For Elizabeth Stender, the road to college admissions was filled with potholes–and it sometimes felt as if she hit every last one. Stender, 18, who graduated this spring from Orchard Park High School near Buffalo, started the admissions process in eighth grade, when she and her mom went to Harvard for a campus tour. “That was probably too early,” she admits in retrospect. “I was shooting really high, though; I definitely had this thing mapped out years in advance.” With an eye on her résumé, Stender worked 2,000 hours of community service in her four years of high school. She put 4,000 miles on the car visiting “between 20 and 30″ colleges during her sophomore and senior years. She ultimately applied to 10 schools.

In spite of her efforts, the results were shocking. Stender was an A student; she scored 1420 on her SATs; she was president of the student body and an accomplished rower. But her early application to Princeton was rejected. Then, one fateful day in April, she went online to discover she’d been turned down by Brown, Yale, and Harvard. “Which,” she says, “was basically like sitting in front of the computer for five hours and getting kicked in the stomach.” Georgetown said no as well, and Princeton dinged her regular admit, too.

She was accepted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and SUNY-University at Buffalo but turned them down–both were “way too big”–and also got the nod from George Washington University in D.C. but declined because she hadn’t seen the campus. She was wait-listed at Boston College, and (finally!) was accepted by all-female Smith, where she mailed a deposit to hold her place. By the end of April though, she says, looking at her options, she was a hysterical mess: “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t want to be at an all-girls school; I need boys!’ ” She languished on the Boston College wait list for almost two months until, finally, she was accepted. Does she wish she’d thought more carefully about where to apply or perhaps added a few more safety schools to her list? “I survived junior year on four hours of sleep per night,” she says. “I don’t think I could have dealt with any less!”

The college admissions process continues to push more and more students to the lunatic fringe. One new book likens admissions to a game of Martian blackjack: College applicants find themselves at a high-stakes table where they don’t know the rules and no one will tell them how to play. “Schools put a lot of information out there,” Stender says, in terms of what they’re looking for–passion, leadership, and the like. “But there’s a lot of things they don’t tell you, too,” she says, “and that’s the stuff that seems to matter. Sometimes it just seems totally random.”

It may be confusing and heart wrenching, but rest assured, college admissions is not random. U.S. News asked guidance counselors and admissions officers for insight into the mysterious inner sanctum of the admissions process, and what emerged was a world in constant flux. “To paraphrase Dickens,” says Martin Wilder, vice president for admission counseling and enrollment practices at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC, “it’s the best of times and the worst of times” to be applying to college. It’s never been easier to get in, he insists: The average acceptance rate at colleges and universities nationwide is 70 percent. But a study done earlier this year found that more freshmen than ever–nearly 1 in 10–are now attending colleges that were their third choice or lower. Indeed, Wilder concedes, “it’s also never been more competitive to get into the more selective colleges.”

Here are a few of the biggest new developments in the ever changing landscape of college admissions.

Early decision. Tongues have wagged for years about the admissions boost that comes with being an athlete, or a legacy, or the daughter of a member of the board of trustees. But earlier this year, a new book called The Early Admissions Game added one more tip to the list. “What [most people] don’t know,” write authors Christopher Avery, Andrew Fairbanks, and Richard Zeckhauser on the book’s first page, “is the true ‘big secret’ of the college admissions process: Applying early dramatically improves an applicant’s chances of admission.” Avery and his coauthors gathered five years’ worth of admissions information from 14 top schools and compared the results with several new national surveys of high school students. Their conclusion: Applying early to an elite college can double or triple an applicant’s chances of admission, a difference equivalent to scoring 100 points higher on the SAT.

They also found that what you don’t know can hurt you. At elite private high schools, interviews showed that 84 percent of students who were not relying on financial aid applied early; at public high schools where it is common for grads not to go on to college, only 43 percent did. (The book also says the U.S. News rankings have encouraged colleges to adopt binding early-decision programs to boost their “yield”–the percentage of accepted students who enroll. This year U.S. News is dropping yield from its ranking methodology; whether that will affect the early-admit situation remains to be seen.)

Despite the clear edge it gives applicants in the admissions process, early decision has become increasingly controversial in recent years. Critics like Yale President Richard Levin have decried the growing pressure on high school students to apply early, saying the system benefits not students but college admissions officers who want to predictably fill their classes. Other detractors say early decision hurts applicants’ chances of receiving generous financial aid, since they’re committed to attending no matter what the size of the aid package. Some schools–including Stanford, Yale, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill–are axing early decision entirely in favor of more student-friendly “early action” (a nonbinding application that usually can be sent to multiple schools). Elsewhere, though, there’s little consistency. Beginning this fall, Harvard will no longer allow any applicants who apply early action to apply to any kind of early-admissions program at another college. At Georgetown, students can apply to other early-action schools but not to any that use early decision. At Brown, students can apply early decision but can’t apply early action anywhere else. College counselors are increasingly frustrated with the process.”I don’t know who this is being done for,” says Marybeth Kravets, a college counselor at Deerfield High School in Illinois, “but I have parents in hysterics when I try to explain it to them. ”

Well, here’s the bottom line: Early admission isn’t for everyone. It was originally designed for people who knew exactly where they wanted to go, and counselors still say students shouldn’t let the prospect of better admissions odds rush them into an ill-advised decision. “If you don’t know,” says Bruce Breimer, director of college guidance at the Collegiate School in New York, don’t go early. Take Lauren McGrath, who applied early to Barnard College mostly because it was where her mom had gone. “Barnard was kind of a fantasy,” she says, “but I don’t think I really knew why I wanted to go there.” When McGrath was deferred, she had a few more months to think about her college decision. “I grew up a lot during my senior year,” she says, “I realized more who I was.” And the new Lauren discovered she wasn’t ready for a big-city school. She visited Bowdoin College in Maine that spring and discovered that she loved its smaller community feel. “You really have to take a step back and take a look at yourself,” McGrath says, “and not just go early because people say you should.”

