Schools, Students Play The Waitlist Game - WSJ article April 11, 2007

Schools, Students Play The Waitlist Game
In Year of Record Applications, Many Colleges Offer More Spots
On Their Lists but Some Step Up Pressure for Commitment
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
April 11, 2007; Page D1

The college-admissions battle is shifting to the waitlist.

After issuing a grisly round of rejection letters this year, many schools have increased the number of spots offered on their waitlists in a bid to better manage their "yield" -- the percentage of accepted students who actually decide to attend. As a result, in a year of record applications, many students who applied to multiple colleges are getting offers for multiple waitlists.

COMING OFF THE BENCH


For waitlisted college applicants:
• Do send a letter expressing your interest and noting any recent accomplishments.

• Do ask your high-school counselor to convey your interest if the school calls.

• Don't say the college is your first choice if it is not.

• Don't visit if it would cost you a plane ticket, since chances of acceptance are still low.

• Don't do anything over the top, such as camping out in front of the admissions office.

The overlapping waitlists will make the next phase of the admissions process trickier for both colleges and students. Just as with the first round of acceptances, colleges don't want to make offers to students who are unlikely to accept because it will drive down their yields, which are important factors in college rankings. So they use a number of tactics -- from calling students directly to seeking early promises to attend -- to narrow down likely candidates.

In recent years, the waitlist has become "almost like a second early-decision process" as colleges grow more savvy about measuring students' interest before making offers, says Ken Fox, chairman of the admission-practices committee at the National Association for College Admission Counseling and a counselor at Ladue Horton Watkins High School in St. Louis. Already, students who have accepted slots on waitlists say they are feeling pressure to show a firmer commitment, in order to stand out when schools turn to their waitlists next month.

That can pose ethical dilemmas: Alisa Rudnick, a senior at San Francisco University High School, was waitlisted at half of the 12 colleges to which she applied. She chose to stay on the lists at two -- Reed College and Skidmore College -- but is also considering enrolling at Bard College, where she has been accepted.

"I'm in a really weird position because it's hard to declare one as your first choice," says Ms. Rudnick, who plans on writing a letter to each college to show interest. But she says she doesn't feel right telling each school it is her No. 1 option -- which is what schools want to hear when deciding who will get offers.

The waitlist has become an increasingly important part of the admissions process as schools seek to maximize their closely watched yield figures. About 35% of colleges and universities maintain a waitlist, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and the number of students offered slots on the lists has been rising. The proportion of waitlisted students actually admitted averages around 35%, according to the NACAC, but schools say it fluctuates as they make adjustments depending on how close they came to their expected yield with the first round.

Admission offers to waitlisted students will start going out in May, after schools receive "yes" or "no" answers from their first round of admissions by the end of this month. So students are encouraged to decide which waitlists they want to stay on as soon as possible, which will demonstrate interest to the schools.

Colleges say they are more uncertain than ever this year about their yield as they see more applications per student and are forced to vie for the same pool of talent. A few years ago, students applied to about six to eight colleges, but students and high-school counselors say the typical range is now 10 to 12.

To broaden its options, Amherst College offered 1,450 spots on the waitlist this year, up from 1,258. With students likely to be on multiple waitlists, "we know we are going to lose a bunch," says Tom Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid.


Northwestern University offered waitlist spots to 2,700 students this year, an increase from 1,750. "We find it more challenging than usual to model how many of the admitted students will enroll," says Keith Todd, director of undergraduate admission at Northwestern, which saw its applications increase by 19% this year to a record 21,949.

The University of Pennsylvania -- which offered waitlist spots to 2,800 people, an increase from 1,800 last year -- says it calls a handful of candidates on the waitlist and their high-school counselors after May 1 to gauge the likelihood that students will accept offers. Last year, the school made such calls to the 42 students who were admitted from the waitlist, says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions. "When you go to the waitlist, you want to have students who really want to be here," he says. "You don't want to go through the selection process all over again."

To be sure, just because a school offers more spots doesn't mean that they will take more students off the waitlist in the end. And not all schools are offering more spots. Georgetown University, for instance, offered waitlist spots to 1,774 students this year, down from 1,820 last year.

