Test Free, Not Test Blind?

“School’s Out for Summer”

                        Alice Cooper

During the nearly ten years that I have been writing Ethical College Admissions, it has generally been my plan to go on hiatus during the summer, thinking there would be no news and no readers during the summer months.  The exception was the three years that I wrote a weekly column for Inside Higher Ed, and to my surprise I found there was plenty to write about.

A couple of weeks ago I planned to write one more post and then shut down for the summer, but didn’t have a topic in mind.  One of the interesting things about writing this blog is the ebb and flow of topics.  One day I have nothing, and the next day too many possible topics.  That happened in this case.

Following my keynote address at the Pennsylvania Association for College Admission Counseling conference in Hershey on June 20,  my friend and loyal ECA reader Barbara Conner, Director of College Counseling at Foxcroft School, asked if I planned to turn the keynote into a blog post.  My initial reaction was no, but a couple of days later I rethought that, and ended up producing two posts based on the speech.  One appeared last week in Inside Higher Ed, and I believe the other will appear next week as my final post before taking the rest of the summer off (unless a major issue comes up that I can’t avoid addressing).

Within a day of the publication of last week’s post, several readers contacted me with suggestions for possible topics.  I’m going to respond with two shorter posts this week, and save the other for the fall. 

*****************************************************************************

Here’s the first:

In the last post I asked whether it is time to rethink the college admissions process, and I used the rise of test-optional and test-blind admission as an example of an area where old assumptions are being questioned.  Afterward I received an email from ECA reader and occasional correspondent Jay Rosner, the Executive Director of the Princeton Review Foundation.

Jay wrote to suggest that the term “test blind” be replaced with “test free.”  He pointed out that the University of California system started using “test blind” as an analog to the financial aid use of “need blind,” but that UC Berkeley has moved to use “test free” to describe its policy.  He argued that “test free” more accurately captures the spirit of the policy, in that “test blind implies that the test scores are there and available for admissions and just not ‘seen,’ while some test-free colleges request that scores not be submitted at all.”

He added, “I happen to prefer the liberation implication for test free. Tests have constricted and skewed the admissions process for a long time, and their absence in admissions frees admissions officers to focus upon the broader band of skills, experiences, and other factors beyond those required to fill bubbles quickly and accurately, and not get distracted by a problematic sense of contrived linear comparability.”

I like the substitution of “test free” for “test blind.”  I think it’s a better description of the change in testing policies.  I also happen to have an affinity for the word “free,” especially at a time when “free to be you and me” is endangered by those who decry judicial activism except when it serves their purposes. (Forgive the political commentary.)

Jay Rosner also offered several other arguments for the substitution in his email and a followup email.

One is sensitivity for how the term “test blind” might be perceived by the sight-impaired community.  “In checking with the sight-impaired community,” he wrote, “I found that some were bothered by test blind, while others were not, but there’s no need to make the former uncomfortable even if it is a minority position in that community.”

I think he’s right.  I might disagree if “test blind” was the only, or even the best, language to describe the testing policy adopted by the UC system, but it’s not.

Jay’s second point has to do with the origins of college admissions testing, particularly the SAT.  He stated, “The SAT, the grandparent of all the admissions tests, was developed by Carl Brigham, a eugenicist, specifically as an instrument to prove the superiority of the white race.  Test developers disclaim this heritage in eugenics, but bubble-test results tedn today to parallel past results.”

He stated that he would likely have a friendly quibble or two with what I write.  I’m going to have a friendly quibble with him on this point.

His interpretation of the intent of the origins of testing is certainly plausible, but I am not convinced.  Brigham and many of his contemporaries in lots of fields were eugenicists, and today they look profoundly ignorant.  But I think that the connection between the eugenicist beliefs of Brigham and his contemporaries and the origins of admissions testing is more tenuous, more complex, based on two separate flawed assumptions.

The first flaw is the belief that it is possible to devise a multiple-choice test that can measure intelligence.  Today we know that intelligence is a complex concept, with many varieties.  At best admissions tests measure imprecisely one kind of intelligence, and what they can’t begin to measure are qualities such as motivation and perseverance that are far more important to an individual’s success.

The second flaw was a belief in a form of the “rational person fallacy.”  All of us are prone to that fallacy.  In its simplest form it says that if I believe something, then surely any rational person would believe the same thing.  That’s obviously a dangerous belief.  

The more odious form of that fallacy is that our belief system or cultural norms should be normative, that it is our duty to make those different from us resemble us because we are “right” or the model of God’s creation.  The best example of that is Christian missionaries trying to convert those they considered “savages.” That same intellectual arrogance was at the root of eugenics, the belief that it is possible to create a race of pure and perfect human beings–that coincidentally look a lot like us.  There is no such thing as either pure or perfect when it comes to human beings.

Jay Rosner’s final point was that the term “test free” has an unanticipated and ironic consequence.  He wrote, “The mere existence of test free has led to high-level reps from both the College Board and ACT recently actually being quoted as favoring test-optional admissions!  Who would have thought?...Self interest just might have something to do with their dramatic shift in position.”

I suspect he’s right.  Test-optional policies are a threat to a world where admissions tests are ubiquitous and worshiped, but if your livelihood depends on the testing industry, then a world that is test-optional sounds pretty good compared with one that is test-free.

I appreciate Jay Rosner’s thoughts and correspondence. And unless I forget and revert back to being a creature of habit, out with test blind and in with test free.

Keystone Keynote, Part 1--Time for a New Admissions Paradigm?

(This is the first of a two-part post based on a keynote address I gave last Monday at the Pennsylvania Association for College Admission Counseling conference in Hershey. It originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” this morning. Thanks to loyal ECA reader Barbara Conner for suggesting that I turn the speech into a blog post.)

Last week I had the opportunity to serve as keynote speaker at the Pennsylvania Association for College Admission Counseling conference in Hershey.  It was the first time in three years that PACAC had been able to meet in person, and it was more like a homecoming or family reunion than a conference.  It was good to see old friends and make new ones.

My keynote address was titled, “Professional Ethics: Endangered Species?”, and I explored some themes I have previously written about and presented on.  Quite frankly, after nearly ten years of writing ECA I often worry that I am rehashing previous posts.

While researching my presentation I realized that I had done the keynote eleven years ago at a different PACAC event, the August Admission Workshop. For that meeting I was asked to talk about the future of our profession, and I mentioned five big issues:

• Demographic Change

• Economic Uncertainty

• Delivery of College Counseling

• Changing Admission Landscape

• The Future of College Admissions and College Counseling as a Profession

All of those issues are still relevant, but what is more noteworthy is what I didn’t (and probably couldn’t) anticipate.  I couldn’t have dreamed that NACAC would be investigated by the DOJ for potential antitrust violations.  I didn’t foresee the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.  It never occurred to me that within ten years we would live through a global pandemic.  And I didn’t anticipate the political climate and social unrest that led on one hand to the Black Lives Matter movement and on the other to red state attempts to return to the 1950s.

During my speech I talked primarily about professional ethics, but I also talked about how COVID has highlighted the urgent need for attention to mental health and wellness.  I suspect that we will be dealing with the fallout for at least a decade as students who lost opportunities for learning and for normal emotional development during the pandemic cycle through the educational system.  That is both a college counseling issue and also an issue for colleges once students enroll.

The question for the college admissions profession is whether the college admissions process as presently constituted contributes to the stress and mental health issues felt by today’s students.  

The admission process we have today is nearly 100 years old.  In his history of admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, The Chosen, sociologist Jerome Karabel talks about college admission “paradigms” (my word, not his).  

A century ago colleges looked for the “best student.”  Admission was based on purely academic preparation, with the old College Board exams resembling today’s Advanced Placement exams, measuring what content a student knew.

In the 1920s colleges moved to a second admissions paradigm, “best graduate.”  Karabel argues that the rationale for the change was that the “best student” paradigm produced too many Jewish students.  Today one of the arguments made by Students for Fair Admissions in its lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is that Asian-American students are discriminated against in the way Jewish students were a century ago.  

The “best graduate” paradigm led to many of the admissions conventions we rely on today. Admission became “holistic” rather than purely academic, with essays, activities, and recommendation letters becoming part of the admissions process. While I believe in the concept of holistic admission, the addition of those factors made applying to college resemble applying to a private club. At the same time the SAT supplanted the old College Board exams, purported at the time to be a measure of aptitude, as venerable Northeast colleges and universities sought to become more national in their student bodies and find “diamonds in the rough.” 

The third, current paradigm is what might be called “best class.” Whereas once upon a time colleges admitted well-rounded students, today they are looking for a well-rounded class.  Highly-selective colleges are crafting a class rather than admitting deserving individuals, and students are admitted based on how they help the institution meet its strategic goals.  We give lip service to student-centered admission, but what we have is really institution-centered admission.

Given what we know about adolescent growth and development and concerns about access and mental health, is it time for a fourth paradigm?

There has already been considerable debate about the future role of standardized admission testing.  The admissions world has become largely test optional, and in some cases test-blind.  Is that a temporary change or the new normal?  Was MIT’s resumption of requiring testing a harbinger or an outlier?  

I suspect the latter. I may be wrong (it wouldn’t be the first time), but I don’t see the testing industry rebounding to be as important as it once was.  The Ivies and near-Ivies that admit fewer than 10% of applicants can get away with requiring testing, but will students bother to apply to colleges with test requirements when there are lots of test-optional choices?  That is particularly true for colleges that recruit heavily in California, where both the UC and the Cal State systems are no longer considering test scores as part of their admissions processes.  Are colleges willing to see a decline in applications in exchange for requiring test scores? 

The testing debate raises broader philosophical questions about the value of test scores.  How much predictive value does testing add to a student’s transcript? Are standardized tests engines of equity and access, as argued by test advocates, or do they measure economic privilege rather than academic readiness? How do we account for test prep, the existence of which makes identical scores mean not the same thing? Do we worship the false precision of test scores? And do we measure what we value or value what we can measure?

Testing may not be the only part of the admissions process up for debate and reconsideration.  An Inside Higher Ed article earlier this year asked whether letters of recommendation were fair or even outdated given the inequality in school college-going cultures and counseling loads.

So what might a fourth college admissions paradigm look like?  At the risk of showing once again my command of the obvious, here are some guiding principles to consider.

1. The college admissions process should measure readiness for the college experience.

Anything that we ask students to do should be predictive of success in college, and we should evaluate carefully the hurdles we expect applicants to clear.  What information is essential to admission? Earlier this week a college dean admitted that some of the information requested on the application is relevant for students once they enroll rather than for admission.

1. The college search should encourage discernment and self-understanding.

Thinking about and applying to college are part of a larger journey for students, a journey that should produce a better understanding of who they are, what they care about, and what they want from their lives.

1. Applying to college should be a “Goldilocks” process.

Not too easy, not too hard, just right.

1. The admission process should be student-centered rather than institution-centered.

There is one more guiding principle that will be much more difficult to achieve.  That is the idea that the admissions process should serve as a bridge from adolescence to adulthood, a rite of passage.  Taking the SAT and ACT and writing personal essays does not quite compare to rites of passage in other cultures such as young Maasai warriors killing a lion (although that rite of passage seems to have evolved due to a shortage of lions in the Serengeti, from 200,000 a century ago to fewer than 30,000 today).  The psychologist Michael Thompson has called the college admissions process a “failed” rite of passage, in that it provides the ordeal without the catharsis. 

The bridge to adulthood goal may be a pipedream.  Given what we know about brain development, it may be unrealistic to expect high school students to have the self-knowledge or life skills that I wish the college process required.  I’m not ready to concede that point, and that doesn’t mean that the aspiration is not valid.

Is it time to rethink the college admissions process we have? Can we develop a better paradigm? 

Preferential Recruiting

The last ECA post commented on some issues arising out of the brief filed with the United States Supreme Court on May 2 by Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA) in its case alleging discrimination against Asian-American applicants to Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill.  There was one other issue from that brief that I intended to address, but inadvertently left out when I put the finishing touches on the post, trying to keep it from turning into a tome.

Beginning on page 20 of the SFFA brief there is a section that argues that “Harvard uses race at every stage of the admissions process.”  That includes recruiting students differently based on race.

The brief states that “African-American and Hispanic students with PSAT scores of 1100 and up are invited to apply to Harvard, but white and Asian-American students must score at least 1310 to get an invitation.”  It continues, “In some states (which Harvard calls ‘sparse country’), Asian-American students must score higher [italics theirs] than all other racial groups, including whites, to be recruited by Harvard.”

I think those couple of sentences raise some interesting questions about affirmative action in college admissions.  Previous court cases involving the use of race in admission have focused on how admissions decisions are made.  

The Bakke case in the 1970s involved a program at the University of California at Davis medical school whereby 16 of the 100 places in the entering class were set aside for “qualified” minority applicants.  The Supreme Court in a divided vote concluded that the UC-Davis program was a quota system and that the medical school was conducting two separate admissions processes, one for minority applicants and one for the rest of the applicant pool.

The Gratz case, decided at the same time as the Grutter case that is now being challenged by Students For Fair Admissions, involved the University of Michigan’s practice of giving applicants from underrepresented minority groups an additional 20 points toward the 100 needed for undergraduate admission.  By a 6-3 margin the Court found that the thumb on the scales approach wasn’t constitutional.

