Solitary Confinement

My school has successfully made it through the month of September with full-time in-person learning. That is a result of superb planning and preparation, but most of all luck. Most of us would admit we didn’t expect to make it this long, and we are planning and living week-to-week, maybe day-to-day.

In my conversations with students since school started a constant theme has been that living in the midst of COVID-19 may produce emotional stress and anxiety they are not even aware of.   

That’s true not only for our students but for us as well.  Last week brought several reminders of how true that is in my own life.

Thursday night was our back-to-school night for parents, and we did it via Zoom because all visitors, including parents, are prohibited from campus in hopes that we can minimize risk and maximize the chances of remaining in-person with our students. As already stated, we aren’t holding our breath. 

For Parents Night, the Upper School faculty met on campus and had a nice but socially-distanced dinner together before the program.  I had dinner with a faculty friend who commented that he felt like he hadn’t seen me.  It’s not his imagination.  Even though all of us are still in school, there are fewer daily interactions than normal. 

Even more pronounced than the lack of quantity is the lack of quality due to the fact that we are all wearing masks.  I have a new appreciation for how good the acting is in the operating room scenes in Grey’s Anatomy.  I haven’t figured out whether it’s harder to emote behind a mask or to read others’ faces when most of the face is hidden.

Last week I had a phone conversation with a close, long-time admissions friend.  This fall marks the first time in years that he is not travelling and visiting high schools, and virtual visits on Zoom don’t provide the same emotional sustenance that he gets from being on the road.  He talked about being genuinely sad at the sense of loss he feels.

Then there was the virtual NACAC Conference last week.  Back in the spring I had determined that I wouldn’t be going to Minneapolis if the conference had been held in person, as I couldn’t see myself flying on a plane or driving 18 hours to hang out in confined spaces during the middle of the pandemic with hundreds or thousands of my closest friends.  I was glad when NACAC assuaged my guilt by going virtual, and particularly glad that the organization could salvage some revenue from what has been a brutal year.

I missed most of the conference, and look forward to watching the recordings of most of the sessions.  But what I missed profoundly was the chance to interact with friends, colleagues, and readers of ECA.  You know who you are.  I caught part of Angel Perez’s opening remarks, and my attention was drawn to all the chat room comments greeting our fellow professionals we couldn’t be with in person.

At school Parents Night has always been the demarcation between the opening of school and settling in to the rhythm of the fall.  Similarly, from a professional standpoint the NACAC Conference has long been an essential component of my fall, a time to relax, refresh, and reconnect before returning to face the onslaught of application deadlines and recommendations to be written.

That sense of connection has never been as important as it is in 2020.  The pandemic has uprooted our lives and put many of us in solitary confinement, stuck at home except for trips to the grocery store.  That is particularly challenging for those who are extroverts, which is a lot of the people in our profession.  The energy many of draw from our interactions with students and with each other just hasn’t been there, or has been harder to obtain, this year.  Of course we have other societal threats and other psychological diseases that put at risk both our personal and our national sense of well-being.

In the best of times, college admission and college counseling can be lonely jobs.  In our institutions either no one understands what we do, or everyone thinks they know what we should do.

One of the things I have most appreciated about being a college counselor is the network of support I have to turn to, both locally and globally.  No other administrator in my school has anything like it.  In the best of years it is a source of reassurance.  In 2020 it is lifeblood, a reservoir of love and support from an extended professional family.

As each of us helps our students navigate their individual journeys this fall, I hope we will take some time to support each other in our own journeys as well.  Back in the spring when the coronavirus was infecting the nation both physically and psychologically, part of my daily routine was reaching out to a different colleague every day to check on them and tell them I was thinking of them.  That exercise was done more out of selfishness than altruism, because I needed the connection with others.  I have let that habit slip, but I will reinstitute it as part of my daily or weekly routine.

The virtual NACAC conference has helped us fill our need for professional development.  I hope all of us will give attention to filling our need for personal and professional connection.

Oneonta

What do colleges and meat-packing plants have in common?  Is being described as a “textbook case” a good or bad thing?  Is it true that there is no such thing as bad publicity?

I’ve been contemplating those questions for the past month as college campuses have become the nation’s newest coronavirus hotspots. (That’s the meat-packing connection).  A report issued earlier this week by researchers from Davidson, Indiana University, UNC-Greensboro, and the University of Washington estimated that re-opening campuses for face-to-face instruction produced approximately 3000 new COVID cases per day.

There have been numerous news stories about coronavirus outbreaks on lots of different college campuses.  The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had to shut down after its first week of classes because of a spike in cases, and several campuses, including the University of Alabama, have had more than 2000 cases.  More than twenty college football games have been cancelled or postponed, including this weekend’s Notre Dame-Wake Forest game. Last Saturday the Baylor-Houston game was cancelled six days after it was scheduled as a last-minute replacement after both teams’ scheduled opponents cancelled for COVID reasons. Perhaps the most outlandish story involved students at Miami of Ohio who threw a party in the house where some of them were supposed to be in quarantine after testing positive.

The college coronavirus story that caught my attention, though, occurred at the State University of New York campus at Oneonta.  More that 10% of the students at SUNY—Oneonta have been infected, and a New York Times article described it as a “textbook example” of a college outbreak. Another NYT article called it New York state’s “worst campus outbreak” and included details such as a man in a hazmat suit leading a student who had tested positive away from her dorm as well as students in an isolation dorm partying and posing for selfies.

SUNY-Oneonta did not require students to test negative for COVID-19 before returning to campus, and also didn’t test students once they returned for the fall.  Both Oneonta and the SUNY system have been criticized for the lack of monitoring and oversight, but I am interested in the Oneonta outbreak for two other reasons.

The first is personal.  I went to high school in a small town 20 miles from Oneonta.  Oneonta was the closest thing to civilization for my one-stoplight town.  That was where we went to shop, to go to the movies, or to go to a bar.

 In the 1970s SUNY-Oneonta was a college, referred to either as Oneonta State or SUCO (State University College at Oneonta), with the acronym often mispronounced.  I never spent much time on its campus, but it was the location for two formative experiences for me.

One was the highlight of my otherwise unimpressive athletic career.  I played #1 for my high school tennis team on a day that we defeated Oneonta High School, ending a home win streak that stretched back more than ten years and had just been featured in Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd.”  The match was at two different locations, including the college campus, so we didn’t realize what we had accomplished until the team was reunited after the match. When as team captain I called in the score to the Oneonta Daily Star and asked the guy on the sports desk when was the last time the high school had lost a home tennis match, I heard him tell one of the other reporters, “I think they just lost one.”

It was also at SUCO that I was introduced to the world of modern art while participating in a choral festival.  In the student union building was an exhibit of modern art, and in one corner of the gallery feed bags were piled up.  When I went over to examine them, I realized they were part of the exhibit, part of a work titled “Feed Bags.”  At that moment I recognized that both my artistic sensibility and my entrepreneurial spirit were lacking.

My second interest in SUNY-Oneonta’s COVID woes is more generic, tied to the idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

That sentiment is sometimes credited to the 19th century showman and self-promoter P.T. Barnum, more famous for saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  Barnum supposedly claimed that he didn’t care what the newspapers wrote about him, as long as they spelled his name right.

The assumption that all publicity is good has been the foundation of the public relations industry.  But if that was ever true, is it still valid today when there are multiple sources of news and publicity?  Barnum lived in a time before 24-hour news cycles and social media influencers.  Do those technological “improvements” make the claim less true today when “all the news” has turned into “all the noise”?  Today public relations firms spend as much time managing and rehabilitating their clients’ reputations as they do putting them in the public eye.

I also wonder whether publicity that is less than positive impacts some institutions more than others.  Early in my career I spent a short stint as the interim public relations director at a small college.  We were desperate for recognition and free publicity and miffed when the local media didn’t find our press releases newsworthy.  What happens when you make the news, but not for the reasons you want?

One of my pet peeves as a college counselor is that media attention of college admission is almost universally focused on a small group of “elite” colleges and universities.  The focus on hyper-selective institutions fuels the hype about the college admissions process and public anxiety.  It ignores the colleges that educate the vast majority of American kids.

I’m sure SUNY-Oneonta has dreamed about coverage from The New York Times, and now it has it, but the coverage is of the institution’s failure to contain the virus.  It’s another reminder of the truth of the quote from Oscar Wilde, that there are two tragedies in life, not getting what you want—and getting it.  I hope all colleges will survive the pandemic, but I especially hope that the negative publicity won’t harm SUNY-Oneonta.

ECA is always interested in deeper questions, even if it is rarely able to answer them.  The outbreaks at Oneonta and on other college campuses raise deeper questions about our ability as a country to get control of the disease.  Should we blame college students for acting like college students?  Should we be surprised when they act like children, and is it reasonable to expect them to act like adults?  Are we suffering from national COVID fatigue, and what does our failure to deal with the disease say about the strength of our country? Can we solve a national crisis when so many of us deny there is even a problem? Do we as a people still have the strength of character, discipline, and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good?

Case Study: Cutting Off Financial Aid

During a weekly “dealing with COVID” Zoom call with several colleagues a couple of weeks ago, I heard the following story.  One of the counselors on the call either knew or had heard about a college student who had run into an unexpected financial aid issue.

The student attends an expensive, private, urban university located in a city with a high cost of living.  She (as I recall the student was female, but gender is not germane to the story) earned enough credits to graduate ahead of schedule after seven semesters, but was planning to take additional classes for the spring semester and then graduate.

What threw a wrench in her plans was that the university informed her that she would no longer receive institutional financial aid given that she had accumulated enough credits to earn her degree.  That led to a debate among those of us on the call about whether the student had been wronged.

I don’t know enough about the particulars of this case to weigh in knowledgeably (which of course has never stopped me or any blogger or pundit from expressing an opinion).  I am, however, interested in thinking through the underlying issues and principles. 

When I first heard the story, it sounded like a “Suburban Legend,” my term for the “truths” about the college admissions process that are shared among parents at the grocery store, on the sidelines of games, and at social gatherings.  Like urban legends, Suburban Legends are repeated often and assumed to be true, and they are most likely to be believed by people who are educated and affluent. 

Suburban Legends never seem to happen to someone you know, but rather an FOAF (Friend of a Friend) or a co-worker’s brother-in-law’s daughter’s boyfriend’s sister’s best friend.  Just as urban legends often reflect deeper fears and anxieties, Suburban Legends arise in response to a college admissions process that can seem mysterious or even unfair and from fears that there are “secret handshakes” in college admission that everyone but you know about.

A couple of the counselors on the call felt that the student had been treated unfairly.  I argued the other position, that the university was within its rights to end its support of the student.

What is financial aid designed to accomplish? That’s the key question in this case.  The purest answer is that the purpose of financial aid is to ensure that students aren’t prevented from receiving an education due to lack of financial resources.  The underlying principle is that access to a college education should not be determined by ability to pay.

That, of course, is not the same thing as saying that a college education is a right.  Many people believe that, and it is a perfectly defensible position to hold. The lack of government support for students attending college suggests that we as a society don’t really believe that, or at least aren’t willing to put our money where our mouths are.  There are unfunded mandates; this is an unfunded ideal.

