"Luckocracy"

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider on December 11, 2023)

I always love it when I find a new word or phrase that better captures a concept that I’ve been thinking about. I always hate it when it’s a word or phrase I wish I had been smart enough to come up with myself.

So it was several years ago when Akil Bello talked about colleges as being highly “rejective” rather than highly selective. That seems to me a spot-on way to express a guiding principle that drives admission for a certain group of colleges. At those places, rejectivity is not just descriptive but also aspirational. A worldview that sees college admission as only about prestige, and that “the harder a college to get in, the better it must be,” is widely and uncritically accepted by the public and promulgated by the media, and motivates colleges to strive to be rejective.

Just before Thanksgiving I discovered a new term that appropriately captures another important concept. Jessi Streib, a sociologist at Duke, recently wrote a book titled “The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College.” Her thesis is that for college graduates entering the job market, meritocracy gives way to what Streib refers to as the “luckocracy.”

I have been thinking about the concept of “luckocracy,” and I think it has application not only to the job search but also the college search. That is particularly true for students applying to colleges and universities where “rejectivity” is a strategic goal and a reality.

There is an on-going debate within the college admissions world about whether the admission process is, or should be, a meritocracy. That debate encompasses a subdebate about whether merit is real, or merely a code word for privilege. Is meritocracy really “privilegeocracy”?

I think there is such a thing as merit. I’m not sure I can give a good definition, but like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart with regard to pornography, I know it when I see it. (It’s just not as easy to find on the internet.) It is also the case, however, that many of the things identified as merit are either covertly or even overtly measures of privilege.

I wonder if we do students (and the public) a disservice when we talk about college admission being a meritocracy. In a meritocracy those who are unsuccessful may come to question their self-worth and merit, and in the selective/rejective admission process there are far more students who possess merit and deserve admission than will actually receive admission offers. I worry about the messages we send those students.

I worry even more about those who are successful in the elite college admission process. I worry that they don’t feel gratitude for the opportunity they receive and empathy for their classmates who are not as fortunate, but rather feel hubris and a sense of entitlement. They didn’t get in because they were fortunate or lucky, but because they were better, more meritorious. That message doesn’t serve them or our society well.

My very first article about college admission, published back in 1988, argued that selective admission is ultimately a problem in distributive justice, where the objective is to allocate a scarce resource fairly. My solution was a form of random selection among those applicants deemed qualified for admission.

The response was interesting. Some thought it must be satire, the college admission equivalent of Jonathan Swift’s A “Modest Proposal.” Others were incensed that I dared suggest that the ability to sculpt or engineer a class should be removed from admissions offices. I was told by admission friends that my name was being taken in vain in admissions offices across the country.

The most interesting response, however, came from students applying to the Ivies and other highly-rejective colleges and universities. They opposed the use of random selection because they didn’t want to gain admission through a lottery, through luck, but rather wanted to believe that they were admitted because they were better than those not admitted.

The idea of college admission as a meritocracy encourages that sense of superiority. That’s where the concept of “luckocracy” comes in. Thinking of selective admission as a luckocracy promotes humility, an appreciation that we may not get what we deserve, not deserve what we get.

One of the central principles of ethics is that individuals shouldn’t be held morally responsible for things over which they have no control. You don’t choose the color of your hair or the color of your skin, so you shouldn’t be rewarded or penalized for those. None of us are responsible for the family or country we are born in. That is a matter of luck, not merit. Many of the components of any individual’s success in the college admissions process have a strong correlation to the circumstances of one’s birth. Luckocracy recognizes that front and center. Meritocracy does not.

It is important to recognize that meritocracy and luckocracy are concepts that can co-exist. Any individual’s success in life is a function of merit and drive, but also of luck and good fortune.  

As we head into the season of helping our students deal with early decision and early action results, I hope we can find the appropriate balance between merit and luck. Whether they want to hear it or not, students and parents need to understand that admission may be a meritocracy, bu itt is definitely a luckocracy.

How Selective College Admission Explains the College Football Playoffs (and Vice Versa)

This past weekend the four semifinalists for college football’s national championship, the College Football Playoff (CFP) were selected. If you are wondering why the CFP is not named for a corporate sponsor, it’s because it has thirteen of them. Lucky 13!  Michigan will meet Alabama in one semifinal game on New Year’s Day, and Washington will face Texas in the other.

The selections were not without controversy.  Florida State, best known as the home of the tomahawk chop cheer but also the champion of the Atlantic Coast Conference, was left out of the field despite an undefeated regular season, largely because its star quarterback is injured and out for the season. It was the first time that an undefeated championship team from one of college football’s Power Five conferences has not been selected, and that prompted cries of unfairness from wounded and disappointed Seminole fans and other observers.

This month is not only the holiday season and the season for bowl games and the CFP, but also the season when a significant number of students will receive decisions on Early Decision and Early Action applications.  Just like college football teams, some will receive good news and some will receive disappointment.

All of us who work in college admissions and college counseling are prone to find connections to other professions or areas of life. Or perhaps that’s just me. But there seem to be some similarities between the CFP and the selective college admissions process.

Could the selective college admission process serve as a metaphor (or is it analogy) for the College Football Playoff? Or is it the other way around? Inquiring ECA readers may not care or want to know, but here goes anyway.

I have never been reluctant to demonstrate my command of the obvious. The simplest connection between the CFP and selective admission is that both involve colleges.

CFP resembles selective admission in that there are not enough spots available for all the deserving candidates. Someone is going to be left out. In both cases selection is made by an admissions committee through a process that is holistic rather than formulaic, mysterious rather than transparent.

One of the debates about CFP selections is whether the committee should be selecting the best candidates or the most deserving candidates. There is a similar philosophical debate within selective admission. Should the admissions process be about rewarding past success or predicting future success? 

In football the argument for Florida State is that its record this year is spotless. The argument against Florida State is that it may not be one of the best teams at the moment or during the playoffs. Should that matter, especially when it is related to something that is not their fault, a season-ending injury to their star quarterback? From an ethical standpoint we shouldn’t be punished for things we have not chosen or over which we have no control.  

Balancing strength of schedule and performance is always an issue in the selective college process, and it was a consideration in picking the playoff teams as well. Florida State had a better record but a weaker strength of schedule than Alabama. Much of Alabama’s strength of schedule is tied to its required courses (its conference slate in the Southeastern Conference, or SEC, generally considered the top conference). But Alabama also chose to take easy elective courses in Middle Tennessee, South Florida, and Chattanooga in order to pad its resume. Those might be considered the college football scheduling equivalent of basket-weaving (not that there is anything wrong with basket weaving or any of those football teams). Should that be held against them?

There are other similarities between the CFP and selective college admission that raise the kinds of issues and difficult considerations that admission committees must work through. 

In Michigan you have the student with the stellar record but also a suspension for cheating. Should that call into question their credentials or disqualify them as a candidate?

Alabama jumped over Florida State to earn the last admission spot despite an early blemish on its transcript and inconsistent performance. Did it, and should it, get additional consideration because it comes from the SEC, a traditional and important “feeder school” for the CFP? 

Georgia failed one final exam after having had the best transcript for the past three years. It was at the top of the accept pile right up until the time that final decisions were released. Should its overall body of work outweigh the results of one assessment?

Then there’s the case of Liberty University, the highest-ranked non-Power 5 conference team and the champion of Conference USA. Liberty also finished the season unbeaten, and will be rewarded with a New Year’s Day bowl game against Oregon. Liberty is also unbeaten, and yet no one has argued that it should be included in the CFP. The selective college equivalent is how an admissions committee should evaluate a candidate with a stellar record but a weaker schedule from a weaker school. None of the Power Five conference teams want to schedule Liberty in football and lose, so should their weaker schedule be held against them.

Finally, there’s the fairness issue. We talk a lot about equity as a guiding principle in college admission, but can either the College Football Playoffs or the selective admissions process be truly fair and equitable? Fairness is in the eye of the beholder, and may look different in Tallahassee, Florida than in places like Seattle, Austin, Ann Arbor, and Tuscaloosa where the home teams weren’t excluded. College football fans would do well to consider the wisdom of legendary Harvard admission dean Bill Fitzsimmons, who I have heard say, “The selective admissions process is rational, but not necessarily fair.”

Let the games, both football and admission, begin. As as you celebrate the holidays, whether Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or even Festivus, remember the words of Tiny Tim (the Dickens character, not the 1960s ukelele-playing novelty singer), “May God bless us, every one.” 

3-for-1 > 2-for-1

“Life in Pieces” was a sitcom that appeared on CBS from 2015 until 2019. It starred Diane Wiest and James Brolin as the matriarch and patriarch of an extended family, and what made it different from other sitcoms was that each episode consisted of three separate vignettes.

Think of this as a blog post in pieces. Instead of focusing on a single topic, this edition of ECA will offer brief updates and commentaries on three recent stories in the news.

Item #1: U.S. News recalculates the ranks for 213 schools.

In case you missed it, on October 27 U.S. News and World Report announced corrected ranks for 213 colleges and universities for the 2024 edition of the rankings published five weeks before.

The revisions impacted each of U.S. News’s ten ranking categories:

National Universities National Liberal Arts Colleges

Regional Universities–North Regional Liberal Arts Colleges–North

Regional Universities–South Regional Liberal Arts Colleges–South

Regional Universities–Midwest Regional Liberal Arts Colleges–Midwest

Regional Universities–West Regional Liberal Arts Colleges–West

The revamped rankings impacted institutions in all but two states (Delaware and South Dakota) plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Marianas Islands. More colleges from Puerto Rico (23) were affected than for any other geographic area. If you didn’t know that Puerto Rico had as many as 23 colleges and universities, join the club. 

Most of the changes occurred lower in the rankings, with the most prominent institutions involved being Colorado College, which moved from 29th to 33rd among National Liberal Arts Colleges, and the Rhode Island School of Design, which moved from first to fourth in the Regional Universities (North) category. 

What led to the changes? U.S. News blamed the mistakes on what it called an “anomaly in the code” it uses to produce the rankings. ECA reached out to U.S. News’s rankings guru, Bob Morse, to request more insight about the anomaly. To his credit he responded almost immediately, but he also declined to provide more detail. I’m sure the code is proprietary.

U.S. News deserves praise for voluntarily and transparently disclosing the anomaly, but there is a larger issue here (ECA readers know how much we love larger issues). Should we really care? Publishing the changes promotes one of the flawed assumptions underlying college rankings, the false precision. Does it really matter if Colorado College is ranked 33rd rather than 29th? It may matter to people at Colorado College, but is CC any less impressive an institution because U.S. News ranks it four places lower? I’d suggest not. 

Item #2: Vanderbilt reaches settlement in financial aid lawsuit.

Last week Vanderbilt became the second university to agree to a settlement in a lawsuit filed last year against 17 universities charging that they were colluding with regard to financial aid policies and packaging. The terms of the Vanderbilt settlement have not been announced, but the University of Chicago previously settled for $13.5 million.  

All of the colleges cited in the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, were formerly members of the 568 Presidents Group. That group, now defunct, was named for a section of a federal statute that allowed colleges and universities to collaborate on financial aid policies as long as they practice need-blind admission. The exemption allowing collaboration expired in September of 2022.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit alleged that the universities were not completely need-blind in their financial aid practices. The argument was that the colleges and universities named give admission advantages to legacies and full-pay applicants, meaning that they are not truly and purely need-blind. 

The universities have claimed that they have done nothing untoward, but just as with some of the federal and state election interference cases, every time one defendant settles we must wonder how fast others will follow. Stay tuned.

Item #3: ACT goes BOGO.

Loyal ECA reader Sue Rexford reached out a couple of weeks ago with a suggested topic for this blog. She had received an email from ACT around Halloween with what was described both as “a spellbinding 2-for-1 opportunity!” and a “BOO-GO” offer, complete with ghost emoji (👻).

The email trumpeted a new offer made by ACT whereby students who registered for the December 9 administration of the test would receive a free retest in 2024. That’s the first time I’ve seen that kind of “if you order now” offer made by the testing industry.

It’s not totally clear why the offer appeared when it did. Was ACT hoping that all of us would substitute 2-for-1 ACT registration coupons for candy on Halloween? And would that constitute a trick or a treat? 

The more likely answer, of course, is that it was trying to stimulate business right before the deadline. The BOGO (“Buy one, get one free”) approach is common in other businesses, and is usually associated with trying to incentivize potential customers to purchase the product in question. That incentive usually suggests that business is not as vigorous or robust as desired. This may be one more sign of just how much the test-optional movement has hurt the bottom line of the testing industry.

