Suburban Legends: Well-Rounded

(Welcome to Suburban Legends, an examination of the “truths” about college admission heard in the checkout line at the grocery store, in the stands at high school sporting events, and at any social gathering of parents with children about to apply to college. Unlike myths, Suburban Legends are plausible, and some may even be true. They are most likely to be believed by those who are educated and affluent, and they are always passed on by someone you trust but never happen to anyone you know.)

The college admission profession lost a legend several weeks ago. Bert Hudnall, who served multiple tenures as the Director of Admissions at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph) as well serving as a college counselor at Ashley Hall in Charleston and the head of school at Salem Academy in Winston-Salem and North Cross in Roanoke, passed away on March 19 at age 87.

Bert was an original–gracious, charming, funny, and the epitome of a Southern gentleman. He was a connector, known for his long, thoughtful letters to friends and former students, always filled with gentle humor and poignant wisdom. He had a gift for lifting up others. At a point in my professional life when I was still trying to figure out whether I belonged and whether I had anything worth saying, he remarked at a conference that he could listen to me and my co-presenter talk about anything. It meant a lot, but even more because he had been the conference’s keynote speaker. I was blessed to facetime with Bert when I visited with a protege of his in Maine last summer, and I subsequently emailed him to let him know that I had quoted him in a book chapter I was writing. That quote is one of the inspirations for this post.

“Colleges are looking for well-rounded students.” That is one of the original and most widely-believed Suburban Legends. Belief in that statement has driven generations of students to pursue a broad array of extracurricular activities in the name of well-roundedness, seen as a formula for college admission success.

The well-rounded student is unique, or at least rare, among Suburban Legends. Suburban Legends tend to be debatable at best and mythical at worst, but the emphasis on being well-rounded was at one point in history clearly true, but no longer. To help illustrate how that has happened, let us turn to an animated commercial spokesperson (or in this case, spokesfish) for assistance.

Back in the 1960s Starkist tuna ran a series of television commercials featuring a character (those of us attracted to bad puns might call him a car-tuna) named Charlie. Charlie was not your average tuna. He wore both glasses and a beret, and spoke with a Brooklyn accent. In each commercial Charlie tried to convince Starkist that he possessed good taste (just why he so wanted to get caught and packed into a can was never clear), and each ended with Charlie being told by his fish companion that Starkist doesn’t want tuna with good taste, but rather tuna that taste good. The commercials end with a note dropped on a hook that says simply, “Sorry, Charlie.”

If Charlie was not a cartoon commercial spokesfish but instead a student applying to Starkist University, he would similarly misunderstand what Starkist was looking for.   His application would highlight not his “good taste,” but rather his “well-roundedness.”  He would focus on his good grades, the fact that he plays both a sport and a musical instrument, his leadership in a club at school (perhaps even founding the club), and his community service.  And his Starkist decision letter would likely be the same as the note on the hook at the end of each Starkist commercial, “Sorry, Charlie.”  Highly selective/rejective colleges today don’t want student bodies full of well-rounded students, but rather a well-rounded class featuring students with “spike talents” in a number of areas.

That hasn’t always been the case.  Fifty years ago being well-rounded was all the rage.  The switch from admitting well-rounded individuals to admitting a well-rounded class is one of several evolutionary changes that have occurred in the college admission process over the past 100 years.  Those changes were described in a book by sociologist Jerome Karabel, The Chosen, tracking the history of college admission at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It’s a fascinating, if dense, read, the kind of scholarly book with lots and lots of footnotes. 

In the early part of the twentieth century, merit was defined as purely academic. Elite colleges were looking for the “best student,” and admission was based on academic prowess or preparation. 

In the mid-1920s selective colleges moved to a different paradigm, looking for the “best graduate” rather than the best student. It was at that point that some of today’s admission conventions came about, things like essays, recommendation letters, and concern for extracurricular activities. Colleges became concerned with qualities like leadership, character, personal promise, and even personality, but those qualities reflected a definition of “manliness”--athleticism, a firm handshake, and an outgoing personality–that seems shallow today. Applying to college started to resemble applying to a private social club.

There is a legitimate debate about whether being well-rounded leads to success and happiness. Many independent schools continue to believe that producing well-rounded graduates is important, but Bert Hudnall questioned that assumption, pointing out that most adults aren’t well-rounded, that successful adults discover and pursue their unique talents and passions, seeking depth rather than breadth. 