The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that it is appropriate to consider race as one of many factors in a holistic admissions process.  That interpretation has its origins in an amicus curiae filed in the Bakke case by none other than Harvard.  Critics of affirmative action in college admission question whether race is indeed one of many factors, or whether colleges have simply found more subtle ways to consider race than the quota system outlawed in Bakke.  

While most of the discussion of affirmative action in college admission focuses on how decisions are made, what about recruitment?  Is it wrong to use different techniques to recruit students from different ethnic or demographic groups?

To be fair, the Students For Fair Admissions brief doesn’t argue that differential recruiting is wrong.  It includes the mention of different cutoffs for different groups primarily to argue that Harvard is conscious of race in all parts of its admissions process.  But is Harvard discriminating by using different cutoff scores in recruiting?

The reference to scores refers to the score parameters that colleges can use when they use the College Board’s Student Search Service.  Student Search gives colleges the ability to reach out to desired groups of students based on factors ranging from their scores on the PSAT or SAT to planned major to zip code.  

We might question whether a university that already rejects 97% of applicants, many of them superbly qualified, needs to be actively recruiting students most of whom won’t have a chance of admission, but the practice of using Student Search to target particular groups of students is a mainstream practice. White and Asian-American students with a score below 1310 aren’t in any way prohibited from applying to Harvard because they don’t get an “invitation,” and this past year close to 60,000 somehow found a way to apply without being actively recruited. 

One of the original definitions of affirmative action was finding ways to expand the pool of candidates to open up opportunities to those who had been excluded by traditional processes.  That was particularly true for institutions like trade unions or public sector jobs such as police and firefighters that were at one time largely closed shops.  It was considered appropriate (and necessary) to expand the pool of candidates from traditionally underrepresented groups by targeted recruitment efforts for those groups.

I think the same is true for colleges.  For a college looking to broaden its diversity, whether ethnic, gender, geographical, or other, it is entirely appropriate to develop recruitment initiatives that reach a broader array of students from underrepresented populations.

There is a clear difference between preferential recruitment and preferential admission.  Colleges have an obligation to give fair consideration of the credentials of every single applicant.  They don’t have an obligation to “invite” every student whose PSAT scores are at a certain level to apply. 

If test scores were perfect predictive tools, it might be appropriate to expect the same test score parameters for every group of students.  But they are not. We know that test scores correlate with family income, and that they disadvantage, or at least don’t predict success, for all segments of an applicant pool.  Different recruiting standards is not the same thing as different admission standards. 

Isn't It Ironic, or Students for Fair Admissions Seeks to Get Out of (the) Grutter

“Define irony,”  convict Garland Greene (played by Steve Buscemi) says in the movie Con Air as convicts celebrate commandeering a plane.  His definition is “Bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.”

On May 2 we may have found another example.  On the very same day that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade was leaked, Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) filed its brief before the Supreme Court in its case against Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s consideration of race in admissions. Define irony.

There are several levels of irony in the interplay between the SFFA filing and Alito’s opinion.  The first is the apparent coincidence of the Roe draft leak and the SFFA brief coming out the same day.  The second is that both attempt to overturn 40-50 years of previous court decisions, abandoning stare decisis, or court reverence for precedent. And both claim to be descendents of Brown v Board of Education.

ECA has read through the SFFA petition to save readers from having to slog through it.  Much of it rehashes arguments that weren’t successful in lower court attempts against the two institutions.  Students for Fair Admissions alleges that both Harvard and UNC discriminate against Asian-American applicants because of their use of race-conscious admission practices to achieve racial diversity.  

The primary evidence cited against Harvard is the lower personal ratings that Asian-American applicants receive, a rating that SFFA alleges lowers inappropriately and illegally the percentage of Asian-American students in each entering class.  With UNC the primary argument is that the university does not consider Asian-Americans as an underrepresented minority as it does with African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

There is one interesting (and I think new) argument in the SFFA filing. It asks the Supreme Court to overturn the 2003 case Grutter v Bollinger.

Grutter was one of two challenges to affirmative action in admissions at the University of Michigan decided at the same time.  The other, Gratz v Bollinger, involved the university’s undergraduate admissions program that gave underrepresented minority applicants additional points equal to 20% of those needed for admission, and the Supreme Court decided by a 6-3 vote that that practice was unconstitutional.  

Grutter v Bollinger involved a challenge to the admissions process used by Michigan’s law school.  In that case the Supreme Court decided by a 5-4 vote that Michigan’s process to obtain “a critical mass of underrepresented minority students” constituted neither a quota nor racial balancing and was therefore constitutionally permitted.

So why is Grutter in SFFA’s sights in this case?  Because in both of the most recent challenges to race-based admission before the Supreme Court, Fisher 1  and Fisher 2, the Court based part of its opinion exonerating the University of Texas by referring to the Grutter opinion, and stressed that no party had asked it to reconsider Grutter.

Now SFFA is asking for that reconsideration, at least partly because it thinks it has a Supreme Court willing to overturn precedent.  But it is also making the claim that its request to end all race-based admission policies is in keeping with the Court’s Brown v Board of Education decision denying the use of race as a factor in determining educational opportunities.  By extension Grutter, which concluded that diversity was a compelling interest sustaining race-based admission, must be a descendent of Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 decision allowing separate but equal schools. The SFFA petition argues that universities ignore Grutter’s conclusion that the use of race must be narrowly-tailored, and that they “resort to camouflage,” using “winks, nods, and disguises” to achieve racial balancing and secret racial quotas.  It concludes that “Because Brown is our law, Grutter cannot be.”   

It’s an interesting and creative argument, but not one I find compelling.  The Brown v Board of Education decision was intended to prevent educational opportunities from being limited or prevented on account of race.  Race-conscious admission is intended to increase opportunities for underrepresented groups.  Race-conscious admission is certainly controversial, but not the same thing as separate but equal, unless you extend the argument to claim that any use of race that benefits one group automatically disadvantages another group, which is what Students for Fair Admissions is claiming with regard to Asian-Americans.

So what are the bigger issues here?

The first is what constitutes “fair” admission.  Students For Fair Admissions claims that the use of race-based affirmative action is unfair, but there are other admissions preferences–for legacies and for athletes–that benefit those who are already privileged.  Why is SFFA not challenging those in court?  It is also the case that “rejectivity” is the enemy of fairness.  When Harvard is admitting 3% of its applicants and could admit 3-4 different freshman classes that wouldn’t look all that different, it is hard to argue that any applicant is wronged when not admitted.

There is also the fundamental question of how to compare the credentials of two applicants.  If you and I both apply to Harvard and are both qualified for and deserving of admission, is it possible to determine that one of us is more qualified and deserving?  Even if I have better grades and test scores, I may have the advantage of coming from a wealthy family, a better-resourced school (or one with more grade inflation), and I may have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on test prep.  Which of us is more deserving? Grades and test scores are meaningless without context.

As pointed out in the lower court decision in Harvard’s favor, the discrepancy in personal rating scores between Asian-Americans and other groups is problematic.  If comparing academic credentials or extracurricular activities is difficult, how does Harvard begin to measure and compare qualities like leadership, self-confidence, likeability, and kindness?  And does the personal rating advantage certain kinds of students and disadvantage others?

A second issue is what constitutes “underrepresented”?  Students For Fair Admissions argues that Asian-American applicants are being discriminated against because the percentage enrolled would be higher if only academic credentials were considered, but the percentage at both Harvard and UNC exceeds the percentage in the population at large.  Is that underrepresented?

The third issue has to do with burden of proof.  In previous cases dealing with race-based affirmative action, the Court has given deference to universities to decide what admissions policies support their missions.  Students For Fair Admissions is arguing that the burden of proof should be on universities to defend their use of race rather than on those questioning those practices.

There is one other important issue raised by the decision in Grutter.  That decision included the expectation that affirmative action would no longer be needed in 25 years.  We are nearly 20 years in, and I am not aware of anyone on the admissions side of the house that thinks that deadline is achievable.  We certainly have a better understanding today that racial inequality in our country continues to be pervasive and deep. 

Do we (and should we) have an exit strategy for racial preferences in college admission?  I remember when we were told that America would only need to stay in Afghanistan for 75 more years.  Is the need for race-based preferences in admission similar?

That’s a difficult conversation to have, and I don’t pretend to have the right answer.  The alternative is hoping that a Supreme Court that has already shown a willingness to ignore precedent and turn back the clock will uphold Grutter and the current use of race in college admission.  Define irony.   

MIT, Diamonds in the Rough, and the Testing Culture Wars

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on May 2, 2022)

Someone once said (okay, it might have been me) that when Harvard itches, everyone else in higher education scratches.  Is the same true of MIT?

We may soon have an answer to that question. MIT’s announcement that it will reinstate its requirement that applicants submit test scores next year has already generated responses from those who believe that it is time for admission tests to disappear altogether as well as from apologists for the testing industry.  

Is MIT’s decision the beginning of a trend, an anomaly, or neither? We probably already have the answer, at least in one regard.  MIT’s announcement has not opened the floodgates to other institutions reversing their test-optional policies.  MIT’s decision was thoughtful and mission-appropriate, even if test skeptics may disagree with the decision, the rationale, or MIT’s interpretation of the evidence.  But MIT’s decision doesn’t translate to lots and lots of other colleges and universities.  This is not the beginning of the end of test-optional.

There are, of course, some global reasons why test-optional policies will not go away.  One is the decision by the University of California and Cal State systems to no longer use test scores in their admission processes.  As a result colleges that recruit heavily in California will have a hard time reinstating test score requirements.  But students outside of California may also rebel against colleges that return to requiring test scores.  The Ivies may be able to get away with it, but two years ago, when the pandemic accelerated the number of colleges going the test-optional route, an admissions dean friend postulated that colleges farther down the food chain may find that students may simply refuse to apply to colleges that aren’t test-optional.

Then there is the elephant in the room.  Perhaps the only force more powerful than the desire to use test scores as an insurance policy in evaluating students’ academic preparation is the pressure on colleges to increase applications and lower admit rates.  Can colleges afford to lose application numbers in a climate where selectivity is worshiped as a proxy for quality?

I’m not particularly interested in weighing in on the testing culture wars.  I don’t think admission tests are evil, just flawed.  But I also am bothered by the worship and misuse of test scores.

ECA is always on the lookout for bigger picture issues, and there are a couple I want to examine.

One is the notion that test scores are an engine of diversity.  I have seen that argument made by defenders of admissions tests multiple times, and I wonder if there is evidence for that or if it is a suburban legend.

One argument I saw for the use of test scores argued that without test scores things like legacy preferences become more powerful.  Maybe, but that’s not evidence for the power of test scores to increase diversity.

The more common articulation is the “diamond in the rough” argument, which says that test scores identify students with ability who come from different backgrounds and would otherwise be overlooked.  The “diamond in the rough” argument was one of the justifications for the move from College Board exams to the SAT nearly 100 years ago, at a time when the Ivies and other elite Northeastern colleges were looking to broaden their student bodies geographically and enroll more public school students.  That was also at a time when the SAT was seen as an objective measure of intelligence.

Today we understand that test scores correlate strongly with family income and that what tests measure is far from clear.  But the “diamond in the rough” argument persists.   

So is there any evidence that the “diamond in the rough” is a real phenomenon?  I reached out to Jon Boeckenstedt at Oregon State, who has been known to call out the “diamond in the rough” argument on Twitter and is also a guru when it comes to aggregating and analyzing data about college admission and higher education in general.  Jon wasn’t aware of any data to support the “diamond in the rough” hypothesis, but also suggested that it was at some level tautological, that “diamonds in the rough” with high test scores are the only diamonds that highly-rejective colleges tend to take a chance on.

I also reached out to Stuart Schmill, MIT’s Dean of Admissions, to ask if he had data on how many MIT students qualify as “diamonds in the rough.”  He was gracious to respond and gracious to admit that he is a regular ECA reader.  He stated that he couldn’t name a specific number, but that he was convinced that there are students whose test scores help MIT to admit them.  He also stated that a number of MIT alums have expressed their belief that they fell into that category. 

His response made me wonder if all of us have the same definition of “diamond in the rough.”  In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Bob Schaeffer, the executive director of FairTest (National Center for Fair and Open Testing) defined “diamonds in the rough” as “applicants with modest high school records but high SAT scores,” pointing that those students are more often than not affluent Asian or white males.  MIT is clearly not admitting those students, leading me to think it is using a different definition (the use of the term “diamond in the rough” was probably mine, not Stu Schmill’s).  His answer suggests that MIT is using test scores to identify not students with modest academic records but high test scores, but rather as confirmation for students with superb records from academic environments without lots of Advanced Placement or high-level mathematics courses.  

I’d love to know if anyone can point me to evidence that “diamonds in the rough” really exist. 

There is one other question I want to consider.  Under what conditions should colleges use test scores? I suspect my command of the obvious will become apparent in my answers.

