Bill Paul '70
Journalists often find a personal peeve or puzzle to be good grist for a story. It was a puzzle that spurred Bill Paul '70 to write Getting In: Inside the College Admissions Process. His book, published this fall by Addison-Wesley, about admissions to highly selective schools like Princton, wasn't born of his own children's travails-at ages 14 and 11, they're years away from application angst-but from his work with the Alumni Schools Committee.
Paul, a freelance journalist living in Westfield, New Jersey, began interviewing high school seniors in the mid-1980s, but by 1991 he had yet to see a single one of his applicants admitted. One of them asked him point blank, "How do you get in?" Paul's sheepish reply: "Don't ask me. I don't know."
Like a beat reporter sensing a scoop, Paul saw in his cluelessness the germ of a book-but there was a bit more to it. He'd been taken with the philosophy of Fred A. Hargadon since first hearing Princeton's dean of admission speak in the fall of 1991. Later, Hargadon agreed to let Paul observe him at work over the course of an admission cycle. Paul also tracked five applicants through their senior years in high school as they struggled with the pressures of college admissions. The story of Hargadon and the seniors make up most of Getting In.
Nobody ever explains how they do admissions, Paul says. "I wanted to bridge the gap between what the kids, the parents, and the high schools see going on inside an admission office, and what Hargadon doesn't see going on outside."
Intense, animated, and voluble, Paul leans forward and then back in his seat as he talks. But as an accomplished writer and assembler of facts, he reins in his opinions, letting the book draw its authority from interviews and closely observed detail.
Paul says he needed to bring the same passion to his subject as Hargadon does. And the dean emerges as a hero, even if Paul winces at the word. "He's definitely someone who should have a national stage, whose ideas should be heard a little more widely than they are," he says. "He's constantly trying to reach through the application and talk personally to the applicant. Not every school tries to do that."
About halfway through his research, Paul realized that what Hargadon is looking for is that which makes someone an interesting and worthwhile person. Paul adds, "Unfortunately, the system as it's configured in high school works totally against individuality coming to the surface."
Paul blasts most high-school guidance efforts, which he says suffer from poor training and understaffing-though there are wonderful exceptions, like Nancy Siegel of Millburn (New Jersey) High School, who is profiled in the book. Of the five seniors followed in Getting In, two are accepted by Princeton. With better counseling, says Paul, the rejected three "would have had a 50-percent better chance" of acceptance.
The author believes that Princeton and other elite universities need to do a better job at reaching out to schools in inner cities and remote rural areas. Although he's not ready to suggest an end to the special consideration afforded alumni children and minorities, he worries about the percentage of recruited athletes in small, select schools like Princeton with more than 30 varsity sports. At Princeton, he notes, "one out of every five students has gotten in, at least in part, on the basis of his or her athletic ability." As a legacy himself (the alumni rolls include his father, Raymond '33, and brother James '65), Paul believes "you must maintain institutions that have a commitment to community."
Paul contends that it's probably no tougher today for truly outstanding applicants to get into Princeton than it was a generation or two ago. But for those a notch below that top group, the odds are clearly worse, because the applicant pool is so much larger (the number of applicants has grown nearly 50 percent in 20 years, from 9,691 to 14,311). With so many similarly qualified applicants, a student who has followed "a different drummer," he says, often stands out.
It's a notion Paul himself exemplies. In 1991, he left The Wall Street Journal, where he had worked as a staff reporter for 20 years (often covering education). Since then, he's done environmental reporting for radio and television, and is the editor and publisher of Earth Preservers, a monthly environmental newspaper for school children which he started four years ago.
And what is Paul's advice to parents of precollege children? "If your kids are in elementary or junior high school, keep listening to what they say they like to do and keep nudging them to do it," he says. "And do the exact opposite of what you've probably been told to do by other parents and by counselors and administrators in high school, who too often don't have a clue."
-Jeffrey Marshall '71
An adaptation of Getting In: Inside the College Admissions Process begins on page 11.

MARK NELSON '77, as Einstein, gesticulates in a Parisian bar that is the setting for a new comedy, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. The play, written by actor Steve Martin, is playing off-Broadway in New York at the Promenade Theatre. Nelson won what could be considered a rave review from The New York Times, whose reviewer called Einstein "Mr. Martin's most winning creation . . . played with fine comic authority by Mark Nelson." Says the former English major, "I have an easier time playing Einstein than I had fulfilling my freshman science requirements. I wonder if I show the physics department the great reviews I got, if they would give me credit?"

WHAT EVENT in life would cause you to give up a six-figure salary? Winning the lottery, perhaps?
In the case of Daniel J. Grossman '85, it was a turn of bad fortune that caused him to leave his job as an attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, and devote his time to a cause close to his heart.
Grossman's son, Matthew, was born three years ago with a rare intestinal disorder that keeps him from holding down food. Matthew underwent several operations and now lives at home. He is fed through a tube implanted into his small intestine, and gastric secretions are vented from a tube in his stomach. At night, a sleep-in nurse monitors his blood-oxygen level and occasionally gives him supplementary oxygen.
Matthew suffers from pediatric gastrointestinal motility disorder, a term for a range of neurological or muscular defects affecting a child's ability to eat and process food. Children with a motility disorder cannot make the muscular contractions needed to move food through their gastrointestinal tract. Matthew's condition has stabilized, and he runs and plays like most three-year-olds. But many kids with motility disorders are far worse off. Some require intravenous feeding, which can lead to liver failure and other life-threatening complications.
For Grossman and his wife, Debby, who is also an attorney, Matthew's condition became the center of their lives. After Matthew was born, she stayed home with him, while Grossman continued his practice at Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy. But as he discovered, "It was absurdly trivial to be arguing discovery motions while your child was lying in a hospital bed."
Two years ago, when his son was at his most precarious point, Grossman took two months' leave. When he returned to work, he realized his life needed reordering. So last January, he founded the Children's Motility Disorder Foundation, dedicated to increasing awareness of the affliction.
Grossman notes that it took doctors three months to correctly diagnose Matthew's problem. "These diseases are frequently misdiagnosed, and there is a critical need for education about these disorders among primary-care physicians," he says. By the time the disorder is identified, a child may have become malnourished and suffered permanent damage. Compounding the problem, adds Grossman, are medical insurers' concerns about containing costs: "Managed care is one of the biggest problems we face in helping diagnose the disease. There is a disincentive for many generalists to refer patients to specialists."
Grossman works full-time as president of his foundation and has no current plans to return to the law. Assisting him is a part-time secretary, and he also leans on the active volunteer work of a board of directors that includes Gregory A. Smith '85, an investment banker in New York City, and Katherine Brokaw '82, an Atlanta attorney.
The foundation's first major grant provides $14,150 to the Children's Hospital of Orange County, in California, for the purchase of a device to aid research. It has also begun an education program that will underwrite speakers and provide a reference service for physicians.

This article is adapted from one by David Rubinger that appeared in the Atlanta Business Chronicle. The address of the Children's Motility Disorder Foundation is 1534 Dunwoody Village Parkway, Suite 104, Atlanta, GA 30338.