Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Frank Bruni for The New York Times. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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IF the gatekeepers at Davidson College had judged the teenager by her ACT score, she probably wouldn’t have gotten in. It was 25 out of a possible 36, and more than three-quarters of the students at Davidson, a liberal-arts school in North Carolina with about 1,800 undergraduates and an acceptance rate of just over 20 percent, do better than that.

Her grades at a small charter school in the Boston area didn’t carry the day. I was allowed to look at her application, with her name redacted, and what I saw was an impressive but unexceptional mix of A’s and B-pluses, along with an impressive but unexceptional array of extracurricular activities much like any ambitious high school senior’s.

I had to read deeper, as the admissions officers at Davidson had done, to understand why they felt so strongly about her, and to feel that way myself. I had to notice details embedded in her letters of recommendation and mentioned fleetingly in bits of personal information that she’d provided.

She’d been reared by a single mother. She had a 6-year-old brother. And for the last few years, she’d spent three nights a week making his dinner and getting him to bed while her mom was at work, earning an income so modest that the teenager met the federal requirements for receiving free lunch at school.

“Look at what she’s juggling,” Chris Gruber, Davidson’s dean of admissions, said as we chatted about her last week. In the context of those stresses, her Advanced Placement classes shimmered brighter; so did her volunteer work.

And though her high school wasn’t chockablock with counselors, she’d had the good sense to read up on Davidson and, in her application, lay out a mix of cogent, sophisticated reasons that it was right for her.

“She researched the place perfectly,” Gruber marveled, and, in all likelihood, “was doing it on her own.” Everything about her suggested maturity, independence, determination. Forget that ACT. She was a wager that Davidson was willing to make, and she was granted early admission to the class of 2020, which will begin studies next fall.

There has been a crescendo lately in talk about how to conduct college admissions in a manner that brings greater socioeconomic diversity to campuses, making them richer places to learn and better engines of social mobility.

I had extensive conversations with administrators at three very different schools that have made such diversity a priority and were willing to discuss specific applicants whose mettle became evident only upon a closer consideration of circumstances. The administrators explained how such an examination is done.

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