1. Make sure test scores add predictive validity to admission decisions.  The test-optional movement has shown us that it is possible to make decisions without test scores even as there is concern about grade inflation both in the wake of COVID and long-term.  There are numerous colleges for whom test scores have been an insurance policy rather than adding value in making decisions, and one article I saw suggested that only about half of institutions that require test scores actually have validity study research supporting their use.  Test scores at best provide a small increase in predictive value compared with high school transcript alone, and that value is for predicting freshman-year GPA alone.  Shouldn’t we look for tools that predict success through college and even beyond?

2. Don’t fall for the false precision that test scores imply. Test scores are too often treated as precise measures, which they are not. Do we measure the things we value, or value the things we can measure? The standard error of measurement for each section of the SAT is more than 30 points, such that there is not a meaningful difference between a 600 and a 630.  Test score cutoffs for institutional scholarship consideration or for National Merit Scholarship eligibility (even though the College Board is a National Merit partner) are inappropriate uses of testing.

1. Consider test scores in context.  Take into account that, even if valid, test scores may not predict equally well for different cohorts of students. The 2008 NACAC Testing Commission Report pointed to research that suggested that test scores over-predict first-year SAT scores for some minority students and may under-predict first-year GPA for some female students.  Then there is the impact of test preparation.  If two students have identical test scores and one has had hours of expensive test preparation and the other hasn’t, those scores don’t mean the same thing.  We should especially guard against test scores becoming barriers to access for students whose high school records otherwise suggest promise.  A year ago I heard about (and wrote about) a public flagship that had denied students from less privileged backgrounds it wanted to admit because they had submitted test scores, not realizing that submitting scores was optional.  In my opinion there is no excuse for institutions not admitting applicants based on test scores alone. 

I don’t have test scores to use as (debatable) predictive tools, but that won’t stop me from predicting that MIT’s decision will not end the testing culture wars. 

Should Colleges Withhold Admit Rate Information?

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider April 4, 2022)

Last Thursday the Ivy League universities released regular admission decisions for the incoming Class of 2026.  It’s not among my favorite days as a college counselor, although I’m appreciative that they released on March 31 and not a day later. That would be a cruel and humorless April Fools’ joke for many applicants.

I’ve always believed that if you set your expectations low enough you’ll rarely be disappointed (does that make me a pessimist or a realist?), and I find myself practicing that mantra at this time of year.  I have been doing college counseling long enough that the emotion I experience when my students get good news is relief rather than joy.  I’m ecstatic for those with good news, but that is more than counterbalanced by the disappointment and empathy I feel for my students who have done everything right and yet get denied or wait-listed at the nation’s most rejective college and universities.  

I often tell my students that they have a right to be disappointed but shouldn’t be shocked by decisions.  I’m rarely shocked, but often disappointed.

A number of years ago I remember an admissions dean at an Ivy or Little Ivy commenting that if a student is a legitimate candidate for the nation’s “elite” colleges and applies to enough of them they would likely be admitted to one, but perhaps not the one they hoped for.  That stopped being the case long ago. I also remember the legendary admissions dean Fred Hargadon telling me that when he was at Stanford he had the flexibility to admit a great kid who had gotten shut out from the most competitive colleges.  By the time he ended his career at Princeton that flexibility had gone out the window, and that was at a time when places like Princeton were admitting 15-20% of applicants rather than 3-4%.  To borrow a phrase from journalist Linda Ellerbee, “And so it goes.”

Last Thursday morning the Wall Street Journal published an article reporting that three Ivies–Princeton, Penn, and Cornell–would forgo announcing their acceptance rates.  They follow in the footsteps of Stanford, which stopped releasing admit rate data at the time of admission back in 2018.

The rationale behind the decision to withhold the information is that publishing the absurdly low admit rates is, according to admission officers referenced (but not quoted) by the WSJ, “doing more harm than good, ratcheting up panic among high-school students and their parents and perpetuating a myth that it is nearly impossible to get into a good college.”

A statement on the Princeton admissions website states that its decision is part of its “student-centered approach to the admission process.”  It goes on to say, “data points such as overall admissions rates and average SAT scores shouldn’t influence a prospective student’s decision about whether to apply to Princeton.  We know this information raises the anxiety level of prospective students and their families and, unfortunately, may discourage some prospective students from applying.” 

I’d like to scrutinize both rationales more closely.  The decision to not report admit rates may be preferable to the celebratory “best year ever” press releases that too often seemed to be crowing “We’re so glad that we could turn down so many of your students,” but I wonder whether withholding the information serves students or serves institutions.

Does publishing admit rates harm students?  Does the panic felt by students and parents arise from the data, or the reality reflected by that data?  Or is the source of stress the focus on prestige, the belief that the harder a place is to get into, the better it must be? I would argue that it is the worship of selectivity, both by institutions and by students and parents, that produces panic and harms students.

Is the perception that it is nearly impossible to get into a good college a myth?  That depends on how you define the terms “good college” and “nearly impossible.”  There are certainly plenty of good colleges in America, perhaps even a plethora, and many of them admit the majority of applicants.  But if your definition of “good college” includes Ivy-like admit rates, then having a 3-4% chance of admission (lower for the average applicant) would seem to qualify as “nearly impossible.”  Ask the 96-97% of applicants who aren’t admitted (along with their counselors) if it is a myth that it is nearly impossible to get into a “good” college.

As for Princeton’s statement, it presents two different arguments.  One has to do with increasing anxiety in students, and the other has to do with discouraging applications. We have already addressed the first contention, that publishing the data increases anxiety and panic.  The second argument, that the information may discourage some students from applying, seems less student-centered than institution-centered.

I think there are two ethical principles at stake here.  The first is transparency.  The college admissions process can seem mysterious, and it is the responsibility of all of us to make that less the case.  Decisions about applying to college should be based on accurate information rather than speculation or guesswork. Having an idea of your chances of admission would seem to be relevant information in choosing where to apply.  While it is true that a student can find the information if they know about the Common Data Set, it is also the case that if we are reluctant to be transparent about our practices, that may tell us something about those practices.

The second principle is respect.  Colleges have a relationship with the students who apply, and that relationship creates certain obligations.  The argument not to report the reality of low admit rates resembles Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” telling Tom Cruise, “You can’t handle the truth.”

If we respect those with whom we are in relationship, we should also trust that they can handle the truth.  If we believe that students entering college should be treated like adults, then we should trust them to be able to handle the truth, because being able to deal with reality, even unpleasant reality, is essential to being an adult. Withholding information is the worst form of paternalism.

The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is generally a good ethical principle, and it may also be applicable in this case. Would colleges, and college admission offices, prefer to have accurate information hidden from them out of concern for their well-being? I’m guessing not.

I respect the institutions’ concern for alleviating student anxiety. I just don’t think that withholding the truth is the way to do it.

Black Enrollment in Liberal Arts Colleges

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education recently published its annual survey of Black first-year enrollment in leading national liberal arts colleges.  The JBHE has tracked that information for the past 28 years.

For those of us who love data, there are some interesting nuggets in the report.  The biggest story is that Amherst has set a new standard for enrollment of Black students, with 100 Black students in this year’s entering class, or a percentage of 19.5.  Amherst has topped the list 13 times, more than any other college, with Wesleyan second topping the list six times.

Amherst is one of two liberal arts colleges enrolling 100 or more Black students in its first-year class.  The other is Barnard, which enrolled 118.  That is 15.3% of the entering class, placing it third by percentage.  Number two is Harvey Mudd, with 17.7%, or 41 students.  That is particularly impressive given that Harvey Mudd is focused on engineering, math, and science.  Harvey Mudd is a great place with an even better name, but I don’t necessarily think of it as a liberal arts college.

In all, there are nine liberal arts colleges on the list with a Black first-year enrollment of 10% or more.  In addition to the ones already mentioned, Swarthmore, Pomona, Haverford, Middlebury, and Bates fall into that category, with Bowdoin and Macalester just missing the 10% threshold by one student.  In 2009, there were only three colleges on the list surveyed by JBHE with a Black first-year enrollment of 10% or more.

In contrast, there were six colleges in the JBHE survey which had entering classes with a Black enrollment below 6%--Lafayette, Grinnell, Smith, Bucknell, Scripps, and Mount Holyoke.  Four of those schools–Smith, Scripps, Bucknell, and Mount Holyoke–saw declines in Black first-year enrollment from 2020, with Mount Holyoke’s being halved from 36 to 18.  Lafayette actually saw a 65% increase in Black first-year enrollment from 26 to 43, while Grinnell’s 5.1% Black first-year enrollment outpaces the state of Iowa’s 3.7% Black population.

The Journal cautions not to draw too many conclusions from those statistics, as the numbers may say more about the way the data is reported than actual significant changes.  Some colleges may be reporting figures that correspond with recent methodology changes put in place by the U.S. Department of Education.  An Inside Higher Ed article about the JBHE survey points out that the DOE guidelines separate Black students from those who self-report as multi-racial or bi-racial and also exclude Black international students.  The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education survey has always counted any student identifying as being of African descent. 

In addition to the reporting of numbers and percentages, there are two other lists provided by the JBHE.  One is a list of one-year gains and losses.  Two colleges, Bates and Harvey Mudd, saw an increase of more than 100%, and five other schools–Lafayette (already referenced), Oberlin, Middlebury, Barnard, and Hamilton–had increases above 45%.

I was particularly interested to see Washington & Lee among the top ten on the list with a 30% increase.  I have previously written about the challenges W&L faces through its connection to Robert E. Lee, who served as President there from 1865-1870, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the removal of Confederate monuments around the country, most prominently in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Confederacy.  The W&L university community has discussed, but thus far pushed down the road, a decision about changing its name.  I have seen W&L described as the least diverse national liberal arts college, and I have suggested that the association with Lee could prevent the University from being the national institution it aspires to be.  I greatly respect the Washington & Lee admissions staff (full disclosure–I have served as a guest faculty member at their MAZE program for children of alumni), and am glad to see them making progress at a time when they face a number of barriers to doing so.

The third list reported by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education involves racial differences in admission rates.  That list is limited by the fact that only 14 liberal arts colleges were willing to report that data, whereas in the past nearly all of the colleges in the survey were forthcoming about their admit rates for Black applicants.  The JBHE theorizes that colleges are reluctant to be transparent because of efforts to challenge race-based affirmative action.

Two colleges, Middlebury and Scripps, show significantly higher admit rates for Blacks compared with their overall rates.  Middlebury’s 31.5% Black acceptance rate is double its overall rate of 15.7% while Scripps admitted 42.6%, 13 points higher than the overall 29.5% rate.  Most of the other colleges reporting data have comparable Black and overall admission rates, although both Bucknell and Macalester have admit rates for Blacks that are more than 10% lower than their overall rates.

How should we interpret this data?  Once again, the JBHE cautions against jumping to conclusions.  It states, “While no firm conclusions can be made, the fact that for the past 10 years there are now more colleges with overall acceptance rates that are higher than Black acceptance rates, causes one to wonder if there has been some curtailment in colleges’ consideration of race in admissions decisions.  Or it may be that the colleges that have a much higher acceptance rate for Black students than they do for the applicant pool as a whole, are unwilling to publicize this information in fear of litigation or do not wish to anger some contributing alumni who are not in favor of race-sensitive admissions.”

I’m grateful for the data.  I am a product of a liberal-arts college, although not one prestigious enough to be part of the survey (but nevertheless a good place that happens to be the newly-crowned NCAA Division 3 national champions in men’s basketball).  I have always believed that the liberal arts college is America’s unique contribution to higher education, but many of those colleges have historically been bastions of whiteness.  I applaud those liberal arts colleges that are working to make sure that they embrace and attract a student population that reflects the nation’s diversity and that small private colleges do not resemble private clubs.      

"That" Counselor

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on March 7, 2022)

Could that be me?  Am I “that” guidance counselor?

I had that thought last week upon reading Michele Norris’s opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled “The maddeningly limited vision of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s guidance counselor.”  The column talks about the Supreme Court nominee’s belief that her high school guidance counselor urged her to “lower her sights” when she wanted to attend Harvard.  

The column goes on to say that Post columnist Jonathan Capehart had done a follow-up survey on Twitter and found lots of successful professionals who all felt they had “that” guidance counselor. It also references Michele Obama recalling her high school guidance counselor suggesting that she rethink her plan to follow her older brother to Princeton.

I did not serve as college counselor to either of them (although, sadly, I may be old enough to have done so). That doesn’t keep the sentiments expressed in the column from stinging.  They are a gut punch to our profession.  Counseling is above all about helping students make decisions about their future, and that is a noble calling, one damaged and perhaps even destroyed by the allegations against “that” counselor.  The perceptions from Jackson and others referenced in Norris’s column should lead to serious self-reflection for all of us. 

I’m hoping there is another side to the story, that the truth is more nuanced than a counselor (“guidance” counselor is an antiquated term, supplanted by “school” counselor) attempting to dissuade a student from following their dreams. I have never told a student that they shouldn’t apply to a particular college.  That’s not my job. But I have also at times had a little voice in my head during conversations with students and parents, a voice that sounded exactly like Chris Tucker in Rush Hour asking Jackie Chan, “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”  Is what I am trying to say what is being heard?

That is particularly true when having conversations about chances of admission.  As already stated, I would never tell a student they shouldn’t apply to a particular college or university, but I do believe it’s my job to help them understand the realities of the college admissions process.