Whether or not being well-rounded makes you a better person, it no longer gets you into college.  Today the well-rounded student is a Suburban Legend.  In the 1970s and 80s, as elite colleges and universities received far more applications and became more competitive or admission, they moved to a third paradigm, the “best class.” Rather than admit a class of well-rounded students, they now seek to admit a well-rounded class, a class with  “well-lopsided” individuals who bring a large variety of backgrounds, talents, and interests to the campus. Today you are admitted to a selective university because of what you contribute to the class rather than your individual merit.

Just as Charlie the tuna conflated having good taste with tasting good, Charlie the college applicant might confuse a class of well-rounded individuals with a well-rounded class. Today well-roundedness is still valued, but communally, not individually. Does that make for a better college community? I am not aware of any evidence for or against.

Jerome Karabel’s thesis in The Chosen is that the history of selective college admissions reflects changing definitions of merit, with a subtext of antisemitism. In particular, he argues that the switch away from the “best student” paradigm was because it produced student bodies with too many Jewish students. Karabel’s contentions are timely now given, depending on your point of view, the Trump administration’s attempts to reform or destroy higher education institutions. The government is calling for “merit-based” admission, and the stated rationale for investigations into particular universities has been alleged antisemitism.

I am skeptical of both claims. Is the current administration’s concern about merit and antisemitism genuine? There is no question that demonstrations on campuses following the Israeli incursion (or was it an excursion?) into Gaza following October 7 revealed an ugly undercurrent of antisemitism, an undercurrent that seems to be becoming mainstream in right-wing politics. There is also no question that universities didn’t handle campus unrest well. But that is very different from 100 years ago, when institutions changed their definition of merit and admission practices to diminish the number of Jewish students on campus.  

As for the call for “merit” in admission and the demand for colleges to report admission data broken down by race, it seems based  on a narrow definition of merit consisting of only grades and test scores, although compared to 100 years ago we understand that test scores are not “pure” measures of aptitude. It assumes that merit is easily measurable and that it is possible to rank students by merit. That reflects a deeper, faulty suspicion that “holistic admission” is really formulaic, with the formula needing to be unlocked.

The larger question here is whether merit is about breadth or depth. Well-roundedness argues for a definition of merit that is broad and shallow, with an individual dipping their toes into many puddles. That approach may be appropriate for children and teenagers trying to discover their unique talents and interests, but is it a desirable goal? Being too well-rounded requires diluting one’s time and focus in many directions. Try to tackle too many activities and you’ll be master of none.

But must the alternative to “well-rounded” be “poorly-rounded”? It is one thing to pursue depth and another to be single-minded. The argument for liberal arts education is to expose us to different disciplines and ways of seeing the world. We live in a time when young athletes and their parents are told by those profiting off youth sports that early specialization is necessary, but there is ample evidence that playing multiple sports improves physical skills and muscle development. Don’t we need that as well for the most important muscle of all, the brain? (We are fully aware that the brain isn’t technically considered a muscle, but the point is still valid.)

The fact that being well-rounded no longer gets you into college doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Well-roundedness shouldn’t be a goal in itself, but rather a means to an end. Having two or three pursuits that you truly care about is more important than lots of activities that aren’t that meaningful, but trying different things helps us figure out what brings us joy and fulfillment.

I think colleges perpetuate the “well-rounded student” Suburban Legend by listing room for up to ten activities on the application. Too many students assume that it is necessary to fill up all the spaces. It’s not. Quality is more important than quantity, and the operative word is “authentic.”  Don’t choose activities because you hope they will impress colleges. Choose activities that fulfill you and reflect your best, true self. If those don’t impress colleges, that’s probably a sign that a college is not the right fit.

Bert Hudnall understood, and modelled, that life should be well-lived. He also recognized that may or may not include being well-rounded. 

March Madness, March madness

March Madness is my favorite time of year, and March madness is my least favorite. This week I am experiencing both, courtesy of the same university.

This week is the beginning of March Madness, as the NCAA basketball tournament is now branded. I must confess that I find college sports less enjoyable these days due to conference realignment and players transferring multiple times, but that won’t keep me from spending Thursday and Friday glued in front of the TV watching the first-round games. One of my quirks is that I never fill out a bracket because it keeps me from enjoying the games, and another is that I always root for the underdogs.

This year that group includes Miami University of Ohio, which barely made the tournament after going undefeated during the regular season before losing in the first round of its conference tournament, and Santa Clara University. There is an interesting connection between the two. Santa Clara is making its first tournament appearance since 1996, and back then its current coach, Herb Sendek, was Miami’s coach.

