Jim McCoy imagines a nightmare in which every college class is filled with valedictorians.

Good test takers, strong essayists, wily mathematicians, they'd all be the cream of their strong, suburban school districts.

But they'd be too much of a good thing. They'd probably think alike, ask the same questions, contribute the same kinds of work, he says.

There'd be no one to test the prevailing winds, no one to weigh theory against a less advantaged reality.

In short, no one like Jim McCoy.

McCoy, associate vice president for enrollment management at Xavier University, was raised and educated in the rural South. He remembers asking a high school guidance counselor and his mother the same question: "Am I going to college?"

His mother, a widowed waitress, was blunt. "Of course not. College is for rich people."

He became a bricklayer's apprentice, enlisted in the Air Force and married at age 18. He sold clothes at a store, but the itch for college wouldn't go away.

"The guy I worked for was a year younger than I, but (he) had a college education."

McCoy went to community college, took courses he missed in high school and worked full time. He finished undergraduate work at age 32 in 1980.

Fighting the profile

Now McCoy is 55, with a Ph.D. in agriculture. At Xavier, he struggles against an encroaching sameness in the student body by using affirmative action and other tools to prop open college doors for students like him, kids who don't "meet the profile."

"I was a poor kid from Appalachia. You are what you are. You teach what you're taught. You don't forget where you came from."

The Supreme Court may not care about that. In two cases involving the University of Michigan, the court is weighing whether affirmative action for racial minorities means illegal discrimination against whites.

Whether the University of Michigan wins or loses, McCoy says, selective schools like Xavier must tend to their missions to "build a mosaic" of experiences for students.

McCoy likens it to recruiting a piccolo player for an orchestra. You look for the person who'll complete the ensemble with a different voice and skill. You don't just add to the violins and trombones because more of them are available.

Overwhelming numbers

Over McCoy's 23 years in college enrollment - at Xavier, Miami University in Oxford, and at Pennsylvania State University - he has seen thousands of applications each year get whittled to a few hundred admissions. At Penn State, he says, some 35,000 applications would produce 4,000 freshman.

Plenty "fit the profile" numerically, he says.

"High test taskers, high GPA folks, usually come from suburban white neighborhoods. Of course. That's where most of the best schools are.

"So, you do a calculation of how you want to shape a class, to bring in folks not normally in the pipeline, young people from rural America, racial minorities, immigrants, international students, students who are the first generation in their family going to college, Appalachians, talented athletes, musicians."

Most colleges, he says, don't employ the strict numbers calculations under fire in the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions. Most do, however, use a "composite" technique, taking lots of things into consideration beyond test scores, but not assigning points or values, he says.

But even that is being challenged in the case against Michigan's law school.

No matter what, McCoy says, high school students shouldn't hear what he did: "You can't go to college. It's only for ... " You fill in the blank.

E-mail damos@enquirer.com or phone 768-8395