What An "A" Means

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on a topic that is fundamental to education, but is discussed either hesitantly or not at all.  The article, by Beckie Supiano, asked sixteen educators, some from the college side and others from the high school side, to weigh in on what an A grade means or should mean.

I was one of the sixteen and told Beckie that it was an inspired topic.  That wasn’t surprising, because a few years back she interviewed me for an article she and Eric Hoover did on what fairness in college admission looks like.  Both of those articles capture my love for philosophical discussions that defy a simple answer. 

Very few topics in education are more contentious than grades, with the possible exception of homework.  Decisions about grading impact every classroom teacher, every student, every class, and every school or college.  

Grades also impact the college admissions process.  It can certainly be argued that one of the factors influencing places like Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Cal Tech, and UT-Austin to return to requiring test scores is that grade inflation has made A’s on student transcripts ubiquitous.  The currency of selective admission is that the rarer any talent or quality (or grade), the more valuable it is–and vice versa. A’s aren’t as impressive when everyone has them.

I am far from convinced that adding test scores to the admission equation actually helps locate the “diamond in the rough” and produces a more diverse student body, but I get that having test scores as an additional data point is useful is distinguishing among applications with similar grades. Whether the addition of test scores leads to better decisions or just easier decisions is a different question.

There are two approaches to grading that parallel two approaches to admission.  There is the formulaic approach, where the final grade is objective and totally driven by numbers.  The other is holistic.  As a classroom teacher I have always fallen into the holistic category.  My ultimate question is assigning grades has been “What does this student deserve?” The holistic approach can be criticized as subjective, but assigning a grade for a piece of work or a course is an exercise in professional judgment.

So what does (or should) an A mean?  A tempting answer is that, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, you know A work when you see it. My answer to the Chronicle was that as a classroom teacher of philosophy at the college level and public speaking at the high school level I have always believed that a B should be relatively easy to get, assuming that a student makes an honest effort and meets the minimal expectations of the course.  A’s should be rarer and harder to obtain, representing depth of understanding and a different level of insight.

That train may have already left the station.  Nearly 80 percent of the grades awarded at Yale during 2022-23 were either A or A-, and Yale is not an outlier on that front.  The question is whether students admitted in an environment where only five percent of applicants are successful have a right to expect A’s based solely on their ability to be admitted.  And what happens to those students when they begin to make grades lower than A for the first time? 

Those questions are particularly relevant as we work with students whose academic and emotional growth were impacted by the Covid pandemic.  During the pandemic many schools were generous with grades in recognition of all that students were dealing with, including hours in front of screens trying to do school.  We have seen a fragility in many of those students. As they encounter less-forgiving grading standards, does that contribute to the increase we are seeing in student mental health concerns?

It is important for faculty members to have discussions about grading philosophy and what grades mean.  That doesn’t mean that every teacher or course need to be on the same page.  At my school any student who doesn’t receive an A for Glee Club is doing something wrong, and that’s okay. What you don’t want is a perception that two instructors teaching the same course have wildly different grades.  Our English Department annually did a table-reading exercise to ensure that there was rough agreement in grading essays.

Schools also need to ensure that there is alignment in grading.  Several years ago the daughter of a colleague was making straight A’s in regular-level courses, but was told she couldn’t take honors-level courses.  That seemed wrong to me, even if it is the case that the expectations in regular-level courses are different.  Either the student should have been given the opportunity to see what she could do at the honors level or she shouldn’t have been getting straight A’s in regular courses.

I just attended a conference where the subject of school profiles came up.  The college folks at the session complained that too many high school profiles don’t contain information about grading scales or grade distributions.  A friend who has just moved back to the college side of the desk told me that he has read 40-50 applications in the past couple of days, and none of the school profiles contained context about grade distributions.  A counselor friend remarked that her school and many others were hesitant, and perhaps embarrassed, to reveal just how many A’s they were giving out. 

There are two other consequences of the number of A grades we see today. One is that they have rendered moot a classic question about college admission, Is it better to get an A in a regular-level course or a B in an Honors or Advanced Placement course? My students used to chuckle grudgingly at my attempt at humor, which was that they wanted students to take the Honors/AP course–and get the A. Today that’s no longer a joke.

