Reforming Selective College Admissions

3 small points to add. Admissions is just one of many things at universities like tenure that do not benefit the student.

Second I believe the north east elite college pyramid is about to collapse. Name recognition is far more important to the graduate than college ranking. Sure about 10 colleges will still be able to pull it off but for the rest it’s gone. I wonder how many Amherst grads get the reaction when they say they went to school at Amherst — you mean UMass? Far more people know where UMass is than know about Amherst college – it’s the facts folks.

The last point is that as small elite colleges loose the cachet they are not going to be able to sustain their ridiculous prices

Stephen Wells, at 7:40 am EST on February 28, 2006

#11: Yes, yes, yes, and yes! and abolish the AP exam!

College composition teacher.

Jane, at 8:35 am EST on February 28, 2006

Reforming Selective College Admissons

I have to agree with CJO. Talk of “prep schools” and a “gap year” are great if you can afford them. These are luxuries that many students and parents do not have the financial ability of which to take advantage. I find the article quite elitist.

Additionally, many schools do not release information to parents as a result of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, not out of some hidden agenda to keep those who “pay the bills” in the dark.

The author should remember that many parents do not pay the bills for their child’s education and to make the assumption that most parents do pay the tuition and fee bill is erroneous.

DHF, at 9:45 am EST on February 28, 2006

Ditto, CJO.

I find this piece sort of dryly and unintentionally ironic, given that there are so many high school students who lack the social and financial capital to even think about going to college. They wouldn’t even know where to start, nor would their parents. The situation she describes seems a bit like an embarassment of riches.

simone eastman, at 11:00 am EST on February 28, 2006

Disagree

I disagree with most everything in this article (and incidentally I did not get into several schools, so I’m not just saying that as a “lucky winner” of the “lottery").

We need university ranking. I don’t like the methodology US News uses, but there are alot of other rankings out there, and we do need to know about some objective measures of quality. The first one I looked for when choosing schools was SAT and ACT scores of their classes — those who didn’t publish their scores or had low averages were struck from any further consideration.

There are, at last count, 6500+ universities in this country, plus foreign schools. No one can examine all of them on his or her own. Rankings tell us who provides a quality education with some degree of accuracy. “Glossy” mailings let us know of the qualities of the school — I certainly didn’t research schools that didn’t bother to contact me, and neither will most people. There are enough schools that will take the time to let you know they exist without seeking out some “secret school” that hides from ratings and doesn’t tell anyone it is there.

Incidentally, price is still a consideration for all but the most affluent families. Merit aid matters alot. This suggestion to abolish merit aid is frankly one of the worst ideas ever posited on this site — one that only further reduces the rewards for real achievement.

Standardized testing is the most objective and least opinion based manner of evaluating student knowledge. I can’t think of a better tool available than the ACT for assessing who is capable of what, except perhaps the AP tests. Unlike high school courses, these are the same no matter the teacher, school, region, or irrelevant factor of the student (i.e. race, sex, nationality, etc. can’t be used believably as an excuse for poor performance when a machine does the grading). They evaluate outcome, not effort or the teacher’s opinion.

Delblanco refers to searching for more “intellectually curious” students. How that is going to be measured is beyond me, and frankly many people will have very different impressions of it, including based on the teacher’s personal opinion and what subject area is being discussed. I don’t know how you would go about admitting “intellectually curious students,” but I suspect it means people with low literacy and math skills (low test scores) who parrot his beliefs.

Studying for the ACT or SAT makes one better at what it assess – in other words, math and English. This is no different than studying in any other course and it is absurd that it is treated differently. Perhaps we should also penalize people who attend school because of the extra education they got. Maybe we should just take home schooled people or even just self educated people where this is going. Retaking the test gives students the chance to demonstrate improvement – not everyone is satisfied and coming back better prepared should not be looked down upon.

These suggestions cannot be termed reform.

Kevin, Undergraduate, at 12:40 pm EST on February 28, 2006

further disagreement

Since when do colleges and universities have a “responsibility as engines of opportunity for the poor and underclass"? This parent assumes that higher education should no longer be a meritocracy.

Going to college is not a right. Some students are not academically qualified to continue beyond high school. They will not benefit from a college education because they cannot absorb or complete the required work. Colleges do not have any obligation—repeat, NO obligation—to these students.