March madness has nothing to do with sports, but does involve games. It takes place not in arenas or on playing fields, but rather in admissions offices.

On Monday, March 9, at least some applicants to Santa Clara received an email from the Admissions Office with the subject line, “SCU is releasing decisions soon–are we your top choice?” What followed was an offer of the “If you order now” variety. 

The text of the email noted that college decisions were starting to come out, and that “your plans may have changed and that your plan B might have become your plan A.” It reported that some applicants had reached out to express their desire to attend Santa Clara, and that the university wanted to give all applicants the same opportunity. It invited students interested in committing to Santa Clara to opt in to a new Early Decision option by Thursday, March 12.

The email raised eyebrows–and much more. Colleges inviting applicants to switch their applications to Early Decision, which is generally considered binding, is not new, but not in March, 2-3 weeks before regular decisions are being released. Baseball Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra is alleged to have said, “It gets late early out here.” It apparently gets early late at Santa Clara.

Santa Clara presented two rationales, two potential benefits to students, for the offer. One is that those opting in would receive their admission decisions ahead of the release date for regular decisions. I don’t find that compelling. It’s mid-March, so at best the earlier decisions will arrive a week earlier. Today’s teenagers have unquestionably grown up in an instant gratification world, but is the opportunity to receive a decision a few days earlier a good reason to switch to Early Decision 3? (Santa Clara already has two rounds of Early Decision along with Early Action and regular decision.)

The other benefit is much more interesting. The email stated that “Our team will know SCU is your number one choice and you are excited to enroll if admitted.” Let’s examine that issue more closely.

I think it is entirely appropriate for colleges to want to know how interested applicants are. I think that interest is a legitimate consideration for admission offices, that it benefits a college or university to enroll students who want to be there. 

I wonder about the timing, though. If Santa Clara wanted to give students a formal opportunity to communicate that SCU is “Plan A,” perhaps it should have been done sooner than the Ides of March. There is also the matter of the three-day turnaround to respond.

I also wonder if adding a third round of early decision is necessary. It is certainly possible for a college to give applicants the opportunity to communicate sincere interest without asking them to commit to enroll.  SCU is trying to manage admission metrics like yield and admit rate. Heavy use of Early Decision has become a popular enrollment management tool, with a number of highly-selective institutions admitting more than half their classes through ED.

That is easier said than done. To use early decision strategically, a college or university has to have a certain level of demand. The marketplace doesn’t allow Santa Clara to do that, despite the fact that it’s a good, venerable institution. According to its 2024-25 Common Data Set, only 609 of its nearly 19,000 applications came through Early Decision. Santa Clara admits just under half its applicants, but its yield (the percentage of accepted applicants enrolling) is around 18 percent, meaning that Santa Clara has to admit five students to enroll one. But if you pull out those admitted through Early Decision and off the Wait List, both of which should have close to 100 percent yield, Santa Clara’s yield is closer to 11 percent.

What Santa Clara is facing is the higher education version of an issue found as well in college athletics and American society at large, the disappearing middle class. The rich are getting richer, and everyone else is falling behind. In college athletics the big conferences get most of the television money and post-season spots, while mid-majors get dinged for lack of schedule strength but can’t get the big schools to play them. If a mid-major develops star players they get poached by wealthier, high-profile programs. There is currently a debate about whether the Cinderellas that have made March Madness so memorable are a thing of the past. Meanwhile, in society at large the top one percent is thriving, with no concerns about or understanding of affordability.

In higher education there is talk about the “enrollment cliff,” but it is really an “enrollment earthquake.” There is an increasing chasm between rich and poor, with wealthy institutions becoming more popular and many smaller institutions fighting for their very existence. Caught in the middle, right on the fault line, are places like Santa Clara. They want to think of themselves as “elite” (an adjective that probably needs to be retired), and have the right to feel that way based on their history, but the marketplace doesn’t allow them to act elite. They wonder whether the shifting ground underneath them are just tremors or the beginning of the “big one,” and they are grasping for lifelines.

Is adding another round of ED that lifeline? I am sympathetic with Santa Clara’s need to manage its enrollment, but its March 9 “solution” raises more questions than it answers.

How does Santa Clara intend to use the information? Responding affirmatively presumably helps a student’s chances of being admitted, but what happens if a student does not respond? Will that be seen as evidence that the student is unlikely to enroll, and will that result in students being waitlisted or denied for that reason alone? And how does this factor into financial aid? In a worst-case scenario, an unscrupulous college or university (which I am in no way accusing Santa Clara of being) could use this as a tool for financial-aid leveraging, providing smaller packages for those who respond because they have shown they are likely to enroll. 

