ECA Book Club: A Conversation With Wall Street Journal Reporter Melissa Korn

(This is the second installment in an occasional series on books related to college admission. The previous ECA Book Club post is here.)

The first anniversary of COVID 19 shutting down the country on March 11, 2020 obscured another anniversary of an event that took almost a year before to the day.  Yes, it’s been two years since March 12, 2019, the day that the Operation Varsity Blues scandal put college admission in the national news cycle spotlight.  I was on Spring Break for both of those events, and throughout this year’s Spring Break I hoped that the rule of 3’s would prove to be a fiction.

By coincidence my Spring Break “it’s too cold for the beach” read (or re-read) was Unacceptable:  Privilege, Deceit, & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal, written by Wall Street Journal reporters Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz.  It’s a good read, a fleshing out of the outstanding reporting they did of a scandal that seems too outrageous to be non-fiction.

Melissa Korn agreed to an interview about the book and the scandal, and she turned out to be just as good an interview subject as she is an interviewer.  Here is a transcript of our conversation (with minor edits for length):

ECA:  Have you watched the Netflix documentary yet?

MK:  I watched it the day it came out or the day after.  I’m not sure I learned anything new, because I had done a pretty deep dive into it myself, but seeing Matthew Modine playing Rick Singer was entertaining.  He does a pretty good job capturing that nervous energy.

ECA:  How does the fact that you have spent so much time covering the story influence your viewing?  Do you find yourself being a critic—“Boy, they got that wrong”?

MK:  I think it’s kind of like when a prosecutor watches Law and Order.  They want to nit-pick everything, and even if the bones of it are fine, you can always find something to comment on or disagree with.  So it helped that I was messaging with a few people while watching it.

ECA:  We just passed the second anniversary of the scandal hitting the news, somewhat lost by the first anniversary of the pandemic.  How did you learn about the scandal, and how quickly did you realize that it was a big story?

MK:  One of the most remarkable things about the story was that no one broke it.  It came out when prosecutors--the Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS--announced that there would be this big press conference and charges would be unveiled against 50 individuals in this enormous college admissions scandal.  Before that no one even knew this investigation was happening, and it had been going on for nearly a year.  I learned about it the same time the public did.  We started getting emails from the press contacts at those agencies and copies of that very juicy 200-page FBI affidavit.  Quite frankly, that document could be a book by itself.

So my colleague Jennifer [Levitz}, who is based in Boston, rushed down to the courthouse, and I started reading and drafting and posting the first versions of the story.  The first three days were a blur, where you forget to do things like eat lunch.  The adrenaline rush is wonderful, but it takes a toll after a day or two of it.

I think we knew it was a big story, but didn’t realize just how big it could get until literary agents reached out and said, “This is going to be a book.  Do you want to be the ones to write it?”  And once we heard from multiple agents, we knew they must be on to something.

ECA:  How fast did that happen after the story broke?

MK:  I heard from two agents the first day, the day the story broke, and three more the next day.

ECA:  So how was writing a book about the scandal different from covering it in real time?

MK:  There are some similarities and some differences.  The biggest differences are length and tone.  At the [Wall Street] Journal the longest stories I write are 2000, maybe 2200 words.  The book is 85,000 to 90,000 words.  That’s a whole lot more, which means you have to plan it out very differently, you have to have a different kind of outline than I build for one of my front-page stories.  You get to go into more detail and add more color and have a little more of a tone.  As a news reporter I’m neutral, presenting facts.  I give the information, but I’m not taking sides.  And I don’t think we were taking sides in the book, but it has more personality.  We can give physical descriptions of people that maybe we wouldn’t in the paper.  We can be a little snarkier sometimes.  And it was nice to have that freedom.

ECA:  What new information did you uncover while researching the book that hadn’t come out in the daily coverage?

MK:  We wanted to make sure that the book was more than a re-hashing of headlines or what had come out in court.  We had made many of those headlines; the Journal broke a lot of the developments in the case.  Even with those stories, there is always information that just doesn’t make it into the article. 

We were able to flesh out some of those developments in the book, things like how the whole case came tumbling down, how the Justice Department first learned of Rick Singer.  Getting into detail about how that all happened and how accidental it was.  Being able to go into depth into who Rick Singer was and what his motivations may have been, what his relationships with families were like and how he knew who might be willing to cross the line.  We also provide much more information about how he networked and how he built up his business, whether it was through word of mouth from parents or through financial services firms.  We had written a little about that in the paper but could go much deeper. 

We also spoke directly to more of the people involved in the case, explaining what happened in each of their cases.  We were the first to get an interview with a student (Matteo Sloane), long before Olivia Jade did the “Red Table” thing.  We ran an article right after talking to him, but it scratched the surface.  There was a lot of information, but there was so much more to say.  The book also put everything in context.  We could explain that here’s why the system is the way it is and how it allowed something like this to happen.

ECA:  Was it hard to interview people who were still engaged in litigation or being advised to “lawyer up”?

MK:  Connecting with sources for this project was by far the hardest thing I’ve done in terms of sourcing and getting people to talk to me.  I’ve gotten people accused of sexual assault on the phone much easier.  These are high-powered individuals with high-powered lawyers.  Many of them also hired crisis communications teams.  Their goal was to be shielded from people like me.

From day one Jennifer and I put together a spreadsheet of who’s who, who’s their lawyer and who are their comms people, and what are their personal numbers and who is their spouse and their kids.  And it worked.  We got an interview with John Vandemoer, the Stanford sailing coach, the day before he was actually sentenced, because I had started talking with his lawyer months earlier. 

We continued our Wall Street Journal policy of “no surprises journalism,” so we weren’t going to write about anyone at length and not have them know.  We were going to be fair, give them a chance to respond or at least know that they were being written about.  That meant travelling around the country, leaving notes on people’s doors, in their mailboxes, sliding under a door or taped to a gate, Facebook messages, text messages, cell calls, talking to a sibling or spouse and begging them at least to get our message to them, because we couldn’t be confident that the lawyer or crisis communications team was doing that.

ECA:  Was this more complicated than most stories on that front?

MK:  It certainly was.  At the outset it seemed like they had no incentive to talk to us, like “what good would it do to have my dirty laundry aired even further.”  The ones who had pleaded guilty just wanted to be sentenced and leave it at that, and the ones who had pleaded not guilty didn’t want to be discussed in the context of this case at all.  So we had to explain to them why it was to their benefit to talk to us.  The way we framed it, and it’s really true, was that at the beginning of the case they didn’t look good, because the only information out there was coming from the Justice Department.  So help us understand why you did this or why you worked with Rick Singer in the first place or why you didn’t think this was illegal.  Help us explain why.  In most cases, the more you know about someone, the harder it is to hate them.  You can find something relatable in them, or at least something human in them.  And once they were able to understand that, more were willing to open up to us.

ECA:  So how big was the scandal?  How many people are there out there who got away with it?

MK:  Singer claims to have worked with hundreds of families on the “side door,” but Singer was known to exaggerate pretty much everything.  700 families?  Unlikely.  There were certainly more than the upwards of 50 that were charged.  We know that there was another proctor who took tests for Rick Singer’s clients who wasn’t charged.  We know that Singer worked with a particular psychologist out in California who would approve requests so that kids could get extra time on the SAT or ACT.  We know that there other parents he worked with where it was more of a gray area, not so cut-and-dried that they did something wrong.  He warned some families off once he flipped.  There were some cases where families worked with him a long time ago where there just wasn’t enough evidence.  There were certainly more people involved than were charged, but saying that it was in the hundreds was a stretch.

ECA:  Why was Felicity Huffman charged and William Macy not?

MK:  That is one of the questions we get a lot, because initially it seemed very odd that she got stuck with this and the husband got off scot-free.  Essentially she was the one who was in charge.  She was the one made the plans, coordinated things, wrote the checks.  He was on a few phone calls, responding neutrally, but he wasn’t making the plans, he wasn’t arranging things with Rick Singer.  He was in the passenger seat.

ECA:  What are the things about the college admissions process that made the scandal possible?

MK:  One of the biggest ones is the autonomy that coaches get picking who they are going to flag as recruits or preferred walk-ons.  There’s so much trust baked into that system—why would a coach possibly recommend someone who’s not going to help their team? So admissions doesn’t check, admissions doesn’t ask, and quite frankly admissions doesn’t know what makes a good fullback or whatever the position is.  At some schools someone else might review it and at some schools it goes straight to admissions.  There was great opportunity for corruption there, with Singer or with someone else.  And as we have found, there have been some other cases, totally unrelated, where coaches may have been getting special benefits or kickbacks or payments for flagging certain applicants.  There have been cases at Penn and Harvard and elsewhere.  So the autonomy and trust for coaches was a huge part.

The other part was the very murky world of development and admissions and how they interact.  When is it no longer a quid pro quo to make a donation when your kid is applying to college?  Is there a date cut-off?  How many months before should I do it?  If it’s within a year, does that seem too fishy?  People have asked these questions for a long time, and people know that money comes with influence and power and perhaps a little extra pull in admissions, but there is no hard dollar amount set.  Schools like it that way, because they don’t want to say, “If you give us a million dollars you will get this, or if you give us ten million dollars your kid will get in.”  That would be too nakedly a quid pro quo, and that would be illegal.  And the defense of some of the parents in the case was, “This is just an extreme version of what everyone else does.”