ACT states in the email that “This second chance can be key to maximizing their superscore, enhancing college applications, and unlocking scholarship opportunities.” I’d probably make the same claims if I was writing advertising copy for the 2-for-1 offer, but as a consumer I can’t say that it would convince me to go immediately to act.org to take advantage of the offer.

The bigger question is whether we want college admission testing, or, for that matter, any part of the college admissions process, to resemble or be advertised like products such as ginsu knives or Ronco products like the veg-o-matic or Mr. Microphone. Do we need the College Board or the ACT doing late night infomercials? And will we soon see the “test-o-matic”?

That’s it for this edition of Ethical College Admissions. 3-for-1 is always > 2-for-1.   

My Last Rec Letter

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on November 6, 2023)

I have always urged high school seniors and their parents to live in the moment, to enjoy the senior year and even the college admissions process. Rather than worry about the big game against the archrival, enjoy being part of a rivalry that is special.  Rather than worry about grades, enjoy your classes and classmates. Rather than worry about college admission, enjoy the chance to make decisions about your future.

That’s easier said than done. Human beings seem programmed to focus on the future (or, once we reach a certain age, the past). A character in Thornton Wilder’s iconic American play Our Town asks if any humans realize what they are experiencing while living. The answer is that poets and saints might, to some extent. Most of us are neither poets nor saints.

I have been trying to live in the moment this fall as I go through my final college counseling season. I’m trying to be cognizant of some of my “lasts” as I experience them. One of those occurred last week. 

A couple of weeks back I wrote what I believe was the last college recommendation letter I will ever write. That’s hard to fathom. For nearly 40 years each fall has been organized around and consumed by application deadlines and the need to write a recommendation for each of my seniors. I may not have enough distance to have perspective, but forgive me as I take a moment to reflect on the counselor recommendation letter. 

When I was first hired as a college counselor, there was a lot of talk about “The Letter,” as if it was the college admissions equivalent of a Talmudic text. The ability to write seemed more important than the ability to counsel kids properly. I have long been skeptical that my letters are read with anywhere near the time and care I devote to writing them, but I have always felt that the rec letter is my opportunity to make a case for a student. 

That’s not always easy. I have never written a negative letter–that’s not my job. As our mothers might advise us, “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing.” But some letters are challenging to write. It’s hard to make chicken salad without chicken.

Every recommendation tells a story. There is the story of accomplishment, the story of growth, the story of adversity overcome, or the story of potential. Obviously some of those stories are easier to tell than others. 

Every counselor has a personal regimen for getting recs done. I have always envied those who are able to get their letters done during the summer, but I’ve never been able to do it. Some counselors work on multiple letters at the same time, but I’ve focused on cranking one out at a time. Some of us get up early or stay up late to carve out the time and creative energy needed to write. There were plenty of Halloweens when I took my children trick-or-treating and returned home to write one last rec letter for November 1.

I wish I were as disciplined and organized in other parts of my life as I was when writing my rec letters. In recent years I have tried to write one a day, and two years ago I wrote a recommendation letter every day for 40 days straight. That’s not quite on par with the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness, but it’s close.

Years ago I received a phone call from the director of admissions at a large public university in the Southeast. One of my students with a very weak transcript had applied, but he said that my recommendation letter made him think he should give the student a chance. He closed the conversation by asking if I had ever considered becoming a creative writer.

That is not to say that rec letters are fiction, but they are an art form. The recommendation is part legal brief, laying out evidence and making the case for a student’s acceptance. It is part character sketch. And if the student’s transcript serves as primary text, the recommendation serves the same function as footnotes do in scholarly books, providing explanation and context. 

There is an ongoing debate about how long recommendations should be. The consensus seems to be one page, but I’ve always had trouble being that succinct. Most of my letters run a page and a half. A counselor friend used to brag about all of her letters being one page, but then admitted that she had accomplished that only by using narrow margins and seven-point font. 

I’ve also been too much of a dinosaur to adopt the bullet-point format for letters. What I have tried to do is front-load my letters so that the essence of the letter is in the opening paragraph, with the rest of the letter providing support for the main thesis. (By the way, given the recent tragedy in Lewiston, Maine and the larger issue of gun violence, I wonder if we should retire the term “bullet point.” If that makes me “woke”--a term I hate and also want to retire– I can live with that.)

Recommendation letters have a lot in common with advertising. In both cases your goal is making the strongest claim possible without compromising the truth or your integrity. Language is important, because I have always believed that recommendations are read negatively. If you don’t say something, it’s probably because you can’t.

If you mention that a student is “diligent,” is that a sign that the student is less than brilliant? I remember hearing a counselor say that a college reported that two of her students weren’t admitted because she described them as “reserved.” That’s unfortunate and wrong, reflecting a conscious or unconscious bias against introverts.

Recommendation writing offers the opportunity for the creative turn of phrase. Many years ago a professor at Lehigh University developed what he termed as the Lexicon of Inconspicuously Ambiguous Recommendations (yes, the acronym is LIAR).

The lexicon was oriented toward job recommendations rather than college recommendations, and his point was what you don’t say may be more meaningful than what you say. If you say “You will be fortunate to get this person to work for you,” is the important missing information that “no one else has been able to get them to work”?

The college admissions equivalent might be “I would place this student in a class by himself.” Is that figurative or literal? A signal that the student deserves high praise or that the student deserves solitary confinement?

In the past year or so there have been some suggestions that the college recommendation is outdated. Certainly it is a convention that had its origins a century ago at a time when college admission was neither particularly selective nor concerned with equity. At a time when we recognize that not every applicant has the benefit of a counselor who knows them or has the time to write thoughtful letters, is it time to rethink the recommendation letter as an application staple? 

At the same time, rec letters may become more important in a landscape where grade inflation calls transcripts into question and standardized test scores are optional. But the notion of needing a recommendation letter makes applying to college seem like applying to a private club. Whatever the future of recommendations, we need to get away from that.   

I always found great satisfaction in finishing a letter and feeling like I had captured my students and told their stories. Now, having finished  a run of close to 2000 recommendations over the course of my career, I feel similar satisfaction. Or maybe just relief.

Let's Get Digital

It has been said (including by me) that the first time you do something it’s innovation, and the second time tradition.

The title of the previous post was a feeble attempt at humor, featuring a bad pun based on a line from a Barry Manilow song. The title of this post features a less bad pun based on a song by Olivia Newton-John. I assure you that this will not become a habit.

One of the joys of writing this blog is finding a community of readers and correspondents. When I started eleven years ago I was far from sure that I had anything worth saying (on many days that is still the case) and far less sure that anyone would want to read my musings. I am grateful for the ECA readers who send me emails about specific articles or who stop me at conferences (I don’t mention that because I’m looking for compliments and comments).

I occasionally get emails from readers suggesting topics for me to address. I remember flying into San Diego for the NACAC Conference a few years back. While I was in the air with my phone in airplane mode, the announcement came out about the introduction of the Coalition Application. By the time I landed I had an email from now-retired loyal ECA reader Jon Reider with the message, “Someone needs to do something about this.” I quickly inferred that “someone” meant me. In 2019 when the Operation Varsity Blues scandal hit and the media insisted on calling it an “admissions” scandal, legendary Georgetown Dean of Admissions Charlie Deacon contacted me to suggest that I point out that none of those charged were admissions or counseling professionals (unless you consider mastermind Rick Singer an independent educational consultant rather than a con man masquerading as one).

Last week ECA reader Tim Gallen reached out to ask that I write about the fiasco regarding the October 11 administration of the new digital PSAT. That day lots of schools and lots of students attempted to administer or take the PSAT only to instead get a message on the College Board test day website, “Sorry! There is something wrong on our end and we’re working hard to fix it. Come back later and try again.” Social media erupted with messages from frustrated counselors.

It is important to stop here and recognize that the failures of the College Board to deliver its product are a minor inconvenience compared with what the people of Israel went through four days before with the terrorist attack, murders, and hostage taking on the part of Hamas. The events in the Middle East quickly put college admissions issues into perspective.

Nevertheless, the digital PSAT failure was beyond annoying for many counselors. Tim recounted his frustrations. “For me, part of the frustration was how little guidance we got from College Board. It seemed like I could never find the answers on their web site that I needed, I spent hours on hold without being able to get through to anyone on the phone before the test, and the emails came very late in the process…I also spent many extra hours going into the exam trying to figure out who had completed their exam setup and who had not because the dashboard forces us to check each student individually.  I provided more free labor for this exam than any other in my 21 years administering the PSAT.” He added that the College Board never reached out to PSAT coordinators to acknowledge the problem or to let them know that the Test Day Toolkit app was back online.

Should the College Board have anticipated that things would go wrong and been more prepared? This is not the first time that technology has failed during a College Board exam, including at least one Advanced Placement exam last spring.

I am willing to give the CB a pass on the tech problems. We all know that technology will fail at inopportune times. I remember the technology administrator at my school doing a presentation about technology as a transformative teaching tool during faculty work week. In the midst of his presentation the internet connection failed, confirming the suspicions of his skeptics. On the very first day of school after we moved to post student schedules on the Student Information System, the SIS went down in the first hour of the day, and when a student who was late to school because of a doctor’s appointment wanted to know where he should go to class, no one could tell him.

I am less gracious about the College Board’s response to the screw-up. I went on the College Board website the morning after the fiasco. There was nothing in the College Board newsroom. The only acknowledgement that there had been an issue was a box at the top of the SAT suite help center with a green check mark and the words “The earlier issue with Test Day Toolkit has been resolved. You can proceed with testing. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

I’m not sure that’s sufficient. Apologizing for the “inconvenience” sounds corporate, the kind of apology you get when an airline cancels your flight. It’s not far from the classic non-apology, “I’m sorry if anyone was offended.”  There’s no responsibility taken and no acknowledgement that the screw-up upended school days all over the country, wasting time and generating stress for both students and counselors.

There is a bigger issue here. Why should schools provide free labor for the College Board? Why should counselors do the work while the CB collects the revenue? It’s not like the College Board is poor. In 2021 (the most recent year for which a Form 990 is available), it made $112 million in profit. That’s a pretty profitable non-profit.

It’s a question worth considering. A College Board presentation at the recent NACAC conference in Baltimore indicated that 60 percent of SAT administrations are now done through school day testing rather than at test centers. School day testing and the digital test will place more burden on schools and school counselors. When we administer the PSAT or SAT in school, are we acting as agents of our school or for the benefit of the College Board? It’s mostly for the College Board. So where is the compensation?

Is administering the PSAT still necessary in a test-optional college admissions world? And is it time for school counselors who administer College Board tests to join Hollywood writers and auto workers and go on strike for better pay and better working conditions, i.e. technology that works?   

Oh Vandy, You Blame and You Rave Cause You're Aching

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on October 9, 2023)

(With apologies to Barry Manilow for the bad pun taken from his song, “Mandy,” the first and only Manilow song I like. And apologies to those ofwho you who are “Copacobana” fans)

All of us have our own markers that tell us fall is here.  It might be apple or pumpkin picking, cooler days and nights, or the arrival of the college and professional football seasons. For those of us in the college counseling world, the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference is a line of demarcation between the start of the academic year and the onset of rec-writing season that will consume our waking hours, and perhaps our dreams, for the next couple of months.

The release of the U.S. News rankings has never been on that list for me. I neither look forward to nor pay attention to the rankings in most years, and I’m always annoyed by the annual local newspaper stories highlighting how universities and colleges in my state have moved up or down the rankings. Is that really news?

There were, however, two noteworthy events arising out of this year’s rankings release.  The first was a change in the methodology used in compiling the rankings, described by U.S. News as “the most significant methodological change in the rankings’ history.” U.S. News is placing greater emphasis on outcomes related to social mobility–on graduating students from all backgrounds, with manageable debt, and set up for post-graduate success–while removing class size, the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees, alumni giving, high school class rank, and the proportion of students taking on federal loans as ranking factors.

The other is the reaction to the new rankings on the part of colleges and universities whose rankings dropped as a result of the changes in methodology.  The most prominent of those was Vanderbilt University, which saw its ranking among national universities drop from 13th to 18th.

On the morning the rankings were released, Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Provost C. Cybele Raver sent an email to students, faculty, and alumni addressing the drop in rank.  The statement was a little over-the-top, leading a columnist for Vanderbilt’s student newspaper, the Hustler, to label the email as “damage control.”

Vanderbilt’s leaders described the new rankings methodology as “disadvantaging many private research universities while privileging large public institutions.”  Their statement took issue with U.S. News’ new emphasis on social mobility: while acknowledging that social mobility is an “important consideration, to be sure,” they argued that it is nevertheless misleading for U.S. News to “commingle this policy concern with measures of educational quality.” 