Is asking for an ED commitment in March ethical? Is it necessary to achieve Santa Clara’s goals? Is it manipulative and coercive? No, no, and yes. I am not a fan of the “switch your application to early decision” game, but doing it this late puts students-and counselors in a difficult spot. Those of us who believe that college admission should be grounded in ethical practices face a dilemma. How should we advise our students? On one hand, we believe that students should make early decision commitments carefully and thoughtfully. On the other, this case qualifies as “early decision” in name only, done at the last minute without the student having any idea about finances. I may be alone, but I don’t see it being unethical for a student to respond affirmatively and then choose another institution. A college or university doesn’t have a right to ask for a commitment at this point in the process, and certainly not with 72 hours to decide.

We can be sure that we will see more admission games like this being played, proving the wisdom in another quote from Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” I hope that colleges, even those challenged by the enrollment earthquake, will adhere to the principle that students should be allowed to make college choices based on good information and following their heart, not coerced through FOMO.

Let the March Madness games begin! And let the March madness games end.

SAT Profiling

California Governor Gavin Newsom may be running for President in 2028. That’s not exactly breaking news. He is currently in the midst of a tour promoting his new book, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.” Writing a book is always one of the bingo card squares for any politician considering a presidential bid.

I haven’t read the book, nor do I plan to. I’m guessing Newsom’s MAGAverse critics haven’t read it either, but that didn’t keep them from erupting in a furor over a comment Newsom made last week during an on-stage interview with Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens when the book tour made a stop in that city. 

Reflecting on his struggles with dyslexia and how they require him to memorize speeches rather than read them, Newsom said, “I’m like you…I’m a 960 SAT guy.” Critics immediately seized on the comment as evidence of  racism and bigotry. Fox News “personality” Sean Hannity posted on social media that “Newsom thinks a 960 SAT makes him ‘like’ Black Americans.” Rapper Nicki Minaj said in a post that Newsom’s “way of bonding with black ppl (sic) is to tell them how stupid he is.” South Carolina U.S. Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate, accused Newsom of the “bigotry of low expectations” and “using your mediocre academics as a way to patronize communities.”

Newsom responded that the outrage was selective, that many of those quick to accuse him of racism have been ironically unbothered by the President of the United States referring to female Black lawmakers as “low IQ persons” or posting memes on Truth Social during Black History Month depicting President and Michelle Obama as apes (Senator Scott did object to the memes). Other observers have pointed out that the criticism of Newsom’s comments seems to assume that they were made to an audience that was predominantly Black. Photos of the event published by TMZ call that assumption into question.

So much for the political (pardon my French) merde. ECA’s beat is college admission, and we are more interested in some of the questions raised by Newsom’s description of himself as a “960 SAT guy.” Do our SAT scores define us? Are SAT scores a measure of merit? Should we care about what an adult’s SAT scores were, and what would they tell us? And have we stumbled across the newest form of prejudice, SAT profiling?

Those questions are embedded in the mythology (and perhaps even the DNA) of standardized testing. And they are relevant today because the pendulum seems to be tipping back toward worship of SAT (and ACT) scores, even as many colleges and universities continue to have test-optional admission policies. Test scores for individual applicants are among the data being required by the federal government from colleges as part of ACTS (Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement). Most of the nation’s highly “rejective” universities have returned to requiring test scores, and a recent op-ed blamed the University of California’s adoption of test-free admission policies for the increase in the number of students at UC-San Diego needing remedial math courses. 

What do SAT scores really tell us about an individual? Are high scores an indicator of merit? Originally the SAT was pitched as a measure of “aptitude,” whatever that means. How does that correlate to IQ, and is calling someone a “low SAT person” better or worse than calling them a “low IQ person”? And what should we make of the fact that the A in SAT no longer stands for aptitude, or for anything? The SAT today is a brand, a self-referential one at that.

The SAT was designed as an instrument to predict, in conjunction with high school grades, freshman year GPA in college. It may be legitimate to ask if grade inflation has rendered test scores as a more meaningful predictor, which seems to be the argument for reinstating test score requirements, but it was never designed to be more than that. But like Ozempic and other medications designed for one purpose but which ultimately found a more profitable use, the SAT has been appropriated for uses for which it is not intended, from scholarship cutoffs to college rankings to real estate prices.

