Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette Lofty mailings from the University of Pittsburgh's honors college -- along with a full scholarship -- helped the university land Kansan Justin Walker. Click photo for larger image. Related coverage College choices: Some find far horizons more alluring ... with Web-only audio. Online graphic: Some of the criteria that students used when selection a college or university. Online graphic: A map of the U.S. showing where students attended college. Home and Away: Part One College-bound kids don't stray far from home Some schools offer students a bigger boost than others Five students, five dreams, none the same Online graphic: See a graphic that shows more information about the colleges selected by Western Pennsylvania high school graduates in 2005. Web only / Where they go: School-by-school results of Post-Gazette study Web only / Trivia: Can you place these schools in the right states? Chat Online Join authors Eleanor Chute and Bill Schackner for a live online discussion about this series from 1 to 2 p.m. tomorrow. You may log-in a half hour before the session to post questions in advance or join the chat while it is in progress. Background "Who Gets In?" is a Post-Gazette report on the college admissions system, examining some of the factors shaping successful applications and including in-depth observations and advice from college admissions officers.

There is talk of planting Justin Chalker's name on a highway sign in Meade, Kan., pop. 1,600, to celebrate the farming town's first Rhodes Scholar.

If that happens, there won't be room to tell the most curious part of the story: How did a teen planning to study in his home state end up 1,200 miles away in Pittsburgh, on a campus he had so little interest in that he tossed the school's first brochure in the trash?

What was it about the University of Pittsburgh's persistent mailings that seduced him? Why did his worth in scholarship dollars grow exponentially the farther he got from Kansas?

That Pitt even found him would seem a long shot. Its recruiters don't get within 200 miles of Meade -- a place where fewer than one in five young adults holds a bachelor's degree -- nor did the university send so much as a pamphlet to his high school.

Mr. Chalker proved to be an academic superstar. The fact he blossomed at Pitt and not at Yale or Harvard was a coup. But it also points to something often overlooked in college admissions: For all of its high-stakes calculation, much of the process turns on serendipity.

Grades, standardized test scores, income and family connections certainly influence where a student enrolls.

But so do other, arbitrary factors like how close a student's high school is to an interstate, how easily an out-of-state recruiter can fly into his hometown and -- in Mr. Chalker's case -- whether a school in a far-off state happens to be buying names of high achievers in Kansas.

It wasn't glossy campus photos that set him on a path ending in a full scholarship and a reserved medical-school slot. Rather, it was appeals from Pitt's honors college, steeped in lofty phrases such as "intellectual journey" and "life above the neck," that slowly won him over. They were capped off with a densely worded letter that even its author, Alec Stewart, dean of the college, admitted violates every marketing rule.

The message resonated with Mr. Chalker, then 17, who quarterbacked his high school football team, had perfect grades and a 1480 SAT. "It was very persuasive," he said.

Still, another teenager might read those same words, cringe and say, "Oh, please!"

That's because college admissions is an odd mix of science and luck, of data mining and personal connections, all focused on fickle teens who sometimes are swayed more by school colors and salad-bar offerings than by class size or prestigious faculty.

"It's not a terribly rational exercise. A lot of it is sheep mentality, because lots of kids want to go where other kids they know are going," said Christopher Small, a higher-education marketing consultant in Connecticut who spent three decades in college admissions.

"An awful lot of kids in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota wouldn't touch the East Coast with a 10-foot pole," he said. Northeasterners, he added, have their own hang-ups about the Midwest and South, even if a school like Hendrix College near Little Rock, Ark., claims six Rhodes Scholars.

"Mom says, 'Gee, I don't want Max in Bismarck. That's a long poke. How are we going to get there for parents' day?'" Mr. Small said. "There's not a lot of social cachet to going to Arkansas to college."

It is no surprise that half of the 14,000 Pennsylvanians who enroll as freshmen out of state land nearby in New York, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia, in that order, according to federal data.

When students do go farther away, preferences emerge that can't be explained entirely by distance.

