The Right Stuff: Getting in at N.C. State

A unique admissions system helps NC State balance the limited number of slots in its freshman class with its land-grant mission to serve the state. When students apply for admission, they must choose a college. Their choice could make the difference between getting in or not.

Published in NC State magazine, Summer 2005

Parents file into the Withers Hall auditorium one Saturday in February with the somber air of jurors returning from deliberation. This is just an information session for freshman applicants and their families at the College of Design. But try using the word “just” with 50 parents who know that at that moment, down the street at Brooks Hall, their 17-year-old babies are fighting for a spot in the fall freshman class.

Jackie Quick and her husband, Clyde, have come from Burlington to support their son, Brian, as he interviews for admission to the graphic design program. Clyde is cool, but Jackie is leaning forward in her chair, her knees bouncing gently.

“I’m nervous,” she says. “Brian’s nervous. I heard there were only 40 spots for graphic design this year.”

Cap in the Air

Nothing is as simple as a percentage when it comes to deciding the personality of a campus

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, March/April 2004

Frenchie was a showgirl. She danced on a drum in Memorial Hall and wore the closest thing to a bikini that Jerry Marder ‘44 had ever seen. Little grass skirts lilting about beyond his imagination, right here in North Carolina, right here on this campus, right before his living eyes. Of the many things that bolted through his mind as he listened to the thrum of bongo drums, Marder thought this: Thank God for Richard Adler ‘43. Lovely place, that New York.

Sixty years later, Marder still recalls the days of Sound and Fury, a student theater group that produced quarterly musicals and entertainment on campus, as one of a handful of cultural experiences he might never have known if not for the infusion of non-North Carolinians at UNC in the 1940s. The details are a bit fuzzy – Adler, a native New Yorker who became a Broadway composer, was more of a playwright in college than the award-winning songwriter he became. But to Marder, out-of-state classmates such as Adler and Sound and Fury’s president, Atlantan Ben Hall ‘43, with their worldly views and talents and their post-collegiate success, were educators in a league with his own professors, no less formative on his life than the war that was being fought a continent away.

“I left Asheville,” Marder says, “and entered the world when I came to Chapel Hill.”

Governer on Guard

Gaston Caperton overcame dyslexia to become a millionaire and rise to West Virginia’s highest office. Now he leads the venerable College Board into a new century – and, he hopes, a new relevancy – on the Web.

Published in Carolina Alumni Review, November/December 2000

 

 

 

 

He is needlessly narrow for a man of such wide ambitions. Gaston Caperton has a tall, thin frame, but he does not possess it the way most of us accept our builds and carry them with us for the lot of our days. He lives outside the boundaries of his trunk’s long, straight, economic lines, propelled by a mind restless for accomplishment. Meanwhile, his limbs are left to catch up, discombobulated and noodly – a leg crooked at the knee and propped on a table here, a stray hand probing the fleece of gray hair as though by accident. His brown eyes are stubbornly squinty. Even the ashy circles and lines on his 60-year-old face contend with his tinny voice like a haggard pugilist backed into yesterday’s corner.

Cross currents, and crosses to bear. So strong that they make it both possible and impossible to believe Caperton has been a two-term governor of West Virginia and a millionaire. Now, as president of the College Board – the nonprofit organization that has long struck fear in the hearts of high schoolers with its SAT and Advanced Placement tests – he confronts the opposing ebbs and flows of his life story most poignantly, sitting before a table of books in his Lincoln Square office in New York.

Just the thought of reading in a spotlight challenges his nerves like nothing else.

“If somebody came in here today and pulled one of these books off this table, and asked you to read it, you would do that with great confidence and it would sound great,” says Caperton, who was diagnosed with a “reversal reading” problem in the fourth grade. “But I would be scared when you gave me the book, and I’d be scared when I read it aloud. Still today.”

The disorder has been both his bane and his blessing.

“I have never thought of myself as very smart,” Caperton wrote in an essay for his high school alumni magazine in 1996. “My dad…taught me to read, word by word. We got up early every morning, and I sat at the foot of his bed and learned how to hear the words, see the words, spell the words, read the words, and understand what they mean. Ten new words every day.”

“A lot of things were very difficult for me,” Caperton says today. “But I worked very hard, and when you’re able to overcome those things, you develop traits that help you throughout life. And those are advantages to you.”

Of course, the poetic irony nearly drips from the story line. The College Board – a creation of Ivy League universities that once were populated only by graduates of New England’s boarding schools, chooses a man who battled dyslexia – attended a public university and became a popular education governor in a state that often is known solely by its economic bleak holes, to lead it into its 100th year. When you add to the scenario the recurring controversies over the SAT – pick your peccadillo: relevancy, racial discrimination, economic bias, disability unfairness – the choice of the first College Board president not to come from academia becomes even more interesting.

But Caperton’s selection in July 1999 wasn’t about poetry or poster-boys for over-achievement, or even perfecting the SAT’s mechanics. It was about the bottom line.