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How do you get into Harvard? "The Applicants" is fiction that's packed with truths about how the process really works

Once in a rare while a teacher or guidance counselor gets tasked with writing a recommendation letter for a student for whom the usual overachiever descriptives do not suffice.

Conveying in a page-or-two letter the character, compassion and off-the-charts intellect of a student who is truly brilliant doesn’t come easy.

Think about it.  Only around six percent of Harvard applicants get an acceptance letter. Admissions officers could fill each year’s freshman class with individuals who were their high school’s valedictorian — many times over.

Would the likes of President Bill Clinton, if he were a high school senior today, stand a chance of getting into Georgetown, his alma mater (16% acceptance rate)?  Perhaps. But only if he and his faculty recommenders knew how to write truly standout essays. 

The stories within The Applicants, a novel now in paperback from Amazon.com, written by authors who share the pen name Ari Morgan, offer readers something more than a great story.

Woven brightly and discernably throughout the book is a fully-articulated paradigm from which to approach the uber-competitive college admissions process.   At times in the story the parental characters are painted with-less-than subtle brush strokes. One prays there really aren’t moms and dads out there who really are as clueless and narcissistic as those portrayed in The Applicants. But perhaps there are. 

The character in the novel to pay closest attention to is the Head Advisor of Pembrocton College Prep (PCP), Sloane Newhall. The aristocratic parents of her elite private school grovel at her feet, because Ms. Newhall’s college recommendation letter is the most important one these children-of-the-one-percent-of-the-one-percent will ever receive, and it’s one that can’t be bought. At Pembrocton, “the counselor recommendation was a solo performance subject to review by no higher authority. It was an object of unadulterated reverence, naked lust, anguished yearning. And it was hers and hers alone to withhold or bestow."

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Post by Jason Bellini.