Holistic admissions. The University of California shook up the admissions world two years ago when it unveiled a new admissions policy called “comprehensive review.” The process, which elsewhere is called “holistic” admissions, takes into account more than just applicant test scores and grade-point averages. It asks admissions officers to consider 14 criteria that include test scores but also leadership positions and the location of the student’s high school–in other words, the “whole” candidate. Private schools, of course, have been doing this in some form for years, but it was unusual for a large public system to have the staff to delve in detail into thousands of applications.

Even more unusual: It’s catching on at other public schools across the country. “California is always the lead steer in areas of admissions and eligibility,” says Brad Quin, executive director of admissions services at the College Board. Indeed all but one school in the Big 10 now practice some form of holistic admissions. And since last fall, every single applicant to the University of Minnesota has faced a more comprehensive admissions system. “Don’t get me wrong,” says Wayne Sigler, Minnesota’s director of admissions, “we still have a healthy respect for test scores, but we have a healthy skepticism for them too–numbers aren’t everything.”

Experts say this swing toward the holistic will only accelerate after the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that affirmative action programs are constitutional if they do not use a “point system,” like the University of Michigan’s, to select their applicants. “The ruling will force even more schools to see there are adverse consequences to a kind of mechanical process in admissions,” says Barmak Nassirian, an official with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “The movement to focus less on triage and more on bringing more data to bear on admissions decisions dovetails very neatly with what the court indicated would be constitutionally allowable.”

Of course, critics of holistic admissions have already emerged. “People get scared,” says Quin. “It’s a little squishier. You know, ‘How do you prove this is a better case than the one you said no to?’ ” But Quin and others insist it’s simply a return to the days before the current devotion to standardized test scores. “Students and parents have always complained that they should be judged by more than just the numbers,” Quin says, “and this policy does just that.”

The wait list. A survey published in January by NACAC painted a bleak picture for students who find themselves on the wait list. A whopping 50 percent of colleges polled reported an increase in the number of students placed on the list. In 1998, according to the College Board, nearly 96,000 students were placed on wait lists, with 12,300 of those later accepted. But last year, almost 134,000 kids nationwide found themselves in limboland, and only 15,000 were granted admission.

What do those numbers look like at your favorite school? Take Kenyon College, a small selective private school in Ohio. Kenyon admits a total of 1,500 applicants each year and enrolls about 450. Last year, 211 students were put on the wait list, 45 of whom were ultimately accepted. Of course, all schools aren’t that kind to their wait listees–according to a NACAC survey, the majority of colleges accept fewer than 10 percent of students on their lists. All colleges are supposed to tell applicants what they’ve done with wait-listed students in the past, says NACAC’s Wilder, “so if you check, and discover that for the last five years running a school’s put 500 kids on the wait list and never taken anybody–that should tell you whether being on that list is a dead-end street.”

Demonstrated interest. To some degree, schools have always factored applicant interest into their admissions equation. “It’s sort of a ’show me some love’ factor,” says Jerome Lucido, director and vice provost for enrollment management at UNC-Chapel Hill. Adds Daniel Walls, Emory University’s dean of admission: “To say that two equal candidates, one who’s shown virtually no interest in the school, who hasn’t contacted the admissions office, who has generic sorts of answers on the application, and an equal candidate who’s shown a lot of interest and done thorough research–to suggest that the one who’s shown the most interest won’t be advantaged in some cases just isn’t true.”

So how much interest is too much? There’s no line in the sand, admissions officers say, but common sense says you shouldn’t be spending your senior year picketing your favorite college’s admissions office. One golden rule: If you’re on a wait list, there’s no better time to demonstrate your intent. Follow up with your most recent grades, any new awards you’ve received, and a letter explaining why this is your first-choice school.

Writing. It may be time to get in touch with your muse. A new College Board study published earlier this year pulled back the veil on the state of high school writing programs–and the results have admissions deans wincing. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors, the study found, never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers. And only about half of the nation’s 12th graders report being regularly assigned papers of three or more pages in English class; 4 in 10 say they never, or hardly ever, get such assignments.

Studies show that essays are the first major “tip factor” behind grades, standardized test scores, and class rank. “So if students can give us a really well-crafted essay or personal statement,” says Robert Seltzer, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “that’s a big plus.” And with the College Board adding essays to the SATs in 2005, many schools are responding to what they see as a renewed emphasis on writing. “You will definitely have an advantage if you focus on writing early,” says NACAC’s Wilder. “Not only for getting into college but for getting ahead in life.”

Senioritis. “Many seniors find their last year boring and repetitious,” concluded a 2001 study by a national commission, “especially once they have been accepted into college.” But it’s the consequences of this senior slacking that worries admissions deans, who fear that today’s unmotivated 12th grader will be tomorrow’s freshman underachiever. As a result, says Dan Murphy, director of college counseling at the Urban School, a prep school in San Francisco, “even in this litigious age” public and private schools alike will–and do–revoke admission for students whose grades have slipped too far. At most schools, slacking admits aren’t tossed more than a half-dozen times in any one year, and usually only in cases where grades have dropped dramatically–from straight A’s, say, to D’s and F’s. Still, says Bruce Poch, vice president and dean of admissions at Pomona College in California, some words to the wise: “If students go to sleep as soon as they get in, some of them are going to have a rude awakening.”

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