Senator Scott’s dig at Governor Newsom’s “mediocre academic record” reflects a misunderstanding, perhaps even a misrepresentation, that SAT scores are a measure of academic merit. But the SAT is a three-hour data point that shouldn’t carry more weight than four years of high school. In my experience there was in most cases a correlation between test scores and academic performance for my students, but that doesn’t mean that SAT scores measure academic merit. They may measure nothing more than the ability to take tests. 

The lure of SAT scores lies in the fact that they provide a numerical shortcut, summing up an individual with false precision. But paying too much attention to numbers is dangerous. How many of us understand that if drug prices were actually lowered 500%, then the government, Big Pharma, or Walgreens would be paying us to take our medications?

With any number, context is important. When my son was in high school and finally started to take his academic work seriously, he would come home and tell me that he got a 96 on a test. I would immediately respond, “Out of how many?” (Yes, I was that kind of dad.) So it is with test scores. Years ago one of my students bragged that he was going to get a 1500 on the SAT. I affirmed his confidence, because that happened to be the year the SAT expanded to three sections and a total possible score of 2400 rather than 1600.

Making sense of SAT scores requires understanding context. Gavin Newsom’s SAT score means something different if he has dyslexia than if he doesn’t. A score earned after hours of test prep doesn’t mean the same thing as an identical score with no prep. Identical scores have a different interpretation when one is based on a single administration and the other superscored after four attempts. And that doesn’t even begin to take into account factors like family background and school environment.

That raises a broader question. Do we measure the things we value, or do we value the things we can measure, or think we can measure? Whatever the SAT measure (a debate for another time), its scores are valued because we can assign a number to them. At the same time, the qualities that are far more important for an individual’s success, both in college and in life, things like work ethic, character, drive, empathy, and the ability to collaborate, are undervalued because we can’t place a number on them. 

We also value the qualities that we possess. Those with high SAT scores are much more likely to see SAT scores as a measure of merit than those with lower scores. Similarly, individuals who lack traits like empathy and moral fiber either deny that those things are real or see them as weaknesses.

Gavin Newsom’s description of himself as a 960 SAT guy may turn out to be a stroke of genius or mistake politically. There is evidence that Americans tend to vote for the taller presidential candidate (which explains the shoe lifts employed by another governor with presidential ambitions). Does the same thing hold true for SAT scores?

Newsom’s admission sheds light on an underreported form of bigotry, SAT profiling. Do one’s SAT scores define them? There is danger in that view. Those with low scores may suffer from Tim Scott’s “bigotry of low expectations,” and those expectations can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those with high scores face their own challenges. Developing hubris and a sense of entitlement are the most common, but I also had a student complain how unfair it was that his teachers held his high scores against him, expecting his academic performance to match up. Call it the bigotry of high expectations.

SAT profiling is real. It is telling that the only files Donald Trump wants released less than the Epstein Files are those containing his SAT scores and school records, which is why he had Michael Cohen send letters to Fordham, Penn, and the College Board back in 2019 threatening them if they released transcripts or test scores. And on this issue, he’s right. 

Our SAT scores do not define any of us, including Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom. True merit consists of qualities like integrity and compassion. Now if someone can only develop a way to measure those on a 1600 scale.

Suburban Legends: Summer Smorgasbord

(Welcome to Suburban Legends, an examination of the “truths” about college admission heard in the checkout line at the grocery store, in the stands at high school sporting events, and at any social gathering of parents with children about to apply to college. Unlike myths, Suburban Legends are plausible, and some may even be true. They are most likely to be believed by those who are educated and affluent, and they are always passed on by someone you trust but never happen to anyone you know.)

Last week I watched an episode of the old Gilmore Girls television series. It’s a show I never watched (and in fact was barely aware of) during its original run, but I have been watching it as part of my research for Hollywood Applies to College, analyzing depictions of college admission in popular entertainment. 

Rory Gilmore, the daughter, is a freshman in high school when the show begins, and as a result concern for college, and especially Harvard, is a recurring plotline. Stay tuned for a future post devoted to the show.

In the episode I watched, Rory, who in the series premiere transferred to an exclusive prep school, discovers that she is “ten years behind on my extracurriculars” compared with her classmates. She panics, joining a Habitat for Humanity-like build project because “it looks good on your college transcript” and either exclaims or complains that “I need to find a retarded kid and teach him how to play softball.” The latter statement is a glimpse into how much our culture has changed in the 20 years since the show first aired. Today no one would dare use the “R word” on television unless they were the President of the United States. Make America hate again.

