Mystique

Ethical College Admissions makes the big time!  Last Friday Washington Post reporter Valerie Strauss republished last week’s ECA post on George Washington University’s announcement that it is need-aware, not need-blind in the Post’s “The Answer Sheet” blog .  Here’s the link.

A couple of hours later I received a call from the reporter who originally broke the story about the “changed” policy for The Hatchet, the GW student newspaper.  He wanted to interview me for a follow-up story he was writing.  I felt my defense mechanisms kicking in.   My interactions with reporters have been positive, but I had been told that someone associated with GW felt they had been misquoted, and my inner PR consultant voice was sending me a continuous loop of warnings and questions: “Be careful”; “What is the reporter’s angle?”; “Stay on message”; “Danger, Will Robinson!” (for those of you too young to remember, that’s a catchphrase from the 1960’s TV show, “Lost in Space”); and above all “Will I sound stupid?”  I had nothing to worry about.  When the article appeared on Monday it was well-written and captured my observations accurately.

What was interesting about the interview was that it morphed from dealing with GW’s need-aware policy alone to talking more about selective admission issues.  I argued that the problem was not GW’s being need-aware, which as far as I can tell falls in the mainstream of accepted practice, but in claiming to be need-blind when it was not.

At one point the reporter mentioned that the need-aware revelations had led several high school friends to conclude that financial need must have been why they were Wait Listed at GW.  He then asked if there were other reasons that a student might be Wait Listed, and it became clear to me that the bigger underlying issue is that there is a disconnect between the public’s understanding of how college admissions works and the realities of selective, holistic admissions as practiced by colleges.

At the same time that the GW story came out, I found another example of that disconnect.  A couple of weeks ago the online publication Baltimore Fishbowl ran a story with the title, “Is the Ivy League Out of Reach for Most Baltimore Students?”  Those of us who work in college admissions and college counseling understand that a similar article could be written for any city in the country with a simple answer—Yes.

The article was listed as a “Sponsored Post,” which I interpret as a euphemism for “infomercial” (I think the correct print journalism term is “advertorial.”)  The gist of the article was that Baltimore lags behind other parts of the country, including D.C., in Ivy League acceptances due to a dearth of “excellent SAT tutors, subject tutors, and private admissions consultants.”  The article further argued that test scores make up two-thirds of a student’s academic profile at the Ivies and that the best test prep consultants achieve an average “300-350 point increase on the SAT.”  It was also clear in the article that the target audience for the article was parents who send their children to independent schools where they already receive first-rate college counseling.

It was no surprise to see that the author of the article was someone who is in the “high-end standardized test prep” and tutoring business.  What was surprising were several comments from readers expressing gratitude to have such deep insight into the inner workings of the admissions process.  And when the college counselor at one of Baltimore’s leading schools (who happens to be a friend) responded with a comment pointing out the flaws in the article, he was attacked, perhaps even trolled.

I’m not particularly interested in addressing the claims in the Baltimore Fishbowl article.  The author explained the claim about test scores being two-thirds of the academic profile by referring to the Academic Index used for athletic admissions at the Ivies, but that is misleading at best and wrong at worst when generalized to Ivy League admissions as a whole.  The claim of a 300-350 point increase is higher than any I have ever seen, and I’d love to see evidence that supports it.  The test-prep industry is one of the marketing success stories of our time, but the value of test prep is a prime example of what I refer to as admissions “Suburban Legends.”  Like urban legends, they sound plausible, and you’ve heard that someone’s sister’s co-worker’s child got into Harvard because of test prep (or some other strategy), but proof, either pro or con, is hard to pin down.

For me, the broader issue in both the examples referenced above is whether we are doing a good enough job of communicating how college admission works and what is and is not important.

Among the biggest changes during my 35 years in this profession is public interest in and attention to the college admissions process.  When I began working in college admissions in the late 1970s, none of my friend or relatives understood exactly what I did or even that such a job existed.  That is no longer the case.  Major publications regularly feature articles devoted to college admission, and the local Barnes and Noble devotes an entire shelf to college guides, a shelf almost as large as the True Crime section.  A couple of years ago the Chronicle of Higher Education described college admission as having “mystique.”

The increased attention given to the college admissions process is a dual-edged sword.  It is good to have the importance of what we do validated, but the public interest increases the hype and anxiety that are already too much of the process, and preying on the anxiety felt by parents and students has become a billion-dollar growth industry.

So are we comfortable with the veil that covers college admission?  It is easy to blame the media, but what the public needs to know is not the same thing as what the public wants to know.  The bigger question is whether colleges really want the public to understand how much of a business higher education has become, the games played in the name of enrollment management, or how subjective holistic admission is?  Are we confident and secure enough in what we do to “preach what we practice”?  Would we rather have “mystique,” or would we rather have public confidence and trust?       

George Washington (the University, not the President)

Legend has it that George Washington (the President, not the University) could not tell a lie.  That legend dates back to his reputedly owning up to chopping down a cherry tree with a hatchet. 

I learned at an early age not to question that “truth.”  In elementary school I wrote a poem, intended to be humorous, about George Washington (the President, not the University) and the aforementioned cherry tree.  I wrote it from the point of view of a boyhood chum of George Washington (the President, not the University) who was an eyewitness to the demise of the cherry tree.  In the final stanza of the poem the future President is asked about chopping down the tree and responds by pointing at the narrator, “He did it.”

The poem was selected for the school literary magazine, perhaps my first ever published piece.  When the magazine came out, I was shocked to see that the final line of the poem now read, “I did it,” which not only removed any hint of whimsy and irony, but changed the entire meaning of the poem.  Upon further investigation, it turned out that I was a victim of censorship.  In typing the copy for the literary magazine, the school secretary took it upon herself to change the line so as not to sully the reputation of the father of our country.  For all I know I may have an FBI file based on having written that poem.

On Monday we learned that George Washington (the University, not the President) doesn’t have that much in common with George Washington (the President, not the University).  GW (the University) is not only capable of telling a lie, but has apparently been lying for years about being need-blind in admission.

That revelation came in a story in the ironically-named independent student newspaper The Hatchet.  In the article, Laurie Koehler, the university’s new Senior Associate Provost for Enrollment Management, described the University’s policy as need-aware and acknowledged that was not a change in policy.  That raised eyebrows, because for years (and in fact up until Saturday night) GW had claimed to be need-blind.

There is an old saying in higher education that any publicity is good publicity.  George Washington (the university, not the President) may be about to find out how true that is. This is the second time in the past year that GW had gotten negative admissions-related publicity.  Last November, U.S. News and World Report moved GW into the “Unranked” category (in essence a class by itself) after learning that GW had misreported class rank data for entering students.  That story resulted in Koehler’s predecessor retiring last December.

I have written about the ethics of need-blind admission previously.  Nearly twenty years ago my first article for the Journal of College Admission was on that topic, and one of my first blog posts last year dealt with need-blind admission.  Here are a couple of quick thoughts about George Washington (the University, not the President) and about need-blind/need-aware.

The positive outcome of this story is that GW is now being transparent about its practices.  When the NACAC Assembly first debated the need-blind issue twenty years ago in Pittsburgh, I argued that transparency was the most important and relevant ethical principle, and I continue to believe that.  The cynical part of my being (which friends and colleagues would say is a pretty big part) says that it is easy to come clean when you can place the blame for misrepresentation on your predecessor, and I also wonder about the fact that until sometime this weekend the GW website apparently was still using language indicating that it was need-blind.  Be that as it may, what’s important is that GW is now accurately reflecting what it does.

It is important to stipulate that there is nothing inherently wrong with need-aware admission, especially when practiced at the margin.  Need-blind admission is an ideal that very few institutions can realistically achieve.  Good ethical principles and policies should balance ideals and reality, and the reality is that higher education is at some level a business (I hope it’s more than that), with revenue and expenses a concern.

That doesn’t mean that all need-aware admission practices are equally defensible.  Giving an opportunity to a student with low or no need is more defensible (assuming the student is reasonably capable of being successful) than denying opportunity to a student because they have financial need.      

Twenty-five years ago need-blind admission was understood to incorporate two different principles.  One was that admission decisions should be made without regard to financial need.  The other was that institutions should meet the full need of every student.  I see an ethical difference between the two.  In ethics there is a distinction between acts that are obligatory/ethical duties and those that go beyond the call of duty.  I consider making admission decisions based on qualifications an ethical obligation, while providing funding morally praiseworthy but beyond the call of duty.  I appreciate the argument that says that providing opportunity without adequate financial resources is cruel, but denying opportunity altogether is worse.  One is unpleasant, the other unethical.  What is worse than either of those is denying opportunity to protect stats like admit rate and yield.

What is wrong in the GW case is not being need-aware, but pretending to be need-blind.  I can only guess that’s because need-blind is seen as being prestigious.  Doing things for prestige reasons is usually a bad idea.  I remember a college adding an essay to its application years ago and admitting that it had no intention of reading the essays, but thought that having an essay would make it appear more prestigious.  Just recounting that makes my blood all over again.  A good rule of thumb is that if you’re embarrassed or hesitant to “preach what you practice,” that might be telling you something.

Finally, the need-blind issue is a great example of the changing admissions landscape.  Usually the term “changing admissions landscape” implies an erosion of ethical standards, but I don’t think that’s the case here.  The financial realities of higher education require us to rethink what is important and why.  The enduring values here are honesty and transparency, and whenever any of us fail to live those values, it hurts all of us.

First Monday in October

Last Monday was the first Monday in October, the day each fall that the United States Supreme Court begins its term.  Last year at this time there was great anticipation in the college admissions world as the Court had on its docket a major affirmative action case, Fisher v. Texas. 

This year the Court will hear another case related to affirmative action, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.  Unlike Fisher, though, that case doesn’t have to do with affirmative action itself, but rather the constitutionality of a state (in this case Michigan) amending its constitution to prohibit race- or sex-based discrimination or preferential treatment in public university admissions when other forms of preferential treatment (such as legacy status) aren’t prohibited.  The oral arguments for that case are today, and I’ll post later in the week if I see any interesting admissions issues arising from the discussion before the Court.      

In admissions parlance, the Supreme Court put affirmative action on a Wait List in the Fisher decision. The Court declined to rule on the merits of the affirmative action program employed by the University of Texas and remanded the case back to a lower court.  What does that mean for the future of affirmative action?  It depends on whom you ask.  As is so often the case these days in American politics, both sides claimed victory.

