A Year Inside College Admissions: An Author Talk with Jeff Selingo

Spend an hour with bestselling author Jeff Selingo, who immersed himself in the world of admissions for a year to answer the question on the minds of teenagers and their parents: how do colleges select their freshman class?  

The result is his most recent book, Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020 by the New York Times. For the book, Jeff was embedded in three admissions offices — the University of Washington, Emory University, and Davidson College — and follows a group of high-school seniors through the process and players behind the scenes, including the marketers, the financial-aid consultants, and the rankers.

In this conversation, Jeff will dispel the entrenched notions of how to compete and win at the admissions game, reveal why families have much to gain by broadening their notion of what qualifies as a “good” college, and explain how the pandemic impacts admissions.