Last Week in College Admissions

Here is news and commentary from the past week in the college admissions world:

HEADLINE:  Simon Newman Resigns as President of Mount St. Mary’s.

It turns out that Newman’s plan/public relations disaster to improve retention by forcing out 25 at-risk freshmen before the end of the first month of school (and the date by which enrollment numbers have to be reported to the Federal government) failed to meet its retention goals in at least one key area—his own job.

There are several lessons here. 

Lesson #1: Before you try to “Drown the Bunnies,” make sure you know how to swim.

Lesson #2:  When you do something stupid and get caught, don’t make it worse by firing those who recognized from the beginning that it was stupid.

Lesson #3:  Success in the business world (Newman previously worked for private equity firms including Bain, the firm founded by Mitt Romney) and resulting wealth are not the same thing as wisdom and leadership.  Higher education may be a business, but it’s a business where the product is hard to measure and where the most important kind of capital is human capital.  (NOTE:  Lesson #3 may hold for areas of American life other than higher education—if you catch my drift.)

HEADLINE:  New SAT Debuts:  Some Registrants Uninvited

This past Saturday marked the first administration of the “new and improved” SAT, but one group of test takers missed the party.  Early last week a number of those registered to take the SAT on Saturday were informed that their test administration was being rescheduled for May.

The “uninvited” consisted of non-high school students, in most case employees of test prep companies hoping to get an “up close and personal” look at the new SAT.  According to a Chronicle of Higher Education article, the decision was made for security reasons, to lessen the likelihood that test content would be stolen and shared.

The concern was certainly well-founded.  The test prep industry has been flying blind ever since the announcement of the new test, and I have had to remind parents and students during the past year that anyone claiming to offer a prep course for the new SAT was only guessing at what might be on the test.  For the test prep industry the chance to see actual test questions must be like Milan fashion week for those who make their living producing fashion knock-offs. 

What is most surprising about the decision is that the College Board would pass on an opportunity to make a few bucks, but there are also several interesting questions raised (long-time readers of the blog are aware that we are much better at throwing out questions than we are at providing answers), some serious, some not.

What does the College Board mean by security?  Industrial security or national security?  Should we think of the test prep industry as engaged in theft of proprietary secrets or as terrorists, stealing a national treasure?  Will the Department of Homeland Security get involved?

Is the College Board’s partnership with Khan Academy an attempt to level the test preparation playing field or an attempt to squeeze out other test prep providers and obtain a monopoly, a potential antitrust violation?

Is taking the SAT a right or a privilege?

Is the College Board guilty of ageism in deciding whom to exclude?

Is test preparation a form of cheating?  That’s the broadest question underlying the decision to exclude adults working for test prep firms from taking the March test, and the answer is the same as the answer to so many college admissions questions, “It depends.”

A number of years ago an admissions dean friend stated that taking an SAT prep class is a form of cheating.  I am hardly a fan of the test prep industry, particularly its suggestion that test prep is necessary, but I don’t agree that preparing for the test constitutes cheating.  Clearly having test questions in advance would constitute cheating, but practicing for the test and receiving instruction on test strategies is not inappropriate.  The question is whether test prep destroys the equity, and therefore the validity, of a standardized test.  Do kids who pay for expensive test preparation get an advantage?  My heart says no; my head says yes.  But is that cheating?  It may be cheating the system, but if the system encourages or rewards the test prep industry, the problem is not with the industry but with the system.

HEADLINE:  Author Pat Conroy Dies at Age 70

Pat Conroy, author of books including The Prince of Tides and The Lords of Discipline, died last Friday of pancreatic cancer.  I never met Conroy, but feel a connection with him in two different senses, one of them related to college counseling.

The first magazine article I ever sold was a piece back in the 1980’s for Southern Living on the football rivalry between Randolph-Macon and Hampden-Sydney, the oldest small-college rivalry in the South.  I was trying to begin a career as a free-lance magazine writer, and Southern Living had a special section on football in the South each September, including team previews, tailgate recipes, and one feature article.  If I’d done careful research, I would have realized that the article had no chance of being published, because the previous feature stories had been written by Pat Conroy and Willie Morris, both legendary Southern writers.  My naivete ended up being a virtue, because the article was published, and I was able to say that I had something in common with Pat Conroy.

It turns out I have two things in common.  In Conroy’s memoir of his senior year as a basketball player at The Citadel, My Losing Season, he wrote about the high school English teacher who turned him on to literature.  That English teacher was none other than Joe Monte, legendary college counselor at Albert Einstein High School outside D.C. and a former President of NACAC.  Joe is a friend and an inspiration, and every time I see him he has a list of books he has read that leave me in awe.  When Conroy was doing a book tour for My Losing Season, he did an event in D.C. and talked about Joe Monte’s influence on his life, not having any idea that Joe was in the audience.  I’m glad that Pat Conroy had and I have the good fortune to know Joe Monte.

I am working on the final installment of my three-part series on issue related to the Turning the Tide report released in January.  This part will focus on some larger questions about whether it is time to rethink how we conduct college admission.  Last week the Washington Post published an article by Jon Boeckenstedt at DePaul questioning whether letters of recommendation are unfair.  It’s worth reading and discussing.    

Drowning the Bunnies, or Sermon on "The Mount"

(Note:  the dual titles for this post are in homage to the old “Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoons, which for each episode had two titles, including one with a bad pun)

One of my basketball players recently received his first Division One scholarship offer.  The offer came from Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, one of the nation’s oldest Roman Catholic colleges. 

Mount St. Mary’s, better known as “The Mount,” is a place I know pretty well.  It is located between Gettysburg and Camp David, and in the early 1800’s Elizabeth Seton, who eventually became the first American saint, lived for a while on the Mount St. Mary’s campus.  In the 1970’s I used to drive past Mount St. Mary’s on my way from my home in upstate New York to college in Virginia, and after her canonization I wrote a poem about her titled “U.S. 15” that included an image of a Lincoln (the luxury car now promoted by Matthew McConaughey, not the President) looking for a Gettysburg address.  It might have been the best poem I ever wrote, which may explain why my career as a poet ended shortly thereafter.

I know Mount St. Mary’s primarily through its basketball team.  Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s “The Mount” and my alma mater, Randolph-Macon, were bitter Division Two rivals in the old Mason-Dixon Conference until they parted ways, with the Mount moving up to D1 and R-MC dropping back to D3.  The face of the Mount was legendary bow-tied coach Jim Phelan, who won more than 800 games in a 49-year career as the school’s head coach, including a national small-college championship.

In recent weeks Mount St. Mary’s has received national attention for a different reason.  In January the student newspaper at the Mount published a story including confidential e-mails from President Simon Newman detailing a plan to boost the school’s retention rate 4-5% by forcing 25 at-risk freshmen to drop out by September 25 (students who leave by that date are not included in the enrollment data required by the U.S. Department of Education).  The article quoted a faculty member (also quoted by the Washington Post) reporting that President Newman had said that faculty needed to stop thinking of students as cuddly bunnies and recognize that it was necessary to “drown the bunnies.”

That alone is enough to disprove the old adage that any publicity is good publicity, but as they say in commercials for products like ShamWow!, wait, there’s more.   In the wake of the article, President Newman demoted the provost and fired two professors, one of them the newspaper advisor and the other tenured (they have since been reinstated).  He also criticized the student journalists involved for publishing confidential e-mails and interpreting them out of context.

We have become used to colleges playing admissions games in order to enhance metrics such as yield and admit rate, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a similar game tied to retention.  I’m also guessing that Mount St. Mary’s is not the first institution to go this route. 

There is much about the Mount St. Mary’s story that is troubling, ranging from being more concerned about rankings than serving students to the use of a confidential survey to identify candidates for removal to punishing those who objected to the plan. The focus of this blog, however, is Ethical College Admissions, not Ethical College Retention.  Are there ethical issues related to admission arising out of the Mount St. Mary’s saga?

Of course there are.  Clearly counseling out 25 freshmen to drop out before the end of the first month of school solely in order to improve the retention rate is indefensible, but the bigger issue is whether those students should have been admitted in the first place.

An offer of admission implies a moral commitment on the part of the institution.  In loco parentis is no longer in vogue in higher education, but offering a student a place in a student body imposes a duty to the institution to provide an atmosphere in which the student has a sincere and genuine opportunity to grow both academically and personally.  It is not the institution’s obligation to guarantee the student’s success but it is required to make a good-faith effort.  That requires treating the student as a human being worthy of dignity and respect, exhibiting what the theologian Martin Buber referred to as an “I-thou” relationship.

That can be challenging at an institution where the budget is driven primarily by tuition revenue.  At such places meeting enrollment goals can be a matter of institutional health or even life and death.  It is clearly unethical to admit a student who has no chance of success, but what if there is some chance?  In my previous job I worked as Admissions Director at an independent school that was struggling.  On my first day I counseled a student interested in transferring to stay at his current school because I wasn’t sure he could pass math in our program, and my secretary informed me that the school had never before discouraged a prospective student.  I had to admit a certain number of risks each year, and I knew some would work out and some not, but I didn’t know which students would fall into which group.  (I also learned that those students about whom I had behavior concerns would inevitably be hanging out with each other an hour after school began, but that’s a story for a different time.)

Even if a student looks unlikely to succeed and graduate, the first month of the school year, and especially the freshman year, is too early to determine that.  College is a developmental process, a transition from adolescence to adulthood, and each student’s journey is different, with the light going on at different times in a student’s college career.

Counseling students properly is part of an institution’s responsibility to the students who enroll and the families who invest both financially and emotionally in the institution’s program and mission, and that may include counseling out.  That’s not what happened here.  In pursuit of short-term goals to improve retention and thereby rankings, President Newman lost sight of the bigger picture and potentially has done long-term damage to a good place. Want to improve retention?  The better and more ethical plan would be to do a better job of helping the students already enrolled succeed and graduate. 

Character Welcome

(Second in a three-part series)

For the past ten years the USA cable television network has marketed itself using the catch phrase, “Characters Welcome.”  That phrase reflects the network’s decision to differentiate itself by producing original one-hour dramas built around oddball characters such as Monk, the detective with OCD played by Tony Shalhoub.

