I’m not sure whether I should grateful to Jeff Selingo or mad at him.
Let me be clear that the prominent education writer and author of Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions has done nothing personally or directly to cause me any harm. But indirectly, I can thank Jeff Selingo for helping me understand existentially that I am a “nobody.”
Just over a year ago, on Super Bowl Sunday 2020, Jeff and I appeared together on a panel at a conference of college presidents held in D.C. You may wonder what kind of group holds a professional conference on the same day as the Super Bowl, but that’s a discussion for a different time and place.
There are two things I remember from that weekend that illustrate just how much our lives have changed over the past year. On Saturday night I met a friend for dinner in Georgetown, unaware how soon dining out would disappear from my life. While taking the Metro back to my hotel, I noticed a woman in my car wearing a face mask, and for the first time wondered if the emerging coronavirus in China was something I needed to worry about. Little did I know.
The following day, I went for a walk on the National Mall before our session, stopping to watch an adult kickball league game. Of course just a month ago that very spot was closed following the terrorist attack on the Capitol and prior to the inauguration of President Biden.
Our session topic was the changing ethical landscape for college admission in the wake of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal and the DOJ investigation into NACAC’s ethical standards. It was clear that Jeff Selingo was the draw, a well-known and thoughtful commentator on higher education. I was there to serve as his foil, and I think the session organizer was surprised and perhaps disappointed by two things. One was that we largely agreed. The other was that Jeff knew who I was. She had assumed that I was a nobody.
That wasn’t the first time that Jeff Selingo has unsuspectingly diminished my self-esteem. It has long been my ambition to write a college admissions book. Nearly 20 years ago I had the idea for a book contrasting the admissions process at two contrasting institutions—university/liberal arts college, public/private, D1/D3. I had approached the legendary Jack Blackburn at the University of Virginia, and he was receptive, but shortly afterward I learned that Jacques Steinberg, then at the New York Times, was publishing The Gatekeepers. The last time I ever saw Jack Blackburn before his death he announced to a room full of people, “Jim, you should write that book.”
The project ended up taking a back seat to my family, my day job, being asked to run for President of NACAC, and then starting and maintaining this blog, leading to writing a weekly column for Inside Higher Ed for three years. But a couple of years ago I became interested in pursuing a different focus for the book idea, and queried a couple of literary agents.
The first expressed interest and asked me to send a book proposal, then never responded. The second, who might have been Jeff Selingo’s agent (or at least from the same agency), responded with a letter stating that the idea looked promising except for the fact that I was a nobody. It wasn’t quite that blunt, although now that I think about it, that’s exactly what it said. Of course what I now know is that Jeff Selingo was probably already in the early stages of what would become Who Gets In and Why.
I can’t remember another college admissions book that was as widely anticipated or as critically acclaimed, including making the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2020. Part of that is tied to the fact that Jeff Selingo is somebody, but a bigger part is that the book itself is well done, avoiding hype and providing a lot of good information and sound advice for navigating the selective admissions process.
It is that last point that raises a possible criticism of or question about Selingo’s book. During his year “inside” college admissions, he embedded inside the admissions offices at three institutions, Davidson, Emory, and the University of Washington, in other words a national liberal-arts college, national research university, and flagship public university. All are good places with some distinctive differences, but all fall into one side of the distinction he draws between institutions that are “sellers” (all three fall into that category) and those that are “buyers.” The difference is that sellers “craft” their class whereas buyers “make” their class.
I love that distinction and find it to be more useful than talking about selective or hyper-selective institutions, but Selingo’s choice of those institutions (which may reflect who was willing to let him watch the “sausage” being made) continues a long line of media coverage that acts as if only “sellers” are worth covering. In the interest of living up to the second part of the book’s title, “A Year Inside College Admissions,” I wish he had decided to show how different admission is for “buyers,” or at places that think of themselves as sellers but aren’t able to be in today’s marketplace.
The buyers/sellers distinction is just one of the important insights Selingo shares with his readers. Some of the other strengths in the book include an honest discussion of the process known as shaping or lopping, where a student who may be in the accept pile deep into the process may end up wait-listed or worse. He provides consumers with an understanding of how Student Search works, how colleges use Early Decision strategically, and how the admissions process for athletes is a matching process rather than the lottery faced by other applicants. He also cautions students to pay more attention to affordability early in the college search.
There is one other thing in Selingo’s book that troubled me. There are two separate instances where admission officers reviewing applications comment that there is no evidence in a student’s extracurricular activities to support their expressed potential major, in one case neuroscience and in the other case premed.
I certainly believe in the idea that a student’s application should tell a coherent story, but the notion that the student’s academic interests have to be supported by their extracurricular choices seems wrong on a number of levels. It represents a failure to understand adolescent growth and development.
First of all, the expectation of alignment between academic and extracurricular interests ignores the fact that a huge number of college students (somewhere between a third and three quarters) change their major, sometime multiple times. If we know that students change their life plans once in college, why should we expect that any major or career plan expressed by a high school student is more than a guess? More to the point, why should we make admission decisions based on that?
Second, that expectation reflects a failure to understand the value of the high school experience. I talk to my students and their parents about high school as a journey of self-discovery, where the goal is answering some essential and existential questions—Who am I? What are my strengths and talents? What do I truly care about? I tell students they should understand the questions even if they don’t yet have answers. High school is a time for trying different things, whether it’s playing on a school team or performing in the band or on stage. The high school experience should be an end in itself. Admission to college should be the product of that journey, not the goal.
The expectation that students show evidence of their academic interests through their extracurricular choices hurts not only students, but also the institution. I’m willing to bet that the majority of those who pass the “alignment” test do so not because they have true passion (something a close counseling friend of mine argues no teenagers possess) but because they have been advised to play that game. Do you want a student body full of those at the expense of the student who will use college to blossom and figure out who he or she is? Isn’t that the purpose of college? Or are Selingo’s “buyers” different in that regard as well?
Who benefits from admission officers looking for alignment between academic and extracurricular interest? Nobody.