An open letter from a disillusioned Harvard KSG acceptee

I was just cc'ed on a letter to President Faust from someone who has a big problem with Harvard's graduate student financial aid policies (my own commentary follows the excerpts):

A few weeks ago, I received the wonderful news that I have been accepted to study at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (KSG), but my initial euphoria was soon stamped out as a second KSG email arrived announcing that I would only be offered loans as financial "aid." KSG suggests that I take out more than $130,000 in loans to pay for my two-year Master's program. $130,000? I want to attend KSG to get the best possible preparation to enter the public sector. How am I supposed to work in the public sector strapped with $130,000+ of education debt? Being accepted to KSG has turned out to be a pyrrhic achievement indeed. So, I write this letter to bring attention to my dilemma in the hopes that future KSG acceptees do not have to face the choices currently before me.

At first, I thought KSG must have made a mistake in calculating my aid, considering my limited financial resources (I have spent the last two years as a volunteer in a developing country) and considering Harvard's much publicized push to increase financial aid, even to upper-middle-class undergrads. But no - KSG considers my financial need "met," by offering loans only. The KSG Financial Aid website says, "Financial assistance is a partnership." I have kept my end of the bargain - I live frugally, I do not have much consumer debt, and I applied (in vain) to a number of external funding sources. I do not feel like much of a partner in this relationship, however, as KSG is not offering me a single penny of assistance.

The author then discusses the contradictory messages sent by the KSG administration, which on the one hand stresses public service, while at the same time forcing students to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt (if interest is included) to attend Harvard. He or she concludes with this:

I therefore implore you, KSG, and Harvard University to increase financial aid to KSG students - through fundraising, through a capital campaign, through bake-sales, or however - so that future students are indeed able to enter public and non-profit service after their education at KSG instead of having to sell themselves as private sector consultants in order to be able to pay back their loans. Otherwise, KSG is guilty of making this country and this world worse, by pushing those who are most able and motivated to serve in the public and non-profit sectors into the private sector. Crass financial calculations are not sufficient justifications for this.

The author brings up a lot of valid points. It is unrealistic to expect students interested in entering the public sector to take on such huge amounts of debt. Moreover, if Harvard can do so much for College undergraduates in terms of tuition wavers and other financial aid, why can't similar benefits be extended to students at Harvard's other schools?

Update:

The full text of the letter can be found on the Critical Mass blog, along with some comments.

Legacy admissions and the "Z List" at Harvard College

The New York Times takes a satirical look at legacy admissions at Harvard College:

Here at Harvard’s Office of Admissions, we have some very exciting news for you. While your SAT scores and grade point average fall below the threshold for acceptance to Harvard’s class of 2012, your Harvard parents’ dogged participation in our annual fund-raising appeals — including their generous contributions to Harvard’s recombinant DNA lab and IMAX theater — have gained you admission to a unique new program called LegacyPlus™.

With LegacyPlus™, you, the Harvard double legacy, will enjoy all of the perks of students who actually got into Harvard — except for the education part.

The Harvard Z-list is real!

There's more than a grain of truth here. Earlier in the decade, The Crimson's Dan Rosenheck documented Harvard College's "Z List," which the admissions office strenuously denied was a legacy list. Rosenheck did some digging, and found otherwise:

... If you talk to enough of these students whom the admissions office makes a special effort to bring to Cambridge, you’ll find they do have something in common: Their parents went to Harvard.

The Crimson obtained information about the legacy status of 36 of the approximately 80 Z-list students at Harvard in 2001-02. Though McGrath Lewis insists the Z-list is “not a legacy list,” 26—or 72 percent of the 36-student sample—were legacies, compared with 12 to 14 percent of the class as a whole.

Even if none of the remaining 44 or so Z-list students were legacies, 33 percent of the 80 students would be legacies—still well above the proportion of legacies in the class as a whole.

College counselors at Harvard’s feeder schools—high schools that routinely send large numbers of students to the College—are nearly unanimous in characterizing the Z-list as Harvard’s preferred conduit for qualified legacy candidates who don’t make the first cut.