Complicating that ideal is the fact that today most institutions treat financial aid as a strategic outlay.  Financial aid, whether need-based or merit-based (and Jon Boeckenstedt has argued there is no real difference), is a tool to help colleges achieve strategic goals.  “Financial need” as a guiding principle has been supplanted by “willingness to pay,” and there is a cottage industry of consultants using data mining to advise colleges on how much aid they must offer, both to individual applicants and the aggregate applicant pool, to achieve the right mix of students and net revenue.  For colleges the awarding of financial aid is less a moral commitment and more an economic investment.

The other answer to the question, “What is financial aid designed to accomplish?” is that financial aid is an investment in a student to help them obtain a degree, with the key phrase being “obtain a degree.”  In this case the student has earned enough credits to obtain a degree, so the college’s investment has accomplished its purpose, regardless of the time frame.  The university is not obligated to provide eight semesters of funding if earning a degree only takes seven. Once the student has qualified to earn a degree, whether or not they have actually received the diploma, the college or university has discharged its obligation to the student.  If you assume that institutional funds are not unlimited, withdrawing support for a student after they have earned enough credits for a degree allows the institution to benefit other students.

There is one other issue that enters in to the calculation of what is the right thing to do in this case, the timing and quality of the university’s communication to the student.  The university does have a moral obligation to communicate the conditions under which it is awarding aid, including what circumstances lead to the loss of support.  If the student learns about the university policy only after she has completed her degree requirements early, then the university has been negligent and potentially harmed the student (if the end of aid means she can’t pay rent or loses university housing). That would override the fact that the university is not obligated to continue the financial aid through the eighth semester.

In ethics there is a distinction between acts that are morally obligatory and those that are supererogatory, or morally praiseworthy.  In this case it would certainly be praiseworthy for the university to continue to award aid to the student for another semester, but it is not required to do so.  Does it make a difference that the student has gone beyond the call of duty in earning a degree in less than four years?  That might be a reason for the university to reward the student by allowing her to remain on aid for the remaining semester, but in my opinion there is no obligation to do so.

Yale and the DOJ: Determinative or Deja Vu All Over Again?

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  That maxim, credited to 19th century American educator Thomas H. Palmer, now seems to be the U.S. Department of Justice’s strategy with regard to affirmative action in college admission.

Earlier this month, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division accused Yale of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against Asian-American and White applicants in the undergraduate admissions process.  The accusation arises from an investigation launched back in April of 2018. 

It also comes less than a year after a U.S. District Court ruled in Harvard’s favor in a lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions on similar grounds. That decision is currently under appeal, and earlier this year the DOJ filed an amicus curiae brief urging the First Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule the lower court’s decision.  So is the complaint against Yale an attempt to re-litigate the Harvard case, a new foray focusing on different policies and procedures, or political theatre in support of the Trump re-election campaign?

It’s hard to know, because what is missing in the letter written by Eric Dreiband, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, is evidence.  Dreiband concludes that “Yale grants substantial, and often determinative, preferences based on race” and also makes the claim that “For the great majority of applicants, Asian American and White applicants have only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials,” but offers no proof. 

That lack of evidence would normally not be cause for concern in a letter of this type, but skeptics recall all too well the letter written by Dreiband’s boss, Attorney General Bill Barr, summarizing the Mueller Report before it was released.  Barr’s depiction of the report turned out to have little resemblance to what the report actually said.

So what are the chances that the Yale probe is going to break new ground on the use of affirmative action in college admission?  The debate over race-based preferences extends back more than 40 years, has been considered by the U.S. Supreme Court multiple times, and the issue remains sticky.

I wish there were no admission preferences, but racial preferences are the most defensible, motivated by a desire to increase educational and societal equity. If the DOJ was truly concerned about the treatment of Asian-American applicants, it would be more fruitful to go after the preferences lumped together in the Harvard case under the acronym ALDC, encompassing recruited athletes, legacies, and children of donors.  Being an athletic recruit is a much more “determinative” hook than race, and the evidence in the Harvard trial suggested that the vast majority of ALDC’s are white.

In a perfect world, admission decisions would be made without regard to race or family connections or ability to pay, but we don’t live in a perfect world.  A report released last week studying the effects of California Proposition 209, which outlawed racial preferences in admission to the University of California system, found that Black and Hispanic enrollment dropped throughout the system, with particularly steep declines at Berkeley and UCLA.  If the events of 2020 have shown us anything, it is that America has a long way to go to overcome its sordid racial history and that the scars of racism are still raw.  Do colleges and universities have a role and responsibility to address societal ills?  Most of us would say yes.

While Dreiband’s letter does not provide evidence that Yale is discriminating against Asian-American and White applicants, it does provide a glimpse into some assumptions underlying the DOJ’s case. 

One of its foundational assumptions is a burden of proof argument, placing the onus on Yale to prove it doesn’t discriminate rather than on the government to prove it does.  Dreiband writes, “Because Yale admits that it uses race in admissions, Yale bears the burden of showing that it satisfies strict scrutiny.  This means that Yale bears the burden of demonstrating that its use of race is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest.”

But should Yale bear that burden?  Dreiband’s argument is essentially that Yale is guilty until proven innocent, and that flies in the face of the most fundamental principle of the American justice system.  Beyond that, previous court cases regarding affirmative action, including most recently the Harvard case, have consistently given latitude to colleges and universities claiming that diversity is a compelling interest.

The DOJ letter argues that Yale’s diversity goals are not “sufficiently measurable,” and describes the goals as “vague, elusory, and amorphous.”  I don’t know about all those adjectives, but the suggestion that Yale must state its diversity goals more precisely is a cheap attempt to draw Yale into an affirmative action Catch 22.  The minute a college or university sets clear numeric goals for diversity, it has in effect established a quota, and racial quotas are prohibited by case law dating back to Bakke, the original college admission affirmative action case heard by the Supreme Court.

The DOJ states that Asian-American and White applicants having a lower “likelihood of admission” than African-American applicants with similar credentials.  That assertion arises from data showing that in every year from 2000 to 2017 the percentage of students admitted from each group was lower than the percentage in the applicant pool.  That statistic certainly raises questions, but is the assumption that there must be proportionality between applications and admits reasonable?  I haven’t seen the data for Yale, but in the recent Harvard case the percentage of Asian-Americans admitted was lower than the percentage in the applicant pool, but exceeded the percentage in the general population.  Does that make Asian-Americans at Harvard overrepresented or underrepresented?

The very use of the phrase “likelihood of admission” implies a misunderstanding of how selective admission works.  It assumes that a student’s chances of admission can be calculated, which further suggests an assumption that admission is formulaic. 

In an admission landscape where only 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 applicants are admitted, the great majority of qualified, even superbly qualified, applicants don’t get in.  To borrow a term from logic, being superbly qualified is “necessary but not sufficient.” In my experience no student is “likely” to be admitted to a place like Yale.

So what should we make of the DOJ’s claim that race is “determinative” in admissions decisions at Yale?  That word suggests that students are being admitted, or not admitted, purely because of race.  Without evidence, it’s hard to evaluate that claim, but I’m guessing that Yale’s use of race is more nuanced than suggested by the DOJ.

From an ethical perspective, the issue here is whether the end justifies the means.  The goal of increasing diversity and opportunity is laudable, but an ethical goal achieved without ethical means is not ethical.

That’s where the concept of “shaping the class” comes into play.  Selective colleges are admitting a class rather than a collection of individuals.  They use the admissions process to achieve strategic institutional goals ranging from revenue to athletic success to diversity.

The question is what “shaping” means.  Is the class shaped or engineered?  If putting together a class is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, do you know you need a certain number of end pieces, do you assemble certain parts of the puzzle without knowing what the whole picture is, or do you begin with a precise picture of what the puzzle is going to look like and work backwards from there?

The DOJ’s use of the word “determinative” suggests the latter approach.  But there are differences in approach even there.  If a university starts with a group of candidates, any of whom will be successful, and then shapes the class from within that group, that is an acceptable approach (even if it doesn’t provide equal consideration for candidates who don’t fit into strategic categories).  An admissions process that has different admission criteria for different groups of candidates does not meet the smell test. 

The DOJ seems to suggest that Yale is using the second approach, but so did the lawsuit against Harvard.  Are we breaking new ground, or is this, to quote Yogi Berra, “Déjà vu all over again”?

The Test-Optional Culture War

One of the few positives to come out of the pandemic is that my wife and I have been able to fill our evenings binge-watching entire television series.  We have discovered and fallen in love with shows like Justified that somehow missed our radar, we have finally seen The Wire, and we have re-watched The Good Wife.  We always choose dramas, and we have asked ourselves more than once if we might have an unhealthy attraction to violence.

That may explain our current fascination with The Sopranos.  I started watching The Sopranos religiously about halfway through its original run, so it’s been fun to go back and watch it from the beginning.

The very second episode features a scene where Silvio Dante (played by Steve Van Zandt, better known as the guitar player in Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band), entertains his fellow mobsters in the back room of the Bada Bing! strip club by doing his impression of Al Pacino from Godfather 3: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

I know that sentiment all too well, because I feel it every time I write about college admission testing.  I vow to lay off the subject, because quite frankly I’m tired of writing about it, and then before I know it, “they pull me back in.”

Last week Inside Higher Ed published an ECA column that, borrowing from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, offered two alternative titles.  One was “Testing’s Existential Crisis,” and the other was “Blanche DuBois, Confederate Statues, and College Admission Testing.” 

The column was a reflection on the combination of forces threatening the testing industry, from technology issues that prevent customers from buying their product (registering for tests) to changes in public attitudes toward testing mirroring changes in attitudes toward Confederate statues.

While I am not presumptuous enough to believe that the column had any influence, two of the issues raised popped up in other venues later in the week. I pointed out the testing industry’s overreliance on high schools and high school counselors as part of its supply chain, and Eric Hoover wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education examining that issue in depth.  I also wrote about how the term “optional” can be confusing for students who may think that “test-optional” or “optional essay” are akin to “optional” National Football League off-season practices.  Within a couple of days NACAC had produced its “Test-optional means test-optional” list, and nearly 500 colleges have signed on to that document. 

It is the test-optional discussion that has pulled me back in.  Several incidents last week make me wonder whether the test-optional movement is about to become a new front in the college admission culture wars.

Last week the International Educational Consultants Association (IECA) issued a statement calling on colleges and universities to make permanent test-optional policies for both admission and scholarships.  On the NACAC Exchange, some independent consultants and high school counselors attempted to guilt and shame colleges that have yet gone the test-optional route, arguing that test centers could enable the spread of the virus and citing reports that some students are being assigned to test centers more than 100 miles away from their homes. 

A few voices went a step farther, taking a position I advanced earlier in the summer with tongue firmly in cheek.  They argued that being test-optional does not go far enough, that colleges and universities should go test-blind, not taking test scores into consideration at all in the coming admissions cycle.

What caught my eye, though, was that on the very same day two different published opinion articles in two different newspapers in two different cities argued that test-optional admission might, contrary to common belief, lessen access to college for students from low-income families.  Depending on your perspective, that’s either an amazing coincidence or suspicious.

One of those was in my local newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch.  On Monday, August 3, it published a guest op-ed with the title “Test-optional admissions might widen disparities.”  The author of the piece was Dr. Sarah Turner, a professor of economics and education at the University of Virginia.  Turner is a respected researcher best known for her work with Caroline Hoxby at Stanford on the Expanding College Opportunities Project.  That project, ultimately taken over by the College Board, attempted to increase the number of low-income, high-scoring high school seniors applying to selective colleges by sending the students packets of information and fee waivers to provide knowledge and motivation to expand their college horizons.

