The Campus Scramble to Recruit

By Ezra Bowen

The phone has been ringing off the hook at Kayode Owens' house in Teaneck, , N.J. Owens, 17, a black football star and high school senior with strong SAT scores (1,320 out of a possible 1,600), has told his mother to let it ring. Representatives of Cornell, Columbia, Swarthmore, Yale, Brown, Bowdoin and Harvard -- all of which have accepted him for next fall -- have been urging him to come. Bowdoin flew him to Brunswick, Me., gratis, for a two-day love feast for minority prospects, complete with a dance at the Afro-American house and a coq au vin dinner at a professor's home. With the May 1 decision date just days away, any further conversation with his suitors would only add to Owens' confusion: "Everybody has been pulling me in different ways," he frets.

Julian Rios, 17, of Miami, feels much the same way, having been embraced by all five of the top colleges he applied to. Two weeks ago, a "go Eli" call from a Yale alumnus was interrupted by a beep signaling a competing exhortation from Brown. Soon after, Brown asked Rios to join other acceptees on a chartered Amtrak train ride to the school, where a whirl of receptions awaited, as did a brass band.

Welcome to the April rush. Across the country last week, colleges were scrambling to land academic superstars. The reason for their push to recruit: with the baby boom busted, enrollments have been on a slow but steady slide since 1980. This has prompted even the fussiest schools to adopt glitzy new marketing gimmicks for wooing top prospects. "Everybody's hustling," says Robert Thornton, director of admissions at New College in Florida. Last week Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., held an open house featuring a student play and poetry readings to emphasize the school's strength in the arts. Colgate staged a science fest, where one prospect proved so dazzling that a professor murmured, "Sign her up, sign her up!"

Meanwhile, as the blue ribbon institutions battle over stars, they are letting legions of very good, if not superlative, students hang out to dry. Richard Steele, admissions director at Duke, reports that this year "I've had more calls from good candidates that have been left out than ever before." One boy in suburban New York with 1,220 SATs and three varsity letters was wait-listed by all four colleges he tried, including Schenectady's Union and Lafayette in Easton, Pa. Observes Phyllis Steinbrecher, a college placement consultant in New York: "What was a safety school is no longer a safety school."

The growing number of shutouts, say admissions experts, is caused in part by ! ambitious parents who push their youngsters to carve too high on the academic hog. A name-brand college, says Steinbrecher, "has become a status symbol, like a Gucci shirt." Moreover, the crush of applicants from affluent white suburbs has created a generation of qualified look-alikes, all of whom simply cannot get in, especially when schools are seeking diverse student bodies. A third factor is what admissions people call the scalp takers: top students who sit on a fistful of acceptances, hogging places that might have been offered to someone else. And in a kind of ripple effect from the leading schools, both the admissions criteria and the intensity of the marketing hype have gone up at second- and third-tier schools, so that they are indeed no longer safe second choices.

In this shifting climate, students have tried to ensure themselves of admission by firing off more and more applications. One Massachusetts boy sent 17 -- an expensive proposition at an average of $30 per application. Such tactics can backfire when students spread themselves too thin. Duke's Steele recalls a hastily written application from a girl who had a "wonderful record, wonderful boards, but her essay was just six sentences long." In addition, many colleges, overwhelmed by the flood of applications and fearing that there will be an unmanageable jump in enrollment, are actually accepting fewer students than in the past. Cornell, for example, had 693 applications more than last year, but accepted 240 fewer students. Colorado College has rejected over 600 more applicants than last year.

The students who have navigated these reefs and gained acceptance to elite schools find themselves in a very pleasant harbor. Or three, or four. "My interviewer at Princeton is so nice to me now," says Donna Katz, of Kensington, Md., who was accepted at five top schools. "He really wasn't when he first interviewed me."

College administrators are not entirely sure that all the courting and hustle are worth the considerable time and expense (Bowdoin's weekend wooing of 34 minority students cost $19,800). Still, none are willing to cut back unless their competitors do. And even when the sales pitch is persuasive, educators wonder if the customer has been well served. "I get concerned that all the marketing is taking the place of good counseling and exploiting people who haven't reached a real maturity level," says Frank Burtnett, executive director of the National Association of College Admission Counselors in Alexandria, Va. A college education is, after all, not cornflakes.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/Brunswick