If a recent report gains traction, the college admissions world may soon embrace the message, “character welcome.”  Last month the Making Caring Common project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education released the report, “Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions,” arguing that the college admissions process can and should promote ethical as well as intellectual engagement in students.

I wrote about “Turning the Tide” in a recent post, intended to be the first in a three-part series (the three-part series is unexplored territory for ECA).  This is part two, some reflections on character as a factor in college admission.  The third part will focus on whether the college admissions process as currently constituted serves the public interest or needs reform, even revolution.

“Turning the Tide” assumes that colleges have the power to change student behavior by the messages sent through the admissions process, an assumption not everyone shares.  But is that the case? Will asking different essay questions and valuing community service in a different way produce a more caring student body?  More to the point, do colleges care about a student’s character, and should they?

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I have strong opinions on this topic.  I am fortunate to work at a strong academic school that nevertheless clearly states that we care more about the kind of person we produce than the kind of student we produce, and with my own children I was clear that I cared more about their character than achievement (although I always added that I didn’t know why I couldn’t have both).

I don’t know that higher education is as concerned with character formation or development as I might like.  Character is acknowledged as a goal in many colleges' mission statements, but does that carry over to the admissions process?  Several years ago a senior administrator asked me if I had written about a student’s character in a letter of recommendation.  He was disheartened, or at least disillusioned, when I responded that they didn’t care about character.

Colleges are more concerned about behavior.  Dishonest or criminal behavior (which may reflect lack of character) can disqualify a student for admission (except for blue chip athletes, who get a pass), but strong GPA’s and SAT/ACT scores almost always outweigh strong character.  In my experience the student most likely to be disappointed by the college process is the great kid who thinks that character and good citizenship will be plus factors.

Perhaps that’s as it should be.  Character can be hard to define, much less to measure.  Does the nice kid who does the right thing on a daily basis exhibit character, or is character defined only by how one deals with adversity or even tragedy?

It is also the case that discussions of character can reflect personal and cultural biases.  Back in the 1960’s in Seattle, a citizens' committee made life or death decisions about whom would receive access to kidney dialysis at a time when there weren’t enough machines for everyone who needed treatment.  The committee’s definition of good character, including church attendance and membership in civic groups, reflected a narrow definition without diversity of thought, ethnicity, or experience, leading one commentator to write that the Pacific Northwest was no place for a Henry David Thoreau with bad kidneys.

As described by Jerome Karabel in his history of college admission at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, The Chosen, discussions of character and conventions like letters of recommendation entered college admission back in the 1920’s during a paradigm shift from admitting the best student to admitting the best graduate.  That move made admission to college resemble admission to a country club. Karabel argues convincingly that the move was an attempt to lower the number of Jewish students being admitted to HYP. 

The challenges inherent in defining and measuring character don’t mean that a college or university shouldn’t value character.  The admissions process is a key component in building a campus community, and a successful community requires a critical mass of individuals with character just as much as it needs other kinds of critical mass. 

The “Turning the Tide” report argues that colleges have a responsibility to send messages about what colleges value, and that those messages should be about concern for others and benefitting society.  I wonder whether several trends in admission actually work in opposition to those goals.  The “well-rounded student” is out of vogue at the nation’s most selective schools, and yet there is some evidence that being well-rounded is important for success in life, if not in the college admissions process.  “Hyperselectivity” may reward a certain kind of student who is obsessed with achievement or better at gamesmanship.  What happens when there is a student body full of such students and what happens after they graduate?  Will future graduates of the most elite colleges have the same impact on society that previous graduates did?  I don’t know the answers, but I think the questions are worth asking.

The USA cable network has sought to distinguish itself from the competition by counterprogramming, establishing a niche by developing programming that is original and different.  I would love to see just one highly-selective college or university decide to counterprogram by focusing on enrolling a student body devoted to character rather than academic achievement alone.  That would require different messages to students and parents, it would require investigating non-cognitive measures and predictors of success, and it would require the confidence to care less about U.S. News rankings. It would be an interesting experiment, and I’m betting it would be successful.

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of a day when children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  We have made much progress as a nation in the half-century since that speech, but we still focus on color of skin, only with an appreciation for the benefits greater diversity brings.  The next step in honoring Dr. King’s message is to value “ethicity” (a word I just made up) as well as “ethnicity.”

Reneging on Early Decision

Is it ever appropriate to renege on an Early Decision commitment?  Is it that big a deal?  Last Monday a post on the NACAC Exchange sought the collective wisdom of the list on those questions. The counselor responsible for the post wanted to advise a student on the repercussions of breaking an Early Decision commitment in order to accept an offer from another school. She reported that another area counselor had stated that backing out of an Early Decision commitment is not that serious, but she had heard rumors of ED list-sharing between colleges and even blacklisting.

The post on the Exchange arrived as I was in the midst of an all-too-rare frenzy of cleaning out my Inbox, and so I deleted it without much thought.  Later that same evening I received an e-mail that looked like another Exchange post, except that it was addressed to “Jim.”  It was from a colleague I have met but don’t know well, and she asked, “Should our group respond?”

One of the gifts I received from my mother was the ability to read between the lines and understand subtext and nuance.  Her first comment after my high school graduation was, “Dennis sure won a lot of awards,” which I correctly translated as “You sure didn’t.”  Likewise, when she told me how good my sister was to her, I understood that the commentary wasn’t about my sister but about me.  So when I read the e-mail, I realized that the proper response wasn’t that “Yes, someone should” but rather “Let me take a whack at it.”   I responded to the Exchange, but let me take a whack in this venue as well.

I consider an Early Decision commitment a big deal.  A number of years ago I had a student tell me on a Friday that he was planning to apply Early Decision to one institution and then tell me on Monday, after a weekend campus visit, that he was applying ED to a different institution.  He, like many students, considered Early Decision as an end in itself rather than a means to an end.  He was applying Early Decision, he just hadn’t decided where.  I told him that if one weekend campus visit could change his mind about where he wanted to go, then he wasn’t ready to apply anywhere Early Decision.

I don’t know whether I would give the same advice today.  I haven’t changed my view that Early Decision should be chosen as an application option only if a student is far enough along in their college search to know that they have an absolute first choice and don’t need their senior year to bolster their credentials for admission, but the realities of the selective college landscape today mean that Early Decision may now be a necessary strategy.  With some institutions admitting half their classes early and at least one Ivy anticipating that the admit rate for regular applicants will be 2%, Early Decision may be the only chance for an unhooked student to get admitted to a highly selective college or university.  There is therefore cognitive dissonance between my beliefs about how the college search and admissions processes should be conducted and my responsibility to advise my students properly.

Early Decision is not legally binding, but is a moral contract where the college agrees to give the student a decision earlier than normal in exchange for the commitment to attend if accepted.  Usually Early Decision also specifies or implies that the student will withdraw other applications once accepted Early Decision.  Most colleges require the student and parent (and in many cases the school counselor) to sign an Early Decision agreement acknowledging the expectations of Early Decision.

So, when, if ever, is it legitimate to back out of an Early Decision commitment?  It is considered kosher to renege on Early Decision if the college is unable to meet the student’s demonstrated financial need (not necessarily the same thing as what the family is willing to pay)?  On the same day that the post regarding Early Decision appeared on the NACAC Exchange, I received a call from the parent of one of my seniors who had been accepted E.D. 2 over the weekend.  The dad was confused and flustered because the financial aid package seemed to include no grant and approximately $30,000 in loans, a very different package than suggested on the college’s Net Price Calculator.

I hope the dad’s understanding about the financial aid package was incorrect, but that kind of package would seem a legitimate reason to back out of the ED commitment.  I suppose an all-loan package qualifies as meeting full need, but asking a family with clear need to go into debt more than $100,000 is indefensible.  I don’t happen to believe that a college has an ethical obligation to meet a student’s financial need, but it is ethically desirable and praiseworthy to do so.  I think the bigger issue from an ethical (and perhaps legal) standpoint is the discrepancy between the financial aid award and the Net Price Calculator.

Do colleges share ED lists and do they blacklist students and schools who break ED commitments?  In my Exchange post I mentioned that the technology now exists for colleges to know when a student has enrolled elsewhere and that it is not unheard of for both colleges to withdraw acceptances when they learn that a student has played games.  That is more likely to occur with double depositing on May 1 than in Early Decision.  I don’t have evidence of any kind of Early Decision blacklist, and suspect there are plenty of institutions who would be unconcerned that a student had backed out of a commitment at another institution, but I have heard a Dean of Admission at a prestigious national liberal-arts college state that she would hold a student’s failure to live up to the Early Decision commitment against the student’s high school.

What is a school counselor’s obligation with regard to an Early Decision commitment?  That question came up in a follow-up from a counselor after my post to the Exchange.

I think our first responsibility is to educate our students about what Early Decision means, focusing less on the Early piece and more on the Decision piece.  Early Decision is not a game or strategy or choice to be taken lightly.  The ethical obligations for the counselor are increased if he or she has signed an Early Decision agreement form or if the school is a member of NACAC, where the Statement of Principles of Good Practice requires counseling professionals to advise students to abide by application requirements and restrictions.  That is hard to do without the support of school administrators, especially in a litigious age.  In the rare case where there is a compelling reason for backing out of an Early Decision agreement, I would counsel the student to contact the college and ask to be released from the commitment.  The college may not be happy, but it also doesn’t want to force a student who doesn’t want to be there to enroll.

The larger question, of course, is whether Early Decision should exist at all.  That’s a discussion for another day. As long as ED is a recognized convention within the college admission world, we need to make sure that it works as intended and that it is taken seriously by all parties. 

Turning the Tide

(First of a three-part series)

Last week, just in time for the Blizzard of 2016, the Making Caring Common project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education released a report, “Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions.”  The title is misleading, in that the report’s title and focus on concern for others have nothing to do with either University of Alabama football fans or college students who need to do laundry more often, but the report should nevertheless spark a lot of discussion in the world of college admission.

Making Caring Common’s goal is producing caring young people with ethical awareness and a concern for the common good, and “Turning the Tide” attempts to examine how those qualities might be reinforced through the college admissions process.  The report, authored by psychologist Richard Weissbourd, co-director of the project and a presenter at last fall’s NACAC conference in San Diego, argues that “the college admissions process is powerfully positioned to send different messages that help young people become more generous and human in ways that benefit not only society but students themselves” and that “colleges can powerfully collaborate to send different messages to high school students about what colleges value.”