ECA:  Which parts of the scandal do you find most offensive?

MK:  There are probably two that I find most astonishing.  One is the photoshopping of people’s faces onto other athletes.  Singer’s team would take a picture of someone who actually played water polo or was actually a pole vaulter and stick the client’s face on it, to pitch them as that athlete.  And these were real people.  In the book we found the people whose pictures were used and whose lives were in certain ways stolen for the benefit of Rick Singer’s clients, and I think that was really heartbreaking.  There are people behind this.  There was so much discussion about who the victims are, and legally speaking the test agencies and the colleges and universities were deemed the victims, but in reality the victims are the people who didn’t get in because Rick Singer worked his magic.  And that really helped us put faces to that.  These were people who were perfectly good kids, but they weren’t thinking about a school like USC, and USC wasn’t thinking about students like them.  They got lost in the system a little bit.

The other thing that’s not necessarily surprising but is horrifying is the abuse of extra time, the ease with which some of these families could get extra time to take standardized tests.  And perhaps that’s no longer going to be a concern or an issue or a problem with tests playing less of a role than they did even two years ago.  A colleague of mine, Doug Belkin, helmed an article we did in 2019 looking at 504 accommodations and extra time and just how concentrated those are in wealthy areas.  If you know the system, you know how to game the system, and you can afford this external evaluation, then you get your kid extra time and you give them an edge.  It blows me away, how common that is.  And if that happens, you have students with legitimate learning disabilities who get looked at suspiciously.

ECA: Who do you feel most sorry for from all this?

MK:  The kids whose pictures were taken and used.  The other group I feel sorry for are the students themselves, the supposed beneficiaries.  They had to grapple with the idea that their parents didn’t believe in them, that their parents didn’t think they could do it well enough on their own, that their parents lied to them, that they didn’t earn getting into these schools.  You think about the psyche of an 18-year-old, and that’s absolutely devastating.  The relationships with their families have been frayed, some beyond repair.  These are kids who will forever go through life with an asterisk at the end of their accomplishments.

Melissa Korn belongs in the pantheon of reporters covering college admission today, and I appreciate her time and honest insight.  Unacceptable is a great overview of a scandal that still stings for our profession and a good addition to any college admission-themed reading list. Here’s the link to the publisher:

Mea Culpa

I hate getting things wrong.

The previous post, which appeared in yesterday’s “Admissions Insider” in Inside Higher Ed, contained a major factual error, and I am both embarrassed and appalled by it.

The second paragraph of the piece wondered whether the Fiske Guide to College’s decision to stop reporting test score ranges in a test-optional landscape would be followed by the U.S. News college rankings.  In so doing I reported that U.S. News had announced last summer that it would not rank test-blind colleges, and followed that up by expressing my fervent wish that U.S. News would list all colleges as unranked.  It was a throwaway paragraph, not germane to the main argument in the article.

Except that through a combination of misreading and misremembering, I got U.S. News’s announcement from last summer ass-backwards.  They actually announced that that they would begin ranking test-blind colleges. 

Madeline Smanik, the Communications & Public Relations Manager for U.S. News and World Report, reached out yesterday afternoon to point out the mistake, “I saw your article about the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, and I’m writing to ask for a correction. Your article states “back in the summer U.S. News did announce that it would designate test-blind colleges as ‘unranked.’” But that is not what we announced. In June, we announced that we will rank test-blind schools.”

Here’s the actual announcement.

There’s no excuse for the mistake.  I regret it and apologize to U.S. News for the misinformation (which was in no way intended to be disinformation). 

Detrimental

(This post originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed’s Admissions Insider newsletter on March 29, 2021.)

A couple of weeks ago the Fiske Guide to Colleges announced that it will stop reporting average SAT and ACT scores for colleges in the guidebook.  Edward Fiske, the Guide’s editor and namesake (it originated as the New York Times Guide to Colleges), called the data “inaccurate and misleading,” and said score ranges would be omitted for the foreseeable future.  That decision seems correct given a recent Wall Street Journal article reporting that only 46% of students using the Common Application during this admissions cycle submitted standardized test scores, a substantial drop from 77% a year ago.

The announcement immediately fueled curiosity and speculation about whether the U.S. News & World Report college rankings would follow suit.  Test scores have always been an important metric for U.S. News, counting for 5% of the overall ranking last year.  Last year U.S. News discounted scores in computing a college’s ranking for institutions where fewer than 75% of applicants submitted scores, and that would appear to be the case for the vast majority of institutions with test-optional policies this admissions cycle.  An Inside Higher Ed article on the Fiske announcement reported that U.S. News hasn’t made any announcement about its methodology for the 2022 rankings, but back in the summer U.S. News announced that it would begin ranking “test-blind” colleges.  I wouldn’t mind seeing U.S. News make all colleges unranked.

Whether guidebooks and rankings should report and use test scores is only part of a much larger question.  As we come to the end of an admissions year unlike any other, how should test scores be treated in a test-optional landscape?

That’s not a one-year issue.  Many colleges that went test-optional this year because of the pandemic have extended their policies for at least another year, and even before COVID the test-optional movement was growing.  But test-optional policies raise as many questions as they answer.  Does “test-optional” mean different things for different institutions?  Do test-optional policies reduce or exacerbate concerns about equity in college admission?  Do colleges give submitters and non-submitters equal consideration?  Are there unanticipated consequences to test-optional admission beyond the impact on the testing industry’s bottom line?

One of those consequences might be the dramatic rise in applications to the nation’s most competitive universities.  That rise has been attributed to students being more willing to take a shot at extreme “reach” schools without having to submit scores.  If highly-competitive universities return to requiring test scores, it may be less about belief in scores as a metric and more about trying to tamp down application numbers so that they can process and read applications.

Are colleges giving advantage to students who have submitted good test scores, and should they?  A different Wall Street Journal article reported that among Early Decision applications to Penn, two-thirds of applicants reported test scores whereas three-quarters of those accepted did.  That statistic by itself does not constitute proof, but it does raise questions about whether submitting test scores improved students’ chances for admission.  I will be interested to see more data from other institutions.

Most of the discussion I’ve seen so far has focused on cases where submitting test scores has benefitted applicants.  But has submitting test scores also hurt some applicants?  I recently heard that the admissions staff at a flagship state university told counselors on a Zoom call that they were surprised how many students submitted low test scores, stating that the presence of test scores was “detrimental” to their being able to admit first gen and underrepresented students they wanted to recruit and enroll.

The promise of test-optional admission is that colleges will give both submitters and non-submitters equal consideration.  But is that even possible?  Admission officers are human, and they operate under the belief that more information is always better.  I would also guess that the majority of admission professionals have some deep-seated fealty to test scores even if they know that admission tests are flawed.  I have heard several admission officers comment that it is impossible to “un-see” a test score once viewed.  

It is also the case that regardless of what you think about test scores, in this year student transcripts are less reliable measures than ever before, with some students having a virtual school “experience” that doesn’t come close to a normal classroom experience and many schools less rigorous in giving grades to students struggling with non-school challenges during COVID. 

That raises a question about whether good scores are more valuable in the current climate.  A number of years ago then-Kenyon Dean of Admission Jennifer Delahunty stated in a New York Times op-ed about gender in the admissions process, “Because boys are rarer, they’re more valued applicants.”  She received lots of undeserved criticism for that statement, because what she was really stating was a poignant insight into the essence of selective admission.  The rarer any talent or quality, the more valuable it is in the selective admission process.  In 2021, when only a minority of applicants are submitting test scores, good scores are beneficial because they are rare.

That presents equity issues.  COVID has exacerbated the gap between rich and poor on all kinds of fronts, and college admission testing is among them.  Part of the reason for the rise of test-optional policies was the simple fact that so many students weren’t able to test because of test centers that had diminished capacity or were closed altogether.

Students from affluent backgrounds often had the resources to overcome that.  A friend who does independent counseling told me that one of her clients flew from North Carolina to Montana in order to take the SAT in an open test center.  That is (I hope) an extreme example, but I know of students in the DC area who were assigned to take the test in West Virginia.  There are some fortunate students whose families can afford to make that drive or stay in a hotel, but far more students who can’t.  Rewarding good test scores advantages even more those who are already advantaged.

That leads me to return to the flagship university for which low reported scores were detrimental to admitting students they otherwise wanted to enroll.  I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I don’t get that.

I would argue that test-optional admission should work both ways.  Not only should students have the option of whether or not to submit scores, but colleges should have the option of whether, or how much, to consider scores.

We know that test scores are meaningless without context.  Two identical scores don’t mean the same thing if one is obtained through hours and thousands of dollars of test prep and the other isn’t.  First gen students and those from under-resourced high schools may not even know that not submitting scores is even an option.  That shouldn’t be held against them.

The point of the college admissions process is, or at least should be, to identify students with the potential to succeed in college.  We have a special obligation to those students who most need access to education as a means to transform their lives.  If there are students an institution wants to recruit or enroll, and test scores are the outlier, practice test-optional admission and ignore the test scores.

