This is the first article in a four part series.
Part 2: Recruiting a New Elite
Part 3: Byerly's Eye On the Yard
Part 4: Stairway to Harvard

Last spring, Harvard and Stanford were chasing the same girl. Anna K. Kendrick, a Boston resident and graduate of the Winsor School, had scored acceptance letters from both coasts. A national crew champion and National Merit Finalist, Kendrick had made her case—now it was the colleges’ turn to make theirs.

Admissions decisions are commonly mailed to applicants on March 31. Savvy high schoolers have been trained to look for the “thick envelope”: the large package presumably filled with the posters, housing forms, and other materials sent out to accepted students. It’s the first time a university makes its pitch to admitted students, and many schools look to woo with glossy fliers and full-color pamphlets.

In Kendrick’s case, the Crimson fired the first salvo.

“I got the Harvard packet first, and so it was thrilling to have a packet of papers with ‘Veritas’ letterheads,” Kendrick writes in an e-mail. But she was surprised to rip open the Priority Mail envelope to find “essentially just manila letters and photocopied sheets of info.”

While most schools only require receipt of a reply card by the May 1 acceptance deadline—that is, a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’—Harvard asks its admitted students to enclose a three-part freshman housing application, an order form for the freshman register, and, if applicable, an application for one of three freshman pre-orientation programs. All these forms, some of which require personal statements totaling hundreds of words, must be filled out and returned to Harvard in under a month. Students have their first assignments before they’ve even set foot on campus.

For Kendrick, Harvard’s package, printed mostly in staid black-and-white, paled in comparison to the colorful, “stylish-looking” collection she soon received from her suitor on the West Coast.

“Once I got Stanford’s packet, Harvard’s didn’t seem that exciting anymore,” she writes. “It was in a glossy red folder, with...well, class of 2009 refrigerator poetry, perhaps that says it all.”

Stanford’s rah-rah style tempted Kendrick, but ultimately Harvard pulled rank. Sometimes the best brand in the business just can’t be beat. Come September, Kendrick found herself moving into Canaday Hall on the northern tip of Harvard Yard, a newly minted member of the Class of 2009.

KENDRICK'S choice makes perfect sense in the world of marketing expert Richard A. Hesel. To illustrate the influence of powerful brand names, Hesel points his clients to a certain ivory tower on the Charles.

“We put up ‘America’s Intellectual Powerhouse’ on the screen, and everybody says Harvard. Everybody,” says Hesel, a principal of the Art & Science Group, a consulting firm that specializes in marketing for higher education. “We put up ‘Free-Choice Curriculum,’ and most people guess Brown.”

Prestige, celebrity, presidential pedigree—you name it, “Harvard’s got it,” as Hesel says. And in a nation obsessed with image, the marketing power of a collegiate Cambridge setting—red bricks, ivy leaves, and Veritas—is second to none.

Last year, nearly 23,000 students applied for admission, and 80 percent of those admitted chose to attend, compared with 72 percent at Yale and 68 percent at Princeton. Given a choice between Bulldog and Crimson, most students put their chips on red: nearly three out of four students accepted to both Yale and Harvard find themselves in Cambridge come fall, says one veteran of the admissions game.

Harvard’s allure persists despite the scuttlebutt that annually makes the rounds of college guidebooks and high school hallways: arrogant undergraduates, prep school snobs, little interaction between faculty and students, a social life descended from Puritan roots, a campus whose temperature is as chilly as its temperament. “Kids won’t pass up Harvard, even though they may not be elated the entire time they’re there,” says Katherine Cohen, founder of IvyWise, an admissions counseling service in Manhattan.

The admissions office, housed in Radcliffe Yard’s Byerly Hall, annually surveys its accepted students, whether or not they decide to come. Certain perceptions turn up every year.
“It’s all the things that you would guess,” says Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67. “For example, acceptability of professors...” Fitzsimmons stops himself, taking a more general tack. “Take a stereotype, whatever it is, you’re gonna see it,” he says.

But some stereotypes are based on truth. Harvard is in fact a wealthy place: more than 80 percent of the Class of 2009 hails from the top half of the national income distribution. It can also be difficult for students to garner personal attention: the student-to-faculty ratio is higher than Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. And an internal Harvard memo from 2002 revealed that Harvard students rate their campus’s social life below many of their peers at other elite schools. The memo, first reported in The Boston Globe, ranked Harvard 26th out of a survey of 31 colleges in student satisfaction with social life.

Even Fitzsimmons admits that Harvard isn’t the warmest of places.

“You probably aren’t going to get calls every day in your room asking you do you want to come out to play or go to lunch,” he says. “It’s not the way Harvard works.”

BYERLY Hall, despite the ubiquity of its brand, faces stiff competition each year from its closest rivals in the admissions game. To keep high-achieving students like Kendrick from jetting off to Stanford, Harvard’s extensive marketing operation strives to promote accessibility and combat the negative stereotypes.

“There’s a very privileged kind of image associated with some of the Ivy League colleges, including Harvard,” Fitzsimmons says. “That’s something that you’re always trying to overcome.”
Harvard annually sends over 20 admissions officers on hundreds of high school visits across the country.

They host traveling information sessions with representatives from Georgetown, Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, and other peer schools. With “well over half” of applicants now applying online, according to Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73, the admissions website has recently been revamped, adding interactive video, campus tours, and student testimonials.

Over 200,000 copies of the official Harvard College viewbook are printed each year;