The Last Bastion of Bolshevism

SOMEWHERE in the swampy backwoods of New Jersey, the world's last remaining Communist bureaucracy lurks. Its address is for a P.O. Box in Princeton, a move designed to give it a totally undeserved aura of academic legitimacy; in fact, it's in Lawrence Township.

The name of the tax-exempt beast is ETS, short for Educational Testing Service. ETS is responsible, if that is the word, for administering large gobs of the evil alphabet soup that you must take to get on with your educational career: PSAT, SAT, AP, GMAT, NTE, GRE. Most universities, or at least the ones you'd want to attend, make these tests a prerequisite to applying: no ETS, no education.

Everything that Marty Feldstein told you was wrong with monopolies is wrong with ETS. It's inefficient. It doesn't give a damn about the consumer. It makes mistakes, egregiously and regularly. It's ridiculously priced (Fifty bucks for a GRE, 10 more for the ETS-published books you need to study properly). It's faceless. It's Orwellian.

OK, OK. No denying it--this personal. ETS has not been nice to my family.

My brother mailed his GRE application late because a) he's an idiot and b) there was a mail strike in Canada. ETS refused to register him, or even to send extra standby books to his test site. So he's basically not going to grad school next year.

I sent my GRE application in on time, despite the mail strike, but they got me, too. I bubbled in everything just fine, used a brand spanking new No. 2 pencil, and paid my money, which ETS gladly accepted. But they didn't give me a test site. Not at Harvard. Nor MIT. Nor Boston University. Nor anywhere else in Boston. Nor in the Boston area.

At last check, the only thing ETS would tell me was that I'd get a seat within 125 miles of Harvard. What a relief.

THE CHEERFUL, FACELESS bureaucrat at ETS tried to make me feel better by assuring me that my problem was not unique to Massachusetts. It was also happening in Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland, New York, Florida--at which point, numbed, I made her stop.

"So how many other people did you do this to?"

Finally realizing her indiscretion, she clammed up like Clarence Thomas faced with a question about Roe. Can't tell you that, sir; can't even estimate. Further queries got the same kind of neither-confirm-nor-deny blather one usually associates with Kremlin cronies asked questions about Finland.

Then there's the 125-mile rule. Fine print says that you're guaranteed to get a seat within 125 miles of your first choice registration site. (This tickled the funny bone of the jolly Bolshie bureaucrat, no cartographer she, who told me they had once sent someone to Baltimore. Hyuk, hyuk.)

This is, I am told, a more common occurrence in Europe, which I suppose means you could wind up in another country. Bring a No. 2 pencil and a passport. Villagers in Brussels bolt their doors, as waves of Germans with extraordinary analytical scores flood in for a few gruelling hours of bubbling.

The 125 miles is in itself a revealing number, obviously cooked up by the ETS legal departments with some impressive foul-ups in mind. Of course, it is absurd to expect someone in Boston to write an important test at 9 a.m. in Amherst. (ETS will not, needless to say, give you a free 50 points for getting up at 5 a.m., or, even more needless to say, pay for your hotel or train fare.)

One hundred twenty-five miles just happens, as it turns out, to be the blast radius of the average Soviet ICBM.

ETS PLEADS that it has to process 50,000 applications a year. So what? The Harvard College admissions office copes with nearly as many, and while you may get a thin letter from them explaining that you're not a steroid-addled jock or a ninth-generation legacy named Winthrop, they won't simply fail to process your application.

Or insist that you take a road trip.

Gary Bass '92 needs a ride to Seattle.

I have met the enemy and it is ETS.