I read a fascinating article by Matt Feeney in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. It’s paywalled, so I’ll quote some key snippets, which are enough for a simple case study. Here are some questions to think about as you read:
- Is college admissions an accountability system? Why or why not?
- Do the holistic and Coalition portfolio admissions processes fall short of any of the principles in the MAP? Which ones, how and why?
- Which is better from a MAP perspective: to select randomly from the pool of qualified students, or to “launch an inquisition of their applicants’ souls”? Why or why not?
- What changes would help these admissions processes live up to the MAP more completely?
- What gaps or other weaknesses of moral accounting itself are revealed by this analysis?
Here the first excerpt:
My wife is a high-school counselor, and her boss (the head counselor) conveyed a revealing tidbit to me: An Ivy League admissions dean told her that his office could simply replace the class they admitted with the next most competitive group of applicants, and the next several after that, and it would make no difference. In 2015 the undergraduate admissions dean at Tufts University made a similar confession, noting that 74 percent of the nearly 20,000 applicants to Tufts were deemed qualified for admission while 42 percent were recommended for acceptance. The school’s actual acceptance rate that year? Sixteen percent, a number that has likely only shrunk: This year, applications to Tufts ballooned by 35 percent.
The article points out that colleges could select students randomly from the qualified set. Instead, they’ve doubled down on the decades-long trend of trying “to peer deeper into the character of their candidates.” It describes the heyday of “well-rounded” criteria in the 80s and 90s, which demanded broad extracurriculars. Once that became too widely gamed, they started looking for “well-lopsided” candidates who showed focus on a specialization. That’s a bit harder to game, but they have continued to peer further into character, now using holistic admissions to assess “authenticity”:
But there is a problem with the new authenticity standard. The people who made applying to college an elaborate performance, a nervous and yearslong exercise in self-construction have now decided that the end result of this elaborate performance must be “the real you.” The tacit directive in all this — “Be authentic for us or we won’t admit you” — puts kids in a tough position. It’s bad that kids have to suffer this torment. It’s also bad that admissions departments actually think that the anxiously curated renderings that appear in applications can in any way be called “authentic.” It’s like watching Meryl Streep portray Margaret Thatcher and thinking: Now that is the real Meryl Streep.
The article then argues that authenticity is actually just a marker for class:
This points to another dark aspect of all this personalizing, with its imposed subtleties of performance and discernment — the barely hidden class bias. Admissions personnel are generally eager to add their voices to the chorus bewailing the socioeconomic and racial bias in standardized testing, but they’re largely incurious about the class bias in their own softer measures. In practice, that is, what ends up resembling “authenticity” to admissions officers is an uncannily WASPy mix of dispensations better understood as discretion, or, perhaps, good taste. After all, what admissions readers really dislike are the braggarts, and isn’t bragging a vice of the classless, the parvenus and arrivistes?
Feeney then turns to the newest thing in admissions, the Coalition App, used by 150 or so top institutions:
The great innovation of the Coalition App is that it takes the form of an online account that students can open when they reach ninth grade. After they open their Coalition App account, students can start assembling a portfolio of their high-school efforts, uploading papers and image files and other documents both curricular and extracurricular, into their personal master file, called a “locker.”
Of course, “can” start in ninth means “must” start in ninth grade. Veronica Hauad, deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago (one of the founding schools of the Coalition) explains some of the thinking behind encouraging students to start so early: “The application process shouldn’t be this frenzied process in the fall of your senior year, which is already busy.” To illustrate, she addresses a hypothetical high-school student. “Let’s think long term,” she says, “about my identity and what my application will look like.”
Admissions reformers, as this example shows all too clearly, address problems with their process by proposing huge expansions of that process. It’s also a nice statement of the existential conceits of admissions personnel in prestigious colleges. Two very different things get blithely bundled together in their minds — the profound matter of who a young person is becoming, and the administrative preference that the young person be more legible within a process of selection and rejection. “My identity and my application,” Hauad says, as if these two things are part of the same ethical process of becoming a person.
Feeney closes with some moral judgment:
Setting up a yearslong, quasi-therapeutic process in which admissions goads young people into laying bare their vulnerable selves — a process that conceals a high-value transaction in which colleges use their massive leverage to mold those selves to their liking — is reprehensible. It is terrible thing to do. It renders the discovery of true underlying selves absurd. Sometimes, as we’ve seen, admissions people will admit they have this formative leverage over young people. But they fail to show the humility that should attend this admission, the clinician’s awareness that to use this power is to abuse it. Instead, they want even more power. They want to intrude even more deeply into the souls of their applicants. The name they give these ambitions is “reform.”
The admissions department isn’t an educational body. It’s an administrative one. Its mission isn’t teaching. It’s seeing and selecting. As its preferences and methods drift into the larger culture, they have formed themselves into a vague and largely unquestioned assumption that a central ethical duty of American teenagers is to make themselves legible to a bureaucratic process — and morally agreeable to its vain and blinkered personnel.
And a thought about reform, with more moral judgment (my emphasis):
It’s worth considering what real reform would look like. Real reform would make the process simpler and less time-consuming, less mysterious and morally presumptuous. As I mentioned above, a lottery stands out as a good option. Admissions bureaucrats faced with thousands more applicants than they can accept soon reach a level of arbitrariness. At that point, they launch an inquisition of their applicants’ souls. This makes little sense academically but allows them to stage a powerful, utterly undeserved disciplinary claim on the inner lives of teenagers — that is the abiding scandal of college admissions.
I’ll offer my own answers to the questions at the top sometime soon.