Forgiving Without Forgetting

Recently I was asked to weigh in on a case involving a student whose behavior on social media last summer cost him both his place on an athletic team at a prominent university and ultimately the opportunity to enroll at the institution. An adult who is trying to help the young man deal with the consequences of his actions and move forward contacted a close friend for advice, and that led to my being asked to consult.

The case could be described as “ripped from today’s headlines,” and in fact it received coverage last summer on several national media websites.  During the summer of 2020 the student in question and a friend appeared in a 38-second video, taken by another buddy, that subsequently went viral.  On the video they used the same racial slur that in the past month led country music star Morgan Wallen to be declared ineligible for the Association of Country Music Awards and New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. to lose his job.

The adult seeking to help the young man became aware of his plight through his son, who works out with him and vouches for him as “a great guy who made a mistake.”  That conclusion is reportedly shared by several black athletes who are in the workout group along with several of his coaches who are black.

The situation was described to me as “a pure public relations issue” in the sense that there are no pending legal consequences.  The three boys involved had been drinking and were supposedly using the word in question to refer to each other, and yet the one behind the camera (who also had his college admission rescinded) clearly made a derogatory comment about George Floyd.

My friend and I were asked specifically about the college admission implications.  The athlete has reportedly written a detailed accounting of the incident for a college essay, but we were asked if the student is legally required to disclose the incident.  Do colleges need to know, and do admission offices do “background checks” on all applicants?

I will not name the student out of respect for privacy and because I am more interested in the larger issues raised by this specific case.

Let’s start with the contention that what we have here is a public relations problem.  I think that characterization fundamentally misunderstands and understates the seriousness of the offense.  There may be no legal jeopardy, but it is a character issue, for two different reasons.

The first is the use of the word.  In 2021 racial bigotry or insensitivity is a character flaw, and there is no conceivable justification for any white person using a word that is so obviously derogatory, hurtful, and hateful, with the possible exception of Twain scholars discussing Huckleberry Finn (and even that is open to debate). I work with high school students and know that they say terrible things to each other in private, but even if that were the case here (and the reference to George Floyd renders that doubtful) that doesn’t make this acceptable.  The same is true of using the slur and claiming you are quoting rap lyrics. Regardless of whether you believe that Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head are victims of cancel culture or that Trumpism is really an attempt to Make America Hate Again, there is no reason to use that word.

The second consideration is the public nature of the incident once it went viral on social media.  This generation of students will likely find social media, and specifically their social media footprint, a cross to bear as adults.  Their worst moments are now preserved in a way that my generation never had to worry about.  How many of them will lose jobs or opportunities because of their “youthful indiscretions,” a term the late Congressman Henry Hyde used to try to explain away an affair that ended when he was in his 40s?

The students in this case are now public figures.  Their story has been covered by major news outlets, and they now bear the burden of proof to show that this is a one-time screw-up rather than a pattern of behavior.  They need to show, in short, that they are not racists but merely dumbasses.

That is also why they can’t try to avoid reporting their situations to colleges.  It doesn’t appear to me that they have done anything that forces them to answer “yes” to application questions about discipline, but my advice would be that they have to expect that colleges will find out, and it is going to be better if the information comes directly from them rather than from someone else.  If they were to be admitted without the college knowing the whole story, they might be expelled even if they keep their noses clean once in school because it will appear they weren’t forthcoming about the truth. 

In response to the question about whether colleges do social media background checks on applicants, the answer has historically been no, but that may be changing.  A recent article in Inside Higher Ed reported on a 2020 survey conducted by Kaplan indicating that 65% of admission officers see students’ social media footprints as fair game in the admissions process, with only 36% actively checking applicants’ profiles.  That figure is 11% higher than just two years ago. Coaches have always been more likely to check the social medial profiles of recruits. Even if colleges aren’t checking social media postings, they will respond if a negative post or video is brought to their attention, including rescinding acceptances.

So how does this young man move forward?  He has paid a price for his action, and he should have.  But should he be given an opportunity for redemption?

The adult seeking to help the young man had received advice from legal and HR professionals in the corporate world to do some sort of formal sensitivity training. Several college coaches interested in recruiting the athlete have indicated that a certificate indicating completion of that kind of training will allow them to move forward with their administrations.

I think that is a piece of the redemption process, but I don’t think it’s enough.  Colleges willing to consider him will want to know that he understands the gravity of his offense and that he has learned from the incident.  That must include some sort of work on race and reconciliation, but I would caution against doing something that looks like he’s checking a box.  Sensitivity training is a piece but I would also want him to do some sustained community service addressing issues of racial injustice.  He has dug a hole for himself, and climbing out will require time, sincere reflection, and a significant effort to repair the damage done by his words.

If he was my student I would be advising him to deal with the issue up front, having a conversation about his situation before even applying.  He may find a number of places unforgiving, but if I were him I would want to know that a college knows my past and is willing to give me a chance nevertheless.  I think using his essay to address his mistake is a good thing, and if there are adults who can vouch for his character, especially from within the African-American community, he should seek letters of recommendation from them.

This young man deserves a second chance, but that second chance won’t come as quickly or as easily as he might hope.  He is not going to just get beyond this.  He may hope to be forgiven, but he shouldn’t expect people to forget.

Nobody

I’m not sure whether I should grateful to Jeff Selingo or mad at him. 

Let me be clear that the prominent education writer and author of Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions has done nothing personally or directly to cause me any harm.  But indirectly, I can thank Jeff Selingo for helping me understand existentially that I am a “nobody.”

Just over a year ago, on Super Bowl Sunday 2020, Jeff and I appeared together on a panel at a conference of college presidents held in D.C.  You may wonder what kind of group holds a professional conference on the same day as the Super Bowl, but that’s a discussion for a different time and place.

There are two things I remember from that weekend that illustrate just how much our lives have changed over the past year.  On Saturday night I met a friend for dinner in Georgetown, unaware how soon dining out would disappear from my life.  While taking the Metro back to my hotel, I noticed a woman in my car wearing a face mask, and for the first time wondered if the emerging coronavirus in China was something I needed to worry about.  Little did I know.

The following day, I went for a walk on the National Mall before our session, stopping to watch an adult kickball league game.  Of course just a month ago that very spot was closed following the terrorist attack on the Capitol and prior to the inauguration of President Biden.

Our session topic was the changing ethical landscape for college admission in the wake of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal and the DOJ investigation into NACAC’s ethical standards.  It was clear that Jeff Selingo was the draw, a well-known and thoughtful commentator on higher education. I was there to serve as his foil, and I think the session organizer was surprised and perhaps disappointed by two things.  One was that we largely agreed.  The other was that Jeff knew who I was.  She had assumed that I was a nobody.

That wasn’t the first time that Jeff Selingo has unsuspectingly diminished my self-esteem.  It has long been my ambition to write a college admissions book.  Nearly 20 years ago I had the idea for a book contrasting the admissions process at two contrasting institutions—university/liberal arts college, public/private, D1/D3.  I had approached the legendary Jack Blackburn at the University of Virginia, and he was receptive, but shortly afterward I learned that Jacques Steinberg, then at the New York Times, was publishing The Gatekeepers.  The last time I ever saw Jack Blackburn before his death he announced to a room full of people, “Jim, you should write that book.”

The project ended up taking a back seat to my family, my day job, being asked to run for President of NACAC, and then starting and maintaining this blog, leading to writing a weekly column for Inside Higher Ed for three years.  But a couple of years ago I became interested in pursuing a different focus for the book idea, and queried a couple of literary agents.

The first expressed interest and asked me to send a book proposal, then never responded.  The second, who might have been Jeff Selingo’s agent (or at least from the same agency), responded with a letter stating that the idea looked promising except for the fact that I was a nobody.  It wasn’t quite that blunt, although now that I think about it, that’s exactly what it said.  Of course what I now know is that Jeff Selingo was probably already in the early stages of what would become Who Gets In and Why.

I can’t remember another college admissions book that was as widely anticipated or as critically acclaimed, including making the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2020.  Part of that is tied to the fact that Jeff Selingo is somebody, but a bigger part is that the book itself is well done, avoiding hype and providing a lot of good information and sound advice for navigating the selective admissions process.

It is that last point that raises a possible criticism of or question about Selingo’s book.  During his year “inside” college admissions, he embedded inside the admissions offices at three institutions, Davidson, Emory, and the University of Washington, in other words a national liberal-arts college, national research university, and flagship public university.  All are good places with some distinctive differences, but all fall into one side of the distinction he draws between institutions that are “sellers” (all three fall into that category) and those that are “buyers.”  The difference is that sellers “craft” their class whereas buyers “make” their class.

I love that distinction and find it to be more useful than talking about selective or hyper-selective institutions, but Selingo’s choice of those institutions (which may reflect who was willing to let him watch the “sausage” being made) continues a long line of media coverage that acts as if only “sellers” are worth covering.  In the interest of living up to the second part of the book’s title, “A Year Inside College Admissions,” I wish he had decided to show how different admission is for “buyers,” or at places that think of themselves as sellers but aren’t able to be in today’s marketplace.

The buyers/sellers distinction is just one of the important insights Selingo shares with his readers.  Some of the other strengths in the book include an honest discussion of the process known as shaping or lopping, where a student who may be in the accept pile deep into the process may end up wait-listed or worse.  He provides consumers with an understanding of how Student Search works, how colleges use Early Decision strategically, and how the admissions process for athletes is a matching process rather than the lottery faced by other applicants.  He also cautions students to pay more attention to affordability early in the college search.  

