front cover of The Early Admissions Game
The Early Admissions Game
Joining the Elite, With a New Chapter
Christopher Avery, Andrew Fairbanks, and Richard Zeckhauser
Harvard University Press, 2004

Each year, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors compete in a game they’ll play only once, whose rules they do not fully understand, yet whose consequences are enormous. The game is college admissions, and applying early to an elite school is one way to win. But the early admissions process is enigmatic and flawed. It can easily lead students toward hasty or misinformed decisions.

This book—based on the careful examination of more than 500,000 college applications to fourteen elite colleges and hundreds of interviews with students, counselors, and admissions officers—provides an extraordinarily thorough analysis of early admissions. In clear language it details the advantages and pitfalls of applying early as it provides a map for students and parents to navigate the process. Unlike college admissions guides, The Early Admissions Game reveals the realities of early applications, how they work and what effects they have. The authors frankly assess early applications. Applying early is not for everyone, but it will improve—sometimes double, even triple—the chances of being admitted to a prestigious college.

An early decision program can greatly enhance a college’s reputation by skewing statistics, such as selectivity, average SAT scores, or percentage of admitted applicants who matriculate. But these gains come at the expense of distorting applicants’ decisions and providing disparate treatment of students who apply early and regular admissions. The system, in short, is unfair, and the authors make recommendations for improvement.

The Early Admissions Game is sure to be the definitive work on the subject. It is must reading for admissions officers, guidance counselors, and high school seniors and their parents.

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front cover of Joining the Conversation
Joining the Conversation
Dialogues by Renaissance Women
Janet Levarie Smarr
University of Michigan Press, 2005

Avoiding the male-authored model of competing orations, French and Italian women of the Renaissance framed their dialogues as informal conversations, as letters with friends that in turn became epistles to a wider audience, and even sometimes as dramas. No other study to date has provided thorough, comparative view of these works across French, Italian, and Latin. Smarr's comprehensive treatment relates these writings to classical, medieval, and Renaissance forms of dialogue, and to other genres including drama, lyric exchange, and humanist invective -- as well as to the real conversations in women's lives -- in order to show how women adapted existing models to their own needs and purposes.

Janet Levarie Smarr is Professor of Theatre and Italian Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

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