Turner’s op-ed argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the assumption that test-optional policies are more equitable, promoting the enrollment of low-income and underserved students, is “naïve.”  She suggests that removing test scores from the admissions equation places more weight on high school grades, which she describes as “most useful when seen within the context of standardized test scores,” and she argues that the value of high school grades is even more limited due to grade inflation and the disruption of school last spring by COVID-19. She also argues that “history shows that tests have been democratizing.”  

I found the timing, placement, and content of the article odd, and I soon learned I wasn’t alone. Turner’s article was already the subject of a vigorous conversation on Twitter, with Jon Boeckenstedt at Oregon State finding that it contained six of his nine “tropes” used by defenders of testing.  He also voiced a suspicion that had occurred to me as well, that the article might be part of a campaign orchestrated by the testing industry to impugn the test-optional movement.

That suspicion only increased when I discovered that, on the same day as Sarah Turner’s article appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a letter to the editor written by four Chicago-area school superintendents had been published in the Chicago Sun-Times.  The letter, titled “Defending the SAT/ACT,” pointed out that the Illinois State Board of Education provides the SAT to Illinois students free of charge, and expressed concern that “some” colleges and universities are making testing optional.

The superintendents’ letter is not as detailed or nuanced as the Turner op-ed, but both articles employ remarkably similar arguments. Like Turner, the superintendents challenge the conventional wisdom, stating “having the SAT and ACT be optional might sound like it will make access to college more equitable, but it creates more barriers.”  Like Turner, they argue that high-school grades are unreliable, given that “research indicates low-income and minority students overall are still performing lower academically.”  And both articles argue that the SAT and ACT serve a valuable diagnostic function measuring student growth.

So are the two op-ed’s coincidental or evidence of a pro-test campaign (not the same thing as a protest campaign)?  Zachary Goldberg, spokesperson for the College Board, told ECA that the College Board was unaware of Turner’s op-ed before it appeared. 

I’ll take his word for it, but I also know that answer doesn’t qualify as a blanket denial of any involvement.  The two articles bear some resemblance to the playbook used in a previous defense of testing, the 2017 “advertorial” in The Atlantic paid for and written by none other than the College Board.  The two main tenets of that advertorial, entitled, “When Grades Don’t Show the Whole Picture,” were that high school grades are unreliable predictors and that test-optional policies harm rather than help diversity.

The conspiracy theory would make a great plot twist on the dramas my wife and I binge watch, but I am more interested in the arguments being advanced in the two articles.

Of the two the superintendents’ letter makes the weaker case.  The fact that many, not “some,” colleges are moving to test-optional doesn’t impact the use of the SAT as a statewide assessment in Illinois, and the reality is that the new front in the battle between ACT and SAT is not college admissions testing but statewide testing.  That’s where the money is.  Test-optional policies don’t mean that students can’t submit test scores, only that they have the option not to.

I agree with Sarah Turner that grade inflation and the turmoil in schools this past spring make high school grades a less than perfect predictor of college performance, but I don’t have the same faith in test scores she has.  Everything I’ve read suggests that test scores provide only a small amount of added value to high school grades.  For many institutions admitting the majority of their applicants test scores add no predictive value.   

The contention that test scores provide an objective measure guaranteeing equity for low-income and underrepresented students is an assumption dating back to the early years when testing was seen as a measure of nature rather than nurture.  We have known for a long time that test scores have a strong correlation to family income, and the “score inflation” created by the wealthy paying thousands of dollars for test prep makes test scores even less equitable.  Sarah Turner writes that “test scores are a way to convey to colleges achievement and skills that might not be represented on a high school transcript.”  I’d love to know what those are.

One of the characteristics of culture wars is that neither side is likely to be convinced to change its view.  So it may be with the test-optional culture war, even though the current popularity of test-optional policies is a function of pragmatism rather than philosophy. I’m far from anti-testing, but farther from being convinced by the two op-eds last week.   

Should/Will Hunting

Among the things overshadowed this spring by the coronavirus pandemic was the announcement by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) that it is replacing its Code of Ethics and Professional Practices (CEPP) with a new document that lists ethical best practices rather than the mandatory practices contained in the previous document.

That announcement was not unexpected.  The leadership of NACAC was put in a tough position once the United States Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation on the grounds that three of the prohibitions in the CEPP unfairly restricted colleges from competing for students.

What will the new document look like?  We now have a glimpse, as the NACAC Admission Practices Committee has circulated a draft to the NACAC membership for review and comments (the comment period ended on Wednesday).  For those of you who have better ways to spend your summer, are waiting for the SparkNotes version, or wish you had your own college admissions ethics nerd to give you the kind of intelligence briefing President Trump receives on matters of national security, Ethical College Admissions is here to provide summary and commentary.

The Title

New:  Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission

Old:  Code of Ethics and Professional Practices

Older:  Statement of Principles of Good Practice

The new document has a new name, which is probably fitting and necessary to distinguish it from its predecessors, but it means that NACAC has a new title for its ethics document for the third time in five years.  For many years the Statement of Principles of Good Practice was iconic and perennial, even as it went through annual revisions and several iterations.  That title was misleading, because it wasn’t really a statement of principles but rather a set of rules. The biggest challenge in naming the new document is coming up with a new acronym to replace SPGP and CEPP.  GEPCA, anyone?

How Does the New Document Compare With the Old?

By and large, the Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission remains true to the previous document, with the obvious exception that the ethical practices named are now recommended rather than required (more on that later).  I didn’t see any major omissions in substance.

The new document is more concise and less wordy than its predecessor.  That is both a potential strength and a potential weakness.  It has been edited to be easier to read, and hopefully that means that more professionals will read and be familiar with the document.  What have been lost in the attempt for simplicity are examples that Lou Hirsh, former chair of the Admissions Practices Committee and primary author of the CEPP, included to illustrate the kinds of issues that the Admission Practices Committee might deal with.  Those examples provided a kind of “case law” for interpreting the ethical code.

For example, the new document states in the Recommended Practices for Implementation under the Truthfulness and Transparency heading that “colleges should make publicly available accurate, complete, and current information,” with one category being “factors considered in making admission, financial, and scholarship decisions.”  That follows closely I. A. 2. b. from the previous document (without the codification), but eliminates some of the language from that section, “including, but not limited to, students’ demonstrated interest, social media presence, personal conduct, legacy status, and financial need.”  That specific language is certainly not essential to asserting the importance of truthfulness and transparency, but those examples represent the kinds of gray areas where colleges may not be fully forthcoming and transparent about their practices.

The definitions of application plans (Early Decision, Regular Decision, Rolling Admission, Restrictive/Single Choice Early Action) have been moved to the glossary (one of the significant new features in the previous document), and that makes sense.  That glossary has been simplified considerably.

There is one omission from the previous glossary that made me wonder.  The definition of “colleges” removes the words “accredited and not-for-profit” from the previous definition.  Is that a sign that NACAC intends to open up membership to institutions that are unaccredited and/or for-profit?  Or is it an indication that, along the lines of my argument in the “Membership vs. Profession” section below, NACAC aspires for this document to lay out ethical guidelines for all colleges, including those in the for-profit sector?  I hope it’s the latter, but fear it’s the former.

A fourth section, dealing with procedures for education, monitoring, and compliance, has been dropped due to the fact that NACAC will no longer be enforcing the provisions of the document.  The new document puts the Admission Practices Committee in an educational rather than a policing role, but Lou Hirsh suggested to ECA that there might still be a need for a process allowing members to contact the AP committee about practices that seem ethically questionable.

Word Choices—Preamble

One of the innovations in the previous document was the addition of a Preamble, a broad statement of what the college admission counseling profession stands for.  I was a member of the Steering Committee (chaired by Todd Rinehart, soon to become NACAC’s next President) and was one of the voices arguing for the inclusion of such a statement.  I’m glad the new document keeps the Preamble, adding a paragraph referring to the DOJ issues that led to the new document and changing the order of two other paragraphs.

Because I drafted a good part of the previous Preamble, I am probably hypersensitive to a couple of word changes in the new draft.  Whereas the CEPP “protects the interests of both students and institutions by upholding a college admission process free from coercion and discrimination,” the new document replaces that language with “supports both students and institutions by promoting best practices in college admission.”  I see that as a weaker commitment or aspiration, and I don’t see why the inability to enforce requires stepping back from the previous commitment.  Similarly, whereas the old document claimed to be an affirmation of what we “stand for,” the new document is an affirmation of what we “believe.”  I don’t find that to be an improvement.

Word Choices—Membership vs. Profession

There is a similar word change in the introduction to the section on Professional Conduct.  The CEPP stated that “Advocating for the best interests of students in the admissions process is the primary ethical concern of our profession.”  The draft changes “profession” to “members.”

That choice of words raises an important question about both the document and about NACAC.  Is NACAC a membership organization or a professional organization?  I have always argued that it is the latter, that NACAC serves the college admission counseling profession and not only those within the profession who join NACAC as members.  Obviously membership should have benefits and privileges, but NACAC shouldn’t be satisfied to represent only its members.  Similarly, the ethical standards in the Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission should not apply only to NACAC members.  They should be an articulation of the ethical principles that underlie the profession.  Speaking for the profession may be seen as presumptuous, but speaking only for members puts NACAC’s moral authority and influence at risk.

Word Choices—Must vs. Will vs. Should

The ultimate question, of course, is what the impact of NACAC’s move from a mandatory practices document to a best practices document will be.  Will the change to a best practices document be earth-shattering?  Will NACAC’s inability or unwillingness to enforce its ethical code render those principles ineffective?  To what degree is NACAC’s identity as a professional organization tied to its commitment to promoting ethical admission practices? 

Although the CEPP contained only mandatory practices, that has not always been true of NACAC’s ethics documents.  Back in the mid-1990’s there was a major revision of the Statement of Principles of Good Practice under the leadership of my friend and predecessor as NACAC President, Bill McClintick.  That revision involved a document that included some practices deemed mandatory and others best practices.

I’m an optimist, perhaps even a dreamer, but I don’t accept that the lack of enforcement means the end of ethical behavior.  It certainly could, but doesn’t have to.

While NACAC was the rare professional association that monitored and enforced its code of ethics, it has never been the case that most ethics complaints had to be resolved with sanctions.  In the vast majority of cases brought before the Admission Practices Committee, institutions came into compliance voluntarily once made aware of questionable behavior.  Most college admissions offices have historically tried to do the right thing, and they’ve done it out of belief in the values of the profession and concern for students rather than fear of NACAC sanctions.             

Acting ethically may be harder in a climate where many institutions are in danger of not surviving, but the essence of ethical behavior is acting in the public interest rather than pure self-interest, with the assumption being that when all of us act ethically, it helps each of us.  That’s true today whether it comes to following traffic laws or wearing a mask to limit spread of the coronavirus. 

The new Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission is a good document.  Each of us in the profession needs to take this opportunity to re-commit to the values that led us to this work, and we should hold each other accountable in our shared commitment to students.  If we allow college admission to become its own Wild West, we risk losing public trust and confidence that is already fragile, and that will hurt all of us.  As Benjamin Franklin said after the signing of the Declaration, “We must all hang together, or we will certainly hang separately.”  We should pay attention.