There is one other thing in Selingo’s book that troubled me.  There are two separate instances where admission officers reviewing applications comment that there is no evidence in a student’s extracurricular activities to support their expressed potential major, in one case neuroscience and in the other case premed.

I certainly believe in the idea that a student’s application should tell a coherent story, but the notion that the student’s academic interests have to be supported by their extracurricular choices seems wrong on a number of levels.  It represents a failure to understand adolescent growth and development.

First of all, the expectation of alignment between academic and extracurricular interests ignores the fact that a huge number of college students (somewhere between a third and three quarters) change their major, sometime multiple times.  If we know that students change their life plans once in college, why should we expect that any major or career plan expressed by a high school student is more than a guess? More to the point, why should we make admission decisions based on that?

Second, that expectation reflects a failure to understand the value of the high school experience.  I talk to my students and their parents about high school as a journey of self-discovery, where the goal is answering some essential and existential questions—Who am I? What are my strengths and talents? What do I truly care about?  I tell students they should understand the questions even if they don’t yet have answers.  High school is a time for trying different things, whether it’s playing on a school team or performing in the band or on stage.  The high school experience should be an end in itself.  Admission to college should be the product of that journey, not the goal.

The expectation that students show evidence of their academic interests through their extracurricular choices hurts not only students, but also the institution.  I’m willing to bet that the majority of those who pass the “alignment” test do so not because they have true passion (something a close counseling friend of mine argues no teenagers possess) but because they have been advised to play that game.  Do you want a student body full of those at the expense of the student who will use college to blossom and figure out who he or she is?  Isn’t that the purpose of college?  Or are Selingo’s “buyers” different in that regard as well?

Who benefits from admission officers looking for alignment between academic and extracurricular interest?  Nobody. 

Subject Tests, R.I.P. or College Board Cuts Backs on Suites

Of all the indignities we’ve been forced to endure during the past year while living with a pandemic that’s well on its way to killing half a million Americans, the hardest may be the inability to properly remember and say goodbye to the people and things we’ve lost.

A good friend from college passed away last spring after a long bout with cancer, and his funeral was private and live-streamed.  By the time a memorial service was able to be held socially-distanced in late summer, I couldn’t attend because I was in quarantine following a potential exposure to the virus.  Two of my closest friends in the profession have lost spouses in the past four months, and trying to express my deep sympathy via telephone and e-mail seemed woefully inadequate.

Recently the college admissions world lost two long-time mainstays.  Since we can’t have a proper funeral or even a wake, please indulge me as I try to offer a eulogy or sendoff. 

In case you missed the obituary:

“SAT Subject Tests, beloved member of the College Board family, departed this earthly existence suddenly on January 19, 2021 at the age of 83 after a long period of declining health. Death was hastened by recent complications due to COVID-19.

Subject Tests, also known by childhood friends as Achievement Tests, devoted its life to the college admissions assessment and testing industry, most recently as a member of the SAT Suite of Assessments.  Compared with its more popular older brother, Subject Tests never sought the spotlight, leading family members to use the affectionate nickname “SAT II.” Subject Tests was efficient, not demanding as much time from students as other assessments, and it had special concern for the plight of international applicants and students who were home-schooled.

SAT Subject Tests is survived by an older brother, SAT (AKA Scholastic Aptitude Test or Scholastic Assessment Test) as well as a younger cousin, Advanced Placement (“AP”).  Coincidentally and perhaps ironically, another close relative and suitemate, SAT Essay, passed away on the same day.  

No memorial service is planned.  In lieu of flowers the College Board requests that contributions be made to Advanced Placement.”

In words borrowed from a famous orator, I come to bury, not to praise. The College Board’s announcement that the Subject Tests were being discontinued, effectively immediately, with the essay to follow in June, was unexpected but also not surprising.  2020 was not a good year for the testing industry, and last week Inside Higher Ed reported that the CB had reduced its workforce by 14%. 

A confluence of factors ranging from the pandemic to the College Board’s and ACT’s difficulties in bringing their products to customers to the rise of test-optional and test-blind policies has called into question whether college admission testing will ever return to the prominent role it once played.  While the College Board is, repeat after me, a non-profit organization and not a business, it is only natural that it would look to consolidate by shutting down un-(non)-profitable product lines.

It would be a mistake to lump together the Subject Tests and the essay, even though there is an interesting connection between them.  The Subject Tests were once valued and vital.  From its beginning the essay (which could have been branded as “Essay-T”) was flawed.

We have always known that the ability to write is an important academic skill for college.  The challenge has been how to measure that.  The most common way has been through the application essay, but it is perhaps the most curated part of a student’s application, involving multiple drafts and multiple editors.

The College Board has tried a number of ways to measure writing skills as part of both the SAT and Subject Tests.  For years that was done in a multiple choice format, both with the Writing Achievement Test and also with the Test of Standard Written English (“Tuss-we”), a short-lived appendage to the SAT with a top possible score of 60+.

If it is a mistake to provide essay answers to short-answer questions., something long-time readers of this blog know is my specialty, then so is using short-answer questions to measure the complexity and sophistication of thought that requires an essay.  A Writing Achievement Test where the student doesn’t do any actual writing is really an Editing Achievement Test.

The Writing test was the star of the Golden Age heyday of Achievement Tests, the test that most colleges sought, often requiring two others as well.  That ended in 2005 when the College Board decided to add a third section of the regular SAT that would take the place of the Writing Achievement Test and would include a required 25-minute essay.  That decision was made to mollify the University of California system, the College Board’s biggest client.  The irony, of course, is that the University of California is now at the center of the test-blind movement that threatens the College Board’s long-term business, er, non-profit model.

The essay never caught on for several reasons.  Teachers of writing argued that the 25-minute essay encouraged formulaic but not necessarily good writing.  The essay prompts were unimaginative, and essays were not graded for accuracy, such that a student a student could argue that the War of 1812 took place in 1950 without penalty.  Most important, the essay scores, graded by two readers on a 1-6 scale, seemed to have little correlation with what I knew of my own students’ writing abilities.

The decline of Subject Tests is partly practical and partly philosophical.  The practical consideration is that the number of colleges requiring (or even “strongly recommending”) Subject Tests had declined precipitously down to one hand, and a recent Forbes article reported that overall Subject Test usage had declined 45% in the past decade. 

On the philosophical front, admission testing has increasingly been seen as a barrier to equity and access.  That’s an important lens through which to view all admission requirements, but the admissions process should be not only about access to college but also readiness for college. Subject Tests were designed to be a tool to measure what students actually know and what grades actually mean.

Last fall NACAC released a report on standardized testing, and it made me think back to an earlier NACAC report from 2008, a report from a Commission on the Use of Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admission chaired by Harvard Dean of Admission Bill Fitzsimmons.  I thought about doing a blog post comparing the two reports, and may still do that at some point.  The 2008 report recommended that the future of admission testing be more closely aligned with high school curricula and measure content required for college coursework.   

The College Board announcement suggested that the void left by the death of Subject Tests will be filled by AP exams, stating “the expanded reach of AP and its widespread availability for low-income students and students of color means the Subject Tests are no longer necessary for students to show what they know.”  I’m not totally convinced.  I know that the CB wants AP to be its showcase product line moving forward, but it’s hard to make an argument for widespread equity and access at $95 per exam.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not suggesting that Subject Tests rise from the dead, but want to make sure that someone says a few words of remembrance and appreciation before they are buried.

I Beg Your Pardon

Did a line from a popular song half a century ago foreshadow the final days of the Trump Presidency?  That question sounds like the kind of online click-bait I always fall for.  Did Nostradamus really predict the coronavirus?  Which 1980s female heartthrob would I not recognize today?

The question also begs other, more pertinent questions from discerning ECA readers.  What is the song, and which outrageous Trump administration action did it predict?  And what does this have to do with ethical college admissions, this blog’s expressed beat?

There is a connection, and we’ll get there eventually.  Until then I beg your pardon as I digress more than usual.

So what 1970-ish pop song might loosely be interpreted to have predicted recent political events?  There are multiple candidates, depending on your willingness to take a leap of faith or logic.  While the politics are different, the mob violence and attempted insurrection of the U.S. Capitol bring to mind a song written by Stephen Stills during his time in the Buffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth, with its reference to “a thousand people in the street,” and another song sung by Stills as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, referring to “four dead in Ohio.”  The Trump Administration’s attempts to deny the election results and gum up the peaceful transition of power recall Don MacLean’s American Pie with its reference to “the players tried to take the field, the marching band refused to yield.”  If we really want to attempt to extend the argument and get cute, we could even include Three Dog Night (“liar, liar”) or Michael Jackson’s second solo hit, Rockin’ Robin (“tweet, tweet”).

The correct answer in this case is, to borrow an SAT phrase, “none of the above.” The song in question is what Casey Kasem might have described as a number one country hit that crossed over to become a top five hit nearly 50 years ago.  It is also a song that includes in its very first line the rhyme “pardon” and “rose garden.”  It’s Lynn Anderson’s 1971 hit single, Rose Garden.