The other is the extinction of the “gentleman’s C.”  It’s now the gentleman’s A-.

Birmingham-Southern

One of my college counseling friends just returned from a Road Scholar excursion to places where some of the most monumental events in American history took place. She traveled to Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, all important locales in the Civil Rights movement.  She found the trip powerfully moving and inspirational, and perhaps even a little miraculous when it stopped raining for the first time all day at the very moment she crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

My friend’s trip to Birmingham made me think back to my last visit there, just as memorable if not as inspirational.  My daughter’s first job after graduating from college was at a Birmingham non-profit, and so I drove down with her to help her get settled. (It worked out perfectly because NACAC wanted me to speak at an event in D.C. the next day and paid for my flight.) 

Driving west from Atlanta on I-20, maybe an hour from Birmingham, I suddenly noticed a huge, majestic bird fly out of the woods on the right side of the interstate. It was on a flight path that put it directly on a collision course with our car. I was certain it would pull up and clear the vehicle–until it didn’t.  When we arrived in Birmingham my daughter’s gray RAV-4 sported some new purple splotches in a couple of spots.

I thought about Birmingham last week for a couple of other reasons.

The first was the beginning of March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament.  I have always been a college basketball fan, and the first two days of the tournament are two of my favorite days of the whole year.  As a new retiree, this year I could sit (in the spirit of full disclosure, I probably did more lying) on the couch watching games to my heart’s content. 

Watching college basketball is less enjoyable now that the transfer portal has essentially turned into free agency. I have a former player currently playing at his fourth college in four years (after having originally committed to a fifth). He’s a good student, but I wonder about the quality of his college experience.

I always find myself rooting for the underdogs, and this year one of the popular choices for an upset was Samford, located in Birmingham (actually Homewood, a suburb of Birmingham). (The University of Alabama-Birmingham also made the tournament.) Samford was a popular upset choice because of its unique style of play, termed “Bucky Ball” after its coach, involving frenetic full-court pressing. Samford ended up losing its first-round game against traditional blue-blood Kansas after coming back from a 21-point deficit, and might have won but for a questionable foul call late in the game.

Birmingham has been even more on my mind since learning that Birmingham-Southern College will be closing at the end of the school year after having been in existence since 1856.  The cause of death was failure to secure a $30 million loan from the state of Alabama to stay afloat, but the reality is that the venerable liberal-arts college has been seriously and chronically ill for some time.

None of my students have attended Birmingham-Southern, but I have been aware of it for more than fifty years, before I went to college myself. My minister was from a prominent Alabama family and was a B-SC alum. Birmingham-Southern also happens to be the alma mater of former U.S. Senator Howell Heflin and comedian Pat Buttram, best known for his portrayal of Mr. Haney on the 1960s sitcom Green Acres.

Last week’s announcement was sad. I feel for the students, faculty, and staff who have had their lives upended by the closure as well as the alumni who will lose connection to an important part of their past.  It is one thing to know that Birmingham-Southern is endangered and quite another to receive the stark news that it is closing in two months.

There is also some irony in the announcement having come during March Madness, because one of the things that initially put Birmingham-Southern in some financial jeopardy was seeking Division One glory. B-SC had been a basketball powerhouse in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), winning two national championships during the 1990s, and like a number of smaller schools decided to make the jump to NCAA Division One in hopes of increasing name recognition and revenue through making the “Big Dance.” Birmingham-Southern never made the tournament during its four-year run in Division One, but had on-court success, winning nearly two-thirds of its games. In doing so it accumulated $6 million in debt.

It is hard to know whether Birmingham-Southern was a victim of bad decision-making or bad luck. It tried many of the strategies that other institutions have used to increase enrollment, but none of them worked. After moving back to Division 3 for athletics, it added football, a lever many small colleges have used to increase enrollment, particularly male enrollment. It went into further debt to upgrade and beautify the campus and add programs. It tried the tuition reset route, cutting its sticker price in half in 2017. Despite all of those efforts, enrollment dropped 37 percent since 2009, and its endowment declined by 23 percent.