Remembering Bill Royall

There aren’t many individuals who can claim legitimately to have brought about substantial, even revolutionary, change in the way that college admission is conducted.  Recently we lost one of them.

Bill Royall passed away on June 25 at the age of 74, fourteen months after being diagnosed with ALS.  He was an entrepreneur known in the college admissions world for having founded Royall & Company, the largest and most prominent direct marketing, student recruitment, and enrollment-management consulting firm serving college and universities. In 2015 Royall & Company was sold to The Advisory Board for $850 million, and today it works with more than 1700 colleges and universities as a subsidiary of EAB, which split off from The Advisory Board in 2018.

Bill Royall was also a philanthropist and patron of the arts in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia.  He was most recently the driving force behind the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ acquisition of Kehinde Wiley’s sculpture, “Rumors of War.”  That sculpture, purchased for $2 million and unveiled last December, served as an important generational and racial counterbalance to the five Confederate monuments lining Richmond’s Monument Avenue.  Four of those statues have been removed over the past several weeks in the wake of national and local protests against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement following the senseless murder of George Floyd.

Royall came to the higher education marketplace somewhat by accident.  He started in politics, serving as Executive Director of the Virginia Republican Party and as press secretary to Governor John Dalton.  In 1983 he started Royall & Company to provide direct marketing and fundraising support to political campaigns and nonprofit organizations.  Five years later he took on his first higher-education client, Hampden-Sydney College.  His college business grew from there and by 1995 Royall & Company was working exclusively with colleges and universities.

Royall’s method was using direct mail to expand the funnel, increasing inquiries and applications. That revolutionary approach found a niche as college admission morphed into enrollment management and adopted more sophisticated marketing practices.  The company moved into other areas—design, financial aid modeling, yield prediction—as the enrollment management landscape evolved.  Today, when data mining and analytics are increasingly important, EAB is at the forefront of research into student behavior.  All of that has its origins in Bill Royall’s creative vision and support for his client colleges.

Perhaps the best example of that came after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.  In the aftermath of Katrina, Tulane University relocated its admissions office 1000 miles away to Royall & Company’s headquarters in Richmond for several months to recruit its next class while the university recovered from the effects of the hurricane on the city. As a result of that experience, Tulane’s Dean of Admission, Dick Whiteside, became recognized within enrollment management and higher education as an expert on emergency planning and recovery, and he ultimately became one of numerous former admission deans to work for Royall & Company and EAB.  Tragically, Whiteside died a year ago from injuries suffered in an automobile accident caused by a drunk driver. 

The number of colleges and universities that have used Royall & Company’s services is a powerful testament to the impact that Bill Royall had on college admission.  Given that this is a remembrance and not a eulogy, it is also worth noting that not everyone was enamored with the Royall & Company approach.

Some of the criticisms speak to larger questions and concerns about the direction of college admission. 

Take, for instance, one of Royall & Company’s inventions, the “snap app,” an application sent to a student with most fields already populated.  I have heard critics refer to it as the “crap app” (and in the interest of full disclosure, I may have used that term a time or two myself). 

I know admission deans who question the efficacy of the snap app, arguing the approach ramps up application numbers but that those applications are “soft,” less likely to yield an enrolled student.  There are colleges that have stopped using Royall for that reason.

For most of my career, the guiding assumption in admission has been that increasing applications is good, no matter where those applications come from, and the snap app generally achieves that goal.  But does it make a difference how a student applies?

That is not a new discussion.  I remember when admission officers debated whether an application submitted through the Common Application was as “serious” an application as one submitted through the institution’s own application.  That debate ended long ago, and today colleges that use the Common or Coalition applications rarely have their own institutional app as well.  Is the snap app less “serious” than other ways of applying?  Today we have analytics that answer that question precisely.

There is a more philosophical question attached to the snap app.  How easy should it be to apply to college?  Both the Common and Coalition apps exist to make it easier for a student to apply to college, and the trend today is to make applying easier, with fewer requirements and barriers.  The test-optional debate is the latest front for that debate.  The argument for the use of snap apps is that it removes barriers to applying.  Given that students applying by snap app often receive fee waivers, the snap app might be argued to be an engine for access.

The other side of that argument is that the snap app fails the “Goldilocks test,” which says that applying to college should be neither too easy nor too hard.  Are students who apply by snap app actively engaged in the application process, and does that matter? What do we want the experience of applying to college to mean? We believe that going to college should be transformational for a student.  Should applying to college be as well?

Other criticisms of the Royall approach are grounded in a deeper concern about the role of vendors in college admission.  That rears its head each fall (but maybe not this fall) in complaints about the commercialism on display in the exhibit hall at the NACAC Conference.  For years Royall & Company has been an anchor tenant for that exhibit hall.

I remember attending a conference venting session a few years back where Royall & Company was included in the pantheon of college admission villains, along with the College Board and the U.S. News college rankings.  I did not then, and do not now, agree with that characterization.  If there is anything to be learned from the current debate about monuments and heroes, it is that every one of us has a complex story that defies easy characterization.  Bill Royall’s success was due to the fact that he served his college clients exceedingly well.

One of those clients was my close friend Anita Garland, who retired last year as Dean of Admissions at Hampden-Sydney College, Royall & Company’s first college client.  I asked her for her thoughts on what Bill Royall had meant to her and H-SC.

“On my last day in the office before my retirement, in the last hour, the last call I made was to Bill Royall.  Bill was a mentor and a friend to so many of us. He understood the pressure that deans of admissions were under, and he really cared about his college partners. Even as his college partners grew into the hundreds, Bill maintained the personal feel of a small business with R&C.

“Bill had such a vision and was always a step ahead of the curve.  He always seemed to know what we needed before we needed it, and assured us that it would work, and we were smart enough to believe him.  I learned so much about marketing from him. 

“Bill never relinquished a chance to build a new relationship—a new partner, a new collaboration—which is what his business—and our business, for that matter—is all about.  Bill always made his partners feel like Royall-ty, and he never closed a conversation without thanking us for our business.  It says a great deal about Bill that he kept his first client throughout the years he ran his business.“

Bill Royall, R.I.P.  You will be missed.

Why Admission Tests Are Like Toilet Paper, and Other Musings

Two weeks ago I wrote a post entitled, “The College Board’s Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Week,” borrowed respectfully and lovingly from a book title by the children’s author Judith Viorst.  I wrote about the class action lawsuit filed against the College Board in response to its on-line AP Exams this spring and the decision by the University of California to end use of the SAT and ACT over the next five years.  The UC system is the College Board’s biggest customer.

For the past two weeks the nation’s consciousness has been appropriately focused on the protests of police violence in the wake of the tragic death of George Floyd, and the depth and breadth of the outrage felt by citizens from all backgrounds promises transformational change. The past two weeks have also been potentially transformational for the admission testing industry. 

• ·      Marten Roorda has left his position of CEO of ACT, and there have been open calls for the removal of his counterpart at the College Board, David Coleman.

• ·      The College Board’s attempt to open registration on May 28 for test dates in August, September, and October became another public relations fiasco, as students attempting to register after having been prevented from testing this spring found phone lines jammed for hours and some test centers filling up in the first few hours.

• ·      The College Board issued a press release acknowledging challenges in providing universal access to the SAT for high school students in the class of 2021, announcing that it will not offer a version of the SAT that can be taken on-line at home, and asking colleges to be flexible with students in recognition of the difficulties most will have in completing testing.

• ·      The number of colleges and universities going test-optional for at least the coming year continues to grow, with at least four Ivies and the University of Virginia joining the list.

I applaud the College Board for acknowledging its difficulties after initially maintaining that the SAT registration process was, like its claim about AP exam completion and submission, a huge success.  I do wonder why the College Board always tends to communicate with its members through press releases.

The statement reveals that the biggest threat facing the admission testing industry is supply chain disruption.  During the pandemic that same issue has affected products ranging from toilet paper to meat.  Now add admission tests to the list.

The supply chain for both the SAT and ACT relies on local test centers, most of them high schools.  Now the social distancing requirements in many states mean that test centers won’t be able to test as many students.  Will students be squeezed out of testing, or be forced to travel 100 miles to find an open test center? Will school districts not allow high schools to open up to strangers on a Saturday?  And will the colleges that require admission tests step up and offer themselves as test centers? At a time when there is a lot of discussion about testing and its future, the biggest threat to the SAT and ACT might be the supply chain.  It’s hard to make money when customers can’t buy your product.

My last post reported on the University of California’s decision to give up requiring the SAT and ACT, and loyal reader Ethan Lewis pointed out that I had misreported part of the plan put forth by UC President Janet Napolitano.  I somehow missed that the plan to end the requirement for test scores will apply only to California residents.  Out-of-state applicants will still have to submit scores from the ACT, SAT, or the new test that the university is talking about creating.  I apologize for my oversight on that point and appreciate Ethan bringing it to my attention.

That raises an interesting question.  Is it legitimate for a college or university to require testing for some students but make it optional for others?  I have asked that question before about universities that are test-optional, except for engineering students or scholarship candidates.

I suppose that depends on your justification for being test-optional.  Are you test-optional for philosophical reasons, because you question the validity of the test?  Are you skeptical of how much value test scores add to the validity of admission decisions?  Are you not selective enough for test scores to make a difference in admission decisions? Or are you test-optional as a tool for profile enhancement, allowing you to admit students you want on your campus but whose test scores might hurt your data for ranking purposes?

In the case of the University of California, the argument might be that it serves California residents and knows the high school curriculum offered at California high schools.  Requiring out-of-state students to submit test scores provides an additional data point to evaluate the credentials of applicants from schools that the UC admissions offices may not know as well.

I wonder whether there are other iterations of the concept of requiring admission tests for only some applicants. We know that test scores have context.  If you and I have the same SAT score but I come from a wealthy family and a good school and have spent a sizable amount on test prep, while you don’t have any of those advantages, then the scores don’t mean the same thing.

Given that we now know that SAT and ACT scores have a high correlation with family income, and that the value test scores add to predictability is minimal, should we require test scores only from applicants who come from families above a certain income, with students from lower socioeconomic groups able to receive a decision based only on their high school transcript?  That’s the test-optional I’d like to see.

In the last post I argued that it is odd that after being test-optional for the next two years the University of California will allow students to submit the SAT and ACT for scholarship consideration but not for admission.  Why use test scores for a purpose for which they are not intended, scholarship consideration, when you are not going to use them for admission, the purpose for which the test was designed? 

That leads to one other issue.  The purpose of the SAT is predicting freshman-year GPA.  That’s certainly helpful, but shouldn’t the college admissions process be intended to predict a much broader definition of success, say likelihood of graduation or success beyond graduation?  If testing is going to be part of our admissions calculus, shouldn’t we develop tests that measure the qualities that lead to success?

Do we measure what we value, or do we value what we can easily measure?

Fortnight

It has been two weeks since my last post, and yet it feels like years given what our country has been through in that short time.  The last post came a day after the murder of George Floyd by police officers but before public awareness and outrage over that crime led people to go into the streets in protest around the country and around the world.

