Every spring we get the same question from families just starting an engagement: what should we be reading? Below is the working list our advisors hand to new families — books, essays, and one set of annual reports that genuinely change how a family thinks about the year ahead.
The first book on the list is always Jacques Steinberg's The Gatekeepers. It is dated in places — the admissions cycle it describes is older than most current applicants — but it remains the clearest account ever written of what actually happens inside a selective admissions office. Families who read it stop asking some of the questions we wish they would stop asking, and start asking better ones.
Paul Tough's The Years That Matter Most is the harder, more recent companion. Tough is honest about what the application process does to families, to high schools, and to the students themselves. We do not agree with every conclusion, but every advisor on our team has read it twice. Families who read it tend to make calmer, more deliberate decisions in 11th and 12th grade.
For the writing — and almost no one reads enough about this — we recommend two essays: William Zinsser's On Writing Well (the first three chapters are worth the entire book) and Verlyn Klinkenborg's Several Short Sentences About Writing. They are not college-essay books. That is the point. The students whose essays we end up most proud of are the ones who, somewhere along the way, started reading writing about writing.
The students whose essays we end up most proud of are the ones who, somewhere along the way, started reading writing about writing.
On the institutions themselves, we send families to the annual Common Data Set filings for every school on their list. The CDS is not a brochure. It is the same data set every school files with the federal government, and it tells you, in plain numbers, the admit rate, the testing range, the share of admitted students who enroll, and the breakdown of how scholarship money is actually distributed. It will answer most of the questions families try to answer by reading rankings.
Finally, the one annual report we read every fall: the National Association for College Admission Counseling's State of College Admission. It is dry. It is also the closest the industry has to a real, evidence-based account of what is shifting in any given year — testing policy, demographic trends, yield rates, financial-aid practice. Most of the loudest claims about admissions in any given year are settled or refuted in the back pages of this report.
What is not on this list, deliberately, is any single ranking. We do not assign U.S. News reading to families. We have nothing against rankings as one input among many, but a family that begins their reading with rankings tends to spend the next four years rearranging that list rather than understanding what each school actually does. The reading above is the antidote.
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