The recommendations in the "Turning the Tide" focus on two areas.  One is promoting “meaningful, sustained community service,” contrasted with what the report describes as “high-profile or exotic forms of community service, sometimes in faraway places, that have little meaning to them (students) but appear to demonstrate their entrepreneurial spirit and leadership.”  Related to that focus are suggestions on how colleges might assess ethical awareness and concern for others, primarily through revised essay questions.

The second area involves reducing pressure to achieve to impress college admissions offices (what I would describe as resume-building).  Recommendations include: emphasizing quality over quantity in extracurricular activities; reducing the emphasis on taking as many AP/IB courses as possible; discouraging “overcoaching” of the application process; reducing test pressure; and challenging the belief that there are only a handful of “good” colleges.

I read “Turning the Tide” while snowed in over the weekend, and it is an important contribution to the conversation about what college admission should represent as process and as profession.  Like many reports, it is much better at identifying problems than it is at proposing solutions, and some critics have already questioned its basic premise that today’s prospective college students are lacking in ethical awareness and concern for society.

The report also hints at/begs larger questions about both college admission and higher education.  Is a college education about producing good students or good people?  What are the messages that colleges send to students through the college admissions process, and what messages should they be sending?  Does the college admissions process need overhauling, and are the changes needed evolutionary or revolutionary?

I’m going to attempt to tackle some of those questions in what will be a first for ECA, a three-part series.  In this first part, some observations regarding “Turning the Tide.”

First, I accept and endorse the report’s basic premise that colleges have an opportunity as well as an obligation to drive the conversation about what qualities and what credentials are important in the college admissions process.  The report seems to assume that colleges have the power to change the behavior of students and parents, and I’m not sure that’s the case, because there are other powerful influences at work.  But at a time when there is a billion-dollar industry profiting off the anxiety related to the college admissions process by peddling myths (or the term I prefer, “Suburban Legends”) about college admission, the failure of our profession, especially on the college side, to speak up and clarify what is important and what is b.s. is a lost opportunity and perhaps an abdication of responsibility.

One of those “Suburban Legends” involves community service, and the strength of the report is its focus on “meaningful, sustained community service.”  There is an argument to be made that all community service has value, but there is a clear difference between service that reflects an individual’s passion, service done to fulfill a graduation requirement, and service that is court-mandated.

There is also a difference between sustained service and one-shot service.  A number of years ago one of my students wrote in a college essay that his community service during our two-week experiential learning term was the most meaningful experience of his life.  When I pointed out that colleges might wonder, “If it’s was so meaningful, why aren’t you still doing it?”, he didn’t have a good answer. 

In many parts of the country there is a subtle arms race when it comes to service, founded in an assumption that the more glamorous the service, the more it will impress colleges. Is building a house in Haiti more worthwhile or impressive than building a house in one’s own community?  Colleges certainly don’t send that message, but do they dispel that idea clearly enough?

“Turning the Tide” isn’t as strong when it comes to making the admissions process more sane, rehashing ideas like reducing the emphasis on AP/IB courses and testing.  I don’t disagree with those, but don’t see that they will automatically produce more ethically aware students.  What those things have in common with community service is that they are shortcuts that stand-in for substance and depth.  One of the things about college admission best kept secret is how little time is spent reading applications compared with how much time students spend completing them.  Until that changes those short-cuts will continue to be emphasized.

One of the groups listed as supporting “Turning the Tide” is the Board of Directors of the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success.  I find that interesting, hopeful, and ironic.  One of the things that appealed to me about the Coalition was its language about establishing an admissions process that encourages reflection and personal growth in students, and yet when I sat through Coalition presentations at NACAC and the College Board Forum I wasn’t hearing anything that supported that, particularly in the proposed new application platform. 

The schools that have joined the Coalition are a powerful collection of leading public and private institutions that can truly drive conversation and changes about what the college admissions process should be.  At the same time, the establishment of the Coalition also seems at odds with the emphasis in “Turning the Tide” on expanding students’ thinking about “good” colleges, since the Coalition can be seen as an elitist club with membership requirements that exclude the majority of  “good” colleges and universities in the United States.

I hope “Turning the Tide” will engender an ongoing discussion within our profession about how college admission can serve the public interest (the “common good”) and not just institutional self-interest.

ECA Quoted in Washington Post

Last week's post about the release of PSAT scores has garnered attention in several places.  

It was quoted in an article in Valerie Strauss's "Answer Sheet" column in the Washington Post, and despite the fact that the quote she selected highlighted my technological incompetence (inability to remember User Name and Password), I appreciate the mention.

The post was also highlighted last week by Inside Higher Ed as one of its two daily "Around the Web" selections.

Robert Schaeffer of FairTest expressed his appreciation for our question about whether the College Board's release of PSAT scores was best described as a fiasco or a snafu in a post on the NACAC Exchange.

As always, we are grateful for our readers and for the recognition.

Occam's Razor, Conspiracy Theory, and the College Board

I’m not a big fan of sports talk radio, but I listen when I’m in the car during times when NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered aren’t on.  Recently I have noticed a common advertiser on several different sports talk radio shows, the Dollar Shave Club.  I use an electric razor, so am unlikely to become a member, but apparently the deal is that the club does home delivery of razors and blades for less cost than found in stores.

I have become intrigued, though, by another product offered by Dollar Shave Club, Dr. Carver’s Easy Shave Butter.  I’m curious about the difference between Shave Butter and shaving cream, shaving foam, or shaving gel.  Is there such a thing as Difficult Shave Butter, or would that be considered shave margarine?  Is Dr. Carver the famous George Washington Carver, and if so, is Easy Shave Butter another of the hundreds of products he invented from peanuts?

In the last few days I have also been thinking about a different kind of razor.  In philosophy Occam’s Razor, named for the medieval philosopher William of Occam, is the hypothesis that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon or problem is usually the correct explanation.  Obviously William of Occam never watched TV detective shows, and obviously he never dealt with the College Board.

So is the College Board rollout of PSAT scores more accurately described as a fiasco or as a snafu?  Who would have guessed that the Board could make the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success’s introduction of its new application platform appear to be a public relations stroke of genius by comparison?  If the goal was to increase traffic on the NACAC Exchange, it worked. There were more than 50 posts regarding accessing scores.

It will probably not come as a surprise that most of them contained a hint of frustration and anger.  It wasn’t just the fact that the test scores were a month late or the difficulty in accessing scores whether you are a student or a counselor. For students it was a five-step process, and at the end of step five some students were told that they hadn’t taken any College Board assessments. 

For counselors the only thing more difficult than accessing the score reports was figuring out what the scores meant.  Over the weekend I went on the College Board website looking for explanatory information.  After getting my User Name and Password straight (not the College Board’s fault), I found a download that looked promising, but when I clicked on it I got not the PDF but the previous page.

The response from the College Board has been underwhelming (but hardly surprising).  Several e-mails expressed sympathy for our difficulties, but there was nothing that resembled an apology or acceptance of responsibility.

The discussion so far has been about accessing scores, but the more interesting issue is the scores themselves.  I had all my students in grades 9-11 take the PSAT (not the PSAT 8/9), and my preliminary look at the scores tells me that the ERW scores (Evidence-based Reading and Writing) for each grade are 30-35 points higher than the Critical Reading scores were last year for the same grade.  The math scores are also higher, but not to the same degree.  I also see that the increase in verbal (CR/ERW) + Math scores from 9 to 10 and 10 to 11 is about 120 points, close to twice the increase I saw a year ago in each case.  I’m apparently not the only one seeing increased scores.  Several independent school counselors have reported that the numbers of students with National Merit index scores exceeding the cutoffs for Semifinalist and Commended Student status are much higher than previous years.

So what does that mean?  I’m not sure, and the preliminary concordance released by the College Board isn’t much help.  Are my students much brighter than a year ago? Maybe.  Does the new test advantage students from schools with rigorous academic programs?  That was a hypothesis when I saw the design of the new test, but it is hard to imagine that an organization devoted to access and equity is going to produce a test that advantages those who are already privileged.  Or is this a new form of “recentering,” where all the scores are higher? If so, will we hear a year from now that the nation’s record-high SAT scores are evidence of the success of the Common Core, which just happened to be developed under the direction of one David Coleman, who leveraged that accomplishment for a new job as President of the College Board?

Occam’s Razor doesn’t help us answer any of those questions even when enhanced with an existential version of Dr. Carver’s Easy Shave Butter. It also doesn’t answer the broader question, which is why college admission continues to have rollouts of “new and improved” technology-driven innovations that are new but not improved.

First, there was the Common Application, then the Coalition, and now the College Board.  What do they have in common?  All involve the introduction of an enhanced technology platform that doesn’t work as promised.  Why is that?

(Please note:  What follows is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, which doesn’t mean it’s not also right.)

The only thing stronger than my belief in rationality as represented by Occam’s Razor is my belief in conspiracy theory.  What do Common Application, the Coalition, and the College Board have in common?  They all begin with the letters “CO.”  If that’s not evidence of a conspiracy (another word that starts with “CO”), I don’t know what is.

Is it coincidence (another CO word) that when the Common Application was taking heat for its lack of competence (CO word), the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success reared its head to deflect attention and make the Common Application’s problems seem minor?  Just when the counseling community (both CO words) begins getting exercised about the Coalition’s efforts, along comes the College Board with problems that take the Coalition away from the spotlight.  Are the snafus nothing more than a comedy (CO word) of errors, lack of competence (CO word), competition (CO word) to see who can screw up more creatively, or communism (CO word) rearing its ugly head?

And what is the significance of the letters CO?  It just happens to be the chemical formula for Carbon Monoxide.  Carbon Monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and toxic, killing its victims without awareness that they’re endangered.  At some level, aren’t all these innovations a kind of Carbon Monoxide, having a toxic effect on all of us and on the college admissions process we love?

So—Common Application, Coalition Application, College Board.  Coincidence or conspiracy?  Which seems like the more reasonable explanation? 

ECA Mentioned in Inside Higher Ed

The most recent ECA post  (the one dealing with Fisher v. Texas as sequel, not the correction) was selected yesterday by Inside Higher Ed as one of its two “Around the Web” selections, the 11th time a post from this blog has been selected.

