ECA Goes on Holiday

The Ethical College Admissions blog will (or at least plans to) go on holiday for the remainder of the summer.  We need a break, and so do you.

When I started this blog nearly ten (!) years ago, my practice was to shut down during the summer months on the assumption that there is little college admissions news and even fewer readers interested in devoting summer vacation to reading about admission issues.  During the three years that I wrote a weekly column for Inside Higher Ed,  though, I discovered that there was more than enough material to write about, including major issues such as a branch of the University of Texas revoking scholarships it had promised to students from Nepal and the University of California-Irvine rescinding acceptances to 500 students because it had overenrolled.

In the event of breaking news, ECA will return with commentary, but otherwise it will resume at the beginning of the new school year.

Thanks for reading Ethical College Admissions and practicing ethical college admissions.

"Athlete-Students": Amateurism, Academics, and Advancement

(Originally published in the July 12, 2021 issue of Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider”)

The National Collegiate Athletic Association has had an interesting couple of weeks in its struggle to maintain control over the business of intercollegiate athletics.  On June 30 the NCAA announced an interim “waiver” allowing student-athletes to be compensated for the use of their names, images, and likenesses (NILs), including social media platforms.  That probably wasn’t coincidence, because on July 1 new laws went into effect in multiple states making compensation for NILs permissible.  The NCAA waiver will remain in effect until a more permanent NCAA rule or federal legislation is passed.

Earlier in June the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston et al that the NCAA may not prohibit student-athletes from receiving payments or benefits that are “education-related.”  That includes things like scholarships for graduate school after an athlete’s eligibility has run out and paid internships.

Some pundits have interpreted the opinion from Justice Neil Gorsuch as opening the door for college athletes to be compensated beyond the athletic scholarships they already receive.  The Alston decision, though, is narrowly-tailored, applying only to a small group of education-related benefits.  Justice Gorsuch’s opinion gives the NCAA latitude in defining what is and is not educational.  He makes it clear that the association would be within its rights to prohibit member institutions from awarding student-athletes Lamborghinis as a means of getting to class, and also recognizes that paid internships provide an opportunity for abuse.

The long-term danger to the NCAA emanating from the Alston case lies not in the opinion from Gorsuch but rather from a concurring opinion written by Justice Neil Kavanaugh.  Kavanaugh seemed to open the door for a broader consideration of possible antitrust issues emanating from the NCAA’s monopsony over college sports. 

Kavanaugh states that “the NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.”  The NCAA controls the market for student athletes, and its compensation rules result in student athletes being paid at a below-market rate.  Kavanaugh sees that as “price-fixing labor,” which he describes as “a textbook antitrust problem.”

Kavanaugh’s opinion also raises some of the questions that make payment of college athletes a complicated proposition.  He asks, “How would paying greater compensation to student athletes affect non-revenue-raising sports?  Could student athletes in some sports but not others receive compensation?  How would any compensation regime comply with Title IX?  If paying student athletes requires something like a salary cap in some sports in order to preserve competitive balance, how would that cap be administered?  And given that there are now about 180,000 Division I student athletes, what is a financially sustaining way of fairly compensating some or all of those student athletes?”

I happen to think those are great questions, but ECA readers are all too aware that I am fonder of and better at posing questions than I am at providing answers.  But both Kavanaugh and Gorsuch ignore, probably intentionally, an essential “elephant in the room” question.  Has the time come to rethink what intercollegiate sports represent, especially when it comes to big-time football and basketball?

The NCAA’s defense of its position is based on preserving what it calls the “revered tradition of amateurism” as the foundation of college sports.  That phrase is taken from a 1984 Supreme Court case, NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which dealt with the NCAA’s control of television revenues. The NCAA even seems to argue that amateurism is part of its brand, distinguishing college sports from the professional version, and an NCAA press release about the NIL waiver emphasized that the new policy does not conflict with the NCAA prohibition of “pay for play.”

But did the “revered tradition of amateurism” ever exist?  The opinion by Justice Gorsuch points out that “American colleges and universities have had a complicated relationship with sports and money” dating back to the very first intercollegiate athletic competition, a boat race on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee in 1852 pitting teams from Harvard and Yale.  Long before Poulan/WeedEater sponsored the Independence Bowl, in fact long before the advent of college football itself, the regatta on Lake Winnipesaukee was sponsored by a railroad executive promoting train travel to the lake.  He offered the “student-athletes” an all-expenses-paid vacation with lavish perks, including unlimited alcohol.