Efforts by colleges to measure commitment can be frustrating for students who are uncertain where they want to go. Alex Graber-Tilton, a senior at Wall High School in Wall, N.J., received a letter from Carnegie Mellon University offering him a spot on its priority waiting list -- which the school says is meant for students who definitely know Carnegie Mellon is their first choice. When making waitlist offers, the school promises to go to the priority list first, before its regular waitlist. But to nail down students' commitment, the school asks those accepted to make a decision quickly.

If you get an acceptance, you are expected to send a $600 deposit by May 8 to secure the slot. Since waitlist offers typically roll in throughout the month of May, that could mean committing weeks before the student hears about offers from other schools.

"It's like you've been pushed aside for someone else, but they still want to know if you want to go there," says Mr. Graber-Tilton, who plans to turn down the priority-list slot. He wants to study engineering and was also waitlisted at Rice University, as well as Harvey Mudd College where he hopes to ultimately go. Otherwise he plans on going to Case Western Reserve University, where he was accepted.

The priority waiting list "allows students who really, really want the place to come forward," says Michael Steidel, director of admission at Carnegie Mellon, which had a record 22,422 applicants this year.

For some students, losing an enrollment deposit to a school that accepted them is a no-brainer if they are later admitted from the waitlist to their top choice school. "Forgoing that is not a big deal to me when you pay thousands of dollars in tuition," says Scarlet Neath, a senior at Lamar High School in Houston. She was accepted to the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Southern California. She was waitlisted at her first choice, the University of Virginia, and plans on holding out until the end.

For those who are on the waitlist and want to stand out, deans of admissions recommend that students write a letter expressing interest and updating the school on any recent accomplishments. Many colleges say they don't advise spending money on a campus visit, given the rather small chance of being admitted.

And going overboard won't help. "Two years ago, a kid pitched a tent outside the admissions office in an effort to show his interest," says Charles Deacon, dean of undergraduate admissions at Georgetown University. Unfortunately, it rained on the third night, and "the next day, the tent was gone," he says. The student wasn't admitted.

Write to Anjali Athavaley at anjali.athavaley@wsj.com2

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Colleges Need a Reply. May I See Your Notes? - NYT article - April 12, 2007

April 12, 2007
Online Shopper
Colleges Need a Reply. May I See Your Notes?
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
WARM congratulations,” said the letter, which came last week addressed to my 18-year-old daughter.

The phone rang while Zoe was filing the letter with the others — she also received an “I look forward to meeting you on campus” and a “We are pleased to provide you” letter on heavy embossed stationery.

“ ‘Angelina’ is on line one,” I informed her. “And ‘Brad’ sent you another mash note.”

Angelina is our code name for one of the small liberal arts colleges in the Midwest (enrollment 1,450, student-to-faculty ratio nine to one) that luckily wasn’t as picky as the Ivies this year. Although Harvard accepted fewer than 9 percent of its star-studded applicants, Angelina still had eyes for B students from the West Coast. So did Brad (enrollment of 1,418; student-to-faculty ratio of 12 to 1).

“And ‘Jennifer’ left a message earlier,” I said. “She hopes you don’t pick ‘Angelina.’ ”

Welcome to admitted-student season, when many of the same high school seniors who worried that they might not get in anywhere are being courted like celebrities by colleges that accepted them. The tables turn in April, when admissions officers are well aware that the students they want probably got into other similar colleges, too.

Which should be a relief. Except for one tiny problem. After my daughter and her friends were warned that acceptance rates are dropping at the top colleges, they all applied to twice as many colleges as they would have back in the days before everyone started worrying about how likely they were to be rejected.

And as a result, they ended up with a nice problem to have. They were accepted to too many colleges, including ones they’ve never seen. In the end, they can pick only one college. From our town in Northern California, Claire is trying to figure out if she would prefer Bard College to Boston University. Would Lucy like New York University?

So how to choose? The ideal way would be to visit the colleges that sent acceptance letters. But not everyone has the time or money to travel to see multiple campuses before the May 1 deadline for sending a deposit to most colleges.