Rose Garden was composed by singer-songwriter Joe South.  I remember that name, but didn’t know much about him until researching this piece.  In case you are wondering, Joe South was not his real name, but unlike Bill Murray’s lounge singer character on Saturday Night Live, his last name did not change depending on in what part of the country he was performing.

Joe South was an accomplished studio musician whose credits include playing on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album, Aretha Franklin’s recording of Chain of Fools, and Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence album.  In addition to Rose Garden he wrote songs ranging from Games People Play to Walk a Mile in My Shoes to the Deep Purple song Hush.

But was Joe South prescient, not only a songwriter but also a prophet?  To answer that question let us turn to the philosophical principle known as Occam’s Razor, named for the 14th century philosopher William of Occam.  Occam’s Razor states that when evaluating multiple explanations for the same event, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.  William of Occam was clearly neither a conspiracy theorist nor an aficionado of TV murder mysteries.

Applying Occam’s Razor to the song Rose Garden, the simplest answer is that Joe South was not predicting Donald Trump’s “Get Out of Jail Free” pardon-fest.  The song does rhyme “pardon” and “rose garden” in its very first line, but the narrator states that he or she (Lynn Anderson chose the song over objections that it was not a song for a female singer) never promised a rose garden, not the Rose Garden.

The obvious explanation for the pairing of “pardon” and “rose garden” is that there are few other rhymes.  There is “harden,” and if you are not a purist you could stretch to get “carton” or “Spartan.” The other options are all proper names.  There is NBA star James Harden, who wasn’t born when the song was written.  There are actresses Eve Arden and Marcia Gay Harden, golfer Harry Varden, and former Virginia Governor Colgate Darden, for whom the business school at the University of Virginia is named.  There also used to be a Jarden consumer products company, whose products ranged from Mr. Coffee to Yankee Candle to the Crock-Pot to Rawlings baseball equipment.

That brings us back to the college admissions connection.  Two of those pardoned by Trump in the final weeks of his term have previously been in the news for their involvement in admission-related scandals.

One of the 143 pardoned in Trump’s final hours was Miami developer Robert Zangrillo, who was among those arrested in March, 2019 as part of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.  Zangrillo was accused of paying $250,000 to get his daughter admitted to the University of Southern California as a faux crew transfer recruit.  He pleaded not guilty and had not yet gone to trial.

Zangrillo, the CEO of private investment firm Dragon Global, denied that he had worked with Rick Singer to bribe officials at USC, instead characterizing the money as a legitimate donation.  He and his lawyer subpoenaed USC officials for documents attempting to prove that the university was anything but a victim in the bribery scandal, er, donation solicitation.

A White House statement regarding the Zangrillo pardon described him as a “well-respected business leader and philanthropist” and stated that daughter Amber Zangrillo did not have others take admissions tests for her and that she currently maintains a GPA of 3.9 at USC.  That is probably due to the extra study time she has gained from not rowing in college, an activity she claimed in her transfer application took up 44 hours each week over a four-month period.

I don’t know that we ever expected Trump White House statements to contain “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” but there is an important detail left out.  Amber Zangrillo may not have had any of Singer’s confederates take the SAT or ACT on her behalf, but she was the only student named in the original FBI investigation who had one of Singer’s employees actually take a class for her, retaking an art history class that Amber Zangrillo had failed.

There is a second individual on Trump’s pardon list with a sketchy college admissions past.  Several weeks ago Trump commuted the sentence of another Floridian, Philip Esformes.  Esformes was serving a 20-year sentence for orchestrating the largest Medicare fraud in the nation’s history.

Esformes also had a connection with Rick Singer.  While not charged in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, forensic accountants sorting through Esformes’ Medicare fraud discovered that he had used $400,000 of the money to make a contribution to Singer’s Key Worldwide Foundation.  The Los Angeles Times reported in July of 2019 that Esformes had paid Singer in 2012 to “slip his daughter into USC as a fake soccer recruit” and fix his son’s college entrance exams.

Philip Esformes took a page from Singer’s playbook by paying University of Pennsylvania basketball coach Jerome Allen $300,000 in bribes to facilitate son Morris Esformes’ admission to Penn as a basketball recruit.  Allen took the money on his way to becoming an assistant coach with the Boston Celtics.  Morris Esformes attended Penn but never made the basketball team.  I wrote about that scandal in a column for Inside Higher Ed back in 2018, and was subsequently interviewed for an article that appeared in Sports Illustrated (but not quoted, to my immense disappointment).

Morris Esformes graduated from Penn, and now his father has graduated from the pen.

I beg your pardon (for the expletive I just uttered, but chose not to print).

Ivy Lottery

(This post originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” newsletter on January 11, 2021).

Admission to Ivy League universities has been compared to winning the lottery.  What if that was the case literally as well as figuratively?

That is the premise behind an op-ed published in the New York Times just before Christmas.  The piece, written by Times columnist and critic Ginia Bellefante, carries the catchy title, “Should Ivy League Schools Randomly Select Students (At Least for a Little While)?”

Bellefante’s column is one of a number of commentaries this fall that have questioned how the pandemic will influence the college admissions process for this and coming admission cycles.  Her hypothesis is that the pandemic has “only intensified inequalities in an education system that has relentlessly favored the well-off and aggressively prepared.”

Her use of the adjective “well-off and aggressively prepared” refers to applicants, but many of us have wondered if the pandemic will widen the chasm between rich and poor not only among applicants but also among institutions.  The early numbers would seem to support that. 

Over the past couple of months there has been concern about declines in both the numbers of students submitting applications through the Common Application and also completing the FAFSA.  Those declines seem to be more pronounced among first generation applicants, those eligible for fee-waivers, and those attending high schools with a large percentage of low-income students.

On the institutional side, Bellefante’s column appeared on the same day that the Wall Street Journal reported that Early Decision and Restrictive Early Action applications at the Ivies have “skyrocketed” this fall.  Harvard saw a 57% increase, Columbia 49%, and the smallest increases (22-23%) were at Brown and Penn.  Of course we are less likely to see the WSJ or other mainstream publications publish stories about the many lesser-known but reputable colleges and universities that are struggling to keep their heads, and their enrollments, above water. Just last week, though, the New York Times ran an article on the financial impact of COVID on Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

The higher early Ivy numbers may be linked to the decline in the role that test scores are playing in the current admissions landscape.  The loss of test dates and test centers has meant that many students have been able to take the SAT or ACT just once or not at all, and as a result the great majority of colleges and universities have adopted test-optional admission policies this year.  But has the absence of test scores emboldened students to take shots at places they might not have considered had test scores been required?

Bellefante suggests that the absence of test scores will hurt students who attend high schools that are not known quantities for admission offices, that colleges will play it safe by admitting students from schools and programs that are safe and familiar.  Embedded in that argument is an assumption that a number of critics of testing have called into question, which is that test scores help identify students that are “hidden gems.”

Her proposed solution is for the nation’s top private colleges and universities to undergo a “radical rethinking of admissions” to respond to the injustices, both economic and personal, perpetrated by the pandemic. She argues from a DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) lens that elite colleges should expand their reach and influence by admitting a broader spectrum of students, but she also recognizes that there is a fundamental contradiction in a commitment to DEI in an industry where success and prestige are determined by how many applicants are turned away.

Bellefante’s specific proposal is that the Ivies and similar institutions admit students by lottery, at least for the short term.  The use of random selection or a lottery is an idea that raises its head in college admission every so often. 

I have raised it myself. More than 30 years ago, my very first published article on college admission was in the Chronicle of Higher Education at a time when it published just one opinion piece each week on its back page. I argued that selective admission is an example of distributive justice, a type of ethical dilemma where the challenge is to distribute a scarce good or service fairly.  I further suggested that admission officers should focus on determining who is qualified for admission rather than who is most qualified for admission, and that the class should be admitted randomly from among those determined to be qualified.

It is an understatement to say that the article was not received well. There were generally two reactions.  On one hand I received reports that my name was taken in vain in some admission offices, and on the other there were people who were convinced that my suggestion was a joke, a college admissions version of Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal” to turn poor and starving children into food.

Bellefante’s advocacy for a lottery goes beyond what I or anyone else have proposed.  She argues not only that universities admit by lottery from among superbly qualified applicants, but that institutions be more forgiving in their definition of “qualified,” stating, “A revolution in the name of fairness would seem to require, at the minimum, the abandonment of perfection as a baseline.”

There are a couple of really interesting questions embedded in Bellefante’s argument.  The first is what is the goal of the admissions process.  Should it reward past performance or predict future accomplishment?  Or, as Bellefante seems to suggest, should admission be offered to those who will most benefit from the opportunity, whose lives will be transformed?

The practical answer, of course, is “none of the above.”  The admissions process as it exists today is first and foremost about achieving strategic institutional goals.  I would love to see an “elite” institution conduct an experiment and admit its class through a lottery for even a single year, whether from a pool as broad as that suggested by Bellefante or one more narrow.  But it is unlikely to happen because it would mean a loss of institutional control, with admissions officers no longer able to craft or sculpt the class.  What would happen if a lottery resulted in a dramatic drop in diversity or legacy and athlete admits?