Both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh’s opinions dismiss the NCAA’s contention that the references to amateurism and student-athlete compensation in NCAA v. Board of Regents serve as any kind of precedent for the issues facing college athletics today.  But even if 1984 was a time of Orwellian purity in college sports, with the NCAA as Big Brother, the landscape has shifted dramatically since.

In 1984 the NCAA basketball tournament had not yet been trademarked as “March Madness,” and national champions in football were determined by voters rather than players.  ESPN was five years old, just emerging from the days when it relied on sports like Team Rodeo and Australian Rules Football for its content. The era of super-conferences had not arrived, meaning that the Atlantic Coast Conference had nine members and the Southwest Conference still existed.

What all those developments have in common is that they have brought more money into the world of college sports.  The only sector not profiting handsomely is the talent, the athletes producing the labor and the product.

The focus on amateurism and payment of student-athletes has precluded an equally important question.  Is it time to rethink the “student” in “student-athlete”?

At the very least it may be time to reverse the order to “athlete-student.”  For many college athletes, maybe most, the commitment to athletics is the driving force in their college experience.  Both in and out of season, athletes’ schedules are built around training and practices, with classes fit in to ensure eligibility.  Even when athlete-students are getting college degrees, are they getting college educations?  Will managing their NILs and personal brands cut into athletic time or study time?

Nothing reveals the myth of the student-athlete more than the NCAA transfer portal.  It may be a helpful tool bringing transparency to the transfer process, but it’s become a form of free agency for college athletes. The athlete-students in the portal aren’t looking for a college to attend, but rather a team to play for.  The number of athletes entering the portal is frightening, with close to 1700 basketball players as of a month ago, enough to fill the rosters of nearly one-third of the colleges playing Division One basketball.

The more fundamental question is whether intercollegiate athletics should be considered part of the educational mission of higher education or part of the advancement arm of the university.  The compensation packages provided to coaches and athletic administrators dwarf the salaries for almost any other employee, including presidents. We may want to consider coaches as educators, but the language and behavior exhibited by many coaches in their interactions with players would never be permitted for any other faculty or staff member.

I have always believed that athletics have educational value and that the playing field is its own classroom.  But it is hard to square educational ideals with the reality of big-time sports.  Athletic programs long ago became powerful avenues for marketing and institutional branding, and there is too much money at stake for that genie to return to the bottle.

I generally believe in evolutionary rather than revolutionary change, but I think big-time college athletics needs revolutionary change.  Modest payments to college athletes and reversing “student” and “athlete” is evolutionary.  What would be revolutionary, and honest, would be to hire and pay college athletes, at least those for whom college serves as an apprenticeship for a pro sports career, as employees of a university’s marketing or advancement offices, with the opportunity to take classes as a benefit. I’ll leave the details for others.

I don’t claim that my modest proposal will end all that is wrong with college athletics, just the hypocrisy.

Ready or Not, Here They Come

I have always preached that the college search and application processes shouldn’t be just about admission to college but also readiness for college.  In a perfect world the process of applying to college would test the very qualities required to be a successful college student—independence, self-knowledge, organization, maturity, and persistence.

We don’t live in a perfect world, of course, but graduates in the class of 2021 have lived through a world during the past sixteen months that has been even more flawed than normal.  They have lived during their final three semesters of high school through a time of global pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and attacks on the U.S. Capitol and democracy itself. 

That doesn’t count the upheaval in their education.  The fortunate ones have experienced school in person complicated by masks and social distancing, but many students haven’t had a true school experience for more than a year.  Virtual learning and Zoom meetings are exhausting, and we won’t know for several years just how much academic learning and progress has been lost, much less the emotional toll of what we’ve lived through.

How ready are they for college?  And how ready are colleges for them?

Recently long-time ECA reader and London correspondent Anne Richardson raised some important questions and concerns for college faculty and student life professionals.  She described it as a “rant”; I see it as on the money.

Anne wrote, “I am really hoping that all of these institutions are thinking carefully about how to deal with the Class of 2021 when they arrive on campus next fall.  It is a class that has been out of traditional classrooms for months.  The students have been away from friends and isolated in many ways.  They are all over the place academically, and many are disillusioned about education.  This may be the most diverse group ever to set foot on campuses in every sense of the word.  What kinds of support will all of these students need (and they will need support in multiple ways), and how are residential life and faculty preparing?”

Anne might actually be understating the issue.  It’s not just an issue impacting new college freshmen.

