n a gray November morning, the day after he took his SAT's, Reuben Quansah and 42 other black and Hispanic high school students from New York, Washington and Philadelphia boarded a bus at the Port Authority Terminal and headed toward Bucknell University, three hours away in Lewisburg, Pa.
Reuben had worked hard preparing for the tests, carrying his study guides everywhere, reviewing 3,000 vocabulary words, reading Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" because his English teacher said it included every single SAT word. But with the test behind him, he was looking forward with particular enthusiasm to the trip to Bucknell.
Reuben is one of three New York City students whom The New York Times followed from the spring of junior year to the spring of senior year, as they navigated the college admissions process, which consumes and distorts the final year of high school. The others are Jed Resnick from the Collegiate School, an elite Manhattan private school, and Gerta Xhelo, an Albanian immigrant who attends Grover Cleveland High School in Queens.
Reuben had started with only a sketchy knowledge of the admissions process, but soon realized it offered enormous opportunities if he was able to seize them. So while Gerta dreaded every step along the way, Reuben came to relish his own gathering success.
When he got to Bucknell, for an invitation-only minority recruitment weekend, Reuben alone did not demean the distant, unfamiliar campus. In his tour group, some students made fun of the local radio stations — country, country and more country. One girl peevishly asked the guide, "Are we the first black people you've ever seen?" Reuben edged away from the group.
Instead, he bombarded the guide with questions about the engineering programs. She didn't know much, but her boyfriend was an engineer and she offered to introduce them. Reuben also changed his dorm assignment so he could room with an engineering student. They stayed up all night talking technology.
He visited the engineering building, open around the clock to serve students who must take 30 hours of course work a semester, instead of the 14 for liberal arts. He introduced himself to faculty members and was impressed by their friendliness.
"They really went out of their way," Reuben said.
By the end of the weekend, Bucknell was at the top of Reuben's list.
Reuben had done everything he could to improve his prospects. Over the summer, he had an internship in the information technology department at Bellevue Hospital Center, where he divided his time between computer networking classes and helping the tech staff service 4,000 computers.
He also took part in a weekly reading group at the Archbishop's Leadership Program, where handpicked parochial school students study black history, leadership and study skills. A demanding book a week, including "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe and "Five Plays" by Langston Hughes, is more than most teenagers attempt in the lazy days of summer. Especially with a dictionary nearby and the mandate to look up every unfamiliar word — gerrymander, acquiesce, facade, incumbent.
Before the SAT's, his mother, Maureen Dowouna-Nortey, even offered a blessing in the Ewe dialect of her native land, Ghana.
Neither work nor prayer did much to lift his scores — to 970, from 920 in the spring of his junior year at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx. This would be disqualifying at a first-rate engineering school, including Bucknell's, were Reuben not such a poised and purposeful minority candidate. But college admissions officers say they generally view the SAT's of poor or nonwhite students through a different prism than those of a privileged boy like Jed.
The bias of these tests has long been a subject of debate, reaching full boil recently when the head of the California state university system proposed eliminating them as an admissions requirement. But while the movers and shakers argue about the SAT's, closer to the ground things are informally taking care of themselves.
At Bucknell, for instance, the dean of admissions, Mark Davies, said that average SAT scores there are 1,280, but that appealing minority candidates are not held to that standard, or even close to it. "Tests just don't do it for them," Mr. Davies said. "Tests don't measure motivation."
So Reuben was very much in the running at Bucknell, but lacked one of Jed's options. While Jed applied early decision to improve his chances at Yale, that was never a possibility for Reuben, as it rarely is for students who need scholarships. Only with multiple acceptances, and thus competing financial aid packages, can disadvantaged teenagers cut the best deal.
Still, his counselor, Bill Lessa, knew that Reuben would be prized by colleges seeking to increase minority enrollment. The city's parochial schools are a popular recruiting venue for such diversity programs. With Hayes's tuition of $3,750, the thinking goes, these boys are prescreened: from good homes with parents willing to sacrifice for education.
When Mr. Lessa wrote Reuben's recommendation, he wanted to stress that this was a young man without perceived inner-city liabilities. Only a deft touch prevented racial stereotyping. Mr. Lessa highlighted Reuben's "work ethic and time management skills" and his "remarkably consistent social behavior."
But Reuben was his own best salesman. There was no recruitment trip he didn't eagerly take, unless it conflicted with an important physics lab or his advanced Cisco computer training. His mother rearranged her work schedule as a nurse-technician at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx to join him at Lafayette, where parents were put up in hotels and students in dorms. This time, Reuben roomed with a divinity student and spent the night discussing his faith.
But Reuben's methodical progress was nearly derailed by a 17-day strike of teachers and guidance counselors at Hayes just as he was putting together his applications in December. His mother was furious. Why was she paying all this money if her son wasn't in school? For a few days, Reuben was at loose ends. But he quickly created a routine for himself.
