Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers taps one of our deepest fears: judgment. More specifically, it examines our fear of being judged by a small knot of faceless men sitting around a laminate conference table in cheap suits, evaluating our pasts and determining our futures based on incomplete evidence and the results of unpassable tests.

But Steinberg's book is no Kafka retread. Nor is it even fiction. Rather, The Gatekeepers belongs to the recent glut of books that examine the business of higher education, and (like Nicholas Lehmann's The Big Test) expose aspects of the system outside the ivory tower of teaching and research. With the growth of the business model in college administration, and the rising necessity and expense of higher education, the mysteries of the university have come under increasing scrutiny.

Steinberg, a national education reporter for The New York Times, sets out to illuminate the shadowy world of college admissions. His Castle is Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut; his faceless men the admissions staff. Like all books rooted in deep fears, though, Steinberg's has a message. He wants us to know that these bogeymen, these admissions officers, are actually awful nice folks.

Steinberg's method stands in contrast to those other classics of college-admissions lit: the U.S. News & World Report annual rankings, and advice tomes with titles like Getting In. He looks to put a human face on the admissions process; he does this by tracking a single admissions officer, Ralph Figueroa, at a single highly selective liberal arts school, through a full admissions season. Along the way, he details a half dozen cases, students applying to Wesleyan among other schools, as a benchmark for understanding the process.

This method provides the book's greatest strength, in its clarity and specificity, but also seems to ensure its weaknesses. Chief among them is, well, the perfection of all Steinberg surveys. Wesleyan itself, for instance, provides a pastoral idyll; the only apparent problem the campus has is its inconsistent architecture and a general need for power-washing. There are no tensions with the town; the teaching, we assume, is excellent (Steinberg never takes us into a Wesleyan classroom); even student dissent is tolerated, so long as the students restrict their graffiti to colored chalk.

Ralph, the admissions officer who serves as Steinberg's hero, likewise comes across as a middle-American PC paragon, unflaggingly cheerful, inexhaustibly conscientious and attractively multicultural. He charges across the landscape in a lime-green Saturn, recruiting minority students with excellent test scores; he discusses his commitment to minority education over a hamburger; he cracks stodgy jokes at the high schools he visits, and he reads every word of every application essay that crosses his desk.

The students Ralph passes judgment on -- their names unchanged by Steinberg, a factor that may explain their flawlessness -- cement the feeling of unreality. Julianna has near-perfect test scores, comes from an elite prep school and a multiracial background. Jordan dreams of the Ivy League and boasts a letter of recommendation touting his short stories from writer Richard Price. Even the black sheep shine -- Becca, with her high GPA and class presidency, admits to having eaten a pot brownie as a sophomore but took her punishment honorably. Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, has nothing on the class of 2004.

The Gatekeepers grew out of a series of articles in the Times; in its repetition of background information and inconsistencies in tone, that heritage shows. Each "character" gets introduced multiple times, and each chapter takes a different track in approaching its topic, switching abruptly from analysis of national trends in university recruiting to day-in-the-life anecdotes about the admissions process itself.

These day-in-the-life chapters are the best in the book. Once he dispenses with scene-setting and exposition, Steinberg shows a talent for transmitting information through anecdote, providing a clear picture and building a degree of suspense in his accounts of the Wesleyan admission committee deliberations or Ralph's 10-hour shifts of reading, punctuated by the mantra "read faster, say no."

Even more fascinating, though, is Steinberg's epilogue, which provides the book's only real hint at the cost of the admissions enterprise. Despite the perfection of Wesleyan and of this incoming class, fully half of Ralph's kids (whether at Wesleyan or other schools) wash out, unable to complete their freshman years. The unexamined implication indicts the pressure of competitive admissions: Having gained the prize of a spot at a place like Wesleyan, these ideal students are too burned out to deal with college. For all the ability and benevolence chronicled in The Gatekeepers, Steinberg closes with the barest hint of a fuller story -- one with less artificial struggles and more serious consequences than the game of admissions.

Jacques Steinberg will speak Tue., Sept. 17, 7 p.m., at the Friends Select School, 17th St. and Benjamin Franklin Parkway. For more information, call Michael Fox at Joseph Fox Bookshop, 215-563-4184.