Paul A. Harris tracks overachievers. He combs the Auburn University campus for star students, athletes, community-service leaders. Kids with credentials. As associate director of national prestigious scholarships in Auburn’s University Honors College, he is responsible for identifying and developing students to compete for the coveted prizes known by the surnames they carry: Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Fulbright.
Mr. Harris appeals to classes and clubs; he pumps professors for names. “At any time on Auburn’s campus, there are three to five Rhodes candidates,” he says. He tries to find them.
When students come into his office, he says, he’s “like a nurse taking vital signs.” Major? GPA? Research? Extracurriculars? If they pass that bar, he can help them reach higher. Auburn hired Mr. Harris last year. Last week it announced its first Rhodes scholar since 1980.
Fellowship advising, once an Ivy League trade secret, has become a sophisticated, widespread profession. Membership in the National Association of Fellowships Advisors has grown more than tenfold, to 300, since its founding, in 1999. Advisers not only scout talent but also act as mentors, helping students, if not to land scholarships for graduate study, then at least to lift their ambitions and define their goals. At its conference last summer, the advising group featured sessions on how to nurture passionate commitment and cultivate “voice” in the scholarship essay.
Of course, everybody wants to win. Helping students score high-profile awards brings opportunities to them and kudos to their colleges. Morale and reputations rise, administrators say; prospective students, donors, even state lawmakers take note. But advisers can’t guarantee victory. And as their ranks have grown, so have debates about how far they should go to help students win.
The professional association adopted a code of ethics this year that defines its “core values” of integrity and fairness and makes clear that the advisers’ mission is not to choreograph students, but to counsel them. The prospect of triumphant news releases may motivate colleges to hire advisers, but the importance of their one-on-one counseling has itself become apparent, says Jane Morris, president of the association. “Our universities are recognizing the benefit to the students,” says Ms. Morris, who is director of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships at Villanova University, which added another adviser this year. “It’s something that has taken off.”
Scholarship-granting foundations, committed to merit and access, praise the strengthening of applications from a broader array of institutions. “We have fantastic scholars coming from back of beyond,” says Mary C. Denyer, assistant secretary and head of scholarship administration at the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission. “You know that it’s because there’s been someone at their school who’s identified them and said, Here are your opportunities.”
Elite institutions still dominate lists of top-scholarship winners. Harvard and Yale students have won a combined 52 Rhodes scholarships in the past 10 years, 16 percent of the total. But the Ivies’ share of winners has dipped over time, and each year, a first-time winner or two will break into the crowd. Augsburg College, in Minnesota, announced a Rhodes scholar last year; Truman State University, in Missouri, did last week. At the same time, advisers are monitoring a sea of scholarships that may not have the same cachet but still offer competition, recognition, and money.
‘The Right Students’
Without dedicated fellowship advisers, students are less likely to strive for postgraduate awards, or even know they exist. On some campuses, faculty members who serve as liaisons to various scholarship foundations have little time to promote opportunities, never mind to find and help students pursue them. Meanwhile, a college down the road may have started deliberately advising students. And winning. And putting up billboards on the interstate.
Considering its competitive advantage helped Western Washington University decide to open a fellowships office two years ago. “The existence of these offices on other campuses meant that other students were obviously getting guidance that the students at Western were not,” says Christine L. Compston, who directs the office there.
At each of the past three biennial national conferences of the advisers association, one-third of the members have said they were new to the field. Some have opened free-standing offices, commonly affiliated with undergraduate research, at their institutions. Others operate out of career centers or honors colleges. Wherever they sit, the advisers’ first priority is networking. Ambitious students have to know where to go, and faculty members where to send them.
At Auburn, Mr. Harris can’t possibly poke his head into every rehearsal room and research lab, and so he worries: “You never know if you’re getting all the right students.” That’s why he always wears a nametag. He wants students to recognize him and tell their friends, “That’s the guy we need to talk to.”
One student mentioned Mr. Harris’s name to Jordan D. Anderson, a senior who needed money for dental school. His vital signs were strong: biomedical sciences, 3.9 GPA, organic-chemistry research, two national championships in swimming. Can dental school wait? the adviser asked. What about the Rhodes? (Those scholarships, arguably the most prestigious postgraduate awards, send 32 American students a year to the University of Oxford.) Mr. Anderson was vaguely familiar with the Rhodes but felt Mr. Harris was just flattering him: “I thought, That’s really nice.”
But he thought twice, figuring that Mr. Harris knew his stuff, and discovered a master’s program in global health sciences at Oxford. He decided to go for it. The energetic Mr. Harris, an Auburn alumnus and political scientist, spent about 60 hours with Mr. Anderson this summer and fall. He edited three drafts of Mr. Anderson’s personal statement, helped him choose who would write his letters of recommendation, set up several individual and two panel interviews for practice, and organized a “mocktail” party in the private dining room of Auburn’s conference center to simulate the traditional evening event for Rhodes finalists.
Mr. Anderson—who, if not for Mr. Harris, wouldn’t have applied—was one of the 32 winners. “If I hadn’t met with him and been encouraged to go ahead,” he says, “I don’t think I would have.”
Some institutions seek out prospective winners more aggressively. Texas A&M University recently turned an institutional scholarship program into a pipeline for postgraduate awards. Campus officials had traditionally selected “university scholars” from all merit-aid recipients with GPA’s of at least 3.5 after their first semester; now applicants are given a list of 18 prestigious awards. “Identify the national scholarship(s) for which you are most likely to apply,” the application says, “and describe the reason for your interest.”