Not everyone agrees that those conversations are appropriate.  My first boss believed that a counselor should never tell a student that they might not be admitted, because if it pans out it will appear that’s what the counselor wanted to happen.  I have had counseling colleagues at other schools prohibited from having conversations about admission chances. I think it’s hard to advise students effectively if that topic is off-limits, and I think that such a policy can boomerang on a school and counseling program.

That’s not to say those conversations aren’t fraught with peril.  All of us–students, parents, and counselors–process things on two different levels, one intellectual and the other emotional.  A student can understand intellectually that admission to a given college is unlikely, and yet be emotionally invested in a way they don’t recognize, such that it hurts when the predictable rejection occurs.  It is easy for students (and parents) to see college decisions as a measure of an individual’s worth, which of course they aren’t, and at those moments college counseling can become grief counseling.

I decided a long time ago that I would err on the side of more info rather than less, trying to give my students as much knowledge and context as possible.  I tell my students that they have a right to be disappointed by decisions, but I don’t want them to be shocked.  I’m also careful to make clear that I’d be glad to be wrong.

I hope that Ketanji Brown Jackson’s and Michele Obama’s guidance counselors were misunderstood, that they were guilty not of limited vision but of knowing too much.  Good college counseling is a tight-rope walk between supporting students’ dreams and making sure they have a safety net. College counselors should be trail guides, helping students plot a course, telling them what lies around the bend, and making sure they don’t miss the scenery as they navigate their personal journeys.  We should never tell a student not to take a certain path unless we know that danger lurks.

The tight-rope walk is even harder in the era of COVID.  The pandemic has affected all of us psychologically in ways we are not even aware of, and has delayed development in adolescents who have had “normal” upended for the past two years, unable to attend school in person, losing much of the social interaction that is so important, and having to live behind a mask.  All of that is hard enough for us as adults, but it’s producing far more students who are fragile.  It is our job to help them even when we ourselves are exhausted and struggling. 

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memory of her interaction with her guidance counselor should cause all of us to think about the messages we send to students.  We need to be aware of our implicit biases, and we need to work constantly to communicate both effectively and sensitively.  The most important thing we communicate is our love for our students and our trust in them.  We are a helping profession, not a profession that hinders. The article tells us that we can do a better job.

Back in the 1960s Marlo Thomas became famous as “that girl” in the television series of the same name.  Neither she nor any of us want to be “that” counselor.

Rethinking College Admission: The NACAC/NASFAA Report

Are we overdue for a new college admissions paradigm? An article last week in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” asked whether requiring recommendation letters is fair or even outdated, given that public school counselors are overwhelmed by both counseling loads and the variety of other duties dumped in their laps. As a result many may not get to know their students, even as their independent school counterparts spend hours crafting letters that put their students in the best light.

The question about recommendation letters follows two other recent reports in which NACAC was a partner.  The more recent of the two, released in conjunction with the non-profit group Just Equations, questioned whether colleges put too much emphasis on Calculus in evaluating applicants’ math preparation and capabilities.  A future ECA blog post will look at the issues raised by that report as well as some collateral questions.  Prior to that report, NACAC had partnered with NASFAA (National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators) on a report funded by the Lumina Foundation, “Toward a More Equitable Future for Postsecondary Access,” looking at ways in which the admissions and financial aid processes might promote more equity.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech had a section built around the phrase “100 years later,” referring to racial opportunity a century after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.  Should we rethink college admission “100 years later”?  The admissions process we have today had its genesis nearly a century ago.

Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen, a history of admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and a fascinating scholarly read, details how holistic admission and conventions like essays, activities, and recommendation letters came about in the 1920s, turning admission to college from a purely academic enterprise to more resemble applying to a country club.  Karabel concludes that all of those changes arose as a way to limit the percentage of Jewish students at elite colleges.

The world, and especially the world of higher education, are very different than they were a century ago. Yes, colleges have moved from admitting the “best student” to the “best graduate” to the “best class,” but do various pieces of the admission processes serve students and society as well as they serve institutions?

I think it is interesting that NACAC has partnered on the two reports.  Under the capable leadership of CEO Angel Perez, the association is searching for its niche or “brand” now that it is no longer allowed to serve as the arbiter of professional ethics.  There is both opportunity and risk in that endeavor.

Back during my tenure as NACAC President, I argued that NACAC should see itself not as a membership organization for college counselors but rather as a professional organization promoting college counseling.  There is certainly a legitimate role for NACAC to promote discussion about the assumptions underlying the admissions process without being prescriptive.  It is one thing to raise questions about the value of calculus and another to tell member colleges that they shouldn’t value calculus.

For “Toward a More Equitable Future for Postsecondary Access” NACAC and NASFAA brought together a group of admission and financial aid thought leaders to question assumptions about practices in both areas.  The report is informed by a presupposition that the college admissions process was “not fundamentally designed to promote equity” and that elements of systemic racism can be found throughout college admission.  

The admission recommendations focus on Black students while the financial aid recommendations are targeted for all underserved students.  They reflect two larger societal issues of concern.  One is the decline in Black students enrolling in college over the decade from 2010 to 2019 from 66% to 57%.  The other is government disinvestment in public higher education.

On the admission side of the house there are four areas that the report looks at–institutional selectivity, the application process, how admissions decisions are made, and staffing in admission offices.  Let’s look at each briefly.

The report argues that “many of the processes and criteria associated with highly selective admission are designed to exclude, not include” and that “the fundamental inputs associated with selective admission are themselves tainted by racial inequity.”  It references NACAC research that shows that “the more selective the college, the more weight is placed on added variables.”  It also wonders whether students of color are disproportionately excluded by the half of colleges that don’t admit a third or more of their applicants, but doesn’t provide evidence of that.

I find the section on selectivity the least convincing part of the report.  The focus on selectivity as a proxy for prestige is clearly one of the most objectionable parts of the college admission landscape, but selectivity exercises an unfair and inequitable influence on the process for all students, not just students of color.  It is true that the use of Early Decision as a tool for selectivity advantages students from privileged backgrounds with access to savvy college counselors and that test-prep and the opportunity to test multiple times are inequitable, but it is also the case that many highly-selective colleges and universities craft classes with 40-50% students of color. 

The second area examined by the report is the application process itself.  The report argues that applying to college was “designed as a barrier to entry.”  It specifically addresses application fees and the lack of equal access to college counseling resources as impediments to equity, and proposes a “student-centric” application process where a student could select a college and have his or her records shared digitally without additional action on the part of the student. 

That recommendation aligns with the argument in the report’s third section that a student’s K-12 experience should be the primary factor in making admissions decisions.  It recognizes that high school grades are a flawed measure, but argues that other factors are even more so.  It suggests that only half of institutions that require test scores in the admissions process have done validity research on what test scores actually tell them.  It also criticizes the cost of the tests, describing them as a “civil rights concern,” and points out that even the availability of fee waivers forces students to “prove that they are poor.”

The college admissions process should be a Goldilocks process, neither too easy nor too hard.  Anything we ask students to do in applying should be predictive of success in college, and we should carefully evaluate the application hurdles we ask students to clear.  At the same time, applying to college should encourage discernment and require sweat on the brow.

The bigger issue is access to college counseling.  We have traditionally had a school-based counseling model, and that should clearly remain at the center of our efforts, but we also need to recognize that effective school-based college counseling is not available for many students.  I’d like to see NACAC focus on developing new resources to provide knowledge about college and find ways to connect students with counselors through technology and social media.

The final admissions issue highlighted in the report is the need to diversify our profession so that students see themselves in the professionals they work with.  The report points out that “the absence (of) Black perspectives in the admission and financial aid offices presents a tacit, unintended barrier to entry for many Black students, particularly those who are first in their family to attend college.”  College admission and college counseling are professions where the most important capital is the quality of individual practitioners, and attracting and retaining outstanding professionals from a wide array of backgrounds has to be a priority.

The NACAC/NASFAA report raises important questions about rethinking what we do and why we do it.  The most important, and obvious, change might be moving the admissions process from institution-centered to student-centered. 

A Question About the New Digital SAT

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed's “Admissions Insider” on January 31, 2022)

Last week the College Board announced that the SAT–er, SAT (trademark) Suite of Assessments–will move to a digital format beginning next spring for international test-takers and the following spring for students in the United States.  The class of 2025 will be the first impacted by the change in the United States, with the Fall, 2023 PSAT and the Spring, 2024 SAT being the first administrations of the new test format.

The announcement was not unexpected.  Both the College Board and ACT have been hit with supply-chain issues due to COVID just as so many other industries have, with many students over the past two years unable to take the tests because both organizations are so reliant on high schools serving as test centers.  With so many students unable to test, the vast majority of colleges are test optional, and it is not clear that we will ever go back to the golden age of testing.  That becomes increasingly unlikely with the University of California system and other colleges becoming not just test-optional, but test-blind.

Both testing companies have been investigating moving to online testing for some time, with the College Board administering Advanced Placement exams online for all students in the spring of 2020 and some last spring.  One of the hangups has been test security.  At one point the College Board was talking about installing a 360-degree camera on test-takers’ devices to prevent cheating, something that raised significant concerns about privacy.  It appears that the CB has figured out the security issue without resorting to such draconian measures. 

The move to a digital format is actually not the most revolutionary aspect of the new test.  That would be the move to adaptive test questions, where for each section of the test students will answer a set of initial test questions, with their answers determining the difficulty of the questions they are then given.  That means that every student will not take the identical test.  It also helps to allay concerns about test security.

The use of adaptive testing is new as far as I know, but it is not a new concept.  More than 30 years ago a college admissions dean tied into the College Board told me that research had been done on an adaptive testing model that could deliver an accurate SAT score with as few as three questions.  It wasn’t implemented because there was fear the public wouldn’t accept it.

The new test will be longer than three questions, but also shorter than the current three-hour-plus test that can seem like an ordeal measuring stamina as much as whatever it is that the test currently attempts to measure.  The digital SAT will last two hours.  The biggest differences in content appear to be that there will be shorter reading passages and that students will be able to use a calculator for all math problems.  

It should not be a surprise that the College Board announcement hasn’t converted those who are already skeptical about the value of testing.  Several critics have described the announcement as new and improved packaging for the same old product, a kindler, gentler equivalent of what a number of politicians have referred to as “lipstick on a pig.”

There is one important question about the new test that I haven’t seen raised or answered.  Will the test be less expensive?

The current version of the SAT costs $55.  The new test, however, takes only two-thirds as much time.  It is also the case that the College Board’s overhead for administering the new test should be lower.  There won’t be printing costs, mailing costs, or the need to hire people to open and sort returned boxes of tests and answer sheets.  Shouldn’t the new testing format be accompanied by a lowering of the price for students to take the test?

I’m not holding my breath.  When the College Board moved to electronic score reporting to colleges, requiring only pressing a button rather than mailing paper reports, I don’t recall the cost for sending score reports dropping (if my memory is incorrect, it’s not the first time, and I apologize).

I commend the College Board for re-thinking delivery of the SAT.  One of the rationales for the new testing format is to reduce student stress and make testing more equitable.  If we’re really serious about that, let the College Board (and ACT) be like Jake from State Farm and give every student the Rodgers Rate or the Patrick Price to take their tests.  That will produce more equity and less stress.

The Need-Blind Antitrust Lawsuit

Justice is blind.  But are need-blind admission policies either blind or just?  

That’s one of the questions raised by a class-action lawsuit filed last week against sixteen prominent national universities in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois.  The universities include:

Brown Georgetown

Cal Tech MIT

Chicago Northwestern

Columbia Notre Dame

Cornell Penn

Dartmouth Rice

Duke Vanderbilt

Emory Yale

The universities are being targeted because of their membership in the 568 Presidents Group.  That group takes its name (or number) from a section of the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act that allows colleges that are need-blind in admission to qualify for a limited antitrust exemption that permits them to establish common principles for assessing financial need. The 568 exemption has been renewed several times by Congress, most recently in 2015 when it was extended until September 30 of this year.  Interestingly, seven of the sixteen schools targeted are not currently listed as members of the 568 Presidents Group, and eleven listed 568 members, nine of them liberal arts colleges, were not targets of the suit. 

The essence of the suit is that the named institutions are guilty of antitrust violations because many of them do not actually practice need-blind admission for all applicants but give preference to affluent applicants.  In addition, the 568 Presidents Group has developed a “consensus methodology” for evaluating a student’s financial need, which is allowed by the federal legislation, but the plaintiffs argue that the 568 group is a “cartel” that uses the methodology to fix net prices and limit the amount of aid individual applicants receive.

An interesting side note in the suit is that one of the lawyers involved is Eric Rosen, who as a federal prosecutor led the prosecution in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal cases. He is now a partner with Roche Freedman, one of the firms representing the plaintiffs, and he told Inside Higher Ed, “Varsity Blues took on the side door of admissions.  This case takes on the back door–alleging that, while conspiring together on a method for awarding financial aid, which raises net tuition prices, defendants also favor wealthy applicants in making admissions decisions.  The law does not allow them to do both.”

So does the 568 Presidents Group operate as a “price-fixing cartel,” in violation of anti-trust laws? I’m not an antitrust lawyer, and I still can’t fathom why the Department of Justice concluded that NACAC was a sinister force restricting competition through its voluntary Code of Ethics and Professional Practices (which, in the spirit of full disclosure, I helped draft), so I am not equipped to answer that question.