Several weeks ago, Jocelyn Samuels from the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and Catherine Lhamon from the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education sent a joint letter to college and university presidents.  The letter stated that the Fisher decision preserved the legal precedent that colleges have a compelling interest in a diverse student body and can advance that interest through their admissions programs.  The letter also affirmed that a 2011 Guidance on the Voluntary Use of Race to Achieve Diversity in Postsecondary Education statement from the two offices remains in effect, and included a list of Frequently Asked Questions about the Fisher case.

They may be alone in being that optimistic about the future of affirmative action in its present form.  Just yesterday I talked with the Dean of Admissions at a flagship public university who said that he is spending a lot of his time with university lawyers preparing a defense of the institution’s affirmative action program in anticipation that there will be new legal challenges in the wake of Fisher, and an article by Eric Hoover in yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that a number of colleges and universities are thinking about and preparing for a “race neutral” future.

With all due respect, I found the optimism in the letter unwarranted.  The Obama administration (I think it is fair to assume that the letter represents the administration view) is technically correct that the Fisher decision did not overturn affirmative action in its current form, but several justices made it clear in their opinions that they would have done so if asked.  In no way could Fisher have been interpreted as upholding the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, as the letter seems to suggest.  As Richard Kahlenberg points out in an op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, four justices (Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Ginsberg) voted on different sides of the two cases.

At the very least, the Fisher decision places the burden of proof on those who want to use race-conscious approaches to achieve diversity.  Fisher was remanded back to the lower court because it had failed to exercise strict scrutiny, taking at face value the University of Texas’s claim that diversity was a compelling interest and that its affirmative action program (which operated to supplement the diversity produced by the state’s top 10% program) was necessary. Fisher will put the onus on institutions to demonstrate that diversity is a compelling goal, that any affirmative action program is narrowly tailored to achieve the goal, and that no race-neutral solution would be effective.  That’s a subtle, but significant, change.

I also wonder if Fisher will lead to a much-needed conversation about diversity.  I am not suggesting that we need to back away from a commitment to diversity but rather to clarify how and why diversity is important.  Is all diversity equally valuable?  One of the odd arguments made by counsel for the University of Texas during Fisher was that it needed to admit more underachieving middle class and wealthy students of color for the sake of diversity.   

Diversity in higher education has been so worshipped as a virtue that it wouldn’t be surprising to see some university rebrand itself as a 21^st century “Diversity”—think the Diversity of California or Brown Diversity.  But is diversity an intrinsic value, good for its own sake, or an instrumental value, good because it provides and supports a richer educational experience?  I would argue the latter. 

Fisher v. Texas  was the fourth major Supreme Court case dealing with affirmative action in college admissions, and odds are that it won’t be the last.  The issue defies easy solution because it brings into conflict two important fundamental principles. 

One is equality of opportunity.  In August we celebrated the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  I have watched it multiple times, and I am always struck by two things.  One is how different the world was in 1963, from voting rights issues to segregated lodging facilities and even separate drinking fountains in the South.  The other is King’s genius in alerting the nation to the cognitive dissonance between the promises made in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and the reality of racial discrimination.  We have made great strides, but do we have equality of opportunity today, and can we provide opportunity to higher education in a meaningful way without using racial preferences in admissions?

The other issue is fairness.  If giving preferences on account of race is wrong, isn’t it wrong even when done with noble intentions?  Does the end justify the means?  Is there any alternative?

I am much better at asking questions than I am at providing answers, but two things are clear to me.  It would be a mistake to keep affirmative action in its present form, and it would be a mistake to abolish affirmative action altogether.  By comparison, the current “discussion” between Republicans and Democrats over the debt ceiling and the government shutdown is a walk in the park (but not a National Park).

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Several years ago, at the funeral for University of Virginia Dean of Admissions Jack Blackburn, I ran into Bill Hartog, the long-time Dean of Admissions at Washington and Lee University.  We shared our fond memories of Jack and his legacy for our profession, and commiserated about becoming elder statesmen, or just older.

I shared my experience of attending a meeting of independent school college counselors, including several who had just moved across the desk from the college side.  At the end of the meeting, one of them looked at me and stated how inspiring it was to see the old-timers present.  Thinking he wanted affirmation, I started to reply, “It sure is,” when it hit me that the old-timer he was referring to was me.

Bill observed that he was now 25 years older than the next oldest member of his staff.  He sensed that people in the office were asking, “Who is that old guy, what does he do here, and why is he always so grumpy?”

No one would begrudge Bill for being grumpy this week.  I returned from Toronto on Sunday night to learn that the Washington Post had published an article about colleges that count incomplete applications when computing application totals and admit rate.  The focal point in the article was W&L.  A day later Washington and Lee President Kenneth Ruscio called for an internal review of the school’s procedures for reporting admissions data.   

The original article correctly points out that W&L’s practice is not out-of-line with the accepted guidelines for reporting data to the federal government or as established by the Common Data Set, but there is also an implication that what W&L is doing is comparable to the misrepresentation of admissions stats that occurred at places like Emory and Claremont McKenna and Bucknell.  Based on what I have read and what I know, that is not the case.

I read the article not as an indictment of Washington and Lee but as a criticism of the current state of college admission.  There is a disconnect between the accepted practice within our profession and public understanding of how the admissions process works.  The implicit criticism of W&L was due to counting as completed applications more than 1100 applications that were incomplete, an inclusion that lowered the acceptance rate from 24% to 19%.  That’s common practice, and I don’t consider it unethical, but many of us are guilty of massaging statistics to make us look better.

I also think we have deliberately kept a veil of mystery over how admission works, at least partly because we don’t want the public to know how subjective and imprecise holistic admission can be.  That veil of mystery is a double-edged sword.  It increases public fascination with college admission, but it also leads to skepticism and distrust about our practices and our motives.  As colleges move to a culture driven by marketing, we also send a message that we are motivated by self-interest rather than the public interest.  It is also the case that every instance of misrepresentation at one institution harms all of us.

The larger issue is that we have allowed admissions metrics to become a proxy for institutional quality.  Because educational outcomes are so difficult to measure, we have turned to things that are easy to measure (and easy to manipulate) and assigned them value that is in no way justified.  The unchallenged assumption is that the more popular the institution—application numbers, admit rate, yield—the better it must be.  There are plenty of culprits for that way of thinking—Presidents, Provosts, and Boards; Bond-rating agencies; and of course, U.S. News and World Report, the poster child for measuring educational quality without considering the educational experience.  The logical conclusion of the “Popularity=Quality” mindset is that the ultimate gourmand experience will be found at McDonald’s.

Either Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli said that there are three kinds of lies—lies, damned lies, and statistics.  Colleges and universities know better than to spread lies or damned lies, but I think we can expect more scrutiny over our use of statistics. I suspect we will be challenged both by Gen X parents and by the federal government to find new ways to show the value of a college education and the value added by particular institutions.  The Obama administration’s proposal to rank colleges and allocate federal aid based on access, affordability, and outcomes may be the first salvo.  We need to be proactive and not reactive.

Postcard from Toronto

Today happens to be the first anniversary of the blog.  It’s been a good year, and as I have told several people at NACAC in Toronto, one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done.  I am particularly grateful to all of you who read and comment both privately and publicly.

I celebrated by doing a session this morning with Lee Coffin from Tufts and Chuck Lovelace from the Morehead-Cain Foundation at UNC-Chapel Hill.  Our topic was one that readers of the blog will find familiar.  Are we measuring the right things in the college admissions process?  We addressed (not the same as answering) that question in three different areas: non-cognitive predictors of success; 21^st century skills; and measures of institutional quality.  It’s a discussion worth having, and Lee and Chuck have both done first-rate thinking in how to merge theory with practice.

Last week Eric Hoover at the Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to write a guest post for the Chronicle’s Head Count blog, and it appeared yesterday.  Here’s a link.

This was the first time in five years that I didn’t have official duties.  Several people asked me if I missed it, and I responded by asking if I looked like I had a sense of loss.  No one answered yes.  I enjoyed the opportunity to serve NACAC, and the experience has certainly benefitted me both personally and professionally, but I finished my term with a sense of satisfaction that I had done my best and that it was time to move on to other things.  Writing about the ethics of college admissions has helped make that transition easy.

This morning the NACAC Assembly amended the Statement of Principles of Good Practice to address the use of international agents.  The Assembly adopted amended language to the motion put forth by the Board of Directors and Admission Practices Committee based on the report of the Commission on International Student Recruitment.  The amendment to the SPGP’s Mandatory Practices allows member institutions to use incentive-based agents when working with international students but requires that the institution ensure “accountability, transparency and integrity.”

I think it was important for the Assembly to validate the thoughtful deliberative process employed by the Commission, but "accountability," "transparency," and "integrity" all leave plenty of room for definition and further discussion. I think no one believes this will resolve the agent issue once and for all.

Justice and Mercy

I used to give my mother-in-law a hard time because the first part of the newspaper she looked at every morning was the obituaries.  I haven’t adopted that habit, but now that I have reached the stage in life where being referred to as middle-aged is a compliment, it doesn’t seem quite as amusing.

Recently I saw that the father of a former student had passed away.  A classical guitarist who had immigrated to the United States to receive a kidney transplant, he seemed to be on death’s doorstep 20 years ago, so I was surprised that he had lived this long. 

Seeing his obituary made me recall my proudest counseling moment. His son was bright, strong-willed, and rebellious, and his junior year could have inspired a soap opera or reality show.  He chafed under rules and expectations that were minimal, scored high enough on the PSAT to be a National Merit Semifinalist but didn’t have grades to match, shaved his head for shock effect, and in late January disappeared for a week.  It turned out he was visiting a girl at a college in the Midwest.

During the last month of school he was convicted of back-to-back honor offenses.  Both could be categorized as stupid rather than deceitful, but at St. Christopher’s the Honor System is the foundation underpinning everything that happens at the School, the line you don’t cross, and an upperclassman with multiple offenses is in deep trouble.  Both the faculty and his peers were at the end of their ropes, and the Honor Council recommended expulsion.

The Headmaster consulted me before acting on the recommendation.  We agreed that the boy wasn’t a bad kid, just immature and stuck in a bad home situation.  At the same time, it wasn’t in his or the community’s best interest to remain.  We finally arrived at a creative solution—either expel him or get him into college early.

And that’s what happened.  A good liberal-arts college (the same one he had visited for a week in January) was willing to offer him admission without a high-school diploma.  We didn’t expel him, he was accepted to college early, and four years later he graduated with honors, after which he wrote me the kind of thank-you note I’ve received only rarely in my career.  It meant even more because of the back story.