They also argued that the metrics used in the old methodology were better measures of “quality,” and they described the changes as reflecting “incompetence and lack of rigor” on the part of U.S. News.

There’s a lot to unpack here. 

Let’s start with the changes in U.S. News’s methodology. For years the rankings have justifiably been the subject of criticism, with one of the major beefs being that U.S. News focuses on input factors rather than output factors. The methodology change is an attempt to respond to that criticism, and U.S. News deserves credit on that front.

The bigger question, though, has always been whether the metrics used in the rankings actually measure what they are purported to indicate. For years admissions selectivity was a major metric. But does admissions selectivity tell us anything about academic quality? The belief that “the harder a place is to get in, the better it must be” is a Suburban Legend.

Or take alumni giving rate, one of the metrics removed this year. U.S. News used to suggest that it measured alumni satisfaction, but doesn’t it really measure the effectiveness of an institution’s development arm?

So is the focus on outcomes and measures of social mobility a better approach? That’s actually two different questions.

A spokesperson for U.S. News told Inside Higher Ed that outcome measures like student debt and postgraduate income are more important indicators of value. That would seem to beg the question of why it has taken U.S. News until now to put more emphasis on those factors while eliminating others.

It also raises the question about whether U.S. News is fundamentally changing what the rankings are intended to measure. Student debt and postgraduate income may be important indicators of “value,” but is that the same thing as academic quality? That’s at the heart of Vanderbilt’s criticisms.

The broader question is whether social mobility should be one of the overriding goals of colleges and universities.  I think the answer is yes. Higher education has a responsibility to society to be an engine of access and opportunity for traditionally underrepresented groups. Research like that done by Raj Chetty and his coauthors demonstrates that what U.S. News calls America’s “Best” colleges aren’t distinguishing themselves on the social mobility front.

Let’s turn to Vanderbilt. The statement issued by the chancellor and provost comes across as tone-deaf, but we all know that they were likely bombarded with panicked emails from alumni and parents asking what’s happening in Nashville that has led to a drop from 13th to 18th in the rankings.

The answer, of course, is that the change in ranking is a function of the change in methodology. Vanderbilt is just as good a place as it was a year ago, and one of the flaws in the U.S. News rankings is their false precision.  How much difference is there between institutions five places apart? I wish Vanderbilt had stuck with that line of argument rather than attacking the new rankings methodology as “flawed,” marred by “incompetence and lack of rigor.” The same charges could have been made with the old methodology. 

I find myself sympathetic to Vanderbilt’s argument that the data on indebtedness and postgraduate earnings is incomplete because U.S. News sources it from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard. That scorecard only reports those metrics for students receiving federal aid, so in Vanderbilt’s case it leaves out two-thirds of its graduates. 

On the other hand, I am particularly bothered by Vanderbilt’s characterization of the new methodology as “privileging large public institutions” with higher percentages of Pell Grant recipients and first-generation students. Any methodology is going to advantage some institutions and disadvantage others, but the use of the word “privileges” is too strong, too emotional, and plain wrong.

Vanderbilt is in some ways a victim of its own success.  It is among a group of nouveau riche institutions that have become dramatically more selective over the past 30 years.  In the 1990s Vanderbilt admitted 65 percent of its applicants (per, ironically, the 1993 edition of the U.S. News rankings), whereas today that number is under ten percent.  Is Vanderbilt that much better today? Probably not. Has that success led to institutional hubris? Perhaps. 

The statement by Chancellor Diermeier and Provost Raver is also a reflection of the new definition of “American Exceptionalism” exemplified by politicians like Donald Trump and Kari Lake, where you take exception to any result that doesn’t go your way. 

The reality, of course, is that neither input factors nor output factors come close to measuring what is most important about a college education, the experience a student has in and out of the classroom while in college. That’s extremely difficult to measure, but trying to rank colleges without that component is like trying to rank “America’s Best Churches” without taking into account spirituality.

Is there any way to fix that, to determine just how much value a particular college or university adds?

I’d like to suggest an experiment. Author Malcolm Gladwell has suggested that prestigious colleges are “selection effect” institutions rather than “treatment effect” institutions, with their prestige reflecting whom they are able to select rather than what value they add. I’d love to see a higher education version of the movie Trading Places, with a university like Vanderbilt trading its student body with that of a college that is much less selective and much more socioeconomically diverse. Would the outcomes be any different?

Preference for Privilege

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on September 18, 2023)

What obligations do America’s colleges and universities have to society at large? Are those different for public and private institutions? And do elite colleges have special responsibilities?

Two separate events this summer have placed a spotlight on those questions. The first, of course, is the Supreme Court Decision regarding race-conscious admissions in the cases filed by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That decision has not only caused highly-selective colleges to rethink their policies and procedures with regard to seeking racial diversity, but has also had collateral impact and brought renewed scrutiny on legacy admission policies. 

The second is the release of a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research by authors Raj Chetty and David J. Deming of Harvard and John N. Friedman of Brown University. The study, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges,” examines how wealthy, privileged applicants benefit from admission practices at elite colleges and universities.

The paper received major attention from the mainstream media, but I’m not sure it breaks any new ground. What it does, though, is provide a deep dive into data and some context for on-going discussions about inequities within college admission.

Chetty, Deming, and Friedman pull together information from sources ranging from federal tax returns to SAT/ACT scores to application and admission records for individual colleges and universities to get a picture of how much the admission process at elite colleges benefits those who are wealthy and privileged. The researchers looked at three groups of universities:

• Twelve “Ivy-Plus” institutions consisting of the eight Ivies, plus Duke and Stanford Universities; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the University of Chicago.

• Twelve other highly selective private colleges: California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon, Emory, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, New York, Northwestern, Rice, and Vanderbilt Universities; the Universities of Notre Dame and Southern California; and Washington University in St. Louis.

• Nine highly selective public flagship universities: Ohio State University and the Universities of California, Berkeley; California, Los Angeles; Florida; Georgia; Michigan-Ann Arbor; North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Texas at Austin; and Virginia.

The research concludes that one form of diversity not particularly sought or valued by elite private colleges is economic diversity. 

A previous study published in 2017 by Chetty and Friedman with several other researchers found that 38 colleges, including five Ivies, enrolled more students from the top one percent of incomes than from the bottom 60 percent. 

The new study builds on the previous one, finding that students from the top one percent of income brackets are 55 percent more likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college than middle-class applicants with comparable credentials. 

How much of that disproportion is due to admission practices, and how much is due to student choice in where to apply? Chetty and his coauthors find that while differences in application and matriculation rates account for about a third of this disproportion, a full two-thirds of it can be explained by higher admission rates for students from high-income families.

Those differences in admission rates by income are tied to three admission practices.

The first is legacy preference, which accounts for 46 percent of the variance. Chetty and his coauthors report that legacy applicants from the top 1 percent of incomes are five times as likely to be admitted as the average applicant with comparable credentials and demographic characteristics, while legacy applicants coming from income levels below the 90th percentile are three times as likely to be admitted.

Another 24 percent of the advantage enjoyed by applicants from the top one percent of incomes is tied to athletic recruiting. We have long known that being a recruited athlete may be the best of all admission “hooks”: discovery in the SFFA case showed that the admit rate for recruited athletes at Harvard with high academic scores is something like 83 percent, compared to 16 percent for other similarly-placed applicants. Families that have the financial resources to pay for coaching and travel teams can improve the chances of athletic recruitment.

The remaining 30 percent in variance in admission rates between the top one percent and everyone else is attributable to differences in applicants’ non-academic credentials. Specifically, Chetty et. al. conclude that applicants coming from the top one percent of incomes are 1.5 times more likely to have strong non-academic ratings (encompassing extracurricular activities and personal qualities) compared to the other 99 percent of applicants. The researchers find that this difference is linked to whether applicants attended a public or private high school, as students from private high schools “have much higher non-academic ratings (but no higher academic ratings) than peers with comparable test scores and demographics at other schools.”

That takes us back to our original questions. What should we think about the fact that elite colleges systematically cater to the wealthy? Is there anything wrong with that? The answer, like the answer to so many college admission questions, is—“It depends.” It depends on your assumptions about higher education and the college admission process.

First of all, elite private colleges are just that–private. As such they have a right to make decisions that are in their self-interest. If they choose to see themselves as a clan or family and  give preferences to those from within the family, they have that right. By contrast, public institutions are different, with obligations to the citizens in the states they serve. Public flagships giving preferences for state residents is defensible. Public flagships giving preferences to legacies is less defensible.

Second, elite colleges are businesses. They may not be motivated by profits, but revenue is an important driver, just like for any business. The question is whether, and how much, concerns for revenue should influence admission decisions.  

But elite colleges are more than just businesses. They have an obligation to serve not only institutional interest, but also the public interest. The Bible (Luke 12:48) says that to those who are given much, much will be demanded. Much has been given to America’s elite institutions.

Suppose, for instance, that a college or university argued that a college education was a purely economic transaction, and that in the interest of maximizing revenue it was going to give preference to full-pay applicants, or even allot admission spots via silent auction, with those willing to pay the most being admitted. Such an institution might very well be able to fill its freshman class in such a fashion, but it would certainly spark public outrage.

Ethics are about ideals, about what should be the case. The college admission process should be about access, opportunity, and fairness. It may be time to rethink some of the conventions of college admission that had their origins a century ago when the college-going population was very different, things like essays and recommendation letters. They make applying to college like applying to a private club.

We should be embarrassed by, and ashamed of, a college admission process that advantages those who are already privileged.  

Remembering John McGrath

I was saddened to learn that John McGrath passed away last week after having bravely fought a serious illness for the past couple of years. NACAC members may remember John, or at least know his name, but those of us who served in NACAC leadership remember him both well and fondly.

John served as Deputy CEO for NACAC until the end of October of 2021, bridging the end of Joyce Smith’s tenure and Angel Perez’s first year. John came to NACAC after a distinguished career as a civil servant. He had most recently served in the Department of Education, but had also worked at the Department of Labor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and on Capitol Hill. 

John’s life and work are a reminder of the importance of the civil service, men and women who devote themselves selflessly to public service behind the scenes and make government work.  Remembering and appreciating them is especially important in these crazy times when government employees are derided as the “Deep State” by politicians who want to centralize government control in the hands of the Executive Branch and return to the days when government jobs were filled by politically-appointed sycophants. Do we really want a “shallow” state?

I always enjoyed my interactions with John and valued his calmness, his wisdom, and his desire to do what was best for NACAC and its members during turbulent times. In 2013, shortly after John joined NACAC, I was asked to do a presentation for the State and Affiliate leadership on “Successful Transitions in Leadership.” Afterward, he was kind in his remarks about the presentation, stating that he had gotten to know a lot of leaders on the college side of the desk but that he was glad to have a better understanding of what the secondary members of NACAC had to offer. His comments meant a lot.

Later, when NACAC decided to rebrand the Journal of College Admission, John called and asked if I would contribute a back page essay to the inaugural issue of the revamped publication.  I was honored to be asked, and especially because he was doing the asking.

Shortly after John’s retirement from NACAC, just as he and his wife were about to celebrate his new freedom by taking a cruise, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.  I reached out to him several times to let him know I was thinking about him, and I was always impressed by his strength, bravery, and stoicism in dealing with the bad news. His example is a gift for all of us.

All of us in the profession benefit from the hard work behind the scenes of folks like John McGrath and the other hard-working members of the NACAC staff.  Like baseball umpires, we only notice them when something goes wrong or not to our liking. The next time you receive a communication from NACAC, think of John and be thankful that we had the gift of his talents and commitment.  And if you attend the NACAC Conference in Baltimore and come across any of the staff members helping with the conference, be sure to thank them for all they do on our behalf.  

Permanent Record

“This is going to appear on your permanent record.”

If those words, spoken by my third-grade teacher, were intended to terrify, they had the intended effect. I had never before gotten into trouble, but a couple of friends and I had let our exuberance get the best of us. Depending on your interpretation we either defaced or creatively enhanced the covers of a workbook. We didn’t write anything offensive or draw pictures of genitalia, just added descriptors like “The Great” to our names and illustrated the cover with stars. The teacher wasn’t amused. 

That summer my family moved, and I wondered if my permanent record might lead me to be placed in reform school in my new locale, but the permanent record turned out to be an empty threat. The workbook incident never came up in any job interview. And I’m confident that on Judgment Day I’ll have far more serious sins to account for.

For several reasons I have been thinking about the concept of the permanent record recently. Specifically, should it be possible to edit or erase one’s permanent record? 

The first was former President Donald Trump’s request (or maybe demand) of Republicans in Congress to expunge his two impeachments. Regardless of whether you think the impeachments were unjustified or that the not guilty verdicts were unjustified, is it possible to pretend they just didn’t happen? The justice system has a provision to expunge records for juvenile offenders with youthful indiscretions or mistakes, but should we get a do-over for things we do in our 70s?