Daniel Golden was even more critical in his special feature in the inaugural issue of 02138:

Harvard actually has different levels of legacy preference, systematically and in some ways elaborately distorting its standards on behalf of a certain group. While children of middle-class alumni enjoy a modest edge, which may be heightened somewhat if the parents volunteer to interview applicants or organize reunions, the offspring of major donors receive in effect double preference - both as legacies and "development cases," whose admission is considered vital to fundraising. They fly first-class through Harvard admissions, often enjoying personal interviews with Fitzsimmons and slots on the exclusive "Z" list, which ushers in, via a one-year deferment, well-connected but often academically borderline applicants.

(Golden also wrote a book on this topic, see Harvard College and the children of America's elite).

This is one area where the Harvard Extension School's undergraduate ALB program holds a definite edge over the College. Family alumni status and wealth have no impact on admissions, and neither do standardized tests. The only thing that will get you into the program are several semesters of dedicated study and good grades. In other words, it's a meritocracy.
-->

The Harvard Extension School's 88% dilemma

Another ALM history grad (and his wife) have described last year's Harvard and Extension School Commencement ceremonies on their blog. It's a great post. The author explains everything in detail, and provides pictures. Maybe I'll do something similar when I receive my diploma on June 5.

There's something else I would like to highlight from Tim's post:

I was one of only 14 History majors graduating this year. The Dean of the Extension School stated that, in the 97-year history of the program, less than 1% of people who enroll in the Extension School finish their degree requirements and graduate. (and No, there should not be an extra number after the "1" in 1%).

Wait a second, you say. Didn't the Harvard Extended entry on ABTs a few weeks ago state that the completion rate was 52%? What gives?

Well, the 52% figure that I shared with readers refers to the all-time percentage of matriculated students in the liberal ALM programs who had finished their degree requirements and graduated as of 2006. The number that Tim heard from the dean refers to the percentage of *all* students who enroll in Extension School classes who actually end up receiving their degrees.

I am not sure if the 1% figure just applies to the ALM program, or whether the ALB and certificate programs are also included. Regardless, it points to an important fact about the Extension School student body: The overwhelming majority take classes on a casual basis. One DCE administrator recently told me in an email that "88 percent enroll in a course or two for personal enrichment, career advancement, or to test the waters for future graduate work." I regularly find evidence of this in my Google blog search RSS feed -- see recent entries from Free Range Chick and Unpunished Rapture.

This has been the nature of the student body since President Lowell established the program near 100 years ago, and Harvard has benefitted greatly because of it. Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them from nearby communities, have been able to take classes and sample the Harvard experience while bringing in revenue and furthering the University's community outreach goals.

Harvard Extension School critics

However, this has also led to an unfortunate situation for those students who are not taking classes casually. Amongst some members of the Harvard community and the public at large, the Extension School's reputation is associated with the temporary experiences of the majority, as opposed to the serious, long-term academic commitments of the minority. For instance, a press release that was apparently composed by two Harvard officers named Eric Sinoway and John Longbrake makes a point of distinguishing the Extension School from Harvard's "principal academic units," and describes the student body as casual class-takers. This article in the Harvard alumni magazine 02138 portrays the Extension School as an avenue for people or companies that want to "purchase the Harvard brand," and calls Extension School degree programs a "perk." Alexandra Petri, a columnist for The Crimson, thinks even less of Extension School students, judging by a quip in her recent discussion of the Core curriculum.

Never mind the dedication of the ALM and ALB candidates who can matriculate only after proving themselves in EXPO or the ALM proseminar, the contributions of the Extension School students who work closely with Harvard faculty as teaching and research assistants, or the accomplishments of the 1% who complete their coursework and research requirements and graduate. For those who have never bothered to find out about this subset of the Extension School student body or the degree programs they belong to, the HES does not appear to be much different than the typical continuing education program at a local community college, providing casual classes for people who want to satisfy personal interests or give their careers and educational goals a boost. In their eyes, the 88% defines who we are.

Don't get me wrong: Casual, continuing education is a great thing. It helps individuals and benefits society. I've personally benefited from taking classes for personal enrichment and/or career advancement, such as the Mandarin courses I took at the Taipei Language Institute in the 1990s and my very first class at the Extension School -- an introductory short story writing class that I took through the Summer School in 2002, almost on a whim. It was for undergraduate credit and had no impact on my graduate coursework or research, but it was a lot of fun -- it gave me a chance to indulge my interest in fiction and creative writing, and also produced a short story that was later published in the Harvard Summer Review.