In 2015 insidehighered.com highlighted ECA eight times, four times from April to June (more than any other site during that period) and four times from October to December (second to only one other site).

We are grateful for the recognition.

Correction: It's Abigail Fisher, Not Sarah

A reader of the blog who is obviously more vigilant than I am (which apparently doesn't take much) has pointed out that the plaintiff in Fisher v. Texas is Abigail Fisher, not Sarah Fisher as identified by me in yesterday's post. 

I don't like making careless errors, and so appreciate the mistake being pointed out.  It did make me wonder where I got "Sarah" from.  A quick Google search revealed two possible candidates. One is a race car driver who used to race in the IndyCar series and has competed in the Indianapolis 500. The other is a young actress and singer who was a cast member in Degrassi: The Next Generation.  Not only have I never seen the show, but I was also unaware that there was a previous generation.  As far as I know, neither Sarah Fisher has been involved in any case before the Supreme Court.  I apologize to them and I apologize to you.

Fisher v. Texas, the Sequel

I am not a fan of movie sequels, and don’t get me started on remakes.  Do we really need a new version of Point Break without Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze (and did we need the version with them)?  Apparently there is talk about remaking a different Swayze movie, Roadhouse, where he plays a Ph.D. in Philosophy who utilizes his philosophical training as a bar bouncer.  It’s my favorite bad movie.

While cinema scholars may choose to differ, I have never seen a movie sequel that is better than the original.  The one sequel that could have broken that rule never got made, for reasons that may seem obvious.  The 1980’s movie Flashdance was about a welder who dreamed of being a ballet dancer.  If Flashdance 2 had been about a dancer who dreams of becoming a welder, that’s a movie I would pay to see.

Are Supreme Court case sequels any better than movie sequels?  Apparently not, based on comments made by Justice Anthony Kennedy during the recent oral arguments for the Court’s rehearing of the affirmative action case Fisher v. Texas.  “We’re just arguing the same case,” complained Kennedy, generally considered the swing vote.

Kennedy is right that the arguments presented by both sides during the oral arguments on December 9 seem reheated rather than freshly prepared.  The lawyers for plaintiff Sarah Fisher argue that the University’s use of affirmative action damaged her by denying her a place in the student body and that the affirmative action program does not meet the “Strict Scrutiny” test the Supreme Court laid out in the previous hearing of the case. The lawyers for Texas answer that she wouldn’t have been admitted even without the affirmative action program, that a lower court has upheld the constitutionality (by a 2-1 margin) of the holistic program, and that the program is necessary to achieve a critical mass of diversity down to the individual classroom.  One of Kennedy’s frustrations was that Texas had not done additional research or fact-finding to support that contention.

The case involves a program the University of Texas uses to supplement the state law that mandates that the University admit students who rank in the top 10% of their high school class.  The top 10% rule, which fills 75% of the class at UT-Austin, is not being challenged in Fisher. Lawyers for the University argue that the top 10% rule produces diversity, but only from lower socioeconomic groups who attend weaker high schools.

The University fills the final 25% using holistic admission. Most of the students admitted are white, but the University argues that it should be allowed to take race into account to supplement the diversity produced by the 10% rule.  When Fisher was last argued before the Supreme Court, it appeared that Texas was arguing that diversity required that some middle and upper class minority students with weaker academic records be admitted.

If the arguments are familiar, so are the broader questions.  Should universities have discretion to decide whom to admit based on their missions and strategic goals, or does the Court have a legitimate interest in how that is done?  How important is diversity, and is it a means to an educational end or an end in itself?  If racial preferences are wrong, aren’t they wrong even when used for the best of intentions?  If affirmative action is necessary, when will it no longer be necessary?

I am assuming that I will weigh on some of those issues in the future, and one of the projects I have in the back of my mind is a series of posts on the history of affirmative action in college admission, so here are several observations and questions that arise out of the oral arguments for Fisher, the sequel.

In a perfect world, there would be no need for race-conscious admissions practices, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Over the past couple of years it has been become clear in places like Ferguson and Baltimore that we haven’t made as much progress in overcoming our history with regard to race as I wish was the case.  It is hard for me to judge whether some of the recent campus protests with regard to diversity reflect real divisions on campuses or a new generation of students flexing their political muscle.  I am disappointed by the defense of affirmative action in Fisher, I’m not sure that race-conscious admission policies are ultimately defensible philosophically, and yet declaring affirmative action unconstitutional is probably not good public policy right now.

The biggest news story coming out of the Fisher oral arguments was a comment by Justice Antonin Scalia about African-American students being better off going to a “less-advanced” or “slower track” school where they would make better grades than at a place like UT-Austin.   That comment is insensitive at best, but it also provides a glimpse into a question that underlies some of the discussion about Fisher.  Does the value of a college education lie in the name on the diploma or in the experience one has in college?

Scalia’s assumption is that students admitted under affirmative action struggle in college, an issue that has come to be known as “mismatching.”  The evidence is far from conclusive, and which study you accept is probably influenced by what you want to believe.  The point of access is success.  Scalia is arguing, I think, that success is more important than access, and I would agree with him on that (which makes me very uncomfortable).  The student who goes to Texas-El Paso and excels is probably better off than he or she would be going to UT-Austin and struggling, but if a student can do the work and graduate it doesn’t matter.  A doctor who graduates at the bottom of a medical school class is still a doctor.  What is worrisome about the mismatching argument is that it is similar to the arguments made back in the 1950s for separate but equal schools.

Sarah Fisher’s argument also turns on the question of name on diploma vs. experience in college, but in a way that puts her in conflict with Scalia.  Fisher argues that she has been damaged because she wasn’t admitted to UT-Austin.  But has she been damaged because she graduated from LSU rather than UT-Austin?  She may have had to pay more in out-of-state tuition, but was she damaged by having to attend a different flagship public university?  Those of us who revel in irony can take great satisfaction in the fact that Fisher’s argument flies in the face of the assumption articulated by her greatest advocate on the Court.

Is Fisher v. Texas a challenge not only to affirmative action but also to holistic admission?  I don’t think so, but it does demonstrate that holistic admission can serve as a shroud making the admissions process mysterious.  It is hard to critique a decision that is holistic, and holistic admission could mean that each candidate is admitted for a different reason, whether it be transcript, test scores, leadership, ability to pay, or race.

There is a different issue that has thus far escaped scrutiny.  In the oral arguments, U.S. Solicitor General defends Texas by stating that “everybody competes against everybody else.”  That doesn’t square with my experience of how selective admission actually works.  At a time when classes are crafted or engineered to produce a class full of differences and meet an institution’s strategic goals, it is not the case that every applicant is competing for every place in the class. Students without a “hook”—most commonly athletic recruit, diversity, or legacy—are at a disadvantage, and 75-90% of applicants are competing for 10% of the places.

Will we see another sequel to Fisher?  It depends on the reviews to this one.  Stay tuned, and happy holidays.

Distributive Justice and Random Selection

The last post dealt with fairness in the college admissions process.  In that post I talked about selective college admission as an example of Distributive Justice, a kind of ethical dilemma where the challenge is to devise a fair means of distributing a scarce resource or opportunity. 

I also mentioned an article I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education back in 1988 where I argued that the fairest way to fill a freshman class in a highly selective admissions environment is to use random selection from among those identified as being qualified for admission.  It was my first article about college admission, and it is old enough that it does not exist in the Chronicle archives, but my tech person at school (who also happens to be my son) helped me scan it and convert it so I could reprint it as a blog post.  You will note that I was even more verbose back then than now.

You will also note that ECA has a new home.  That is also at the urging of my son the tech guru (read the previous phrase by channeling your favorite Jewish mother character from television or the movies).  He has been encouraging me to develop a website to house the blog and other work, and so here we go.  We hope to add content and features in the coming months.

I’m also hoping to adapt the blog somewhat, or at least return to my original vision from its founding three years ago.  At the time I planned for a mixture of long and short posts, a mixture of news notes and opinion pieces, but the blog has become more about the longer opinion pieces (sermonettes).  I am going to try to post more regularly with a mixture.  On Monday I’ll try to post a summary of this week's oral arguments on affirmative action before the Supreme Court in the return of Fisher v. Texas.

Thanks as always to all of you who read and comment on Ethical College Admissions. 

The Only Fair Way for Elite Colleges to Choose Their Freshman Classes Is by Random Selection

EVERY SPRING, thousands of high-school seniors across the country anxiously watch the mail for a letter from the admission office of one or more of the so-called selective colleges and universities, the contents of which will profoundly affect the course of the recipient's life, The fortunate minority receive a thick letter of acceptance, opening the door to an exclusive club and all the privileges of membership. The rest receive a thin letter of rejection and, along with it, a lesson in the disappointments of adulthood.

It can be a hard lesson to swallow. As a college-admission counselor at a high school l spend a lot of time trying to console talented young people who have suddenly discovered, after four years of outstanding performance in their school work and extracurricular activities, that they are not good enough. I try to persuade them not to take the rejection personally, to convince them that they are simply victims of a process that is essentially unfair. To understand that, they have to know about how college admission works and what it is that makes an institution "selective." For all colleges, l tell them, admission is first and foremost a numbers game. Each institution seeks to enroll a certain number of freshmen. To reach that goal, admission offices must send out more acceptances than there are places, since not every accepted applicant will enroll. For the selective colleges the difference between the two numbers is relatively small.

An institution is defined as "selective" if qualified applicants always outnumber the spaces it has available and it routinely has to reject some candidates who fully meet its standards for admission. The competition for admission to the 50 or so truly selective institutions in this country is intense: a handful of those colleges admit fewer than a quarter of the students who apply.