The 568 antitrust exemption came about as a consequence of a DOJ investigation and consent degree in the early 1990s regarding the actions of nine elite colleges known as the Overlap Group. Seven of the nine are on the 568 list found above. That group of schools was accused of restricting competition by comparing and standardizing financial aid offers.  The justification for that practice was that students shouldn’t make college choices based on cost alone.  Depending on your point of view, that position either makes perfect sense or is an excuse masking price-fixing.

The lawsuit suggests that the consensus methodology used by the 568 Presidents Group schools function as a thinly-veiled equivalent of what the Overlap Group was doing.  That certainly could be the case, but there’s no evidence in the lawsuit that proves that contention.  The closest is several quotes from financial-aid officers at places like Yale and Harvard suggesting that the consensus methodology prevents them from awarding as much aid as they can using their own institutional methodology. A 2006 Government Accountability Office study found that the antitrust exemption had not affected affordability over the first couple of years after its establishment.  I suspect that the lawyers representing the plaintiffs are hoping that discovery will provide incriminating evidence that things have changed.

Any methodology for evaluating need is a set of principles and assumptions, and every methodology has its flaws and biases.  At one time the need analysis formula penalized families for having the foresight and responsibility to save for college, which doesn’t seem right or fair.  The consensus methodology used by the 568 group incorporates the principles used by the College Board’s CSS Profile.  Could that methodology limit aid offers for some students?  It could, but can’t the same complaint be made about any methodology, including the federal methodology used in determining family contribution on the FAFSA?

From an ethical perspective, an important consideration in judging any action is intent.  It is one thing if the consensus methodology was developed in order to minimize the awarding of financial aid, and another if minimizing aid is an unanticipated consequence of the methodology.

ECA is always on the lookout for broader issues and questions, and there are several embedded in the complaint against the 568 Presidents Group.

The first is what qualifies colleges and universities as elite. Is it the quality of the education they provide or because they cater to the wealthy?

The lawsuit contains prima facie evidence that supports the latter view, that the student bodies of the defendant schools are top-heavy with students from affluent backgrounds.  All but two of the universities named have at least 10% of students from the top 1% of family incomes, with three above 20%.  All of the universities have between 58 and 74% of students from the top 20% of incomes, compared with only 3-6% from the lowest 20% and 21-36% for the middle 60% of incomes.  Those figures are shocking and embarrassing, unless you believe in a form of Calvinism where the wealthy are both smarter and better than the rest of us.

The second question is whether institutions that are private have a right to fill their student bodies with students who are from wealthy backgrounds.  Private colleges receiving federal aid have an obligation to follow federal laws, but the Supreme Court has extended considerable discretion to colleges in various cases involving race-based affirmative action to determine what mix of students fits institutional needs.  Does that apply to wealth as well as race?

That depends on whether you see higher education as an industry or as something more than that.  Clearly selective colleges and universities use the admissions process to advance strategic institutional goals, and revenue is one of those.  The lawsuit describes “enrollment management” as one of the villains in this case, and that may be a form of protest over policies and practices that are institution-centered rather than student-centered, focused on self-interest rather than the public interest.

The lawsuit claims that the 568 members are guilty of antitrust violations because they claim to be need-blind but aren’t for every admission decision, and that raises a larger question about whether need-blind admission is any longer possible for all but a few colleges with long histories and huge endowments.

Back in the early 90s, at the same time that the 568 exemption was established, the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice, the precursor to the CEPP, required colleges both to be need-blind in admission and at the same time meet a student’s full need.  A number of private colleges argued that it was fiscally impossible to do both, that in order to manage financial aid budgets they needed to be need-aware at least on the margins, and after a contentious debate in the Assembly, NACAC’s legislative body, the restrictions were loosened. At the time I argued that transparency should be the guiding ethical principle.

Since that time, a number of colleges that philosophically believe in need-blind have been forced to back away from their need-blind as their financial aid budgets have become strained.  Does that suggest that need-blind admission may be an anachronism, aspirational rather than practical?  Has the expectation that colleges be need-blind embodied in the 568 exemption become an unfunded mandate? Is it okay for colleges to be “need-peek”?

There is one issue that both sides in the case agree on.  That is that the decision to attend college should be primarily economic in nature.  The plaintiffs argue that colleges are focused on revenue and therefore advantage applicants who are affluent, but also argue that the consensus methodology provides economic disadvantage to students applying for aid.  The cost of college makes the decision at least partly financial, but should it be only about cost?  Isn’t that also a form of blindness?

Ethical Erosion

(This originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on January 10, 2022)

When the Department of Justice ended NACAC’s ability to enforce ethical standards for the college admissions profession several years ago, there was widespread concern that the admissions world might turn into a Wild West.  That hasn’t happened yet, thanks to the vast majority of colleges that have chosen to put students’ best interests first, but I have recently heard of three practices that hint at erosion of those ethical standards.  If I wanted to be metaphorical, I might call them evidence of college admission climate change or even “variants”.

One of my students recently reported that he had been invited to apply to a university without having to pay an application fee.  On the surface there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and in fact there may be an ethical issue in colleges collecting millions of dollars in revenue from application fees.  What was interesting in this case was that the invitation came from a university with an admit rate close to 10%.

Normally waiving application fees is a strategy aimed at encouraging applications, and normally that happens when a college is worried about making its class. Obviously application numbers have become a metric of success and prestige for colleges and universities, but is there any justification for a university that is already turning away 90% of applicants waiving the application fee to incentivize students to apply? Does the university in question need more applications, or does it, like my children when they were younger, see “need” as a synonym for “want”?  And is waiving the application fee any different than Harvard sending out more than 100,000 letters several years ago encouraging students to apply when it already had one of the two lowest admit rates in the country?

What we have here might be an example of what I have previously referred to admissions “gluttony”.  There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking more applications, given the pressures placed on admission offices by presidents, boards, and bond-rating agencies.  What is wrong is encouraging students to apply when they have almost no chance of being admitted, the practice known as “recruit to reject”.  There is an implicit moral contract between colleges and applicants, with each having obligations.  Among those obligations for colleges is treating each applicant as a human being deserving of respect and consideration.  The German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that human beings should never be treated as means to an end, and “recruit to reject” does exactly that.

The second issue is an interesting take on test-optional admission.  The university in question claims to be test-optional, but also recently said that only 600 of its nearly 6000 places in the freshman class will be filled by students who haven’t submitted test scores. Apparently that change was made in the middle of the admissions cycle, because I know several counselors who had gotten different messages about testing from this institution earlier in the fall.

There is definitely a mixed message here.  The university lists TEST OPTIONAL in big letters on its website, but in smaller print describes its policy as “test flexible,” stating that “While we encourage students to submit standardized test scores, they are not required to consider admission or scholarship consideration.”  I won’t attempt to parse that sentence.

Test-optional and test-flexible are not the same thing.  Test-optional means that the decision whether or not to submit scores is the student’s.  Test-flexible means that the university wants test scores but will grant exceptions.  Test-flexible is test-optional with a wink, optional the way off-season NFL workouts are optional.

What “test flexible” means at this particular university is that students with a GPA of 3.6 or better don’t need to submit scores.  That raises the question of why test scores are relevant for some students but not others.  Are test scores more predictive for a student with a 3.59 GPA than one with a 3.60? 

The bigger issue is having a quota for students who do not submit test scores.  There was certainly circumstantial evidence last year to suggest that test-optional policies may have actually accentuated the value of good test scores, as many institutions admitted a higher percentage of submitters than non-submitters.  That, however, is a very different issue than artificially restricting the number of students you will admit without test scores.  Even worse is doing so without being transparent about it.

I wonder if more colleges will go the test-flexible route.  When COVID first hit and SAT and ACT administrations nationwide were cancelled, an admission dean friend wondered out loud whether most colleges would be able to be anything but test-optional, whether students would get to the point where they wouldn’t apply to institutions requiring test scores.  Will selective colleges be able to risk a decline in applications because of fealty to test scores?

The third issue involves incentives for students to apply Early Decision.  That is not a new issue, because even before the NACAC Code of Ethics and Professional Practice was de-fanged by the DOJ there were colleges providing incentives for Early Decision enrollees including things like preferences for housing and course registration and even guaranteed parking spots, which on some campuses might be worth their weight in gold.

A college counseling friend recently told me that one of her students had been told that applying early decision would increase the amount of financial aid the student would receive.  That’s an interesting twist. For years the common wisdom was that early decision applicants would receive a smaller package due to financial leveraging algorithms, with the college able to offer less aid to seal the deal because the student has already signified his or her intention to enroll.

I have wondered whether one of the admissions consequences of COVID would be more focus on early decision, with colleges looking to lock in as much of the freshman class as possible early.  That would explain preferential packaging for early applicants.  

Then again, applying early might also becoming more appealing to students.  A large portion of my senior class applied either Early Decision or Early Action, and I have noticed more of my students this year applying ED-2 than ever before.

I am a purist (perhaps even a dinosaur) who believes that early decision is a legitimate enrollment management tool, even if flawed by benefitting students from wealthy families who attend schools with savvy college counseling.  I also believe that early decision should be a match between student and college, freely-chosen and motivated by love.  Providing financial incentives to early decision applicants clouds the motive, and also resembles the “and if you order now” mentality found in the old Ronco commercials.  But in today’s climate, do colleges care why students enroll, as long as they enroll?

College admission has always been a balancing act between institutional interest and the public interest.  The practices outlined above may be another sign that balance is shifting. Just as worsening coastal erosion is a warning sign of climate change, ethical erosion is a warning sign for our profession.     

ECA Cited in New York Times article

The parent of one of my former students alerted me just before Christmas that ECA had been cited in an article in the New York Times. The “Your Money” article by Ron Lieber addressed Early Decision and that a student may be released from the ED commitment if a college is unable to meet the student’s financial need. The article has a link to last spring’s ECA article on “Rejectivity.”

A Tale of Two Editorials

Most of us in the college counseling world spend more time thinking about and dealing with issues related to standardized admission tests than is warranted (then again, some of us may feel that any time at all is unwarranted).  That has not lessened in the era of test-optional admission.

I have had lots of conversations this fall with students and parents about when and whether to submit test scores at test-optional colleges. My rule of thumb has been to submit scores that are at the upper end of the middle 50% range, but I have also told multiple students that I can’t guarantee that my best advice is right, that in this new test-optional landscape all of us are making it up as we go along.  Earlier this fall I had a debate, and perhaps a rare disagreement, with a colleague over whether a student should submit a composite ACT score of 34 at highly-selective colleges and universities, given that savvy and strategic students aren’t submitting anything but very high scores.

I am also finding that students and parents can’t get their heads around the concept of admission without test scores, believing that test-optional policies are temporary, even illusory.  On the day that PSAT scores were released earlier this week, I had calls from several parents anxious to find out the scores.  I resisted the temptation to tell them to relax because they don’t really matter. 

Will the elimination of test scores as an admission factor for the University of California system put to rest the frenzy over testing once and for all?  Despite how big and influential that system is, I suspect not.

NACAC publishes a twice-weekly digest of college admissions news called Today in College Admission.  The past two issues referenced editorials criticizing the University of California’s decision to abolish the use of test scores altogether, one from the Los Angeles Times and the other from the Boston Herald. I found it odd that two different newspapers would choose to editorialize so close to one another, and wondered if we are about to see a backlash to the move away from admission testing.

It was even more odd when I read the two editorials.  They were almost word for word the same.  I checked to see if the two papers are part of the same group, and apparently they aren’t.  I reached out to the editorial page editors at both publications for an explanation, but haven’t received any answers.  Shanda Ivory at NACAC shared that the articles for Today in College Admission are aggregated not by NACAC but by a company called Bulletin Media that publishes the digest.  A Bulletin Media representative stated that the publishing platform missed the similarities because the URL’s for the two editorials were different.

As a detective I resemble Inspector Clouseau more than Sherlock Holmes, and I am fully capable of adding 2+2 and getting 5, but here’s what I think happened.  The LA Times editorial was published on September 1, the Boston Herald one on September 6.  It makes perfect sense that the University of California decision would be a natural editorial topic for the LA Times.  I also noticed on the Boston Herald website that some opinion pieces are labelled “Boston Herald editorial staff” while others are labelled “editorial.”  The editorial about testing falls into the latter category.  While the Herald does not attribute the editorial to the LA Times, I am guessing that it adapted the piece from the West Coast paper.

I use the word “adapted” because the two editorials are close to, but not, identical.  The Boston Herald piece removes the LA Times conclusion early in the editorial that “UC should reconsider this policy and use at least one test as part of its admission process, though it should be free to students with a few no-cost retries.”

The two editorials also diverge in the closing paragraphs.  Here’s the LA Times version:

“One way that UC could use standardized entrance exams fairly is to calculate a test score range that would indicate a student has what it takes to succeed in college, and then rely on grades and other factors.  This is similar to how many prestigious colleges do it.

“An applicant wouldn’t get extra ‘points’ for a score beyond proficiency, which would tamp down the parental race to spend thousands on the best test tutors and endless taking of the test.  Once a student does well enough to qualify, there would be no point in trying to improve the score.