A real review of the Harvard Extension School

My ALM journey was a completely different experience. It was academically rigorous and intellectually demanding, and took years to complete. The ALM thesis requirement goes far beyond the writing and research assignments found in many "traditional" masters programs, and can in no way be considered fun. It therefore disappoints me that those of us who have been admitted to the Extension School's degree programs or have earned our diplomas are not taken seriously in some quarters. On a person-to-person level, it's very easy to correct misperceptions. But when 02138, The Crimson, and Harvard's own officers promote the casual Extension School identity and even negative stereotypes, it's very difficult to highlight another perspective of the Extension School experience. This in turn makes it harder for serious Extension School students -- and the programs we belong to -- to get the recognition we deserve.

Harvard Extension School graduates lining up for Commencement

Strange database queries at the Harvard Business School, and a new model for downloading online music

My Computerworld blog was recently updated with some new functionality and a new name -- The Digital Media Machine. The focus is mostly new media technologies, ranging from the Internet to virtual reality, but I also touch on some subjects that might be interesting to my Harvard Extended audience. For instance, yesterday I blogged about a strange incident at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library:

The Crimson, the student-run newspaper at Harvard, has a report of an unusual incident in a campus library. Administrators at the Harvard Business School library were forced to block a user's IP address from accessing Factiva, an online database of news articles and other text documents, after determining that the user had downloaded millions of articles in the span of a few months.

It turns out that the user in question was (probably) building a very large census of news articles and other text documents for a computer content analysis, using a script that scraped the articles from the password-protected Factiva database. I can totally sympathize: As some of you may remember, I also carried out a very extensive content analysis of news articles from China's Xinhua News Agency for my thesis, and was frustrated by the manual processes involved in getting samples and query results from LexisNexis Academic.

There's another new post on my Computerworld blog that might interest anyone who pays for online music: A proposal to revamp the per-song and per-album pricing model from a flat fee (e.g., iTune's 99 cents/song scheme) to a scaled pricing model that actually evaluates whether or not you value the song.

UMass Boston and bias in the Boston Globe, continued

I wanted to post a brief follow-up to an issue that came up last year, when a student group at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, claimed bias in the Boston Globe. The story was picked up by Universal Hub, and drew a lot of community comments. The group used stats from LexisNexis to support their case, claiming that "the Boston Globe has an established pattern of seriously underreporting events at UMass Boston--a large public college--when compared to its generous coverage of large private colleges in the Boston area."

As regular readers of this blog know, I have used LexisNexis in my thesis research and class papers. I collected additional information from LexisNexis that better described the patterns of Boston Globe coverage relating to UMass Boston and several other colleges in the area, including Harvard. The data supported the UMass group's claim of bias/favoritism toward different colleges and universities in the area. You can see the results here.

At the time, I anticipated that the public shaming of the Globe would encourage it to pay more attention to the news, events, and research coming out of UMass Boston. So far, that hasn't happened. This afternoon, I did some more Lexis Nexis searches, comparing references to UMass Boston and MIT, and found that coverage of UMass Boston has actually declined in the Globe, when compared with earlier years. (Harvard, BC, BU, and Northeastern were left out of this survey, owing to the tendency of sports-related happenings to inflate the results).

Here's what I found, when I compared the January 1st to June 11th UMass and MIT coverage for each year, starting in 2004:

MIT or "Massachusetts Institute of technology" in the headline

2004: 43
2005: 32
2006: 26
2007: 32

UMass in headline, and "University of Massachusetts at Boston" or "UMass Boston" in the full text, but not Dartmouth or Lowell or Amherst in full text (this allows for the short version of UMass in headline, which copy editors and editors prefer, but the article is about UMass Boston, as opposed to UMass Amherst, UMass Lowell, and UMass Dartmouth)

2004: 5
2005: 19
2006: 7
2007: 2

So, while coverage of MIT has actually increased when compared with the same period last year, and is comparable to the 2005 levels, articles about UMass Boston are not only rare, they are considerably less common than last year's levels.

