenberg said. “I think these books kind of feed the paranoia that’s out there.”

Furstenberg called Hernandez’s descriptions of admissions officers “inaccurate” and “preposterous.”

“The people who do this work . . . they’re well educated; they’re bright; and they do it because they care about students and the institutions they work for,” he said.

Hernandez, 30, originally taught high school English and Spanish. She then spent four years in admissions before resigning to have a daughter, now 6 months old. Eventually, she hopes to return to secondary education.

She said she wrote the book to help point applicants in the right direction.

“Kids feel unworthy to apply to these schools, and it’s a shame,” she said. “Students have to keep in mind they don’t have to appeal to a panel of Nobel Prize chemists.”