A guiding principle in ethics is “Treat like cases alike.”  The challenge, of course, is that rarely are two cases alike.  Every ethical dilemma brings with it a unique combination of circumstances and considerations and requires its own calculus.  That calculus must balance the interests of the individual with those of the community, as well as balancing justice with mercy.  Rarely is it possible to find a solution that accomplishes both, which is what made the previous case so satisfying.  

I have been thinking about the interplay between justice and mercy recently thanks to one of last year’s seniors.  He was an excellent student and school citizen who early last fall came down with a mysterious malady that ended up taking away most of his senior year.  He couldn’t sleep or hold down food and quickly fell way behind academically.  He went to numerous doctors and received numerous diagnoses and treatments, but none made him better.

By the end of September it was clear that the best case scenario was a significant drop in grades, and he decided to apply Early Decision to college so that senior year grades would not come into play.  I was okay with that approach, given that he was a strong candidate for a school he wanted to attend, but I cautioned him and his family that the college would need to be made aware of his situation eventually.

The challenge of the school year, and especially the senior year, is that you can’t call time out and stop the clock.  Christmas break offers one of the only concentrated periods of time when a student might catch up after falling behind.  When January arrived, the student’s health issues remained serious and undiagnosed, it was clear that he would only be able to complete two of his first semester classes, and we knew that we had to, in the words of my GPS, “Recalculate.”  The good news was that he was in college.

As a school we were trying to be sensitive and supportive of the boy and his family, but the situation raised some difficult practical and philosophical questions.  What should we do about the courses he wasn’t physically able to complete?  Is earning a high school diploma about earning a minimal number of credits or about a certain quality of experience?  What was our duty to the student, and what was our responsibility to the college he wanted to attend?  If Woody Allen is correct that 90% of life is showing up, what happens when you can’t even do that on a regular basis?

I struggled to sort out my ethical obligations.  In any ethical dilemma, there are multiple duties involved.  The philosopher W.D. Ross argued that ethical duties arise from relationships, and that every relationship carries with it what he calls a prima facie (or first glance) duty.  In this case I had a duty to the student.  I also had a duty to my school, I had a duty to the college, I had a duty to the profession, and I had a duty to my core values as an individual.  Unfortunately Ross only tells you how to identify possible duties, not how to choose among them.

It wasn’t until March that doctors at the Mayo Clinic diagnosed the student as having postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS).  Having a diagnosis and knowing that it was treatable and not chronic was a relief for everyone, but finding the right combination and dosage levels of medications remained a challenge, and hopes for being able to come to school on a regular basis proved overly optimistic.   

As a school we were trying to do the right thing, balancing mercy and justice.  The family didn’t want to consider a repeat senior year.  The college said they would allow him to come if I/we certified that he was ready.  How could I do that, when he wasn’t healthy enough to come to school more than a period a day and would finish his senior year with 1.5 credits?  At the same time, he hadn’t chosen to get sick, and an important moral principle is that you can’t judge or punish someone for things they haven’t chosen.

He finished the school year one-half credit shy of the minimum number required to graduate.  We allowed him to walk at graduation, and gave him two options for earning a diploma.  He could take an on-line course during the summer to get the final credit or we would give him a diploma at the end of his first semester in college.  Of course the family didn’t like either option, and asked us to give him academic credit for therapy he did at the Mayo Clinic during the month of July.

The student started college a week ago.  He seems healthy and ready, but he has also essentially missed a year of school.  I don’t know that we achieved either mercy or justice, and I don’t know that we came up with the “right” answer.  Sometimes an okay answer has to be good enough.    

Desperation

Nearly a quarter century ago I took a three-year hiatus from my college counseling career to take a job as admissions director at an independent school.  I left college counseling reluctantly, because I loved the school and the kids I worked with, but I was commuting 160 miles round-trip daily and my wife told me I could consider any job I wanted as long as it was in Richmond.

I realized quickly that the school was struggling, far more than I had been told.  I attended a Board meeting before I started the job, and while casually reading the minutes of the previous meeting discovered that just a month before a motion had been made and defeated to fire the Headmaster, the person who had just hired me.  I began my first day on the job, a month before the opening of school, counting up all the returning and prospective students and discovered that the best possible scenario was 40 students shy of the minimum budget number.  The Headmaster had no clue.  Perhaps most telling was that when I went to the business office to get paper clips, they asked me how many I needed.  The school couldn’t afford to give me a whole box.

Less than two weeks before school started, I attended an emergency evening meeting with the Headmaster and the Executive Committee of the Board. They wanted me to make cold calls to try to recruit last minute enrollments.  I refused, telling them that if word got out on the street that we were desperate, the school would never recover.  The school might need that approach or that kind of admissions director, but I wasn’t willing to do that.  I stood there waiting to be fired, but one trustee spoke up and backed me, and the rest of the group backed down.

But what happens when you really are desperate? A recent New York Times article about falling college enrollments mentioned two institutions, Loyola University in New Orleans and St. Mary’s College of Maryland, that have fallen far short of their enrollment goals this spring, forcing them to cut their budgets by millions of dollars.

One paragraph in the article raised eyebrows among those of us in the profession.  Loyola was reported to have called students who had been accepted but not enrolled, including sweetening financial-aid offers.  The Times article stated that recipients of the calls included students who had already deposited elsewhere, a violation of the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice.

Loyola officials responded both to the NACAC Exchange and to InsideHigherEd (which did a follow-up piece) that they had been misunderstood, that the school had made the calls and financial aid offers only to accepted students who hadn’t informed Loyola that they were going elsewhere.  I appreciate the clarification from Loyola, but am also glad to know that the NACAC Admission Practices Committee will apparently investigate based on complaints made by NACAC members after the Times article appeared.

I am more intrigued by the larger questions raised by the articles. 

The most obvious has to do with May 1.  What are the ethical imperatives implied by the May 1 National Candidates Reply date?  Is May 1 the “end” of the admissions process, such that it is improper for institutions to recruit after that date? Should institutions like St. Mary’s and Loyola get a “pass,” given that financial stewardship, saving employees’ jobs, and staying in business are all in some sense ethical objectives? Are we about to see new attempts to erode the May 1 deadline?

Let me answer the last question first.  I certainly hope the answer is no.  I consider May 1 the most important convention for preserving sanity and ethical practice in the college admissions world.  The May 1 date clearly provides protection for students to ensure they receive all decisions before making a final choice, but I would also argue that it provides protection for colleges, both as a benchmark for judging where enrollment stands and also as a guard against deterioration into a Wild West mentality.

It is also clear that the admissions cycle continues past May 1 for many institutions, including rolling admissions schools, those utilizing Wait Lists, and schools that have to deal with considerable summer melt.  There is nothing wrong with recruiting students after May 1, IF those students haven’t deposited at another institution.  It is appropriate to contact accepted students who have not deposited or informed you that they are going elsewhere, but conversations must stop once it is clear that a student has committed to another school, and financial exigency does not change that.

Are the shortfalls faced by Loyola and St. Mary’s anomalies, unique to those institutions, or canaries in the enrollment management coalmine? In the past week I have heard about two other institutions with freshman classes smaller than expected, although nowhere near the same degree as the two institutions named above.  At least one tried to cut back on its discount rate, only to find a corresponding drop in deposits. This spring I found that economic considerations seemed to drive college decisions for my students far more than I have ever seen before, choosing public over private and in-state over out-of-state.  I’m not sure if the decisions are driven by ability to pay or unwillingness to pay, but if it’s happening with my families, it has to be a wider phenomenon.  Will college admissions officers need to rethink fundamental assumptions? 

The ultimate question is whether college admissions can walk the fine line between being an industry and being a profession.  What distinguishes the two is the degree of commitment to the public interest as well as self-interest. Can we continue to agree on a set of principles that serve all of us well even when they might not always serve me well?  I hope so.  As Benjamin Franklin said about signing the Declaration of independence, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Summer Break

Ethical College Admissions is taking a break for the rest of the summer (let me be clear that I mean ECA the blog, not college admissions practices that are ethical).  I had planned to start the hiatus a month ago, but waited for the Supreme Court to announce its decision in Fisher v. Texas.

I’m not spending summer in the Hamptons or the south of France, so if some issue of monumental importance raises its head I’ll be prepared to comment on it.  But this seems like a good time to step back, recharge, and focus on some other writing projects.

I started this blog last September not knowing if I would find anything to write about, whether I could discipline myself to post on a regular basis, and whether anyone would find it worth reading.  What I discovered was that all kinds of issues I couldn’t have anticipated popped up, and after a week went by following a post I felt an urge to sit down and address a new topic.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to blogging.  One is that the blogger should write for himself or herself.  The other is that blogging is about a conversation with readers.  I accept both views.  I have found that writing has helped me clarify my own thinking about issues, but knowing that there are people reading the blog, including people whose opinions I value greatly, has proved fulfilling at a level I couldn’t have imagined.  One analytical tool tells me that close to 5000 people have viewed the blog, with readers from 49 states (the holdout is North Dakota) and 30 other countries.  I am particularly grateful to those readers who sent me e-mails or told me in person that they enjoyed the blog.  That means more than you can know.

I already have a queue of topics I’d like to address, but I’ll also be thinking about how to improve the blog.  My original intention was to include both some short posts as well as the 900-1100 word sermonettes, but it will surprise no one who knows me that lengthy somehow won out.  The older I get, the preachier I become.  I am thinking about doing a several-part series tracing the evolution of the affirmative action issue from Bakke to Fisher.  I’d welcome suggestions for how to make the blog better or topics/issues you’d like to see addressed.

We are officially on break.  Back in September.   

Fisher

On Monday the Supreme Court announced its much-awaited decision in the affirmative action case, Fisher v. University ofTexas.  The announcement wasn’t a surprise, given that this is the final week in the Court term and that Fisher was the earliest argued case still remaining on the Court’s docket.

What was surprising is that the decision was by a 7-1 majority (Justice Kagan recused herself).  That is the kind of majority many observers thought this Court was incapable of producing.  That strong majority, along with the long period of time between oral arguments and the decision, invites speculation that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion was narrowly tailored in order to cobble together that majority.

I read the opinion as soon as it came out on Monday morning, and had hoped to post a response later in the day, but I had a meeting out of town on Tuesday and Wednesday and didn’t want to rush just to get something out.