Most applicants for admission at selective institutions are not just qualified; they are superbly qualified, with high-schooI grades and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores at the top of the scale. In 1982, Princeton accepted only one-third of the high-school valedictorians who applied, and barely half of the applicants with S.A.T. scores in the 750-800 range. In 1984, the mean score on the verbal section of the S.A.T. for the 2,492 students accepted at Georgetown was 628. Last year, Stanford turned down 60 per cent of the applicants who had all A's on their high-school transcripts, and 70 per cent of those whose S.A.T. scores were above 700, To choose a freshman class from a large group of exceptional applicants, admission committees must subject them all to rigorous and exhaustive scrutiny. At most selective colleges, anywhere from two to five people read each application and evaluate the candidate's grades, courses, activities, test scores, essays, and recommendations. Being a superb student isn't enough, Personal qualities are also considered, and applicants are given both academic and non-academic ratings.

lN PUTTING TOGETHER A CLASS, the committee gives major consideration to "diversity," not only to assure students a broad educational experience but also to achieve other goals, ranging from increasing minority enrollment to satisfying the demands of alumni. No one can deny that the process is thorough, but is it fair? The huge gap between the number of highly qualified applicants and the spaces available forces admission committees to make fine (and usually subjective) distinctions among applicants with almost identical credentials. It is part of admissions mythology that individual merit is the yardstick by which candidates are judged.

The problem is that little agreement exists on what constitutes merit, how it can be measured, or how to compare applicants of diverse background and interests. The admission process should be an exercise in just distribution, in finding a fair means of allocating a scarce resource--places at an elite institution--among too many qualified candidates.

To be fair, selection must be based on clearly defined objectives and relevant, easily measured criteria, and the judges must accord due process and equal consideration to each applicant. By those standards, the process as presently conducted is far from fair--institutions rarely, if ever. spell out their objectives; special preference is customarily given to certain candidates; and the judgments underlying admission decisions are mostly subjective and arbitrary.

Is the purpose of the process to identify and select the applicants most likely to succeed academically, or those most likely to benefit from the educational opportunity? Or is it simply to reward past performance? The answer is None of the above. The real purpose is to admit the candidates who can best help a particular institution achieve the goals (which in most cases are more political than educational) hidden behind the concept of diversity. To reach those goals, the committee may give candidates in certain categories special preference, with the effect that those candidates compete only among themselves rather than with all applicants.

For example, if the institution's goal is a champion football team, and a fullback is the missing link, the fullbacks will compete for admission only against other fullbacks. If the goal is to maintain balanced proportions of men and women in the student body, then candidates of the sex that predominates will find it more difficult than the rest to gain admission. If the goal is to increase the number of students from certain minority groups, then applicants from those groups will have the edge. And because all institutions have fundraising goals, children of alumni and of the rich and famous will usually get preference.

Diversity is clearly a laudable objective, particularly given the history of minorities' limited access to higher education, but should it be achieved at the expense of fair, equal consideration for all applicants? In the name of diversity, the likes of Brooke Shields, Patrick Ewing, and the Kennedy kids get the chance to receive their education at elite universities, while other talented young people, with equal or superior credentials, do not.

The way in which selective colleges guarantee the diverse make-up of their entering classes is only one of the factors compromising the fairness of the process. Another is the unlimited discretion the colleges exercise in deciding whom to admit. Obviously, the more subjective and arbitrary the decision, the less fair it is.

One reason for such subjectivity is that grades and test scores, the objective measurements most commonly used to predict success in college, are of little use in making close distinctions among the superior students who apply to selective institutions. Their grades and test scores predict success for all of them.

Unfortunately, not all can be admitted, and, because the differences are statistically insignificant, it is impossible to predict which applicants will be most successful.  Another reason is the committees' lack of accountability. Selective colleges have far more qualified applicants than they can admit. Without objective information with which to make fine distinctions, the committee is free to decide arbitrarily. It has the luxury of knowing it will choose a superb freshman class, no matter how it decides. The undeniable fact that there are always too many applicants for too few places provides immunity from criticism of its choices.

The excess of qualified candidates also distorts the way in which applications are evaluated. Because many well-qualified applicants must be turned down, admission committees are put in the position of looking not for reasons to admit but rather for reasons to exclude. Numbers are of overriding importance. Every year, quite a few applicants on the accepted list end up being cut, because of concern that more on the list will enroll than there is room for. They are rejected at the last minute, never knowing how close they came to getting in.

The only fair way to choose a freshman class from among too many qualified applicants is by some type of random selection. One way would be to have the qualified applicants draw lots. Another would be to accept candidates when their credentials are complete and they are judged qualified, until the class is full. A third, which an admission officer of my acquaintance has long recommended, would be to put every qualified applicant on a "waiting list" and admit the ones who respond first.

Random selection has several clear advantages. It would guarantee equal consideration, and it would make rejection easier to take, since not getting in would be due to bad luck rather than to personal failure. It would also be easier on admission committees. Not only would it save a great deal of the time and money currently spent splitting hairs to select a freshman class, but it would also restore the committees to their proper function of determining who is qualified, rather than who among the qualified should be admitted, Despite the advantages, however, random selection is probably not an idea whose time has come. The benefit to selective colleges of being able to use discretion in choosing a freshman class is too great. Also, many admission professionals actually believe it's possible to make informed choices among equally qualified candidates and, ironically, so do some students.

It can be argued, of course, that admission to a selective college has nothing to do with just distribution, because higher education is not a scarce resource. There are over 3,000 colleges and universities in the United States, the argument goes, and no one who wants a higher education is denied the opportunity to get it. That being the case, selective colleges, particularly those that are privately owned, should be free to admit whomever they wish.
Such reasoning ignores the fact that the elite institutions occupy a special place in American society.

Therefore, they have a special obligation to uphold the national ideals of fairness, equality of opportunity, and due process in allotting the coveted places in their freshman classes. Unless they do so by instituting a means for just distribution of places, the qualified candidates who get thin envelopes will have to continue either to accept the rejection as an authoritative judgment of their worth (and perhaps allow it to ruin their lives) or take it as a challenge to go out and prove through their accomplishments that the admission committees blew it.

Original Article

Is College Admission Fair?

Is the college admissions process fair?  Asking that question brings to mind an old joke about television.  The joke, credited to comedian Fred Allen (among others), asks, “Why do they call television a medium?”  The punch line?  “Because it’s neither rare nor well done.”

Like the joke, asking if the college admissions process is fair relies on a potential double-entendre.  By “fair,” do we mean “just” or do we mean “not that good”?

Last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Hoover and Beckie Supiano wrote a fascinating piece on the concept of fairness in college admission.  I was quoted rather extensively in the article, so I’m not exactly objective, but they did a great job of examining the various dimensions of a principle that’s hard to argue against and even harder to define.

No one in his or her right mind would argue that the admissions process should be intentionally unfair, but what does fairness in college admissions look like? Even if we agree that “fair” equals “just,” that raises more questions than answers (which regular ECA readers know we are perfectly comfortable with).  Does a just admissions process reward past performance or predict future accomplishment?  Is fairness about equal treatment or equal consideration?  Is it fair for an institution to admit based on institutional interest and priorities? Is an admissions process based on merit fair, given that much of what passes for merit is really privilege in disguise?  

Fairness lies in the eyes of the beholder.  I learned that first hand a number of years ago when my parents divorced after thirty years of marriage. I was in graduate school at the time, and as I watched them go through that experience I had three “a-ha” moments.  The first was an odd role reversal where I found myself the adult and them the children.  The second was that each of them was happier after the divorce than I had ever seen them together.  The third had to do with the concept of fairness.  Each of them said to me in separate conversations, “All I want is what’s fair,” but they had very different conceptions of fair. 

Fairness in college admission is challenging even when focusing on a single variable.  Take SAT scores for example.  We know that they have a high correlation with family income.  If two applicants have identical scores, one from an affluent suburban school and the other from a rural high school where 10% of graduates go to college, do those scores mean the same thing?  Should a set of scores earned after spending hundreds of dollars on test prep count the same as those for a student from an inner-city environment who takes the test cold? 

The same is true for things like GPA.  Is it fair to consider a transcript without context?  Students from the same high school with the same GPA may have very different schedules, and different high schools have very different grading scales, and even more important, different grade distributions.  What’s more fair, admitting the student who earns a certain GPA without breaking a sweat, or the student who earns the same GPA in the same courses through hard work that maximizes ability?

Both of those examples make the case for a holistic admissions process as best and maybe fairest.  But making fine distinctions among hundreds or thousands of superbly qualified applicants requires either a complex calculus or the use of professional judgment that is largely subjective.

The very first article I ever wrote on college admissions was an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education back in 1988.  In the article I argued that selective college admission is a textbook example of Distributive Justice, a type of ethical dilemma where the challenge is to find a fair way of allocating a scarce resource.  I also posited that the fairest way to allocate scarce spaces in freshman classes was using random selection once admissions officers had identified those who were qualified for admission.

It was an idea whose time had not come.  For months I heard reports of my name being cursed in admissions circles, and some close friends thought I must be joking, writing a satire akin to Jonathan Swift’s proposal to eat children.  The most interesting feedback was from students who wrote letters to the Chronicle.  They were opposed to random selection, wanting to believe they were admitted because they were better than other applicants.   The article was ultimately reprinted in several venues, including a textbook on logic.  I never figured out if it was seen as an example of good logic or poor logic.  I may reprint that article in a subsequent post.

Perhaps the appropriate question is not “Is college admission fair?” but “Should college admission be fair?”  Do highly-selective colleges and universities worry about fairness in the admissions process?  At some level, yes, in that they strive for decisions that make sense within a school group, for instance.  At another level, they worry more about what’s fair for the institution.  I have heard a legendary admissions dean say that “The admissions process is rational, but not necessarily fair.”  Another well-known dean put it a different way, “I work for … university.  My job is to bring in the best, most interesting freshman class to help the university achieve its strategic goals.  It’s not my job to be fair to students or schools.”

There is probably a disconnect between what the public expects from the college admissions process with regard to fairness and the reality of the process.  Just because fairness isn’t easy to define doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth aspiring to.  If college admission serves not just institutional interest, but the public interest, then the public deserves a process that is as fair as possible.  The alternative is that we lose public confidence and trust in our profession.

The next time someone describes college admission as fair, let’s make sure they mean "just" and not "just okay."

Restricted Early Action

This edition of Ethical College Admissions will tackle two issues that are unrelated except for a tenuous connection to the November 1 Early Decision/Early Action deadline. WARNING: This post may serve as evidence that I am suffering from PNSD (Post-November 1 Stress Disorder) after surviving the two most hectic, stressful two weeks of my entire career.

