The Old College Try

Marlborough School brought 51 girls to Yale and got them an hour with a dean. He enticed them with the university’s world-class drama program. He boasted about its expert professors. He even talked up the sailing team.

Then associate admissions dean Rob Jackson hit the California girls with this: Yale receives 15,000 applications each year, and “we only have so much space here.”

As the high school sophomores and juniors filed out into the rain, undaunted, for a private tour, their chaperons ducked upstairs with Jackson to try to secure some of Yale’s “space” for Marlborough’s seniors.

Yale was just days away from mailing its acceptance letters to members of the current senior class. Steve Burnett, a college counselor at Marlborough, and Jim Skrumbis, the high school’s principal, knew Jackson had three hours to shrink the “admit” pile by 22 applicants. They wanted to persuade him to keep Marlborough’s files in the stack. After all, there’s not much value in a prep school that prepares students for elite colleges but can’t get them in.

The meeting last month in Jackson’s office lasted 45 minutes. Burnett and Skrumbis walked out knowing, mostly, which Marlborough applicants Yale would admit. They were pleased. “We made a pretty good case,” Burnett said.

Not every high school gets that access, and not every college allows it. But for college preparatory schools like Marlborough, such meetings are part of an admissions strategy that is sophisticated, successful and far more personal than at just about any public school.

These private schools hire counselors away from college admissions offices. They take packs of students across the country to visit campuses. And they parlay any advantage, any connection, to get their graduates admitted to the nation’s most coveted universities.

“Ninety percent of it is about the girl--who she is and what she does,” Skrumbis said. “We pride ourselves on working the margins.”

At Yale, striding through a Gothic building that looked more suited for a church than the university’s athletic department, Skrumbis got a head start on promoting next year’s seniors.

“Should we go put in a pitch for Cameron?” he asked Burnett.

Cameron Washington, a junior at Marlborough, ran 400 meters in 55.6 seconds at a meet in California last year. Skrumbis and Burnett figure that talent, on top of good grades, will be Cameron’s hook when she applies next year to super-selective colleges. If the track coaches want her, the admissions deans probably will too.

“She’s the real deal, so keep your eye on her,” Skrumbis told one of Yale’s coaches, who seemed a little surprised to see the prep-school pitchmen all the way from California. “She’s an outstanding student. We’re an outstanding school.”

Some decry that sort of advocacy by private schools as unfair lobbying.

Marlborough sophomore Danielle Koffler, an ice-skater who wants to attend a college with a rink, sees it differently. “You could kind of say we have an advantage,” she said. “But that’s also what we’re paying for.”

Indeed, Marlborough focuses so intensely on its students’ higher education because the school’s reputation depends on it. Tuition and fees for next year total $20,100, and getting students into college goes a long way toward justifying that. Not community college. Not even certain state universities. But a “name college,” one that ranks highly in guidebooks and looks smart on a sweatshirt or a sticker on the family SUV.

Like the universities where it sends its graduates, Marlborough is selective. Surrounded by mansions in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park, the 113-year-old school starts in seventh grade. Four hundred girls applied this year for that grade’s 85 spots.

Marlborough’s 530 students get small classes, highly qualified teachers, a variety of extracurricular activities and courses that range in the upper school from contemporary poetry to multivariable calculus.

The package also includes a college counseling staff dedicated to placing the school’s graduates. Two counselors work at this full-time, year-round, and an assistant works with them to track the paperwork and hold students to deadlines. A third counselor, the school’s admissions director, is committed part-time. All three counselors have experience on the other side--evaluating applications in college admissions offices.

Marlborough gets students thinking seriously about college by 10th grade, a full two years before they apply. In the fall, the girls take a preliminary entrance exam--the PSAT. To identify the type of college they want, many sophomores, plus a few juniors, pay $1,600 for the school’s spring-break tour of Eastern campuses. (Students are close enough to California campuses to visit them on their own, the counselors figure.)

This year’s Eastern itinerary crammed 18 campuses into seven days. For girls seeking city life, the group stopped in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, in New York at Columbia and NYU, and at several campuses in Boston. For those interested in a women’s college, there was Barnard. For a taste of smaller, quieter schools, Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College, where Burnett once worked in admissions, and Connecticut College were included.

