"I wish there was something I could do to help people not turn themselves inside out," one admissions director said.
THE GATEKEEPERS: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.
"The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College" (Viking; $25.95) is his account.
One morning in late February, Mike Schoenfeld will gather about two dozen manila folders from his desk and carry them to a hearing room inside the admissions office of Middlebury College.
Starting in fall 1999, Jacques Steinberg, a national education correspondent for The New York Times, spent eight months inside the admissions office of Wesleyan University, one of the most selective colleges in the United States.
The experience of Rice provides a preview of the subtle ways that life would most likely change inside the admissions offices of colleges like Yale, Princeton and Stanford should the Supreme Court decide to impose strict restrictions on affirmative action.
► "[T]he process of offering admission at selective Ph.D. programs is chock-full of assumptions that are seldom made explicit or challenged," wrote Sian Beilock, vice provost for academic initiatives at the University of Chicago in Illinois, in her review of the book Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping, by Julie Posselt.
A revealing new book, Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping by University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, education researcher Julie Posselt, investigates the processes at 10 top-ranked departments including astrophysics, biology, physics, economics, linguistics, political science, and sociology and examines the values and practices that appear to govern them.
Ms. Richardson, who attended live presentations and visited several college booths, said, "It was an easy way to see what's available without having to make a lot of trips and to get some inside information on how admissions officers make decisions".
Once inside (no admission is charged), this is immediately evident.