Last fall I was part of a debate with several colleagues about which college students were going to be most adversely impacted by the pandemic.  Was it seniors, who were going to miss the sense of completion and closure to the college journey that the senior year should bring, and who are entering a workforce with diminished employment opportunities for recent college graduates? 

Or did college freshmen, who entered a campus environment that was either virtual or isolated by COVID restrictions, have the greater challenge?  The freshmen didn’t have anything to compare their college experience with, but in a very real sense they haven’t had a true orientation or on-boarding to campus culture.  As disruptive as the academic part of their education has been, their ability to experience the social side of college, the connection with both students and faculty, has been even more disrupted. 

We have certainly seen it at the secondary level.  I have had several conversations with families of students who changed schools this past year who never felt like they connected with classmates outside of class in an environment where sports and clubs were diminished or shut down entirely.  I’m not sure it’s anyone’s fault, because schools were challenged just to be open safely, but in retrospect I’m not sure that the schools recognized the special challenges faced by new students during a time of COVID restrictions. 

I have to believe that the same is true of the students who entered colleges in the fall of 2020.  Is it coincidence that a larger number of my 2020 graduates seemed to think about transferring, with many of them referencing a perception that the grass was greener at colleges and universities other than the ones they had chosen?  Whatever the answer, colleges need to be prepared to deal with more significant academic, social, and emotional issues not only with first-time freshmen, but with returning students as well.  In a sense there are two full classes of “new” students on most college campuses who will be transitioning to the college experience.

It’s also not a short-term issue.  Back in April I was asked to serve as moderator of the closing session at the Potomac and Chesapeake Association for College Admission Counseling virtual conference.  Our assigned topic was “Getting Back to Normal or Planning for a New Reality?”  One of the panelists, a counselor at an urban public school, made the point that the legacy of COVID will impact students for at least several years going forward.  The impact was not just on high school seniors but on younger students as well.  Their development and preparation for college was also thrown off track, and they will bring a different set of issues, both academic and mental health, with them for several years to come.  That’s not even to speculate on what kinds of impacts there have been on students currently in elementary school.

How ready are colleges for these students?  A colleague who has been on a number of Zoom calls with colleges recently and has asked that exact questions hasn’t gotten the sense that many college campuses have thought about it more than superficially.  I’m sure it’s the last thing colleges want to think about when they are already dealing with lost revenue during the pandemic and also have to worry about their own campus-wide staff exhaustion and mental health.  And, of course, we don’t have a good handle on what the issues are and in what ways they will manifest themselves.

But ready or not, here they come. Our students will enter and return to college with significant academic and personal issues that will need to be addressed.  We all want access to educational opportunity, but that access is hollow without opportunity and tools for success.

Lexington Without Concord

(Originally published in the June 14, 2021 edition of Inside Higher Ed’s Admissions insider)

Lexington, Virginia is a small town of about 7000 residents located in the Shenandoah Valley where Interstates 81 and 64 diverge.  Lexington is usually described with adjectives like “charming” and “quaint,” and it appears on any list of the best small towns in Virginia.

Lexington is also a college town, home to not one but two venerable institutions, Washington & Lee University and Virginia Military Institute.  Last week both colleges made news.

On Friday W&L announced that it would retain its name after a year-long deliberative process within the university community.  The name change discussion arose following the national reckoning last summer ignited by the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.  The protests over needless killings of black citizens during police stops for minor offenses evolved to calls for removing monuments honoring Confederate figures, with the most prominent being Robert E. Lee.  Washington & Lee, where Lee served as President for five years following the Civil War, may be the ultimate monument to Lee.  

Three days before the Washington & Lee announcement, a special investigative team from the law firm Barnes and Thornburg LLP released its final report into the climate and culture at VMI, especially with regard to race and gender.  The investigation was ordered last fall by state leaders including Governor Ralph Northam, an alumnus of the Institute, following an article in the Washington Post alleging an ingrained culture hostile to both women and students of color.

I have followed both stories with more than casual interest.  My students regularly attend both colleges, and I have been thinking about respected friends in both admission offices.  Admission loosely translates as “to the mission,” but admission offices have to market not only an institution’s mission or aspirations, but also its unique personality and campus culture, both strengths and flaws.  Both W&L and VMI are steeped in a proud history, and both have to come to grips with those histories at a time when social norms and attitudes are changing dramatically.

For Washington & Lee that history is captured in its name.  The university’s association with both George Washington and Robert E. Lee is not honorary but “specific,” according to the Board of Trustees’ “Message to the Community” posted on June 4.  What had been Liberty Hall Academy was renamed for Washington in 1796 after he made a financial gift that enabled its survival.  Lee’s name was added in 1870 after his death while serving as President, credited with “saving and transforming the school after the devastation of the Civil War.”

