Amherst College has always been known for its high selectivity. Indeed, it is Amherst's remarkable student body that makes it one of the best colleges in the nation. But how is the student body put together exactly? What criteria are used? How does the admissions office find America's best and brightest, year after year? All of these decisions are made in the Wilson Admission Center, an inconspicuous two-story building nestled between Kirby Theater and the Alumni Gymnasium. While this building wouldn't catch the eye of a casual observer, every year within these walls thousands of hearts are broken and thousands of dreams satisfied.

To find out more about the complexities involved in admitting students, I recently met with a few of the architects of our student body. I spoke first with the Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Thomas Parker. When asked where it all begins, Parker responded, "The very earliest contact we make with high school sophomores [is] through something called 'Student Search.' That's when you start to get all that mail from colleges. We are able to identify students with the help of the College Board, and we buy the names of the nation's brightest kids based on standardized testing, [specifically] the PSAT and PLAN.

"In February of junior year, we open our doors to high school juniors who are touring schools in the Northeast. But it's really in May and June of junior year when you start to see kids that start to really think about the process. That's when it hits them, 'Hey, in a year from now, I'm going to be getting ready to go to college.'"

Tours of the College are given throughout the year for prospective applicants and students. Barbara Sieck '05, an experienced tour guide, said that she became a guide to give back to the College. "At this point it's not really this desire to say 'Amherst is the best school I've ever been in,'" she said. "It's just a way to highlight the things that are really important to me, and hopefully those things will resonate with people who are interested in those things, too ... I like, as a tour guide, being able to present a personal way to relate to this school."

In addition to managing tours and hosting people throughout the school year, the admissions office staff, made up of 10 people, take trips in the fall to high schools nationwide, shortly before applications begin rolling in. The admissions officers are assigned regions, becoming experts on certain areas of the country. Offering half-hour long informational sessions at high schools, the admissions staff also speaks with school principals and guidance counselors, as well as local churches and community organizations, in an effort to glean more details about the local students and to determine which students are particularly outstanding.

After this recruiting period, the admissions staff accepts applications until Jan. 1. According to Parker, "One of the most comical things is that close to half of our applications come in during a two to three day period right before the deadline. If you come here around Dec. 30, you'll see the Fedex truck, Airborne Express, UPS, all lined up out here! We literally have buckets and buckets of mail that come in."

Early decision applications, which are binding, are due Nov. 15. They undergo the same procedure as regular decision applications, and acceptances that are sent in December are limited to 30 percent of the accepted class. "If we took more than that, the number of students from first-generation backgrounds and on financial aid would go down, because early decision applicants tend to be a more affluent people. If Amherst were suddenly to take 40% of its class early, we'd skew things towards affluence. The mix of students is very, very important. There are colleges that are playing that game, taking half their class early, but their socioeconomic diversity is really suffering. There are schools in the Ivy League that have [only] 40 percent of their students taking financial aid, which is ludicrous," Parker said.

Senior Admissions Fellow Chris Kuipers '01 had the distinction of reading more applications than any admissions officer last year, just over 1,300. Kuipers also had much to say about his experience traveling around the country as a regional officer. "We were out on the road traveling in Philadelphia, and we tried visiting about four schools a day," he said. "One day we went first to an elite private school, were greeted warmly by a counselor and talked to a group of 20 students who knew everything about Amherst College. Then we left that school and drove half an hour to a run-down inner-city school, met a counselor who knew next to nothing about Amherst, and had one or two students who showed up to the info session ... There was such an enormous disparity within one city in terms of resources. That helped me really understand the uphill struggle that we have in admissions … It showed me the amount of hard work that our office has to do to reach out to find students from all kinds of places."

All of the staff in the admissions office participate in the reading of files, most of which occurs during January and February. Each file is read by two admissions officers, at least one of whom has significant admissions experience, and every file is assigned a grade on a numerical scale, both on an academic and non-academic basis. Academic factors include GPAs, SAT scores and other standardized test scores. The admissions officers also evaluate each candidate on leadership experience and documented accomplishments. Each admissions officer then writes a paragraph describing the candidate. This reading period concludes by the end of February.

In March, each application goes through a "weeding" process. By this time the staff has thoroughly read every file, and the pairs of officers assigned to the same files go through them together, deciding which ones will go to the full committee of admissions officers. When files go to the committee, all of the admissions officers meet together to discuss each file. Each regional pair of officers present the files that they've read, fielding questions that other officers might have. The committee then votes on every file, and the majority of the votes determines whether to accept, wait-list or reject the candidate.

Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Aries, chair of the faculty committee on admissions and financial aid, sat in on some of the committee sessions. "I was very impressed with several things, one of which was the quality of the applicants … you realize how precious every spot is," she said. "We've got thousands of people applying, and most of those people are highly qualified and very talented.

"The second thing that impressed me was the thoroughness and thoughtfulness with which these cases had been read. I was very struck by how each reader made a person emerge from every application they presented, and how their talents came out. There really was careful attention paid to each one. And then, I was struck by how difficult it was to make the decision."

Parker emphasized the difficulty of this particular part of the process. "The whole committee process is miserable. We're a nice group of people, we're pretty good-hearted and tolerant of one another. I'd love to tell you that it's a lot of fun, but it isn't at all. By the time a kid is coming to committee, I would be proud to have any of the kids as my own children. It's simply a numbers game. You can't have a class of 500. You have to cut some people … that's not fun for anybody, especially when there are faces attached to the names. We all have to say, 'This is tough, but we're all suffering together, we're all suffering equally.'"

At the end of March, acceptance letters are mailed. In a large follow-up effort to attract accepted students, alumni-run receptions for accepted applicants are held in 14 cities, from New York City to Honolulu. The admissions office also hosts an accepted students weekend during which about 250 students spend the night, attend classes and go to various department panels. The weekend requires a large-scale coordinated effort among student hosts, the faculty and the admissions staff.

I talked with several accepted students during the special weekend event last spring. "[The weekend] is good because you get an insight into what student life will be like," one prospective student said. "The professors' presentations were cool, too."

Another commented that it was valuable to hear firsthand about experiences at Amherst. "You can talk with professors all you want but they're not the ones who spent four years of their life here as students," he said.

By May 1, accepted students are required to mail in their final decisions, and by July 1, all decisions by the admissions office, including those concerning wait-listed students, must be made.

From the first colorful brochure to the final acceptance letter, the lives of both the prospective student and the admissions officer are brought together in a process that is as grand as it is daunting. Summing it all up, Parker noted, "The numbers part of it is a reasonably exact science. Trying to get the intangibles is not an exact science. I'd love to tell you that I'm some kind of extraordinary expert, or that Amherst College has some extraordinary powers to discern intangible qualities, but we're not, we don't presume, and we try our best to discover who the kids are that are going to take advantage of this place."