“Right off the bat they got you thinking,” says one of the university scholars, Ella J. Doerge, a senior majoring in genetics. Kyle E. Mox, national scholarship coordinator in the honors program, focuses on the chosen cohorts. Every semester the students participate in small seminars organized around hot topics like energy geopolitics, language wars, and eugenics. The discussions not only sharpen participants’ perspectives but also prepare them for rigorous applications and interviews. Ms. Doerge, a varsity swimmer, applied for the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships this year. She was a finalist for the Rhodes but was not selected, and plans to attend medical school instead.
Florida State University’s five-year-old Office of National Fellowships has developed “promotion plans” to identify candidates for each major scholarship, the earlier the better. “There has to be years’ worth of doing the right thing,” says Susan Blessing, a professor of physics who proposed the office to the provost.
D. Craig Filar, director of the two-person office, may help students choose an internship or study-abroad program or suggest an activity or language to study. But scholarships aren’t the primary driver, he says. “You don’t want to choose things to make yourself an attractive candidate. You want to do the things to enhance what you’re hoping to accomplish. And that, in turn, will make you a good candidate.”
All that striving can begin to change the campus culture. Mr. Filar overheard a freshman this year casually mention a foreign-affairs fellowship: “I think I’m going to apply for the Pickering,”
Florida State has enjoyed an enviable record in its office’s brief history: three Rhodes scholarships, three Trumans, three Goldwaters, 22 Fulbrights, and many other honors. The university’s only previous Rhodes scholar graduated in 1977. Nothing has changed but the infrastructure, says Mr. Filar. “It wasn’t that we didn’t have Rhodes-caliber students before.”
Too Much Help
Among fellowship advisers, “grooming” is a dirty word. One apocryphal adviser who wrote students’ Truman applications clearly crossed the line. But where is that line, exactly?
After years of discussion, the National Association of Fellowships Advisors adopted an ethics code that expects advisers to “encourage the intellectual autonomy” of applicants and to urge them to “self-assess their qualifications.” Each guideline implies the potential overreaching of a cutthroat competitor. But advisers aren’t competing, the code emphasizes; students are.
“All application materials,” it says, “shall be the sole and original work of the applicant.”
The Rhodes Trust is trying to ensure as much. Its application went online for the first time this year, with log-ins for students only. Advisers complained; they wanted log-ins, too. “I absolutely refused,” says Elliot F. Gerson, secretary of the American Rhodes Trust. (The Marshall Commission gives advisers log-ins but allows them only to look, not to make changes.)
All Rhodes applicants—indeed, most scholarship candidates—must pledge that their applications are their own work. But Mr. Gerson wonders what that means these days. He values fellowship advisers’ getting the word out to a large pool of students, yet he knows that they edit personal statements and send them to professors for further changes, resulting in final drafts that vary substantially from the originals. “Is that still the students’ work?” he says. “I don’t know.”
Mr. Mox, of Texas A&M, has felt the temptation to tinker. But when he sees the opportunity for a deft revision in an applicant’s essay, he stops. “I have a master’s degree in creative writing. I can do that,” he says. “This is a 20-year-old biochemistry major who can’t.”
Still, it’s tricky to offer such wide-ranging services without overreaching. A fellowship adviser might help a student choose an internship, introduce him to a research mentor, moderate dozens of discussion groups, edit several versions of his scholarship essay (and his professors’ letters of recommendation), and conduct a series of mock interviews. But the goal is to prepare, not to package him.
Preparation is valuable, says Tara Yglesias, deputy executive secretary of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. With a mentor’s help, Ms. Yglesias, a first-generation student at Syracuse University in the early 1990s, applied for and won a Truman. But packaging is detrimental, she says. “It’s up to us to make sure those kids don’t win.”
‘Better Than Therapy’
Playing down the importance of winning helps advisers and students see the value in simply striving for scholarships. Students not only learn to apply for grants, a useful skill, but also, through rigorous essay questions and interviews, think deeply about their ambitions and goals. Applying for postgraduate scholarships is “an educational enterprise,” according to the new ethics code.
“It’s better than therapy,” says Nona L. Charleston, director of nationally competitive scholarships at the University of Tulsa. Advisers across the country help students develop alternate plans. They rattle off the accomplishments of unsuccessful applicants who went on to open law practices or join the faculty of the Mayo Clinic.
Still, those kinds of narratives can be a hard sell in annual reports when top-level administrators are looking for numbers. “It’s actually part of my responsibility to make them all understand that this is about more than just winning the scholarships,” says Jane Morris, the adviser at Villanova. She tries to introduce deans to applicants who don’t advance in the competitions. And in reports, she and other advisers mention wins but highlight how many students they counsel and how many applied.
“Are the numbers really ever entirely out of our head? Of course not,” says Stephen C. Hill, associate director of the Office of Fellowships at Northwestern University. But putting them aside allows advisers to serve students better, he says. “If the students felt like they were being sized up like a piece of meat—'Can you win or not? And if not, why are you bothering me?'—we’d have no buzz.” Northwestern’s office has so much buzz on campus that its staff has grown to five.
Meanwhile, other institutions are venturing into the field. After-hours advisers at the College of St. Scholastica, in Minnesota, are lobbying for a full-time position. Mount Holyoke College recently advertised for a more exclusively dedicated adviser. At Grand Valley State University, in Michigan, a fellowship adviser will start this month.
Grand Valley’s immediate goal is helping students to aspire. “We were not doing well by the students who really were capable of getting these things,” says Jeffrey Chamberlain, director of the honors college at Grand Valley State.
But, he adds, “our president has his heart set on a Rhodes.” He hopes to have one within eight years.