W&L has reveled in its association with Lee ever since, but how should it respond in a time when he has become a divisive figure? Earlier this year the faculty voted 188-51 to change the name, whereas alumni tended to oppose the change.  The Board voted 22-6 to keep the name, but removed Lee’s name from the chapel and decided to physically separate its main auditorium from the Lee family crypt (Lee is buried at W&L, as is his horse, Traveller). It also committed the university to expand its diversity and inclusion initiatives while expressing regret over “the university’s past veneration of the Confederacy and its role in perpetuating ‘The Lost Cause’ myths that sustained racism.” That didn’t satisfy critics, including a faculty member who on Twitter accused the Board of being “more afraid of being called woke than racist.”

Is that criticism fair? Confederate “heroes” are overrepresented when it comes to statues and namings, providing a counterpoint to the adage that history is written by winners.  I didn’t grow up in the South, so I don’t get the worship and veneration of figures like Lee, but the attempt to turn Lee into a 19th century Mike Flynn seems false.  Can we acknowledge our history, even the ugly warts, without celebrating it? Must we obliterate any mention of figures like Lee, or can we judge them in context?

If any place has a legitimate reason to retain Lee in its name, it’s W&L.  I recognize that my perspective is clouded by the fact that I am a white male, and that others see the issue differently.  In a time where there is political and cultural division, I struggle to find a rational middle ground, even as I know there are critics who argue that rationality is a form of white supremacy.  I’m sorry, but I’m not willing to concede that point. 

My real question is whether W&L’s decision to hold onto the Lee name may hurt its ability to attract the diverse applicants required to be the national liberal-arts college it aspires and deserves to be.  Washington & Lee has an opportunity, fraught with danger, to take Lee’s emphasis on civility (captured in its “speaking tradition”) and honor and to build on those values with a 21st century commitment to being a college that is traditional but also diverse, inclusive, and forward-looking. Is retaining Lee’s name an impediment to that?  

Washington & Lee’s neighbor, Virginia Military Institute, is dealing with its own challenges with regard to its past and its resistance to change.  Founded in 1839, VMI is the nation’s oldest state-supported military college, and it has a proud history of producing citizen soldiers and leaders.  Its graduates possess a loyalty perhaps unmatched by any other college, and it provides needed diversity within the landscape of American higher education.

The external review of VMI’s culture and climate came about after a Washington Post article reported that black cadets find themselves in an environment where not only is there continuing veneration of the Institute’s Confederate history but also racial insensitivity that extends to racial slurs and even references to lynching.  Other articles alleged differential treatment of minority students by VMI’s single-sanction honor system.

The Barnes and Thornburg report begins by describing VMI as traditionally “run by white men, for white men.”  It describes a culture resistant to changing practices and traditions that lack sensitivity to minority and female students.  It also finds that neither the Honor System nor the “Rat Line,” VMI’s two most distinctive and beloved traditions, are responsible for any of the racial or gender issues on Post, VMI’s name for its campus.

The report tells a story that is far more nuanced than the newspaper articles suggest.

Like W&L, VMI’s culture is closely tied to its association with a major Confederate figure. Stonewall Jackson, the legendary Confederate general who died from friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville (and whose arm is buried in a different location from the rest of him), was a professor at VMI, a charismatic figure who inspired loyalty from followers who were willing to overlook the fact that he was probably more than a little crazy (fortunately that would never happen today).  Until recently fourth class students were required to salute a statue of Jackson.  The Corps of Keydets also fought and lost ten members in the Battle of New Market, and until recently VMI students took the Cadet Oath on that battlefield.

The report alludes to a more fundamental issue that’s not unique to VMI but found on many campuses, a debate about the essence of an institution.  Nearly twenty years ago I served on a three-person team charged with evaluating VMI’s admissions and financial aid offices.  It was fascinating to spend three days on Post, and our report concluded that VMI needed to work hard to overcome unique challenges in recruiting both women and underrepresented minorities.

One of the interesting things we learned was that everyone at VMI had a clear vision of what the essence of the Institute was.  The only problem was that those visions, while clear, didn’t coincide.  The military people asserted that VMI was first and foremost a military school, the faculty believed that VMI was primarily an academic institution, and the athletic administrators and coaches argued that VMI had made a primary commitment to be a Division One athletic school.  

