C. W. Henderson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR - C. W. Henderson was named by USA Today as one of Six Who Made a Difference, and he is an author at Penguin Group and at Prentice Hall Press writing about higher education and college admissions. He is executive editor of Ivy League Week at Thomson Reuters, and executive editor of Education Letter at the Wall Street Journal Professional Edition.

He is president of educational publisher ScholarlyMedia and its imprint ScholarlyEditions, which publishes 2,000 reference books annually. He is a PhD candidate, has an undergraduate degree in journalism, and a graduate degree in English.

Henderson has been an international educational researcher specializing in college admissions for more than a decade, including doctoral research in both the United States and the UK. As a researcher and writer focusing on Ivy League and elite college admissions, he has edited more than one hundred articles on this topic.

BOOK DESCRIPTION - According to the book, Open the Gates to the Ivy League, twenty colleges ranked in the top twenty-five by U.S. News have back doors for college admissions. Author C. W. Henderson researched the top fifty ranked U.S. national universities, and reported the findings in the book.

Henderson explained that a back door is an alternate gateway providing admission to an undergraduate degree program, and is different from the usual application process, such as the "common app" method. "The very foundation of the back gateway process rests entirely upon the concepts of equity, fairness, and opportunity," he said. "This now means that students rejected by top colleges can learn how to gain entrance through the back door, giving them a 'plan B' for getting into the Ivy League and other top colleges," Henderson said, adding that all Ivy League colleges except Princeton have back doors for undergraduate degree admissions. Some colleges have as many as three back doors for gaining admission.

The book provides details for each college back gateway, including how to apply, housing and tuition. What all back gateways have in common is that they take students to an undergraduate degree just like the front entrance does. The book offers details on the back gateways of seven universities of the Ivy League proper, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, and Brown, as well as an additional sixteen of the so-called "second tier" of the top fifty elite universities, plus Oxford and Cambridge, the top colleges of the U.K. "This is a new contribution to educational research, and will not only give students and parents a 'plan B', but if rejected by a college, will provide an immediate way to again apply. Some of the back gateways in this book are virtually unknown, while others are just underused," Henderson said.

At his Open the Gates blog at www.openthegates.com/blog he has updates on college admissions including back gateways to top colleges; also at openthegates.com you will find daily news about higher education and college admissions.