In Fisher the Supreme Court vacated a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision supporting Texas, remanding the case back to the Fifth Circuit to try it on its merits.  The Fifth Circuit had denied Fisher’s appeal on the basis that Grutter v. Michigan, the last big affirmative action case decided by the Supreme Court, had required courts to give deference to universities to determine whether a diverse student body is a compelling interest and how to achieve that.  Justice Kennedy’s opinion finds that deference to be mistaken.

The good news is that the Fisher decision does not address the merits of affirmative action, although both Justices Scalia and Thomas made it clear that they would have voted to overturn Grutter if asked.  What it does is put the burden of proof on colleges and universities that take race into account in admission in order to achieve diversity.  Whereas the Fifth Circuit decision supported the idea that colleges should have discretion to decide what their institutional priorities are and how to achieve them, Justice Kennedy’s opinion puts the burden of proof on universities to demonstrate that achieving diversity is a compelling interest and that the admission policies put in place are narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.

So where does the Fisher decision leave the affirmative action debate?  It in no way resolves it, but it changes it by raising some fundamental philosophical questions that have been taken for granted in the past.     

The first question is, Is diversity a compelling educational interest for colleges and universities?  I think the answer is clearly yes, that a student’s education is broader and richer by being exposed to classrooms with a diverse array of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.  I also think that the higher education establishment has taken the value of diversity as an article of faith, asserting the value but not necessarily demonstrating the value. 

What factors contribute to educational diversity?  Given America’s history of racial discrimination, does being a student of color automatically bring diversity, or are there students of color who don’t contribute to diversity because of their socioeconomic backgrounds?  Are we as a society in a different place than we were during the Civil Rights Movement 50 years ago, or are our sensitivities to race just under the surface?  In oral arguments Texas argued for the importance of critical mass in order to relieve individual students of the burden of representing all students of a particular background, but didn’t have a great deal of research to show that classroom diversity would be lacking without the affirmative action program.  The amicus brief filed by the College Board and other educational organizations argues for self-determination, that colleges and universities should be trusted to determine their own policies, and it is clear that the court buys that argument only with limits.

If diversity is a compelling interest, is affirmative action necessary to achieve it?  Do colleges have alternatives?  In the Fisher case, the necessity argument was complicated by the fact that the defendant was the University of Texas. Several years ago the state of Texas instituted a law requiring that students ranking in the top ten percent of their high school classes be automatically admitted to public colleges and universities.  According to the UT-Austin website, 75% of the in-state spots in the freshman class are admitted through that program.  That law is certainly controversial and debatable on its own merits, but it has produced a diverse student body, if diversity is defined in terms of ethnic origin.  It was the program to admit the remaining 25% of students who were not in the top ten percent that was being challenged, and in oral arguments the attorney for Texas seemed to suggest that diversity required admitting underachieving middle- and upper-class students of color. It would have been easier to argue that affirmative action is necessary to produce a diverse student body had the defendant in Fisher not been located in Texas.

The ultimate question is whether the end justifies the means.  No one (at least no reputable voice) wants to return to the racial segregation of the 1940’s and 50’s, but does it make a difference how an institution achieves diversity?  In the first affirmative action case argued by the Supreme Court, the Bakke case, the medical school at the University of California at Davis set aside a certain number of slots for minority students and essentially conducted two different admission processes.  That approach was declared unconstitutional, but in succeeding cases institutions are less blatant but still figure out the result they want and reverse engineer the admission process to produce that result.  In Fisher the Supreme Court clearly answered that the means of achieving diversity is as important as the goal of achieving diversity.

In the wake of Fisher affirmative action lives, but colleges and universities will be challenged to demonstrate that their admission processes meet the burden of strict scrutiny if challenged in the courts.  That should stimulate a healthy discussion about how best to accomplish a worthy goal. I’m guessing that the Supreme Court will deal with this issue again in the near future.

Correction:  In the initial post I stated that the Bakke case involved the law school at the University of California-Davis.  It was the medical school, and I have corrected it above.  Thanks to Jon Reider for pointing out the error.  I could blame it on senility, but the truth is I was in a hurry to post and got careless.

Secret Agent

The National Security Agency wasn’t the only D.C. area entity dealing with fallout from leaks to the press last week.  While it didn’t receive the same publicity or have the same level of intrigue and serious implications for American society, NACAC was forced to release the report of its Commission on International Student Recruitment early after InsideHigherEd obtained a draft and published an article about the Commission’s findings.  It wasn’t exactly the Pentagon Papers, but NACAC had to speed-up its roll-out of the report to members and other stakeholders.

A Chronicle of Higher Education article on the report’s release characterized the report as weak and as attempting “to mollify everyone,” focusing on the Commission’s recommendation to change the language in the Statement of Principles of Good Practice prohibiting the payment of commissions to international recruiters from mandatory to a best practice.

I think that criticism is unfair, but I am hardly objective.  As a member of the NACAC Board, I was one of the driving forces for the Commission approach, arguing that a simple prohibition as originally proposed was an easy but wrong solution to an issue that is complex and in the words of the report, “dynamic.”  I think the Commission brought together a lot of good minds to study the morass of issues surrounding recruitment of international students, but the expectation that it would “solve” the problem is naïve.

What the Commission Report doesn’t attempt to do is address the ethical complexities that arise out of the use of agents compensated by commission to recruit international students.  That, of course, is exactly what I find most interesting.

Let’s try to sort through the issues.  First and foremost is that more American colleges and universities are recruiting students internationally.  Much of that is economically driven as colleges look for revenue, but it is also the case that bringing students to the United States from around the world is important educationally and also in the national interest.

Recruiting internationally is a challenge for many institutions.  Not only is it expensive to send staff members abroad, but getting a foothold in the international marketplace requires a network of contacts and knowledge of the culture.  A number of institutions have attempted to address these challenges by outsourcing recruitment to agents located overseas.

The use of agents is not in itself inherently wrong.  What is questionable from an ethical standpoint is that many agents are paid on a per-head commission basis, a practice that violates the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice and is also illegal in the United States.  Given that per-head compensation of agents has been long-standing practice in many countries, is the NACAC/U.S. position morally right or arrogant and culturally naive?

A complicating factor is that in most parts of the world there is not a school-based college counseling infrastructure, although there seems to be movement in that direction.  If NACAC were to prohibit colleges from using agents (per-head) without there being legitimate alternatives for students to get information about American colleges, then it harms member institutions trying to do the right thing and perhaps also harms students. Any ethical principle is worthless if it is also impractical.

(It is not the case that there are no alternatives.  EducationUSA, a branch of the State Department, operates advising centers in 140 countries dispensing information about American higher education.  EducationUSA does not represent particular institutions and also does not work with agents who charge commissions.)

The essential issue is whether there is something fundamentally wrong with an agent being paid on a per-head commission basis.  There is always a tension in college admissions between counseling and sales; does per-head compensation tip the scales?  If I am being paid by a college for every student who applies or enrolls, is my advice to a student based on what is best for the student or what is best for me? 

Clearly there are agents who are ethical despite being paid per head, but the world of agents is rife with questionable and corrupt practices, from double dipping (accepting payment from both students and institutions) to conflict of interest to misrepresentation to falsification of transcripts and writing essays for students.  Commission-based compensation may not be responsible for these abuses, but it creates the conditions for them to breed and spread and poison the good work that is out there.

I hope that NACAC will not abandon the principle that payment of commissions based on the number of students recruited or enrolled is wrong.  The principle that admission officers and recruiters should be professionals and not salespeople led to NACAC’s founding. The commitment to ethical professional practice, while under siege on a number of fronts, remains the bedrock of our profession.  The federal prohibition on per head compensation for students receiving federal financial aid is telling, and the experience with the predatory recruiting practices utilized by many for-profit institutions in the U.S.  after the Bush Administration eased restrictions for a number of “safe harbors” should reassure us that per head compensation is dangerous and problematic, no matter where it occurs.

There are certainly those who argue that the train has already left the station with regard to agents and per-head compensation, including the American International Recruitment Council (AIRC), which argues that training and certification of agents is the better path.  That may be an interim step, but I don’t buy the argument that it’s the best we can hope for.  The fact that something is an accepted practice doesn’t mean that it’s best practice.  The fact that people commit bank robbery doesn’t mean that outlawing bank robbery is futile.

Saying that NACAC shouldn’t abandon its principle doesn’t mean that simply outlawing use of agents in its current form is the solution.  As the Commission correctly recognized, the issue is complex and dynamic.  Real reform requires developing legitimate recruiting alternatives for colleges that want to do the right thing for international students.  NACAC is not going to solve this issue alone, and I hope the Commission report will begin a discussion with groups like the College Board, NAFSA, AACRAO, IECA, HECA, and AIRC on a new framework for international recruiting, a framework that puts ethical principles like institutional oversight, accountability, transparency, and integrity at the forefront.

My hope is that the work of the Commission is the beginning of a larger discussion about the landscape of international recruiting, and my dream is that NACAC will serve as landscape architect, bringing simplicity and even beauty to that landscape.

 

Is "Fit" an Endangered Species?

Is “Fit” an endangered species in college counseling/admissions?  That question came up last week during a conversation with my close friend Brian Leipheimer.  Brian is the Director of College Counseling at the Collegiate School in Richmond, and he and I get together on a regular basis to compare notes and consume beverages.

The question came up because Brian was organizing his year-end Board report around the “fit as endangered species” theme to educate the Board about some of the trends and issues impacting college counseling. Brian continues to believe in the importance of fit and hopes it’s not endangered, but his hypothesis is that at many colleges fit is being eclipsed and preempted by the acronyms ED (Early Decision), DI (Demonstrated Interest), and FP (Full Pay).

I found the conversation both timely and ironic.  While Brian was preparing his board report, I was working on a presentation to alumni at the University of Richmond.  My assigned topic?  The importance of fit.

Both the conversation and the presentation made me think about fit, a concept that has been at the center of my college counseling philosophy and practice for more than thirty years.  It is one of a growing list of core values and beliefs that I find myself worrying are, shall we say, outdated.  Is the endangered species not fit but me?  Am I a Jumpasaurus, a college counseling dinosaur?  Are endangered species aware that they are endangered, or do they suddenly cease to exist?

The notion of fit is based on the belief that every one of the more than 3000 colleges and universities in the United States is right for someone and every one of them is wrong for someone.  What makes them right or wrong is the match or fit between the needs and expectations of the student and the culture or personality of the college.

I see fit as a world-view, the alternative to what might be called the “Best College” world-view.  That world-view, also known as the “Rankings” world-view, states that “you should go to the best college you can.”  What is flawed is the definition of “best” college.  More often than not “Best” equals “most prestigious” which has come to equal “most selective.”  This view sees the value of a college education in the name on the diploma rather than the college experience itself.

