Conning Harvard

This book manages to be both engrossing and exasperating. Let’s start with the positives. Zauzmer’s meticulous research shines through, offering a detailed look into Harvard’s admissions process—a subject I find particularly intriguing as a former dean of admissions and current independent college counselor. The intricate details of Adam Wheeler’s scams and forgeries are undeniably fascinating.

However, the narrative falls flat because Wheeler is portrayed entirely from the outside. His voice, which is crucial to understanding his motivations, is glaringly absent. Wheeler’s actions—risky, baffling, and almost guaranteed to lead to his downfall—cry out for psychological exploration. While Zauzmer paints him as merely deceitful, his behavior seems more pathological to me.

What’s particularly irksome is Zauzmer’s uncritical reverence for Harvard. She concludes the book by suggesting that Harvard’s relentless pursuit of Wheeler—a $30-billion institution punishing a student who embarrassed it—is somehow a noble stand for truth that benefits society. That’s laughable. Adam Wheeler is not emblematic of dishonesty among college applicants. His case is an extreme anomaly, not a symbol. Comparing it to society’s broader issues is as absurd as suggesting John Wayne Gacy represents modern societal norms.

There’s also a tone of arrogance throughout the book that I find unsettling. Zauzmer is condescending toward Bowdoin, Wheeler’s first college, referring to it as lacking in prestige—even though Bowdoin consistently ranks among the top colleges in the U.S. She also fixates on Brunswick, ME, describing its climate as "uncomfortably arctic," though its average annual temperature is only slightly lower than that of Cambridge, MA. These comments feel unnecessary and dismissive.

Even more troubling is Harvard’s initial failure to question Wheeler’s impossibly stellar credentials. His over-the-top achievements should have raised red flags immediately. While some schools, including Yale, rejected him, the book glosses over this. It’s astounding that Harvard’s admissions team could overlook the fact that

Wheeler’s excessively convoluted writing style was more parody than prose—hardly a match for the education Harvard prides itself on providing.
Additionally, the fact that Wheeler, an above-average student at a relatively typical public high school, managed to earn mostly B/B+ grades at Harvard before he resorted to cheating raises uncomfortable questions about the rigor of Harvard’s curriculum. If someone with credentials far below those of top-tier applicants can perform adequately, how challenging is the education, really?

But above all, what lingers is the human tragedy that Zauzmer fails to fully explore. Wheeler is not portrayed as a complete person but reduced to a caricature of a criminal. What drove this seemingly ordinary adolescent to commit such extensive fraud for so long? There’s no evidence that he was a fundamentally bad person. Instead, his story seems like a sad tale of personal unraveling. I feel for him and his family and wish the book had delved deeper into his humanity rather than distilling his life into a simplistic morality tale. This is not the symbolic narrative the author wants it to be; it is, at its core, a story of a troubled young man whose complexities remain unexplored.