“It’s a shame that the university asked for a well-researched study of the issue by faculty and then decided to ignore their recommendations without considering the ways in which college entrance exams could be used to make better and fairer decisions about which applicants receive the coveted acceptance email.”

Here are the last two paragraphs of the Boston Herald editorial:

“While it’s true more affluent parents can afford tutors for their children and pay for multiple test-taking, entrance exams at least give students the chance to demonstrate their ability, on top of grade history, essay and letters of recommendation.  Test-taking fees should be on a sliding scale, based on financial need.

“If there’s one thing the Varsity Blues scandal has taught us, it’s that there will always be those looking to game the system and give their children massively unfair advantages.  We need more ways to level the playing field.  Entrance exams are one of them.”

So is taking another publication’s editorial content and changing it common or considered ethical?

This blog, of course, is not devoted to journalistic ethics but rather the intersection of ethics and college admission.  So let me consider a couple of issues of substance in the two editorials.

The LA Times argues that the UC system should use at least one test as part of its admissions process, but does not specify that it should be the SAT or ACT.  A report issued by a task force appointed by the UC system’s Academic Council has recommended that the University consider instituting its own admission test that is more tied to what students learn in class than either of the national tests are, but the UC recently decided that developing its own test would be too expensive and time consuming.

The pro-test argument is that sans testing, high school grades become far more important at a time when we know there is grade inflation and student-mental-health-aware generous grading as a result of COVID.  The Times editorial claims that “grade inflation is widespread at affluent high schools,” apparently referencing a 2018 study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  

The Herald editorial concludes that entrance exams are a way to “level the playing field.”  That is a common defense of testing tied to the idea that standardized tests help identify “diamonds in the rough.”  That idea gives more credit to test scores than deserved.  Test scores may provide another metric to compare students from different high schools with similar grades, but test scores are far from unflawed as a metric.  Not only do they correlate strongly with family income, but affluent students may also have the ability to take tests multiple times and also spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars for test prep, and as a result two similar or identical scores may represent different realities. Those factors argue against leveling the playing field.

The interesting suggestion in the LA Times version of the editorial is that colleges use test scores as a benchmark or threshold of proficiency, such that if a 1200 represents the qualifying score then a 1270 or 1350 should provide no additional advantages in the admissions process.  I think that’s an interesting way to get rid of the false precision that too many people assign to SAT and ACT scores.

The Los Angeles Times may be right that the University of California is making a mistake in moving away from testing altogether, but any test should measure actual learning and readiness for college work in a way that it is not clear the SAT and ACT do.

Admission--Choice or Chance?

(This essay originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed’s Admissions Insider on November 15, 2021.)

Is admission by lottery the cure to all that ails the college admissions process?  That notion rears its head every few years, and I have been (more than once) among the voices writing about that topic.  My very first published article about college admission, in fact, was a 1988 back page essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that argued that random selection is the fairest way to allocate scarce slots at highly-selective colleges.

A new study in the journal Educational Researcher questions whether admissions lotteries would be the panacea advocates envision.  The article, “What If We Leave It Up to Chance? Admissions Lotteries and Equitable Access at Selective Colleges,” was co-authored by Dominique Baker, a professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University, and Michael Bastedo, a professor of education at the University of Michigan.

The major takeaway from Baker and Bastedo’s research is that the use of random selection in choosing whom to admit may not result in a more fair or equitable process. They ran 1000 simulations on two cohorts of students, 1400 ninth graders from the 2009 High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS) and 1275 tenth graders from the 2002 Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS). They used GPA and SAT score thresholds to predict admission by lottery to either selective or moderately selective institutions (based on Barron’s selectivity categories in place at the time of each study).

Baker and Bastedo conclude that the lottery approach would negatively impact the enrollment of several groups of applicants.  Lotteries using middle 50% test score ranges would likely result in classes with a Black and LatinX population of 1-4%, and the test-score cutoffs would have to be closer to the tenth or thirteenth percentile to maintain current levels of enrollment for those two groups.  A lottery based on GPA cutoffs would disadvantage male applicants, potentially lowering male enrollment by as much as 33%.

It’s an interesting study, and my summary may not do it justice.  I’m trying to overlook the fact that their literature review does not include my contributions. But I also think the article raises some interesting questions about some larger issues and assumptions underlying the admissions process in general. 

First and foremost is the assumption that the point of using random selection or any other selection method in a selective admissions landscape is to achieve a desired result.  That is certainly the orthodox view today, where admissions offices at selective institutions “craft” their classes to achieve strategic institutional objectives ranging from revenue to diversity to athletic success.  That approach serves institutions really well.  The question is whether it serves society as well or at all.

One of the consequences of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal was a loss of public trust in the college admissions process.  There is a widespread perception that college admission as currently constituted privileges the already privileged. One of the defense arguments in the recent OVB trial was that the parents involved understood Rick Singer’s “side door” admission scheme to be business as usual.  Are those of us in the profession okay with that perception?  Should college admission be a reflection of society, or should college admission be counter-cultural?

At the heart of the loss of public trust in the admissions process is concern that the process is not fair.  We all know that fairness lies in the eyes of the beholder.  When my parents got divorced years ago both wanted a settlement that was “fair,” but had very different conceptions of fairness.

At least part of the concern about fairness is tied to the suspicion that selective colleges start with a conception of what the desired class looks like and then reverse engineer the process to achieve the result.  That undoubtedly serves institutional interest, and quite frankly I would be tempted and inclined to pursue that strategy if I was an admissions dean.  As a high school counselor, though, I ache for my students who apply to highly-selective colleges, who are superbly qualified and worthy of admission, but have no chance because they don’t contribute to achieving the desired result. 

What obligation do colleges have toward applicants who spend hours completing applications and $80 for the right to be considered?  The admissions process is an implicit contract between colleges and applicants that students will be considered on the merit of their credentials.  Obviously what constitutes merit is open for debate, but an admissions process built on achieving a desired result does not meet that obligation.

The argument for a lottery or random selection has always been about means rather than ends, about how decisions are made rather than what outcome they produce.  Selective college admission is at least partly a case study in distributive justice, in trying to allocate a scarce resource fairly or justly.  Random selection gives every single applicant judged to be qualified for admission an equal chance to receive one of the scarce spots in the class of those admitted.  Admission by lottery is also, as Baker points out in one interview about the study, “incredibly transparent.”

But what happens when a desirable means produces a less than desirable end? Are fairness and equity the same thing or competing values?  Baker and Bastedo seem to argue that they are different, arguing that admissions lotteries “do not appear to produce more-equitable outcomes.” Baker has also been quoted that “statistically fair is not automatically equitable or just.”

No one, other than the political actors behind Students for Fair Admissions who challenge race-based admissions preferences but seem unconcerned about legacy and athletic preferences, thinks taking a step backwards with regard to diversity is a good idea.  But if a lottery that gives each individual applicant an equal chance of being admitted produces a smaller pool of students in certain groups, is it the lottery that is flawed or the assumptions used to determine who is qualified to be part of the lottery?

Baker and Bastedo’s study uses SAT/ACT test scores and GPA’s at various thresholds to determine who is included in the lottery. That is understandable, because both are easy to measure and plug in for purposes of a study.  Both are short cuts.  Easy to measure is not the same thing as measuring effectively.

There has been a lot of attention paid to the predictive flaws inherent in test scores. Test scores represent performance on a three-hour test rather than four years of high school.  There is a strong correlation between test scores and family income. Two test scores, one the result of hours of test prep and the other without extensive preparation, don’t mean the same thing.  There is also, of course, the question of what exactly the SAT or ACT measure.  They certainly can’t measure essential qualities like work ethic, grit, and perseverance.

The same flaws exist with GPAs.  A grade-point average is a better measure of academic performance over a sustained period of time than test scores, but a GPA is meaningless without context.  Two identical GPAs from two different schools may mean very different things.  Grade inflation was rampant long before COVID, but the pandemic has resulted in eased grading in most schools.  The more students who have a 4.0 GPA, the harder it becomes to differentiate among students.  And use of GPA alone ignores a much better indication of readiness for college, the rigor of courses taken. 

The goal of a lottery approach is to give equal consideration to every qualified applicant.  But equal consideration doesn’t mean equal treatment.  If use of test scores disadvantages Black and LatinX applicants, then ignore test scores and focus on strength of schedule and GPA as predictive metrics.  Working at a boys school, I have always felt that junior and senior year grades, perhaps in conjunction with test scores, provides a more accurate snapshot of a boy’s readiness for college than cumulative GPA. 

Baker and Bastedo argue that lottery results could be volatile from year to year.  One year a college might have 10% diversity and then 2% the next.  I am less concerned by that than I would be with a process that always results in low diversity numbers.  One of the issues that could have gotten Harvard in trouble in its case over Asian-American admission (and could still if that case ends up before the Supreme Court) was the argument that the percentages of different racial and ethnic groups was remarkably, even incredibly, consistent from year to year.  Baker and Bastedo suggest that the only way to ensure consistent diversity would be to run a lottery within subgroups, but recognize that would be illegal.

The Baker and Bastedo study is based upon the assumption of a national lottery.  I don’t think we’re ready for that, but I have long wished that individual selective colleges and universities might engage in “counterprogramming,” choosing to make admissions decisions differently from everyone else.  For example, one might look to fill its freshman class based on the values in the Turning the Tide reports.

I’d love to see one or two institutions serve as laboratories for admission by random selection. Admission officers would save reading time by not having to make distinctions among applicants but rather just have to determine whether an individual applicant is qualified for admission.  There are also alternatives to a pure lottery.  An institution might decide to use something like the NBA draft lottery where certain applicants have multiple lottery tickets, whether for diversity reasons or reasons of academic excellence.

Are we ready for an admissions process using the “Fickle Finger of Fate”? Anyone willing to take a chance on chance? 

The Cruelest Month

In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot observed that “April is the cruelest month.”  He obviously never worked in a college counseling office.

I find myself numb and exhausted as we enter November.  I apparently survived October, although that was in question until the last minute, but wouldn’t claim to have recovered yet.

Back in my admissions days, I would wake up on Sunday mornings in the fall and my first thought would be “Shit, I have to drive to New Jersey today.” (Please excuse my French, and no disrespect intended for New Jersey--it was the thought of the drive, not the destination.)  Now each fall, when October comes, my first thought most days is “Shit, I have to write a recommendation letter today.”  At the end of September, I apologized in advance to my staff, because I know that I am tired and grumpy throughout the month of October.

Last month I wrote a recommendation letter every day, including weekends.  Once upon a time I could write multiple letters in a day, and I am in awe of all my college counseling colleagues who have that superpower, but one rec a day, except in an emergency, is all I attempt in order to maintain my energy level and focus.  I wish that I had as much discipline and organization in all parts of my life as I had last month, but it still took a toll both physically and emotionally.

My two children, both now adults, grew up with an intuitive understanding that recommendation season was different than other times of the year, that Dad was preoccupied with the need to get recs written. I remember many Halloweens when I would take the kids trick-or-treating and then come home to finish a last recommendation for November 1. But October, which I have in a previous blog post described as Rectober and which I have seen other colleagues refer to as Suck-tober, seems worse today.

That is not my imagination. Over the course of my college counseling career I have seen the application process become both accelerated and compressed.  My son was born 35 years ago in my second year as an independent school college counselor.  He was due around February 1, and the first sign of what a great kid he would be was that he waited until after the deadline to be born (I had second thoughts eight months later when he woke up crying and caused me to miss the ground ball through Bill Buckner’s legs, one of the most memorable plays in baseball history, especially for those of us cursed to be fans of the New York Mets). February 1 was still a major application deadline for which a number of my students were submitting their first application.  Today I expect my seniors to have all their applications completed before February 1, and I would panic if one was only starting the application process then.  

For the bulk of my career the fall was a series of waves, with a deadline every two weeks, with the period in December leading up to the January 1 deadline being the busiest couple of weeks of the application season.  In recent years, however, November 1 has been a tsunami as more and more institutions introduce Early Decision and Early Action options, and now October 15 isn’t far behind in application volume.  What used to be a three to four month process is now crammed into three to four weeks.  The burden of recommendation writing largely dissipates once November hits.  This year 70 of my 90 seniors applied somewhere by November 1, and I’m sure that percentage is small compared to plenty of other schools.

The question is whether it’s healthy.  It’s great for colleges, spreading out reading over a longer period.  But what about the rest of us?  I wonder if I can make it through another October like this one.  I worry even more about my seniors.  The current admissions calendar forces students to make decisions about their futures before many of them are developmentally ready.  In particular, the number of selective colleges admitting more than half their classes in Early Decision makes the decision about whether and where to apply early monumental, since deciding to use an ED chip for one institution lessens a student’s chances in regular admission at other places.  The larger question is whether college admission offices have any clue about the realities of being a high school student.

I am sure that I am not in my right mind at this time of year (ECA readers may argue that “at this time of year” is unnecessary), but I’m not sorry to see October in the rear-view mirror.  And I’m grateful for colleges that have early deadlines on November 15 or December 1.    

Varsity Blues Verdicts

The verdicts are in.  On Friday, October 8, a jury in federal court in Boston returned guilty verdicts against the first two Operation Varsity Blues defendants to go to trial.