What hasn’t changed is the frenzy and confusion over the role that extracurricular activities play in college admission, especially at highly-selective colleges and universities. A number of years ago, an NPR story included the claim that “extracurriculars are just as important as academics.” And just last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article reporting that the pressure on teenagers to spend their summers on “resume-polishing summer activities” has gotten “even worse.”

The need to “polish” a resume, and to spend your summers doing it, is a perfect example of a Suburban Legend. It’s widely-believed and accepted uncritically, it’s plausible, and if both NPR and the WSJ are reporting it, it must be true.

But is it? Is curating a list of activities as part of one’s “personal narrative” or “brand” necessary for admission to what people used to refer to as “elite” colleges (before Doug Lederman’s op-ed for Inside Higher Ed last week calling for the end of that terminology)? There are a lot of reasons to subject the belief in the importance of resume polishing to stricter scrutiny. 

Let’s consider the idea that extracurricular activities are just as important as academics. In my experience “transcript, transcript, transcript” is as foundational for college admission as “location, location, location” is for real estate. The first consideration in evaluating applicants is always academic, including both strength of schedule and grades. I can think of one instance years ago when a college announced that they were transcript-optional, allowing applicants to submit a video rather than a high school transcript, but it was a gimmick cooked up by a new president looking for a way to distinguish the college from lots of other liberal-arts colleges.  

That doesn’t mean that extracurricular activities are unimportant. Your activities outside of class can be a way of demonstrating qualities like commitment and leadership, and many of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities assign applicants a rating for extracurricular activities as well as for academics. But that does not mean that activities are just as important as academics. If a student is not competitive academically, it would take an exceptional extracurricular accomplishment to compensate, something like being a blue-chip athlete, teenage Nobel Prize winner, or Disney Channel star. 

The great debate with regard to activities is quality vs. quantity. The Common Application has space to list up to ten activities, but that doesn’t mean you need to fill up every space. You don’t get points deducted for not having ten, and you don’t get extra credit for having more than ten. I had a student a few years back who wanted to list 18 activities. I advised him that he needed to narrow the list down. After consulting with his mother, he brought back a new list–with 25 activities. It sent a message, just not the message he thought. He looked like someone with too much breadth and not enough depth, or someone who lacked the ability to prioritize what was important.

One or two serious and meaningful commitments is better than ten things that merely fill up time. How do you determine what belongs and what doesn’t? Create your activity list in descending order of importance to you. List what you care about first, then what’s next, and so on. You will eventually arrive at a line where everything above is meaningful and everything below is filler. Get rid of the filler. 

The Common App activities section also asks about the amount of time you spend weekly on each activity. If your activities add up to more than 168 hours per week, admission officers know that you are exaggerating. On that note, admission officers read lots of applications and are generally pretty savvy about evaluating activities. A number of years ago one of my students described a community service opportunity that he had done during the school’s two-week inter-session as the most meaningful thing he had ever done. He may have been right, but the first question an application reader would have asked was, “If the activity was so meaningful, how come you stopped after two weeks?”

That leads us to the Wall Street Journal article. The first couple of sentences in that story state that crafting a “smorgasbord of resume-building summer activities” is no longer enough, that ambitious students now have to “fret over crafting their ‘summer story.’”

Several parts of those statements deserve parsing. The first is the idea that students need to pursue a “smorgasbord” of activities to impress admission officers. The second is that summer is primarily a time to “burnish” summer portfolios. And the third is that students must convey a “cohesive narrative” through their summer activities. None of those are necessarily wrong, but they also miss the point.

The point is that students should pursue activities not because they want to impress admission officers, but because they find those activities genuinely fulfilling. The question is not “What looks good?” but “What do I truly care about?” What is genuine also happens to be what impresses. 

Is the article right that the pressure to fill the summer with activities has gotten worse? Summer programs for high school students have always used college admission as a marketing carrot (and maybe a stick). For a number of years I worked in a summer program devoted to college admission run by an entrepreneurial dean. Students signed up thinking it would give them an admission edge, which it didn’t. Colleges offered summer programs as ways to use campus facilities and generate revenue. But the University of Chicago is apparently now offering an early decision option for students who attend certain summer programs on its campus.

I also wonder about the idea that a student’s choices have to be tied together in a “cohesive narrative.” Certainly every application tells a story, and there should be integrity to that story. The WSJ story quotes a Stanford student whose four summers consisted of an internship, research on a college campus, volunteering at a local hospital, and running a nonprofit. Those might all be meaningful, but they are all things I would expect to find on my bingo card of summer activities designed to impress college admission officers. Can admission officers detect the difference between substance and the illusion of substance?