A whirlwind college tour is a rite for thousands of high school students. Usually, though, their parents, or maybe a tour company, lead the march--not their counselors and principal. As Marlborough traveled last month, at least three other Los Angeles prep schools were on the road too: Brentwood, Harvard-Westlake in Studio City and Campbell Hall in North Hollywood.

Free from their parents, at least on this trip, Marlborough’s students didn’t have to ask how much the tuition was. They didn’t need to test the locks on the dormitories. And they could openly declare certain things to be really cool, like the flier in an NYU dorm advertising “weekly discussions dedicated to the exploration of sexual bondage, power relationships, sadomasochism, and pleasure.”

That is not to say Marlborough’s girls were easily impressed. They are smart, articulate and confident, and they know what they want from college--everything. “I’m Ingrid, and today I’m interested in psychology, English, Spanish and music,” one girl told an admissions officer, joining a chorus of would-be singing lawyers and dancing mathematicians.

In the private tours and information sessions arranged by their counselors, the girls asked question after (often esoteric) question, recording the answers in their steno pads.

“Do you have a fencing team?”

“Has your Tel Aviv study abroad program been put on hold?”

“Are the rare books in the library only available to English majors, or are they open to everybody?”

The wet, chilly Northeastern weather was not the turnoff the sun-loving Californians expected. After all, sophomore Molly Tobin pointed out, “You get cute clothes when you’re in a cold climate.”

At Yale, where Molly fell “completely and utterly in love,” the admissions office opened early to accommodate Marlborough’s schedule. The Ivy League university admitted four seniors from Marlborough during its early-decision period and was passing judgment on 11 more. A month before the school’s college tour, Marlborough’s director of college counseling, Susan Lewandowski, flew east to personally lobby for the school’s girls at Yale and several other universities.

Not all colleges welcome such visits, however. Princeton’s admissions officers, for example, ban high school counselors from their offices and do not accept their phone calls. Any communication must be written.

“I’ve just always operated on the principle that if we aren’t able to provide particular opportunities for all of the schools from which we receive applicants (over 5,000 schools in a given year), we shouldn’t provide them for any,” admissions dean Fred Hargadon wrote in an e-mail to The Times.

Yale’s doors are more open.

“We interact with all kinds of counselors, and we do it often,” said Richard Shaw, the university’s dean of undergraduate admissions. “I don’t think that’s giving them any significant advantage when that goes on. It just means we’re communicating.” (His staff does not communicate, however, with the growing field of independent counselors, who are not employed by schools and charge students for advice.)

Among public high schools, those in well-to-do suburban districts tend to have college counseling offices most similar to the prep schools’. But they are juggling the needs and files of hundreds more students. They can only marvel at the time their private-school colleagues can devote to their students--and the access colleges afford them.

“They pick up the phone and say, ‘This is what I’ve got from my spring crop. What do you think?’” said Cynthia Martini, one of two college counselors for the 1,000 juniors and seniors at highly competitive Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton.

“I don’t know if it’s fair or unfair. That’s the way of life,” Martini said. She would like to tell more admissions officers about Sunny Hills, where students were accepted this year to Yale and Stanford. Unlike private-school counselors, however, Martini can’t visit a campus unless the college pays her way or she happens to be nearby.

Marlborough cannot be sure what difference its counselors’ advocacy makes, but the school can show off an impressive list of colleges that have accepted its students. The week after Marlborough’s group visited New Haven, Yale admitted four more girls--a total of eight, or nearly 10% of Marlborough’s Class of 2002. This year, 45% of the seniors who applied to Ivy League schools were admitted, and the UC system took 90% of Marlborough’s applicants. Other highly selective colleges, such as Northwestern, Vassar and Wesleyan, admitted 76% of the Marlborough students who applied, according to counselor Burnett.

Overall, he said, this was “our best year ever.”

Now Marlborough is concentrating on the juniors--track star Cameron and her classmates. The girls are attending workshops to learn how to write compelling, persuasive essays. Their counselors will write letters of recommendation over the summer. And until the spring of 2003, the school will continue “working the margins.”

At Brown University, two stops after Yale, Skrumbis persuaded Cameron to introduce herself to the track coach leading the question-and-answer session. As she shook the coach’s hand, Skrumbis volunteered Cameron’s best time.

“Sub-55, 400 meter. Great student,” he said.

Walking back to the bus, Skrumbis patted Cameron on the back.

“There you go,” he said. “You’re making all kinds of connections. Good for you.”