The New York Times: Hidden Gold in College Applications

In a piece for The New York Times, Columnist Frank Bruni writes:

"If the gatekeepers at Davidson College 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 Davidson, 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 Davidson had done, to understand why they felt so strongly about her, and to feel that way myself."

Read the full story in The New York Times.