Agony of Admissions

Jerry Pope perched on the edge of the chair, manila folder in hand, and made his case.

"I've met this kid," said Pope, the admissions director for St. Olaf College. "He's incredible and would make a great 'Ole.' " The boy was an athlete, a volunteer and a musician. He had scored high on his ACT college entrance exam.

But his grades were only average. One of Pope's colleagues shook her head. "I say we 'waitlist' until we see his first-semester grades."If we waitlist, we're going to lose him," Pope said.

Michael Kyle, St. Olaf's vice president and dean of enrollment, scanned the boy's transcript. "I think it's dangerous to be taking C students," he said, and then looked more closely. "He had a D!"I didn't see that," Pope said, and paused. "His dad is CEO of Google; does that help?" And he winked.

The boy was waitlisted.

Facing a glut of well-prepared applicants, admissions counselors across the country are spending the winter making tough decisions about next fall's freshman class. With record numbers of students graduating high school and wanting to go to college, getting into a selective college has never been more difficult.

At St. Olaf, once primarily a college for children of Lutheran Norwegian immigrants, applications are up 35 percent over two years. Publicity from the book "Colleges That Change Lives," an increased emphasis on marketing, and a growing reputation for music, math, science and international study have pushed the college onto the national stage.

This year, for the first time, St. Olaf received more than 4,000 applications.

It has room for 720 freshmen.

Shaping the class of 2011 wasn't as simple as merely admitting the best-qualified students. If admissions counselors did that, Kyle said, St. Olaf would be a college for female musicians from Minnesota. But they wanted more diversity, so counselors looked at everything from grades, test scores and essays to music and geography.

St. Olaf has 27 varsity sports, and they needed athletes. Its orchestras needed oboe and string bass players. There were "legacy" applicants -- students from families with a history at St. Olaf -- to balance against talented students from other states.

Then it got down to individuals. Essays mattered; creativity, good writing and humor earned points. Minnesota applicants who didn't make a campus visit were a concern; counselors questioned how serious they were. Prospective students who coasted in their senior year didn't get the benefit of the doubt. But counselors were willing to give kids some leeway on grades if they were taking a heavy load.

By early November, St. Olaf had accepted 118 freshmen through early decision. That left roughly 600 freshman spots to fill, and thousands more applications to go through. For this group, they promised a decision by Feb. 1.

A dozen staff members spent December and January reading files. Those with two yes votes went in one pile. Those with split decisions went in another.

A strong pool, little room

On a frozen Tuesday morning in January, the admissions committee gathered in Buntrock Commons to plow through the split decisions. Sunlight flooded the room through floor-to-ceiling windows, and hot coffee and platters of pastries and fruit filled a table. Hundreds of applications in manila folders were stacked nearby. Kyle and Pope sat in a cluster of plush chairs with Jill Lynch and Jenny Howenstine, associate admissions directors, and Luke Anderson, who tracks enrollment data. The men wore ties and polished shoes, the women were in skirts. In admissions, casual wear is out; you never know when a potential student might drop by.

Information on each applicant and each admitted student was tracked on Anderson's laptop computer and projected onto a big screen. The numbers indicated that the class was already nearly full. "If we admit all the admit/admits, we only have room for 35 more students," Anderson said.

Pope picked up a file. The girl had a near-perfect ACT score, but her high school grades had suffered because of family problems. "I'm not a sucker for these sob stories, but what's happened in this home is so extensive," Pope said. "It's amazing her grades are as high as they are."

Admit, someone said, and the first decision of the day echoed through the room.

Admit.

Admit.

Admit.

Rolling the dice

Last year, a little more than a third of the students who were accepted to attend St. Olaf actually enrolled. This creates a delicate problem. St. Olaf's admissions office must admit more students than it thinks will actually enroll -- but not too many more.

Kyle's plan for this year was to admit roughly 2,100 students, expecting about 31 percent to actually enroll. Anderson devised a formula to help predict, weighing five characteristics: academics, gender, state of residence, and whether students were Lutheran or legacies.

The most likely student to enroll, Anderson said, is a Lutheran boy from Minnesota with ties to St. Olaf and average to low academic credentials. High achievers from many other states have just a 27 percent chance of enrolling.

"It's always a roll of the dice," Kyle said.

This year, St. Olaf wants the size of the fall class to be 70 students fewer than last year's 790. Getting to that number is tricky.

"I started this job two years ago," Kyle said. "I didn't expect it to be so gut-wrenching to decide who gets in and who doesn't."

At St. Olaf, the process is personal. Counselors have met many of the applicants. They correspond with others by e-mail. A girl from Hawaii once sent Pope a package of fresh pineapples. (She didn't get in.) Another sent him a Chicago pizza, packed in dry ice. (Pope ate the pizza but said it wouldn't affect the admission decision.)

Counselors recalled that a Chicago student was the only visitor to send a thank-you note for the sweatshirt they sent him after a campus tour was interrupted by a hailstorm. They remembered who was intense or funny during an interview and who sat quietly -- there, perhaps, only to please a parent.