I wondered if the Internet could help. When my daughter and her friends were trying to identify which colleges to apply to, they gathered information from college Web sites, online ratings sites and college discussion forums.

So now that they had to narrow their choices, was there a different way to glean information online?

For advice, I phoned Beatrice Flair, a college counselor at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, a public charter school that encourages students to aim for the top colleges nationwide.

Ms. Flair was familiar with the problem.

“I had a kid one year who applied to 28 schools and got into most of them,” she said. “With every school that is Tier 1, there is no way to tell ahead of time if you’re going to get in.”

“So how do you narrow it down from 28 to 1?” I asked. “Start by looking at the schools’ Web sites?”

“Many kids have already used the information on those sites to the nth degree, and what more can be there that they don’t already know?” Ms. Flair said. “Unless there’s a section of specific information for admitted students. That would be a place to go. Also, you might find e-mail addresses for admissions reps and professors. Send them questions. Use their answers to compare schools.”

Another well-known source of information is Collegeconfidential.com, where students and parents compare notes about colleges. Less well known is one of the site’s new sections — called “campus visits” — with hundreds of reports (filed anonymously) that describe everything from atmosphere in the dining hall (“the staff in the cafeteria were very unfriendly,” wrote TheVeganActress of Knox College) to the small details (“little or no air conditioning. Dirty bathrooms,” drummerdude_07 wrote of Dartmouth).

But don’t rely too heavily on one opinion. “It’s good to communicate with people who have had the opportunity to visit, but at the same time, take their comments with a grain of salt,” Ms. Flair said. Similarly, it’s time to stop worrying about ratings. While a college-ranking site like Usnews.com (where the premium online edition of “America’s Best Colleges 2007” costs $14.95) may be useful if you’re on a waiting list and want to find out if that college admitted any wait-listed students last year, some counselors say it’s time to stop obsessing over a college’s general ranking.

Michele Hernandez, a college consultant and author of “A Is for Admission,” (Warner Books 1999), said: “What does it matter if one school is No. 1 and one is No. 3? You can’t split hairs like that when what matters now is to get beneath the surface and find out which school you’ll really like being at the most. Now is the time to look at the social things, and how’s the parking, all the things that you’ll care about when you get there.”

A site that uses those measures to compare colleges is College Prowler, which also publishes 233 college guidebooks. It has finished processing survey data from current students. This information is on a searchable database at Collegeprowler.com (an annual subscription is $39.95).

“We grade schools in nontraditional categories, and we’re particularly strong at helping you make sure you’re going to fit in socially,” said Luke Skurman, chief executive of College Prowler.

For instance, if you’re set on the Big Ten and are unsure whether you’ll be happier at Illinois, Wisconsin or Michigan, you can use Collegeprowler.com to compare the colleges in such categories as Greek life (in which the three earn grades ranging from A-minus to A-plus) and night life (Michigan gets B-plus and the other two A-minus).

The biggest drawback to the College Prowler guides is that there aren’t enough of them.

“We’re adding more,” Mr. Skurman said. “Every time someone searches for a term on our Web site, we see the schools where our actual customers really are the most interested in. College of New Jersey, Drew University, Texas Tech, Lake Forest, Sewanee, DePaul, they’re all books we’re going to be starting very shortly.”

Ms. Flair, the college counselor, said students shouldn’t agonize over a decision.

“If they’ve made good choices when they were applying, then they have a lot of good places to choose from,” she said.

I hope my daughter follows that advice. I’m sure Angelina will understand if Zoe prefers Jennifer after all.

E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com

USEFUL WEBSITES FOR COLLEGE PLANNING

USEFUL WEBSITES FOR COLLEGE PLANNING.

1. marilyn Kaufman/college planning educator www.dreammakers4u.net
you will get a schedule of upcoming events. Marilyn’s email is mkaufman5@aol.com and her phone number is 972-248-2363.