In real time we lack the perspective to know when history is being made, but this feels historic. The protests have been more widespread and lasted longer than I remember in previous cases, and in my home town of Richmond, Virginia there is unprecedented momentum for removing the Confederate statues for which Monument Avenue is named.

A national nerve has been touched by the recent deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville.  They, and far too many of the more than 5400 people killed by police since 2015 according to a Washington Post database, lost their lives for alleged offenses in no way deserving of the death penalty.  Even if we recognize the stress and danger faced by police on a daily basis, it is hard to understand how this happens again and again.

The outrage is real and deep, but the vehemence of the protests has been surprising. I wonder if that’s related to living through the coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home orders over the past twelve weeks.  That has deprived us of needed human connection, and it has made us feel powerless against an invisible enemy.  Racism is an older, more entrenched, and just as mysterious disease as COVID-19, but it’s a disease we should be able to cure together without waiting for a vaccine.  

I have struggled personally with how to respond.  As a white male who doesn’t have to fear that any interaction with police may turn violent or even deadly, does my background and perspective disqualify me from contributing meaningfully, or does it impose an added obligation to speak out? I want to support my students, especially my students of color. I am filled with sadness and embarrassment that my generation has failed to heal America’s racial history and social and economic inequality.  And I’m angry that some of our elected leaders are more concerned with “law and order” than justice.

This blog takes its beat as the intersection of ethics and college admissions, and this issue touches on both. 

Ethics is about ideals, about how we should live.  The killing of George Floyd reveals once again cognitive dissonance between the ideals that we as Americans claim to uphold and the reality faced by too many black Americans.  Not only is their experience with the justice system different, their economic experience living in the wealthiest nation on earth is different, and this spring the data on COVID-19 suggests that black Americans are victimized by the coronavirus at higher levels.

For those of us in the college counseling and admissions profession, one of our ideals is promoting opportunity and equity for all young people.  The Preamble to the NACAC Code of Ethics and Professional Practices (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I had a hand in writing) states that,

“We are committed to increasing the enrollment and success of historically underrepresented populations. We are dedicated to promoting college access and addressing systemic inequities to ensure that college campuses reflect our society’s many cultures, stimulate the exchange of ideas, value differences, and prepare our students to become global citizens and leaders.”

The events of the last couple of weeks are a clarion call not only for our country but also for us as professionals.  Access to education should be transformational not only for individual students, but also for our country.  How will we, individually and institutionally and as a profession, step up in this moment?

The College Board's Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

How was your week last week?  Chances are it was better than the week the College Board experienced.  Last week the College Board found itself attacked, and perhaps existentially endangered, on two different fronts.

The more significant of the two is the unanimous vote by the Board of Regents of the University of California in support of President Janet Napolitano’s plan to suspend the system’s use of the SAT and ACT as a requirement for admission until 2024.  Under Napolitano’s proposal, released just two weeks ago, the UC system will extend for two years the test-optional policy it adopted in March in response to the disruption in testing for high school students graduating in 2021.  Beginning in 2023, all University of California campuses will be “test-blind,” meaning that students can submit SAT or ACT scores but they won’t factor into admission decisions.  By the fifth year the University of California will develop its own admission test or abolish the use of testing in admission altogether.

The California decision is a blow to the testing industry at a time when it is already reeling from lost test dates and revenue in the wake of COVID-19.  It is a particularly bitter blow for the College Board, as the University of California system is its biggest “customer.”  According to the Los Angeles Times, 80% of the UC system’s 172,000 applicants last year submitted SAT scores.

The impact is even bigger than that, though.  The College Board has always treated the University of California with “most favored nation” status.  It was the UC system’s adoption of standardized testing for admission as part of Clark Kerr’s Master Plan in the early 1960s that made the SAT a national test.  That wasn’t an accident.

According to Nicholas Lemann’s book, The Big Test, the UC decision to adopt the SAT was the product of a long marketing campaign on the part of the College Board.  The CB’s first branch office was opened in Berkeley, home of the University of California’s flagship campus, in 1947.  The University of California was the first public university to become a College Board member, with the CB making an exception to its requirement that member institutions have the SAT as an admissions requirement.  At one point in the 1950s the College Board went so far as to offer the SAT at no cost to University of California applicants.  Can we imagine such a thing today?

More recently, the new version of the SAT introduced in 2006 was in response by a threat by then UC-President Richard Atkinson to eliminate the SAT as a requirement for admission to the system.  Atkinson argued for a test rooted in achievement rather than aptitude, and the SAT was changed to incorporate higher-level mathematics, a writing section with an essay, and scores on a scale of 2400 rather than 1600.  The writing section with essay has since been removed from the newest iteration of the SAT, but Napolitano’s proposal for a new test captures Atkinson’s desire for a more achievement-based test.

An article by Eric Hoover in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the California Board of Regents vote came after six hours of intense debate by videoconference over the pros and cons of standardized testing in admission.  Defenders of testing cited a report issued back in February by a panel appointed by the university’s Academic Senate.  That report recommended that the university continue requiring the SAT or ACT for the near future.  Those wanting to end testing argued that the testing requirement disadvantages applicants from underrepresented populations, with one UCLA student calling the SAT a “racist” exam.

There is one irony, perhaps even an oddity, in the plan put forth by President Napolitano.  During the two-year period when the University of California is “test blind,” it will not consider test scores for admission but will for scholarship evaluation.  That means that the UC system will choose not to use the SAT or ACT for the purposes for which they are intended, but will use them for purposes for which the tests are not intended.  Regardless of how you feel about the tests, that seems misguided.

The second threat to the College Board comes in the form of a class action lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles asking for $500 million in damages as a result of the Board’s failure to provide adequate access and oversight of its Advanced Placement exams the past couple of weeks. Among the plaintiffs is the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, better known as FairTest.

Once the pandemic shut down schools nationwide in March, the College Board announced plans to offer AP exams to be taken by students online at their homes.  The exams were shortened from three hours to 45 minutes, with students all over the world taking the same exam at the same time.  The syllabus of topics to be covered was shortened, and the exams were open-book, open-note assessments.

The pivot to the new format raised more questions than it answered.  The College Board’s expressed justification for the change was concern for students hoping to earn college credit for their AP work, but the cynics among us will be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that the real concern was the loss of revenue that would have resulted from cancelling the exams altogether.  But does the new online exam resemble the traditional Advanced Placement exams, and will colleges evaluate scores and award credit for these exams as they have in the past?

As soon as the AP exams commenced on May 11, there were reports of students getting error messages or timing out when they attempted to submit their completed answers. Those unable to complete the submission process were told their only option was to retake the exam during the makeup period.  For the second week of the exam schedule, the College Board allowed students experiencing submission difficulties to take a photo of their answer and submit by e-mail.  That didn’t satisfy critics, including those filing the lawsuit.

I have read both the complaint in the lawsuit and the College Board’s press release announcing the success of the online exams, and I am not convinced by either of them.

The lawsuit alleges that the College Board was negligent, “knowingly discriminated,” and “failed to honor its commitments to students.”  It argues that the AP Program was aware in advance that there were concerns about access to connectivity, test security, score comparability, and accommodations for students with disabilities, but “did not change its policies to address them.”

I’m not a lawyer, nor did I sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night, and while it is hard to know in our litigious society what conclusions a judge or jury might draw, I’m not sure what the College Board was supposed to do.  We are in the midst of a pandemic the likes of which hasn’t been seen for 100 years, and with schools nationwide closed the College Board’s options were limited to either rushing into circulation the online, at-home tests or cancelling the AP exams altogether.  Cancelling would have led some other group to argue that the CB “failed to honor its commitments to students.” Clearly the test format disadvantaged students with poor connectivity or needing accommodations, and the College Board makes an appealing villain, but I’m not sure what alternatives there were.

At the same time, the College Board’s response to students frustrated by their inability to submit answers once they finished the test was tone-deaf, right out of the public relations playbook used by the Trump administration to deny responsibility for the failed national response to the coronavirus.  The College Board had to have anticipated that there would be technology problems, and responding with “it must be your browser” and “just retake the exam” doesn’t cut it. 

The correct customer service response for a faulty product is to have a back-up system in place from the start, or else just apologize and refund the customer’s money.  

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Furloughed

After three years as a weekly column for Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” newsletter, Ethical College Admissions is returning to its previous home for the foreseeable future.

Consider this part of the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.  ECA has been furloughed, a small sacrifice compared to the millions of Americans who have lost jobs and businesses over the past three months.  We hope that the economy may recover to a degree that will allow us to continue our partnership with Scott Jaschik and the folks at Inside Higher Ed, because it’s been a good one. 

Three years ago, back before Rick Singer was a household name, before the Department of Justice decided that it should be spending its time investigating NACAC, and before the future of standardized testing (and perhaps higher education as we know it) came into question, I wondered how I would ever find enough material to write a weekly column year round.  That hasn’t proved to be a problem, and I’m proud of my body of work and grateful for my readers who will now have to find this site.

I will continue to write about the intersection of ethics and college admission, just not weekly, and I may take the summer off unless there is an issue that demands analysis.  For the big issues I will still seek Inside Higher Ed as an avenue.

Thanks for reading, and please spread the word.

ECA Has a New Home

The Ethical College Admissions blog has a new home.  Beginning today, ECA can be found as a column in Admissions Insider, a new college admissions based weekly newsletter published by the higher education website, Inside Higher Ed.

Here's a link to the new site:

This site, The Thoughtful College Search, will remain and we hope to develop new content.

Thank you to all the readers who have followed the blog.  We hope you will continue to read it at the new location.

The Ethical Significance of May 1

(This is the second in an occasional series on the new Statement of Principles of Good Practice and related ethical issues.)

Today is the first of May.  The significance of the day depends on your background and perspective.

If you’re fond of Germanic paganism or attended a girls’ school, you may associate May 1 with dancing around the Maypole to celebrate the coming of summer.  If you grew up in a Soviet bloc country, it’s a day for parades featuring lots of military hardware.  If you’re a loyal supporter of President Trump, you will celebrate “Loyalty Day” today.

On this day in 1930 a ninth planet was identified in our solar system and named for Mickey Mouse’s dog Pluto (it was later “de-planeted” before returning to planet status last month).  The Empire State Building was commissioned in 1931, and three mismatched cultural icons were born on this day—Calamity Jane, North Korea, and SpongeBob SquarePants.  Hopefully none of them will choose to celebrate their birthday by shooting something off.

For those of us in the college admissions profession, May 1 is arguably the most important day of the year.  It is the National Candidates’ Reply Date, the date by which high school seniors should have made one, and only one, enrollment deposit.  In theory May 1 brings the admissions cycle to a close, although we know that many rolling admission places continue enrolling into the summer and that the use of Wait Lists has become a distinct part of the admission cycle.  

For admissions offices May 1 can be a time for celebration, a time for relief, or a time for panic.  If deposits are slow, May Day can turn into “May Day! May Day!,” the international distress call.

May 1 can also produce anxiety for students.  Up to now the college search and admission processes have been about options and possibilities.  Now choosing one door means closing others.  The finality of May 1 is hard for some students.

In 2005 May 1 fell on a Saturday.  I was in the dugout coaching a baseball game when my cell phone rang.  It was one of my seniors, one of my son’s best friends.  He was having trouble making a final decision among three good options, and as I recall his mother wanted him to deposit at the school he liked least.  We talked through the options while I kept the scorebook and finally he decided where he was going to mail his deposit.

