The Atlantic Monthly's "First Annual College Admissions Survey"
A Frodo's Notebook Review
by Daniel Klotz - Redactor in Chief

It's time the graduating high school students of the world faced the music: statistics are for sixth-graders. When you're eleven years old, it's acceptable to memorize the backs of baseball cards-how many runs and RBI's a players had last year, which team has won the most championships. In fact, knowing the numbers for sports teams is still okay at seventeen (and fifty-three) years of age. But when it comes to college, you're missing the picture if you're just looking at the college admissions process as if it were a statistics table to memorize or an equation to balance. The task of choosing the right school is a finer art than that, and one publication that has a grip on what it requires in a sea of those who don't is the Atlantic Monthly.

What the Atlantic brings to the table in its First Annual College Admissions Survey (from the November 2003 issue, available online) is a serious concern for the place of wisdom in the process. The Atlantic also operates on the underlying conviction that there are many things more important than hype, and rather than trying to make a big fuss to boost sales ("Find the right school for you!" "America's Best Schools Unveiled!") the gang of writers assigned to the feature (led by James Fallows) continually remind everyone to calm down. Wisdom and a sense of calm-exactly what many college-bound students and their parents need.

The College Admissions Survey is not rubricked or systematized coverage of the area of interest. Rather, it makes an attempt to look at it broadly-an "exploration," as they happily call it. Fallows, in an article introducing the section, explains

The purpose of this special section, which will be an annual feature, is to examine the admissions system as it is meant to work-and to explore the realities of its current operation and their implications for students, parents, and the colleges themselves. Our goal is to give high school students and their families a practical sense of what to expect from the process, to help them find the best match of student and college.

Fallows points out that the college-admissions bureaucracy is designed to do "the subtle, subjective work of matching millions of students with thousands of schools" in a way not unlike finding prom dates or even spouses, and it does that well. Yet, he points out, the system is under pressure as "a battlefield in a brutal competition for prestige." Thus, the Atlantic feature includes stories by writers who have interviewed all sorts of people involved in the process. The writers try to explain to frantic students and parents the way the process is designed to work and how they can best engage it (yes, applying to a safety school is a good idea, but there's hope if you forget or don't get in). Other writers tackle the shadier socio-economic side of things-the pressure to grant prestige in various ways-and how that effects the whole deal (if lots of students apply to a school, it looks selective, so even more students apply the following year). From both angles, the Atlantic survey helps to demystify the college-admissions process.

What it would do well to explore in future issues The feature is simply brilliant. Anyone affected by the college admissions process who doesn't take the time to read this feature, amazingly offered for free on the Atlantic website, deserves any misery resulting from their inattention. Don't let hubris stand in your way: you need these articles.

At the same time, since Frodo's Notebook is a result of the work of college-bound high school students and college underclassmen (our most frequent fiction contributor, Monica Rana, is studying at Harvard), we hope our two suggestions on what the Atlantic might explore in future editions of this feature, which we anticipate, will carry some clout.

1.) More on motives for going to college. This first edition of the feature takes for granted overly-interested parents, high school counselors, and students. In our experience, lots of bright high schoolers aren't so sure that college is such a big deal, many parents don't realize they have an important role to play, and high school counselors look at college as mere job preparation, like a technical school for smart people. People fitting these descriptions could use some Atlantic-esque wisdom: why should people go to college? Why do people go to college? The most memorable advice given to me in my search for a school was, "Unless you want to become a real humanist, in the true sense of the word, don't go to college where they make you read and think all the time. You'll be happier learning a trade." What's the truth in this? How can parents and counselors get involved in ways that help students without burdening them with too many expectations?

2.) Acknowledge the difference that differences make. Small, private liberal arts schools like St. John's in Annapolis, Maryland, or Amherst are significantly different from large research universities like Johns Hopkins or M.I.T., which are in turn different from state schools and technical schools. That is to say nothing of the plethora of schools undergoing identity crises, such as my school, Eastern University, which was Eastern College when I was admitted three years ago. Our main campus facilitates a small, private liberal arts undergraduate college, but we have satellite campuses in the region and internationally with a diversity of graduate programs. I wasn't prepared for a school that had such a broad vision and a questionable commitment to putting undergrads first. The Atlantic lumps all these different types of institutions together into a single college-admissions system. But doing so is like talking about magazines with the Kenyon Review, ESPN, O: The Opra Magazine, Car & Driver, and the New Yorker all in one category.

This annual feature deserves to exert the impact it aims for: less stressed college applicants and colleges that focus on real improvement rather than just making their statistics look good for the likes of the U.S. News & World Report. The Atlantic's achievement in this feature deserves to be commended, in large measure because, unlike the U.S. News feature "America's Best Colleges," it recognizes the impact it may exert and tries to make it as positive as possible.

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