2. www.fastweb.com great place to check out scholarship options etc.
3. www.collegeboard.com
4. www.elearning.makingitcount.com a representative from this company was a treasure trove of information and this site has some great ideas for financial options.
5. Carol Gene Cohen, Cohen's College Connections Her number is: 972-381-9990./ another college planning educator
6. college rating site http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm
7. www.collegeconfidential.com
8 http://www.ratemyteachers.com/
9 www.campustours.com
10 www.studentsreview.com
11 www.campusdirt.com
12 www.collegedata.com
13 www.collegiatechoice.com

Colleges Reject Record Numbers - WSJ article April 3rd 2007

Colleges Reject Record Numbers
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
April 3, 2007; Page B9

This year's college-admissions competition is turning out to be more brutal than ever -- and not just for students who applied to elite universities.

A number of top-tier state schools and smaller liberal arts colleges say they received more applications this year from well-qualified students -- and consequently are turning down a higher percentage of them.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received 20,017 applications, up from 19,736 last year. The state school's acceptance rate fell to 33.3% from 34.1%. At Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, 4,624 students applied, up 8%, yet it accepted 1,348, down from 1,395 last year, to prevent overenrollment. Even schools that admit the vast majority of applicants are becoming more selective. Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, saw a record 15,836 applicants this year, up from 15,498 the year before; it accepted 73% of them, down from 78% last year.


"Students are being more intelligent about what their options are when getting into school, and they are looking in the next tier now," says Jennifer Delahunty Britz, Kenyon's dean of admissions and financial aid. "Schools that did not used to be on the radar of talented students are now on the radar."

Many Ivy League universities also drew record numbers of applicants and consequently admitted students at lower rates. The University of Pennsylvania saw applications rise 11% over the last year to a record 22,634, while its acceptance rate fell to 15% from about 17% last year. "The talent of students in the pool was so exceptional that we had difficulty making choices," says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the Philadelphia school.

Dartmouth College had a record 14,176 applications, up 2% from last year. It accepted 2,165, or 15% -- its lowest acceptance rate in history. Harvard University drew a record 22,955 applicants and accepted a record low 9%. At Stanford University, the number of applications rose 7% to 23,956. It accepted 10.3%, down from 10.9% last year.

Several factors are fueling the rise in applications. One is population trends: The number of students graduating from high school has risen each year since the 1995-96 school year, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The U.S. Department of Education predicts that the trend will continue until at least 2013.

Another is the growth in international students. At UNC-Chapel Hill, for instance, recruiters went abroad for the first time this year, making trips to Shanghai and other Asian cities to promote the college. UNC had 736 foreign nationals apply this year, up from 590 last year. The university admitted 167 of them, up from about 125 a year ago.

A third is the growing use of the Common Application, a form that can be completed online and sent to a number of admissions offices far more easily than paper-based applications. More than 300 schools accept it.

The Common Application has "made it much easier for people to file 10, 15, 20 applications," says Charles Deacon, dean of undergraduate admissions at Georgetown University. Georgetown doesn't take the Common Application to try to hold down its number of applicants, he says. Still, the Washington, D.C., university saw applications rise to 16,198 from 15,067 last year. It accepted 20% of them, down from 22% a year ago.

To be sure, not all of the most-selective colleges saw a rise in applicants. Yale University's applications fell to 19,323 from 21,101 last year. Although there has been speculation that Yale's low acceptance rate last year caused fewer students to apply this year, the dean of admissions has said the decline was due to a random fluctuation, says Yale spokesman Tom Conroy.

Generally, though, college officials agree it has become more difficult to get into selective schools. As a result, some high school counselors are encouraging students to be more realistic in deciding where to apply. "It's more competitive every year," says Shirley Bloomquist, a private counselor in Great Falls, Va. "I'm seeing more parents and students look at safety schools."

Ms. Bloomquist says she now emphasizes that students should prepare for their "likely" schools, those where they have a good shot, rather than their "reach" schools. She also encourages high schoolers to start looking at colleges during their sophomore year rather than spring of junior year, when most begin the process. That gives them more time to find additional schools that may not be their top choices but still would be desirable.