An hour later the phone rang again.  “I just mailed all three envelopes!” he exclaimed with panic.  “What should I do?”  I told him to calm down and on Monday he called the two schools that he wasn’t attending.  “I bet I’m going to become one of your stories,” he prophesized.  And so he has.

May 1 serves as the cornerstone for the ethical infrastructure underlying college admissions.  The current (but not the new) Statement of Principles of Good Practice has a list of what are called “Member Conventions,” defined as “a set of understandings or agreements to frame our code of ethics.”  May 1 does not appear on that list (but does appear elsewhere in the document), but May 1 is the ultimate admissions “convention.”  There is nothing sacred about May 1, but we have agreed on this date as a “finish line” to ensure that both students and institutions have a level playing field.

May 1 supports the ethical principle that students should be able to make a college choice that is informed and made without undue coercion or manipulation.  A student should be able to receive decisions from all the colleges to which he or she applied and have time to compare the pros and cons of each option before choosing the best fit.

May 1 also helps college admission remain a profession rather than a cutthroat business.  It provides a framework that keeps us from falling prey to our baser motives to serve ourselves and not our students, and it keeps the college process from deteriorating into a “Wild West” where there are no rules.  As a result it helps preserve public trust in our profession.

That is not to say that May 1 is not under constant threat of erosion.  As a marketing and business mentality comes into conflict with college admission’s traditional emphasis on education and counseling, and as more institutions struggle for survival, there are more challenges to May 1 every year.  Attempts to circumvent May 1 constitute the vast majority of complaints made to Admission Practices committees both at the national and affiliate levels.

Those challenges to May 1 take the following forms:

            --Requests to deposit by an earlier date without making it clear that the student has until May 1;

            --Incentives to enroll earlier, ranging from a discounted enrollment deposit, early registration for classes, a scholarship reserved for students who deposit by a particular earlier date, and even backstage passes to a concert;

            --Insinuations that enrollment, housing, or placement in a certain program might disappear “unless you order now.”

I asked Lou Hirsh, Chair of the National Admission Practices Committee for NACAC, to comment on the importance of May 1.  As usual, he is far more eloquent than I am.

“The May 1 National Candidates Reply Date protects both students and colleges:

·      It frees students from the chaos – and unfairness – of being forced to commit to a college before they have heard from other colleges or weighed other financial aid and scholarship offers.

·      It ensures that colleges compete fairly with each other. It lets them plan their mailings, phone calling, off-campus receptions, and on-campus yield events knowing that they are reaching students before they have been forced to make a commitment elsewhere. Without it, colleges would be embroiled in a self-defeating “early deposit deadline arms race.”

But what also makes May 1 so central is that it is so pedagogically important. For the first time in their lives, these (mostly) 17-year-olds are being asked to make an informed and life-changing choice. As their teachers (and whether we work on the counseling side of the desk or the college admission side, we are, indeed, “teachers”), we want them to enter their adulthood weighing pros and cons, reining in their impulsiveness, and taking the time to think about the human beings they have become and the ones they hope to be. Like so much else in education, the process is as important as the outcome.

Colleges that bully students into forgoing their May 1 rights by making them commit early in order to secure a scholarship offer or by implying some other disadvantage betray a fundamental ethical and pedagogical imperative. Other colleges play by the rules and in the process serve the best interests of students. Why can’t they?”

The draft of the new Statement of Principles of Good Practice includes a section outlining dates, deadlines, and procedures for the college admission cycle, and May 1 is the central component of that calendar.  The new document requires colleges to abide by May 1 for enrollment to not just institutions, but to special programs, majors, and institutional scholarships, even those that are administered by departments.  It also requires institutions to be explicit about whether deposits received before May 1 are refundable.

Regardless of how you celebrate May 1, take time today to appreciate the role this day plays in preserving the integrity of the college admissions process.

Haggling: A Follow-Up

The previous post, “To Haggle or Not to Haggle,” was selected by insidehighered.com for its “Around the Web” section.  We are always grateful to have recognition from that respected site.

After the post was published on Wednesday, I received an e-mail from Jon Boeckenstedt at DePaul, and I asked his permission to post it.

“You’ve equivocated two terms: Tuition discounting and merit aid.

Almost all financial aid, whether it be ‘need based’ or ‘merit based’ (which are silly distinctions without meaning any more, but I’ve written about that enough to justify my not doing more today) is discount.  That simply means that if your tuition is $60,000 and you offer $30,000 in aid, you simply forego the revenue, in the form of a discount (in this case, 50%).  You essentially agree to educate that student for $30,000 in revenue.

There are exceptions, in the case where specific scholarships are funded and restricted (the Miller family sets up an endowment to fund ten scholarships of $30,000 annually).  In that case, you charge $60,000, and you get $60,000 in revenue: $30K from the student and $30K in cash from the funded award.

But for new students, most aid is discount, even if the endowment is huge.”

I have great respect for Jon, and always pay attention to his comments and insights.  In this case I oversimplified.  I knew the distinction, and probably should have made that clear.  The point I was trying to make was that tuition discounting does not automatically correlate with willingness to haggle, which is what the New York Times article was suggesting.  I think Jon’s point that most aid, whether labeled as “need based” or “merit,” is actually a tuition discount is an important and misunderstood point.”

Another reader, an independent consultant I will not name because I haven’t asked permission, wrote to say:

“I don’t know any independents who haggle.  Parents may.  I won’t.”

I wasn’t alleging that most or any independent consultants haggle with colleges for their clients, but I thought the Times insinuated that providing advice for haggling was part of the package of services offered by many independent consultants.

I am thankful for readers of the blog who take the time to write or to speak to me in person.  I started Ethical College Admissions nearly five years ago not knowing if I had anything worth saying or if anyone would read it, but knowing there are regular readers who care about these issues is gratifying.

I hope to be back with a post on Monday reflecting on May 1 as an ethical cornerstone for college admissions as a profession.

To Haggle or Not to Haggle

A couple of weeks ago an article in the “Your Money” section of the New York Times encouraged high school seniors and their families to engage in what the article described as an “annual ritual” in the college application process, appealing financial aid packages.  The article quoted a certified public accountant in New York as claiming that a family might cut $5000-$10,000 off their tuition bill with a little “strategic haggling” prior to May 1, and even suggested that families consider hiring a professional haggler.

I found several things about the article misleading and even troubling, but I also know that I tend to be naïve and idealistic, which sometimes masquerades as bemused cynicism.  I’m not ready to accept that financial aid appeals are an “annual ritual” or that families should believe that haggling a normal part of the admissions process. 

Paying for a college education has become a greater challenge as the cost of higher education outstrips family incomes, and in the past five years or so I’ve seen economics determine students’ college choices more often and more significantly than used to be the case. That usually involves choosing public in-state options over private or out-of-state public universities rather than renegotiating financial aid.

The Times article suggests that the increasing use of tuition discounting (or what is often euphemistically referred to as “merit aid”) means that colleges are more amenable to haggling over price, but I’m not sure the two are connected.  In my experience tuition discounting (which may be well over 50% at many tuition-dependent private colleges) takes place at the front end, with the exception of a few schools trying to stay alive.  Is that about to change?  I hope not.  I don’t want paying for college to resemble buying an automobile.

The other contention in the article that doesn’t smell right is that the last two weeks of April are timely for trying to negotiate with colleges.  It is true that colleges are under pressure to make the class, but the implication in the article is that a pool of scholarship dollars becomes available as students turn down the offer of admission and financial aid package to attend a different institution.  That’s like assuming that a college will take a student off the Wait List for every admitted student who doesn’t enroll.  I haven’t worked in a financial aid office, but in my experience that’s not how financial aid works.  Please feel free to correct me if I’m off base.

I’m also bothered by the suggestion that families should think about hiring a “haggler” to help negotiate.  Parts of the article read like an infomercial for independent educational consultants, reporting that the number of full-time independents has grown by more than 400% in the past decade.  I want to be clear that I am not bashing independent college counseling, which is a legitimate part of our profession.  It’s the implication that one must hire a consultant to haggle that I am questioning.

The most interesting question posed in the article is whether the early FAFSA and the advent of prior-prior year data will increase the number of financial aid appeals.  Is the downside of prior-prior that the aid evaluation system will not have the ability to respond to dramatic changes in a family’s financial situation that occurred in 2016?  And how will colleges deal with those situations?  Will they be fluid in adjusting aid packages to take into account changed circumstances or will they conclude that those changed circumstances will come into play a year from now?

I have written about this issue before (more eloquently than I am now), and changed financial circumstances is one of three reasons for which I would advise a student to appeal a financial aid offer.  A second would be when another college has a more generous financial aid offer, recognizing that one institution might be more willing to give merit aid to a particular applicant than another.  The third is when finances are an impediment to a student’s attending his or her first-choice college.  The college may or may not be able to do anything to help the student, but I want the college to be aware.

What I don’t want is students and families haggling with the sole goal of getting the lowest price possible.  College is a huge investment for families, second only to buying a home, and cost is an important consideration, but the real issue is the relative value of the college experience among the various options a student has. 

Buying socks at Walmart or Costco should not be the model for choosing a college.  The college process may seem bizarre, but it shouldn’t resemble a bazaar.      

The New SPGP is Here! The New SPGP is Here!

Whatever happened to comedian Steve Martin’s career?  Last week I had the television on, barely paying attention, until I saw an ad that featured a guy who looked a lot like, maybe even exactly like, Steve Martin.  At first I thought that the ad, promoting a new online class on comedy to be taught by none other than Steve Martin, was a comedy bit, but I never saw a punch line, so either the ad is serious or else the humor was so subtle I missed it.  The company promoting the course, Master Class, looks legit, offering online courses taught by celebrities ranging from cooking taught by Gordon Ramsey to tennis taught by Serena Williams, and now comedy taught by Steve Martin.

We all know that fame and celebrity are fleeting, that in the age of YouTube and social media Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” may last three minutes and 48 seconds.  One minute you’re the next big thing, playing a banjo and cracking jokes with an arrow through your head, then hosting Saturday Night Live and starring in serious films, and before you know it you are teaching an online class on comedy.  What’s left, being in the cast of Celebrity Apprentice or Dancing With the Stars?

If indeed Steve Martin’s career is in decline, it may have started with the movie, “The Jerk.”  In the most famous scene from that movie, he announced with exuberance that “The new phone book is here!  The new phone book is here!” It is out of homage to that scene that I devote this post to announcing that “The new SPGP is here! The new SPGP is here!”

A little over a year ago NACAC appointed a Steering Committee on Admission Practices to review and revise the organization’s Statement of Principles of Good Practice.  The Steering Committee consists of nineteen members and is chaired by Todd Rinehart from the University of Denver, past chair of the National Admission Practices committee.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of the Steering committee.)  If Master Class decides to offer a course on the SPGP, Todd would be the ideal choice to teach it.

The Steering Committee/Commission approach is one NACAC has used in dealing with other big issues (Bill Fitzsimmons at Harvard chaired a commission on testing ten years ago, and Phil Ballenger from the University of Washington chaired a commission looking into international recruiting issues about five years ago) and in my opinion represents NACAC at its best, bringing multiple respected voices together and giving them time to work on issues that are challenging and controversial.