The bigger issue is whether merit and fairness are mutually exclusive concepts.  Can merit and justice co-exist?  I want to believe they can.  I continue to believe in meritocracy as an ideal, but I also recognize that “merit” is hard to define.  There are lots of examples of merit that are thinly-disguised descriptions of privilege.

When I wrote my article arguing for the use of random selection in elective admission, there was a third reaction that I didn’t expect.  It came from students who wanted to believe that their admission to an Ivy League university was because they were superior, intellectually and perhaps morally, to those not as fortunate.  They wanted to be the college admission version of John Calvin’s “elect,” and they didn’t want luck to play any part in their admission.

That’s exactly why the Ivy League lottery proposed by Ginia Bellefante would be a good thing.  A number of years ago I heard a presentation from Nando Parrado, one of the survivors of the 1972 plane crash in the Andes mountain involving a Uruguayan rugby team.  After two months without rescue, Parrado and a teammate climbed a 15,000 mountain without gear and hiked across Chile for ten days before finding help. 

Parrado insists that he is in no way a hero.  He lost his mother, sister, and best friend in the crash, and he talked about the role that serendipity or happenstance played in his survival, noting that he would have died in the crash if he had sat one row ahead.

Admission to an elite college signifies being deserving and meritorious, but it also signifies being fortunate.  We need to make sure that those admitted are as focused on the second as they are on the first.

Do Extracurriculars Make Up For Academics?

One of the topics considered on the December 16 edition of NPR’s All Things Considered was “What It’s Like To Apply to College in the Pandemic.”  The correspondent, Ryan Delaney of St. Louis Public Radio, reported on “the unique challenge of pandemic college applications.”

Those of us who work with seniors are all too familiar with those challenges.  They begin, of course, with simply living through a health crisis that has upended life as we know it in a way not seen in more than a century, since the misnamed “Spanish Flu” of 1918. 

Surviving the pandemic is hard enough physically, but it also takes a toll emotionally, and students may find that the adults in their lives are ill-equipped to be reassuring.  In addition, the past year has revealed deep divisions and vulnerabilities in our national ability to deal with crisis.  Do we have the will to endure sacrifice, or at least the ability to recognize and acknowledge threats to our continued leadership in the world?

For members of the Class of 2021 the uncertainties of the college admissions process in the midst of a pandemic are layered on top of those existential challenges.  Almost all of our students had their school journeys upended beginning in March, and for many seniors school has been virtual for almost a year.  The pandemic has particularly devastated the non-academic side of school life, obliterating sports seasons, concerts, and rites of passage such as proms and graduation ceremonies.  Last spring my seniors complained that we had maintained classes and learning virtually but sucked all the fun out of the school experience.

Not only have transcripts been affected by virtual learning, but the pandemic has removed opportunities to take the SAT and ACT for huge numbers of students.  That may not be a bad thing, because it has led the vast majority of colleges to consider their usage of testing and to adopt test-optional policies, with some institutions making a leap to test-blind admission.  In addition, seniors have been unable to engage in the single most important part of researching colleges, the campus visit.

The All Things Considered story touched on the issues sufficiently, as NPR stories tend to do, but there was one statement in the report that made me raise an eyebrow (maybe even both).  Reporter Ryan Delaney stated, “In normal times, extracurriculars can make up for academics.”

I question whether that statement is true.  Colleges are certainly interested in a student’s commitments outside of the classroom, which is why applications ask for the information, but the idea that extracurricular activities “make up” for academics is false for all but a small group of students.

In my experience probably 98% of most college decisions are based on academic fit.  If the currency of real estate is “location, location, location,” the currency of college admission is “transcript, transcript, transcript.”  Strength of schedule and grades are by far the most important factors for admission.  I happen to think that test scores and essays are overrated as admission factors in most cases.  They serve to supplement the transcript and provide detail for the self-portrait being painted by the applicant, but I can think of very few students in my long career who may have been admitted or not admitted purely because of testing or because of an essay.

The same is true of activities.  A student’s involvements outside the classroom may tell a story about what they value or how they spend time, but they don’t “make up” for academics except in rare cases.  To be admitted because of activities in spite of academics you need to be a blue-chip athlete, a teenaged Nobel prizewinner, or the star of your own show on the Disney Channel.

Where might activities become a tip factor?  Athletics play an oversized role in many admission processes.  Every college with an intercollegiate athletics program, whether Ohio State or MIT, is looking for student-athletes who can be successful in the classroom and on the playing field.  At many strong academic institutions in Division 3, student-athletes make up a third of the student body.  Because coaches are so involved in recruiting and advocating for athletic recruits in selective admission processes, being a recruited athlete is the best hook to have.  It is not by accident that Rick Singer took advantage of athletic recruiting as part of his “side door” admission plan.  But if you are a dedicated three-sport high school athlete not playing in college, your athletic commitment will not “make up” for lower grades.

Activities may also play a larger role in admission processes where the vast majority of applicants have superb transcripts.  All things being equal (which of course they never are), if both of us have comparable academic credentials but you play the oboe in a year where the college orchestra is desperate for an oboe player, you may very well be admitted instead of me.  If I apply to the same college a year later as an oboe player with comparable or even better credentials, I may not get in because the college already has an oboe player.

In most cases, however, activities won’t make a difference, much less “make up” for academics.  Every high school in the country has a student council president and a newspaper editor.  If you are the best trumpet player in your school, that makes you 1 of 38,000 nationally.  For an activity to possibly “make up” for academics, you need to earn distinction beyond your school, earning statewide or national recognition.

Students should pursue extracurriculars in things they care about, not because they are looking to impress admission offices.  Quality is more important than quantity, and substance is more important that the illusion of substance.  How many clubs are started each fall by seniors with a shelf life that lasts until college applications are submitted?  I trust (and hope) that admission officers can distinguish between substance and packaging.

I am a devoted NPR listener (except during pledge drives), and I am better informed about lots of subjects as a result.  As a college counselor, though, in this case I think spreading the idea that activities “make up” for academics is both inaccurate and a disservice.    

2020 KO's 20/30

Boxer Mike Tyson, who last month returned to the ring at age 54 to headline the biggest pay-per-view event of 2020 with an exhibition bout against Roy Jones, Jr., is credited with this piece of strategic planning wisdom: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Consider George Washington University punched in the face.  According to an article several weeks ago in the GW student newspaper, the Hatchet, one of the casualties of the coronavirus pandemic is the university’s 20/30 strategic plan announced back in the summer of 2019. 

That plan, one of President Thomas LeBlanc’s signature initiatives, attracted attention both for the “20,” its call to reduce undergraduate enrollment by 20% over the next five years, and for the “30,” the plan to increase the share of STEM majors on campus to 30%.  The 20/30 plan was put on hold last April, and while GW has made no formal announcement, the newspaper article suggests that it is now dead in the water.

GW’s 20/30 plan is far from the only strategic initiative that lots of colleges and universities will have to rethink in light of the pandemic, and in fact one of the lessons for all of us from 2020 is that any notion that we are in control is a delusion.  This year, both personally and institutionally, emotionally and pragmatically, has been about reacting, pivoting, and adapting to changed circumstances and changed assumptions.

I wrote about the GW plan for Inside Higher Ed back in the summer of 2019 when it was first announced.  The plan was revolutionary in its announced goal to lower undergraduate enrollment by 20%, a “rightsizing” that would return enrollment to levels from 2013 prior to a five-year expansion.  In my experience, most references to “rightsizing” are after the fact attempts to rationalize enrollment decline, so announcing the intention to downsize was bold and risky.

Even before COVID, GW was trying to work through the implications of intentionally lowering enrollment, developing six different models for how lower enrollment would impact considerations including diversity, academic quality, male enrollment on campus, and of course net revenue.  President LeBlanc had estimated that the enrollment reduction would cost the university $16 million dollar per year over a four-year period.

In a sense, the pandemic accelerated the plan and highlighted its challenges.  This fall GW saw an 8% drop in undergraduate enrollment, enrolling 300 fewer students than a year ago.  I give GW credit for not trying to spin this fall’s drop as “all part of the plan.”

So what are the larger issues that GW helps shed light on?  One is the recognition that no matter what our noble aspirations might be, higher education is first and foremost a business.  It requires revenue to keep the lights on and pay our salaries and health insurance.  One of the side effects of the pandemic is economic, and colleges and universities have not been immune.  That has already played out in retrenchment of faculty and staff, athletic teams, and even entire academic programs.

What does that mean for college admission?  It probably means that ability to pay will become even more of a plus factor than it has been previously.  In a period of economic crisis, net revenue will take precedence over other competing priorities.  Given the news stories the last few weeks (including the previous ECA post) about declining enrollment in college nationally, impacting most the very students who most need a college education to change the course of their life and provide economic opportunity, we must hope and ensure that concern for net revenue doesn’t push aside all other considerations.

If the pandemic is going to advantage further students who are already advantaged, that may be true at an institutional level as well.  Jeff Selingo’s new book, Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions (which will be the focus of an upcoming ECA post) makes an interesting and useful distinction between colleges that are “sellers” and those that are “buyers.”  Sellers are those with far more qualified applicants than spaces available and buyers are those who have to work hard to make their class with substantial tuition discounts.

