Universities: The Search for Something Else

While proven classroom performance remains the best ticket to college, other qualities can also turn the trick — a wild sense of humor, a weird hobby, or almost anything that sets a student off from the ordinary. Anxious to tap un usual attributes that may not show up in a high school senior's grades or test scores, college admissions officials are relying more heavily on references from school principals and personal inter views with the applicant himself. In selecting next year's freshmen, the nation's leading universities took extra pains to seek out students who, says Cornell University Admissions Dean Walter Snickenberger, "look like they have something else to offer."

The straight arrows in the class of 1972 will be balanced by plenty of students with something else to offer. The University of Pennsylvania found one in a senior at Massachusetts' Phillips Academy with a generally undistinguished academic record. He impressed Penn officials by mentioning in his application his deep love of sailing, which, he rhapsodized, occupies his attention "from the first wakening sail in early April to the last frostbite stint in late October." Columbia passed over applicants with stronger academic credentials to accept a practicing Buddhist from up state New York, a New Jersey student who arranged music for an off-Broad way show and a Long Island youth who accompanied his application with photographs of his sculpture. It also agreed to accept Vladimir Gulevich, 20, of Paterson, N.J., who graduated from his local high school two years ago with below-average grades, went on to a Manhattan business school. Gulevich caught the notice of admissions officials by writing the required essay about himself in the form of an extended poem, then by showing interviewers a sheaf of first-rate translations of Russian verse.

"I'm Different." At Swarthmore College, which rejected four out of every five students who applied for admission, one of the 450 accepted was a youth with average grades who spent last summer driving a Jeep across the U.S. and sleeping in jails. "That takes maturity," comments Douglas Thompson, the school's assistant dean of admissions. "Swarthmore looks well beyond mere grades for qualities of uniqueness, which usually come across in interviews or in the essay that Swarthmore's application requires. We want a boy with something that tells us: 'Hello, I'm different.' "

Universities are particularly inclined to depart from considerations of grades and tests in choosing students who show unusual initiative. Harvard, for example, rejected one applicant who ranked third in his high school class while accepting a classmate who ranked 15th and did not fare as well on his College Board exams. The youth chosen, explains Admissions Director David Smith, displays "personal strength and determination." Wesleyan similarly passed up a top student and star athlete from a suburban Boston high school to pick instead a lower-ranking classmate who, predicts Admissions Director Robert Kirkpatrick, "will work like hell to get through."