The Steering Committee on Admission Practices was charged with looking at the SPGP with a fresh set of eyes, including:

--engaging a cross-section of NACAC members in discussion about the document and what it should represent;

--simplifying the document and modernizing its language:

--adapting the SPGP so that it sets ethical standards for the changing educational landscape of college admission.

What is that changing landscape?  It can be hard to define, although as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, we know it when we see it.  It is an outgrowth of the tough market conditions that many colleges and universities find themselves in and the pressure on admissions offices to be marketers and salesmen rather than educational counselors. 

It also reflects an increasing divide between the college and secondary sides of our profession.  That shows itself in different answers for the sentence completion, “Why doesn’t NACAC…?”  Secondary school counselors are more inclined to finish that question with a request to legislate or regulate [insert admission practice or enrollment strategy], while colleges’ answers tend to congregate around “leave us alone”? 

The Steering Committee has developed a working draft of the new document, and has asked for feedback from individual members by April 28.  Presentations about the document and the Steering Committee process will be featured at affiliate conferences throughout the Spring.  I will be presenting next week with Lou Hirsh (current National AP Chair who has done much of the writing of the new document) at the Potomac and Chesapeake conference in Williamsburg.

It is my plan to do a series of blog posts (interspersed with posts on other topics) on the new document and some of the ethical issues related to it, but here are some quick thoughts.

The proposed SPGP is simpler, if not shorter.  It addresses issues involving transfer admission, international recruitment, and housing deposits in a way the previous document didn’t.

The new document is built around ethical principles, at least partly due to my influence.  I have argued before that the SPGP had a lot of rules and very few principles.  The new document is organized around ethical principles including truthfulness, transparency, confidentiality, professional conduct (engaging in respectful discourse and avoiding conflict of interest), and protecting the best interests of students.  Under each broad principle is a section called “Implementation” which includes many of the specific rules that have been part of the SPGP.

The other piece in the proposed SPGP is a section devoted to the responsible practice of college admission, covering topics such as application plans, admission cycle dates and deadlines, Wait Lists, transfer admission, and the use of international agents for recruitment purposes.  The document also includes a glossary defining admission terms.

The other significant change is that the new SPGP eliminates the distinction between mandatory practices and best practices.  Everything included in the new document will be considered mandatory and subject to enforcement.  One early Steering Committee discussion was about whether NACAC should even try to enforce ethical practices, given that many other professional associations have ethics statements that are aspirational but not enforced.  There was a strong consensus among committee members and affiliate leaders that NACAC should continue to enforce its ethical principles.

Obviously attempting to come to agreement on the principles guiding the day-to-day practice of college admission is a challenging process, and all of us may not agree on what’s included or what’s omitted.  I’m proud of the work that the Steering Committee has done, and proud of the objective to create a document that protects both students and institutions and also makes a statement about what our profession stands for.  I urge you to read the draft and submit your comments by April 28.

The Real March Madness

The basketball extravaganza known as “March Madness” has come to an end.  Before you rush off to remind me that the Semifinals and Final (otherwise known as the “Final Four”) have yet to be played, please allow me to point out that the remaining games will take place not in March but in April.  “April Madness” doesn’t have the same lilt or ring to it, which is why the NCAA hasn’t trademarked it along with “March Madness” and “Final Four.”   

I have always loved college basketball, especially when played by real college students rather than the rent-a-pros who treat college as a sabbatical between high school and the NBA.  I will watch this weekend’s games with interest, although I much prefer the first-round games when I can root for underdogs.  Three of the “Final Four” teams—Gonzaga, Oregon, and South Carolina—are fresh faces but hardly underdogs.

Then there is North Carolina.  I had a love/hate relationship with the basketball program at UNC-Chapel Hill long before the academic fraud involving paper courses that involved a significant number of student-athletes.  I used to admire legendary coach Dean Smith and the way his teams played, yet always found myself rooting against them.  That changed when one of my best friends from college married one of Dean Smith’s daughters, making the Carolina coach virtual kin.  After attending the wedding and seeing him in his father-of-the-bride role, it became much harder, but not impossible, to root against him and the Tar Heels.

The real madness of March doesn’t take place in basketball arenas but rather in admissions and college counseling offices.  At this time of year I always feel like a contestant in a reality show.  When my students receive good news I feel relief rather than joy, relief to have made it through another episode without being voted off the island.  Is that exhaustion, lack of perspective due to being in the midst of the admissions season, or a college counseling version of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

I don’t think that’s just me.  I have talked with several colleagues recently, people who are stars in our profession, who are suffering from a mid-career crisis, questioning whether it’s time to go back to the classroom or time to get out of education altogether.

One close friend works in a school where the narrative is “how do we recover from this tragedy?”, the tragedy being this spring’s college results.  The irony is that the perception does not match the reality.  The year has been good at worst and great at best.  The voices of the minority who are disappointed are much louder than the majority who are thrilled.

Another friend is living the spring change in title from “Director of College Counseling” to “Director of Blame.”  When college decisions aren’t as desired, it must be the counselor’s fault, and the fact that blunt discussions about the realities of the process have been had doesn’t prevent students and parents from being stunned.  So why is that?

One reason is that all of us process the world on two levels, one intellectual and the other emotional.  We may know intellectually that admission to a given institution is a long shot, but emotionally we don’t really believe it, and when the reality hits it hurts at a deep emotional level.  That’s hard for students who don’t have much experience with rejection and failure, and perhaps even harder for parents, who at an unconscious level may see college admission as validation of their success as a parent.

The other reason is that, at least in independent schools, there is a belief, or maybe a hope, that college counselors are like Hollywood agents, able to cut deals for their students.  I try to dispel that “suburban legend” by confronting it directly with my parents, and it always draws laughter, but the laughter is nervous.

For me the biggest frustration each spring is the widespread and growing collegiate worship at the altar of selectivity.  Early in my career I remember a legendary Ivy League admissions dean making the comment that “the admissions process is rational, but not necessarily fair.”  Another Director of Admissions from a Little Ivy expressed his belief that if a student has the right kind of credentials and applies to enough highly-selective schools, he or she will end up with a reasonable option.   

I’m not sure either of those is true today.  The gospel of selectivity is a cousin to prosperity theology, where wealth is a consequence of virtue.  The admissions equivalent is that selectivity=quality.  That unexamined assumption underlies the U.S. News and World Report college rankings and drives many of the unsavory games that colleges feel compelled to play.

I’m happy for all the colleges bragging about their record application numbers and their 2-3% admit rates in regular admission and sad for my students who are victims of the quest for selectivity.  It is true that they are not entitled to admission to a certain school or group of schools, and that they will have a good college experience wherever they end up.  It is also true that being disappointed is good preparation for adulthood.  But I worry that we have created a system where admission has become random rather than rewarding merit.  The long-term result is societal disillusionment with the college admissions process and lack of trust in our profession.  As a counselor there are certain schools I no longer recommend because they want my students’ applications, but not the students themselves.

The marketing expert Seth Godin did a TED talk entitled “This is Broken,” highlighting things and processes that are poorly designed.  At this time of year I wonder if the college admissions process is broken.  Do admission conventions like Early Decision still make sense?  If more colleges are measuring demonstrated interest, should we be more intentional about the role interest plays and how students demonstrate it?  Should we redesign the college process to look more like the matching process that medical residency programs use? 

The psychologist Michael Thompson once wrote that the college admissions process can make normal people act nutty and nutty people act quite crazy.  I’m trying to determine which of those categories my March madness belongs in.     

Incentive Compensation

Several weeks ago I received a phone call from an admissions dean friend with an ethics question.  If this were a movie trailer rather than a blog devoted to the ethics of college admissions, I might describe the question as “ripped from today’s headlines.”

The dean works for one of the myriad of small liberal-arts colleges that are tuition driven, whose very existence is dependent on its admissions office achieving enrollment targets.  Enrolling the freshman class is never going to be easy, but the dean is a pro, an institutional icon, with a staff that does a remarkable job representing the college year-in and year-out, and as a result the college is holding its own as much as any small liberal-arts college these days.

The consequence of that success is that the college, for budgetary reasons, has set an ambitious freshman class goal, above anything the college has previously achieved.  As you might expect, the admissions staff has been under great pressure to bring in the freshman class, and the dean wants to support the staff and reward them for meeting goals.

The dean’s question was what kinds of rewards are appropriate and which are in conflict with the ban on incentive compensation in the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice.  Can a college give a staff member a bonus for reaching an enrollment goal?  The word on the street was that competitor colleges are doing exactly that.  If such a bonus is impermissible, what about adding an amount to the following year’s salary, or paying off student loans?

The relevant section in the SPGP is I. A. 3. a., which states that:

            “Members will be compensated in the form of a fixed salary, rather than commissions or bonuses based on the number of students recruited.”

The idea that admissions professionals should be compensated by salary rather than on a commission basis is as old as the Statement of Principles of Good Practice itself, and is in fact the very first statement in the earliest version of the SPGP I’ve seen.  It reflects the principle that college admissions and college counseling are a profession rather than a business, that we are educators and not salesmen.

The prohibition on per capita compensation extends beyond the SPGP.  It is also part of U.S. Federal law.  A 1992 amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965 prohibited colleges and universities eligible for federal financial-aid funds from paying commissions, bonuses, or other incentives for recruiters based on the number of students they recruit.  In 2010 the Department of Education issued regulations for improving the integrity of federal student aid programs, regulations intended to respond to abuses in the for-profit college sector. Those regulations included the following statement on incentive compensation:

            “Institutions will not provide any commission, bonus, or other incentive payment based in any part, directly or indirectly, upon success in securing enrollments or the award of financial aid.”

Of course the incentive compensation issue was a major part of the discussion about the use of agents to help colleges recruit international students in certain parts of the world.  Per capita compensation is a common, and economical, way for American colleges to contract with agents, and NACAC’s decision to allow colleges to pay agents per head to recruit internationally, albeit with conditions intended to ensure “accountability, transparency, and integrity,” remains controversial.  I have talked before about the ethical tension between ideals and pragmatism, and allowing agents to be paid per head was a compromise recognizing the complex nature of international recruitment and the lack of an infrastructure for college counseling in many parts of the world.

Let’s return to the dean’s dilemma (“Dean’s Dilemma” would be a perfect title for a drab novel set in academia).  Which kinds of staff rewards are legitimate, and which are questionable?

My response to the dean was that it is perfectly legitimate to give a bonus to a staff member, as long as the bonus is not tied to meeting a particular enrollment goal or area target, but I also wanted to consult with two friends who are also supporters of this blog.  They also happen to be the current Chair of the NACAC Admission Practices Committee and his immediate predecessor, Lou Hirsh and Todd Rinehart.  In addition to the SPGP expertise, both have experience running an admissions office, Lou at the University of Delaware before his retirement and Todd currently at the University of Denver.

Both gave similar answers.  Part of being a good manager is motivating staff members to achieve goals and then validating and rewarding them when the office finds success.  Both commented that both salary adjustments and bonuses are legitimate forms of reward, although Lou added as an option “the catered gourmet meal with expensive wine pairings for the entire staff.”  That’s even better than the box of Cheez-It’s I would have gladly accepted in my admissions days (or daze).

