One Sepember morning a few years ago, a group of alumni who interview candidates on behalf of the admission office gathered outside the auditorium of the Lewis Thomas Laboratory. Over coffee and bite-sized Dunkin' Donuts, the crowd at the refreshment table was laughing and joking with a tall man with long arms and big hands. He had short gray hair, a deeply furrowed brow, and deep-set eyes-Princeton's legendary dean of admission, Fred A. Hargadon.
After the coffee and doughnuts, we settled into the auditorium. Hargadon was introduced from the stage by one of his lieutenants. He strode to the platform, a sheaf of papers under his arm, then grasped the podium. He looked us over for a moment, then said in a sharp, no-nonsense voice that he was going to give us "some idea why you don't understand" how the Princeton admission process works.
The house lights dimmed, and on a large screen at the front of the room a graphic appeared, showing that 1,534 high-school valedictorians had applied for admission the previous year.
"Now," the dean said, "Of that 1,534, how many do you think we offered admission to?"
Hargadon paused.
"About 495," he said. In the audience there were audible gasps. The dean paused again. "How would you like to be one of the eleven hundred who paused again. "How would you like to be one of the eleven hundred who managed to achieve that in high school and then get a letter telling you you're not being offered admission to Princeton?"
Another graphic appeared on the screen. The previous year's group of applicants included 2,669 students who had scored between 750 and a perfect 800 on their math SAT. Of those, only 650 had been accepted, roughly 24 percent. The dean summarized the situation succinctly: "A lot of people wonder just what it is we are doing."

From the book Getting In: Inside the College Admissions Process. Copyright 1995 by Bill Paul. Reprinted by permission of Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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