The Barnes and Thornburg report suggests that identity crisis still exists and plays into the culture issues that have brought attention to VMI.  The report suggests that the real tension at VMI is between athletes and non-athletes.  Non-athletes believe that athletes don’t buy into the full VMI experience and resent that they are excused from many of the disagreeable parts of the experience.  Where this crosses into race is a tendency among many associated with VMI to believe that all minority students at VMI are athletes.

The issues facing both colleges make Lexington, Virginia a front line in the culture wars. Washington & Lee and VMI are laboratories in the search to translate and adapt programs that have worked successfully in one era into a different era.  Are their core values timeless or relics of the past?

The Spanish philosopher George Santayana said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  But what about those who can’t let go of the past and those who want to erase the past?

Should College Lists Be Published or Perish?

I have been a pain this spring (my colleagues would probably say “more of a pain” is the more accurate description, and might specify a part of the anatomy as well).  I would like to think that I am generally easy to get along with, but I recognize that I also have an annoying streak of righteous indignation. 

My cause this spring has been shutting down the tradition of publishing a list of the colleges being attended by each of our seniors.  I know that other schools settled this a long time ago and will consider me a troglodyte for only litigating it now, but publishing the college list has long been an accepted cultural norm at my school, including a Commencement program insert and publication in the school magazine during the summer.  At a school that venerates tradition and traditions, change is never uncomplicated.

If students or parents have been bothered by publishing the college, I am not aware of it. That has made my questioning of the appropriateness of publishing a list seem like tilting at windmills, solving a problem that no one else thinks even exists.

Of course, “accepted,” or even “acceptable,” is not the same thing as “right.”  That distinction spotlights one of the foremost challenges in trying to live ethically on a daily basis, deciding which battles to fight and when. It is easy to take a stand when public opinion is with you and little moral courage is required, and much harder when a consensus isn’t present that a problem even exists.  There can be a fine line between “moral crusader” and “nut.”  Into which category I fall depends on your perspective.

The last few weeks of any school year bring a variety of requests from across campus wanting information on where members of the senior class are going to college.  The student newspaper wants to publish the college list in its last issue.  Members of the Alumni Board want to write personal letters to the graduates welcoming them into the alumni body, and having the student’s college selection will make the letter even more personal.  Lower school teachers are curious about how the little boys they taught years ago turned out..

I think the interest among various constituencies in the college list is for the most part legitimate.  A school like the one where I work is a family, and there is genuine interest, care, and concern for the other members of the extended family.  Preparing our students for college, both for admission and even more for success once in college, is a key part of our mission, and knowing that we have succeeded with a senior class is a point of pride for the entire school community.

The issue for me is not whether it is legitimate for members of the school community to ask for the information, but whether it is appropriate for the college counseling office to provide information about where individual students are going to college.  The college search process is intensely personal, and news about the outcome of that process should be the student’s to share, not my office’s.

Like many other ethical principles, that’s easier said than done.  In Homage to Clio the poet W.H. Auden pointed out that it is much easier to promise “I will love you forever” than it is to promise “I will love you next Tuesday.”  Similarly, it is one thing to make a moral pronouncement that the College Counseling Office will not release information about the college choices of individual seniors and another thing to refuse to tell a colleague where one of their students is going to college.  I’m not as pure nor as principled as I might claim or wish to be.

It was easy to wean the student newspaper away from dependence annually on a list provided by my office, pointing out that student journalists should practice the craft of reporting by gathering the information about college choices from the seniors themselves. (I did agree to serve as Deep Throat for my student Woodwards and Bernsteins, confirming or denying the information they had gathered.)  I told the Alumni Office that I had no objection to them having the information, but suggested that they should contact each soon-to-be alum to request his information.  I am more accommodating with individual colleagues who are asking about the college plans of a particular student.

No Commencement insert with each boy’s college choices was published, and the school publications will include only an aggregate list with only the colleges attended and the number of students attending each.

But is that any better?  A recent article by New York Times “Your Money” columnist Ron Lieber cautions against putting too much stock in published college lists of any kind.  Lieber describes such lists as being “as closely watched as the homecoming score and the police blotter,” and says that, “With each passing year, these lists become ever more misleading.”

Why misleading? Because highly-selective (or to use the more avant garde term, “highly-rejective”) colleges use the admissions process not to reward deserving students, but rather to craft a class that helps meet institutional priorities. In the rarified air where 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 superbly-qualified applicants are admitted, an individual applicant gets an acceptance letter  because they are “hooked” (recruited athlete, connected family, underrepresented diversity) or are just plain lucky.  Where they attend high school is no longer a hook if it ever was.

