Inside The Admissions Game

Do we really want Rebecca? Almost any college would offer a seat in its honors program to lure such a talented applicant. But this is the choosy University of Chicago, where the 12 members of the admissions committee can't even decide whether to let her through the door. With seven applicants competing for each of 1,011 slots in the class of 2003, Chicago clearly doesn't need Rebecca. Rick Bischoff, her advocate on the committee, argues that she has strong leadership skills. He recalls being so impressed when he first met the young woman that he muttered, "I sure hope she's smart." In fact, her transcript is very good. And yet Chicago has already rejected hundreds of applicants with better grades. Bischoff tosses on the cluttered conference table a Kelly-green folder that sums up Rebecca in 32 pages. "Look at the way her teachers write about her," he urges. "Plus, she doesn't like 'Dawson's Creek'."

Around the room, brows furrow. This is a zero-sum game: accepting Rebecca would mean curtains for yet another of the nation's most gifted high-school seniors. One committee member complains that the girl's answers to application questions don't echo the lofty academic ideals that Chicago projects in its literature. "Yes," a pro-Rebecca member fires back, "and don't you get suspicious when they do?" Bischoff, his arsenal nearly spent, launches what Chicago admissions counselors call "the don't-give-a-s--- argument." So what if Rebecca will get only C's in math--she, and not some higher-scoring robot, is the provocateur we want sitting in class. Dissenting voices crackle, but fall silent when Ted O'Neill speaks. O'Neill, 52, is a machinist's son who came to this work after years devoted to the study of Romantic poetry. As dean of admissions, he has spent a decade urging his staff to look past grades and test scores. Yes, other kids appear more deserving. "But we are the University of Chicago," O'Neill reminds his colleagues. "We can do what we damn well please, so long as we have good reasons." Moments later, Rebecca is admitted.

In an age when jurors scurry from murder trials to explain their verdicts on CNN, few deliberations remain secret. But what happens behind the door of the college-admissions office each year is still a dark mystery to 2.5 million applicants and their jittery retinues of parents, teachers and counselors. Over the past year, Chicago permitted NEWSWEEK to watch what goes on behind the wizard's curtain. The only condition: that we obscure the identities of kids like Rebecca, whose real name is, well, not Rebecca. This week Chicago's decisions on whom to accept for the fall of 1999 will land in mailboxes around the globe: big envelopes for those invited to the great Gothic campus built with John D. Rockefeller's millions--and small ones for those who'll be enrolling somewhere else.

The American tradition of "going East" to find the best colleges means Chicago will never have the cachet of the Ivies, with which it competes aggressively for students. But these days Chicago is hot. The number of applicants grew 25 percent this year alone. More remarkably, their average SAT scores leaped 20 points, to about 1370, with the biggest surge from the very top kids. Those who get big envelopes can enter the owlish, arrogant place that refused the Queen of England an honorary law degree because she'd done no scholarly work to deserve it. Chicago prides itself on being a grind. As the school's own recruitment book dryly warns, "You know you're doing well when your GPA is higher than the number of hours you sleep a night."

The admissions cycle that ends this week formally began last April 1 when the first batch of high-school juniors visited campus. A year earlier, though, Chicago was already sending recruitment packets to 45,000 of the nation's top sophomores. By last summer, an explosion of visits to its campus--up 50 percent from 1997--signals Chicago's growing popularity. For O'Neill's harried staff, it's a bittersweet prospect. By instinct they want to share their school with every applicant who's qualified. But more great kids ultimately means... more small envelopes.