The earlier post that suggested getting rid of merit-based aid was the worst idea ever is right on target. Students who achieve academically in their K-12 years deserve assistance in continuing to achieve. They’ve already got proven track records and have demonstrated that they value education and what they can get out of a school system. Too much focus on “underclass” recruitment ignores the huge problems with retention. If you bring in underqualified students without providing continual and expensive support mechanisms, they will self-select out long before graduation.

This is not to undermine the importance of need-based financial aid. I appreciated the author’s comments on misguided marketing techniques, and agree that much of that money would be better spent in assisting students who do choose to attend. There are many academically talented students out there who could not afford college without financial aid and can’t win the biggest merit scholarships for whatever reasons. These students also deserve to have the opportunity to complete higher education without massive mountains of debt at the end of four years.

grad03, at 1:40 pm EST on February 28, 2006

Caveats [ie., Cautions] re: some of the responses to this piece

While, as I already made clear in my earlier response, I find the piece flawed, I also think I should note that some of the comments made about it are equally problematic, though usually in different ways.

First, since careful reading is necessary for a credible response, I do have to note to Baktu Basix that the author was not referring to her own daughter’s enjoyment of a gap year, but to a daughter of friends. Further, from what the author indicates, she may no longer have to go through the admissions process (at least not on the undergraduate level), since she didn’t mention having any other children beyond those two who had already gone through the process. Although she did speak from a point of view of privilege (given the fact that she seemed to be focusing solely on “selective” colleges), she certainly didn’t seem to be mired in self-absorbed whining. In fact, she did call for the abolition of merit aid in favor of more need-based aid, an action which would no doubt hurt her friends who have sacrificed so much already (!) to send their daughter to the “highly regarded Eastern prep school.”

However, I will grant that the aspect of Ms Henderson’s piece that comes closest to whining (if not actually makes it) is the insistence that parents have been unfairly painted as “neurotic, striving, over-involved Baby Boom parents mercilessly push their hapless children to achieve at ever higher levels so parents can validate themselves and their social status through their offsprings’ admission to prestigious colleges.” She claims that only “a small group of people” deserve this characterization, yet offers no proof that parents as a whole are being unfairly demonized. Rather, I have to note again that her causal argument needs to be carefully and honestly re-examined. How likely is it that colleges would, in fact, have moved to the current level of marketing if parents’ desires to get the “best bang for their buck” (with prestige factoring heavily into the definition of “bang") weren’t a primary if not the main force driving the competition? Who are the people who see a college education as a commodity or a product and demand the “best value” (and again, we have to examine that definition) for their dollar?

On another topic raised by Baktu Basix, not all colleges are admitting “a lot of people who can’t read, write, or calculate at a tenth-grade level.” Nor do all colleges “graduate a fair number of people who still can’t read, write, and calculate.” In fact, Ms Henderson wasn’t arguing that college admissions were becoming “too selective"; rather, she has an issue with the marketing and the attendant problems that do or that she perceives to stem from the marketing—-in “selective” colleges.

And finally (re:Baktu Basix’s comment), as a community college professor myself, I have to comment on your reference to your students who work third-shift jobs and are attempting full-time college work. I also have encountered inspiring stories involving students in such a situation, students who are making many sacrifices in order to gain the education they weren’t able to pursue when younger. However, your reference to the hope of no longer having to work third shift suggests that perhaps those students to whom you referred were holding down the equivalent of two full-time jobs simply to better their economic situation—-to get a better job, to be able to afford more material things. While that’s not a goal to deride, I do wonder how many of those students who are doing double duty are simply impatient about pursuing part-time education—and are pursuing a college degree or certificate not because of love of learning, but primarily or solely because of a desire for economic advancement. I’ve encountered a number of situations in which students hold down a full-time (plus) job while attempting to go to school full time—and when something has to “give,” it’s the schoolwork. Faculty are expected of course to grant extensions to people who are overextended because they don’t know how to prioritize or to people who have placed learning lower (sometimes much lower) on their priority scale. I do know that some financial aid rules may sometimes or often make it necessary to work full-time and go to school full-time; however, not all students fit into the somewhat melodramatic picture you painted—especially in situations in which the students’ salaries are higher than those of the community college professors from whom they’re taking classes.

And Kevin the undergraduate’s oversimplifications once again prove problematic: “Studying for the ACT or SAT makes one better at what it assess – in other words, math and English. This is no different than studying in any other course and it is absurd that it is treated differently.”

