Do you know why I admitted you? No, you don’t.

Yesterday I had lunch with a couple of 3Ls who told me that in their clinic, after students get partnered up, they go through a little getting-to-know-you exercise—a series of questions that culminated in, “Why did Dean Zearfoss admit you?” According to my lunch companions, the answers were all along the lines of, “because I have red hair”; no one wanted to answer in a serious way because they felt it would be an arrogant thing to surmise.

I love that! The unwillingness to answer strikes me as pure Michigan Law. But reluctance to brag aside, the fact is that none of them could have a sensible answer to that question. I’m frequently astonished to see people asserting with great confidence that they know why they were admitted to thus & such school. Newsflash: no, they don’t.

Let’s consider an example. Here’s one I lifted from a comment on a college admissions blog: “More than four decades ago I went through the admission process of the college of the University of XXX. I did not have a distinguished high school record: I was not an honor student, I was not a member of numerous organizations, did not perform any community services, and so forth. This being said, I did have perfect college boards and a sense of humor that I brought out in the essay I wrote. I have always thought that my essay was the reason that I was admitted, which was not how most colleges and universities operated at that time.”

As an initial matter, let me just observe that I think people should stop speculating about the admissions process after four decades have passed. But more pertinently, I think it is highly unlikely that someone can accurately gauge the humor quotient of an essay written when he or she was 17 years old. Certainly, I read a lot of essays that are plainly intended to be humorous but that fall flat. Writing with humor to an utter stranger about one’s self is not an easy task, and in admissions, there’s the built-in generational difference to contend with. So I’m dubious about the self-assessment. Even if it were correct, though, what on earth would make him (I’m going to stop using the alternative pronoun now, because it’s exhausting, and because anyway, I just can’t stop picturing this writer as my brother) think that the humorous essay was the but-for cause of admission, as opposed to, say, the perfect boards??!?? However humorous his essay was or wasn’t, I’m guessing the perfect scores made it seem a little funnier.

More fundamentally, the fact is that in a holistic admissions process, there never is a but-for cause. The right metaphor for admissions isn’t a scale, where you add weight by small increments—5 grams for the writing, 5 grams for the scores, etc.—and eventually you tip the scale, or you don’t. A better metaphor is a jigsaw puzzle; each element of information fits together and at the end, you might have a picture with a lot of pieces missing, or a picture that just isn’t what you’re looking for. Or you might have an excellent picture that you think would fit excellently with all the other puzzles you’ve already assembled. But in any event, you don’t ever look at a jigsaw puzzle and say, “This is the one piece that makes the difference.”

-Dean Z.
Assistant Dean and Director of Admissions