Gamal Abdelaziz, a former casino executive with Wynn Resorts, and John Wilson, a former executive with Staples and the Gap who is now a private-equity financier, were convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit bribery and fraud. Wilson was also found guilty of additional fraud and bribery charges and of filing a false tax return for taking a deduction for payments to coaches and the foundation run by Operation Varsity Blues mastermind Rick Singer.

On the afternoon that the verdicts were released, Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed reached out to me for comment for a story he was writing about reactions to the verdicts within higher education and the college counseling community.  It will not surprise regular readers of this blog that I was happy to do so.

There were two parts to my response.  The first, and easier, comment attempted to address the significance of the verdicts on the defendants and the legal system.

“The verdicts send an important message that ‘side doors’ and cutting in line for advantages in the admissions process are fundamentally wrong.  They also maintain confidence in the judicial system.”

I wasn’t in the courtroom for the trial, so may be missing some of the nuances of the defense presented by attorneys for the accused, but I am struggling to figure out the strategy in going to trial in the first place.  47 of the 57 parents and coaches charged in the scandal have previously pled guilty or agreed to do so, making Abdelaziz and Wilson outliers.  Every person deserves their day in court, but dating back to March 12, 2019, when the FBI indictments came out, the government’s evidence against Singer and the parents has seemed convincing and perhaps even overwhelming.

Early in his career, back when he was primarily a stand-up comedian, Steve Martin did a bit on how to be a millionaire without ever paying taxes.  Today that bit wouldn’t be as funny, because it is routine for millionaires and billionaires to legally avoid paying their fair share in taxes. 

There were two parts to Martin’s scheme.  The first was “Get a million dollars.”  The second was excuse your failure to pay taxes with two simple words, “I forgot.”

I don’t think Steve Martin served as Abdelaziz’s or Wilson’s lawyer, because news reports from the trial would have mentioned an attorney with an arrow through his head playing a banjo or claiming to be a “wild and crazy guy.”  The defense attorneys, though, seem to have taken a page out of Steve Martin’s playbook.  They claimed that their clients were victims, convinced that their payments to Singer and coaches were philanthropic donations.  But both paid Singer and his cronies to construct fake athletic profiles so their children could be admitted as recruited walk-on athletes in sports the children did not play, or at least did not play at a level that would qualify them to play in college, so how clueless were they really?

Abdelaziz was accused of paying Singer $300,000 to get his daughter into the University of Southern California as a basketball recruit, ignoring the fact that she did not make her high school team.  Wilson supposedly paid Singer $200,000 for his son to be designated as a water polo recruit for USC, half of which ended up at the university, and then contacted Singer about having his twin daughters admitted to Harvard and Stanford as ostensible sailing recruits.  For both parents there are traces of Steve Martin’s “I forgot” defense, whether it be “I forgot that my child doesn’t play that sport” or “I forgot that bribery is against the law.”  Thankfully the jurors did not buy the Steve Martin defense.

But what about the other defendant?  A New York Times  article on the verdicts argued that “the college admissions system was also on trial.”  The second part of my response to Scott Jaschik focused on that issue.

“What the verdicts don’t do is resolve the issue of whether colleges were innocent victims of Rick Singer and the Operation Varsity Blues parents or were ‘unindicted co-conspirators.”

So were the scandal and the trial indictments of the college admissions process?  The easy answer is no.  The fraud was perpetrated by a corrupt con man masquerading as an independent college consultant, parents willing to go to any lengths to obtain admission to an “elite” college for their children, and coaches willing to trade slots on their teams for some easy money.  There were no admissions officers caught up in the shenanigans. (It is also the case that no admissions officers uncovered the fraud.)

On a more global level, the answer is not as clear.  While the extent and particulars of Singer’s scheme were shocking, no one was surprised to learn of the concept of the “side door” reserved for wealthy families.

But is that a college admissions issue, a higher education issue, or a societal issue?  Colleges use the admissions process to achieve institutional goals and priorities, and like it or not, one of those goals is revenue.  Higher education is a business, and colleges are looking for individuals with the ability to pay the sticker price or with the resources to be a development prospect (whether donations tied to or in the hopes of admission qualify as philanthropy is a discussion for another time).

Is advantage for the wealthy unique to higher education or part of a larger societal issue?  Even if we know that the wealthy cut in line for all kinds of societal perks, should admission to college be different, given higher education’s aspiration to be a pipeline to access and opportunity?  Those questions triggered the final part of my response to Scott Jaschik.

“We know that the wealthy bring all kinds of advantages to the admissions process just as they do in many areas of life.  Should the college admissions process accept that as a fact of life?  Should it provide further advantage to the already privileged?  Or should admission to college be counter-cultural, guided by principles of equity and fairness?  What will we learn from the scandal?”

What, indeed?

Does U.S. News Trust But Not Verify?

(Originally Published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” September 20, 2021

Ronald Reagan famously used the phrase “Trust, but verify” to describe his posture toward discussing nuclear disarmament with the Soviet Union. 

His use of that phrase was brilliant on a couple of levels.  Talking about trusting an adversary was on one level an expression of good faith, but adding verification made it clear that any idealism was also tempered with a dose of realism.  The additional genius of the phrase as applied to the Soviets was that it was adapted from a Russian proverb, “Doveryai, no proveryai.”

The Operation Varsity Blues scandal trial currently taking place serves as a reminder of the fine line between trust and verification in college admission.  Colleges trust applicants to be honest and truthful in what they list on their application.  While we wouldn’t want that to change, Operation Varsity Blues serves as a cautionary tale.  The widespread fraud, including constructing elaborate and false athletic resumes for sports the students involved didn’t even play, was not uncovered by admission offices.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice…

The trial is not the only “ripped from today’s headlines” story that provides a test case for the interplay of trust and verification.  Last week U.S. News and World Report published its annual “America’s Best Colleges” rankings.  I have since received numerous emails from colleges trumpeting their ranking, and my local newspaper has published its annual story highlighting small changes in local institutional rankings as if they signified major news. 

This year there was considerable speculation about how U.S. News would treat test scores in its rankings recipe, given the rise of test-optional policies during the last admissions cycle.  U.S. News resisted calls to remove consideration of test scores from the formula. Colleges receive “full credit” for test scores if 50% of entrants reported scores (the figure had previously been 75%).  Colleges where fewer than 50% of entrants submitted scores received a “discount” of 15% in the impact of scores on its ranking.  According to U.S. News, that affected 4% of institutions.

The focus on how many places Wossamotta U. (alma mater of Bullwinkle J. Moose) may have moved up or down in the rankings, and the attention given to minor changes in U.S. News’ methodology, may be obscuring a more important issue.

Over the weekend I was doing research on the relationship between admissions selectivity (rejectivity may be the better term) and prestige, thinking about how number of applications and admit rate drive institutional behavior.  In the course of the research I stumbled upon a U.S. News list of the Top 100 colleges with the lowest acceptance rates according to the 2022 rankings..

That list included eight institutions identified as having admit rates below 20% that I found surprising.  Alice Lloyd College in Pippa Passes, Kentucky was listed as having a 7% admit rate, making it seemingly as selective as MIT and Yale.  The other surprises include the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma (13%); the College of the Ozarks in Missouri, Limestone University in South Carolina, and Ottawa University in Kansas, all at 14%; Wiley College in Texas and Bacone College in Oklahoma (15%); and Texas Wesleyan University (19%).  

As already stated, I was surprised by, and perhaps even suspicious of, those numbers.  All are regional institutions that serve a valuable role in the landscape of higher education, but it seems odd that they would be as selective as the national universities and liberal arts colleges that populate the U.S. News list. 

Eight or nine years ago I recall some colleges doing creative accounting to lower their admit rate, counting inquiries as applications. At that time one college corrected data regarding applications received and students admitted that resulted in changing its admit rate from 27.4 to 89.1.  That institution explained the discrepancy as “counting in a different way.” U.S News subsequently moved that college into the “Unranked” category. For the record, I wish U.S. News would place all colleges and universities in the Unranked category.

I was intrigued by the reported low admit rates for those eight schools, and decided to follow up by comparing the U.S. News data with the data for each school on the Common Data Set (a collaborative initiative jointly sponsored by the College Board, U.S. News, and Peterson’s) and IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System), an arm of the National Center for Education Statistics that is part of the U.S. Department of Education.  Any institution receiving federal aid is required to report data in a number of areas, and I assume there are significant consequences for reporting false information.

It will probably nor surprise readers that I found discrepancies between what U.S. News is showing and what was reported to IPEDS, for there would no reason to write about this if all the data squared.  With a couple of exceptions, the IPEDS reporting for each college varies significantly from what U.S. News shows.

According to the IPEDS data for 2019-20, Alice Lloyd’s admit rate is 28%, not 7%.  Limestone’s is 51% rather than 14%, Bacone’s is 72% rather than 15%, Texas Wesleyan’s is 42%, not 19%, and the University of Science and Arts in Oklahoma is 36% rather than 13%.  Wiley College is listed in IPEDS as being open enrollment.  That’s quite an accomplishment, an open enrollment institution with a 15% admit rate.

There are two outliers among the outliers, both of whom share an interesting characteristic.  Ottawa University in Kansas actually shows up on the U.S. News Top 100 list twice, once at 14% and once at 24%.  Ottawa has an online component as well as satellite campuses in Kansas City, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Surprise, Arizona.  The main campus reports an admit rate of 15% but a yield rate of 66%.

The College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri, a conservative Christian institution that brands itself as “Work Hard U,” has a similar interesting statistical anomaly.  Its reported admit rate on IPEDS is 10%, actually lower than credited by U.S. News, but it also reports a yield of 91%.  I’m by no means a statistical expert, but that extremely low admit rate and extremely high yield rate suggest they have a different kind of admissions process than most other institutions.

I contacted U.S. News to see if there is an explanation for the discrepancies.  A spokesperson responded by pointing out that “acceptance rate is not part of the methodology,” and also added this note about U.S. News’s approach to quality assurance.

“For quality assurance, rankings data that schools reported to U.S. News were algorithmically compared with previous years' submissions to flag large change statistical outliers. Respondents were required to review, possibly revise and verify any flagged data to submit their surveys. For the third year in a row, they were also instructed to have a top academic official sign off on the accuracy of the data. Schools that declined to do this step could still be ranked but display a footnote on their U.S. News profile on usnews.com.

After submitting, U.S. News assessed the veracity of data submitted on a factor-by-factor level and contacted select schools to confirm or revise data. Schools that did not respond or were unable to confirm their data's accuracy may have had the data in question unpublished and unused in the calculations.”

If I am reading that correctly, U.S. News uses an algorithm that flags large changes in data from year to year, and then has institutions revise data as needed.  But what about data that doesn’t change dramatically? Does U.S. News attempt to verify all the information submitted (which would obviously be a huge job) or does it operate on an honor system, trusting that institutions will answer truthfully?

The larger issue here is not whether acceptance rate is part of the ranking methodology, but why the U.S. News data doesn’t match the IPEDS data.  Is the admit data an anomaly, or is there other questionable data U.S. News uses in its ranking methodology? Where is the line between trust and verification? And should we trust rankings based on data that is self-reported and unverified?

The College Counselor as Hollywood Agent

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” September 7, 2021)

I counsel my students that the college search isn’t ultimately about college admission. The college process is part of a larger journey of self-discovery, where the objective is to discern who you are and what your unique purpose is. 

It’s taken a long time, perhaps too long, but I’ve finally figured out my own raison d’etre. I’m determined to spend the rest of my days trying to de-mythologize the college admissions process.  “De-mythologize” might be the wrong verb, because the beliefs and assumptions I want to investigate, clarify, and stamp out aren’t myths per se, but closer to urban legends.  Like urban legends, they are plausible, but never happen to anyone you know. 

I prefer to call them “Suburban Legends.”  They are the “truths” about college admission that are shared as gospel in the grocery store, on the sidelines of games, and at any social gathering where parents of high school juniors and seniors congregate.  They are believed and propagated by people who are educated and affluent.  Some of them may be true, but many aren’t.

A recent New York Times article included a classic Suburban Legend.  The article wasn’t about college admission but rather about the efforts of independent schools in New York City to address their histories as privileged and predominantly white institutions. Many have adopted antiracist policies and language, and the article shows why the debate over critical race theory has become so politicized.  Schools trying to do the right thing in becoming more diverse and inclusive and helping students and parents come to grips with the vestiges of systemic racism must navigate dangerous waters. On one shore is the Scylla of right-wing legislators trying to score cheap political points, and on the other the Charybdis of diversity consultants arguing, in an example from the Times article, that “individualism, worship of the written word, and objectivity” are tools of white supremacy.

What caught my attention, though, was a sentence in the middle of the article.  “A letter or call from the counselor at a top private school can work wonders with college admissions offices.”

The notion of the college counselor as Hollywood agent, cutting deals for students, is a popular trope.  Jacques Steinberg, then a New York Times reporter, used the relationship between a high school college counselor and a Wesleyan University admissions officer as a narrative device in his 2002 book, The Gatekeepers. In an article titled “Fenced In By Delusions,” adolescent psychologist Michael Thompson describes the “relationship delusion,” whereby independent school parents believe, or at least hope, that schools have “special” relationships with certain colleges whereby their child’s counselor can facilitate admission by picking up the phone and calling a buddy in the admissions office.