What are the lessons from Birmingham-Southern’s demise? The obvious one ( command of the obvious is my specialty) is that colleges and universities are first and foremost businesses. I have certainly been guilty of criticizing higher education for acting too much like an industry, but colleges are businesses with employees and payrolls, and when they don’t have enough customers, they go out of business. That can happen even to places like Birmingham-Southern with track records of nearly 170 years and that are reputable enough to have earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

Birmingham-Southern also serves as a cautionary tale for small, tuition-driven, liberal-arts colleges. They are what Jeff Selingo refers to as “buyers,” in that they have to offer significant tuition discounts to make their class.  

Overspending on financial-aid was another of the factors that put Birmingham-Southern into financial crisis. I worry that small colleges dependent on tuition revenue will be particularly impacted this spring by the FAFSA roll-out crisis.

Peter Pitts, a retired admissions officer at Monmouth College in Illinois, calls himself “the Small College guy.” He has done considerable internet research into small colleges and recently published a book that serves as a directory to some good places that aren’t as well known as they should be. The title is “333 Awesome Small Colleges (that just might save you money!)” and it’s available through Amazon.  I’m glad to see a book that joins Loren Pope’s “Colleges That Change Lives” in giving attention to this group of schools, but of course Birmingham-Southern is featured in both.

Small colleges are an endangered species. Many of them are located in rural areas, and many have historically been focused on the humanities and sciences. Neither of those are particularly valued or desired in today’s marketplace. 

And that’s unfortunate. The small residential college is both the backbone of American higher education and America’s foremost contribution to higher education.  

I am far from unbiased, because I am a product of one of those colleges, but I worry that Birmingham-Southern may be the proverbial canary in the coal mine. I hope that’s not the case. I also hope that all of us will keep everyone in the Birmingham-Southern family in our thoughts and prayers as they grieve and deal with their unfortunate loss.

A Follow Up on Yale's Test-Flexible Policy

After the last post ECA reader Cigus Vanni reached out to me about my comments regarding Yale’s new test-flexible policy, which gives applicants the option of submitting AP or IB scores in place of SAT or ACT scores.  I stated that I thought those tests were better measures of what students had learned. Cigus didn’t disagree, but pointed out a couple of things I hadn’t considered. One is that the new policy may accelerate the AP arms race, leading students to take more exams. He also wondered how a student’s decision about which AP exam scores to report might be read. Will students disadvantage themselves by submitting nothing but math and computer science scores rather than scores for a broader spectrum of subjects?

Cigus’s other point was even more profound.  It is great to make reporting IB exam scores an option, but ultimately meaningless because students don’t take IB exams until the end of their senior year, after the admissions process has already played out.  Cigus commented, “Someone did not think this through,” and I plead guilty, but I don’t think I’m alone. Cigus said that he had reached out to the Yale admissions office but hadn’t received a reply. I told him it was probably in the mail, but also advised him not to hold his breath.

In any case, after our interaction Cigus decided to post on the NACAC Hivemind, and it generated quite a reaction of support. I’m glad to have teed him up. 

Et Tu, Yale and Brown (and UT- Austin)?

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on March 18, 2024)

The train leaving the test-optional station has added several new cars. Yale University, Brown University, and the University of Texas at Austin have all joined Dartmouth College in announcing that they will return to requiring applicants to submit standardized test scores, ending the test-optional policies they put in place back in 2020 when the pandemic prevented students from taking standardized tests.

At first glance, the decisions made by each institution seem to be similar, and the conspiracy theorists among us may find or imagine collusion. All three argue that test scores are valuable, perhaps even the most valuable, predictors of academic success, more so than a student’s high school transcript in an age of rampant grade inflation. All assert, without necessarily providing evidence, that requiring standardized testing produces a more diverse student body and actually benefits students from disadvantaged backgrounds and high schools (in Texas’s case, by helping identify students “who might benefit most from the university’s student success programs”). Give Yale credit for acknowledging that conclusion is counterintuitive.

For each of the three institutions there is a broader context to ending their test-optional policies.