So is it wrong for schools to publish a list of where graduates are attending college?  Like so many other questions related to college admission (and ethics, for that matter), the answer is “It depends.”

At a basic level the list of colleges being attended by graduates is a report of factual information.  Of course it is rarely that alone, because it usually serves a marketing or advertising function as well.  My school generally runs a full-page ad in the local newspaper each spring around graduation, a practice in response to a similar ad produced by our sister school.  Are we celebrating our seniors, marketing the school, or both?

Whatever the intent, that practice can backfire and send unintended messages.  Several years ago our admissions and marketing offices, which oversee production of the ad, produced an ad featuring college pennants. The pennants did not represent a cross-section of senior choices, but rather the “name” colleges being attended by some of our graduates.  That can lead people to believe that only name colleges are important and valued.  Two hours after the ad appeared I had an email from a senior parent wanting to know why his son’s choice was on the list.  I told him that the ad did not come from the College Counseling Office and that we value and celebrate every student’s college choice.

The publishing of some kind of college list is probably not going away, because the public wants that information.  Some years ago when a colleague of mine had a son applying to kindergarten, he attended the admissions open house.  During the presentation he observed prospective parents casually leafing through the packet of information—until they came to the college list.

I think our job as educators is telling parents not just what they want to know, but what they need to know.  Any published college list should prominently feature the disclaimer, “Your results may vary.” 

More importantly, schools should emphasize not college placement but college counseling.  The real secret sauce of any good school is not its college results but its ability to help students and parents navigate a process that is confusing at best and irrational at worst.  Good college counseling is worth its weight in gold—or at least more than any of us are being paid.     

Wait Lists, Poaching, Extension Etiquette

On the first day of May I sent my children a text message, “May Day!!! May Day!!!”  My daughter responded, “Such a dad joke.” And indeed it was.

For some in the college admissions world May 1 can be May Day, a day for celebration, for dancing around the Maypole to celebrate the fertility of the admissions cycle or holding a Soviet-bloc military parade to show off institutional enrollment strength.  (Where does one rent parade missiles and tanks these days?)

For other institutions that haven’t “made” their class, the proper response to May Day might be to issue a “May Day!!!” distress call, as May 1 becomes a day not for celebration but rather a day of reckoning or even panic. We know that the idea of May 1 as an “end” to the admissions cycle has always been a convention, a useful fiction, and with COVID having knocked the admissions process off its moorings, even the most optimistic of us expected that the “process” will extend longer in 2021 than in previous years.

There has been a lot of speculation that colleges would keep longer wait lists this spring and make more frequent use of them.  A recent article in Inside Higher Ed reported on a survey of high school seniors conducted by Art & Science Group that indicated that 20 percent were on at least one wait list, and I have heard of a major state university with a wait list numbering 15,000, or twice the size of its entering class a year ago.  I have also seen more colleges adopt some sort of guaranteed transfer option at a specific institution or a program like Verto.

For all the talk about wait lists, I have seen or heard very little actual wait list movement thus far this spring.  There are the usual suspects for whom the wait list is an intentional part of their enrollment management strategy, who might admit 10-20% of the freshman class annually using the wait list as a kind of “Early Decision 3,” but otherwise, very little wait list action for being in the second full week of May. 

It is certainly possible that I’ve just missed it—it wouldn’t be the first time.  But I also wonder if we are seeing a subtle shift in the admissions landscape with regard to wait lists. Will one of the fault lines between rich and poor institutions become the ability to even have a wait list?

The assumption has always been that once colleges at the top of the food chain begin going to their wait lists, there will be a ripple effect, perhaps even an enrollment pandemic, with colleges infected with “May melt” as students leave to upgrade to reach schools accepting them off wait lists.  That assumption is grounded in the belief that college choice is first and foremost about prestige and brand.

I wouldn’t bet against that proposition, even as I don’t want to accept it, but recently saw an interesting trend with my own students.  Right after May 1 my local newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, did a front-page story on the fact that the most competitive public universities in Virginia have significantly larger wait lists this year.  The reporter asked if I could connect him with a couple of  wait-listed students. 

Three responded that they would prefer not to be interviewed.  All of them said that they are happy with their choice, and that while they might consider a wait list offer, they wouldn’t leap to change.  One talked about feeling exhausted after a trying school year and wanting to be settled with the decision.  Perhaps the prevailing wisdom about students jumping at wait list offers will hold up, but this year has affected all of us in ways we don’t fully understand, and we shouldn’t assume that the old norms will hold in a world that is different.  