The article left me with more questions than answers. Is the Wall Street Journal reporting news or making news, reporting on a phenomenon or creating a phenomenon? What messages does it send, and are those messages healthy? We are already seeing a huge increase in mental health issues among young people. Is the college admission process a contagion? 

The article quotes an independent educational consultant who talks about having students narrow their focus to one or two “passions.” But how many high school students have a true passion, much less two? College is supposed to be the time when you figure out who you are, but you can’t get into college unless you already know?

I also think it’s interesting that the article contains no quotes from admission officers. Do they value and reward students who are resume polishers? If not, why aren’t they speaking out? Silence is assent. What is the impact on a college or university of having a student body full of students who are good at playing the resume-polishng game?

Admission offices could help solve this problem by being transparent about what they want–and don’t want–with regard to extracurricular choices. Students are strategic thinkers who will figure out how to game whatever system is in place. What about asking for three activities instead of ten, sending a message that quality counts? Or how about ignoring summer activities altogether, or making it clear that intellectual curiosity and making a difference are preferable to a polished resume?

Alice Cooper sang “School’s out for summer.” Even professional athletes have an off-season to relax, rejuvenate, and refresh. Shouldn’t high school students have the same gift?

Does College Admission Need a Commissioner (Part 2)

During my time as a teacher, both with high school and college students, I always found it a good idea to begin class by reviewing what we had covered previously. I will follow that practice leading into the second part of this two-part post.

Most of part one was devoted to examining the issues in college sports, where two prominent championship coaches (Dan Hurley and Nick Saban) recently called for commissioners in their sports to rein in the chaos arising from the transfer portal and payment of athletes. We observed that there is an increasing chasm between the “college” and “sports” in college sports, and pointed out that big-time college sports are really part of a university’s advancement arm rather than its educational arm. We also expressed skepticism that the appointment of a commissioner would have the desired impact, that a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions underlying college sports is what is really needed.

Despite the clickbait title of this post, I believe that college admission needs a commissioner less than college football and basketball. The issues aren’t as severe–yet, although the coming demographic cliff and increased government interference on college campuses with regard to research funding and international students may create a Hunger Games environment for certain segments of higher education. College admission has historically been built upon a culture of ethical professional practice, and the optimist in me wants to believe that will continue. The realist in me recognizes that foundation is fragile and requires constant vigilance and preventive maintenance. 

My original plan for this post was to stop at this point and invite you, the reader, to weigh in on the essay prompt, “If I were the commissioner for college admission, I would…” I’m interested in your answers, and hope they will result in a future post. But an email from a reader convinced me that there are some bigger issues worth investigating here.

Reader Carter Delloro from Marymount School in New York sent me a thoughtful email responding to my “Early Decision: End or Mend?” post. In that piece I poked fun at the writer of a New York Times op-ed who argued that Congress should abolish early decision programs. My retort was that the author wasn’t paying attention to how little actual legislating our current legislators do and that he must have watched too many movies starring Jimmy Stewart or appearing on the Hallmark Channel.

Carter called me out for making light of the op-ed’s call for Congressional action to eliminate early decision, calling it “fatalism” (I prefer skepticism), correctly pointing out that the proper solution for an inept Congress is electing new members of Congress. He didn’t point it out, but I was also unfair to Jimmy Stewart and Hallmark. He stated, “If you feel like a congressional law is not the most effective path forward, that’s one thing.”

That is the thing. That is in fact my position. I don’t see Congressional action as the most effective path forward. 

I would be thrilled to see our elected representatives actually read the Constitution they carry as pocket ornaments. I would love to see Congress step up as a co-equal branch of government rather than serve as a rubber stamp for the Executive Branch (that’s true whether we have a Republican or Democratic President). I want our elected representatives to act in a bipartisan fashion to protect us from out-of-control masked marauders creating chaos on our streets. But I don’t want Congress dictating the admission policies that colleges must use (but regulation through legislation is preferable to regulation through executive orders). 

We can certainly debate what is the appropriate role for the government with regard to college admission. The government should regulate practices that are discriminatory (but may disagree about what those are). At the other end of the spectrum, the government shouldn’t be dictating that colleges must require standardized test scores for admission. Falling into the gray area in-between are things like legacy admission (hard to defend if racial preferences are illegal) and filling large portions of the student body through early decision (creates two-tiered preferential admissions process that advantages applicants who are already privileged).