Yale is introducing what it calls “test-flexible” admission. It will require test scores, but is broadening the scores a student can submit beyond SAT and ACT scores to include Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate scores as well.

I have mixed feelings.  On the one hand, I think AP and IB scores are better measures of what a student has actually learned than are SAT and ACT scores. On the other, I worry that a proliferation of testing policies will confuse students and counselors. We already have too many institution-specific procedures for submitting grades and recommendations, and we seem headed for the same thing with regard to testing. We now have test-required, test-optional, test-flexible, and test-blind/test-free (and there may be others I have missed).

Brown’s decision regarding testing was one of several recommendations made by an ad hoc committee appointed by President Christina H. Paxson. The university also reinforced its commitment to early decision and will continue to study preferences for legacies and children of employees, two cohorts that together make up 9-10 percent of the Brown student body. Those two things are related. Brown acknowledges that the ED pool is less diverse than its regular applicant pool, with a higher percentage of legacies. 

The executive summary of the internal Brown study (the report itself has not been made available to the public) states that “early decision has proven to be a powerful tool for shaping the composition of Brown’s student body.” There is no question that is true, but the example cited is the QuestBridge process that matches low-income applicants with colleges. That example seems disingenuous. The QuestBridge process may happen at the same time as early decision, but it isn’t truly a function of early decision. The majority of students admitted in early decision do not resemble the students brought to Brown through QuestBridge.

The Brown report does contain one of the best acronyms I have encountered, HUG. According to a footnote HUG stands for students from “historically underrepresented groups,” defined as “American Indian, Alaska Native, African American or Black, Hispanic or Latinx, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” It is possible that HUG is a widely-used acronym and that I don’t get out as much as I should, but I want to give a hug to whoever came up with it.

The end of test-optional at UT-Austin is one of six significant changes to the admissions process announced by the university last week. Those changes include the introduction of both early action and a wait list, modification of the required essay and a reduction in the number of short answer responses from three to two, and a “narrowed scope” for letters of recommendation.

It is the last of these that I find interesting, and perhaps troubling. The university will now encourage applicants to seek letters of recommendation from outside their high schools. The explanation is that this change “reduces the burden of this work on high school teachers and counselors and allows university staff to better leverage other materials.”

It’s certainly nice to know that UT-Austin is concerned about the burden on teachers and counselors, but I have to believe that there is more to this than concern for our well-being. There is certainly room to debate the role that recommendation letters play in the admissions process and how equitable they are, but the point of recommendation letters is (or should be) to provide insight into a student’s academic record and potential, to place the transcript in context. Can recommenders outside a school setting speak to that? As a counselor friend wondered, have they actually read any recommendations written by non-school recommenders? I am also unclear about what “better leverage other materials” really means.  

Moving beyond each institution’s justification for returning to requiring test scores, there are several broader questions and assumptions deserving scrutiny.

The first is whether test scores actually significantly improve the ability of admission officers to predict applicants’ success or rather give them confidence in their own judgments. The Brown committee’s executive summary suggests that a lack of scores for students from underserved high schools and communities “may mean that admissions officers hesitate to admit them.” 

I have asked before if we measure what we value or value what we can measure. Do test scores measure something important and valuable, or does their value lie in the precision (perhaps false precision) that they offer? Several years ago I had a student who was a Division One football prospect. The college he wanted to attend showed little interest until after its archrival had offered a scholarship. It needed the validation from another coach to trust its own evaluation. I wonder if test scores offer a similar source of validation for admission officers.

That relates to a second question. Has not having test scores for all applicants during the past four years resulted in worse decisions at the Ivies and similar institutions? Has there been a higher percentage of admits who turned out to be unable to do the work? None of the institutions returning to requiring test scores has provided evidence that there have been more admission misses in a test-optional environment (and I wouldn’t expect them to admit that), but that’s worth knowing.

That leads to a philosophical question or assumption that I haven’t seen discussed. What is the goal of the admissions process? The UT-Austin announcement describes test scores as a “proven differentiator that is in each student’s and the university’s best interests,” while Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions Jeremiah Quinlan stated that students with higher scores are likely to have higher Yale GPAs.