There’s a great difference between “studying” for the ACT or SAT by, for example, using the SAT’s free word-a-day or problem-a-day online service and spending hundreds of dollars to take a prep course. Even so, studying to ace a test should not be the only reason one studies in a course; those who often study solely for tests (especially if they cram) often don’t retain the information and understanding—or if they do, not as well as they would if they studied to understand the subject for knowledge’s sake. Perhaps that accounts for a lot of the people who graduate from colleges with embarrassing inabilities to read, think, write, and use mathematical reasoning.

And yes, indeed, “race, sex, nationality, etc.” *can* “be used believably as an excuse for poor performance when a machine does the grading"—-if the test is designed, even if unintentionally, on the basis of certain demographic assumptions.

Regarding the junk mailings, my 11th grade son is currently more amused by them than anything else. And I don’t know if we can condemn all promotional material as “degrad[ing] the integrity of the institution,” as Cassius claims. While I agree that “A college degree is not a new car that needs a flashy commercial,” I don’t think that all of the junk mail is flashy. In an age where mass communication is central, not making oneself known could jeopardize one’s existence. It’s more the way in which some or many of these mailings are done that may be the issue, not *that* they are done. Yet Kevin the undergraduate’s belief that his rather passive (which some might call lazy) approach to research is shared by “most students” is based on what evidence? The high schoolers I know don’t wait for something they’re seeking to land on their doorstep: they make the effort to look for it.

While I spotted other problems with logic or adequate support for claims, these are the ones that I think are most pertinent to the issue at hand.

CJO, at 3:50 pm EST on February 28, 2006

Response

One of the reasons Ivy League schools send out materials to prospective students is to let them know of their interest — just sending a packet says that you might have a chance to attend or that they might be interested in taking you. Also, for all the reputation of the Ivies, most people don’t know much about them but their names and rankings.

Kevin, Undergraduate, at 6:20 pm EST on February 28, 2006

In response to CJO

Dear CJO,

You’re right: I misidentified the kid who’s taking a year off after prep school. My bad, as the young folk say. I grovel in shame and vow to read more carefully, particularly when I have a head full of over-the-counter flu medicine. But I’m still relieved that somebody’s child gets to do that. My sentiment hasn’t changed. And as Natasha points out in her comment, maybe the year-off gambit is just another way of playing the game.

Next item. I didn’t claim that all colleges admit people who can’t read, write, or calculate at a tenth-grade level, or that all colleges graduate people who still can’t read, write, or calculate. Some do, though. Articles published on this very site have told the story. Anyone who has spent time in business—and I’ve spent more of my life there than in a classroom—has run into plenty of college graduates who can’t write a business letter. My all-time personal favorite is a cover letter from a young chap with a degree in communications from a well-known university. It contained 19 errors in grammar, punctuation, and usage; I remember marking it up before sending it back to the lad who wrote it. He was applying for work with a publishing firm, by the way. Brilliant, as the Guiness commercials say.

Here’s a curious bit from your comment:

(begin quote) However, your reference to the hope of no longer having to work third shift suggests that perhaps those students to whom you referred were holding down the equivalent of two full-time jobs simply to better their economic situation—-to get a better job, to be able to afford more material things. While that’s not a goal to deride, I do wonder how many of those students who are doing double duty are simply impatient about pursuing part-time education—and are pursuing a college degree or certificate not because of love of learning, but primarily or solely because of a desire for economic advancement. (end quote)

Well, yeah, a lot of my students do want better paychecks. Perhaps their main motivation is not a “love of learning.” So what? Why do they need to be just like me—or like you, CJO? And who the hell are we to decide what a love of learning is or isn’t? Some of my students carry burdens I can barely imagine, and I’ve carried a few loads in my life. They work hellish hours at crappy jobs for rotten pay, and they have children and sick parents to care for, and they’re “impatient about pursuing part-time education” because their lives suck and they’d like them to stop sucking quite so much, and they’d like their children to have a few things that they didn’t have. They want a credential that might mean the difference between not having and having health insurance for their children. Somehow, many of these people get the school work done and pass their courses.

Are they going to school “simply to better their economic situation"? There’s no “simply” about it, pal. When a person is the first one in his or her family even to dream of attending a community college—and I have scores of such students every year—then his or her desire to have a marketable mental skill that will pay more than seven bucks an hour counts as “love of learning” in my book.

But back to the original topic of the article above: the admissions practices of selective colleges. Why shouldn’t colleges market themselves? They run on the universal fuel: dollars. Once all of us (faculty and staff, that is) agree to work for no pay and no benefits, then administrators won’t have to worry about money, and then we can deep-six this whole tawdry business of persuading people to write the checks that become our salaries. You’ll excuse me if I don’t volunteer first; I’m busy writing a mash note to my school’s marketing people.