Of course, it can be argued that this is not a true measure of UMass Boston-related coverage, as I am excluding all of the articles that may also cite the other University of Masschusetts campuses. Furthermore, there may have been some UMass-related news that did not mention the school's name in the headline.

Others may point out that this is not a fair comparison -- MIT is one of the largest research universities in the United States, and is involved with several high-profile national initiatives that generate lots of news, such as the Broad Institute.

But even if you exclude consideration of MIT, and just concentrate on the results for UMass Boston, the trend is clear: The city's largest newspaper has reduced coverage of a major public university on its own doorstep.

Incidentally, I was prompted to look into this issue by an interesting discussion taking place on the Extension Student discussion forum. I started the thread after seeing two of Harvard's own publications -- the Harvard Gazette (a publication of the Harvard News Office, I believe) and the Harvard Crimson (A Harvard College-oriented newspaper) placing the Harvard Extension School last in Commencement-related articles.

Update:


Uncomfortable with the possibility that certain types of articles about UMass Boston were being excluded because of no mention of the school in the headline, I expanded the search criteria to include references to "University of Massachusetts at Boston" or "UMass Boston" in the headline *or* lead paragraph. The results for the year-on-year searches from January 1 to June 11 since 2004:

2004: 30
2005: 52
2006: 22
2007: 24

The results for MIT or "Massachusetts Institute of technology" in the headline or lead paragraph:

2004: 179
2005: 166
2006: 187
2007: 158

The problem with including the lead paragraph results is that many articles are not specifically about the university in question. For instance, one of the 2007 articles that mentioned UMass Boston in the lead paragraph was an editorial that only mentioned the school because of the UMass Boston Commencement speech by Gov. Patrick. The real focus of the editorial was community colleges across Massachusetts.

College imposters, part II: Azia Kim exposed at Stanford

Coming on the heels of the Godelia affair, comes news from Stanford about a similar case. The Stanford community is abuzz over the story of Azia Kim, an 18-year-old who passed herself off as a Stanford undergraduate for nearly a year, even going so far to illicitly inhabit several Stanford dormitories for months at a time without anyone uncovering her true status. The Stanford Daily's Daniel Novinson picks up the story:

Azia Kim was like any other Stanford freshman. She graduated from one of California’s most competitive high schools last June, moved into the dorms during New Student Orientation, talked about upcoming tests and spent her free time with friends.

Azia Kim allegedly climbed through this first-floor window in Okada to sleep during spring quarter. The 18-year-old was evicted after her ruse was uncovered Monday night.

The only problem is that Azia Kim was never a Stanford student.

Kim, an 18-year-old from Orange County who graduated from Fullerton’s Troy High School, lived in Kimball throughout fall and winter quarter. She lived in Okada, the Asian-American theme dorm, until Monday night, when University staff finally caught onto her ruse.

Friends aren’t sure of her motive for sneaking onto campus and living a lie, but many speculate that she felt pressure from overbearing parents to attend Stanford — regardless of whether she was admitted.

The comment thread under the article references the Godelia case at Harvard earlier this year. There are certainly some similarities: Both Kim and Godelia wanted to be regarded as students at the country's most exclusive colleges. Both were successful at doing so for long periods of time. Both gained access to restricted facilities including undergraduate dormitories and dining halls.

But there are some notable differences as well. Godelia was more than 10 years older than a typical College undergraduate, while Kim fit in in terms of her age relative to other Stanford freshmen. Godelia had a Harvard affiliation -- he had once been an Extension School student, while Kim did not have any current or previous Stanford academic or employment record. Godelia had a criminal past. While attending Baylor in the 1990s, he had been arrested by Baylor police for trespassing, sexual assault, and burglary. Kim apparently had no criminal record. Godelia was also very public with his attempts to associate himself with the Harvard College undergraduate community by taking part in various College-oriented activities, hanging out at undergraduate dormitories, and crashing classes, as described in this Harvard Crimson article. Kim tried to keep a low profile -- the Stanford Daily article does not mention her taking part in any clubs, although she did make friends in the Stanford dormitories and pretended to study for exams.

There is also the issue of motive: While both wanted to be regarded as undergraduates at these two elite programs, the Stanford Daily article suggests Kim was motivated by family pressure. Godelia seemed to seek recognition or validation from the Harvard community itself.