But is that the point? At best, SAT and ACT scores are meant to help predict freshman year GPA. They don’t claim to predict success throughout or beyond college.  

UT-Austin reports that students who submitted test scores had a GPA that was 0.86 points higher in their first semester on campus than the GPA for test withholders, while a recent study of students attending Ivy-Plus colleges from Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights research group reported that students with SAT scores of 1600 have freshman GPAs 0.43 points higher than students with identical grades but SAT scores of 1200. That same study finds that students who don’t report test scores have college GPAs equivalent to those who earn a SAT score of 1307, ignoring the fact that there is no such thing as an individual SAT score of 1307 (it would be either 1300 or 1310). 

Obviously, colleges and universities want to admit candidates who will be successful, but is a student with a freshman year GPA of 3.9 a better or more deserving candidate than one with a 3.4 GPA? Should elite colleges and universities look to admit those who will earn the best grades, or those who benefit the most from the educational opportunity to attend an elite college? Should test scores be used to identify who is qualified for admission or to select among qualified candidates? I would argue that the proper use is the former.

Most or all of the coverage and discussion of the recent announcements will focus on whether this is the beginning of the end for the test-optional movement (it isn’t). It is the broader questions that are far more important. I hope they won’t get left at the station.

Dartmouth Reinstates Testing Requirement

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on February 19, 2024)

Earlier this month, Dartmouth announced that it will reinstate its requirement that applicants submit test scores beginning with the next admissions cycle. The announcement gives all of us in the college admissions world something to obsess over besides the FAFSA disaster.

It is too early to know how significant Dartmouth’s move is. Is standardized testing about to make a comeback in college admission, and will other highly rejective colleges and universities follow Dartmouth’s lead?  Is this the canary in the coal mine for test-optional admission? Is this a skirmish in the college admission culture war over testing, or will it expand into a major battle? 

How you feel about this development probably depends on two things. One is your attitude toward standardized testing. The other is your favorite movie metaphor. Is this the triumphant return and resurrection of an exiled heroic protagonist? Or is the testing industry more akin to the villain in a suspense or horror film who, just when you think that all has ended well and the closing credits are about to appear, turns out not to be dead after all?

Or is the answer one you might find on SAT/ACT multiple choice/guess questions, “None of the above”? When MIT reinstated its testing requirement a couple of years ago, it turned out to be a decision by a single institution rather than the beginning of a movement. That may be true in this case as well. As of this point, no other institution has followed Dartmouth’s lead. 

Dartmouth’s decision came after internal research commissioned by the college’s new president, Sian Leah Beilock, and conducted by four Dartmouth professors, three economists and an educational sociologist. They conclude that “SAT and ACT scores are highly predictive of academic performance at Dartmouth” and that “test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving applicants who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts.” They also conclude that under a test-optional policy “many high-achieving less-advantaged applicants choose not to submit scores even when doing so would…benefit their application.”

I applaud Dartmouth for making its decision based on data. I know, respect, and trust Dean of Admissions Lee Coffin, and I have been told that President Beilock is a rising star in the world of higher education. 

At the same time, I suspect that many academics are more enamored by testing than those in the admissions and counseling world. The Dartmouth professors cite several other studies on the influence of test scores to bolster their conclusions, but, as with much academic research, you can probably find studies that support whatever position you already hold.

The appeal of test scores is that they provide an additional data point at a time when grade inflation makes it more challenging to draw conclusions from a student’s transcript. The danger lies in assigning test scores a false precision and failing to consider them in context.

The concept of “contextualized texting,” considering test scores within the context of the student’s high school, is the most interesting part of the Dartmouth research and announcement. One of the conclusions of the research is that students from under-resourced high schools who score above the 75th percentile within their high school cohort are well-prepared to succeed at Dartmouth. The announcement states that “A score that falls below our class mean but several hundred points above the mean at the student’s school is ‘high’ and, as such, it has value as one factor among many in our holistic assessment.”