My students’ responses have perhaps more significance for colleges that don’t have the luxury of going to a wait list now that May 1 is past.  Before we had a pandemic to worry about, the raging issue in the admissions world was whether we would see a dramatic increase in post-May 1 poaching in the wake of the demise of NACAC’s mandatory ethical standards after the DOJ investigation.  I was about to say I haven’t seen that, but just now a senior stopped by to ask if it was normal to be offered an extra $10,000 in scholarship money.

I wonder if my students’ hesitancy to talking with the reporter about wait lists, and particularly the reflection on feeling exhausted, serves as a cautionary tale for colleges who hope to induce second thoughts or buyers’ remorse among students who have already deposited at another college.  How many students and parents can be bought by additional scholarship dollars or perks like guaranteed parking places or preference in course registration?  Can incentives change the mind of someone who has decided and is ready to move on?

The other issue is how to let the public know that a college is still open, perhaps even very open, for business.  The most common means of spreading the word that applications are welcome is what used to be called the NACAC Space Availability Survey.  Like a number of other NACAC services and programs, it has been rebranded, and is now the College Openings Update: Options for Qualified Students.  It is only a matter of time until that becomes an acronym, COUOQS. 

NACAC produced that survey earlier than normal this year, and as of this morning there are nearly 400 colleges on the list.  I can imagine that adding your institution’s name to that list is a strategic dilemma for many enrollment managers.  Do you look desperate, and given the principle of transparency, is there anything wrong with looking desperate when you are in fact desperate?  In the interest of fairness, I would also point out that what most of us really need is a list of options for unqualified students.

Over the past few weeks I have received several communications from colleges announcing that they are extending their application deadlines.  Those announcements raise some interesting questions.  Who is the target audience?  Are there students just getting around to applying for the fall now?  And why set deadlines at all?  Setting an application deadline is generally a good idea unless the deadline passes and you haven’t reached your goal.  There are plenty of students and parents who take deadlines seriously and won’t apply even if they have interest, assuming it’s too late.  Once a deadline comes and goes, the one who is dead could very well be the one who created the deadline.

Is there an etiquette to extending deadlines?  I’ve noticed several guiding principles.

The first is “It’s not me, it’s you.” You never admit that you are extending your deadline because you need applications.  Perhaps that doesn’t need to be said, because students and parents are relatively savvy, or at least suspicious that you are not extending out of the goodness of your heart.  Nevertheless, deadline extensions are always positioned as done out of concern for students rather than the institution.

The second principle is tying the deadline extension to some item in the news.  If you need to extend your deadline, hope for a volcano eruption in Iceland, a typhoon in Bora Bora, or panic over gasoline shortages caused by pipeline cyberattacks.  Even if students live thousands of miles away or have no geographical knowledge of where those places are, you can justify the extension based on the fact that the event impacts students in some way.  Of course COVID provides a legitimate cover for any change, even a change of deadline, both this year and probably for the next couple.

Stepping back from my feeble attempts at humor (“Such a dad joke”), I hope all of us feel empathy for our admissions colleagues for whom May is in no way an end to the admissions cycle.  May all of us survive COVID--and the admission challenges posed by COVID.

Rejectivity

(Originally published in the May 3, 2021 edition of Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider”

I have a new favorite college admissions-themed adjective—“highly-rejective,” as in “highly-rejective colleges.”  I was first introduced to the term by friend and ECA reader Mike Oligmueller several weeks ago, and it was apparently first coined by Akil Bello on Twitter back on March 12.  Last month a post by Jon Boeckenstedt for his excellent Higher Ed Data Stories blog was titled “The Highly Rejective Colleges.”

“Highly-rejective” is obviously a play on “highly-selective,” but is it more than that?  Are “rejective” and “selective” synonyms, different attitudes reflecting the same truth? Are they opposite sides of the same coin, such that a college is selective if you happen to get in and rejective if you don’t? Selective certainly sounds more affirming and less cold, but is that a good thing?

Will 2021 come to be known as the year of highly-rejective admission?  The group of colleges and universities labelled by sobriquets ranging from “highly-selective” to “hyper-selective” to “elite” have had record-low admit rates this year, with Harvard bottoming the list at 3.5%.  But does a low admit rate equal “highly-rejective”? What if many of those not admitted are not denied admission but rather Wait Listed? Does that make a college “highly-Wait List-ive”?

