A Is for Admission: The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges.

I have volunteered as a Harvard alumni interviewer for the past 15 years. Applicants to the college, sometimes as many as a dozen each year, come to my home. I talk to each of them for about an hour. I write a one- or two-page report on their intellectual and personal strengths. I rate each one on Harvard's 1 (future Nobel laureate) to 6 (potential embezzler) scale, choosing numbers (usually 2s or 3s) to describe their academic, extra-curricular, personal, and overall qualities. Then I mail the result to Cambridge.

I have many comforting explanations doing this. I say that chatting with bright high school seniors is a fine way to stay in touch with succeeding generations. I feel some obligation to Harvard, not so much for the education it provided but because the student newspaper, and the woman I fell in love with there, changed my life. My wife is also an interviewer, and I enjoy sharing that interest with her.

But I have no doubt the most important reason I interview for Harvard is the thrill I get from helping sort what I think of, with less and less justification, as the American elite. It is not pleasant for the child of egalitarian parents to confess a love for preserving the pecking order, but it is clear I have those feelings.

I may be more susceptible to this infatuation with illusions of the meritocracy since, at 52, I represent that large chunk of the middle class that grew up after World War II defining themselves not by the old standard of whether they went to college, but where. I attended a California suburban high school that rarely sent graduates to the Ivy League. My mother, a UCLA graduate, was not happy about my going to Harvard, which she thought grew out of snob appeal. I now think she was right, but that has not stopped me from placing my own children in public and private high schools where a mother who did not want her boy to go to Harvard would be greeted with a tactfulness usually reserved for the elderly or the ill.

As a journalist, I have heard enough life stories to know that Ivy League matriculation has little if anything to do with how close people come to their dreams of power, wealth, love, and fulfillment. Character traits and financial resources bestowed long before they take the SAT seem to dictate most choices. A 17-year-old who yearns to be a dentist in New Jersey seems, at least to me, to be as likely to reach that goal if she attends Yale or Cal State L.A.

Nonetheless, Ivy League students have an unappealing tendency to assume they will one day rule the world. That faith erodes only gradually as they see the widening gap between their expectations and their lives. Emotional illness, alcoholism, bad marriages, bad luck, ennui -- the red-bound class reports I receive every five years from Cambridge are full of accounts of dreams abandoned or severely revised.

At my office, the limits of the Ivy mystique are evident. The Washington Post has a reputation for elitist hiring. Ivies fill newsroom slots far out of proportion to our share of the American population. But the executive editor to whom we all report has two degrees from Ohio State. Among the likeliest successors to the managing editor, a Yale man, are graduates of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Florida, and Occidental. The assistant managing editor for metropolitan news, who has the most reporters and more say than anyone over what I do, studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The publisher went to Harvard but that is unlikely to have had much to do with his success.

Flip through the Almanac of American Politics and note the alma maters of the political elite. Here are the colleges attended by the first 25 governors listed: Auburn, Yale, Harvard, Ouachita Baptist, Yale, Yale, Villanova, Ohio State, Florida, Georgia, Berkeley, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas Wesleyan, Kentucky, LSU, Dartmouth, Florida State, Harvard, Michigan State, Williams, Purdue, George Washington. Let us try U.S. senators, starting in the back and going forward: George Washington, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Wisconsin, Harvard, American, Washington State, Dartmouth, Wisconsin, Washington & Lee, Yale, St. Michael's, Utah, BYU, Texas, Georgia, Princeton, Memphis State, South Dakota, South Dakota State, the Citadel, Clemson, West Point, Yale, Penn State.

Venture outside the northeastern megalopolis or beyond the pricier parts of the Los Angeles basin and Chicago's North Shore and you find the number of young people seeking Ivy admission substantially reduced. Many of them, even those with 1500 SAT scores, are far more interested in attending their state's best public university.

