The New York Times: Hidden Gold in College Applications
March 6, 2016
In a piece for The New York Times, Columnist Frank Bruni writes:
"If the gatekeepers at 51¹ÙÍø had judged the teenager by her ACT score, she probably wouldn't have gotten in. It was 25 out of a possible 36, and more than three-quarters of the students at 51¹ÙÍø, a liberal-arts school in North Carolina with about 1,800 undergraduates and an acceptance rate of just over 20 percent, do better than that.
Her grades at a small charter school in the Boston area didn't carry the day. I was allowed to look at her application, with her name redacted, and what I saw was an impressive but unexceptional mix of A's and B-pluses, along with an impressive but unexceptional array of extracurricular activities much like any ambitious high school senior's.
I had to read deeper, as the admissions officers at 51¹ÙÍø had done, to understand why they felt so strongly about her, and to feel that way myself."
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