Topic #1:  Is it time to rethink the counselor recommendation letter as a meaningful part of the college admissions process?

I’ve been thinking about that question on a daily basis through October as I tried to find time and energy to write the largest number of recommendations for Early Decision and Early Action applications of any year in my entire career.  This time of year is always a challenge, and I can remember Halloween nights when my children were little when I would take them trick-or-treating and then return home to write last minute recs, but this is the first time I’ve had the sense that this deadline might get the best of me mentally and physically.

So what’s different?  Clearly I’m older, and the three hours it takes me to write a good letter drains me, even as I still feel great satisfaction in capturing the essence of a student and telling their story.  Part of the additional burden is having the largest class in school history, twice as big as my first class 25 years ago, and yet I know my colleagues in public schools with absurd counseling loads won’t and shouldn’t feel any sympathy.

The other changes are more global and subtle. One is that the application process has become compressed.  When I started in this profession, the application process lasted from mid-October until the end of January.  My son was born nearly thirty years ago at the beginning of February, and I have clear memories of spending the previous weekend working on rec letters for the last major deadline.  The workload used to be fairly evenly distributed throughout the process, with a wave every two weeks.  Now the November wave has become a tsunami as colleges move deadlines earlier and earlier. 

For students the message is that the early applicant gets the worm, that applying ED or EA is advantageous.  With the most selective colleges having admit rates of 5-10% and committed to crafting a class, the best (and maybe only) strategy for the unhooked student is to apply early. That coerces too many students to make application decisions before they are developmentally ready.   

The college recommendation letter is an art form, perhaps even an example of “neo-realistic American fiction.”  Its role in the college admissions process dates back to the 1920s, when colleges became more interested in producing good graduates (defined in a narrow way that resembled country club membership), than good students.  At independent schools “the letter” takes on mythic proportions, such that when I was first hired as a college counselor writing “the letter” seemed to be the entire job description. 

Is it time to rethink the rec letter?  I have talked to colleagues the past couple of weeks who are convinced that it’s time to replace the narrative letter with a paragraph or series of bullet points.  I’m not ready to go that far, or to follow in the footsteps of a predecessor whose recommendation letters consisted of either “Recommended” or “Highly Recommended,” but I worry that the quality of my letters will suffer as the quantity increases.

At a time when there is discussion about designing a new admissions process, I hope that “reform” will not mean a new application platform alone.  I hope we’ll think carefully about what we’re trying to measure, which parts of the application process provide useful information, and how the timing of the admissions process impacts not just the colleges asking for the info, but also the students, teachers and counselors that have to provide the info. 

Topic #2:  Is it time to rethink Restricted Early Action?

“How many kids do we have applying early?” is a question I commonly receive at this time of year.  It’s a question I no longer know how to answer.  “Early” now includes Early Decision, Early Action, Restricted Early Action, “priority” deadlines, and rolling admission, so any attempt to answer ends up being an essay answer to what is intended to be a short-answer question.

In a landscape full of confusing options, the one that takes the cake is Restricted Early Action.  Restricted EA might be described as a compromise between Early Decision and Early Action, with a student restricted from applying other places (with exceptions) but having until May 1 to commit, and like most legislative compromises it is deeply unsatisfying.

Restricted EA came about because several high profile institutions threatened to withdraw from NACAC if not allowed to prohibit their EA applicants from applying EA to other institutions, as allowed by the commonly agreed upon definition of Early Action.  This was one of the early skirmishes in what has become the ongoing war within college admissions between institutional autonomy and common professional standards, and the vote to allow Restrictive EA was seen by many in the profession as another victory for the privileged few.

Restricted Early Action raises some interesting ethical issues. Restricted EA came about after some highly-selective colleges saw an insane increase in applications after making the change from Early Decision to Early Action, a change made in response to criticisms that Early Decision advantages students who are already advantaged.  I understand the desire to keep EA numbers from getting out of control, but how can a college interfere with a student’s freedom to apply to other institutions? I am surprised that someone hasn’t filed a lawsuit alleging restraint of trade.  The same argument could be made about Early Decision, but I think that Early Decision is different.  ED is a contract, a moral contract to be sure, where the student agrees to declare a first choice and limit applications in exchange for an early decision from the institution.

I would argue that Restricted Early Action is really a form of Early Decision, only Early Decision that is non-binding.  When the NACAC Admission Practices Committee and Assembly developed definitions for Early Decision and Early Action back in the 1990s, they drew the line between the two as being binding vs. non-binding, defining Early Decision as binding.  That is certainly defensible, but I would argue that the line is better drawn as single-choice vs. multiple-choice, with students restricted to a single choice in ED.  Colleges with Early Decision programs should then have the option of being binding or giving students until May 1 to deposit.

I don’t know that my “modest proposal” is any less confusing, but it is more consistent philosophically.  It doesn’t address more fundamental questions about early applications, such as whether Early Decision should exist at all or whether colleges should admit more than half their classes early.  Those will have to wait for another day.

ECA is off to the nation’s capital for the College Board National Forum, looking forward to discussions about the Coalition and prior-prior along with infomercials for College Board products.

The Coalition

“Someone needs to ask questions, probably you.”  That was part of the first message I saw upon checking e-mail as soon as my transcontinental flight landed on the tarmac in San Diego on the Tuesday prior to the NACAC Conference.  The correspondent was a loyal ECA reader with a suggestion for the next post, forwarding me a NACAC Exchange discussion on the announcement the previous day that the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success will offer a new application platform beginning next year.

I’m not sure I’m the right person to be asking questions or that I will ask the right questions.  I am concerned rather than exercised by the existence of the Coalition, and readers of the blog know that I am far more comfortable in the clouds than in the weeds.

It is not an understatement to say that the Coalition was the major topic of conversation during NACAC.  A Saturday morning session devoted to explaining the new initiative was packed despite having moved to a larger room.  That session was not as contentious as expected, but ended with a line at each microphone hoping to comment.  I had the distinct feeling throughout the conference that folks affiliated with the Common Application were overjoyed to find themselves not the center of attention.  Within the college application platform “family,” the Common App suddenly finds itself the “good child.” 

Does college admissions need another application platform?  I can argue both sides of that question.  In a perfect world I’d like to see the application process simplified, with students able to use a single application for all schools.  But I also worry about the Common Application becoming too common, too big.  In its quest to increase membership and market share, I fear the Common App has lost its moorings, core values such as the belief in holistic admission.  The same danger exists for organizations like NACAC.  Is there a point at which membership growth compromises mission?

The Coalition, on the other hand, is smaller and more homogeneous, but runs the risk of being elitist and exclusive.  There are 125 colleges and universities that meet the Coalition’s dual criteria for membership, a six-year graduation rate of 70% and a commitment to meet full need (or, in the case of public members, affordable tuition for in-state students).  As of the conference, 83 had signed on.

I appreciate the Coalition’s expressed goal of increasing access, but I am not alone in feeling that the access piece feels like an add-on.  The Coalition began as a reaction to the technology problems encountered by students and colleges two years ago after the Common App introduced a new technology infrastructure.  That debacle opened a lot of eyes to how easily the college admissions process could ground to a halt as a result of the power concentrated in a few players (Common App, College Board, Hobsons).

I applaud the Coalition’s desire to refocus the college process away from being transactional and toward “reflection and self-discovery.”  I like the idea of replacing the personal essay with writing that is more reflective.  But given that some Coalition member schools will accept the Common App as well as the new application, I have visions of answering whether students are better off writing the essay for the Common App or submitting materials through the Coalition’s Virtual Locker portfolio feature.   On that note, is it my imagination or were 75% of the vendors at NACAC highlighting their portfolio “products”?

What I find most worrisome about the Virtual Locker is the underlying assumption, that admissions frenzy is caused by the short window of time in which the process takes place.  I’m not sure that’s correct.  Will having the ability to begin collecting admission materials as early as ninth grade abate the frenzy or accelerate it?  Will it give an additional edge to the already privileged, and will it lead to a new admissions-related industry, the Virtual Locker Monitor/Consultant (“We Unlock Your Future”)?  The Coalition has announced that it will delay the start of the Virtual Locker until next summer, and that seems like a smart move.

The broader question is whether starting the college search process earlier is desirable, or even possible.  The acceleration of the application process into the early fall rather than the winter has already compromised much of the educational and developmental value of the senior year in high school.  How early do we want kids obsessing about college?  Should college admission be the primary goal of a high school education or the product, the natural next step?

I am probably ultra sensitive about this issue because I work with boys.  My students are bright and motivated, but the X factor in their intellectual growth and development is maturity.  Each spring when I meet with juniors, I ask, “Has it hit you yet that next year at this time you will be getting ready to go someplace else?”  Over the course of the spring I can see the consciousness of the junior class change.  The students I meet with in February or March, who are the first to make appointments and presumably the most ready to think about college, almost universally answer “No.”  By April, the answer is “It’s starting to,” and in May the answer is “Yes.”  Several years ago I was in a Board committee meeting where a Lower School parent asked whether waiting until the junior year to talk about college was too late.  Before I could respond, a university professor who was the father of two boys already in college spoke up.  “Yes it is, “ he said.  “But any earlier is too early.”

I hope the Coalition will help us have a conversation about whether we have a college admissions process that serves the public interest.  Do the college search and application processes measure readiness for college?  Should the college admissions process be a bridge from adolescence to adulthood?  Are we measuring/valuing the right things and are we asking the right questions?

Perhaps most important, are we sending the right messages?  The Coalition includes many of the nation’s leading public and private colleges and universities, and as a result has the opportunity to shape discussion within the profession and to educate the public.  I would love to see the Coalition make a strong statement asserting that applying to college is about self-discovery rather than just getting in somewhere, that authenticity is more important than resume-building and gamesmanship, and that the value of college lies in the experience one has in college rather than where one is admitted.

  

Late Post Card From San Diego

I just finished my first day back at work on the East Coast after five wonderful days with 7500 of my closest friends in San Diego.  Here are some updates and observations from the NACAC Conference:

          ---The big issue in San Diego was last Monday’s announcement of the creation of the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success consisting of 83 elite private and public colleges and universities.  The Coalition will introduce a new application platform next year as an alternative to the Common Application, and there are a lot of questions and concerns about how it will impact college admissions.  When I landed in San Diego last Tuesday and turned on my phone, the first e-mail I saw was from a loyal reader of this blog.  He forwarded me part of an e-mail discussion on the NACAC Exchange, and commented that “someone (you?) needs to ask some questions.”  I plan to comment on the Coalition and the issues it raises, but need time to process and to catch up on all the work that piled up at school while I was away.