The pandemic is clearly impacting both groups, but I anticipate a growing gap between those groups.  The nation’s most selective colleges and universities are going to be minimally impacted, but may even thrive in the new normal.  I hear rumors that Harvard may announce tomorrow that it was up nearly 50% in Restrictive Early Action applicants.  To use an agrarian metaphor, Harvard and its ilk are ranches or even plantations (from a size and wealth perspective only). Meanwhile, the landscape for colleges that are subsistence farms will be more challenging and threatening, and some may face foreclosure from the marketplace.  

But there is also a third group, and I’m going to be particularly interested in what happens to the schools in that cohort.  They are all good, reputable, selective places that fall a rung down on the selectivity pecking order.  I have friends and colleagues who predict that the institutions in that category will go heavy on admitting a larger portion of their classes in Early Decision and will increase usage of other enrollment management tools such as reliance on demonstrated interest and strategic use of wait lists.

I’m not as convinced.  I think there are going to be a number of good institutions that won’t be able to maintain the illusion of selectivity in the new marketplace, that will have to be satisfied to enroll a class with less control over the competing priorities and metrics.  They may not be knocked out by 2020, just knocked down with less confidence in their ability to take a punch.

This is the final Ethical College Admissions post for the year.  What a year it has been.  Thanks to all of you who take the time to read the blog, and thanks to all of you who write in support. 

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, or Festivus (airing of grievances, anyone?), let us not forget the words of Tiny Tim (the Dickens character, not the ukulele-playing 1960s novelty singer).  “May God bless us, every one.”

The Community College Canary in the College Admission COVID Coal Mine

There is no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic has changed life as we know it in innumerable ways for a longer period of time than any of us would have wished for. Dating back to last spring there has been a lot of speculation and lots of questions about how the pandemic might impact college admission as we know it. 

Would the pandemic lead students to stay closer to home for college?  Would families be willing to pay private-college tuitions for virtual learning?  Would a large number of 2020 graduates take a gap year and defer college, making admission that much more competitive for 2021 graduates? Will colleges find it harder to predict and manage yield, and will that lead them to hedge their bets by admitting more students up front? Will dramatic losses of revenue put the viability of some venerable but tuition-driven colleges at risk?

We will have to stay tuned for the answers to some of those questions.  Three different recently-reported data points, however, provide glimpses of troubling trends and unanticipated consequences on a couple of fronts.  But are they the proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” or are they more like early returns on election night, alarming but meaningless once all the votes are counted? Answering that question requires either a soothsayer or a college admissions version of Steve Kornacki.

Several weeks ago the Common Application reported that the number of students using its platform to apply to college is 4% lower than a year ago.  The decline among first generation applicants and those eligible for fee waivers is more pronounced, around 10%.

Two things are worrisome about those stats.  The first is that the gap between first-gen and other Common App users widened just during the first two weeks of November.  The other is that the Common App numbers may not reflect “early returns.”  A year ago nearly two-thirds of Common App applicants had submitted at least one application by mid-November, and nearly half of all applications had been submitted by then.  It is still early, but then again, in the words of Yogi Berra, “It gets late early around here.”

The second concerning statistic is a decline in FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) completion.  As of late November, the number of seniors completing the FAFSA was 16% lower than a year before.  As with the Common App, the decline is even greater among students who most require financial assistance to make attending college a possibility.  Among students attending high schools eligible for Title I funds, meaning that at least 40% of families come from low-income families, the drop in FAFSA completion is 19%.  The decline is even more pronounced, 21%, among students attending high schools where Black and Hispanic students make up more than 40% of the school population.

The final set of statistics is the most troubling.  Several weeks ago the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported that enrollment at community colleges is 9.5% lower than a year ago.  The drop at four-year non-profit institutions over the same period is 2%.

The community college decline understates the problem, because the decline in first-time students at community colleges is considerably greater.  In terms of race and ethnicity, enrollment among white and Asian students attending community colleges has declined approximately 19%.  The percentage decrease for first-time Black, Hispanic, and Native-American community college students is closer to 28-29%.  The decrease is consistent across age groups, and the decline in enrollment among men is twice that for women.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by those numbers, but I am.  My expectation back in the spring was that community colleges would be more appealing for students living in the pandemic, close to home and less expensive. I certainly didn’t foresee a decline in community college enrollment.

I’m obviously not alone.  A recent article in Community College Daily, a publication of the American Association of Community Colleges, described the enrollment decline as surprising and staggering.

What is not clear is why.  Does virtual learning present more of a problem in a community college environment?  It’s certainly the case that it’s difficult to learn a job training skill like welding virtually.  Do community college students have less access to computers and the internet?  Or has the economic downturn and massive loss of jobs due to the pandemic had a double effect on community college students who count on income from their jobs to pay for community college classes?

Regardless of the causes, the effects are alarming.  There has been a lot of discussion recently about the hidden long-term effects of COVID-19 on individuals who may not initially seem that sick.  Are there hidden long-term effects at a societal level as well, and are the numbers listed above for the Common App, the FAFSA, and community college enrollment early symptoms of those effects?

What the statistics listed above tell us is that the pandemic is impacting educational opportunity among the very people who most need access to education.  That issue may pale compared with trying to prevent another spike in deaths following a nationwide surge of the virus. It may also pale with trying to combat the denial, entitlement, and moral weakness that prevent us from coming together in shared sacrifice to withstand the virus.

We shouldn’t be surprised by the statistics.  We know that the pandemic has taken a greater toll both economically and in terms of public health on citizens of color and on those from socioeconomically-disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Understanding the context doesn’t mean that we should accept it.  The college counseling profession has an obligation to be profoundly countercultural.  Access to education has always been one of the drivers of equity and opportunity in our society.  For our country to be the society it aspires and claims to be, we can’t afford to leave behind a generation of young people for whom education is the path to economic security and success.

That is obviously easier said than done at a time when the pandemic has challenged individuals, institutions, and governments.  Some of it has to take place at the policy level, whether it be recommitting to early childhood education, simplifying the FAFSA, or a long-term commitment to making college more affordable (not necessarily the same thing as free).

And what about our responsibilities as members of a noble profession devoted to opportunity?  At an institutional level, we can be voices that net revenue should be only one of many institutional goals.

I also wonder if it’s not time for us to re-think how information about college and college admission is provided and dispersed to students and families without access to good college counseling in their schools.  There is a hunger for knowledge about applying to college, and it’s a vacuum we can’t afford not to fill. 

Years ago, I proposed that NACAC develop resources for parents and students to understand how college admission works.  That proposal became one of the precursors to the Knowledge Center, but never took off for two reasons.  One was limited resources compared with unlimited demands.

The other was a philosophical debate about the direction of the organization.  NACAC saw itself as an organization serving college counselors, the professionals on the ground, whereas I have always felt that NACAC should serve college counseling.  That’s a fine distinction, but as NACAC carves out a new identity for itself in its post-ethics policing future, I hope it will re-focus on living its claimed role as trusted source of information, both for professionals and the public at large, but especially for the students who should be but aren’t completing the FAFSA or attending community college. 

Do We Need a January PSAT (and other questions about the future of admission testing)?

Last week the College Board held its annual National Forum, and like most other conferences and meetings during the pandemic it was held virtually.  I don’t always attend the Forum, but have gone the past two years, even presenting last fall in D.C. 

I didn’t sign up for the virtual Forum largely because of my experience with the virtual NACAC Conference, where I registered then didn’t have the time to attend the sessions or watch the recordings.  Even though I wasn’t “present virtually” (that sounds like the premise for a sci-fi movie), I glanced through the program for the Forum to see what was being discussed. 

College Board meetings often feel like pep rallies or infomercials for College Board products, and I certainly noticed some of that.  What I noticed even more was what was missing from the program.  There are two issues I would have like to seen discussed.

The more consequential of the two is the elephant in the Zoom room, the very future of admission testing itself.  If there was any discussion, or even acknowledgement, of the existential threats to the testing industry as we know it, I missed it.

This has been a hard year for the College Board.  The pandemic shut down almost all spring testing, and this fall hasn’t been dramatically better. Nearly half of the students nationally who registered for the SAT administrations in August, September, and October weren’t able to take the test because of school closures or diminished seating capacity. (The ACT has had the same issues.)  

That has led to a string of significant consequences. When students weren’t able to take admission tests due to supply chain issues, the College Board lost revenue from fewer students taking the tests and from less student data to sell through the Student Search program.  The transition last spring to Advanced Placement exams taken online at home received mixed reviews, and may have cemented the suspicion that online admission testing is an idea whose time has not come.

The loss of testing opportunities for students meant that colleges moved en masse to test-optional policies for at least the coming year.  But is testing in college admission on a sabbatical, or is it being furloughed with no guarantee of reinstatement?

And is the test-optional movement a revolution, or merely a provisional government on the way to a future that is test-blind?  Admission testing may turn out to be collateral damage in a movement that has arisen from the confluence of the pandemic and the social unrest related to the Black Lives Matter movement.  There are voices asserting that the SAT and ACT are tools of systemic racism, and last week a California Appeals court upheld an earlier court decision prohibiting the University of California system from using test scores. The plaintiffs in that case had argued both that tests are racially discriminatory and classist, and also claimed that applicants with disabilities are denied access and opportunities even by test-optional policies.

