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- my name's molly hensley-clancy. i graduated from yale in 2013, and in 2015 i saw my admissions files. what goes on inside admissionsoffices is really mystery. so, i went to the basement of the admissions officeat 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 educationrights privacy act, which allows you to see everything that your college keeps on you, including everything that the admissions officer has wroteabout you, for a brief time. then, yale and some other schools caught on that people were using this law, and they started destroyingadmissions files. so they basically turned myentire college application
into a few bullet points, some numbers, and a couple sentence long paragraph. one of the admissionsofficers 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 theadmissions officers do is they try and turn youinto a series of numbers.
so, they rank your grades,they rank your essays, and they also rank what yourteachers said about you. it's pretty subjective. so, there was one admissions officer that clearly liked me a littlebit better than the other. and, she thought my admissionsinterview 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 fora specific type of person. they try and predict whatyou're gonna be on campus; what role you're gonna play. and so, my admissionsofficers did exactly that; right in my files it said, she will be a highimpact writer on campus. and, when i got to campuswriting 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 differentraces, and different incomes. so, i went a big inner-city,public high school that had a lot of studentsthat were african american, that were immigrants andthat 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'dbe a good admit for us from the minneapolis public schools." and the other one was even more explicit; "i'm in her corner andit would good to take one 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 intoany of those boxes. i'm white, both of my parents wentto an ivy league school, i'm not low income. as far as i know i wasone of only two students to get into yale from the entire minneapolis public school system. and the other one to getin was also the white, middle class daughterof two college grads.
two years later, the nextperson to get into yale from my high school was also white and both of his parentshad 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 offera couple of ap classes, and you probably can'tafford an sat tutor,
and you might be workinga job at a supermarket instead of doing a bunch of clubs and applying for awards. and so there's a lot ofreally, really smart poor kids who worked really hard in high school and are definitely able to doreally well at these schools, and they don't get in. so, what did i learn fromlooking 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 jobplaying 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 bullshit. and actually, in januarya bunch of schools
like yale and harvardgot 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.