2      ---Another friend of this blog, Bill Dingledine, received the Gayle Wilson Award for extraordinary service to the profession during the conference opening session.  Bill was the first person to post a comment when ECA started three years ago.

        ---On Saturday the NACAC Assembly amended the Statement of Principles of Good Practice to prohibit colleges from asking applicants or secondary schools to list or rank order their college or university preferences.  I have written about this issue, both with regard to the Common App adding a question and the Federal Government proposing ending the listing of other colleges on the FAFSA.  Not everyone on the college side is happy with the change, and in fact I saw a college admissions dean walking around the exhibit hall with a home-made sandwich board urging delegates to vote against the proposal.  I understand that having rank order information is helpful to colleges, but its misuse, even if only by a few schools, is wrong.  I applaud Todd Rinehart and the Admission Practices committee for their willingness to take on this issue.  Todd has been a great AP Chair, and I hope there might be more NACAC leadership in his future.  His AP shoes won’t be easy to fill, but the new Chair, Lou Hirsh, is a superb choice as Todd’s successor.

        ----The current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education contains an interesting article by Eric Hoover and Beckie Supiano examining the concept of fairness in college admissions.  It’s a thoughtful and well-written treatment of a challenging topic (I am quoted in the article so may not be totally objective).  I plan to write a follow-up post on the subject, and may even reprint a 1988 essay I wrote for the Chronicle arguing that random selection is the only fair way for elite colleges to admit students.  It was the first article I ever wrote about college admissions, and it was also an idea whose had not (and has not) come.

        ---Finally, the previous post was featured by Inside Higher Ed in its “Around the Web” section last Tuesday, the 7^th time that has happened.

Last week was enjoyable, even if I’ll pay for it the rest of the month.  Thanks to everyone who went out of your way to mention that you read and/or appreciate ECA.   The interest and support means a lot.

College Counseling or College Placement

Last week I was part of a four-person team (two college admissions deans, two independent school counselors) invited to evaluate the College Advising office at a good Mid-Atlantic boarding school. I have participated in this sort of thing or been part of accreditation teams a handful of times, and there are three constants. It is always educational and eye-opening to be on another campus, the visitors get more from the experience than the institution being evaluated, and it is amazing how much you learn about the culture of a place in a short period of time.

A couple of things during the visit inspired this post.  First, the person who at most schools would have the title of Director of Admissions is instead the Director of Enrollment Management.  Enrollment Management has become common enough in higher education that I have suggested (only half in jest) that NACAC might rebrand itself as NACACEM, but it is the first time I have seen a secondary school use that term.

I have no problem with that.  Enrollment Management is a controversial, misunderstood, and hot button term for many in the college admissions world.  It is easy to label many of the unsavory practices in college admissions under the umbrella of Enrollment Management (and I was correctly called out by Jon Boeckenstedt for being guilty of that in a post a couple of years ago), but Enrollment Management is a neutral concept, and on my own campus I have said that our admissions office should be thinking strategically about Enrollment Management rather than just filling spaces.

I’m not nearly as accepting of the other hot button term I encountered during the visit. While the office we were evaluating is the College Advising office, we learned that the Board committee overseeing that area of the school is the Admissions and College Placement committee (why it isn’t the Enrollment Management and College Placement committee I’m not sure).

The term “College Placement” produces a visceral response deep within my being, at least when used as a verb rather than a noun.  It also brings back memories.  Twenty-five years ago, soon after starting my job at St. Christopher’s, the school went through a strategic planning process.  I argued passionately that my job is college counseling rather than college placement, but my argument fell on deaf ears among the Board members overseeing the plan.  I lost the battle but ultimately won the war, but I am not foolish enough to believe that everyone in the school community believes in the gospel of college counseling.

College placement is the secondary school version of the view that college admissions is about sales rather than counseling.  It is particularly present in independent schools, whose customers may believe (and may be promised) that the investment in time and tuition will pay off with a prestigious college sticker on the BMW.

One of the most destructive suburban legends about the college admissions process is the metaphor of the college counselor as Hollywood agent.  This view sees college counselors as negotiators, cutting deals for students.  That is grounded in the assumption that college admission is about who you know more than what you know, that an independent school college counselor can pick up the phone and call his buddy in the admissions office at Brown or Pomona and call in a favor.  The psychologist Michael Thompson refers to it as "The 'Special Relationship' Delusion" in an excellent article entitled "Fenced In By Delusions."

If I have that power (which would actually be a superpower) I’m not aware of it.  I have the ability to serve as an advocate and get a close or even a second look for a student, but that is grounded not in relationships but in credibility and professionalism.  It is worth noting, however, that when I surveyed counselors for a NACAC pre-conference workshop several years ago, several commented that they suspected or feared the existence of a college counseling secret society with powers they weren’t privy to.

The emphasis on college placement rather than college counseling is misguided, seeing the destination as more important than the journey.  It is also unfair to students.  When I was young I wanted my students to get in to college because of my efforts, but as I have matured I have realized how foolish that was.  Our job is not to get students in, but rather to help them get in.  We are trail guides, providing knowledge, wisdom, and support during a process that can be mysterious and stressful.

The general public may believe that college placement (the noun, as exemplified by the college “list”) is a metric of school quality, of value added, and schools don’t go out of their way to disabuse them of that notion.  But good college counseling is the real gift, the real added value that a school can provide its students and parents.  The college search process should be transformational just as college is transformational, and college counseling that understands the developmental importance of the college process, helps the student look within to understand his or her true self, and provides guidance and wisdom to help a family navigate the complex and often-confusing admissions and financial aid processes is worth its weight in gold, or at least tuition dollars.

FAFSA-palooza

This summer those of us who qualify as “college admissions geeks” had the opportunity to experience our very own “FAFSA-fest,” as the U.S. Department of Education made two major announcements regarding changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.   The addition of a third FAFSA-related announcement from the White House earlier this week turned it into a “FAFSA-palooza.”

FAFSA.com

In late July the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will take over the web domain FAFSA.com as part of a negotiated settlement with its previous owner, Student Financial Aid Services, Inc.  Student Financial Aid Services, Inc. is a for-profit company providing services such as FAFSA form preparation for a fee, and the settlement with the Department of Education coincided with a separate complaint filed against Student Financial Aid Services by another Federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for illegally billing more than 100,000 consumers.

I first encountered this issue during my tenure as President of NACAC.  A Board member had done a Google search for the FAFSA during one of our meetings, and all of us were disturbed to learn that the first search result was FAFSA.com rather than FAFSA.gov, the official site to access the FAFSA. On FAFSA.com families were offered help in completing the FAFSA but had to pay a fee to do so (if the form isn’t free, doesn’t that make it the “AFSA”?).  The services appeared legit, but I was troubled by the fact that families (and counselors) who were unsophisticated or just not paying close scrutiny could easily believe they were on the official FAFSA site and spend money unnecessarily.

I applaud the Department of Education for taking over the web domain.  Not only does the decision serve the public interest, but this issue provides a counterpoint for those who believe that there should be no Federal presence in education and that the Department should be abolished. 

Abolishing FAFSA Order

In August the Department of Education announced proposed changes to the 2016-17 FAFSA. The most substantive of those changes is that colleges receiving a student’s FAFSA will no longer see the list of other colleges to which the student is sending the FAFSA.  Currently a student may send the FAFSA to up to ten colleges, and those colleges know the other colleges on the list.

The proposed change is in response to concerns about how that information is being used.  The FAFSA form does not explicitly instruct students to list colleges in rank order, but in recognition that a number of states use FAFSA order to disburse state grants, the instructions state, “For state aid, you may wish to list your preferred college first.”

But how do colleges use the order listed by students on the FAFSA?  Both NACAC and InsideHighEd.com have reported that at least some admission offices and consultants on enrollment and financial aid are trolling the data to judge a student’s interest in a given institution, and may make admissions and financial aid decisions based on a student’s FAFSA order.   Several studies suggest that 55-70% of students enroll at the school listed first on the FAFSA, and examples of how FAFSA order is used include leveraging financial aid, offering less institutional aid to a student who lists a school as number one and is therefore presumably likely to enroll, or protecting yield by wait listing a student who is qualified for admission but lists the institution lower on the FAFSA.  The latter practice could be a violation of federal law, which prohibits the use of FAFSA information for any purpose other than awarding financial aid.

So what are the ethical issues involved here?  The NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice prohibits colleges from asking students to rank their order of interest.  That’s not the case here, but the only thing worse than asking is making assumptions about interest based on a student’s FAFSA order when the student isn’t aware it’s being used that way.  That would be less of an issue if a student provides the order voluntarily, with full awareness of how it may be used. 

There are also ethical issues related to the leveraging of financial aid.  Is it ethical to offer less financial aid to a student because he or she is more likely to enroll, or more financial aid to a student who is less likely to enroll?  Those practices may serve an institution’s interest, but they also have the potential to harm public trust in the college admissions process.

I have seen suggestions that colleges knowing FAFSA order may benefit students, but I am unclear what those benefits might be, and invite readers to weigh in on potential positives for students and or institutions.

When my children were little, they had a hard time understanding the difference between want and need.  My son used “need” as a synonym for “want,” whereas my daughter added a third category, “really want,” as if really wanting something imposed an enhanced obligation on me to provide it.  I get that colleges want, and maybe even really want, the information they get from a student’s FAFSA order, but I question whether they need it.

The Department of Education is soliciting comments from the public until October 13.

Earlier FAFSA Timeline

Late Breaking News:  On Monday the White House announced that as of October 1, 2016 students will be able to complete the FAFSA using previous year tax information rather than having to wait until the end of the tax year. 

On the surface, that seems like a good move, but it’s too early to know.  I believe in the Law of Unanticipated Consequences, and as Jon Boeckenstedt points out in article on the Chronicle of Higher Education website this morning, this change could have major reverberations for college admissions and higher education.  Stay tuned.