The second was the news that the state of Florida’s revised history standards now include a standard that suggests that slavery was not all bad, that some slaves learned trades like being a blacksmith. It is hard to fathom that in the 21st century anyone can spin the subjugation and enslavement of other humans as in any way defensible. Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis simultaneously disavowed any knowledge and then doubled-down on the claim.

History, of course, is the ultimate permanent record. Winston Churchill is credited as having said that “history is written by the victors.” I am fully aware that we live in a time where there isn’t agreement about what is and isn’t a fact, but I believe that our understanding of (or perspective on) history may change, but not history itself.

My hometown, Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy, and for years the city’s signature street was Monument Avenue, featuring statues of Confederates like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Those statues were removed following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. I didn’t grow up in Richmond, so didn’t have any attachment to the monuments, but over the past 50 years Richmond has moved from worshiping its Confederate past to forgetting or erasing its Confederate past. I wonder if it’s possible to adopt a third option, acknowledging our history while also putting it into context.

What really got me thinking about the “permanent record,” though, was a recent post on the ACCIS (Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools) e-list. 

The counselor who posted had been contacted by the admissions office at her school about a new student interested in enrolling as either a ninth grader or a tenth grader. The student had been at another private school where he had earned a 4.0 GPA in ninth grade, but was the youngest in his class by a significant amount of time, and the family was considering a repeat year for social-emotional reasons. The family is wondering if the student would need to report both ninth grade years when he applies to college given that he would have a full 9-12 transcript from the new school.

I think there are a couple of interesting issues here. One regards reclassing, and the other what has to be reported about the student’s record.

I have seen more requests for a student to reclass (not necessarily the same thing as repeating) at my school in recent years. A lot of those are either explicitly or implicitly about athletics, hoping that a “redshirt” year will change a student-athlete’s options. In my experience rarely does that work out. My rule of thumb for both athletes and non-athletes is that an extra year won’t change your list of college options. Instead you may be a stronger candidate for the same group of schools.

I wonder whether we will see more requests to reclass because of COVID. The pandemic clearly impacted students both academically and in terms of personal health and well-being, and a reclass year for some is a way of buying time to re-capture some of what was lost. I have particularly seen an uptick in requests to reclass from students who transferred to my school in the ninth grade and realized how far behind they were.

The counselor posting on the ACCIS e-list reported that the family’s reason for seeking a re-class was primarily because of the fact that the student was significantly younger than his classmates. I happen to think that’s a good reason for an extra year, even if his academic record doesn’t suggest that a reclass year is necessary.  I think we underestimate the role that maturity plays in an adolescent’s well-being and sense of self.

Both of my children ended up doing an extra year, for different reasons. My son repeated first-grade because he was a late bloomer in terms of fine-motor skills. I didn’t see the benefits until late in high school when he blossomed and went to college confidently on a high note. My daughter has a December birthday, so when our sister school wouldn’t consider her as a kindergarten applicant, we thought we would put her in the junior kindergarten program in our county public schools. The school system said she was ready for kindergarten. A year later she redid kindergarten at our sister school after the Head of School came to visit me and said they would consider her for first grade if we insisted, but that she advised against it. She said my daughter’s relative youth wouldn’t be an issue for the first few years, but would show up when her classmates went through puberty or when they started to drive.

The ethical issue here is whether it is appropriate to expunge or erase the student’s previous ninth-grade year. I responded to the counselor that it’s not appropriate or ethical (those might be the same things). 

I have always believed that a transcript should be an unedited record of a student’s academic performance. When I was in graduate school in philosophy, one of my classmates, the one receiving full funding from the department, admitted one night that he had spent a year at another graduate school, but hadn’t reported it on his application. Ethics was clearly not his philosophical area of interest. Erasing a year is a form of deception just as much as erasing a year or a job off of one’s resume. It may be that the extra year needs to be explained, and that is best done in a letter of recommendation. 

A transcript should contain the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And a permanent record should probably be permanent.

Supreme Court Takeaways

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” July 17, 2023)

I spent most of last week reading the Supreme Court decisions in SFFA v. Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill. It’s 237 pages long, and if you are looking for an entertaining and uplifting beach read, look elsewhere. 

There has already been plenty of commentary, perhaps too much, on the decisions. That, of course, will not stop me from weighing in. I have joked before that “it takes a lot to render me speechless, and unfortunately for all of you, this is not one of those times.” This is definitely not one of those times. 

I have written about the issues surrounding the treatment of Asian American applicants to Harvard numerous times since 2015, not long after the Students for Fair Admissions complaint was filed in federal district court. That spring I was interviewed for NPR’s All Things Considered on the “landscape” of college admissions. It was a couple of days after a coalition of 64 groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights alleging that Harvard discriminated against Asian American applicants, and most of the interview with host Arun Rath focused on that issue. 

I am trying to separate my reactions to the decision from my concerns about the Supreme Court. At his confirmation hearing back in 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts stated, “My job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” That view seems quaint looking at today’s court, which sees nothing wrong with changing the strike zone or even the rules of the game. I’m not sure which bothers me more, a court that has no problem abandoning 50 years of judicial precedent and settled law, or individual justices who believe that abiding by a code of ethics is beneath them. Is believing that the billionaires who lavish attention and gifts are friends who expect nothing in return evidence of naïveté or evidence of hubris? 

The opinion, authored by Roberts, is most certainly a shot across the bow of higher education, but I am far from convinced that it will have the far-reaching impact that many commentators assume. There are three reasons.  

First, the ruling impacts a relatively small number of colleges. There are fewer than 200 colleges and universities selective enough that admission is, to use the court’s term, “zero-sum,” where admitting one student means denying someone else. The ruling doesn’t apply to the vast majority of colleges concerned only about enrolling enough students to make the budget. It affects name colleges, and as always, media attention on college admission focuses only on name colleges. That’s a rant for another time. 

Second, most of the institutions impacted by the ruling have already reaffirmed their commitment to diversity and access, as they should. On that subject, Senator J. D. Vance’s comparison of those declarations by the Ivies and Vance’s home-state colleges like Kenyon and Oberlin Colleges to the Massive Resistance following Brown v. Board of Education would be laughable if it weren’t so tone-deaf and offensive. 

The court decision is not about diversity as a goal (although DEI in all forms is clearly under attack on multiple fronts), but rather about the means to achieve the goal. Does a desirable end justify a less than perfect means? That is an old question in ethics, and in this case the court has said no. 

The reality is that colleges have other tools at their disposal in seeking and identifying diversity. Tools such as the College Board’s Landscape program provide demographic context on applicants’ high schools and ZIP codes, and a New York Times article last week reported on the Socioeconomic Disadvantage Scale (SED) being used by the medical school at the University of California, Davis (the defendant in the 1978 Bakke case). Application essay prompts inviting students to write about their “personal identities” have proliferated in the last few years. 

Most importantly, Roberts’s opinion does not outlaw all consideration of race in the admissions process. He explicitly states at the very end of the opinion that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life.” Admission decisions are about context, and race is certainly part of the context for an individual applicant. 

So how, then, should the opinion be construed? As I read the decision, it is really concerned with the consideration of race within the context of two widespread selective admission practices. One is holistic admission, which the court seems to see as a shroud giving colleges license to admit whomever they want, with different students admitted for different reasons—academic accomplishment in one case, athletic talent in another, diversity in another. 

Even more problematic is another common selective admission practice, admitting not individuals but rather shaping a class. Roberts talks about Harvard’s “lop” process, the final step in its process, whereby tentative admits are culled to shape the final class. At that stage Harvard admitted that it is aware of the composition of the class in terms of race, legacy, athletes and financial aid status. The Supreme Court concludes that race is determinative during the lop process for a significant percentage of admitted African American and Hispanic applicants.

That is not a new concern. As far back as the Bakke case, the court stated that race could be considered as one among many factors in an individual admissions decision, and Justice Lewis Powell cited Harvard’s admissions process as an exemplar of that process. In a separate opinion in that case, Justice Harry Blackmun wondered whether the Harvard plan was merely a covert way of accomplishing the quota that the University of California, Davis, law school was using openly, and during oral arguments in the current case, Justice Samuel Alito asked if Harvard had sold Powell “a bill of goods.” While the recent decision is primarily about racial preferences, there is a larger issue for admissions offices to consider. Is admitting and shaping a class rather than admitting individuals an appropriate practice?

There is an irony here. The Supreme Court is essentially accusing Harvard and other selective colleges of reverse engineering the admissions process to achieve racial balancing, and yet one of the criticisms of the current conservative majority on the court is that they also engage in reverse engineering, starting with the political result they want to achieve and then finding the legal precedents and interpretations that justify their position.

If racial preferences are now in jeopardy, the court ruling may also be a death knell for several other kinds of preferences. There has already been discussion of legacy preferences, but what about athletic preferences for sports that are largely played by athletes who are white and affluent, like squash, water polo, fencing, ice hockey, golf, sailing and lacrosse? Race-based admission is an attempt to address America’s historical racial inequities, whereas both legacy and athletic preferences serve to preserve privilege. Of the two, race-based admission is far more defensible. I’m sure Students for Fair Admissions will be challenging those preferences any day now, but forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

The other admission practice that needs to come under scrutiny, perhaps even strict scrutiny, as a result of this case is the practice of assigning students a personal rating. One of the troubling revelations from the Harvard case was that Asian Americans received lower personal ratings than other groups. I don’t want to believe that was evidence of discrimination, but it didn’t make Harvard look good.

A student’s personal qualities should be part of a holistic evaluation, but qualities like leadership, integrity, grit, sense of humor, compassion, kindness and helpfulness are hard to measure. If those are soft skills, trying to rate them is even softer, perhaps even arbitrary and subject to implicit bias.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, it is important to keep our eyes on the prize. Promoting equity and access to education remain an essential goal, even if how we pursue them has to change.

Transparency and Cabrini's Closing

Do college admission offices have an ethical obligation to be transparent with applicants and the public?

At first glance that seems like a softball question with an obvious answer. The field of ethics is about ideals, about how we should act. Colleges are in relationship with prospective students, a relationship that should be grounded in trust and respect. Treating students and their families with trust and respect would seem to imply being transparent about our policies and procedures. That is especially the case if we think of colleges and universities as institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

Of course it’s not that simple. Higher education is also a business and, at times, seems to be mostly a business. During the lower court trial in the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case that may be decided by the Supreme Court as early as tomorrow, one of Harvard’s arguments was that its admission procedures were proprietary, the equivalent of industrial secrets. That may have been a mistake, because it made it look like Harvard had something to hide. We talk about practicing what we preach, but shouldn’t we also preach what we practice?

As businesses, colleges have ethical obligations to multiple constituencies–prospective students, current students, alumni, faculty and staff, and the communities where they are located and are often major employers. Perhaps the strongest of those ethical obligations is staying in existence.

I have been thinking about this since hearing the news last week that Cabrini University outside Philadelphia will be closing at the end of the 2023-2024 school year. Cabrini is one of a number of institutions struggling to stay afloat, and it most certainly won’t be the last institution to close.  My heart goes out to everyone in the Cabrini community as they go through a mourning process and try to figure out what comes next.  Villanova will take over the Cabrini campus, and apparently Cabrini is working with other area institutions to place current students. Just yesterday LaSalle University added a page to their admissions website devoted to Cabrini students who may want to transfer.

I recognize that those in charge at Cabrini are scrambling to figure out and close the loop on all the consequences of the closing, and in looking at the Cabrini website there is a new page on the Cabrini legacy, including FAQs on what the closing means. But as of this morning, the admissions page for Cabrini doesn’t mention the closure, and still lists ways to apply to Cabrini. I assume that is in the process of being corrected, but should Cabrini appear to be soliciting applications from new students when it will be out of business a year from now?

Going back to the question raised at the beginning, the real question may be not whether a college should be transparent, but rather how transparent.

My previous job (now 30-some years ago) was as the admissions director at a struggling independent school. When I was hired my boss somehow forgot to tell me how bad things were. I got my first inkling when I was invited to attend a board meeting before starting the job and noticed that the minutes from the previous meeting included a note that a motion to fire the headmaster, the person who had just hired me, had failed.

The school was hemorrhaging enrollment, and no one seemed to know why. When I was hired the headmaster told me that they had prepared budgets at three different enrollment levels, yet when I arrived for work on my first day a month before the start of school and counted up the bodies, the enrollment was 40 fewer students than the bottom figure. No one at the school had any clue.

