Ed Boland writes about his former profession in the New York Post. Very interesting.

Former Yale admissions officer reveals secrets of who gets in

Working as a gatekeeper at Yale gave me lasting insight into the formation of the American elite.

My colleagues and I were sent to scour the country looking for the best and the brightest young minds. In the fall, I went everywhere, from Charleston, W.Va., to Kokomo, Ind., to Montreal, to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Working as a gatekeeper at Yale gave me lasting insight into the formation of the American elite.

My colleagues and I were sent to scour the country looking for the best and the brightest young minds. In the fall, I went everywhere, from Charleston, W.Va., to Kokomo, Ind., to Montreal, to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

I was welcomed with varying degrees of energy and enthusiasm. In Ohio, an eager headmaster at a boarding school took me to a nice lunch and toured me around the campus in his convertible with the top down. At a large public school outside Detroit, I sat outside the cafeteria at a sticky table chatting with a representative from a local cosmetology school. Largely ignored by the students, we passed the time talking about the challenges of having very fine hair.

Brilliance and stunts

After the recruitment season wrapped up, the admissions staff returned in the late fall to New Haven and started the early-decision process. We would spend hour after hour poring over huge stacks of applications and green-bar computer reports.

We parsed transcripts and called guidance counselors with questions like: “So far, there seem to be three students ranked number one in your school who have applied to Yale. How do you account for that?” As a first step, two staff members read each application and assigned it an overall ranking of 1 (TAKE THIS KID!) to 4 (NO WAY!).

The applicants were an impressive lot. A girl wrote a brilliant feminist essay — worthy of Harper’s, really — about gender and socialization, revealing that she was a phantom serial farter in public and yet no one ever suspected because of her gender.