Even high school seniors with exceptional grades are being careful with their expectations. Last year, "I had some really smart friends who applied to some schools they didn't get into," says James Newman, 17, the salutatorian at Lamar High School in Houston. He has a 4.82 grade point average (boosted above 4.0 by International Baccalaureate courses) and scored a 2210 on his SAT out of 2400. He is active in his church youth group and has been an Eagle Scout, vice president of the National Spanish Honor Society and vice president of the school choir.

Mr. Newman applied to Princeton University, Stanford, Middlebury College, Duke University, Davidson College in North Carolina and the University of Texas at Austin. But he learned from his friends' experiences. "I tried not to have a definite first choice," he says. "I thought it's likely I'd get rejected because it's so competitive." He was turned down by Princeton, wait-listed at Stanford and accepted by his other choices. He says he is now leaning toward Duke -- he's not optimistic about getting into Stanford.

Indeed, college officials warn they may not take many students from their wait-lists this year. "We have not gone to the wait-list for two years, and we would like to," says Tom Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid at Amherst College. Wait-lists allow colleges to adjust their freshman class if there is a shortage of students with particular strengths and characteristics who plan to attend.

Amherst currently has 1,450 students on its wait-list. Mr. Parker expects fewer than half to stay on it. Of those who do, Amherst hopes to accept 25 students.

In the past few years, colleges -- even top-level state schools -- have seen a higher-than-expected yield, or percentage of students admitted who end up attending. That means there are fewer spaces for wait-listed students.

The greater competition has made the admissions process increasingly frustrating for students, including those who don't apply to elite schools. Corey King, a senior at Urbana High School in Ijamsville, Md., who wants to study music, heard from his first choice, Berklee College of Music in Boston, via email last week. "I actually injured my hand punching my door when I found out I didn't get in," he says.

Mr. King, who has a 3.2 grade point average, is a member of his high school's rock music appreciation club and French club. He also applied to McGill University in Canada, the University of Maryland and Towson University in Maryland. "Now I'm afraid I won't get into McGill or Maryland, and I'll get stuck going to Towson," which he considers "one step above community college."

If Mr. King is turned down by McGill, he says he will reapply to Berklee next year. He says he is feeling pessimistic after the Berklee rejection, but there is one consolation: "No matter what, everyone is like, 'I'm so done with high school,'" he says.