The world-view that sees fit as important is built on several foundational assumptions.  One is that a college education can be transformational in a young person’s life, with the experience one has in college being more important than where one goes.  The second is that where one goes to college is important, in that not all colleges are alike.  Finally, college selection is personal.  What is right for you may not be right for me.

There are two key ingredients in determining fit.  One is the student.  Understanding one’s self is essential to determining fit.  Who are you? What do you care about?  What do you want from college?  Issues like size, location, distance from home are all obvious considerations, but so are seemingly less-important things like climate and food.  If you can’t stand cold weather, going to college in Minnesota or Maine may be a mistake, while food, both quality and quantity, is pretty important to most of the college students I know.

The culture or personality of the college is the other component.  Figuring out what is unique or distinct about school culture requires some work, especially in these days of sophisticated marketing which makes schools sound alike.  A number of years ago I attended a conference session where a publications consultant read a passage from a viewbook from a small liberal-arts college and asked the representative from that college to stand.  Twenty admissions officers from twenty different institutions stood up.

Fit requires sophisticated research, and that is the part of the college search process that too many students shortchange.  It requires visiting enough campuses to have a base of knowledge in order to do “comparison shopping” among institutions.  I fell in love with the first college I visited, not realizing until much later that what I had fallen in love with was not the particular institution but the idea of college.  Years ago I worked a summer program at the College of William and Mary attended by students hoping to get an edge in the admissions process (which of course didn’t happen).  Every year I would counsel at least one student who discovered after three days that they couldn’t stand colonial architecture.  At another attractive campus a prospective student told his family to get back in the car as soon as they arrived because there were “too many trees.”

What too often gets overlooked is academic fit.  Several years ago one of my former students came back after his freshman year and stated that the only thing he didn’t think about in choosing a college was academics.  Fit requires finding the right balance between the intellectual, the achievement, and the social.  Going to a school where the other students are in a different place on that continuum is a recipe for misery.

The other issue with regard to academic fit is where you fit within a school’s student body.  One of my students, fortunate to be admitted to a selective institution, learned that the downside was that he had to work much harder than his classmates to earn grades that would qualify him for competitive internships.  Another student who earned good grades at a prestigious small college was told when he applied to law school that he would have been better off attending an easier undergraduate school and making straight A’s.  That seems absurd to me but perhaps says a lot about the legal profession.

Are colleges abandoning concern for fit?  Two years ago I attended a panel at a small conference featuring admissions officers from several selective institutions.  When I asked about fit, they looked at me as if I was speaking in tongues.  That doesn’t mean that fit is any less important in college counseling.  The rise in the use of ED, DI, and FP means that students have to apply more thoughtfully rather than simply apply to more places.  That increases the need for students to think about and articulate their fit with a particular institution.  

 

Counting in a Different Way

A couple of weeks ago I was on a panel at the annual meeting of the Deans and Directors of Admission for the Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia.  During the Q and A, a Director of Admission wondered if any of the school counselors on the panel were seeing a trend of students applying to fewer colleges, as applications were down 9% at his institution. 

I gave him a three-part answer.  First, I don’t see any evidence that my students are applying to more or fewer colleges, but it is also the case that my office has worked hard to encourage students to apply more thoughtfully rather than just applying more.  Second, I’m not convinced that having fewer applications is necessarily a bad thing.  Third, and perhaps most significant, he is one of only a handful of college admission reps in my 30 year career to have, or at least admit, anything other than a record admissions year.

Within a couple of days came the news that two more colleges, York College of Pennsylvania and the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Texas, had been moved into the “Unranked” category in the U.S. News college rankings due to having submitted inflated data.  I have previously written ad nauseum about misreporting data and also recommended that U.S. News place all colleges in the Unranked category, but one piece of the story caught my eye.

According to both U.S. News and Insidehighered.com, Mary Hardin-Baylor corrected data it had previously submitted regarding both the number of applicants and the number of students admitted for the 2011 entering class.  The corrected numbers change the percentage of applicants admitted from 27.4 to 89.1.

That is not a misprint.  Mary Hardin-Baylor’s acceptance rate was more than three times higher than originally reported, meaning that the university is closer to open enrollment than highly-selective. That’s hardly a slight adjustment or miscalculation, and there’s bound to be an interesting story there.  Unfortunately I don’t what it is, because Mary Hardin-Baylor did not respond to my questions, but I can only imagine the turmoil within the university community when the error was discovered. 

According to the Insidehighered story, a spokesman for Mary Hardin-Baylor stated that there was no intentional misrepresentation and that the university was “counting its applications in a different way” than that required by U.S. News, which relies on the Common Data Set definitions.

The phrase “counting its applications in a different way” is intriguing. I assume that means Mary Hardin-Baylor was counting inquiries as applications, because the only other possible explanation is that it was adopting the creative accounting made famous by another Texas institution, Enron.

I don’t believe for a second that Mary Hardin-Baylor is the only college or university “counting its applications in a different way.”  Several years ago my office received a request for a transcript in February from a college for one of my seniors whose application was incomplete.  We hadn’t sent a transcript because we didn’t know he had applied—and, as it turned out, neither did he.  He had visited the school in question the previous summer and filled out a card during an information session, and obviously the school was considering that an application.

It doesn’t take much sleuthing to find other potential examples of “counting in a different way.”  The most recent editions I have of U.S. News’s “America’s Best Colleges” are from 2012 and 2009, and I looked at those issues to check Mary Hardin-Baylor’s numbers.  The 2009 book shows UMHB with 1258 applications and 962 acceptances, while 2012 shows 8323 applications and 3114 acceptances.  Either Mary Hardin-Baylor experienced a 600% increase in apps over that span or it started counting differently.

Even more interesting was that I found two other institutions “counting in a different way.”  I won’t name them, but both are rural regional institutions, and so I was surprised that one accepted only 10% of applicants and the other 7%.  One of them has a long history of being unbelievably selective, and from looking at its enrollment and its admission numbers it is clear that it is counting acceptances “in a different way,” such that only students who enroll receive acceptances.  If a cursory glance at those numbers arouses my suspicions, I wonder why they don’t arouse U.S. News’s.  Is it too trusting or too lazy to verify?

The bigger question is, Is more better?  That could easily be a topic for one of the ads featuring an adult asking four children about whether bigger and faster is better.  I remember the ads but have no idea what they’re selling.  Is having more applications better?

The conventional wisdom has been yes.  One of the unexamined myths of college admissions is that selectivity=quality, and that is why so many colleges go to great lengths to increase application numbers.  Several years ago a friend of mine became the Vice President and Dean of Enrollment at a small liberal-arts college, the kind of place that is the backbone of America’s higher-education system, a solid school academically that admitted 75-80% of its applicants.  The first thing he did was move to a two-part application, with the first part being basic information (and the application fee).  Part 2, which includes the more substantial information, is sent once Part 1 is received.  The first part  counts as the application, and because many students never complete the second part, within a year the institution’s acceptance rate was cut nearly in half.  But is it a better (or even different) institution?  The same argument can be made with colleges that have adopted “snap” (or a word that rhymes with snap) apps to increase numbers.  Is there a difference between increasing number of apps and increasing number of serious applicants?

It is important to affirm and recognize those who are attempting to maintain sanity in the admissions process, and earlier this year the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools (ACCIS) sent a letter of commendation to John Mahoney and his staff at Boston College.  Concerned about rising numbers of applications, BC added a supplemental essay last year.  The topics are substantive and require both thought and serious interest, and they support the belief that applying to college should be a Goldilocks process—neither too easy nor too hard.  The supplemental essay had more impact than expected, with applications dropping 26%, and there was undoubtedly consternation among those who measure success by rising application numbers, but I applaud BC and other institutions that are fighting the prevailing wisdom about increasing application numbers.  It’s time to count (measure success) in a different way.

Waiting

If you want to get my blood boiling (and, as a bonus, get an essay answer to a short answer question), ask me how I’m keeping busy now that May 1 is past and my seniors have made their final college choices.  I’ll try to avoid boring you with a rant about how my time in the spring is consumed more working with juniors than with seniors, but all bets are off once the topic of Wait Lists comes up.

A colleague and close friend stopped by my office yesterday for a venting/counseling session, one of three different conversations I had about Wait Lists during the day. Just when his daughter had come to peace with her college choice, her counselor has asked her cryptic questions along the lines of “would you say yes if asked to go to the dance?” about the school that was her first choice and where she was Wait Listed.  Are the counselor’s questions a signal that she might get a call?  Will a Wait List offer come with sufficient financial aid?  Should the family get its hopes up or stick with the existing situation?  Do they have time and energy to think about all this in the midst of AP exams and her sister’s college graduation this weekend?

I told him he had “appropriate anxiety.”  Just as you’re not paranoid when the thing you’re afraid of is real, angst and frustration are perfectly normal responses to being on a Wait List.

Of course it is not only students and parents (and school counselors) who feel anxiety regarding Wait Lists.  Several years ago I talked with the Dean of Admissions at College X.  There were rumors that University Y might be going to its Wait List.  If they went, there would be a chain reaction.  When Harvard itches, everyone scratches.  She needed to pull the trigger on her Wait List first, she said.

Wait Lists are the admissions equivalent of limbo (the theological state, not the dance).  Students on a Wait List are caught in a netherworld between the known and unknown, between reality and possibility.  The view is always shrouded by fog and the rules are unclear.  It’s not a place you would choose to take a vacation. 

Wait Lists have become a regular part of the admissions process, such that I expect that 10-20% of my senior class will ‘upgrade” and end up at their final destination off a Wait List.  The use of Wait Lists may be the least transparent part of the college admissions process—and that’s saying something. 

The lack of clear rules regarding use of Wait Lists and the impression that Wait List procedures have become the “Wild West” of college admissions led Jake Talmage, the Director of College Counseling at St. Paul’s School for Boys in Baltimore, to ask NACAC to study Wait List procedures in a motion to the NACAC Assembly two years ago in New Orleans.  Jake’s motion resulted in two changes to the Best Practices section of the Statement of Principles of Good Practice regarding Wait Lists.  One asks colleges to utilize written or electronic communication in offering admission off a Wait List.  The other change gives students 72 hours to respond to an institution’s offer.  That provision generated considerable debate, with some colleges arguing that institutional needs dictated moving more quickly down the Wait List.

