Acceptance: A Legendary Guidance Counselor Helps Seven Kids Find the Right Colleges -- and Find Themselves by David L. Marcus

From the Publisher

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist spends a year with a legendary high school guidance counselor who gets kids into the right colleges by focusing on self-discovery rather than test scores, grades, and the other traditional tools of the trade

Gwyeth Smith, known as Smitty, has made a national reputation by flouting the conventions of the college application ritual. He often steers kids from the SAT to the ACT, which he considers a more straightforward test that produces higher scores. He urges parents to home in on hidden bargains, scour the country for scholarships, and challenge financial aid offices rather than take out large loans. He will sometimes talk a seeming shoo-in candidate out of setting her sights on the prestigious Ivy League while goading another long-shot student into aiming for that same Ivy League school. His unorthodox approach is grounded on the principle that getting into college shouldn't just be about getting in; it should be a kid's first great moment of self-discovery.

David L. Marcus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former education writer for U.S. News & World Report, follows Smitty and "his" kids around Oyster Bay High, a diverse public school in Long Island, New York, as he works his unique magic on their applications and their lives. Smitty's kids run the gamut from the sweet but pathologically disorganized boy next door to the valedictorian who applies to twenty-eight schools. As the year unfolds, Smitty deals in his own ingenious way with almost every complication that can bedevil the applications process. What about the kid who doesn't test well? The kid who plunges into depression after being rejected by Columbia? Theoverachieving Korean American boy worried about reverse discrimination? Smitty has answers for all of them.

While Smitty excels at easing the pressure of the college hunt, his success comes from imposing a different-and deeper-challenge. He makes kids articulate (orally and in writing) their profoundest fears, their drawbacks, their secret hopes. In short, he makes them figure out who they are. Along the way, he uses his savant's knowledge of America's thirty-six hundred colleges and universities to pair each student with the right one. He sidesteps the applications industrial complex, with its slick Web sites, private essay coaches, and obsessive focus on metrics. He brings to the college search counterintuitive insight and even wisdom-attributes that thousands of students and their parents, frustrated with the excesses of the process, will find useful and inspiring.

Publishers Weekly

The college application process is a time of major anxiety for high school seniors and their parents. Fortunately for all concerned (including administrators, teachers, and private coaches), Marcus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning education writer for U.S. News and World Report, has documented the year he spent at suburban Long Island's Oyster Bay High School closely observing the rather unorthodox college counselor Gwyeth Smith and seven college-bound seniors. In this insider's look at the college application process, Marcus reveals the personal realities the kids and their parents face, the way college decisions are made and how and why Smith manages to ease the powder keg of worry and emotions with good advice, eventually helping make the "right match" for each student. Readers meet all kinds-the kid who doesn't test well; the one who is depressed after an early admission rejection; the high-achieving Asian-American at odds with his parents; the good girl looking for something "different"; the athlete with mediocre grades. In sometimes the most counterintuitive ways, Smith helps them by demonstrating how each has the ability to write good application essays, find their true "passion" and represent themselves as people colleges will want to accept. A wonderfully enjoyable antidote to the spate of books focused on the college admissions "game" of "getting in." (Aug.)

Tamela Chambers - Library Journal

In this aptly titled book, award-winning journalist Marcus (What It Takes To Pull Me Through) chronicles the efforts of acclaimed guidance counselor Gweyth (pronounced to rhyme with Faith) "Smitty" Smith and seven students to find the best colleges for them. Marcus's revealing group portrait aims to drive home the point that a college's reputation matters less than students' ability to "fit" successfully into its social and academic culture. While Marcus writes that his purpose for profiling Smith was to see how one man teaches students to play the "admissions game" in "the way that charts the best course for their lives," it also appears to be a testament to the therapeutic qualities of writing, highlighting the self-discovery students find through a college essay-writing course. This refreshing look at the college admissions process reads like a novel and is likely to shock parents and overachievers who cling to the notion that admittance is dependent only upon class rank and test scores. VERDICT Marcus's poignant book will have readers wishing that they too had had Smitty as a guidance counselor and rooting for the students profiled. Highly recommended for parents and college-bound students as a good alternative to the standard college admission guides.—Tamela Chambers, Chicago P.L.

Kirkus Reviews

Another look at the college-admissions process-this time through the experiences of an influential Long Island guidance counselor and seven of his students. When Pulitzer Prize-winning education reporter Marcus moved from U.S. News & World Report to Newsday, he noticed that the area's highest acceptance rates were coming from a relatively small, unknown school-the diverse Oyster Bay High School-and that the mitigating factor was an especially committed counselor named Gwyeth "Smitty" Smith. To determine what made Smitty so successful, Marcus followed him through the process, focusing in particular on seven students. There was the underachieving athlete with the big heart and difficult home life; the engineering hopeful with an overbearing mother; the well-rounded Jewish girl who worried that she wouldn't stand out; the overworked African-American who would be the first in her family to go to college; the intellectual Korean-American who wasn't sure he could live up to his family's expectations; the free-spirited girl who couldn't focus; and the valedictorian who never had to worry. Marcus's portraits are honest and interesting, and some of the outcomes are quite surprising, thanks in part to the counselor who encouraged the students to think outside the box, even when it meant defying parents or preconceived notions about reputation. Smitty is clearly an excellent counselor who goes to great lengths to make sure his students make the right choices-negotiating work hours with a student's employer to make sure she had enough time to study, seeking out admissions officers at conferences to talk about specific students. But while it's encouraging to read about a counselor more committed tothe students' well-being than the number of Ivy League acceptances on his rap sheet, there's nothing particularly revolutionary or illuminating about his practices, and readers may struggle to find a takeaway message that hasn't been covered in countless other college-admissions books-including Jacques Steinberg's The Gatekeepers (2002) and by Jay Mathews's Harvard Schmarvard (2003). Engaging and inspiring, but without significant purpose in an overcrowded topic.

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