Other top-ranked colleges and universities have uncovered similar frauds. In the mid-1990s, Yale accepted into a graduate program a student named Tonica Tonise Jenkins who had forged a transcript from an Ohio community college. Serial con man James Hogue pulled a similar trick at Princeton in the 1980s, gaining entrance as "Alexi Indris Santana" after claiming to an orphan from Utah (he also has an interesting Harvard connection, as described in the answers.com page). Both Jenkins and Hogue are serving time for far more serious crimes committed after they were expelled from their respective programs.

One thing that's worth mentioning about these cases is that they all involve people who were caught. How many others have never been caught, or have even received degrees, job offers, or status after forging academic documents and lying about their pasts?

Note: Comments have been disabled on this post. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about this post.

A painful case

There is a disturbing piece of news reported by The Crimson earlier this week, which came out of an investigation conducted by a Harvard College student and blogger named Kameron Collins '09. The news concerns a 30-something former Extension School student named Michael Godelia, who has allegedly been passing himself off as a Harvard College undergraduate, and until recently was sitting in on classes and gaining access to Harvard facilities -- including Lamont Library and undergraduate dorm rooms.

From the Crimson article by Anna Tong:

"I was walking out of a final and he told me he liked my jacket, and started talking to me," said James B. Onstad '09. "We talked for maybe half an hour and over the next year he contacted me a few times through Facebook. He always had business schemes he was trying to pitch to me."

Joseph K. Cooper '07 said Godelia has shown up to parties in his Currier House suite uninvited. "This guy was very strange," Cooper said. "He asked a couple of sophomore girls where they lived, and asked for the layout of Currier. It was very off-putting."

Collins, the blogger, knows Godelia, and researched his past after participating in an on-campus panel together. What he found was disturbing enough that Collins opted to write a blog entry entitled "Have you seen this man?"

At this point, we do not know how Godelia has managed to access Lamont Library or a House's dining hall, as these and many other Harvard buildings and facilities require a student ID for access, unless one has bought a Special Borrower Card for special access to Harvard libraries.**

Recently, Godelia also has been spotted at several parties on campus, including post-initiation celebrations at the Harvard Advocate. An e-mail over the Advocate's e-mail list from the group's President cited that several members complained of Godelia's inappropriate behavior at an Advocate party. The e-mail, which was accompanied by the photo seen above, alerted members that Godelia was forbidden to enter the building under any circumstances. The e-mail both identified Godelia and reminded members of the seriousness of sexual harassment.***

Godelia was already known to some Advocate members because he had earlier attempted to Comp the magazine, though his Comp was cut short when members realized that the man -- believed to be 32 -- was not a registered undergraduate, or for that matter, a Harvard affiliate.

According to an online article (linked above) from Baylor University's student newspaper, The Baylor Lariat, Godelia -- nicknamed "The Loose Cannon" -- was asked not to return to the campus after an 11-day stakeout that ended with Godelia being arrested, charged with burglary of habitation, and asked not to return to campus.****

*Confirmed by FAS and relayed by a Crimson Reporter: Michael Godelia is, in fact, NOT -- nor was he ever -- an Undergraduate at Harvard College, despite claims to the contrary. Godelia was previously registered at the Extension School. He is not enrolled in the Extension School this semester.

**Visit here for more information on Special Borrower Cards.

**Direct quotes from this e-mail have been retracted due to confidentiality.

***The accuracy of the Baylor article has also been disputed, though because I have not found that the article was retracted citing factual inaccuracy and has since remained available since it was originally published 1996, the link will remain available on this post.

The blog investigation carried out by Collins generated dozens of comments from other undergraduates (including some supporters) who recalled interacting with Godelia.

But the most interesting comments come from a commenter who claims to be Godelia. This commenter vigorously denies a variety of criminal charges and claims made against him, and further states that he is a Harvard undergraduate.

According to Collins, research by the Crimson has determined that Godelia has never been a Harvard College undergraduate. I am not even sure he formally entered the ALB program at the Extension School, although he reportedly took several semesters of HES classes, ending last fall. The HUPD is "aware" of Godelia, and earlier this week a Law School employee removed him from a class he had been sitting in on, says the Crimson.