Few Pennsylvanians choose North and South Dakota yet more venture farther off to Montana and Hawaii. They prefer Arizona to neighboring New Mexico, North Carolina over South Carolina, and Vermont over New Hampshire.

As they sift through applications, admissions officials in Pennsylvania sometimes wonder whether chunks of their own state have fallen into a black hole.

Muhlenberg College in Allentown, which attracts students from three dozen states and 12 foreign countries, hasn't sent a recruiter to a high school in metropolitan Pittsburgh in a decade. It used to make exhaustive swings through the state's second largest city but found it had better luck in Portland, Maine; Florida; and Fairfield County, Conn.

"I can't put my finger on it. It's one of those things where you scratch yourself on the head and say, 'Gee, we ought to be doing better here,' " said Chris Hooker-Haring, Muhlenberg's dean of admission and financial aid.

Other recruiters say it's hard coaxing Pittsburghers east of the Allegheny Mountains. An analysis of State System of Higher Education data supports that.

Of students from Philadelphia and contiguous counties who enroll as freshmen at one of the system's 14 state-owned universities, 25 percent choose campuses in the western half of the state. But curiously, Pittsburghers don't go east. Less than 2 percent from Allegheny County do so.

They, in effect, bypass hot majors such as biotechnology, computer security and pharmaceutical product development, offered only at campuses in Eastern Pennsylvania.

It's not just arbitrary decisions by students that affect enrollment patterns.

Consider how colleges build their freshman class.

They set out, in theory at least, to scour the entire 50 states. But that's not easy for a school with maybe a dozen recruiters and a limited travel budget.

So they make educated guesses about whom to approach and whom to bypass by purchasing data -- at 28 cents or so a name from sources like the College Board -- on hundreds of thousands of high school juniors. The lists are sorted by attributes that include grade-point average, career interest, religion, ethnicity and ZIP code.

By tracking who inquires, applies and enrolls each year, schools draw conclusions about their chances to snag, say, an Asian-American student from Mt. Lebanon who scores at least 1400 on the SAT, plays soccer and likes accounting.

If a ZIP code historically does not provide a college with suitable prospects, it could affect not only a student's odds of getting mail from there but even how seriously an initial inquiry is taken.

And when it comes to the odds of being wooed face to face by a Big 10 recruiter from another state, a town's size can mean more than a student's grades.

A recruiter flying into Pittsburgh is less likely to spend time driving to Clarion County if he can stay closer in at larger, more affluent high schools that yield higher densities of suitable prospects.

"If you're not an athlete, it's very unlikely that you are going to be visited at a small, rural school by anyone other than the schools in your state, and not all of them," said Allen Meadors, chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

"You can skip over a lot of Ohio, Illinois and the West Virginia area and go to St. Louis, Chicago, Kansas City and the Twin Cities," said Kurt Thiede, Bucknell University's vice president for enrollment management. "Those are the areas where populations would be more interested in, or predisposed to, national institutions versus regional institutions."

Yet for all the precision, there are surprises: Why is Allegheny College, which draws mainly from Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York, seeing an uptick in interest from Arizona and Wisconsin, states it rarely visits?

Likewise, Ohio University is baffled by Texas. "We're up nine applications," said Dave Garcia, Ohio U.'s director of undergraduate admission. "Why? I don't know. We don't do anything in Texas."

To schools out to broaden the mix of their freshman class, it may be especially true that all "A's" are not equal.

A Montana resident will have an edge over equally qualified students in New York if a campus there puts a premium on geography, said Rob Sheinkopf, director of enrollment management at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, under the Illinois Board of Higher Education. An Ivy League school could decide it wants no more than five students from the same high school -- bad news if your child is the sixth-most-attractive prospect.

To change the odds of where students will enroll, some schools will ante up more merit aid, slash prices and take other risks.