The more interesting question is whether 2021’s highly-rejective numbers are a product of COVID.  Any attempt to analyze or provide context for this admissions cycle is at best an incomplete first draft of history, but it certainly appears that the chasm has widened between rich and poor institutions, or what Jeff Selingo calls “buyers” (poor) and “sellers” (rich).  The most popular institutions have thrived, but there are many good and venerable colleges struggling to make their class and maybe struggling for survival.

The popular narrative is that test-optional policies have emboldened students to apply to places they wouldn’t have had they been required to submit SAT or ACT scores.  I wonder if the test-optional explanation is sufficient. Is the increase in highly-rejective admission a short term by-product of COVID, or has COVID merely accelerated and accentuated a trend that has played out over the course of my career?

Over the past thirty years the number of colleges and universities that qualify as “highly-rejective” has proliferated.  In 1992 there were 20 colleges that admitted fewer than one-third of applicants, according to data provided in that year’s U.S. News “America’s Best Colleges” guide; today there are 75-80.  There were 2 colleges that admitted fewer than 20%, and today that number is closer to 40. 

So what is responsible for the change?  Are there far more students graduating from high school and going to college?  Are students applying to more colleges because it is easier to do so, thanks to innovations like the Common Application?  Or is the increase in “highly-rejective” colleges a product of the influence of college rankings?

One factor is the evolution of college admission into a sophisticated business. The move to a business orientation brings with it not only enhanced use of marketing techniques and data analytics, but also acceptance of the adage that if you are not moving ahead, you are falling behind. One of the easiest ways to demonstrate progress is to increase the number of applicants and decrease the admit rate.

To borrow a phrase made popular by late-night TV advertising, “But Wait, There’s More.”  There is a deeper issue here, a fundamental clash of world-views about the essence of the college search and higher education itself.  Is college about brand or experience, and is college choice about prestige or fit?

Selectivity has always been closely aligned with the quest for prestige, believing (or at least wanting us to believe) that the harder a college is to get in, the better it must be.  That view is explained by Marxist theory, with the Marx in this case being Groucho.  Groucho Marx never wanted to be a member of a club that would have someone like him as a member. That, my friends, is the rationale for selective admission.  The assumption is that the less likely it is that a place will have you as a member (offer admission), the more desirable it becomes.

At some point low admit rates changed from being a by-product of success to a metric of success, and ultimately became the goal of the admissions process itself.  For colleges and universities wanting to swim with the sharks, a key part of institutional brand today involves worshipping at the altar of “rejectivity.”

My computer’s version of Microsoft Office does not recognize rejectivity as a word, but in fact the term is associated with psychologist Eric Erickson’s Psychosocial Stages of Development.  For Erickson rejectivity refers to a sense of stagnation and a lack of meaning in one’s actions that may occur between the ages of 25 and 64.

In a college admission context the gospel of rejectivity is an antidote to an institutional sense of stagnation.  Highly-rejective colleges derive meaning and status from their ability to turn away more applicants, and the belief in rejectivity explains college admissions conventions from “recruit to reject” to the use of Early Decision as a tool to lock up a large portion of the entering class, making “regular” admission much more competitive.

But has rejectivity gotten out of hand?  Several years ago New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, who recently announced that he will be leaving the Times staff for an endowed professorship at highly-rejective Duke University, wrote a tongue-in-cheek column where he claimed that Stanford would be admitting not a single student for that admissions cycle.  Today we might call that perfect rejectivity.  The premise for that column doesn’t seem quite as funny today as when it was published.

Thirty years ago, the lowest admit rate for any college was 17%.  Has the increased rejectivity produced a better college admissions process?  Colleges are continually pushed to be more rejective by Boards, rankings, and even bond-rating agencies.  But does a 95% rejection rate produce better classes than an 83% rejection rate, or does it increase the sense among the public that the system is rigged?  College admission depends on public confidence and trust in our process and our profession.  That confidence and trust have already been threatened by the shenanigans of wealthy parents in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.  Does excessive fealty to the gospel of rejectivity pose a greater threat?

I don’t have an answer, but as a college counselor I struggle with my responsibility to students and parents. Good college counseling requires a Wallenda-like balancing act between supporting students’ dreams and making sure they understand the reality they face.  It would be unethical for me to discourage students from applying to certain schools, but is it ethical to encourage them to apply to schools where their chances are almost non-existent?  How do I avoid feeding the beast of rejectivity?

Can we band together to “Reject Rejectivity,” or at least put it on a Wait List?

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.