Those are positive steps but don’t begin to address the larger issues.  Primary among those is the classic question of how large a Wait List should be and what being on a Wait List should signify.  A recent Washington Post article named several institutions that Wait Listed more students than they admitted. At first glance that seems absurd, but I think it’s a more complex issue than it appears.

I learned that after my own professional Black Monday back in 2000.  Over the weekend the decisions from the University of Virginia had been mailed, and as I walked in to chapel that morning there was a buzz in the air.  Six seniors that I thought would be in the gray area between admit and Wait List had been denied.  My instincts aren’t usually that far off, and so I called the late Jack Blackburn and made an appointment to meet with him.  When I got to his office he showed me the folders, and each of the students had been Wait Listed at one point and then moved into the deny pile.  He explained that every spring there was an internal debate within his office about the Wait List.  Some thought being on the Wait List should be a message that a student was qualified for admission but space not available.  That might lead to 2000 students being placed on the Wait List.  The opposing school of thought was that few of the students on the Wait List had a legitimate shot at getting off and that it wasn’t fair to give them false hope.  That spring the smaller Wait List advocates won the day.

One of the incidents that triggered Jake Talmage’s concern about Wait List procedures was seeing a student Wait Listed in December by a rolling admission school, told the Wait List would be reviewed in May.  I see that as a twist on the classic understanding that being Wait Listed is a sign that a student is qualified but there is no room at the inn.  The institution, it seems to me, is saying that the student is someone they don’t want to admit, but might have to.  That might be cruel, but I’m not sure it’s unethical, as long as the practice is transparent.

What has changed is that Wait Lists are no longer used as a safety net but as a calculated enrollment management strategy.  It has been described as “Early Decision 3,” with a number of schools planning to admit the last 10-15% of the class off the Wait List to keep the acceptance rate low and yield high.

The ethical issues raised by use of ED-3 and Wait Lists in general are the same issues raised in all parts of the college admissions process.  Does it serve students, or just the institution?  Is it transparent? Do students know how decisions are made and what they can do to improve their chances?  What role do demonstrated interest, academic merit, and institutional needs play?  Is it equitable? Does it squeeze out students with financial need? Does it advantage the already privileged with access to savvy college counseling?

A veteran admissions dean once told me that the perfect admissions process would be to Wait List all acceptable candidates and admit those who most want to come.  I’m not sure that’s any crazier than the system we have in place.  If Samuel Beckett were to return from the dead and write a modern sequel to his most famous absurdist play, he could do worse than call it “Waiting List for Godot.”    

Being Yourself

Nearly twenty years ago I served as chair of the Professional Development Committee for the Virginia Association of Independent Schools.  The committee’s primary job was putting together the program for the annual VAIS Professional Day Conference, and one year during my term we brought Alfie Kohn to the conference as keynote speaker. 

Kohn is one of the original “edutainers” who has made a career of writing and lecturing about education without actually working in a school.  His keynote address was a critique of grades and other external rewards, and it produced widely varying reviews.  A number of teachers found his presentation refreshing and inspirational, the best keynote in years. Others gave it the lowest rating possible on conference evaluations, and some even commented that VAIS should take his message to heart and show its opposition to rewards by refusing to pay him.

I considered the strong sentiments a sign of success.  The job of a keynote speaker is to provoke thinking, and people were clearly provoked. 

If being provocative is also the job of an op-ed writer, then Suzy Lee Weiss is wise (or Weiss) beyond her years. Weiss is the Pittsburgh high school senior who wrote an op-ed for the March 30 edition of the Wall Street Journal titled, “To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me.”  In the article, which she characterized as a satire during a Today Show appearance, Weiss argued that selective colleges lie to prospective students when they tell them to “be yourself.”

Weiss’s article drew widespread attention and criticism.  Many were offended by the tone of the piece, finding her references to diversity mean-spirited and insensitive.  I was surprised by the visceral reaction to the piece among a number of colleagues on both sides of the desk who are sick and tired of media coverage of the college admissions process that focuses almost entirely on students who don’t get into the Ivies and, like Groucho Marx, don’t want to be a member of any club (or college) that would have students like them. There were also responses from current students at Ivy League schools suggesting that clearly she must not have had the sterling qualifications that students admitted to those schools obviously possess.

I wasn’t offended by the article.  I thought Weiss failed the first rule of satire—if you use humor or satire, make sure it’s funny—but I have been guilty of the same offense too many times.  I also don’t feel sorry for her (she is apparently attending Michigan). But I think the piece touches on interesting questions about the current state of college admission, the messages we send to students and parents, and the changing nature of the work we do.

First and foremost is the question she indirectly poses.  Do we mislead or do a disservice to kids when we tell them to “be yourself,” as if “be someone else” is an option?

That begs larger questions. Is the college search process a journey of self-discovery or about obtaining membership in a club with a secret handshake? Should college be a product of who you are and what you’ve accomplished or a be-all, end-all goal? Which is more important, the name on the diploma or the college experience itself? As Eric Hoover observes in his article about College Confidential in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, the article of faith underlying that site is that your life is defined by where you go to college. I wish media coverage of college admissions didn’t accept that premise so uncritically.

College counseling is a tightrope walk fraught with danger.  It is my job to support my students in pursuing their dreams and at the same time ensure that they are grounded in reality, and the changing admissions landscape makes that hard.  I don’t know Ms. Weiss’s credentials, but I feel her pain.  This year I had five or six seniors with stellar grades and course loads, SAT scores around 1500, and the kind of character and leadership qualities that schools like mine hope to produce.  All would have Ivy League admits 10-15 years, but none got in.  All have good college options, so I don’t feel sorry for them, but I share their disappointment.

I remember talking to Fred Hargadon shortly before his retirement as Dean of Admissions at Princeton.  “Anyone who thinks we’re doing anything other than splitting hairs has no idea,” he lamented.  He talked about spending three hours in committee deliberating over 50 applications, ultimately admitting five, then the next morning not being able to remember why they picked those five. 

It’s far worse today in the age of 30000 applications and 5-6% acceptance rates.  Colleges and universities don’t add staff to match the increase in apps, reading time is decreased, and holistic review may become “half-istic.”  In such a climate, are certain kinds of applicants advantaged and others disadvantaged?

Last week at a professional conference, I had a conversation with a colleague about Susan Cain’s book, Quiet.  The book makes an argument that introverts are underappreciated in our culture, but have important intellectual and leadership strengths.  My colleague wondered if introverted kids who are hesitant to blow their own horns are at a disadvantage in the selective college admissions process.  The corollary is whether the process rewards kids who are savvy about packaging themselves.

How does one maintain sanity and a sense of purpose as college counseling becomes more complex and challenging? My answer is the same one Suzy Lee Weiss finds wanting—“Be Yourself.”  Our work should be a reflection of who we are and what we believe.  So while it makes me feel on far too many days that I am a dinosaur, I will continue to preach that the college search journey is more important than the destination, that the search and application processes should measure a student’s readiness for college itself, and that what one does in college is more important than where one goes.

 

P.S.  My cynical, tongue-firmly-in-cheek self wonders—Now that Suzy Lee Weiss has been published in the Wall Street Journal and interviewed on the Today Show, should she appeal her denials on the grounds that she has new information to add to her file?

 

Demonstrated Interest

It takes a lot to get me worked up.  My wife says she has seen me excited, truly excited, only three or four times—when my children were born, when we stood in line for what we thought was the NBC studio tour only to end up sitting in the second row of the Tonight Show audience on a night when David Letterman was the guest host, and the night that the Mets won Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.  (The fact that all of those things took place more than 25 years ago is not meaningful, I hope.)

It takes a lot to get me worked up not only in my personal life, but also professionally.  There have been only three times in my career when righteous indignation led me to protest a college decision.  For a while this spring, however, I thought there might be a fourth.

What triggered my consternation was learning that a university for which St. Christopher’s has historically been a feeder school was planning to Wait List a student with credentials that were not just good, but superb.  Such a decision would have been unprecedented, and when my colleague questioned the reasoning, he was told by an admissions officer, “We don’t think we’ll get him.”  The institution made that assumption based on the other schools where the student was applying, information they had because of an alumni interview.

That explanation raised several questions.  Is it appropriate for an alumni interviewer to ask a student where else he or she is applying?  Is it appropriate for an institution to use that information in making an admissions decision?  Is likelihood-to-enroll a legitimate consideration in making admissions decisions, and how do you calculate likelihood-to enroll? 

It is the last of those questions that is most interesting and most relevant.  I have seen a huge increase in colleges utilizing demonstrated interest in the past few years (are demonstrated interest and likelihood-to-enroll the same thing?), and this year in particular it feels like a number of good private institutions are utilizing demonstrated interest at a level beyond what has been standard in previous years.  Am I alone in seeing that trend?

I have no problem with colleges using demonstrated interest as one factor in deciding whom to admit.  If I were an admissions dean I would want to enroll students who wanted to be at my institution, although I don’t know that I would Wait List more qualified students in order to achieve that.

My concern is with how demonstrated interest is measured.  Demonstrated interest has always been part of the college admissions process, but until recently the way a student demonstrated interest was by applying.  If colleges are going to be tracking and measuring demonstrated interest, they should be transparent about what counts and what doesn’t.  Students deserve to know the rules of the game they are playing.

I also wonder whether there are better and worse ways to measure demonstrated interest.  A student’s willingness to visit campus or meet with an admissions representative during a high school visit not only demonstrates interest, but also contributes to the student making a more thoughtful college choice.  Recently I visited a university where demonstrated interest is clearly more important than it was a couple of years ago.  I was told that one way the institution measures interest is whether a student logs on to the applicant portal.  I responded that I wasn’t sure that my students would log on even if interested, and learned that the institution was about to conduct a focus group during its diversity recruitment weekend because few of the top accepted diversity applicants had bothered to log on.  Apparently you don’t need to demonstrate interest if there’s enough interest in you.

In my student’s case, there were two things that particularly bothered me.  One is that he thought he had sufficiently demonstrated interest.  The institution in question is clear that demonstrated interest is important, and I have known it to wait list strong in-state applicants who don’t bother to visit campus or have an alumni interview.  My student hadn’t done a campus visit, but had an interview because he knew it was important. What he hadn’t done was apply for the institution’s merit scholarship program.  That program is effective at attracting strong applicants who might not otherwise consider the school, but I also wonder whether it is being used as a measure of demonstrated interest, on the assumption that any strong candidate who doesn’t apply for the scholarship must not be serious.  Ironically, my student hadn’t applied for the scholarship because he was concerned that the institution might assume he wouldn’t enroll if he applied for the scholarship and didn’t win it.      