What's my take? It's one thing for Harvard Extension School students to participate in community activities, Harvard organizations, and academic activities that are open to all -- clubs, panels, the Graduate School Council, Phillips Brooks House, etc. It's something else for a handful of students/former students to misrepresent themselves, crash classes, and gain access to restricted areas of campus, such as undergraduate dormitories, using confidence tricks or expired IDs. It's happened before, as this Crimson article about Edward F. Meinert Jr. describes.

Considering the tens of thousands of students who have taken HES classes, and the thousands who have graduated from HES programs, these cases should be seen as isolated incidents. Unfortunately, they reflect very negatively on the Extension School -- one comment on the Harvard College blog mentioned earlier called for Extension School students to lose their FAS computing privileges, and this week I noticed a referrer in my website logs from Google based on a Google search for "Harvard Extension School get rid of it" from a Harvard IP address. The Extension School community doesn't deserve this type of treatment -- we study hard and contribute to the University academically and in other ways. But the Extension School's image nevertheless suffers greatly when cases like this come to light.

Note about comments:

I have disabled comments for this thread. This is the first time I've had to do this, but I feel it's necessary owing to the issue being discussed and the fact that I can't verify the identities of who is posting comments.

April 17: An emailed comment from an ALB candidate named Richard:

... It's important to remember that organizations with a high status level always have impersonators. There are people who try to pass themselves off as royalty and people who try to pass themselves off as VIPs to get into Hollywood parties. This kind of behavior isn't new or unique to Harvard.

On the other hand, one important distinction that needs to be stressed is that there is a world of difference between a degree candidate and an extension student. I don't think that the writers at the Crimson understand that point nor do I think that members of the extension community make them aware of that error. Furthermore, I would argue that the bar needs to be set higher for the Extension School degree programs. I think we would go a long way towards alleviating concerns about the extension population if we took steps to improve the quality of that same population. Until we do, we'll see more of this kind of thing since the Harvard name draws too many strange characters to the program.

The key to the future of HES is establishing it as a distinct but high-quality program. I feel no need to convince others that I'm part of the College and I'm perfectly happy with my status as a HES degree candidate.

Harvard College and the children of America's elite

A few months back I wrote about wiggle room for admissions at the Harvard Business School. This morning in the Boston Globe, I see a column by Alex Beam about affirmative action for rich people at Harvard and other Ivy League schools. Beam basically says that the children of rich alumni get to sneak around pesky admissions criteria that most other Harvard College applicants have to contend with, such as getting sky-high grades and writing stellar admissions essays. Sometimes the rich use admissions consultants to write or polish essays. Sometimes they simply use large amounts of cash, he says, drawing upon the evidence presented in Dan Golden's book The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates:

Golden's book is a well-reported critique of what amounts to affirmative action for rich people, who enjoy a panoply of preferences in the college admission process that outsiders could never dream of. The best-known examples are ``legacy" admissions for alumni children; scholarships reserved for upper-class sports, such as rowing; and the ultimate preference: dough. When you read how Harvard treats the children of its fat - cat Committee on University Resources -- who enjoy such perks as sit-downs with the director of admissions, personal campus tours, and access to the coveted ``Z-list" of deferred applicants -- suddenly real affirmative action for people who need it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

The most egregious example of pay-for-Crimson - play is that of Jared Kushner , now the youthful owner of The New York Observer. While Jared was applying to colleges, his dad, New Jersey billionaire developer Charles Kushner , pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in installments. (Kushner pere pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other counts in 2004 and recently completed a prison sentence.) An official at Kushner's high school told Golden: ``There was no way anybody in . . . the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought, for sure, there was no way this was going to happen." Kushner graduated from Harvard in 2003.

Beam was prompted to write this column after reading Golden's book. I haven't read the book myself, but Golden's thesis doesn't surprise me. Harvard and other schools need rich people to strengthen their endowments, get new academic programs off the ground, and build new facilities. The rich have extraordinary access to deans, university presidents, and influential alumni bodies -- far more than ordinary students or their families. If your last name is Bass, Gates, Bush, Kennedy or Ballmer you'll find it a lot easier to attend the college of your choice, compared to someone with the same high school academic and extracurricular abilities, but surnamed Jones, Lin, Martinez or O'Neill. It's unfair, but that's the way Harvard -- and many other private colleges -- work.