The school had not so much an admissions process as a registration process. On my first day I met with a prospective senior transfer from another school. We obviously could have desperately used him, but in looking at his transcript I had concerns about whether he could succeed academically and graduate, and advised him to stay where he was. My secretary informed me that the school had never before discouraged a prospective student. That may have contributed to the fact that the attrition rate was something like 17 percent, making it nearly impossible to recoup the enrollment loss from attrition and graduation.

The school had been founded as an 8-12 school because three feeder schools were K-7, but two of the three had closed, and the third had just announced that it would be adding an eighth grade the following year. I successfully argued that we shouldn’t try to go to war with the remaining feeder school for students, that we should play the long game and make ninth grade the major entry year, planning for one section of 21 eighth graders and then expanding to 60 for ninth grade.

The only problem with that plan was where the one section was going to come from. At the beginning of the following summer, we had three enrolled eighth graders, and to make things worse, the main academic building was closed for asbestos removal so I couldn’t even give prospective families campus tours. When families called and asked how many eighth graders were enrolled, I was faced with an ethical dilemma. How transparent should I be?

My answer was always that we anticipated enrolling 21 in the eighth grade. I was uncomfortable with that lack of transparency, but I also knew that we might lose those who had enrolled if they knew there were only three enrolled as of early June. The school was probably closer to having to fold than I knew, but I recognized we needed every student we could enroll for survival. In most cases existential survival is ethical.

I was fortunate. We somehow enrolled 22 eighth graders by the time school opened. Today the school is thriving. But I still wonder if my responses to the question, “How many do you have enrolled?” were misleading and unethical.

That brings us back to Cabrini. It is one thing to conduct admission as usual when an institution is struggling and in danger of having to close.  It is another to solicit or welcome applications when the decision to close has already been made and announced. I recognize that it’s been less than a week, that the Cabrini community is reeling and trying to figure out the next steps. In the interest of transparency I hope that one of the first steps will be removing any reference to applying from the Cabrini website.   

Vanity Fare

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on June 12, 2023)

Can college admission officers detect the difference between substance and the illusion of substance?

Asking that question is not designed to impugn my colleagues on the college side of the desk. It is more a recognition that application readers today at selective/rejective colleges and universities are put in the untenable position of having to make subtle distinctions and snap judgments sorting a growing pool of applicants, all in a period of time that would be shocking and depressing to students if they realized how little time is spent reading an application compared with how much time is spent preparing one.

It’s even more the latest iteration in a philosophical debate that dates back at least as far as Plato. How can any of us distinguish between reality and illusion? Is what we think we perceive actually real or merely shadows on the wall of the cave we inhabit? 

From a college admissions perspective, it is a recognition of how easy it is for savvy students, parents, and counselors or consultants to game the system. Can admission officers detect the difference between the genuine essay and the one written with assistance of an over involved adult, or even ChatGPT? Can they smell the difference between the non-profit established because of genuine passion for impacting the world and the one established because of genuine passion for impacting one’s chances of getting into a “name” college? Can they sort out community service that is authentic compared with that required by a school for graduation compared with that which is court-mandated? 

I have been thinking about those questions ever since I saw Daniel Golden’s recent ProPublica article on the rise of opportunities for high school students, or more specifically college applicants, to get published for their research. Golden and his co-author, Kunal Purohit, describe the push to research and publish while in high school as “The Newest Admissions Ploy,” but the article leads me to conclude, or at least suspect, that the research opportunities bear resemblance to Rick Singer’s “side door,” with the obvious difference that they don’t appear illegal or criminal. But are they ethical? That might be a different answer.

The ProPublica investigation described firms like Scholar Launch, Lumiere Education, and Athena Education as “a new industry…extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential.” For a fee ranging from $2500 to $10,000, these and other services match clients with “publication specialists,” often doctoral students looking for an easy side hustle. They work with clients for 3-4 months, assisting them in producing publishable research.

So what’s wrong with that? The practice raises several ethical questions.

The first is whether the research is legitimate.  Do we need research such as that described in the article, an ode to Chick-fil-A’s chicken sandwich and the company’s marketing strategy? Are journal articles written by high school students on topics like human willingness to relocate to Mars and “Social Media: Blessing or Curse” valid contributions to the intellectual realm? Is the existence of these journals and these services a blessing or a curse?

I actually believe strongly in the value of original research for students with an intellectual passion, and I have always loved places like the College of Wooster or Princeton that incorporate a major research-based thesis as foundational with their curricula. At my school I have been instrumental in establishing a program for a small group of students to conduct independent research. Our program does not give either a grade or credit for the research, because we want the message to be that our “Capstone” projects should be about learning for the joy of learning rather than for enhancing one’s resume for college (we recognize that exemplary research can have admission benefits, but that shouldn’t be the primary motivation).

The key word is “independent.” Paying a firm to have a publication specialist assist a student in conceiving and carrying out a research project makes it hard to determine whose work a project might be. All of us who work with students face a tightrope walk to deftly navigate the treacherous terrain between assisting or advising a student and turning their work into our adult conception of what that work could look like. When you are being paid a sizable fee to help a student with their “research,” the temptation to do more than advise becomes acute.

The second issue involves publication. The ProPublica article identifies what it describes as a “byzantine world of online publications,” including the Scholarly Review, the Journal of Student Research, the Journal of Research High School, and the International Journal of High School Research. Some of those may have incestuous relationships with the research services.  The Scholarly Review just happens to have been founded, and funded, by Scholar Launch.

That is not the only conflict of interest. The ProPublica investigation found instances where members of a journal’s editorial board are also mentoring students whose work ends up being published in the same journal. There is no way that would be acceptable in the actual world of published research.

The other publication piece that is curious, and perhaps troubling, is the practice known as “preprints” found in some of these journals. Preprints aren’t traditional journal articles that are peer-reviewed or even vetted by editorial boards. They are pay-for-play, or more accurately pay-for-publish. They are the academic equivalent of vanity publishing. Do we need vanity research?

The other ethical issue, of course, involves equity. These pay-for-play publishing schemes benefit those who can afford to pay. This is another example where we in the admissions profession need to examine our practices from an equity and fairness lens to make sure that we are not privileging those who are already privileged and savvy enough to game the system. That includes colleges ensuring that application readers can tell the difference between substance and the illusion of substance. 

PR Circus

Should a college counseling office serve the educational part of a school’s mission or the advancement part of its mission?  I remember discussing that question several years ago with a friend whose school was considering placing the college counseling office organizationally under the same umbrella as the development and admissions offices.

I argued then, and continue to believe today, that college counseling is first and foremost educational, that the college search is ultimately about students figuring out who they are and what they care about. I also recognize that it’s not that simple.

Early in my career, I remember a strategic planning process where I fought for my office’s work to be described as “counseling” and not as “placement.” I argued that language is important, that “college counseling” is about process, about helping students find the right college fit, while “placement” is about results and suggests that a school places students in the way that a Hollywood agent or corporate recruiter places clients. I lost the battle but stuck around long enough to ultimately win the war.

I particularly think about the two conceptions of college counseling at this time of year. Later this week my school will hold commencement exercises marking the end of each senior’s high school journey. At a school that describes itself as a college preparatory school, part of that journey is preparing students for admission to and success in college.

At the same time, this time of year can easily deteriorate into seeing college choices as public relations opportunities.  The communications office at my school always publishes an ad in the local newspaper celebrating our graduates, a practice begun by our sister school. The ad focuses on the colleges where the graduates will matriculate.

At least the ad lists all the colleges where graduates will attend. Once upon a time the ad cherry-picked the college list to highlight the “prestigious” names. I argued that we should be proud of every student’s college choice, that we should celebrate going to college rather than going to certain colleges. But I also recognize the reality that people in our community draw conclusions about the school and about the college counseling program based on the college list.

I have been considering this issue in a new light in the wake of the news about the student from New Orleans who applied to more than 200 colleges and received more than $9 million dollars in scholarships, leading the school to put in a claim with Guinness World Records.  I wrote about that issue in my last post, but it may also become the poster child for a school losing sight of the point of the college process.

Last week there were two interesting developments in the case. The student in question went to D.C. with his family and the head of the school and received a tour of the U.S. Capitol as well as several congratulatory tweets from his Congressman. And I received an email from someone who works at the school.

The email indicated that the concerns expressed in the last post were shared by many of the faculty and staff at the school. They feel that the attention given to the one student in his quest to set the “record” came at the expense of other seniors at the school. 

The email alleges that adults at the school were responsible for preparing many of the 200 applications, and that the school’s priority on advancing the scholarship narrative meant that other seniors didn’t receive time, attention, and the help they needed.  The correspondent suggested that one of the school’s conscious PR strategies is to identify one “golden child” and relentlessly promote them at the expense of other students.

I am not part of the school community, so am not capable of judging what is true and what is not. I did go to the school website, and immediately saw a pop-up that takes you to a page all about the student’s achievement, including the opportunity to donate for the trip to Washington, D.C.

Some of the allegations in the email are troubling. If the student was able to apply to 200 colleges and for all of the scholarships only with major assistance from adults at the school, that’s ethically questionable or wrong, depending on the level of assistance. If the effort to set a record was a conscious PR stunt, then both the student and his classmates are being taken advantage of by adults.

It’s easy to pass judgment on the school in New Orleans, but I prefer to focus on the larger issue of how we make sure as counselors and educators that our motives are pure and in a student’s interest rather than our own.  In any given year, I might have a handful of students with the potential to be admitted to a prestigious, “rejective” college. I know how hard those acceptances are to earn, and I know that my school (and perhaps the College Counseling Office) looks good when we have success with those schools.

The question is what we do with that knowledge.  Obviously we want to support those students who face a higher bar, but are we doing that for their benefit or ours? And do we end up treating those students differently than their classmates who will end up at less “glamorous” college destinations?

I hope not. I believe that my job as a counselor is to provide every single student with the same level of “customer service” (a term I hate), helping them achieve their dreams and serving as a trail guide on their journey. I believe that the college search should be about fit rather than prestige, but I also know that the prestige world-view saturates our culture and can be hard to inoculate yourself from. I hope that being aware of the trap helps keep me from falling into the trap.

Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship is an important concept in counseling, calling on us to value the dignity and worth of those with whom we interact and treat them as subjects rather than objects. We have to be particularly careful of that in college counseling, given how easily a student’s college destination can become a stand-in or metric for qualities that are otherwise hard to measure.

In the last post I made a point to congratulate the student in question for an impressive accomplishment. My beef is with the adults. I’m not sure that they have sent either the student or the rest of us messages that we should feel good about. The student recently announced that he will be attending Cornell. I hope and trust that Cornell won’t become another ring in the PR circus this has become.  

World Record

I am a year older than the Guinness Book of Records, founded back in 1955.  I became aware of the book about a decade later, and I was fascinated by the idea of world records, although not enough to want to hold a world record myself.

Eventually I lost interest as more and more bizarre activities got on the list of world records. Do we really need to know the record for farthest tightrope walk while wearing high heels or who alphabetized the letters in a can of alphabet soup the fastest? Should we care that someone in Malaysia set a record for assembling Mr. Potato Head in 5.43 seconds or that someone in Nebraska has paddled a boat made from a hollowed-out pumpkin more than 37 miles? 

I have asked before whether we measure the things we value or value the things we can measure, and the inflation in Guinness world record categories suggests the latter. At some point the Guinness Book of Records moved from journalism to entertainment, from a digest of notable human accomplishments to a raison d’etre for all sorts of frivolous pursuits for the sole purpose of setting a world record. We might even say that the Guinness Book of Records, now known simply as Guinness World Records, at some point became a parody of itself, or at the very least a marketing ploy to sell beer.

Not all world records are equally important. The world record for the mile run? Important. The world record for pushing an orange with one’s nose for a mile? Maybe not. 

So where does the record for most scholarship dollars won fit on that spectrum? A couple of weeks ago there were several news stories about a high school senior in New Orleans who has been accepted by more than 170 colleges and earned more than $9 million dollars in scholarships. At the time of the stories, the week before May 1, he was awaiting decisions from at least 30 other colleges and was hoping to get his scholarship haul above the $10 million mark.

So how should we respond to this news?

First of all, we should offer congratulations to the young man in question.  He is obviously a motivated student with an outstanding high school record, and I’m happy for him that he has lots of college options as well as the funding to make college affordable for him.

He may be the only one deserving congratulations. On a more global level, I think this news is not something to be published or celebrated.

There is no world in which applying to 200, or even “only” 170, colleges comes close to making sense. It totally misses the point of what applying to college is about. The college process isn’t about collecting acceptances or scholarship dollars but rather about finding a college fit. 