I find that intriguing, but am unclear about exactly what it means. Colleges like Dartmouth exist in rarified air when it comes to their applicant pools. The Dartmouth report talks about students with SAT scores in the 1400-1450 range from under-represented backgrounds and schools who may be hesitant to report scores in a test-optional environment, but I wonder how many of those students are out there. The report suggests that in each Dartmouth applicant pool there are “hundreds” of “less-advantaged” students with scores in the 1400 range who choose not to report them, but that seems high to me. 

The more interesting case is the student from an inner city or rural high school with a score of 1200-1250 where the high school mean is 950 or 1000. Does a score like that indicate that the student is likely to be successful at Dartmouth? And is the test score a better indicator than the student’s performance and strength of schedule?

The Dartmouth professors’ report suggests that the answer is yes, although it focuses on a higher range of scores. It concludes that test scores alone explain 22 percent of the variance in first-year grades at Dartmouth, whereas SAT combined with GPA explains 25 percent.  High school GPA alone explains 9 percent.

The potential flaw in that conclusion is that there is far more to reading a transcript than the GPA alone. The question is whether admission officers have time to do that in a landscape where there are dramatic increases in applications without a comparable increase in application readers. In such an environment GPA can become a shortcut, and so can test scores. 

There is no question that scores should be interpreted in context. We know that identical test scores don’t mean the same thing when one student spends thousands for test prep and takes the test five times and another takes it once or twice without access to coaching. We also know that test scores have a correlation with family income and parent education level. I would hope that admissions offices are already considering not just testing, but all parts of a student’s application, in context. 

The importance of context is one of several larger issues arising from Dartmouth’s decisions. Another is the “diamonds in the rough” hypothesis, the belief that standardized testing can identify students with ability to excel in college who would otherwise be overlooked. That is a common argument raised in op-eds about the value of test scores, many of which read suspiciously like College Board talking points. But is the “diamond in the rough” a myth or a reality? I’d like to see research that resolves that question.

Unless all colleges reinstate the testing requirement, one consequence of requiring testing is likely to be a decrease in application numbers. As long as bond-rating agencies use application numbers and admit rate as metrics, a decrease in applications may outweigh any benefit from having test scores. The Ivies and near-Ivies may not see any impact from requiring testing, but will students rebel against applying to other colleges that aren’t test-optional? 

The announcement from Dartmouth states that “Contrary to what some have perceived, standardized testing allows us to admit a broader and more diverse range of students”; it further describes the conclusion as “unexpected, thought-provoking, and encouraging.” Of course increasing diversity and access have also been cited as justifications for test-optional policies. Those are important and laudable goals, but I don’t think that decisions about testing should be made based on that consideration. The real question is whether test scores are predictive and add value to admission decisions, and whether that is true for all applicants or not.

I have never believed that test scores are meaningless, but I also don’t believe they should be worshiped. At best, test scores should be part of a balanced admission process in the same way that sugary cereals like Count Chocula are part of a balanced breakfast. In both cases the balance comes from everything else. 

Virginia State Senate Passes Bill to Abolish Legacy Preference

Last week, the Senate of my home state, Virginia, voted unanimously to prohibit public colleges and universities in the Commonwealth from giving preferential treatment to applicants related to alumni or donors. A similar bill is working its way through Virginia’s House of Delegates. 

The legislation would make Virginia the second state, after Colorado, to ban legacy preferences. Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) have introduced similar legislation in Congress.

Unanimous agreement on any bill is rare in today’s polarized political climate, perhaps even suspicious. With some legislation there is more than meets the eye. In this case there might be less.

Legacy preferences have come into scrutiny in the wake of the Supreme Court decision outlawing racial preferences in the case involving Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill. That is a good thing. I have previously described legacy preferences as a kind of transfer of property, similar to country club membership being passed on to the next generation, a characterization subsequently quoted in a New York Times editorial. 

Legacy preferences are far less defensible than racial preferences. That explains the unanimous vote. One can certainly question racial preferences, but they were devised for a laudable goal, intended to redress past discrimination by increasing access to previously underrepresented groups. In contrast, legacy preferences serve to protect privilege. What public official, even those who have benefitted from legacy preference themselves, is going to defend the practice?

