Page 24 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 2 Winter 2014

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rit Marien ’12 had visions of peeling the back off
her Boston College sticker and carefully affixing it
to her family’s car. It would complement the maroon
and gold sweatshirt she already owned as a pre-
cursor of her school spirit, and would show every-
one at St. Paul’s that she was headed to Boston College.
Except, that didn’t happen. Instead of celebrating an
acceptance to her top college choice, Marien was instead
trying to think of ways to explain to her overachieving
St. Paul’s peers why she was heading to the University of
New Hampshire, the public university in her home state.
“When I told my peers in the St. Paul’s community that
I was attending UNH, they were surprised,” says Marien,
now a UNH sophomore. “They thought, ‘Why would some-
one who was a student admissions officer, a prefect, a
two-sport varsity captain, a member of the SPS cycling
team, and a cum laude graduate attend a public state
school?’ Well, my answer to that is: Why not? It’s not the
school you are applying to that matters; it is what you
choose to do at the school and what you make of it.”
Marien’s initial disappointment mirrors that of many
of today’s college applicants in the saturated pool of
hopefuls from all over the world. But though she was
forced to reset her image of which schools were accept-
able for a St. Paul’s School graduate to consider, Marien
is now thriving at UNH, where she is pursuing a dual
major in political science and international affairs, with
a double minor in Asian studies and justice studies.
She is the vice president of her sorority and of the club
hockey team, enrolled in the honors program at the
university, and is a semifinalist for a State Department
scholarship that would send her to China.
With today’s college landscape featuring single-digit
acceptance rates at many of the nation’s most selective
colleges, it is no longer reasonable for SPS Sixth Formers
– or their parents – to assume an advantage of college
choice inherent in their St. Paul’s diplomas.
“There are many wonderful students who don’t get
into Princeton who will be incredibly successful else-
where,” says Princeton Director of Admission Logan
Powell, who has also worked at Bowdoin and Harvard.
Fifty years ago, 86 young men graduated from St. Paul’s
with the Form of 1964, and 44 of them headed to Harv-
ard, Yale, or Princeton. Twenty-one more went on to
Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, or the University of
Pennsylvania. But those were different times, when
virtual college campuses were not accessible to top
students from all over the world through their mobile
devices, when diversity in all the ways that are well-
represented at colleges today – ethnic, socioeconomic,
geographic – was not a prominent factor in admissions
at many selective higher institutions.
“The days of [the Ivies] taking so many students from
one school are long gone,” says Tim Pratt, who directs
college advising at St. Paul’s. “Just look at Dartmouth’s
admitted class from four years ago – they had 1,800
students from 1,300 different schools. I wonder how many
high schools were represented in the Dartmouth class a
generation ago. The notion of diversity extends to the
[feeder] school group too.”
Bowdoin’s Class of 2017 consists of 495 students from
403 high schools. Only 9.7 percent of Princeton’s enrolled
Class of 2017 hail from independent boarding schools
like St. Paul’s. And as much as pressure exists on schools
like St. Paul’s and their college advising offices – and
on the students who aspire to greatness with their SPS
pedigrees – there is equal (perhaps more) pressure on
college admissions offices to craft classes that meet the
needs of their schools.
“In any admissions office, the goal is to create an
environment for students that represents the world they
will enter,” says Whitney Soule, director of admissions
at Bowdoin. “One of the myths among the public is that
college admission is strictly about academic credentials.
It is a combination of credentials and other factors. By
that I mean, for example, geography or a special skill or
a personality or potential or a unique life experience,
and so on. Those things impact the texture of each class
and a dynamic environment. There is never any one
reason a student is admitted, but every college needs to
make decisions that are going to support the institution.
We are stewards of the institution and the experience
we want to provide for our students, and we have to con-
sider variables that may not be obvious or matter to the
general public.”
And the competition is stiff. In 2013, the University of
California, Berkeley, accepted 14,103 students from a
record applicant pool of 67,665 (20.8%), more than 3,000
of whom were first-generation college students.
“The admitted class includes national debating
champions, competitors and winners in national and
worldwide robotics tournaments, world champions in
martial arts and equestrian events, a musician awarded
the top prize in an international Bach competition, and
an Olympic champion,” Berkeley reported on its website
in April 2013.
Not only do college admissions officers need to make
decisions that will ensure the health of their institutions,
but the priorities and policies relating to those decisions
vary from one school to the next and, at each school,
from one year to the next. The bassoon player who may
have had an in at Princeton this year may represent an
overabundance in that school’s orchestra the next.
“For example,” says Princeton’s Powell, “sibling or
legacy status or the importance of community service
or being a recruited varsity athlete can be important,
but their importance will vary tremendously from one
school to the next. The college process requires great
attention to detail. As much as the admission standards
are similar between Stanford, Princeton, and Yale, for
example, we have quite distinct admissions policies
and requirements.”
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