Michele A. Hernandez, a defrocked Dartmouth admissions officer, inadvertently reveals this little-noticed resistance to the green doors and sherry in the common room at the very beginning of her book, A Is For Admission. Every other page bears the unmistakable message that your life may be over if you are denied admission to Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, or Yale. But Hernandez slips, just this once, and reveals that other schools, astonishingly less fashionable, are just as selective as the magic eight. If the Ivy League were actually defined, as it. is in the public imagination, as those schools most likely to reject your children, the list would be different. Here is Hernandez's compilation of the most selective schools, using acceptance percentages culled from Peterson's Guide to Four-Year Colleges 1997:

1. Harvard: 12 percent

2. Princeton: 14 percent

3. Amherst: 19 percent

4. Stanford: 19 percent

5. Yale: 20 percent

6. Brown: 21 percent

7. Georgetown: 22 percent

8. Dartmouth: 22 percent

9. Columbia: 23 percent

10. Williams: 26 percent

11. Rice: 26 percent

12. MIT: 27 percent

13. Duke: 29 percent

14. Bowdoin: 30 percent

Amherst, Williams, Stanford, Georgetown, and Duke have long been accepted as Ivy equivalents among those high school students and parents who care about such things. But Rice and Bowdoin, despite their academic strength, are not big brand names in Scarsdale and La Jolla. Notice that two genuine Ivies, Penn (33 percent) and Cornell (34 percent) do not reach this level of exclusivity. Hernandez defines highly selective schools as any that accept 35 percent or less of their applicants, just enough to include all the Ivies. But that cuts out all the still independent women's colleges, the remnants of the prestigious Seven Sisters. Anyone who thinks this leaves the high-rent neighborhood college hot list unscathed should gather a group of nervous mothers on the Upper West Side and carefully watch their faces as some are told their children have been admitted to Vassar and Wellesley, and others hear they must accept Rice or Bowdoin instead.

I am not certain why Hernandez does not pursue the notion that American teenagers are not quite as enamored of the Ivy League and its clones as she and her publishers are. I suspect when she was still an admissions officer she gave, or at least was tempted to give, the short speech I deliver to Harvard applicants several times a year:

This can be an irrational process, like being struck

by lightning. Cambridge picks some kids for reasons

that elude me and rejects some that I think are

wonderful. You should realize that with your fine

record you are going to get into a splendid college.

You are lucky to be living in a country with the

strongest and most open system of higher

education in the world. Wherever you go, the place is

going to have what you need. You just have to be

ready to grab it when you get there.

Perhaps Hernandez's editor at Warner Books squelched any urge she might have had to add this disclaimer. The commercial hopes for the book are very high and that sometimes leads authors to promise too much. Hernandez says in her introduction that "reading this book ... will greatly improve your chances of being accepted at an Ivy League or other highly selective college." I doubt it, but that does not mean there are not many who want to believe.

It will not hurt to read the book. Some applicants will likely ease their suffering by knowing that a polite call from them to an admissions officer can help when they are on the wait list, while a call from their parents or a private admissions consultant to that same admissions officer can ruin them. Hernandez also provides good advice on what high school courses to take, how to handle the application essay and what to do about extracurricular activities.

If only she had resisted the temptation to devote 30 pages to what the book jacket calls a "trade secret," the Academic Index used by Dartmouth and a few other schools to measure academic strength. It is useful to know that achievement tests (what are called the SAT II these days) are important, but Hernandez's murky analysis of the AI, with mathematical formulae and footnotes, reveals little more than that students with mediocre grades and scores are not likely to get in.

Most unfortunately, despite a few mild warnings against parental interference md paranoia, Hernandez bows to the sanctity of the sorting process with a fervor that makes brain surgeons with Harvard Med School degrees sound like a 19th century prairie populists. My favorite moment is her nose-in-the-air assessment of other Ivy League admissions officers:

They may consist of graduate students; former

teachers; spouses of professors and college staff; and career

administrators. The majority of this group did not

graduate from any highly selective college, let alone

an Ivy League one.... [Many] are not expert readers

... and most of them are not scholars or

intellectuals. Add to this problem the above factors and you

can understand why oftentimes subtle points are

overlooked even though they can be crucial to

understanding a student's academic potential.

My, my. I cannot wait to use some of this language the next time one of my non-Ivy editors fails to appreciate a point in my always subtle news stories. As well-read as Hernandez seems to think she is, she gives no sign of ever having heard of Howard Gardner or any other research on forms of intelligence unrelated to English mid-terms. "What I am trying to say without shocking too much," she says, "is that the very best of applicants will often be brighter than many of those who will be evaluating them."