The Truth behind My College Admissions

- My name's Molly Hensley-Clancy. I graduated from Yale in 2013, and in 2015 I saw my admissions files. What goes on inside admissions offices is really mystery. So, I went to the basement of the admissions office at Yale University, and I got a manilla file folder that had all of my admissions documents. I was able to do that because of a law called the Family Education Rights Privacy Act, which allows you to see everything that your college keeps on you, including everything that the admissions officer has wrote about you, for a brief time. Then, Yale and some other schools caught on that people were using this law, and they started destroying admissions files. So they basically turned my entire college application into a few bullet points, some numbers, and a couple sentence long paragraph. One of the admissions officers didn't like my essays quite as much. She said they were "bordering on cheesy," which, I actually got to see my essays; they were really, really cheesy. Another thing that the admissions officers do is they try and turn you into a series of numbers. So, they rank your grades, they rank your essays, and they also rank what your teachers said about you. It's pretty subjective. So, there was one admissions officer that clearly liked me a little bit better than the other. And, she thought my admissions interview was a nine, and the other one thought it was a six, which was sort of a pretty tepid score. You can really tell in the files that they're looking for a specific type of person. They try and predict what you're gonna be on campus; what role you're gonna play. And so, my admissions officers did exactly that; right in my files it said, she will be a high impact writer on campus. And, when I got to campus writing is exactly what I did. So, one of the things that admissions officers really to do is put together a diverse class, and that means from different races, and different incomes. So, I went a big inner-city, public high school that had a lot of students that were African American, that were immigrants and that were low income, and the admissions officers, in my files, explicitly said that one of the reasons they wanted to let me in was because of where I went to high school, and because of where I came from. One of them said, "she'd be a good admit for us from the Minneapolis public schools." And the other one was even more explicit; "I'm in her corner and it would good to take one from the Minneapolis public schools." So, they chose me to represent a 35,000 student school district where 65% of the students are minorities, and most of the students are low income. I don't really fit into any of those boxes. I'm white, both of my parents went to an Ivy League school, I'm not low income. As far as I know I was one of only two students to get into Yale from the entire Minneapolis Public School system. And the other one to get in was also the white, middle class daughter of two college grads. Two years later, the next person to get into Yale from my high school was also white and both of his parents had Masters degrees. It's really hard if you're a poor kid to put together the kind of application that these schools are looking for. If you come from a low income high school, your school might only offer a couple of AP classes, and you probably can't afford an SAT tutor, and you might be working a job at a supermarket instead of doing a bunch of clubs and applying for awards. And so there's a lot of really, really smart poor kids who worked really hard in high school and are definitely able to do really well at these schools, and they don't get in. So, what did I learn from looking at my admissions files? Not a lot. It seemed clear to me that I got into Yale partly because I was smart, partly because I was really lucky, partly because I did a good job playing that admissions game and selling myself. But, I also learned that I partly got in because of where I came from. And, that was kind of ***. And actually, in January a bunch of schools like Yale and Harvard got together and said, you know, we're gonna try and reform the admissions process. We're trying to make it so it doesn't discriminate against poor kids, so it really gives them a fair shot.