Giving preference to legacy applicants is questionable for any college or university, but the practice is particularly pernicious at public universities, which are supposed to serve all the residents of their state. I say this recognizing that cuts in state funding for higher education have led many flagship public universities to seek out-of-state students as a means of bringing in revenue.

So the bill has a worthy purpose. I find myself wondering, however, especially in light of the unanimous vote, whether it is nothing more than feel-good political theater.

Both legacy preferences and racial preferences impact a small number of institutions. At the vast majority of colleges and universities, any applicant judged qualified for admission is admitted. It is only at a certain level of selectivity where admission becomes zero-sum, where admitting one applicant means that another qualified applicant loses a slot.  

A report in December from the National Center for Education Sciences reported that 578 institutions consider legacy status in the admissions process, but only about ten percent of those admit fewer than 25 percent of their applicants. At most colleges giving preference to legacy applicants does not disadvantage other applicants.

In Virginia there are only three public universities potentially selective enough for legacy preferences to have significant impact in admission. One of those, Virginia Tech, announced last fall that it would no longer consider legacy status in its admission process.

That leaves William & Mary and the University of Virginia, the two most selective publics in the Commonwealth, both considered to be “public Ivies.” In the wake of the Supreme Court decision on race-based admission and the subsequent scrutiny on legacy admission, U.Va. removed legacy status as a box to be checked on its application, but did add an essay allowing applicants to write about a “personal or historic” connection with the university and how that may have influenced them. 

William & Mary released a statement that its competitive admissions process includes consideration of “indicators of an individual’s propensity to enroll.” Legacy status is one of those factors, as is seeking an interview or visiting campus. That suggests that W&M sees legacy status as a potential measure of demonstrated interest.

During my nearly 40 years as a college counselor, those two schools have been among the most popular choices for my students, and I have never seen legacy status provide a huge boost at either of them. U.Va. has always considered out-of-state legacy applicants as if they were in-state students, but I have never seen a “bump” for in-state legacies. At one point there was a process at U.Va. for political cases and students with connections that operated outside the admissions office, but I don’t see any evidence that it continues today. If legacy applicants receive any consideration at either place, it is at the margins.

The hidden issue, of course, is the “preferences for me, but not for thee” mindset. At one private college I’m aware of, alumni would complain about the college admitting risky applicants (which it did a great job successfully educating), only to want to make an exception for weak applicants from their own families or friends’ children. I also remember hearing about a powerful state legislator who threatened to cut one university’s state funding if it didn’t admit a weak but connected applicant who happened to be a constituent. 

Will the same legislators who unanimously voted to outlaw legacy preferences practice what they preach and no longer exercise political clout by advocating for politically-connected applicants? That may be the real legacy that needs to be abolished. 

Jim Jump Interviewed for "College Uncovered" Podcast

ECA author Jim Jump was among those interviewed for the most recent episode of the “College Uncovered” podcast. The podcast is co-produced by WGBH public radio in Boston and the Hechinger Report. The episode, “The Enrollment Industrial Complex,” talks about the growth and influence of the enrollment management industry on college admission.

Here’s the link to the podcast:

https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/college-uncovered

FAFSA Fiasco

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on January 17, 2024)

On December 31, hundreds of thousands descended upon Times Square, and up to a billion people tuned in virtually, to watch the ball drop signifying the end of 2023 and celebrating the start of 2024. On the same day, thousands of other Americans watched without celebrating a different dropping of the ball as the long-awaited soft launch of the new, simpler FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) turned out to be more soft than launch.

The rollout of the new FAFSA actually began the previous day, on December 30, but many students and families who tried to access the FAFSA via the StudentAid.gov website were greeted by messages that the site was unavailable, thanking them for their patience. 

I tried to access the site on January 2, but was placed into a waiting room because traffic was busier than usual. I was able to get in the following day. At that point all indications were that the FAFSA would be available for short periods each day while application rates were monitored and bugs fixed. Last Monday the Department of Education issued a press release announcing that more than one million students had successfully submitted the FAFSA and that the form is now available 24/7.