A few years back I had a senior come into my office and tell me that he had applied to 17 colleges on Sunday afternoon. When I asked him why he told me his dad “went crazy” and made him.  Months later, after the student had been admitted to most of the 17, I ran into the dad. He shook his head in embarrassment, and said, “Please don’t tell anyone we did that.” 

Applying to 17 colleges is too many, reflecting an inability to apply thoughtfully. Applying to ten times that number is absurd, and maybe obscene. I don’t blame the student, but rather the adults. It is a truism in schools that in any interaction between students and adults, someone has to be the adult. It is unclear who fills that role in this situation. 

Did anyone at the school try to put the brakes on this? A CNN article reported that school officials declared the world record and had reached out to Guinness to receive official confirmation. It can be argued that encouraging a student to apply to 200 colleges is a form of child abuse. Were the adults at the school innocent bystanders or willing co-conspirators? In either case there is negligence in allowing this.

But does this case do any real damage? I think it does. How much time did it take to complete 200 college applications, and how could that time have been spent more productively? And what about staff time processing transcripts and letters of recommendation? How many students could have benefitted from the $9-10 million in scholarships racked up by this student?

I also blame the journalists who thought this was newsworthy. I’m sure they will argue that they were just reporting a human interest story, but making a big deal about this encourages other students to try to beat the record. That’s not reporting, but rather making, news. This story is an example of the media focusing on the sensational at the expense of the significant. It sends the wrong message about what the college search should be about. There are far more important stories about college admission that need to be told.

Just once I’d like to go through an admissions season without the annual “this student got admitted to every Ivy” story, the “millions of dollars in scholarships” story, or the “this has been the toughest admissions year in history” story. I’d love for once to see a story about a student whose life trajectory has been changed through receiving the opportunity to attend college at a good place that isn’t a “name” school.

Now that would be one for the record books.

A Short History of Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court--DeFunis

(This is the first in a series of posts looking at the history of court cases involving affirmative action in college admission.)

The 1978 Bakke case is generally listed as the first case in which the United States Supreme Court considered the use of race-based affirmative action in college admission, but the Court had actually previously considered the issue four years before in the case, DeFunis v. Odegaard. Why doesn’t the DeFunis case get more attention? Because ultimately the Court decided not to decide, ruling that the case was moot.

Marco DeFunis applied for admission to the University of Washington Law School in 1971 and was denied admission (actually wait listed). He then brought suit in a state court asking for an injunction ordering the law school to admit him, claiming that “the procedures and criteria employed by the Law School Admissions Committee invidiously discriminated against him on account of his race in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The trial court granted the injunction, and DeFunis enrolled in the UW Law School in the fall of 1971.

A year later, the Supreme Court for the state of Washington reversed the lower court’s ruling, holding that the Law School admissions policy did not violate the Constitution. DeFunis then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, and Justice William Douglas stayed the judgment of the state Supreme Court pending consideration of the case by the federal Supreme Court. By that time DeFunis was in the fall semester of his final year of law school, and one question was if the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Washington Supreme Court, would DeFunis be able to finish or be forced to reapply for his last semester.

When the case came before the entire Supreme Court, DeFunis had registered for his final term at the law school. Because DeFunis had filed his lawsuit on his own behalf and not as a class action suit, the majority of the Supreme Court concluded that the case was moot, no longer within the Court’s purview given that its decision would not change DeFunis’s ability to graduate.

Justices William Brennan and William Douglas voted in the minority that the case was not in fact moot, and Justice Douglas issued a written dissent. It is that dissent that constitutes the most noteworthy aspect of the DeFunis case.

Douglas began his dissent with an explanation of the law school’s admissions process.  It received 1601 applications for 150 spots, and offered admission to 275 applicants in order to yield the 150.  37 of the admission offers, 18 of whom enrolled, came as a result of a minority admissions program. Eligibility for the minority admissions program was solely determined by an applicant’s answer to an optional question asking if their “dominant” ethnic origin was “black, Chicano, American Indian, or Filipino.”  

To make admission decisions, the law school calculated a Predicted First Year Average index for each applicant incorporating two components, grades from the last two years of college and score on the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT.  The highest average was 81, and based on previous years the law school Admissions Committee determined that applicants with averages above 77 were strong candidates for success. Every applicant with an average above 78 was admitted, and 93 of 105 applicants with averages between 77 and 78 were admitted. Applicants with averages below 74.5 were generally rejected. Marco DeFunis had an average on the index of 76.23, placing him the group taken to “committee,” and he was ultimately wait listed.

Students in the minority admissions program were evaluated separately. 36 of the 37 minority applicants had averages below DeFunis, with 30 having averages below 74.5. There were also 48 nonminority applicants admitted with averages below DeFunis, half of them veterans, another group receiving special consideration.    

Justice Douglas ultimately concluded that it was not clear that the admissions policy of the University of Washington Law School violated the Equal Protection Clause by excluding DeFunis. However, he differed from the Court majority in arguing that the case should be remanded for a new trial to investigate the legitimacy of the minority admissions process that admitted applicants with credentials lower than DeFunis.

Douglas’s dissent raised some larger issues that are still relevant today, both with regard to selective admission and with regard to race-based affirmative action.

The first has to do with institutional discretion regarding admission policies and procedures. Douglas argued that the educational policy choices made by institutions regarding admission should not in ordinary circumstances be a subject for judicial oversight. Subsequent court cases have upheld that principle, and yet that precedent is in jeopardy in the Harvard and UNC cases given the current composition of the Supreme Court.

A second issue is the predictive ability and limitations of testing. The LSAT was a major part of the index used by the law school to sort applicants, with possible exception of applicants in the minority category. Douglas called into question the reliance on testing, in particular asking whether one’s score on the LSAT is predictive of success. He argued that tests “do not have the value that their deceptively precise scoring system suggests.” 

The debate over how much value tests add to admission prediction continues today. Do we believe that tests measure the qualities we look for in lawyers (or students), or do we value tests because they give us a number to simplify the evaluation? Do we measure the things we value, or do we value the things we can measure, even imprecisely?

A related philosophical issue is whether the admissions process is designed to reward past performance or to predict future success. Are those the same thing, and if not which of those do test scores measure? Answering that question becomes more complicated when you are talking about professional schools like law or medical school, where predicting future success as a lawyer is not the same thing as predicting future success as a law student.

A third issue involves how to ensure that there is equity in the admissions process. The dean of the Washington Law School talked about wanting a class with a “reasonable representation” of students from a diverse group of ethnic and other backgrounds, making clear that was not the same as a quota. That issue has been an on-going discussion, with the University of Texas in the 2016 Fisher case talking about the desire for a “critical mass” of students from different groups.

That concern is elevated given the history of race in this country, a history that most of us believe is far from resolved. Douglas pointed out that “The years of slavery did more than retard the progress of blacks. Even a greater wrong was done the whites by creating arrogance instead of humility and by encouraging the growth of the fiction of a superior race.” He also pointed out that, “A segregated admissions process creates suggestions of stigma and caste no less than a segregated classroom” and “One other assumption must be clearly disapproved; that blacks or browns cannot make it on their own individual merit.” 

But does it matter how one goes about achieving a goal that is laudable? Should students have been designated as “minority” students solely based on their answers to an optional application question? 

One of the meta issues in ethics is whether the end justifies the means, and that applies here. In his DeFunis dissent Douglas suggested that the law school was in effect conducting dual admission processes, and in the 1978 Bakke case the Supreme Court stated that a separate minority admission process is unconstitutional.  Skeptics of race-based affirmative action have alleged that colleges still have quotas, but have learned to use different language.

The final issue raised indirectly by Douglas involved whether colleges should be admitting individuals or a class. Douglas stated of DeFunis, “Whatever his race, he had a constitutional right to have his application considered on its individual merits in a racially neutral manner.”

I happen to agree with that sentiment in principle, but it seems almost quaint today. Selective institutions today are looking to craft a class through the admissions process rather than admit deserving individuals, with diversity being one of the institutional priorities. Is that at odds with Douglas’s views in the DeFunis case? I have argued before that much more than race-based admission is on trial in the Harvard case, that admission conventions such as the “best class” paradigm and the idea of holistic admission are also on trial.

Justice William Douglas was seen as the most liberal of the judges on the Supreme Court during his tenure, and yet his views in the DeFunis dissent seem almost conservative in the present day (not conservative in the way the present Court is, if in fact the “conservative” majority on the court is truly conservative).  I wonder what that says about the evolution of the debate over race-based affirmative action over the past 50 years. Perhaps we can investigate that in future posts.

The DeFunis case has been largely forgotten. Marco DeFunis ended up practicing law in the Seattle area before dying of a heart attack at age 52. Many of the issues contained in the Douglas dissent should still guide consideration of the issue today. 

Let's Chat(GPT)

Recently I experienced what it must be like to be a losing contestant on the television show “The Weakest Link” (even though I have never watched the show, have no idea how it works, and didn’t know it was still on).

I was asked to organize a session at the Potomac and Chesapeake Association for College Admission Counseling conference on ChatGPT and how it might impact the college admissions process. “Jim Jump” and “technological savvy” are generally not found in the same sentence, but I was asked to lead the session because I had been interviewed by Forbes for an article about whether AI will kill the college essay.

The key to a successful conference session is having the right panelists, and I was fortunate to enlist David Mabe, the Director of College Counseling at Woodberry Forest School outside Orange, Virginia (previously in admissions at Davidson and Bowdoin), and Amy Moffatt, the Assistant Vice President for University Admissions at Towson University outside Baltimore.  Both did an awesome job of preparing and presenting, and multiple times during the session I found myself thinking that I should go sit in the audience and soak up their wisdom so as to prevent me from opening my mouth and demonstrating my ignorance. 

There has been a lot of discussion and speculation about the threats posed by Artificial Intelligence, including ChatGPT. Is this one of those inventions, like the printing press, automobile, and mobile phone, that will change and make our lives easier in revolutionary ways? Is it another example of science fiction becoming reality, or another chapter in the “Fad of the Month Club”? Or, to repeat a question asked in an earlier column, is this the first step in our subjugation by our smarter, and hopefully benevolent, machine overlords?

My initial reaction to ChatGPT focused on risks to the application process, particularly the student essay. How can we trust that an essay was written by the student and not the chatbot, and can we require essays when we can’t verify authorship? I have already seen proposed solutions including handwritten essays and proctored essays. I’m sure David Coleman and his College Board mavens are hoping that one consequence of ChatGPT will be bringing back the SAT essay to increase testing numbers. None of those excite me.  

In putting together the session, we decided that we wanted to focus not only on challenges presented by the technology but also the opportunities it might afford.  

The first of those opportunities is the ability to save staff time on mundane tasks. Amy experimented and found that ChatGPT can be used effectively to compose boilerplate language for any number of tasks ranging from marketing content to job descriptions and staff surveys to travel planning.  One particularly interesting use was having the chatbot generate multiple polite ways to end difficult phone conversations.

ChatGPT is not as good with writing that requires creativity, context, or nuance. There have also been examples of cases where the chatbot confidently and even obstinately asserted as true things that were demonstrably false (this is not an actual example but along the lines of “The War of 1812 took place in 1953”). 

I asked it to compose the introduction to our session in the style of this blog. It did so, but failed to capture my wit and sense of humor. Or maybe it captured my lack of wit and feeble sense of humor all too well. I’m sticking with the former.

On the college counseling side, Dave experimented with using ChatGPT to build college lists, including asking it to recommend ten colleges similar to Duke but not as selective. He then asked it to make a table with information for each college, estimate chances of admission of each, and then asked it to plan a hypothetical college trip to several of the schools.  

He also found that ChatGPT is particularly good at summarizing things.  He sees an opportunity for admissions offices at large universities that receive lots of applications to use the tool to generate a dispassionate summary of recommendation letters in less than 100 words, pulling details, anecdotes, or quotations.

There is also an opportunity to address equity in the admissions process. Counselors in schools with huge counseling loads might be able to generate more substantial recommendation letters than they are currently able to with assistance from ChatGPT (not the same thing as having AI write the letters).

Concern for equity is also one of the challenges. Will access to ChatGPT, particularly as free versions disappear, increase the digital divide, hurting students and counselors without access?

Another challenge for both sides of the desk is change management in our offices. How do we incorporate the new technology into our work, and how do we bridge the divide between generations and between those who embrace ChatGPT and those who fear or loathe it?  

ECA is always most concerned with ethical implications, and there are several with ChatGPT. The equity issue raised above leads the list.

ChatGPT makes it easy for students to “cheat” on college essays, missing the point that the essay is not about finished product but about process. The real value of the college essay is as a means for introspection.  An antidote for cheating might be programs developed by a Princeton student and by turnitin.com to detect the use of ChatGPT, but those have a success rate of 98-99 percent. Is that enough to risk falsely accusing a student of cheating?