Baktu Basix, at 5:35 am EST on March 1, 2006

Parents Should Consider Their Votes

Ms. Henderson should remember that parents DO have a great deal of influence over public institutions by voting for the politicians that fund these institutions and higher ed financial aid programs. Many of the “flaws” she identifies are driven by the need for colleges to prove that they are cost-efficient and concerned about quality.

If parents want better higher education, they should remember to elect higher-ed supportive legislators, and not those who believe their responsibilities begin with cutting funding and end with mandating multiple choice barrier tests.

cga, at 9:15 am EST on March 1, 2006

Weighing in

Ms. Henderson raised many interesting points in her article, and as a practitioner in the admissions field, I can say with confidence that the concerns she mentions have been discussed, analyzed, and debated for some time among college admissions professionals.

We, too, agonize over the increasing use of merit scholarships, but as I told my President at my previous institution, I can’t afford to throw out a merit scholarship program as long as every other school with whom I competed still offered such funds. Admissions personnel also worry about diversity—not just in terms of ethnicity, but also in terms of gender (look at the male/female ratios at any liberal arts college, for instance), socio-economic background, academic and personal interests, and international perspectives. We want our campuses to be lively, interesting, dynamic places, and this is best achieved when we have a student body, faculty and staff who represent a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints. How we best achieve that diversity of perspective is still open to debate, however.

I do take issue with the main premise of the article, and that is the stated focus on “selective college admissions.” Like many writers and critics of the admissions process in higher education, Ms. Henderson seems to extend whatever ills she sees as part of the ’selective admissions’ process to all higher education institutions. Granted, Early Decision is a practice that is most often beneficial to the college rather than the applicant—but the vast majority of colleges and universities do not offer Early Decision options to applicants. To assail the college community in general for the practices of a minority of institutions is unfair. In fact, I would like to remind readers that the ’selective’ colleges that are most often mentioned comprise a tiny portion of the institutions of higher education that are available in this country. One cannot assume that what is true—or perceived to be true—at Harvard, Stanford or Yale, for instance, is true at all or even most institutions.

And yes, I readily admit that many colleges send mailings to students whose names are purchased from the College Board, ACT, NRCCUA, and other sources. But rather than only buying the names of the ‘best students,’ many schools carefully select their list purchases based on a variety factors that are unique to the college itself. Thus, a school that would like to attract more African-American or male students, or more students with an interest in biochemistry and cross-country, will tailor its list purchase to those characteristics rather than overall test scores. And, far from being ‘junk mail,’ research has shown that students and parents cite the mailings received from a college as being helpful in raising awareness about colleges and their programs.

Finally, it is true that many college admissions operations have adopted more of a marketing approach over the years. However, “marketing” includes promotional efforts as well as intensive research and a focus on operational efficiency. To assume that we are merely gathering the names of as many students as possible without regard to their ability to be admitted, enroll or graduate is ignoring our duties to our institutions and to our prospective students. For one thing, it costs money to develop marketing plans, send mailings to students, send staff to high schools and college fairs, and offer on-campus visit opportunities for students and families. Thus, many colleges that engage in such marketing efforts (and not all colleges do) are beginning to focus on keeping their inquiry pools as manageable as possible, and to the greatest extent possible they want to make sure that the students who are inquiring and applying are students who would be a good fit for the college. In addition, many admissions officers believe in their hearts that they are in the admissions field because they can make a difference to the students they encounter and to their institutions. I can’t think of any true admissions professionals who believe that the best way to make a difference is to encourage students to apply to a college just so they can be denied admission.

Susan Hallenbeck, Former College Admissions Dean, at 11:00 am EST on March 2, 2006

Various responses to article and other’s comments

Various comments:

Transparency in college admissions: Amen to the author on that one. They all downplay the SATs in their application materials and admissions presentations, but in the admissions decisions my son has received so far, when he compares himself with kids who got in to schools that he did not, SATs apparently trump the things colleges tell students they’re interested in: grades, activities, National Honor Society, teacher recommendations and good grades in “challenging academic program” (AP and gifted-and-talented level courses). Our anecdotal experience so far is that you can have all the latter, but someone who has lesser qualifications in all those areas will get in if their SATs are in the 1200s and yours are in the 1100s.