Write to Anjali Athavaley at anjali.athavaley@wsj.com1

The Admissions Police - WSJ article

The Admissions Police
Wary of lying applicants, universities are cracking down. Jon Weinbach on background checks, plagiarism screens and the cell number that exposed a sham.
By JON WEINBACHApril 6, 2007; Page W1
Before mailing out acceptance and rejection letters over the past week, thousands of colleges and graduate schools conducted their usual reviews of test scores, transcripts and essays. But less publicly, admissions officers focused on something else: police databases, plagiarism checks and reports by private-investigators.
There's a new age of vigilance in academia. Spooked by incidents including guidance-counselor fraud in Los Angeles, blatant plagiarism at MIT and campus crime in North Carolina, colleges and graduate schools are shoring up their admissions process. In an era when applicants seek an edge with $500-an-hour "admissions consultants" and online essay-editing services, schools are using their own new methods to vet prospective students. Much like corporations that have been burned by CEO résumé scandals, universities are tapping into the burgeoning background-check industry to verify what's written -- or not -- on applications.
The University of California system, which enrolls more than 30,000 college freshmen each year, now conducts random spot checks, asking about 10% of applicants to verify activities, grades or facts from personal essays. Last year, five Division I athletic programs began using a law firm to conduct background checks on high-school recruits. And this school year, Harvard's undergraduate admissions staff added a former professional background checker. "We look at essays with a certain degree of skepticism," says Harvard College director of admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis. "We're not shy about checking further."
An Honor Code
No organization tracks admissions transgression, and university officials say most applicants are honest. But finding the exceptions has become harder as the number of college applications has grown. The Education Department projects 3.2 million Americans will graduate from high school this spring, up from 2.6 million a decade earlier. Record numbers of applications were reported this year, from the Ivy League (including Harvard and Dartmouth) to the Big 10 (Northwestern) and Pac-10 (Stanford). "You can't verify whether they put two or three years into the chess club," says Richard Shaw, Stanford's dean of admissions. "To a great extent, it's an honor code."
GO FIGURE
1
A look at strategies for college seniors to stand out during on-campus job recruitment.2
But threats to that code often start in high school. According to a 2006 survey of 36,000 high-schoolers by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles, 60% of students admit to cheating on tests, and more than 30% say that within the last year, they've copied a document from the Internet. Students are "far more brazen" today, says Michael Josephson, a former law professor who founded the institute 20 years ago. Schools at all levels, he believes, have become soft on cheating: He cites a desire to give students a second chance, a reluctance to commit resources to cracking down and the fear of crossing parents who direct anger at schools, rather than at kids, when improprieties are brought to light. "What you allow, you encourage," he says.
Last year at Campbell Hall, a 63-year-old Episcopal school in North Hollywood, Calif., long-time college counselor Vince Garcia was fired for putting false information on student recommendations. Mr. Garcia, who was well regarded by colleagues at other private schools, cited awards students hadn't won and quoted teacher comments that were false or copied from other recommendations, says the Rev. Julian Bull, Campbell Hall's headmaster.
The school subsequently rewrote recommendations for 55 students and notified colleges that had received the forms. None of the admissions decisions were changed. Mr. Garcia declined to comment on the episode or Campbell Hall's actions but says he remains "committed to working with students to find the best path -- for them -- into higher education." Mr. Garcia is now an admissions officer at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks; Matthew Ward, the school's dean of undergraduate enrollment, says the school is confident Mr. Garcia has "the appropriate level of accountability to be an asset to the team."
'We've Seen It All'
Business schools have taken the lead in cracking down. After a couple of cases of B-school admissions fraud, corporate security firm Kroll started a Global Academic Verifications division in 2003. Kroll now does résumé checks on accepted students for about 20 business schools, including Wharton and Columbia. "Fake degrees, grade inflation, employment titles or dates that aren't true -- we've seen it all," says Kroll's Brian Lapidus, who oversees the division. Medical schools have also raised their guard. Last June, the Association of American Medical Colleges asked all of its members to include criminal background checks in their admissions processes.
RED FLAGS