The second issue is more mundane, an example of “Think globally, act locally.”  I acknowledge that it will irritate those who want to “end, not mend” admission testing. For those of you who wonder just how many clichés I can cram into a single paragraph, I recognize that many readers may ask “Where’s the beef?” I raise the issue because I want to advocate for my students’ interests and because I know how much the College Board values input from its members.  

A crisis like we’ve gone through this spring should lead all of us, including the College Board, to recalibrate what we’re doing.   I hope that includes rethinking the SAT calendar.

That’s already happening to some extent.  After the pandemic hit and removed opportunities for members of the Class of 2021 to take admission tests last spring, the College Board added a September test administration, whereas ACT added multiple dates in September and October.  But is it time to go a step further?

I swear that I remember an announcement back in the spring that the College Board would also add a January testing date for the coming year.  There was a January administration until maybe five years ago that was removed when the CB decided to add an August test date for seniors.  I told juniors and parents about the added January date, expressing my belief that it’s the ideal time for my juniors to take the SAT for the first time.

Imagine my surprise, then, a month or so ago when I was looking at the calendar of SAT dates and noticed nothing about a January date.  Had I made that up?  I reached out to Adam Ingersoll from Compass Prep, who keeps his ear to the ground regarding testing.  He reassured me that I wasn’t crazy, at least on this particular issue, and that there had been some chatter about adding a January date.

It turns out that a January testing date has been added, but it’s a PSAT date, not an SAT date.  And so I want to ask two questions.  Do we need a January PSAT date? And if testing doesn’t disappear altogether, is the current calendar the right calendar for students to take the SAT?

With regard to the first question, the answer depends on what you think the justification for the PSAT is.  The obvious answer is that the PSAT is a practice test for the SAT, and that the January date is a makeup taking into consideration the fact that many students weren’t able to take the PSAT in its normal October window.   

But is practice for the SAT the sole purpose for offering the PSAT?  The official name of the test is PSAT/NMSQT (a tongue twister that makes me want to take a breath or buy a vowel).  That reflects the fact that the PSAT/NMSQT (a registered trademark of the College Board and the National Merit Scholarship Competition) also serves as the qualifying test for the National Merit program.  I assume that partnership is lucrative for the College Board, so a reason to add a January PSAT.  It is also the case that the PSAT is a prime source of names for Student Search, an even more lucrative initiative.

Returning to the “practice for the SAT,” by January shouldn’t juniors be focusing on taking the SAT rather than a practice test for the SAT?  That leads into my second question, whether the SAT calendar should be re-envisioned.

Currently the College Board offers test dates in March, May, and June in the spring and August, October, November, and December in the fall.  Does that testing calendar reflect or respond to the acceleration of the college application process?

For the most part the fall dates for seniors work, with one exception.  The addition of an August test date was a great addition given the earlier application deadlines.  But if there needed to be one less date, should it have been December rather than January? Almost none of my seniors take the December test.

Right now there is a three-month gap between the December test and the March test.  Throughout my career I have advised my juniors to take the PSAT in the fall and the SAT in the spring.  That increasingly seems like a losing battle as an increasing number of students and parents feel the need to take the SAT in the fall of the junior year, and that number is far greater at other schools I’m aware of, some of which no longer give the PSAT to juniors because they have all taken the SAT by October of the junior year. I’ve tried to resist that because I don’t see those scores being anywhere close to what students earn later in the year.

The question is whether that is an independent school phenomenon and whether we are out of touch with the testing schedule of other students.  I tried to obtain data on the percentage of seniors vs. juniors taking the SAT in December vs. October and November, hoping to find out if a lot of seniors are still taking the test as late as December. 

In response to an inquiry, a College Board spokesman told me he didn’t know the junior/senior breakdown.  When I asked whether he didn’t know or whether no one at the College Board knew that information and shared with him my reason for asking, he told me he would check.  I never received any hard data in response, just a comment that January was the least popular administration and that the College Board’s experience is that most students don’t take the SAT until spring of the junior year.  So is it possible that the College Board does not know how many juniors as opposed to seniors take the test in any given month, is that information proprietary, or did they just not want to share the info with me?  And do most students wait until spring because there are no opportunities from early December until early March?

I’d like to see the College Board drop the December test date and replace it with a January test date, but I’m willing to be convinced that I’m misguided.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

"Optional"

Recently a parent of one of my seniors e-mailed me asking if the son should answer the optional COVID-19 essay question on his Early Decision application.  My response was that the boy should write the essay only if the pandemic had impacted him and his family in significant ways, or if he felt the need to provide context for his academic performance last spring.  I suggested that the question was on the application for good reason, given how tumultuous the pandemic has been for students (and us), but that admission officers don’t particularly want to read hundreds of COVID-themed essays.

Embedded in that exchange was an unasked but more profound and interesting philosophical question.  What does “optional” mean in a college admissions context?  Is “optional” ever really optional?

That issue reared its head earlier this week in a thread on the NACAC Exchange that brought back memories of its ancestor, the NACAC e-list, where heated debates about admission issues great and small were a daily occurrence.  Being able to disagree about what we believe is healthy, but this particular debate started out passionate, moved quickly to personal, and ended up ugly.  

The genesis of the thread was a post by Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, responding to an article that appeared on Monday in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania.  That article questioned whether Penn’s adoption of test-optional policies will advantage wealthy students, and quoted Brian Taylor, the managing director of consulting firm Ivy Coach.

Taylor argued that test-optional policies are a sham (my word, not his), not “worth the paper they’re written on.”  He suggests that if one student does not report test scores and another student reports strong scores, the student with test scores will “win every time.”

I believe that both protagonists are at least occasional readers of ECA (my judgment has been questioned several times by Ivy Coach, as is its right).  The mission of this blog is to promote a conversation about the ethical considerations in college admission, so I am choosing to ignore the back and forth on the NACAC e-list and focus on what “optional” does and should mean in an admissions context.

So why would anyone believe that “optional” shouldn’t be taken at face value?  Before focusing in on test-optional, let’s look at the notion of the “optional” essay.  For much of my career the prevailing wisdom, the college admissions equivalent of the unwritten rules of baseball, was that optional essays aren’t really optional.  According to the reasoning, “optional” in “optional essay” has the same meaning as “optional” in “optional off-season NFL workout.” The underlying assumption is that a student’s willingness to complete an essay that’s optional is a marker of seriousness, such that completing the optional essay is almost a measure of demonstrated interest.

That raises an essential follow-up question.  Should an institution label an essay question or any other part of the application as “optional” if it really isn’t?  The operative ethical principle is the principle of transparency, the idea that admission officers and institutions should be open and honest about what they value and what they are measuring.  We should not only be “practicing what we preach” but also “preaching what we practice.”  To go back to the demonstrated interest example, it is perfectly legitimate to measure a student’s level of interest.  What is not legitimate is placing value on a particular measure of interest when you haven’t been transparent to students that it is important to demonstrate interest in that way.

So how does that apply to testing, or submission of test scores, being optional?  What offended Bob Schaeffer and led to his post was Brian Taylor’s suggestion that admission officers are not “telling it like it is” with regard to their test-optional policies.

That offends me as well.  There is certainly a discussion to be had about how colleges will and should treat those who submit scores vs. those who don’t, but the insinuation that the admission profession is lying about test-optional policies doesn’t strike me as true.  College admission/enrollment management is a complex dance between pursuing institutional interest and the public interest, but what made me feel comfortable being part of this profession is that by and large college counselors on both sides of the desks are trying to treat students right and honestly.  Are there threats to that fabric?  Certainly.  If I thought that admission offices were deliberately misleading students about their test-optional policies, I would leave the profession.

Let us recognize that in 2020-21 there is a wide spectrum of views and motivations under the test-optional banner.  There are the true believers who question whether testing is a legitimate part of the admissions process.  There are those for whom test-optional policies are a tool for profile enhancement.  And there are colleges that are test-optional because they have no, well, option. 

Some of that is a recognition that students aren’t able to test through no fault of their own, and the first rule of moral judgment is that you shouldn’t punish someone for something they are incapable of choosing.  Some of it is a desire for affiliation.  Just as once upon a time colleges joined the Common Application because they wanted to be seen as part of an elite club, today colleges that wish they could be requiring test scores are probably afraid to fight the crowd, and maybe afraid of student and counselor backlash if they insist on requiring test scores in the current climate.

So how should colleges with test-optional policies treat those who submit vs. those who don’t?  Trying to evaluate different students from different backgrounds with different experiences is always a challenge, but never more so than this year given the wide disparity of policies and practices among schools in the wake of the pandemic.  More information is usually seen as better than less information, but is it fair to advantage the student who has the opportunity to follow Taylor’s advice and drive three states away or to Nebraska in order to have a testing experience when the only students able to do that are those who are already advantaged? And might that advice put the health of students and their loved ones in jeopardy?  If students with test scores “win every time,” then colleges are neither “telling it like it is” nor doing the right thing.

This year equity has to be a guiding principle in ways it never has been before.  The optional COVID essay is an opportunity for a student to talk about how he or she has responded to COVID.  Should institutions have to answer the same question? How are they responding to serve students whose lives have been upended this year? Which practices, from heavy reliance on Early Decision to heavy reliance on “optional” test scores, might be convenient but wrong?

Submitting test scores should be optional.  Doing what’s right by our students should not.

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.