Harvard Complaint Dismissed

Even though the blog is officially on summer break (and, in fact, at the beach), two quick updates, one newsworthy, one not.

The U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights has dismissed a claim by more than sixty Asian-American groups that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants in undergraduate admissions.  The Department of Ed dismissed the claim because a lawsuit making similar charges filed last November by Students for Fair Admissions is pending in Federal District Court.  A recent ECA post discussed the issues surrounding the charges and the lawsuit.

As mentioned at the time, that post was selected for InsideHigherEd.com’s “Around the Web” section.  In the past three months four ECA posts have been featured, making Ethical College Admissions the most-mentioned site.  To quote a character portrayed by famed character actor Walter Brennan in a 1960’s western series, “No Brag, Just Fact.”  Except in this case it is a brag.  

School's Out for Summer

This is the final post before ECA shuts down for the summer, featuring some news updates and brief comments.

1)    I always appreciate reader feedback, and want to respond to Nola Lynch’s comment posted on the blog yesterday.  She found a distinction I made between consultants and counselors “extraneous,” and objected to my lumping all educational consultants together, including those who are members of IECA and HECA.  The comment may have been extraneous, but I was struck by the fact that the Boston Globe story described those who advise Asian-America students to appear “less Asian” as consultants. 

What I didn’t intend at all was a comment about the independent consultant community at large.  I think of our independent colleagues as being college “counselors,” and had actually forgotten that the C in both IECA and HECA stands for consultant rather than counselor. I plead ignorance rather than malice. My issue was with those whose advice is solely about strategy and gaming the system, a danger about which all of us need to be vigilant, regardless of our title.

2)    Steve LeMenager’s comment alludes to the unhealthy obsession with prestige and branding in college admissions and in our society, and a recent Washington Post story exposes the dangers.  A student at an elite magnet school falsely reported that she had been admitted to a unique program that would allow her to spend two years at Harvard and two years at Stanford.  She also reported that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had personally called her to encourage her to go to Harvard.  The story received media coverage in her native Korea, referring to her as the “Genius Girl,” only to be exposed as false.  The unfortunate incident followed another Post story about a student from the same school who had earned admission to all eight Ivies.  Is that something worth celebrating or reporting as news?

3)    At the end of a monumental week of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court announced yesterday that it will take another look at the case of Fisher v. Texas, which it considered two years ago.  At that time the Court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit asking it to consider whether the UT-Austin affirmative action plan satisfies the legal demand for “strict scrutiny.” The Fifth Circuit approved the Texas plan last year by a 2-1 margin.  Will news of the scandal where the President’s Office at UT-Austin ordered students with connections admitted influence the way the Supreme Court reconsiders Fisher?

4)    On Friday the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will back away from its plan to rate colleges.  The Department will produce a website with lots of data for consumers but will not include ratings.  Avoiding the temptation to rate colleges is a good decision.  Today the Federal government; tomorrow U.S. News?

5)    Sweet Briar College in Virginia will remain open for at least another year under the terms of a settlement brokered by Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring between the College’s Board and a group of alumnae that had filed suit arguing that the closing of the college violates the trust that established Sweet Briar.  Saving Sweet Briar, the alumnae group, will contribute $12 million under the terms of the agreement, and the college will get a new Board and administration. I wrote about Sweet Briar’s closing as a case of institutional euthanasia, and I worry that the settlement is only prolonging the college’s demise, but I admire those who have worked to keep Sweet Briar alive and wish them success.

6)    The June 6 administration of the SAT was marred by a printing error that resulted in students having five minutes less on two sections.  The College Board has since announced that neither of the two affected sections will be scored, but that the error won’t impact the validity of student scores.  The College Board and ETS are easy targets, and there are plenty of folks glad to see them squirming after a screw-up.  There have been calls for everything from giving a free summer re-test to refunding part of the test fee because of the fewer questions to cancelling scores for any student who asks. The CB has responded by offering free registration for October for any student who took the June test.

The College Board’s confident assurance that the validity of a student’s scores are unaffected by the two missing sections begs the question, Why is the test so long?  If scores are unaffected by those two sections, then why do we need those two sections to begin with? The answer may be for PR reasons.  Nearly thirty years ago an admissions dean friend who was active with the College Board told me that it had the technology to give the SAT on a computer with the ability to produce accurate scores with only three questions (how you answered the first question would determine what your next question was).  What kept them from introducing the new test were concerns that the public would lose confidence in the SAT (that would never happen).  So is making the SAT long and arduous tied to building the brand?

7)    This morning’s “Around the Web” section of insidehighed.com lists the most recent post as one of its two selections, the sixth time ECA has been included.

ECA is headed off to summer vacation, remembering the wisdom of Alice Cooper (“School’s Out for Summer”) and Porky Pig (“That’s All, Folks”).  We’ll be back in September.

Less Asian?

“Do Asian American applicants face an unlevel playing field?” was the opening question posed to me by NPR All Things Considered weekend host Arun Rath in an interview about the “landscape” of college admissions.

It was not a question I was expecting, and for a moment I hoped I was having a version of that dream where you realize that the final exam is tomorrow and you’ve somehow forgotten to go to class for the entire semester.  The issue had come up in passing in a pre-interview the previous day with a producer from the show, but I didn’t expect it to be the focus of the interview.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I had somehow missed a news story a couple of days earlier that a coalition of 64 organizations filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights alleging that Harvard’s holistic admissions process deliberately discriminates against Asian-American applicants.  A lawsuit making the same claim was filed last November in federal district court by the group Students for Fair Admissions.  And within a couple of days after the NPR story ran the Boston Globe reported that college admissions “consultants” (not the same thing as college counselors) are advising Asian-American students to appear less “Asian” when applying to elite colleges.

I answered Rath’s question by explaining (but not defending) the nature of highly-selective college admissions.  In an environment where only 5% or 10% of applicants will be offered admission, there are lots of exceptionally qualified students who won’t get in. To borrow a phrase from logic, merit is necessary but not sufficient.   Selectivity, the desire to build a well-rounded class, and the belief in holistic admission all frustrate students and parents who want to understand what it takes to get in.  I also expressed my view that the hidden currency of selective admissions is uniqueness (that may not be the right word), in that the more there is of any quality or talent the less valuable it is, and vice versa.

As a college counselor (rather than a “consultant”), I sit down with every student who aspires to attend an Ivy or similarly selective college or university and explain that earning admission requires both a superb record and luck.  That is especially the case for students without a hook (recruited athlete, diversity, legacy).  The odds for unhooked applicants are much lower, probably less than 1%.  Of the thirteen students in this year’s senior class who were admitted to a national highly-selective school, only one didn’t have some combination of hooks (if you count a couple of Early Decision full pays).  All had superb credentials, but without the hooks they probably wouldn’t have been admitted.

So are Asian-American applicants intentionally discriminated against or just unhooked?  They are not currently underrepresented in the Harvard student body.  Asian-Americans make up 20% of Harvard’s student body, compared with 5% of the general population in the United States.  That doesn’t mean they’re not discriminated against, of course, if they “deserve” an even larger percentage. Affirmative action cases such as Fisher v. Texas refer to the concept of “critical mass,” an imprecise term, given that a precise numerical definition of critical mass looks a lot like a quota. Critical mass is normally thought of as a minimum number, but might it entail a maximum as well?

The plaintiff in the court challenge, Students for Fair Admissions, is an offshoot of the Project for Fair Representation, an advocacy group headed by Edward Blum devoted to ending race-conscious admission.  The group’s concern for the plight of Asian-Americans may be more a matter of convenience than conviction, as it has also filed a lawsuit against UNC-Chapel Hill with no mention of Asian-American applicants. Questionable motives do not automatically mean that the suit is without merit.

Most of the evidence of discrimination presented in the Students for Fair Admissions suit is prima facie, circumstantial in nature.  A 2009 study by Princeton professor Thomas Espenshade and Alexandra Radford concluded that Asian-Americans needed SAT scores 140 points higher than white students to get into elite colleges at the same rates.  The consistency in percentage of Harvard students from various ethnic groups over a long period of time is cited as evidence of racial balancing, as is the discrepancy in the percentage of Asian-Americans at Harvard (20%) compared with the percentage at Cal Tech (40%), which doesn’t take race into consideration in admission.

Then there is the historical argument against holistic admission.  Holistic admission, including such application staples as the personal essay, extracurricular activities, and letters of recommendation, traces its origins back to the 1920s, as documented in Jerome Karabel’s dense but fascinating history of admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, The Chosen.  Holistic admission was part of a move from the “best student” paradigm to the “best graduate” paradigm, ultimately replaced by today’s “best class” paradigm.  Karabel’s contention is that holistic admission was a tool to limit the Jewish enrollment at Harvard, and the lawsuit argues that today holistic admissions limits the number of Asian-Americans.

I don’t want to believe that holistic admission is being used to unfairly discriminate today, even if it’s clear that in the past terms such as “character” and “leadership” were defined in a narrow, even racist, way.  I believe in holistic admission and regret that the Common Application has moved away from it as a pillar of its mission, but also recognize that holistic admission can be a veil of secrecy over the admissions process.

If Asian-American applicants are being disadvantaged in the selective admissions process, it’s less due to holistic admission than other factors.  One is the increasing international nature of the student bodies at highly-selective schools.  Why admit Chinese-Americans when you can admit students from China? 

The other is the “class full of differences” paradigm, which values and rewards spike talents and compelling personal narratives rather than the superb resume pursued by many Asian-American students.  At a counselors’ breakfast I attended last fall sponsored by five highly-selective colleges, the consensus among the admissions officers present was that 90% or more of applicants were qualified, even superbly qualified, but very few were “interesting.”

I was annoyed by that attitude, because I think that a college education should help young people become “interesting,” but in this case it’s also instructive.  Asian-American applicants don’t have to be advised to be less Asian, but rather more interesting, more individual.  In the same way that independent schools had to come to grips that what might be best for a student educationally, being a well-rounded individual, was no longer the best way to earn admission to a highly-selective college or university, the path pursued by many Asian-American applicants, superb grades and scores supplemented by a menu of activities like tennis and violin, is no longer the sure path to Harvard or other schools.

 

P.S.  My hope is to do one more post next week before the blog goes on summer break.