David Villarreal has conducted a six-year-long mating dance with Harvard.

What began as an elementary school crush--he began writing the admissions office after watching an episode of "Doogie Howser, M.D." where a Veritas shield was displayed prominently--suddenly turned serious. The College added Villarreal to its mailing list.

For the next six years, he did his best to impress. He was editor of his high school paper. He made the academic decathlon team. He became an activist in his community. He won nearly every award his high school had to offer.

And he continued to write.

"By my senior year in high school, I already had accumulated a stack of

Harvard information measuring more than six inches high or so," he says.

He returned the favor last year, sending along with his application "five recommendations...three essays, a list of books I've read, a portfolio of all my high school newspapers...every score from every standardized test I've taken."

It worked.

Villarreal was one of the 2,021 applicants accepted. A record 18,867 applied. The acceptance rate for the Class of 2004 was 10.7 percent.

Admissions officers acknowledge that even most of the unsuccessful applicants were scholastically competent.

Why Villarreal was accepted--and why more than 15,000 were not brings to the fore a series of perennial questions posed to Byerly Hall by prospective students, the media and educational experts alike.

What does merit mean in an age when everyone is qualified? How can schools measure it? How do descriptive factors like race and gender mix in?

"Yes, we are an academic institution," says William R. Fitzsimmons '67, dean of admissions and financial aid. "At some level, one does need to be talented academically, but we've got to look so far beyond that," he says.

"So far beyond" means, in the rhetoric of Fitzsimmons and other admissions officers, that academics mean much less than they once did.

Admissions decisions were once based mostly on grades and test scores, seen as relatively objective measures of achievement. They are now based mainly on intangibles. Individual achievement is context-bound. And almost anything that distinguishes one person from another can affect an applicant's chances for admission.