One of the unanticipated consequences of ChatGPT is that the ability to have it summarize and even rate applications may encourage application “gluttony,” the quest to increase applications without increasing staff. In a profession where people are already being stretched thin and where staff burnout is an increasing concern, that would be cruel at best and unethical at worst.

The ultimate ethical issue is one found with any new technology, including genetic engineering. Just because we can do something, does that mean that we should do it? The rapid evolution in ChatGPT and similar technology can very easily outpace the development of ethical and appropriate use guidelines. Just in the past few weeks the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has proposed a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and the European Union has proposed a regulatory framework for the use of Artificial Intelligence. Both are important steps, as there is much we don’t know about both the opportunities and the dangers associated with AI.

Dave Mabe proposed one more opportunity afforded by ChatGPT that I hadn’t considered. Its successful use requires careful and deliberate question-building, and Dave sees that as leading to a new profession, “Prompt Engineer.” 

I have been accused multiple times of being really good at posing questions and not as good at providing answers. I now recognize that, like Jimmy Buffett, my occupational hazard has been that my occupation’s just not around. Prompt Engineer might be the career I’ve been waiting for all my life. It certainly beats being a losing contestant on “The Weakest Link.”

Early Decision 2: A Case Study--Principle or Pragmatism

Is it ever appropriate for a student to renege on an Early Decision commitment? And how should a college counselor respond when a family wants to game the system or play fast and loose with the rules?

Those were just a couple of the questions I found myself contemplating during my Spring Break while sitting on the deck sunning myself and enjoying the view of the Currituck Sound. For those of you wondering, “What’s wrong with you?”, that’s an essay question rather than a short answer and a topic for another time. 

Like most college counselors I am “on duty” even during off hours. I chuckle to myself when my school talks about “work/life balance,” because I understand all too well that schools and colleges operate on an economic model that relies on hiring those of us who are workaholics and lack balance. I also wonder if the next generation of college admission officers and college counselors will be as committed/neurotic as most of us are.

In this instance there was method to my madness.  I had just gotten off a phone call with a college counseling friend who had asked for a consult and a second opinion on an ethical dilemma involving a student.

Like many students who had to navigate high school and college during COVID, the student in question had dealt with academic and mental health challenges, including changing schools halfway through high school and also being home-schooled at one point. As a result their transcript did not match up to their college aspirations.

In middle school and early high school the student had been a champion distance runner until burning out and giving up the sport, at which point they threw their energy into year-round competitive swimming. That included joining a high-end club program known for not only producing Division One swimmers, but Olympians and even Olympic champions.   

Despite the serious commitment to swimming, the student ended up being one of the only team members without Division One interest. The student also went out on a limb and applied to a Restrictive Early Action university, only to be denied.

When the school returned from the Christmas holiday break the counselor learned that during the break the student had reached out to the track coach at a high-academic institution to inquire about potentially running there.  The coach had one spot left, and after the student was vetted by the coach and the admissions office, they applied Early Decision 2 and were admitted.

So far, so good. But as the deadline approached for depositing at the ED2 college, the student and family started getting cold feet. They submitted the deposit, but almost immediately inquired about perhaps deferring admission for a PG year. My counselor friend worried that the motivation wasn’t as much an extra year to solidify readiness for college as buying time to look for other, more palatable options. What made that particularly worrisome was that the counselor’s school has a long-standing, healthy relationship with the university in question.  All of this led the counselor to ask for my thoughts.

In case studies like this one, ECA is always more interested in looking for larger themes and issues. So what are some of those issues?

The first has to do with the increase in colleges offering and students choosing Early Decision 2 options.  I have seen a dramatic increase in the number of my students going the ED2 route, sometimes immediately upon being deferred or denied in ED or Early Action.

Is that a good thing? It’s probably good for colleges as part of an enrollment management plan, but what about for students? Rushing into an ED2 commitment feels a lot like jumping into a romantic relationship immediately after being dumped by one’s ex.

At the same time, I understand the motivation. The growth in early admission options, whether Early Decision or Early Action, can make a student feel like the admissions process is a game of musical chairs where you don’t want to be without a chair when the music stops during regular admission. I wonder, in fact, if “regular admission” may be an endangered species.

With many institutions admitting more than half the freshman class through Early Decision, ED is coercive.  I used to advise students that they shouldn’t apply Early Decision unless they had done thorough research and had a clear first choice, but that train bearing that advice has left the station, along with the larger idea that a college choice should be thoughtful. Today the subtle (and maybe not so subtle) message is similar to that in the old Ronco commercials for must-have products like the pocket fisherman and ginsu knives (technically not a Ronco product). Only instead of “if you order now,” with regard to Early Decision the message is “if you don’t order now.”

I am also seeing more colleges with both Early Action and Early Decision encouraging students deferred in EA to switch their applications to ED2.  That is certainly a way of measuring demonstrated interest, and I’m okay with that as long as colleges are transparent about their practices, but it also encourages students to look at the decision to apply ED as about strategy rather than commitment. What I have grave concerns about is a situation I recently heard about where a university encouraged a student deferred during Early Decision to switch their application to ED2, whereupon the student was denied outright. That’s indefensible.

I think this case also raises questions about the nature of the Early Decision commitment and the inequality in the relationship between college and applicant. There is an old joke that when it comes to a bacon and egg breakfast, the chicken is interested but the pig is committed. When it comes to Early Decision, the college is the chicken and the student is the pig. The student is expected to commit fully at the time of application, but the college bears no obligation other than agreeing to provide a decision at an earlier date.

I would never encourage a student to enter into an Early Decision application without understanding that it is a binding commitment, but I also wonder how defensible that position is. Parents who are lawyers will often ask what is keeping them from breaking the Early Decision commitment, and there is certainly nothing legally binding.  The statistics I’ve seen indicate that the Early Decision yield rate nationally is more like 89 percent than 100 percent.

In this case I also wonder if the college believed that student had committed by applying through Early Decision 2. Its behavior would suggest not. The college required an enrollment deposit from the student, and yet if the student is considered to have committed at the moment of application, a deposit is unnecessary.

The final set of issues have to do with when, if ever, it is appropriate to withdraw from an Early Decision agreement.  In this particular case the family submitted the deposit, then had second thoughts about whether a PG year would better meet the student’s needs. The ethical issues would have been lessened had that come up prior to depositing.

The family asked the counselor about the possibility of deferring admission for a year in order for the student to do a PG year at a boarding school, but it was not clear if they really wanted to defer admission at the ED2 school or buy time to shop for a “better” option a year from now.  I think that makes a difference. Given the student’s background, including both academic and health concerns,  buying time with an extra year may very well be in the student’s best interest academically and personally. I also think that backing out of ED to attend boarding school is not the same thing as backing out to attend another college. But deferring admission should be used only if the student intends to matriculate a year from now.

So what is the counselor to do? Families may not know, or care, that their decisions impact not only them but future applicants.  In this case the counselor has to worry about potential damage to the relationship between the school and the university. I would probably urge the family to contact the college and be honest about their hesitancy to continue the commitment, and I hope the college would allow that. There is no benefit in having a student on your campus who doesn’t want to be there. I also urged my counselor friend to find an opportunity after the fact to communicate with the admissions office that the school was not complicit, or even aware, of the family’s decision-making process.

The college process tests what we believe–about college, about parenting, and maybe about life.  There is a tremendous temptation to look for ways to game the system, and the college admissions process doesn’t necessarily discourage that.  In my opinion we are always better off choosing principle over pragmatism.

Random Questions

This blog has always been more about raising questions than claiming to have answers. Here are some random questions I’m contemplating as we hit the end of February. None of them are keeping me up at night, and none are probably deserving of their own post. I hope they won’t come across as rants or the kind of airing of grievances you might hear from Frank Costanza during Festivus or at any Donald Trump rally.

Question 1: Does February need a rebranding?

We all know that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, and that April showers bring May flowers. What is February’s niche or tagline? It begins with Groundhog’s Day, where Punxsutawney Phil either sees his shadow or doesn’t, and we have six more weeks of winter regardless. The Super Bowl is played during February, Valentine’s Day happens during February, and February is Black History Month (which should last longer than a month). Despite all of these, the closest thing February has to a brand is “the shortest month that seems like the longest.” Can we do better than that? Perhaps the same marketing people who do ads for avocados or Geico can come up with a branding campaign for February.

Question 2: When does Early Action become late action?

We are at the end of February (“the shortest month that seems like the longest”), and I am aware of several colleges that have just released Early Action decisions, barely a month before regular decisions are due to be released.  What gives? Clearly Early Action is designed for the benefit of the institution, allowing it to space out application reading and manage enrollment, but when is Early Action no longer early? And is “regular” admission soon to be a thing of the past?  In the words of Yogi Berra, “It gets late early around here.”

Question 3: Why do brochures for summer programs include a list of colleges attended by “graduates”?

This is the time of year when my office receives a number of emails and brochures promoting summer program opportunities. I was looking at one last week for a program sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Urbanism. It’s a program in Italy called the Center for Introduction to Architecture Overseas (if you haven’t noticed, the acronym is CIAO), and having spent a month nine summers ago living in the small Tuscany city of Lucca, it caught my eye. My attention was drawn to  one piece of the brochure, where it says “Program alums have been accepted to.” 

Is listing the colleges attended by those who attend  summer programs a form of false advertising? Is the message intended to be that attending a summer program like this will result in acceptance to college? Maybe I’m naive, but I think that colleges look at these kinds of summer programs as “It’s nice that your family can afford to send you to a program like this.” My students who have attended these kinds of pricey summer programs generally have a good experience, but I don’t think attending a summer enrichment program improves students’ college admissions chances. Can we get summer programs to market the quality of the experience and not the promise of college admission benefits? In the spirit of full disclosure, I recognize that schools, including mine, are also guilty of publishing college lists in marketing materials, and I’m not totally comfortable with that either, but a summer program advertising where its alumni have gone to college seems even less defensible.

Question 4: If there were an Advanced Placement multiple choice question regarding the back and forth between the College Board and the administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the proposed AP course in African American Studies, the issue would be best described as:

1. The College Board standing up to DeSantis

2. The College Board kissing up to DeSantis

3. Political theater related to DeSantis’s presidential ambitions

4. A pissing contest

5. All of the above    

I have been following and trying to make sense of the issue, as well as trying to determine who is the good guy in all of this.

In case you have spent six months vacationing at the International Space Station or trying to shoot down Chinese weather balloons and unidentified flying objects, here’s a quick summary.

For a number of years the College Board has had plans on the drawing board for the new AP course. After the murder of George Floyd by police in the summer of 2020 and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests, plans ratcheted up to introduce the course, and this year there is a pilot of the course in 60 high schools around the country.

In January the Florida Department of Education rejected the AP course as violating state law related to the teaching in public schools of race-related issues and as lacking educational value. Gov. DeSantis, whose first job after college was teaching U.S. History at the Darlington School in Georgia, described the proposed syllabus as “woke.”  

On February 1, the first day of Black History Month, the College Board announced a revised curriculum for the course, removing some of the topics that Florida and conservatives had objected to. The immediate conclusion from many of us was that the College Board was responding to the criticism leveled by the DeSantis administration, but the CB maintained that the changes had been in the works prior to the objections raised by Florida. That claim was called into question by a timeline released by Florida officials showing on-going negotiations between the state and the College Board over the course.

So what are we to make of this? Should we blame the College Board for engaging in dialogue with Florida, given that the Advanced Placement program is its largest single source of revenue and that Florida is the third highest state in terms of AP participation? At the same time, are Florida’s objections educational or political in nature? 

Governor DeSantis is clearly gearing up for a Presidential run, and his schtick is using the culture wars as a campaign platform. As Republican politicians go, his style is more bully than bully pulpit. Just this morning I read about a proposed Florida law that would establish authoritarian control over higher education in a way that is unprecedented. He has already attempted to turn New College into Hillsdale South and punish Disney for supporting LGBT rights. First Mickey Mouse, now the College Board. Will he target apple pie (or at least Apple), motherhood, and the National Football League next?

As for the College Board, is the introduction of the African-American Studies course filling a void in AP offerings or a way to increase revenue in the wake of declining SAT numbers? As a white observer rather than an African-American Studies scholar, I think there is clearly a need for more education about race and its role in American history and culture. The debate should be about what the focus of such an AP course should be. 

I wonder if the AP course should be African-American “history” rather than “studies.” In many academic disciplines there is a fine line between scholarship and activism. A few of the topics removed from the original draft look like doctoral level work rather than topics high school students need to be aware of. One such topic was Queer Studies. Is that essential to understanding the African-American experience? I’ll leave that to others to answer, but from a historical perspective it is relevant that Bayard Ruskin was forced to take a back seat as a leading voice in the civil rights movement because he was gay.

