Correction Appended: This story misreported the number of Yale students who won Rhodes Scholarships this year. Yale students won five.

If you have your heart set on becoming a Rhodes Scholar, the first thing you should do is transfer to Yale.

As soon as you arrive in New Haven, you'll want to go directly to the Yale office of International Education and Fellowship Programs, located at 55 Whitney Ave., New Haven, Conn.

Once you get there you should be in good shape.

Don't worry too much about the application; the Yale advisors will take care of almost everything. Just sit back and let them handle it. Before long, you'll be ready to join the scores of other Yale students who have won the most prestigious scholarship in the world.

It is not that it is impossible to win a Rhodes Scholarship if you're applying from the University of Michigan - it happened as recently as 2005. It's just that if you go to Harvard or Yale, your chances of doing it are much better.

This year, students from Yale took five of the 32 Rhodes Scholarships handed out annually. Applicants from Harvard won six.

The University has not had a student win the Rhodes since 2005, when Joseph Jewell, a physics graduate student who had attended the California Institute of Technology as an undergrad, won one. That year, Harvard students took five Rhodes Scholarships.

Is it the University's fault or are our applicants being pushed aside because of the University's sub-Ivy reputation?

"The Rhodes keeps its prestige up by selecting a lot of students from Harvard and Yale," said Lester Monts, vice provost for academic affairs.

Even if the Rhodes committee does prefer Ivy League applicants, that bias might be the least of the problems of Rhodes hopefuls at the University.

THE NOMINATION PROCESS

The reason Harvard and Yale students regularly account for about 40 percent of Rhodes Scholarship winners isn't because their top students are substantially brighter than their peers at other prestigious colleges.

Harvard and Yale students fare better because their schools are better at identifying, recruiting and coaching students who are bright enough to win prestigious scholarships and awards.

Most scholarships require an applicant to submit essays, letters of recommendation and curriculum vitae. But some of the most competitive and prestigious scholarships - Rhodes, Marshall and Mitchell - also require applicants to be endorsed by their college or university.

At the University of Michigan, the endorsement process is the responsibility of the provosts council on student honors, which is run out of the vice provost for student affairs office.

Gretchen Weir, assistant vice provost for academic affairs, oversees the council. In an interview last December shortly after the Rhodes decisions were handed down in November, Weir said the council's primary goal is to identify exceptional students from across the University and encourage them to apply for the prestigious British scholarships.

The council e-mails all students whose GPA is over 3.7 to encourage them to attend informational sessions about the scholarships held each January and February. She estimates that about 100 students attend the sessions each year, and about 17 to 20 of those students apply for University endorsement.

After deliberation, the council, which is made up of faculty from all schools and colleges, endorses a handful of students for the Rhodes, Marshall and Mitchell scholarships. In recent years, the University has endorsed about five students a year, most of whom were endorsed for all three scholarships. And sometimes the University endorses the same students multiple years. Alum Lyric Chen, who won the Marshall scholarship this year, was endorsed for the Rhodes, Marshall and Mitchell scholarships by the University the previous year as well.

Weir said the University does not have a set rule regarding how many students to endorse, but she said they want to make sure the University's candidates are not competing "needlessly" against each other.

"We try to add value to each of our nominees," Weir said. "If the University submitted 10 nominees, that would undercut the University in the eyes of the Rhodes committee."

But routinely nominating 20 or more students does not seem to have undercut schools like Harvard and Yale in the eyes of the Rhodes committee. Ahough since the scholarships are handed out based on 16 geographic regions, schools like Harvard and Yale probably benefit from drawing the top students from around the country.

MISSING APPLICANTS

The University's Rhodes drought seems to have more to do with having too few applicants than having too many nominees.

Monts acknowledged that the University has a hard time recruiting Rhodes applicants compared with schools like Harvard and Yale.