Reply to Anyone here read the The Gatekeepers? Fascinating behind the scenes look at the admissions process

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So I just looked up this book The Gatekeepers. Published in 2003 based on spending 1999-2000 with the admissions people.

You know that's an 18 year old experience now - nearly 2 decades out of date, right?

Have there been any updates or more recent insights? Things have changed a GREAT deal since then.[/quote]

Can you be specific?

Other than students applying to more colleges each (thanks primarily due to common app) and higher standardized test scores (thanks to test prep becoming the norm) I don't think much has changed at all.[/quote]

The year the book was written, Wesleyan had 6,955 applicants and accepted 27% of them.
Last year, Wesleyan had 12,453 applicants and accepted 16% of them.

The landscape is entirely different. [/quote]

Yes, students applying to more colleges each, due primarily to the common app (and to facts like Wesleyan, in particular, requires no supplemental essays, making it an easy one to add).  Kids can still only enroll at one school.

What has fundamentally changed about the process of selection and class building?

As far as I can tell, not much.  Book is still very valuable.  And there are many others like it written more recently, and none of them describe a process that is much different.[/quote]

When the book was written, Wesleyan had to produce 5077 rejections (73% of 6955 applicants). 
Last year, they had to produce 10460 rejections (84% of 12453).

Do you think the Admissions Office is spending as much time carefully reviewing applications now as they did when they had half as many to read? The reality is that unless you're hooked, there's no way your application is getting past a cursory initial review unless you meet concrete statistical measures that are much higher than they were 18 years ago. So that's the biggest change in the landscape.

But if you can meet that lofty standard, I think the book's insights still apply. The big takeaway for me was that your kid needs to distinguish him/herself in a way that can be quickly summarized by the Admissions Committee -- "Opera Boy" or "Mountain Climber Girl" or whatever. Something that makes you somehow stand out in the mass of 4.0/1500 SAT kids that make it past the initial weeding out. [/quote]

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