The other thing that bothered me was the assumption that the school thought it had no chance of enrolling the student given the other schools to which he had applied.  On one level, I understand that, but at the same time it sends a message that the institution doesn’t believe it can compete with the Ivies or meet the needs of students considering that level of school.  It sends a message that “this student is too smart for us.”  I couldn’t assure them (and it is not my job to) that the student would choose them over another option, only that his application was sincere and serious.

The other unstated issue is that the decision to Wait List may not be about interest, but rather about yield.  Colleges use demonstrated interest and wait lists to manage enrollment and reputation by keeping the acceptance rate low and the yield rate high.  Maybe I’m dense, maybe I’ve worked too long on the high school side, or maybe I haven’t been brainwashed by Bob Morse and U.S. News and World Report, but I still don’t see how admission metrics=institutional quality.

I didn’t end up having to call or drive to meet with the Admissions Dean.  My student was admitted, he was Wait Listed or Denied at all the other schools they feared losing him to, and he is making his final decision.   

 

Madness

My favorite time of the year as a sports fan is March Madness.  I find college basketball far more interesting than the NBA, and the NCAA tournament, especially the opening weekend, is unsurpassed for drama and the unexpected (all those who picked Florida Gulf Coast to make the Sweet Sixteen, raise your hand).

I never fill out a bracket because I don’t want my betting interests conflicting with my rooting interests.  I like underdogs, and am particularly drawn to good academic schools with competitive teams like Davidson, Butler, and Bucknell.  Like everyone in Richmond, I follow Shaka Smart and the VCU Rams, and this year I am enjoying the success of Wichita State.  Their coach, Gregg Marshall, played at Randolph-Macon when I taught there, and I think (but may be imagining) that I had him in class.

One of the big stories from the first weekend of the tournament was that a university both older and better known than Florida Gulf Coast won its first-ever NCAA tournament game.  On Thursday night 14^th-seeded Harvard, the champions of the Ivy League (which doesn’t give athletic scholarships) upset New Mexico 68-62.  An article in the on-line magazine Slate, though, questions whether Harvard’s success is a victory for the forces of athletic purity or a sign that it has gone to the dark side when it comes to big-time athletics. 

Under coach Tommy Amaker, former star at Duke and head coach at Seton Hall and Michigan, Harvard has become a player in recruiting the kind of talent that hasn’t historically gone to the Ivy League, including two players who had to withdraw from school last spring after their involvement in the cheating scandal that rocked Harvard Yard.  Harvard’s rise in the college basketball world has led to concerns about recruiting tactics and admissions standards, but the biggest cause other than Amaker’s hiring is Harvard’s financial aid policy enabling students from low-income families to attend without having to pay.  If those students are athletes, they receive need-based financial aid comparable to receiving a full athletic scholarship.

It is clear that whatever issues Harvard may have with its basketball program pale when viewed against the landscape of Division 1 athletics, a world where madness isn’t limited to March.

The NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice identifies athletic recruiting as a “recognized exception,” but it increasingly seems that athletics has become a recognized exception to the values that otherwise guide higher education. Last month the University of Alabama offered a football scholarship to an 8^th grader.  Last spring the University of Kentucky won the NCAA basketball championship with a lineup treating “college” basketball as a warmup for the NBA and no intention of getting a college education.  The Penn State scandal had its roots in the powerful hold that the football program has on the University community, and one consequence of the fraud in one academic department at the University of North Carolina was keeping athletes eligible.  I don’t for a minute believe that those are isolated incidents.

The challenges extend to the secondary side, where athletes change schools, sometimes annually, in search of playing time and a college scholarship.  A growing concern is the number of students who “reclassify” in order to play an extra year in high school.  That is a topic for a separate post, and there are legitimate developmental and educational reasons for students to do an extra year, but the widespread nature of the practice is troubling.  A year ago the top athlete at a rival school, a rising senior with a strong academic record, transferred to a league rival, reclassified as a junior, and shortly afterward verbally committed to play football at Stanford.

My college advisor was a Philosophy professor who also served as chair of the faculty committee on athletics.  I share with him the belief that athletics have educational value, that the playing field is its own classroom, as well as the belief that athletics aspires to physical excellence in the way that philosophy aspires to the excellence of the mind.

Ethics is about ideals, and it is hard to square educational ideals with the reality of big-time college sports.  Athletic programs long ago became powerful avenues for marketing and institutional branding rather than education, and there is too much money at stake for that genie to return to the bottle.  It is probably time to end the student-athlete myth and pay athletes as university public relations employees.  That would not end the abuses, just the hypocrisy.

Years ago the President of the University of Oklahoma stated that he was trying to build a university the football program could be proud of.  That would be funny if it were only a joke.  Athletics should support the educational mission of a college and not the other way around.  Unfortunately in 2013 that view looks more and more like madness.

 

By Popular Demand

Is there proper etiquette for colleges to announce that they are extending their application deadline? (Is “proper etiquette” redundant?  Is “improper etiquette” even possible?)

I found myself pondering that question after a single week in February when I received e-mails from at least five institutions announcing that their application deadlines, already passed, had been extended.  The problem with setting a deadline, it seems, is that once it passes with less-than-desired response, the one who’s dead (in the water, that is), is you.

I haven’t done extensive research on the semantics of deadline extension, which of course does not prevent me from commenting.  The most common justification seems to be weather or natural disasters.  A couple of announcements tied the extension to the major snowstorm that had just hit the Northeast, at least one may have referred to Hurricane Sandy, and I kept waiting for an announcement that a college or university was extending its deadline because of the meteor that exploded over Siberia or the near-miss from Asteroid 2012 DA14.  I would hope that colleges and universities would always extend understanding and consideration to students impacted by weather events and other disasters that may impact their ability to meet an application deadline.  I just don’t like institutions using those events as pretense for extending deadlines because the applicant pool needs more water.  By the way, the least common justification is transparency, admitting that more applications are needed or desired.  

One particular announcement caught my eye—and my ire:

            “Due to overwhelming demand (italics mine) from students who have not yet completed the Common Application…we have extended the February 1 application deadline on a space-available basis.”

The two phrases I found interesting in the announcement were “overwhelming demand” and “space-available basis.”  What amount of demand qualifies as “overwhelming” rather than just “whelming”?  Is there a demand threshold that sounds the alarm to trigger a deadline extension? What does “space-available” mean? One would assume that space is available given that the deadline is extended, so is “space-available basis” a euphemism for “operators are standing by” or “if you order now”?

What raised my ire was not the announcement itself, but the backstory.  Less than two months before, the President of the very same university had announced both at a meeting of counselors and later in front of prospective students and parents that the institution would be admitting no one who didn’t apply either Early Decision or Early Action.  That created panic, given that both early deadlines had already passed.  The admissions office went into damage control, announcing that the Early Action had been extended, due to Hurricane Sandy.  I’m guessing, however, that a number of students who had begun filling out a Common Application for that university figured why bother after hearing the President’s message.  The broader question is, If an institution is only going to admit students who apply Early Action, then why have regular decision at all, or why not rebrand “Early Action” as “regular admission”?

The announcement of the deadline extension said to feel free to contact the Office of Admission with any questions or concerns, and being in a particularly (but not that unusual) curmudgeonly mood, I did.  I shot off an e-mail to the generic e-mail address provided pointing out my surprise given the President’s comments.  I added that “I hope this reflects a change in that policy (no one admitted not applying E.D. or E.A.) and not an attempt to pad application numbers when you have no intention of admitting any of them.”

In retrospect, that last statement was a bit strong and perhaps unwarranted, although I think it accurately reflects concern for some of the gaming that is becoming prevalent in the college admission industry.  The good news is that within an hour I received a long, thoughtful, informative e-mail from the Dean of Admission explaining in detail the reasons for extending the deadline and the circumstances related to Common Application submission that has led them to do so.  It was the kind of honest communication I always appreciate from colleges and fear I receive less and less.

Is there a proper, face-saving way to announce that you are still accepting applications even though the deadline has passed?  I’d be interested to know what others think.

Empathy

Last week I stumbled upon an interesting conversation in a website devoted to sports and culture.  Why has there never been a great television series, either drama or comedy, about college?  There have been good shows about high school (Mr. Novak, Room 222, My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, Friday Night Lights) and about law school (The Paper Chase) and medical residency (St. Elsewhere, ER), but nothing memorable (or at least that I remember) about college itself.  The consensus in the discussion was that high school offers more character archetypes, and that it is too hard to show the balance of serious study and social silliness that are intertwined in most people’s college experience.

That evening I saw an ad for an upcoming movie starring Tina Fey as an admissions officer at Princeton.  The two experiences on the same day triggered memories of a more innocent time, regrets about opportunities lost, and another reminder of why I ended up in a non-profit career.

Thirty years ago I had an idea for what I still think could have been the classic show about college.  The twist is that it would be a workplace ensemble sitcom along the lines of Cheers, only set in the Admissions Office of a small liberal-arts college.  The admissions setting provided an interesting intersection between academia and the “real world,” the main character would have been (like me) a recent grad navigating between being a student and being an adult, and the pilot episode would have featured a celebrity visiting the college with his or her child.  Like most of my great ideas, it didn’t pan out, but I thought there was lots of humor to be found in all aspects of college admissions.

I’m hoping that same recognition, that the admissions world offers a treasure trove of laughs, is what led a University of Pennsylvania admissions officer to share and mock excerpts from applicants’ essays on her personal Facebook page.  I’m hoping it’s a feeble attempt at humor rather than meanness and condescension.  The former is a serious lapse in judgment; the latter, a character flaw.

There is little to add regarding the infraction itself.  Under no circumstances is it appropriate for an admissions professional to share information from an application outside the office.  It is both invasion of privacy and theft of intellectual property.

The larger, more interesting, question is whether admissions officers understand and empathize with the young people whose lives they are judging and impacting.  A number of years ago, an Admissions Dean friend of mine vented that she would scream if she read another essay about the “three D’s”—death, drugs, and divorce.  (Not long after a fourth “D” was added—the DaVinci Code.)  I understood her sentiments, but told her that she was being unfair.  For teenagers with limited life experience and who experience emotions more intensely than at any other point in life (which is why first love is so powerful), any of those D’s is traumatic and life-changing.  Do admissions officers understand what it’s like to be in high school?