But is it true?  Can college counselors at independent schools “work wonders,” tipping the scales of justice, or at least admission?

The answer, in my experience, is no.  I’ve been a college counselor for nearly 40 years, and if I have that superpower, I’m not aware of it. 

When I started in the college counseling profession it was common for independent schools to talk about college “placement,” implying that schools “placed” students at various colleges.  I’ve never been comfortable seeing college counseling through a sales lens, and if it was ever the case that a well-placed call could influence admissions offices, that disappeared long ago.

Or has it?  In the wake of the Times article, I reached out to members of ACCIS, the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools.  In a short time I received more than 50 thoughtful and passionate responses from counselors at schools in 24 states plus the District of Columbia.

The consensus of the group was that the Times article misrepresented the influence that independent school college counselors have.  The advocacy call has largely disappeared, especially at the nation’s most competitive colleges. 

Early in my career, it was common to have a call with admissions officers at institutions where my school regularly sent applicants before decisions were finalized.  It was a discussion, not a negotiation, but I had the ability to ask for a second look at candidates on the bubble.  Occasionally a decision would be changed from deny to wait list or wait list to accept.

Gradually the nature of counselor calls changed to a reporting function, providing context on the applicant pool that helped us explain decisions to students and parents.  At some institutions those calls more resembled infomercials, with the message often sounding like “We’re so excited that we could reject so many of your students.”

Today many institutions won’t have conversations at all, not sharing decisions with counselors until after the students have received them. The rationale is equity.  Is it fair to have calls with counselors from some schools when we can’t have calls with all schools?  As an ethical principle that makes sense.  The unanticipated consequence (or maybe it is anticipated) is an erosion of the collaboration across the desk that has allowed college admission counseling to claim to be a profession.  I worry that college admission offices and high school counselors are no longer part of one profession but exist on a dual track.

While there is an overwhelming sense from the ACCIS respondents that the kind of influence suggested by the New York Times is fiction, there is also nagging suspicion or even paranoia that some prominent schools and counselors may retain that influence.  Several counselors wondered if there is a secret society most of us aren’t privy to where schools and colleges make deals using the college admissions equivalent of the Bat Phone or the White House-Kremlin hot line.  Do schools in Boston, New York, DC, and Los Angeles have relationships with colleges that are off limits to the rest of us?

If they do, no one is admitting to it.  I received responses from college counselors at two different prominent independent schools in New York City, both of whom were distressed by the implications in the Times article.  One described the counseling team reacting to the article with “a mixture of sadness and open hostility,” while the other commented, “If my school’s communications department wouldn’t blow a gasket I would write a letter to the NYT to tell them that what they wrote is BS.”

That second comment provides insight into where the belief that independent school college counselors are like Hollywood agents originates.  It comes not from college counseling offices, but from the marketing arm of many schools.  Clearly one of the reasons parents choose independent schools is for a perceived benefit in the college admissions process.  A few years ago a colleague attended an open house for the parents of kindergarten applicants.  Those parents leafed through the packet of information casually, until they got to the college list, which they perused in depth.

Should schools promise either explicitly or subtly that the school and its counselors can provide access and advantage in the college admissions process?  Of course not.  Today the advantage that independent schools provide is an excellent education and a college counseling program that helps families navigate a process that is confusing and stress-inducing.  That kind of support is worth its weight in gold, or at least tuition dollars.  Schools should be trumpeting process, not results.

It’s time to retire the college counselor as Hollywood agent trope.  I’d suggest replacing it with the idea that college counselors are trail guides. At a time when the college admissions world increasingly resembles the Wild West, that’s an appropriate metaphor. We help students and parents plot a course through dangerous and uncertain terrain, anticipate what’s around the bend, and make sure they don’t miss the scenery. 

Now if only the New York Times and other media outlets would promote that view of college counseling.

A Voter's Guide to the NACAC Annual Member Vote

I have been described as a “college admissions geek,” and the fact that I choose to see that as a compliment probably serves as confirmation.  I may be a geek in other ways as well, but I am most certainly not a by-laws geek (you may choose to disagree after reading this post).

One of my first National Association for College Admission Counseling conferences was in Los Angeles in the early 1990s.  I was young and dutiful, and so I went to the membership meeting on Saturday afternoon even when friends were planning to drive out to Malibu.  There were a large number of by-law changes to be voted on, so when the board member presenting them said, “I will now read the by-laws changes one by one,” a voice inside my head said, “I’m out of here.”  Malibu was lovely.

Last week voting opened for the NACAC’s first online annual member vote.  For the first time all eligible NACAC members will be able to vote for two Board Directors and the President-elect.  Previously the officers were elected by the Assembly, NACAC’s legislative body. 

The vote also includes 17 proposed amendments to NACAC’s by-laws.  Yes, that’s a lot of by-law changes.  Last week rather than go to Malibu I listened to NACAC’s webinar explaining the vote and read about the proposed by-laws changes on the organization’s website.  I found myself wishing that someone would put together a “voter’s guide” explaining the proposed changes for those of us who aren’t by-laws geeks.

Why not ECA? What follows is an attempt to explain the choices that NACAC voters have.  It will lay out what’s on the ballot and consider the larger issues this blog always looks for, even when there aren’t any.  What this voter’s guide won’t do is tell anyone how to vote.  I trust ECA readers to think for themselves and make wise choices.

The most entertaining thing about the NACAC webinar was watching the closed captioning service translation of what was being said.  It butchered several names, including my close friend Jane Phone Ash (NACAC Past President), translated by-laws as “buyer walks,” by-law amendments as “buy little moments,” and ad-hocs as “that walks.” It also interpreted NASFAA (National Association of Student Aid Administrators) as NASCAR.

What was most interesting, though, was the closed-captioning translation of NACAC.  NACAC was mentioned 30 times during the webinar, and translated as NACAC not a single time.  There were multiple interpretations of NACAC as NASDAQ (9 times), Mac (5 times), neck (4 times), and NACA (close, but no cigar—3 times).  There were also individual instances where NACAC was translated as knock, magic, neck x, NASA, backpack, and cactus.  I don’t know exactly how closed-captioning services are hired, but if you are a national organization doing a webinar with closed captioning, perhaps you should make sure that the captioners know how to spell your name.

Five of the seventeen proposed by-law changes are language changes tied to the change a year ago in NACAC’s membership model.  That change removed the need for member institutions to have a “principal representative” and replaced it with “primary contact.”  The primary contact can be a clerical person rather than an admission or counseling professional.  

            Article III         Membership, Section 6

            Article VIII      Affiliate Presidents Council, Section 3

            Article IX         The Assembly, Section 5

            Article X          Board of Directors, Section 3

            Article XI         Board of Directors Eligibility, Nomination, and Election Process,

Sections 1 and 3

In addition, Article VII, Affiliated Associations, Section 3a, having to do with the procedures for establishing new affiliates, now establishes that ten of the 20 required voting NACAC members necessary to establish a new affiliate must be admission or college counseling professionals.  That is driven by the language change to “primary contact,” which doesn’t have to be a professional.

Since we are looking at larger issues in addition to describing the specific proposed by-law changes, a comment about that membership model.  At a fundamental level, it has worked amazingly well for NACAC, with the organization’s membership growing by 50% in a year, making NACAC parallel the application increases experienced by some of its most exclusive, elite member colleges.  The larger a professional organization, the more clout it presumably has.  The other side of the coin is that the bigger any organization becomes, the less common ground there may be within the membership.  I worry about an increasing divide within our profession on a number of fronts, not least between the admission and counseling sides of the desk.  I hope that NACAC will stand for something besides being large.

I also found myself bothered by a statement in the rationale for Article III above.  Whereas “principle representatives” were charged with ensuring the accountability and compliance of their institutions, the rationale for the change states that “with the switch to best practices (within NACAC’s Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission), no members should be monitoring compliance for their institution.”  I get the point, but shouldn’t every NACAC member be monitoring compliance for their institution, even if we don’t necessarily have the power to enforce compliance?  Each of us has an obligation as a member of this profession to be an advocate for student-centered, ethical admission practices.

The proposed change to Article X, Board of Directors, Section 2a, is to change the title of President to Chair of the Board.  The rationale is to “provide more clarity” and “align NACAC with peer organizations,” but this is probably part of a larger strategic move to establish Angel Perez, NACAC’s CEO, as the face of the organization.  Angel was an inspired choice for the job, bringing experience as an admission dean on the front lines, and he should be the face of NACAC, but the elected President of NACAC has historically been more than leader of the Board of Directors.  The NACAC President represents the membership and the profession (I am clearly not objective, having served in that role).  The worry here is whether NACAC will become a more staff-centric, “inside the Beltway” professional organization.  I certainly don’t believe that is the intent.

That same concern is raised by some of the other by-law changes having to do with committees.  During my tenure on the Board, a decade ago, there was discussion about whether standing committees were still effective, or whether the future of organizational governance would be short term ad hoc committees appointed to tackle specific issues, an approach that would allow the organization to be more nimble.  NACAC had abolished most of its standing committees previously, and currently has four ad hocs at work. The ad hoc model is promising, but it is too early to know how effective it will be.

The new proposed by-laws abolish NACAC’s three remaining standing committees, Admission Practices, Governance and Nominating, and Finance.  AP and G&N will become “special” committees, and the Finance Committee is being “sunset,” a lovely euphemism that I may want to appropriate for my obituary.

            Article XV     Committees, Section 1c        Removes G&N as a Standing Committee

Article XI       Board of Directors Eligibility, Nomination, and Election Process

                                                Removes reference to G&N as Standing Committee

Article XIII    Officers, Section 5     Removes reference to immediate Past President

serving on G&N

            Article XV     Committees, Section 1a        Removes AP as Standing Committee

            Article XV     Committees, Section 1b        “Sunsets” Finance Committee

            Article XIII    Officers, Section 2d  Changes President to Chair of the Board and

makes reference to ad hoc committees

            Article XIII    Officer, Section 2f     Removes President as ex-officio of Standing

Committees (because there are none)

            Article XIX    Chief Executive Officer        Removes CEO as ex-officio for Standing

Committees

            Article XV     Committees, Section 2          Gives Board power to create committees

            Article XV     Committees, Section 3          Removes description of Standing

Committee membership

The broader issue here is how NACAC will develop a governance structure that empowers and grows leadership among the membership.  It is great to give the membership a voice in electing officers, but even more important is having a hand in guiding the work of the association.  382 NACAC members volunteered for the approximately 80 spots on the four recently-named ad hoc committees, and that makes it clear that members want an opportunity to serve the association and the profession.

I wish these by-law changes were part of a larger blueprint for governance beyond the Board and staff.  The Assembly, NACAC’s legislative body, has had its two biggest tasks, electing officers and voting on changes to the ethics code, taken away, so what is the plan for the future of that body?  I have been part of intense, invigorating discussions as an Assembly delegate, and I have seen other years when there is little business or reason to meet.  What is the Goldilocks solution that will make the Assembly meaningful and relevant?

The standing committee model had its flaws.  There was no consistency in the charge or amount of work among the various committees, and the seven-person limit and the rule against more than one committee member from any affiliate meant that sometimes the best candidates couldn’t get appointed. But having a three-year term gave committee members insight and experience confronting the issues facing NACAC.  I hope the ad hoc committees provide the same opportunity.  Does a committee with twenty members allow and encourage the kind of camaraderie and discussion required to deal with serious issues that a committee of seven does?

I’m not sure how I feel about the “sunsetting” of the Finance Committee.  The rationale given was that the committee’s work duplicates the work of the Board’s Performance Committee and outside auditors.  That may be the case, but ending the Finance Committee means that no NACAC members beyond the Board have an eye on the Association’s finances.

NACAC has been through several tumultuous years.  The Department of Justice investigation into NACAC’s mandatory ethical standards threatened the Association’s existence and removed its signature raison d’etre.  Then COVID caused a dramatic financial loss from the national conference and the National College Fairs program that for years has been NACAC’s major source of revenue.  The organization has been forced to reduce staff at the same time that a new leadership team has come aboard.

I worry that some of these by-law changes, even if right, may be rushed.  NACAC has always been a deliberate organization, and that is both a strength and a weakness.  Perhaps these changes need to be expedited, but the Board has not met in person a single time during the past year. My experience with virtual meetings is that it is difficult to develop the kind of rapport and trust needed to read the room and make sure that all voices are heard, especially those hesitant to express reservations about a particular decision.

I have always believed that NACAC is the best hope for our profession, and I continue to believe that.  I am excited about Angel Perez’s leadership as the organization carves a new path.  I hope that NACAC will remain true to its history and have a governance model that is transparent and decentralized rather than adopt a model that concentrates all power and decision making in the Board and staff.  I wish I had a better sense for what that will look like moving forward.

The opportunity to vote will continue through September 15.  I applaud NACAC for expanding the vote at the same time that so many cynical politicians are trying to suppress the votes of anyone they think won’t support their radical policy positions.  Voting is a right, but also a privilege.  Don’t waste yours.

And in this election, it’s okay to provide food and water to your fellow NACAC members as they are waiting to vote.