Students' applications and essays were a window into young lives. They wrote about how their grades suffered because of heart surgeries or football concussions. How they persevered through hydrocephaly and arthritis. How their parents died, left, drank, were abusive, killed themselves or ended up in institutions.

There was a non-apology from a student who had assaulted another teenager in school and an athlete who defended his weak grades by saying he was concentrating on his sport.

Some teens said they wanted to major in programs St. Olaf doesn't offer. One girl mixed up her essays and sent St. Olaf a piece intended for another school. And there was a confidential counselor's letter lauding a student as a great prospect that had this aside: "You should be glad the mother is back in California."

Too average for admission

Pope pulled another file, this one of a girl with a strong ACT score and good grades. But she had no honors classes or volunteer activities.

"I think we deny," said Howenstine. "She's not very involved."

Pope said he was concerned about turning away a kid with such high grades and test scores. Anderson punched up the student's information on his computer.

"She's interested in big schools with majors we don't have," Kyle said. "Could she do the work at St. Olaf? Yes. But she doesn't bring the compatibility we're looking for."

Deny.

Pope's next file was a minority boy who had decent grades and was an outstanding musician and athlete. "But he's a kid with a B average and a 23 ACT," Kyle said.

"He has everything else we want," Howenstine said.

"Waitlist," Kyle said.

Reluctantly, everyone except Pope agreed. He shook his head. "Boy, I'm getting shut down today," he said.

By the time they broke for lunch, the group had reviewed 34 applications and had accepted 14 of them. They'll have to get tougher, Kyle warned. Slots were filling up.

Lefse stays

As always, last year Minnesota sent more freshmen to St. Olaf than any other state. Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa were next, followed by California, Florida, Colorado, Washington, Missouri and Texas.

Fewer than half of the students who reported a religious preference said they were Lutheran.

St. Olaf President David Anderson said it's important for the college, which has long stressed international study, to have a diverse student population.

"Who sits next to you in class matters," he said. "Having a nationally representative student body is important. To the extent there is educational value in ethnic and racial diversity, we want that."

Getting more students from other parts of the country isn't just to boost bragging rights. With the college-age population expected to decline in the Upper Midwest, it makes sense for St. Olaf to broaden its recruiting base, Anderson said.

"I think we will always have 40 percent Minnesota kids, about 50 percent Lutheran, and lots of kids with Scandinavian backgrounds," he said. "I would think of myself as a failure if we did stray from our roots. We will always be a college of the church. ... We will always have Christmas Fest, and we'll always serve lutefisk and lefse and meatballs there."

Legacy kids

After lunch, the process ground on. Pope ditched his suit coat. Kyle paced the room with a cup of coffee, rubbing his head until his hair stood on end.

They moved rapidly through applications. Waitlist. Admit. Deny. Deny.

Then a stall.

The candidate was a girl with an average ACT score. She was a talented musician, a leader in her school and had relatives who had attended St. Olaf. The test score worried people, and the discussion wore on until Kyle weighed in.

"She's a national candidate, her family is from the college and she wants to be here," Kyle said. "She's taking hard classes, too. I'd be inclined to take her."

Me too, someone said.

Yes.

OK.

Another legacy kid. His parents were Oles, but the boy was a lackluster student with a low ACT score. The family didn't seem to realize how competitive St. Olaf had become. "I talked to his dad for a long time," Anderson said.

Said Howenstine, "I told [his mom] this would be a stretch school for him."

Kyle sighed. "This may be one where one of us makes a phone call to the parents at an appropriate time," he said.

Deny.

Letters to sign

Two days before the deadline of Feb. 1, the college had too many in the admit pile. Pope had resigned a few days before, so Kyle, Lynch and Luke Anderson gathered in Anderson's office to pare the field by 55 more students.

They moved briskly, but decisions were hard. An East Coast girl labeled "quirky" stayed in when Anderson said he had been impressed with her. A talented West Coast musician whose file had been reviewed four times -- "accept,"waitlist,"reject" and "refer" were scribbled in the corner -- was finally, painfully, denied.

"This is a cruel and heartless day," Kyle said.

At mid-February, St. Olaf had admitted less than 53 percent of applicants, compared to 74 percent two years ago. The average ACT score had risen a full point to 28.7. Almost a quarter were legacies, and half were Minnesotans. Sixty percent were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes.

Kyle signed every decision letter. He took the first 1,000 letters home to sign over the last weekend in January, and was plugging away at them in his office even as clerks whisked them away to mail. Using fountain pens he buys specially for the job -- they're fat enough that his hand doesn't cramp, and the ink dries quickly -- he signed five or six letters a minute, adding personal comments if he knew the student or family.

He said it was better than using something impersonal, like e-mail. "I think there is still something magical about hearing from the colleges to which you apply," he said.

He picked up a page and signed it in a loopy flourish of blue ink. Then he added a P.S.: "I hope you come to St. Olaf."

Mary Jane Smetanka • 612-673-7380