I suspect the “empathy gap” is more pronounced in young admissions officers.  I don’t know if that’s a developmental issue or a training issue, but I have talked with a number of secondary counselors who comment that young admissions officers today are too busy giving their admissions presentation to engage in conversation and see applicants as numbers rather than as human beings.  It might be especially pronounced in young admissions officers working at their alma maters.  It wasn’t until leaving admissions that I realized the school I was marketing was an idealized version of the actual institution.  I wasn’t trying to be misleading or unethical, but I was a true believer, and I knew that attracting good students was one way to make the college better.

I also think the “empathy gap” is more prevalent at highly selective institutions like Penn.  When you deal with thousands of applicants, almost all of whom have superb credentials, it is easy to become spoiled and lose sight of the fact that teenagers are “works in progress,” going through an odyssey of self-discovery.  The application process is a snapshot of an individual’s accomplishments, growth, and potential, and the picture that is most complex and interesting may not be the one that initially catches your eye.  At its worst the highly-selective admissions process looks to admit alumni who are already successful rather than students who will grow most from the college experience.

Thirty years ago, my boss, the Admissions Dean, talked about teaming up and becoming comedy writers.  He realized even then where the admissions profession might be heading, that writing comedy might be both a more fun and more sane way to make a living than trying to fill a freshman class.  I’m happy with how things played out. As much as I like the cheap laugh (which I rarely ever get), watching young people grow up and figure out who they are meant to be is far more satisfying.   

The Right Stuff

When I started this blog last fall I had a number of questions and concerns.  Would I find enough to write about?  Could I discipline myself to write and post on a regular basis?  Would anyone want to read anything I wrote? 

I have preliminary answers to those questions, but the question that I am still struggling with is whether I will end up repeating myself.  I am cursed to be inside my own head on a daily basis, and my shtick therefore gets old, and I worry that my writings and my presentations are all variations on the same themes.

I have devoted more energy and space to issues surrounding misreporting of admissions data than I anticipated or wanted, and I am at the point where I may ignore the next scandal of that type because I have nothing left to say.  The other broad theme that I have found myself drawn to repeatedly involves the question, “Are we measuring the right stuff?”  (I use “stuff” rather than “things” in homage to Tom Wolfe, my school’s most famous alumnus.)

Attention to assessment and metrics is pertinent for college admissions in several different respects.  Demographic changes will mean that during the next decade the going-to-college population will change in profound ways.  The NACAC Strategic Plan calls for increased access to post-secondary education, but also recognizes that true access requires the conditions for success.  We need a better understanding of the qualities that lead to success, qualities such as persistence and motivation that have come to be lumped together as “grit.”  For years my goal was to devise a standardized test that measures motivation, and I vowed that if successful, I would share it not in a forum such as this, but rather during an appearance on Oprah.  Unfortunately, I was not motivated (or smart) enough to create such a test, and now my window of opportunity to appear on Oprah has closed.

Measuring the right stuff will also be important for institutions and perhaps even publications that rank colleges.  At some point it will no longer be enough to use input measures that measure popularity rather than educational benefit, especially when those measures are so easy to manipulate.  The Gen X parent is going to demand data and evidence to show educational value, and we can expect both the federal and state governments to pressure colleges to develop metrics that measure outcomes or added value (gainful employment) from a college education.

The other issue is the movement within education toward what have become known as 21^st century skills, skills such as creativity, collaboration, global consciousness, and technological savvy.  Ignoring the question of how far into the 21^st century we will be before the term “21^st century skills” is no longer seen as novel, I haven’t seen much evidence that admissions offices are paying attention.  Several years ago I attended a counselor breakfast sponsored by five of the nation’s very best universities.  When I asked what discussion was taking place regarding 21^st century skills on their campuses, the answer was “none.”  There are exceptions, of course.  During his tenure as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts, Robert Sternberg (currently Provost at Oklahoma State University) worked with Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin to institute the Kaleidoscope Project, which added a series of application essays to measure creativity and other skills and to augment the information provided by traditional measures such as high school grades and SAT scores.  Sternberg’s 2010 book, College Admissions for the 21^st Century, is an interesting read on both 21^st century skills and college admissions.

Recently I have encountered two encouraging signs of progress in thinking about how we measure “The Right Stuff” and communicate what is important about a college education.

The first was a conference held last month at the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice.  The title of the conference was “Attributes That Matter: Beyond the Usual in College Admission and Success,” and it focused on non-cognitive assessment.  A front-page story in the January 18 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education talks about the conference in detail, and more information is also available on the Center’s website and in a number of posts on the Chronicle’s Head Count blog.

The second is a new publication produced by Augustana College in Illinois.  “The Augustana Story” is an interesting attempt to present relevant data in a transparent way.  I originally saw reference to it in a post in the Head Count blog and then received an e-mail from Kent Barnds, Augustana’s Vice-President for Enrollment, Communications and Planning.

The publication has data and graphs with information relevant to four different areas:

Students: Four-year graduation rate; first-to-second year retention; student housing data; admission overlap schools; scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and CAAP Critical Thinking test.   

Faculty:  Full-time and part-time faculty; percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty; breakdown of class sizes; percentage of faculty who advise and average advising load; three-year data on percentage of faculty engaged in international study, internships, undergraduate research, service learning, and other programs.

Investment:  Pie charts for revenue and expenses; Mid 50% ranges for administrator and faculty salaries; percentage of students receiving various forms of financial aid with average amounts; cost to enroll a student and the freshman class; funds invested and student participation in the Augie Choice program that gives each student participant $2000 toward faculty-led research, study abroad, or an internship.

Alumni:  Placement stats nine months after graduation; average indebtedness; default rate on student loans; alumni survey results.

 

There is an interesting discussion to be had on what data is meaningful and why, but I applaud Kent and Augustana for their efforts to tell their story in a different way.  Maybe some day we’ll see a new Common Data Set focused on output metrics or a tool on college websites similar to the Net Price Calculator with information about value-added.  It’s time for us to think more broadly about The Right Stuff, both for success in college and for communicating the value of college.

Dragnet

“The story you are about to see is true.  The names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

 I am old enough to remember those as the opening lines from the 1950s and 60s television show Dragnet.  Dragnet was an ancestor of police procedurals such as CSI and Law and Order, only without episodes being available on cable any time of the day or night.  I remember Dragnet for three reasons.  The main character, Detective Joe Friday, wanted “just the facts.”  Jack Webb, who played Friday, walked without moving his arms.  And the names were changed to protect the innocent.  I always wondered whether names should be changed to protect the guilty as well.

Last week there was an interesting discussion on the e-list maintained by the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools, better known by its acronym, ACCIS.  The Director of College Counseling at an independent school (I have omitted names to protect both the innocent and the guilty) asked for help with a discipline case involving the daughter of not one, but two, trustees.  The daughter had been suspended for alcohol and marijuana use while on a school trip, and the parents are worried that the incident might ruin the daughter’s chances of getting into schools like Stanford and the Ivies.  The counselor asked colleagues to share experiences and wisdom.

The query and the responses it generated raise a number of interesting questions. Is having two spouses serving on a school’s board at the same time a good idea? Should children of board members get special treatment?  Are kids allowed to make—and be forgiven for—mistakes?  Has the volume of applications at highly-selective institutions changed the admissions process such that it is designed to find reasons to deny a student rather than reasons to admit?

Disciplinary incidents are the Scylla and college admission the Charybdis of working in an independent school.  Navigating between the two is an adventure inspired at times by Homer and at other times by Homer Simpson.  In each case a school must walk a tightrope, balancing what is best for the individual with what is best for the community.  The goal is teaching hard lessons by holding a student accountable but making sure there is a safety net so the consequences aren’t catastrophic.

The most catastrophic of those consequences is losing acceptance to college.  Parents in the heat of a disciplinary situation are perfectly willing for their child to be punished, but want to withhold information from going to colleges.  One mother argued in a masterful parsing of words that her son wasn’t really suspended from school because he had received an in-school suspension.  Discipline cases force a school to examine the consonance between mission and procedures.  How important is the college preparation/college placement part of a school’s mission?  Is discipline purely internal, or is there an obligation to inform colleges of offenses, even recognizing that independent school students are suspended for offenses that would be ignored or even laughed at in other school settings? 

I have been fortunate to spend most of my career at a school that is established, that is secure enough in its mission to have expelled two different Board members’ children on the same day, and that balances accountability and compassion.  We have a strong honor code, and a consequence of the code is that students are obligated to report disciplinary incidents on college applications.  In the case of an honor or disciplinary offense resulting in suspension committed after applications have already been submitted, we require students to contact the college, allowing us to come behind them with expressions of support.  Most of the offenses committed by my students fall into the “stupid” category rather than the “evil” category, but I can’t think of a case where a student lost an opportunity because of the offense. 

They are more likely to get in trouble because of their explanation than the offense itself.  Several years ago, a student was suspended after being caught with a beer in a car at the Junior-Senior formal dance.  He neglected to report the offense to his first-choice college, where he was on the Wait List, despite the fact that the college explicitly required.  Once admitted off the Wait List, we made him contact the Admissions Office.  The Dean of Admission required him to come to campus to explain the suspension.  He told the Dean that he had the beer because he hadn’t planned to go to the dance.  The Dean asked if he didn’t look out of place at the dance, given that everyone else was wearing a tux.  “I was wearing a tux,” the student admitted, leading the dean to ask if the student normally drove around the West End of Richmond on a Friday night wearing a tux.  The student ultimately was admitted, but the explanation raised far more serious questions than the offense.

The reasons for revealing disciplinary information to colleges is both philosophical and practical.  The philosopher W.D. Ross argued that an individual should determine his ethical duty in a given case by first identifying prima facie (at first glance) duties.  Prima facie duties arise out of relationships.  As a counselor, I have a number of prima facie duties in a discipline case that arise out of various roles and relationships that I find myself in.  My relationship to the student is one of those, but I also have obligations to my school, to my profession, to my own personal sense of right and wrong, and to the colleges with whom I have a relationship.  Ross doesn’t tell you what your duty is, just how to weigh the various prima facie duties present.  From a practical standpoint, there is potential damage to the student, the school, and future applicants if a school looks to be withholding information, and in the age of social media it is possible and maybe even likely that a college will hear about disciplinary offenses.

The fact that I am old enough to remember Dragnet probably marks me as a dinosaur professionally, and I’m okay with that.  I want to be part of a profession where relationships and trust are valued, where we believe in being honest and transparent, and where we are not afraid to let kids grow from the mistakes they may make.  I’m grateful for my colleagues on the college side who allow me to keep the faith.