This article first appeared in The Wall Street Journal of March 26, 1990, page A1

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Your Fervent Desire to Meet
Abe Lincoln Won't Get
You Into Best Colleges

By Andrew B. Cohen
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Aristotle wrote, "The Good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." Alexander Woolcott said, "Everything good in the world is either immoral, illegal or fattening." Who's right? Or are the two views in agreement? If not, what accounts for the implied dispute?

Sharpen your pencils. Get ready. Go.

If you can write a thoughtful, well-reasoned response to the above problem, you just might earn one of the more coveted prizes in academia: admittance to this fall's freshman class at the University of Chicago.

There are many hurdles to clear on the way to Prestige U., and one is answering the offbeat essay questions that appear on some schools' undergraduate admissions applications. The University of Pennsylvania has this one: "You have just completed your 300-page autobiography. Please submit page 217." Stanford requires applicants to "jot a note telling your future roommate what to expect from you in the coming year," while Smith College asks, " If you were forced to live with only three items, which items would you choose and why?"

GETTING BEYOND NUMBERS

Other schools look for scope. "If you could introduce one new idea or material thing to a primitive culture, what would it be?" asks the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Maine. Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., asks, "If you could change any event in the course of history, what would you change and why?"

How is it that the college admissions process has come to resemble a Barbara Walters special? Even as the population of 17-year-olds dwindles, more students than ever want to get into the nation's most selective schools. And for admissions officers, it's harder than ever to make distinctions among the flood of well-qualified applicants.

After academic measures (or "numbers," as admissions people call them) and extracurricular activities, essay questions and personal statements are the most important elements in deciding who gets an acceptance letter, sent out in early April. Essays are particularly helpful for choosing among the "gray area" applicants, those that are neither obvious must-haves nor obvious no-ways.

ALL ABOUT ABE

Nearly all college admissions officials will admit that, left to themselves, most high-school seniors will submit essays of stupefying dullness. "Imagine, if you will, reading about 2,000 applications between January and March," says Harry Bauld, a former admissions official at Brown and Columbia. "You get essays on the same people--JFK, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln--again and again and again." Mr. Bauld says curve-ball questions separate those who are merely slogging it out from those with a deft touch--what he says admissions people call the "pizazz factor."

Notably absent from the list of schools that ask such "high tension" questions are Harvard and Yale, which seem to have no problem attracting top-caliber students.

"I think Harvard and Yale ask the hardest question of all: 'Tell us about yourself,'" says Sally McGinty, a former admissions officer at Sarah Lawrence who, like Mr. Bauld, is the author of a book on college essay writing.

"The point of asking open-ended questions is this: Every student is different," says Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of admissions for Harvard and Radcliffe. "What they choose to write about is as interesting as what they write. We want the ball to be in the student's court."

But the dangers of asking plain-vanilla questions--like the classic"If you were given the opportunity to spend an evening with any one person, living, deceased or fictional, who would you choose and why?"--can be gleaned from the experience of the University of Pennsylvania. There, a full 5% of applicants want to spend time with Benjamin Franklin, the school's founder. Only God and Jesus are more popular, says the school's admissions director, Lee Stetson.

Adam Karp, a senior at the Fieldston School in New York's Bronx borough, told Penn he'd want to talk with Jack Ryan, the hero of "The Hunt for Red October." Mr. Karp, who wants to attend Penn's Wharton business school, says he first considered "a Trump or a Rockefeller, someone who controls a major financial empire," but decided the fictional Wall Streeter turned CIA operative would be more agreeable to Penn's admissions committee.

"It was a fun question, but I didn't know what they expected to get out of it," Mr. Karp says.

OH, TO BE A SNAIL DARTER

Admissions people want to have fun, too. This longing strikes a poignant note at brain centers like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where one essay question plaintively adds a suggestion to "feel free to use your imagination, recognizing that those who read it will not mind being entertained." Similarly, Caltech asks high-school seniors, "How does 'fun' fit into your life?"

Essays are a good place to detect subtle changes in the zeitgeist. Business-oriented Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., asked again this year, "If you could be anyone or anything for one day, who or what would you be and why?" Last year's bumper crop of Trumps and Iacoccas has been decimated, says Joseph Carver, Babson's dean of admissions, replaced by socially conscious answers. Some of this year's applicants wanted to experience 24 hours as a homeless person or a creature on the endangered species list.

The questions asked often reflect a college's self-image, contends Ms. McGinty. "Hampshire, for example, asks about social concerns. Sarah Lawrence always asks about an art issue."

Perhaps only New York University would cite Andy Warhol's famous-for-15-minutes dictum and ask applicants to describe their 15 minutes. And if brevity is the soul of wit, Princeton, by asking applicants to describe themselves with one adjective, may discover who is the wittiest of them all. (Occidental College and Rice University ask a similar question but allow three adjectives.)

Even tightly focused questions can yield answers that speak volumes. An applicant to Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine, once wrote, "If there is a single word to describe me, that word would have to profectionist."

NEEDING SOME SPACE

Most schools seem, like Vassar, to want students to let their imagination roam without constraint. The college in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., has a blank page in its applications that says at the top: "Your Space: Please use this side of the form in your own way."

Could the school perhaps be a little more specific?

"Your Space is your space," say the accompanying instructions, with Zen-like inscrutability.

By contrast, the essay section in the U.S. Naval Academy's multicolored blizzard of computer forms demands military precision: "In the space below, please trace the sequence of events which led you to seek an appointment to the Naval Academy, the most important influences upon you and your reasons for applying. Then complete your essay by describing how you have prepared for entrance to the Naval Academy, what you have in mind in the way of long range plans or objectives for your life, and how attending the Naval Academy will help you attain them."

Got that? Good.

"You may use an additional sheet of paper if necessary."