What to do when 'outstanding' is average

Remember when the ideal college candidate had good grades, and was high school president and captain of the football team?

Today, you might be better off collecting Civil War figurines or starting your own cricket league.

When it comes to applying to the nation's top colleges, being well rounded may be becoming passé, say school guidance counselors and private admissions consultants.

Sure, breaking into the Ivy League will require high grades and a minimum SAT score well above 1400. But with elite schools inundated by candidates at the head of the class and school clubs, the challenge of standing out keeps getting tougher.

A bulging population of echo-boomers, more aggressive college marketing, and schools casting a broader net for students from different backgrounds and countries are all factors that add to the applicant pool.

What's more, students seeking early admissions by applying in the fall are locking up as much as half of available slots before regular applications are even in the mail.

The result: Admission rates are falling toward the single digits at Ivy League universities and elite liberal-arts colleges. "The process has become far more difficult for students than it was 10 years ago and exponentially more difficult than 30 years ago," says Sally Rubenstone, a private consultant and former Smith College admissions officer.

To be sure, this is mostly a phenomenon at the pinnacle of top schools – only a fraction of the nation's 2,000 four-year colleges and universities deny more students than they accept.

At these schools – places such as the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College in Vermont – admissions directors say 80 percent or more of applicants are actually academically qualified to attend.

Unfortunately, for those applicants, admissions officers say there's no single formula for who gets accepted. "We have an interest in the best and the brightest, whatever the package they come in," says Richard Shaw, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale. "It's not necessarily a narrowly focused person or the person who engages in everything."

Yet counselors say a deeper passion in narrower fields can make it easier to catch the eye of admissions officers at hyperselective schools.

It may be a student interested in languages who starts taking Japanese at a local college and then goes on to a summer program. Or, says Dave Berry, co-founder of the collegeconfidential.com counseling firm, there's the example of the Civil War buff who avidly collected model soldiers. Mr. Berry says that student – who was accepted into several Ivy League schools – described how he hunted in flea markets and worked menial summer jobs to support his hobby. In his application, he included pictures of individual models and described what it took for him to acquire each of them.

"They may not do everything, but they do some things very, very well," says Rosita Fernandez-Rojo, director of college counseling at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn.

Ideally, a student's narrow passion may match a school's peculiar institutional needs, which gives added weight to his or her application. Perhaps the orchestra needs a percussionist or the language department says it's time to find an Italian major.

Counselors emphasize such passions aren't easily faked or packaged, no matter how many last-minute summer programs a high school student attends or private counselors his or her parents hire. "We can see through that," says John Hanson, director of admissions at Middlebury.

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