Lou and Todd cited two tests for determining whether a staff reward is within the spirit of the SPGP.  The first is whether the basis for the reward is holistic, not tied to the number of students an individual staff member recruits.  Todd commented,

“ A staff member may have a goal to increase applications and/or deposits in a certain territory, but focus can also be paid to how many schools they visit, fairs covered, communications to students, applications reviewed, and other duties like campus visit programs/marketing materials/social media campaigns/tour guide programs/etc., (and if they completed these tasks within stated deadlines, and within our program budgets). Most counselors have responsibilities outside of territory management, and chances are if apps and deposits are increasing, so is their work in these other areas, which can be rewarded for having a successful year.

Todd documents and recognizes all of the areas of responsibility as part of the annual performance review.

The second test is whether a reward is tied to the success of an individual or the success of the team.  Lou commented,

“That’s an important distinction. Staff members can contribute to their meeting their targets in all sorts of ways:
 

· The folks in processing responded more speedily to inquiries and other requests.

· Campus visit programs were better organized, and the tour guides were better trained.

· The counselors visited more high schools, attended more college fairs, and did a better job of following up with the students they met.

· The office valued teamwork. If a colleague was overwhelmed with an important office project, someone always volunteered to help out to ensure that the project was successful.

· Most important of all: none of the counselors was under pressure to recruit (and admit) each and every student they encountered. If the college wasn’t a good fit for a student, they could say so. The goal was never to recruit students at all costs. Rather, it was to help the office do a better job at presenting its case to prospective students and at counseling them through the admission and enrollment process.

One sure sign that a dean is violating the SPGP is if the bonus is available only to the staff who come indirect contact with students and parents and not to the support staff.”

College admission is an on-going battle between its aspiration as a profession and the reality that higher education is an industry.  Each of us fights that battle in daily skirmishes, and the choices we make matter.  I’m glad my admission dean friend is sensitive to the care, validation, and well-being of staff members, and even more glad with the commitment to do it the right way.

Maintaining Ideals

How do we uphold our values while at the same time dealing with the demands of our work?  How do we maintain equilibrium between our ideals and our day-to-day realities?  How do we keep what we do from becoming who we are?

Those questions are existential, as old as the concept of work itself. Each of us answers them intentionally or by default on a daily basis.  But I have found myself thinking about them over the past couple of months as the result of an e-mail I received just before Christmas.

The correspondent was a school counselor who recently changed jobs, moving from an affluent independent school to a suburban public high school. She wrote that she struggles every day with a tension I wrote about back in November in the post, “College Admission as Resume Building.” 

Here is the part of the post that prompted her to write:

“As a college counselor, it’s my responsibility to provide my students with information about the realities of the college process, even if I find those realities repugnant.  At the same time, as a human being, should I enable a process that is in conflict with my values?”

Here is the rest of the e-mail, with minor edits:

“You mention that you don’t face that dilemma daily; unfortunately I do because I used to work for an independent school where many of my students were affluent, well-connected and heavily coached.  Recently I changed jobs and am now working for a public high school located in an affluent community that is home to multiple top-notch private secondary schools.  I know what my counterparts are doing and what I am not.  I like that in my current job I do not give my students as much hand-holding as I did previously.  Their words are more theirs and theirs alone.  I also appreciate that many of my current colleagues are not former admission officers because they still believe the best student gets in.  To me, this all seems more authentic and more the way it should be.  However, I am still upset.  The inequity bothers me greatly.  I am torn with knowing how the game is played versus how it should be played.  To this end, I put forth my questions to you:  What can I do that I haven’t done already to make this process fair (even when it never was to begin with), and how do I sustain my values even in the face of a changing world?”

The e-mail touched me, making me both feel guilty for the privilege I enjoy and also grateful and proud that there are colleagues on the front lines struggling with those questions.  I promised to devote a post to her questions, and it has taken me longer than hoped because I’m not sure I have good answers.

The philosophical debate about whether ideals or realities are more important goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle.  Ethics might be defined as the merger of the two.  Ethical principles are expressions of ideals, of what should be the case, and yet any ethical theory that can’t be applied practically has no value.

So how do we sustain our values/live our ideals in a world that may not seem to value or reward them?

It starts with being clear about what your guiding values are.  Throughout my career I have been guided by a belief that helping young people make decisions about their futures is a noble calling, with the college search and application processes being important developmental stages in the transition from adolescence to adulthood.  There are certainly moments when I wonder if that belief is naïve or outdated, but it serves as the foundation for my counseling.

I also believe, and am not hesitant to say, that the college process is not ultimately about getting into college.  It’s about readiness for college (which assumes that college is an experience rather than a credential), and it’s about discernment, about students figuring out who they are and what they hope to accomplish with their lives.  As counselors our job is to be a trail guide for that journey.

Having spent most of my life working in an independent school (something I would never have envisioned), I don’t accept that “hand-holding” or “coaching” or “packaging” are norms for independent school college counselors.  There are probably parents who think that is what they are paying for with their tuition, but I see my responsibility as using my experience and professional judgment to help the student develop independence, not remove the need for independence.

That leads to the second piece in sustaining one’s values, finding a work environment that supports or is consonant with our values.  Most of us talk to students about the importance of fit in choosing a college, but fit is even more important in a work environment.  It is hard to pursue one’s vision of college admission or college counseling when the rest of the institution is on a different page.  I used to believe that I could make a difference no matter where I worked, and I still believe that to some extent, but after working in one dysfunctional institution I realized that being in the wrong environment takes a toll on one’s psyche and one’s soul.

How does one help make the process more fair and how does one deal with knowing how the game is played versus how it should be played?  I’m not sure I have great answers.  There is inequity in the college admissions process just as there is inequity in society and inequity in life.

I have never been a member of a twelve-step program (but might need to be by the time I end my career), but I have found myself referring to the Serenity Prayer as having real relevance for college admissions and college counseling. 

The Serenity Prayer talks about the wisdom of knowing the difference between things over which you have control and those you can’t control.  I can’t control the changing nature of the college process and the games colleges feel pressured to play, but I can help my students and parents understand the reality of the college admission process.  I can help them navigate a process that can be confusing, and I can dispel myths, whether those myths be grounded in naivete or grounded in sophistication through trying to game the system.

One of my philosophical heroes, William James, talked about how each of our lives is a scientific experiment in how to live.  We make choices and decisions without knowing what is right, and every choice involves moral risk. We have to make choices based on what we value and what we believe, and we will probably never in this life be certain about whether we have chosen/lived correctly. 

To my correspondent, the very fact that you are asking those questions and struggling with those existential issues gives me hope for our profession.  Don’t give up your ideals, and keep fighting the good fight.

Rescinding a Rec

Is it ever appropriate for a teacher or counselor to rescind a college recommendation letter?  That question is among the issues at the heart of a Massachusetts school controversy that has attracted attention from publications including the Boston Globe and Huffington Post.

Just before Thanksgiving a student at Stoughton High School in Massachusetts made a swastika out of tape while decorating the halls after school and propped it against a recycling bin in a classroom.  Another student told him it was offensive and to throw it out.  The creator of the swastika did, but not before making a comment about Hitler’s killing of Jews during the Holocaust.

After local police determined that the incident did not constitute a hate crime, the school disciplined the students responsible.  But students weren’t the only ones disciplined arising from this incident.  Two Stoughton teachers received letters of reprimand for talking about the situation with colleagues and students, and a third has been suspended for contacting a college, rescinding her letter of recommendation for the student who made the swastika, and telling the college her reason for doing so.

I was unaware of this issue until receiving an e-mail early last week from Scott Jaschik, the Editor of InsideHigherEd.com, who was writing a story about the incident and wanted my take on the ethical and practical ramifications of rescinding a letter of recommendation and punishing a teacher for rescinding.

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I responded with an essay answer to what might have been a short-answer question.  There are multiple issues in this situation germane to this blog.

First is the role of the recommendation letter in the college admissions process.  Recommendations are part of the student’s “voice,” helping put a human face on a student’s application.  A recommendation serves as the admissions equivalent of a legal brief, making a case for the student.  It also serves as a footnote for the student’s transcript, providing context and explanation.

What it should never be is an indictment.  I have written more than 2000 in my career, and I have never intentionally written one that is negative.  I say “intentionally” because my career almost ended before it began due to a recommendation I wrote that came across as more negative than I intended.

The student in question had a modest high school record at a good school, and in a self-evaluation she admitted that she had not worked that hard.  I had worked in admissions at the college level and thought that was true of most high-school kids and included the quote, naively seeing it as evidence of potential for better work in college.  I learned the hard way that not everyone read it the same way after one university, seeing that the application fee was missing, returned the entire application package to the student, including my letter of recommendation.  (How’s that for an ethical issue?)  Fortunately I was able to rewrite the letter, repair the damage with the student and family, and salvage my career.  The student was admitted everywhere she applied.

But what happens when the expectation that a recommendation will be positive comes into conflict with the truth?  The value of any recommendation consists partly in the credibility of the writer.  I tell teachers that they are not obligated to write a letter and should decline if they have reservations about their ability to put the student in a positive light. 

As a counselor I don’t have that option, so I always write the most positive evaluation I can.  Every recommendation tells a story.  There is the story of accomplishment, the story of growth, the story of adversity overcome, and the story of potential. Obviously some of those stories are easier to tell.  

Does that mean that a letter of recommendation is the truth but not necessarily the whole truth?  Perhaps, but in small schools we sometimes know our students too well and may not have perspective on how they compare to the larger applicant pool.  My rule of thumb is if you can’t say something nice, say nothing.

But what happens if subsequent events render a recommendation letter no longer accurate?  Does a teacher or counselor have the right to rescind a letter?  I believe the answer is yes from an ethical perspective, because the writer owns the recommendation (I am not aware of legal precedents regarding who owns the recommendation).

I have personally never considered rescinding a recommendation I had written, but remember talking to a colleague at another school a number of years ago who was thinking about doing so.  It would take something egregious on the part of the student, and I would simply inform the college that “My recommendation is no longer valid” without offering any explanation.  I would assume that the statement itself would raise a red flag.

So what behavior is egregious enough to take this step?  In the Stoughton case I don’t have enough information to know whether the student making the swastika out of tape is just being a stupid teenager (not to downplay the offensiveness of the symbol) or is a potential danger to both his high school and college communities.  Stupidity (or my being offended) is not cause enough to rescind.

That seems to be a point of contention in this incident.  The Stoughton police determined that this didn’t meet the definition of hate crime, but it is clear that a number of teachers felt that the student wasn’t sufficiently disciplined for what they considered hate speech.   The three teachers were disciplined after the parent of the student who made the swastika contended that the boy was being targeted by teachers.

Should a teacher be disciplined for rescinding a letter of recommendation?  In this case it appears the teacher was suspended more for volunteering the reason for rescinding than the rescinding itself.

The fact that two other teachers were also disciplined suggests larger issues within the school.  These kinds of incidents are teachable moments, and if teachers are prohibited from addressing them it leaves a void of rumor and innuendo that can make the issue much worse inside the school and in the community.  I also wonder about the school’s procedure for reporting disciplinary offenses to colleges.  If a school policy is to report nothing, then the only option a teacher would have to alert college officials about a student who might be dangerous would be through rescinding a recommendation.

Is this an isolated incident, or another example that offensive speech will come out of the closet in the Trump Era?  Time will tell.