Does a student look too good to be true? View a sample application, with some of the telltale signs of exaggeration3 that schools say they look for.
Admissions officers say they have ways to identify heavy-handed parental editing, embellishments and outright lies. Tainted applications can be easy to spot because they lack "internal validity" -- a polished essay may raise eyebrows, for example, coming from a student with mediocre English grades. A simple Internet search can be used to spot-check athletic activities or scholastic honors. The latest innovation: downloadable SAT writing samples. Since the standardized test added a written component two years ago, colleges have been able to compare students' writing proficiency on their SAT essays -- more or less guaranteed to be their own work -- with the prose that accompanies their applications.
The pressure to create a memorable application is growing as admissions brochures trumpet the importance of factors such as leadership, writing ability and out-of-school activities. As a result, colleges have helped fan the perception that exotic pursuits and flawless essays are more important than ever. Lloyd Petersen, a former director of admissions at Yale and Vassar, says the crush of applications "forces people to do things that they wouldn't normally do."
Modeling Experience
Filling out applications, Charlie Covey mentioned his nascent modeling career. The high-school senior in Roswell, Ga., says he signed with a modeling agency in Atlanta last fall, though he hasn't yet booked a job. On the advice of a private college counselor, he added the agency to the applications' "work experience" section. "I've done headshots," says the 18-year-old, who has been accepted to the University of Georgia, University of Southern California and New York University. "I felt kind of bad because I didn't have tons of stuff like a lot of my friends."
Last year, Sonia Minden's heart fluttered when she received a solemn letter from the University of California undergraduate admissions staff. The note asked her to verify the experience she wrote about in her application essay -- an archaeological dig in Switzerland led by a Stanford professor. Ms. Minden, who had a 3.8 GPA and edited the literary magazine at Capuchino High School in San Bruno, Calif., says she thought the letter was tantamount to a rejection. It also raised suspicions among her friends. "They were like, 'did you lie?' " she says.
Ms. Minden, it turns out, was among some 7,000 applicants the UC schools randomly picked for its authentication program. The students are instructed to submit material to confirm details in one of seven application categories, such as volunteer history and personal statements. Though the program started in 2003, there's barely a mention of it on the UC application. (One sentence in the instructions notes that students may receive a "request for further information.") Susan Wilbur, the UC director of undergraduate admissions, says the point is to "send a message that we're committed to the highest degree of integrity."
Ms. Minden says the certification process was disconcerting mostly because she didn't see it coming. "It was kind of a stressful time," she says. The professor who led the dig wrote a letter on Ms. Minden's behalf, and now she is a freshman at her first-choice school, UC-San Diego.
Some transgressions are clear. A few years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked applicants to come up with their own essay question. Two picked an identical topic: "What if Superman had sex with Lois Lane?" Both students excerpted material from "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," an essay by author Larry Niven. Both were rejected. Marilee Jones, MIT's dean of admissions, calls the episode "hilarious," but worries that colleges have helped ratchet up the pressure of applications. In an effort to discourage puffery, she reduced the number of lines MIT's form gave students to list extracurricular activities. "Kids felt like they needed to fill up all of them," she says.
For all the steps colleges are taking to safeguard admissions, they're also eager to boost applications -- which in turn increases their "selectivity" rate, an important factor in school rankings. Some colleges fear that aggressive screening could scare off potential students, says John Barrie, chief executive of Turnitin.com, a Web site that high schools and colleges use to check papers for plagiarism.
The nine-year-old site, which screens more than 100,000 student papers a day, added an admissions-essay service in 2004. Over the last three years, Mr. Barrie says, the site has screened more than 27,000 admissions essays, and found 11% included at least one-quarter unoriginal material. Mr. Barrie says about two dozen schools now use the site to check admissions essays; none of the institutions would agree to be identified.
Universities are only the latest institutions to scrutinize candidates. The background-check industry has mushroomed since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as criminal and résumé checks have been added to the hiring process of the likes of Starbucks (it plans to check aspiring baristas) and Wal-Mart Stores. The National Association of Professional Background Screeners, founded four years ago, now counts more than 400 members; in the early '90s, there were only about 30 players in the business, says the trade group's co-chair, Robert Capwell.
The growing number of Web sites devoted to the admissions industry has made it easier for students to plagiarize material and trade in misleading gossip. Ivyessays.com, a professional essay-editing service, also lets students buy packages of sample essays grouped by theme, question or school. The $12 "Harvard" package includes 10 essays and five short-answer samples tailored to the school's application. (Ivyessay.com's writing is meant to be used as a sample, says editor in chief Adrienne Dowhan.) On chat boards like collegeconfidential.com, topics range from "How to impress admissions committees with your extracurriculars" to "Should I tell them that I'm Jewish?"
Telltale Cell Number
Bari Norman, an independent college counselor based in New York and Miami, says she occasionally sees parents tacitly encourage their children to stretch the truth on applications. The most troubling cases, she says, involve students who feel they're at a disadvantage because they're not lying. Last year, a white client in Miami was distraught because her friends were falsely identifying themselves as Hispanic. "She asked me, with a straight face, 'Why can't I do that?' " says Ms. Norman, a former admissions officer at Barnard College.
Admissions officials at the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley saw the desperation first-hand. In 2003, admissions director Jeff Pihakis tried to call an applicant to tell her she had gained admission. After several failed attempts, he reached a woman who gave him a cellphone number for the applicant. Looking again at the file, he saw the number he'd just been given matched the number the applicant had listed for a purported boss. That led Mr. Pihakis to uncover other fabrications, including false job titles and fake stationery for the sham company. The admissions staff ultimately investigated all 100 of the students it had admitted, uncovering four more applicants who had misrepresented themselves.
The next summer, Kroll approached the school about providing background checks. Since then, all accepted students have had to pass an "employment and background verification" -- and pay a $65 fee -- before enrolling. In the past four years, only one has been rejected. "We were hoping it would be a deterrent," says Mr. Pihakis. "And it has been."
Write to Jon Weinbach at jonathan.weinbach@wsj.com4