Those Thin Letters

"I knew what was in the letter before I even opened it," said Phillip Conrad, 17, a stocky, crew-cut senior who had earned seven athletic letters at St. Clair High School, north of Detroit. "It was thin. If it's an acceptance, it's thick. If it's a rejection, it's just one sheet."

The rejection was from Princeton, which had decided that Phillip's academic grades lagged too far behind his athletic excellence to qualify him for admittance to next fall's freshman class. Philip's two elder sisters had attended Wellesley and the son's failure was a blow to his affluent father, a gas company executive. "What do you say when a school says your son is too stupid to get in?" asked Conrad. "My reaction is..." "Careful, dear," cautioned Mrs. Conrad. "My reaction is that we're very fortunate in being accepted by two of the five schools we picked, and we are on the waiting list on one other one."

Lost in a Library. "Monday was a bad day," said Jeffrey Brookstone, 17, a top student and student-council president at Palmetto Senior High in Miami. "I went oh-for-three." He had been turned down by Harvard, Yale and Trinity. Unassuming and outgoing, Jeff had been featured in Miami newspapers as an outstanding student leader. He had produced a color movie on Palmetto High that won a national award from the Secondary School Teachers Association. His grades had slipped below straight A's only during one quarter, and then because of his extracurricular activities.

Jeff's father, an airline mechanic, took the rejection with good humor. "Bring out your rejection letters, Jeff," he said. Jeff, who had wadded them all into a ball, tried to uncrinkle them. "Its the population explosion," said Brookstone. "You can attribute it all to that. Competition is just too tough." Then he added, with a grin: "All the same, I'll never endow a building at Harvard or Yale after this." But Jeff wistfully recalls visiting Cambridge and New Haven last summer: "Have you ever been to Harvard? The whole atmosphere is just tremendous. You can almost sense the learning and the traditions of the place. And Yale. I could get lost in that library for days."

No Regrets. Alan Lubliner, who had been an introverted bookworm with straight-A grades through junior high suddenly blossomed into an articulate leader in Denver's George Washington High. He became editor of the school newspaper, president of the Denver "Youth for Kennedy" organization, and class valedictorian--but his grades slipped just a shade. As a result, Harvard and Cornell passed Alan over "I don't understand it," complained Alan's father, a hard-driving businessman.

What made them make such a decision? Show this man the scrapbook, Mother. Let him see what kind of a kid it is that Harvard turned down." Alan took a calmer, broader view. "We know that the colleges have fads," he said. "One year they emphasize academic achievement. The next year it may be leadership. The next year it may be social adjustment. I had a choice. I knew my grades would suffer if I did these other things. But I don't regret it. I think they were worthwhile things."

Mighty Tough. At Houston's Bellaire High School, Greg Mermel also had a choice. A bright, cherubic-faced six-footer who had skipped fifth grade, Greg could have taken the normal courses, knocked off all A's. Instead he chose to test his mettle in Houston's tough "major works" classes for advanced students and wound up with a B-plus average, which led Harvard to reject him, Columbia to put him on a waiting list.

Noting that Greg had scored 747 (out of 800) on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, his father, a certified public accountant, said: "When you do that well on the college boards, when you're a National Merit Scholarship winner, and you get into the 99th percentile, and you still don't get accepted, the competition must be mighty tough. "

Anonymous Losers. At suburban Bostons Milton Academy--long a prep feeder for Harvard--a pleasant boy whose three brothers, father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather all had attended Harvard learned from Milton's dean that Harvard had "shot me down." In Chicago an attractive, intelligent girl learned that she had been rejected by Mount Holyoke. "I kept saying to myself I'm not going to cry,' " she recalls. "Then I went up to the library and cried. At exclusive North Shore Country Day School m nearby Winnetka, one of the school's brightest boys was turned down by Harvard and Stanford. Said he: "I' ve been shafted by society. I'm thinking of defecting to the Russians. Maybe I'll join the Mafia--or go to any easy school, pull straight A's, hit those big parties and drink beer on the beach."

The Conrads, Brookstones, Lubliners and Mermels have a lot of company in their disappointment. The great college crunch is on, and, as members of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers discovered when they convened in Chicago to compare notes, all their projections of soaring application rates are falling short. The Ivy League (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale) and its related Big Seven women's colleges (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley) were besieged by 62,000 applications for only 12,190 freshmen openings. Elsewhere, Swarthmore could accept only 460 out of 2,500 applicants, Carleton 375 of 1,750, Stanford 1,261 of 8,000.

But unlike many applicants, Conrad, Brookstone, Lubliner and Mermel enjoy ample consolation. Conrad has been accepted by Cornell, Brookstone will go to George Washington, Lubliner has been encouraged to apply to Boston U., and Mermel got a green light from the University of Chicago.

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