Who Gets In, and Why--an inside look at college admissions

Here's an essay from the WSJ, adapted from a forthcoming book with an evocative title, “Who Gets In and Why, by Jeffrey Selingo. The subtitle is A Year Inside College Admissions

The Secrets of Elite College Admissions: In the final ‘shaping’ of an incoming class, academic standards give way to other, more ambiguous factors by By Jeffrey Selingo, Aug. 28, 2020

"The year I was inside Emory University’s admissions office, the school received a record 30,000 applications for fewer than 1,400 spots in its incoming class. In early March, just weeks before official notices were scheduled to go out, the statistical models used by Emory to predict enrollment indicated that too many applicants had been chosen to receive acceptances. In the span of days, teams of admissions officers covering five geographical areas had to shift 1,000 applications from the thin “admit” stack to the much larger “deny” or “wait list” piles.