I have often told students and parents that all of us process things on two different levels, one intellectual and the other emotional. The FAFSA launch is no different.

On an intellectual level, none of us should have been surprised by the ugliness of the rollout. There have been indications for months that it would be neither smooth nor pretty. The Congressionally-mandated changes in the FAFSA and the methodology for evaluating eligibility for federal student aid are long overdue, in some cases overturning fifty years of government policy.

It is one thing to understand that intellectually, and another to deal with it on an emotional level. I found myself irritated to be repeatedly placed on hold, and my ability to access the FAFSA does not even affect my future. 

One of my pet peeves is phone systems where I am assured how valued a customer I am while I wait minutes for a human being to answer the phone. Having to listen to elevator music while on hold doesn’t help. We obviously have different definitions of “valued.” Rather than thanking people for their patience, StudentAid.gov should have asked for their forgiveness.

But enough about the problems. Obviously the difficulties with the FAFSA rollout have created consternation among both students and their families and those of us in the profession. The financial aid process this spring will not be easy.  

We can acknowledge that it will be a challenge and at the same time see it as an opportunity. Character is revealed during challenging times, and this is an opportunity for all of us to band together to, in the words of NASA flight director Gene Kranz in the movie Apollo 13, “work the problem.” To borrow another quote from Kranz (or Ed Harris, who played him in the movie), “Failure is not an option.”

First of all, we should remember  this is in some sense a return to the old timeline for completing the FAFSA. The schedule this year is what was once the norm. Prior to 2016, when the date for submitting the 2017-18 was moved to October 1, students and their families could not complete the FAFSA until January 1. We’re actually better off today because under the old timeline families had to wait for end of year tax information, whereas now they can use tax information from two years prior. We’ve become spoiled by the new system.

Trying to simplify the financial aid process is a worthy and important goal, and the new FAFSA is a step in the right direction. Whereas last year families needed to answer more than 100 questions to complete the FAFSA, now some applicants will have to answer fewer than 20. The new need analysis formula will “tax” less income for parents and students, with parents able to protect 20 percent more income and students 35 percent more. Having tax information downloaded to the FAFSA directly from the Internal Revenue Service for all applicants is the right move.

I am less certain about other changes. Is changing the name of what used to be the Student Aid Report to the FAFSA Submission Summary an improvement? Similarly, will the Student Aid Index (SAI) be better than the Expected Family Contribution (EFC)? 

I particularly wonder about the end of the allowance for families with more than one child in college. That change affects federal aid, but unless I’m missing something (always a possibility) colleges still have the ability to factor multiple children in college as they formulate aid offers using non-federal aid dollars. I hope they’ll be sensitive to how the change affects those families.

Moving forward, the most pressing need is for colleges and school counselors to work together to educate families about completing the FAFSA, especially for our students who need financial aid to make going to college a reality. I have been encouraged by the number of emails I have seen from colleges trying to provide information and resources.

I’d also like to see the Department of Education ease the verification process for this cycle. The delay in releasing the FAFSA has created a potential bottleneck, and a verification moratorium would remove another impediment to getting past the slow rollout.

Depending on how the spring goes, admissions offices may need to be prepared and flexible to extend deposit deadlines for students who haven’t received financial aid packages from all the colleges to which they applied. Students deserve the opportunity to make their college choice with full information. We like to talk about the admissions process being student-driven. This is a chance for us to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

Finally, let’s make sure we show appreciation and gratitude to the financial aid professionals who are on the front lines bearing the brunt of the delays and the new process. They face uncertainty as to how fast the FAFSA information will be available to institutions, and their spring will be stressful as they try to get packages pulled together. Think of them as first responders. They deserve our patience, sympathy, and empathy.

Simplifying the FAFSA is a good first step, but it’s not enough.  It’s time for all colleges to be transparent about costs and adopt a common way to report financial aid offers. NACAC, NASFAA (National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators), and eight other educational associations have joined together in the College Cost Transparency Initiative, and more than 360 colleges have agreed to make their financial aid letters more transparent. It’s time for us to find common ethical ground in the way we treat students by adopting both common language and reporting when it comes to financial aid.

"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.