Rankings and marketing: I think the key to dealing with all the information flooding in to prospective students is informed guidance counselors who encourage students to open their minds to a wide variety of choices including smaller schools, and who encourage them to utilize the many free online tools that expose them to a variety of schools that might be worth their consideration.

Now for my disagreements with her:

Merit aid — I worked at a women’s college transitioning to co-ed in the 1980s and struggling to enlarge its student body. Merit scholarships were key as the “seed money” that raised the profile of the school, and attracted better students to compete for those awards. Some of the ones who did not win scholarships came anyway, and the effect snowballed, raising enrollment and raising the quality of the students within a few years. The educational atmosphere improved, and more students started applying because of that. The school established itself and secured a better financial footing. This helped it offer more financial aid and programs to all its students.

Writing test to replace the application essay: The essay prompts a student to think a bit about who they are, what distinguishes them from other people, and what they want out of life, and that’s a good thing for most 17 year olds. And in the real world, they are going to eventually have to write cover letters for job applications. Meanwhile, those timed writing tests favor people who can be inventive on the spot, or “BS” if you will. For other types of personalities, asked a philosophical question or to tell a personal incident in 25 minutes with no prior preparation for what’s coming and what they’ll have to write about, their mind goes into a brain freeze. Either way, I don’t think it tells much about what kind of student they’ll be. Preliminary reports about the SAT writing test is that the scoring rewards quantity as opposed to tight organization and careful editing. Yes the essay can be gamed, but so could the “graded paper” — students would just get more opportunities to revise and polish it if the high schools knew it was going to be turned in as part of their admissions portfolio. I don’t really see a good alternative.

Helen, at 5:10 pm EST on March 5, 2006

There are so many things to respond to, it’s hard to choose the most important ones.

First: Merit Aid. I’m for it in a big way. We are a two-professional, upper-middle-class family, and yet $40,000+ is beyond us. We live in a state with high housing values, but assuming we can just take out a home equity loan–which we’d have to pay back–is unreasonable. It’s the middle class which most needs merit aid, because standards for need-based financial aid for people like us are unreasonable.

Second: Standardized tests. I’m for them, too. Our kids go to a high school where students have to test in. It’s extremely rigorous. This means that students’ grades are much worse than at a rgular school. For that reason, some parents take their kids out and put them in regular schools, where they invariably do improve their GPA. Without standardized tests, there’s no way for my kids to show what their grades mean in the big picture.

Third: Essays. I have mixed opinions. I have one kid who has written a novel in her spare time, and could whip out something creative quickly, BUT I don’t think it’s appropriate for those SAT essays to be scored. They should just be sent to the colleges. It’s also true that they favor the quick thinking. My other child could take a whole day to write one sentence, but given enough time could write a killer essay. For that reason, I think the colleges should also get essays which the student has written in a more thoughtful, un-time-constrained way.

Fourth: Rankings. Again, mixed. I doubt anyone could say Yale is better than Stanford or Princeton or vice-versa. However, those schools clearly have more talented students and professors, and more resources than some school down in the US News second tier. Maybe a decile ranking would suffice. What I personally found helpful was not the rank number per se, but a close reading of the rest of the chart. For example, our oldest child selected her school knowing that more than 70% of the classes had fewer than 20 students, and that practically everyone who enters graduates in four years. Those kinds of comparisons are very useful.

KLS, at 3:20 pm EST on March 6, 2006

I agree with change in the early admission process because it is not being used in the manner in which is was set up. Because of this process we truly expect our students to know what college/university they want to attend when they are juniors in high school? This again is because the colleges/universities reap the benefits. But to abolish merit-based awards is another way to squeeze the middle class who get nothing else for their children. They work too hard to get financial aid and they are not wealthy enough to play the “prep” school game or allow their children to have a “gap” year. If we discontinue merit we should discontinue athletic scholarships and even the playing field.The only way we will see change is if the colleges/universities make the change-do they truly care about educating our future?

LD, at 1:50 pm EST on March 10, 2006

It’s stupid to say rankings are meaningless. And that market forces are some how evil in the education business.

It’s time for Deirdre Henderson to wake up and realize that going to highly selective colleges is about a lot more than social prestige.

It’s 2006 and global competition is here. Taking a year off or not participating in the admission process is a bad idea. 1st tier schools do matter, they are better.

Deirdre Henderson should realize the post WWII comfort ride that our fathers and grandfathers gave us is over. Our kids are going to have to work their butts off to succeed.

Bill, at 3:00 pm EDT on October 26, 2006