Many of the topics and readings removed from the updated course are secondary sources that students may now study as part of a project that will make up 20 percent of their AP score. The in-depth project may be a good idea, but as far as I know no other AP course has a similar project component.  Is the project unique for this course or part of the future of many AP courses?

More questions than answers, and some of the answers are troubling. At least we know that March is about to come in like a lion, only to leave like a lamb.

(Re)Commended

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” January 30, 2023)

In case you missed it, there was a bizarre news story coming out of the D.C. area a couple of weeks ago. “So what’s new?”, you might ask, noting that the phrases “bizarre story” and “D.C. area” in the same sentence are normally not newsworthy. 

This particular story had nothing to do with the 15-round lightweight fight which resulted in Kevin McCarthy at long last achieving his life’s dream of being Speaker of the House of Representatives, although it did take place in the same time frame. It involved an investigation, but not into Hunter Biden’s laptop or whether Dr. Anthony Fauci created COVID.  The investigation was not federal, but rather conducted by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares.

What caught my attention were both the target of and the reason for the investigation. The target is the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Northern Virginia, ranked by U.S. News as the top high school in America. We (that’s an editorial “we”) mention that factoid only to make the point that TJ is widely considered as one of the best secondary schools in the country, not because we consider U.S. News’s rankings either valid or meaningful.

What really raised my eyebrows, though, was the issue creating the need for the investigation. The school is being investigated for having failed to inform students that they had been recognized as Commended Students in the National Merit Scholarship Competition. 

“Commended Student” is one of two levels of recognition in the National Merit program. Students who score in the top one-half of one percent on the PSAT taken in the junior year, the qualifying test for National Merit. Semifinalist slots operate on a state-by-state quota system (a topic for another time). Those who score among the top 50,000 students nationally (approximately the top 3 percent of test takers) but do not qualify as Semifinalists, receive Commended Student recognition.  

Miyares has taken up the mantle for a group of TJ parents who are claiming that the failure to notify their children of their designation as a Commended Student has harmed them in the college admissions process.  In a press conference Miyares talked about children denied their dreams and that the failure may constitute a civil rights violation.  But is that the case?

I know that “unpack” is one of those words that has become a cliche and everyone is tired of, but there’s a lot to unpack here. 

It’s unclear whether this was an administrative oversight or a deliberate decision to avoid sharing the information, and that makes a difference. Intent is a key factor in making judgments about the ethical implications of a situation. I saw one claim that National Merit may have sent the package with the Letters of Commendation with insufficient postage, delaying its receipt.  In philosophy Occam’s Razor is a principle that one should always look for the simple explanation first, and just as a doctor might want to rule out obvious diagnoses before looking for the rare disease found only on hospital shows, we should make sure that this is not a case of simple error or oversight.

There is also some irony in that this is an issue at TJ (several other Fairfax County Public Schools have been named as guilty as well).  TJ had 131 National Merit Semifinalists this year, almost 30 percent of the senior class.  To put that in context, only one other high school in the country had more (Stuyvesant High School in New York City), and TJ has in its senior class more Semifinalists than 14 states. Given that number, putting too much emphasis on the 240 seniors who were recognized as Commended Students runs the risk of creating a three tiered student body with regard to National Merit.  I have never been to TJ (where the average SAT score according to the school profile is 1531–yes, you read that right), but are Commended Students picked on by Semifinalists? And what about the approximately 80 students who don’t qualify for either? I am not defending the failure to dispense the recognition, only pointing out that TJ is far from a normal school.

I learned early in my career as a counselor that the issue presented by a disgruntled parent is rarely the real issue, and suspect that is true here.  The focus on the National Merit issue is being seen as evidence that Thomas Jefferson (the school, not the President) is abandoning its roots as an elitist school in its quest to embrace an equity agenda. Attorney General Miyares’ investigation seems to be much more about the change in TJ’s admissions process away from admissions testing in order to diversify the student body, which is approximately two-thirds Asian. Those of us who are cynics, or rather realists, may wonder how much of this is a real issue as opposed to political theater.

ECA is not interested in litigating the cultural wars, but rather looking at the broader underlying questions. There are several that have not been addressed sufficiently.

The first is whether the students affected have been harmed or discriminated against. Several articles have mentioned that they were unable to list Commended Student on early college applications. But that assumes that colleges value National Merit recognition. That is debatable with regard to Semifinalist status, but if there are colleges that see being a National Merit Commended Student as a deciding factor in admission, I’d like them to contact me and let me know. Being a Commended Student is not meaningless, but it’s also not particularly meaningful. I was a Commended Student years ago when the National Merit exam wasn’t tied to the PSAT (it apparently changed a year later), and it’s unlikely that I will list that honor on my resume–or my tombstone. 

The second question is, should it be a school’s job to inform National Merit recipients? National Merit has always been behind the curve when it comes to technology.  Long after all colleges had moved to online applications and typewriters had all but disappeared, the National Merit application remained a paper application requiring a typewriter.

There has to be a way for National Merit to inform students directly about recognition.  The obvious one is to notify students using their accounts with National Merit’s PSAT partner, the College Board. The College Board informs students of their PSAT scores by sending them an email. What can’t Semifinalists and Commended Students be informed the same way?

This is part of a larger issue where agencies like the College Board and National Merit want schools to do their work for them. The College Board has pushed the School Day SAT, and I expect it will want the new digital SAT to be administered through schools. But the College Board has in the past refused to pay those who proctor during the school day because the proctor is already being paid by the school and a stipend would constitute double dipping. But test proctors, and school officials expected to dispense National Merit certificates, are agents of the College Board or the National Merit program, not of their schools. If you want those of us in schools to do your work, you should be compensating us. 

The final larger issue, and the hardest to navigate, has to do with the nature of merit.  George Will wrote a column about the TJ situation in which he stated, “The opposite of an equitable society is a meritocracy.”

But are equity and merit at odds? Both are important values (not everyone will agree), and there is a tension between them. They are also concepts that can arouse political emotions.

The challenge may be in how those concepts are defined. There are certainly those who are suspicious of equity as a way to water down merit, but equity doesn’t mean equality of result but rather equality of opportunity.  Much of what we have traditionally referred to as merit is really privilege in disguise. The National Merit program defined “merit” as how one does on one three-hour test, and we know that standardized testing correlates strongly with family income. Test scores measure merit imprecisely, and only in context. Two identical scores don’t mean the same thing if one student spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on test prep and the other didn’t. Which of the two is more meritorious?

That tension between merit and equity will be one of the most important philosophical societal issues of our time. Finding the right balance between the two is what we should be investigating. 

"I Am Not a Robot"

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider on January 9, 2023)

“I am not a robot.” How many of us have been asked by Google or other websites to prove that? It is tempting to say that being forced to check the “I am not a robot” box is dehumanizing, but it’s actually humanizing. 

The “I am not a robot” checkbox is an example of a captcha (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Humans and Computers Apart), a tool designed to filter out spam and bots. I prefer to think that it’s real aim is to inconvenience me. Having to find the kitty pictures among a mass of images is annoying, although it’s still an improvement on having to type distorted text into a box. Does the fact that I have a hard time determining whether that’s a 0 (zero) or a capital O mean that I’m not human or that I might need glasses?

Will “Are you a robot?” soon be a required question on college applications? That question is raised by the recent introduction of ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence app that interacts conversationally, giving it the ability to “write.” A New York Times article describes ChatGPT (the GPT stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”) as “the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public.” More than one million people signed up to test it in the first five days after its release.

To borrow from the title of a recent ECA column, it’s “too early to tell” what this means. Is this another example of technological advances making our lives both simpler and simultaneously more complicated? Another instance of science fiction turning into non-fiction? Another chapter in the age-old philosophical debate about what qualities distinguish us as human? Or the next step down the road leading to servitude to our smarter and hopefully benevolent machine overlords?

ChatGPT poses particular challenges for those of us who love the written word and those of us who work in education.  The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni asked in his most recent column whether ChatGPT will make him irrelevant. (I’d like to think not.) What happens to take-home essay assignments when you can’t be sure that the essay was written by Johnny and not his AI app? In higher education the humanities are already under threat. What happens to the humanities when the human component is removed? “Machinities,” anyone?

That brings those of us in the college admissions and counseling worlds to consider the college application essay. Does ChatGPT signify the end of the application essay?

I was interviewed for a Forbes article with the title “A Computer Can Now Write Your College Essay–Maybe Better Than You Can.” Forbes fed ChatGPT two college essay prompts, one the 650-word Common Application prompt, “Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story,” and the other the “Why Wisconsin?” essay from the University of Wisconsin-Madison supplement.  According to the article, each essay took ChatGPT less than ten minutes to complete. That is both far less time than we hope students would spend composing essays and far more time than most admissions officers spend reading essays.

I was asked to weigh in on whether the AI-produced essays were convincing, whether they looked similar to essays from actual high school seniors, and whether anything in the essay suggested that they were written by AI rather than a human being. My answer was that I probably couldn’t detect the AI authorship, but that I also wouldn’t label the essays as convincing.

I found both essays to resemble cliche essays, with neither answering the prompt in a convincing way.  They also didn’t sound like an essay a teenager would write, but rather an essay a teenager might write with major assistance and editing by an adult.

The Forbes reporter, Emma Whitford, had provided ChatGPT with the following factoids for use in the “identity” essay–competitive swimmer who broke his shoulder in tenth grade, interested in majoring in business, parents from Bangalore, India who now own a restaurant in Newton, Massachusetts.  ChatGPT threw all of that at the wall in formulating the essay, with some interesting creative embellishments. The writer began swimming competitively at the age of nine, the broken shoulder came in a swimming accident, and the interest in business came from working in the family restaurant, where he helped his parents with “inventory management, staff scheduling, and customer relations,” as well as marketing and advertising and developing new menu items.

The “identity” essay did exactly what many student essays do, throwing out lots of things in hopes that something will stick. But it didn’t really address the prompt. The weakest part of the essay, in fact, is the part dealing with the student’s Indian heritage. It consists of vague generalities about “a deep appreciation for Indian culture” and “the challenges and opportunities that come with being a first-generation immigrant,” but there is nothing in that paragraph showing how coming from an Indian background has influenced the student’s experience or world view. Can I imagine a student writing such an essay? Yes. Are my standards for what makes an essay compelling too high? Possibly.

The “Why Wisconsin?” essay had similar characteristics. The information provided to ChatGPT included an intended major in Business Administration and Marketing, part-time work at the family restaurant, and a love for Badger football. Again, the bot showed some creativity in expanding on those themes. It referenced the student’s starting as a dishwasher and progressing to researching the restaurant’s competition and identifying its “unique selling points,” and included a Camp Randall Stadium reference. But, like many student first drafts of the “Why…?” essay, there is nothing that shows any real familiarity with the university or that would prevent one from inserting any other university’s name into the essay.

Nevertheless, the quality of these essays is either impressive or scary, depending upon your perspective. This seems like a major leap beyond learning that a computer could defeat a human world champion in chess.

So what are the ethical implications? That, after all, is the focus of ECA.  

The low-hanging fruit answer is that it is clearly unethical for a student to submit an essay written by ChatGPT. The more complicated question is whether it is unethical for a college to require an application essay or make the essay a significant factor in evaluating a student’s application. How can you use an application essay to help make admission decisions when you can’t tell whether the student actually wrote the essay?

Then again, in how many cases is an essay determinative for an admissions decision? I think essays, like test scores, are overrated by the public. Personal statements and essays are important for some students at some colleges. Most colleges are not selective enough to give attention to a student’s essay unless it contains some kind of red flag. It is only at the very highly selective/rejective colleges and universities, where the vast majority of applicants have superb transcripts and scores, that the voice piece of the application, including essays, becomes important and differentiating.

It is already clear that ChatGPT is capable of composing a passable essay, and that may be enough to augur the end of the personal essay as an admissions factor. Just how good an essay AI can produce may be dependent on the quality of information given it. My father was a pioneer in the computer field, and I learned early the concept of GIGO–Garbage In, Garbage Out.

I’m far from convinced that ChatGPT can produce great college essays. Great essays have a spark to them that is not about the ability to write but rather the ability to think. Great personal essays are clever and insightful, with an authenticity and a sincerity that’s–well, personal. As Roger Ailes once said about public speaking, you either have to be sincere or fake sincerity, and it’s very hard to fake sincerity. 

That skepticism toward ChatGPT’s writing abilities may label me as either a dinosaur or a dreamer. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I’ll take either over being a robot.