For instance, Pittsburgh teens are likely to get mail in the coming months asking them to consider an unusual destination -- Vermillion, S.D. It is home to the University of South Dakota, flagship research campus in a state so hungry for out-of-state students it has begun offering Pennsylvanians lower tuition -- about $3,800 a year -- than they would pay as resident students on public campuses here.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Vice Chancellor Jackie Clark greets Shaler High School juniors Karyn Kelly, left, and Lisa Huber, center, while representing the University of North Carolina at Pembroke during the Pittsburgh National College Fair. Click photo for larger image.

Billboards in Pittsburgh for the University of North Carolina at Pembroke might strike some as out of place.

But the school doesn't think so. It and other North Carolina colleges view their chances of wooing Pennsylvanians as unusually good, partly because family beach vacations and relatives who relocate there raise the odds a Pennsylvania student can be won over by touring the campus.

But other schools play down their locations, like Alderson-Broaddus College, which deleted references to Philippi, W.Va. from its college fair banners this year. "If we don't put the words West Virginia anywhere on the table banner, or table top display, people are more apt to walk up," said Kim Klaus, director of admissions.

Colleges know the importance of cracking into the limited universe of schools liable to be on the radar of students at a particular high school. When that happens, even a high school hundreds of miles away can become a prime feeder, as Carnegie Mellon University found over the years in New York City.

Ten percent of Stuyvesant High School's 800 graduates apply to Carnegie Mellon, and the 25 or so who enroll make the math-and-science-focused school in Manhattan a bigger source of freshmen for it than any other high school -- even ones in Pennsylvania.

Occasionally, colleges get help raising their profile from unlikely sources.

A private educational consultant in Portland, Maine, took a liking to Susquehanna University after visiting campus in 1998 and since has directed dozens of Maine teenagers to the small campus in Selinsgrove, Snyder County, said director of admissions Chris Markle.

Washington & Jefferson College's swim team gives the school unexpected visibility in some Chicago-area high schools, and its water polo team helps in the state of California. The squad "even plays matches out there. Guess why?" said Al Newell, vice president for enrollment.

Even a highway ramp can help. Marietta College in southeast Ohio insists that easy interstate access has produced more students from Cleveland over the years than would be expected, given the 165-mile trek.

But what's on a road also can scare away prospects.

Touring Juniata College's tranquil campus in Huntingdon County won over sophomore Tommy Beideman, 20. But the ride up on Route 522 was almost too much for the Philadelphia suburbanite.

"I don't know how many cows I saw, but it was definitely more than I was comfortable with," he said.

Pittsburgh seemed just as alien to Mr. Chalker, raised in southwestern Kansas.

He was one of 35 seniors in a high school of 150 students. He liked science and figured he would land at the University of Kansas.

Pitt knew him only as one of 50,000 purchased names belonging to honors-college-eligible students with PSAT scores of 1360 or higher, said Betsy Porter, director of admissions and financial aid. Pitt mailed him material over several months and would have stopped had he not responded by Thanksgiving of his senior year.

In Kansas and neighboring Nebraska, he could garner only a few thousand dollars of tuition aid, said his mother, Belinda Chalker. But the University of Notre Dame offered $20,000 a year, and things got more generous farther east.

He was impressed when he and his parents toured the Oakland campus, which has 17,000 undergraduates. It was surely no accident that the school invited him to sit in on a 10-student composition class in the Austrian Room, an exquisite 18th-century-styled classroom with ceiling murals and crystal chandeliers.

Pitt covered his tuition upon accepting him, and Mr. Chalker later landed the school's most competitive merit-only prize: a Chancellor's Scholarship, worth more than $100,000 in tuition, room and board.

Mr. Chalker, who studies chemistry and the history and philosophy of science, did not disappoint. In November, his selection as a Rhodes Scholar made Pitt one of only three public universities in America this year to have a student receive the prestigious honor, which includes two or three years of paid study at the University of Oxford in England.

Mr. Chalker said his decision to attend Pitt was cemented by the full scholarship, but he would not have looked at Pitt were it not for those lofty and initially unwanted mailings, which over time changed everything.

"A bit serendipitous," he said. "It was a bit of chance, I guess."