The question is, if not government regulation, then what? Carter identified the larger issue as what he described as the “collective action problem.” He argued, “Why would a college be the first to implement your suggestion when it would make their jobs more challenging and their institution's future more precarious?...When there is a collective action problem, the system constraints and incentives must change to elicit action. Otherwise, none will be taken.”

I think those are good points. The other side of the coin, though, is that institutional success is reliant upon public trust and confidence. We already know that we have a growing skepticism about the value proposition of higher education. That will only increase as we face a future where a college diploma is no longer a clear path to economic security. Our inability to rein in self-serving and manipulative practices could actually make our jobs more challenging and our institutions’ future more precarious. Can we sacrifice narrow institutional interest for the broader public interest, recognizing Benjamin Franklin’s sage advice during the Continental Congress that “we must all hang together, or we will all hang separately”?

We already have a model for what voluntary collective action might look like. For years NACAC’s ethical standards filled that need. NACAC members (which included the vast majority of colleges) agreed to ethical principles and rules intended to protect vulnerable students from coercion and manipulation. We understood that certain things that might be in my best interest are not necessarily in our best interest. Adherence to the Statement of Principles of Good Practice was voluntary; no one was forced to be a NACAC member. And it generally worked. The Admission Practices Committee monitored and enforced the standards, but most complaints were resolved amicably.

That ended when the U.S. Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation into NACAC. The DOJ interpreted prohibitions on colleges poaching students committed to or enrolled at other colleges and incentives for early decision applicants to be anti-competitive. The DOJ saw NACAC as a cabal controlling college admission, which is laughable for those of us who know how hard it is to get those in our profession to agree about anything. It also interpreted our ethical standards not as protecting students, but as preventing them from getting the lowest price, an interesting take given that most questionable practices serve institutions much better than they serve students. But the real objection may not have been the principles themselves, but the attempt to police them. There are certainly some of us who thought it was worth fighting the DOJ, but NACAC chose to settle, paying attention to the truth found in the 1960s hit song, “I fought the law–and the law won.”

It was not apparent at the time, but the DOJ investigation was part of a larger cultural shift. It was the beginning of a movement away from a social order based on rules. Today we see that impacting college athletics and even the post-World War 2 international order. It is easy to blame that on Donald Trump, but he may be a symptom rather than a cause. Today we have a generation of leaders who think that attention to rules reflects weakness, that the only law worth paying attention to is the law of the jungle. It’s a view articulated by a school administrator I know who was famous for saying “rules are for clerks.”

I have been described as being much better at asking questions than I am at providing answers. That is true with the collective action problem described by Carter. We have three options.

Allowing college admission to devolve into the Wild West is not a good answer. Neither is abrogating our responsibility to allow government to regulate college admission due to our own inaction. Are we willing to have decisions about our work made by those guided not by educational best practice but by a partisan political agenda. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in his speech at the world Economic forum at Davos several weeks ago, “If you are not at the table, you are probably on the menu.” 

That leaves reaching agreement on what we stand for and translating that into a student-driven college admission process. I believe that it is possible to agree on a set of ethical principles that protect students without hurting institutions. Ethics is about ideals, what we believe should be the case. The college admission process should be an important developmental step in a student’s personal journey from adolescent to adult. How can we be educators and not just salespersons? We don’t need to police our principles in order to assert our principles.

If we aspire to be at the table rather than on the menu, it’s time to make our collective reservation and figure out what we want to order. We may not need a commissioner, but we do need to be committed–to our students and to each other.

Are You a Curling Parent?

“They got a name for the winners in the world, I want a name when I lose,

They call Alabama the Crimson Tide, call me Deacon Blues”

Steely Dan

They say history is written by winners.  That idea is commonly attributed to Winston Churchill, although a 2019 Slate article suggests that similar sentiments have been expressed by historical losers ranging from Robespierre to Herman Goering.

I have always been more drawn to the losers, those who finish fourth in the Olympic event and just miss a medal, or just miss making the Olympic team after devoting years to the quest for a gold medal. I commiserate with those beaten out for a scientific breakthrough or invention because a competitor had more funding or published first. 

I know their pain all too well. I know what it’s like to put your all into something and find out it’s not good enough. My moment of failure and disappointment came in my quest to find the perfect parenting metaphor.

In the late 1990s it became clear that there was a changing dynamic in the behavior of parents. I labelled the new generation of parents as the “high maintenance parent,” and was part of several conference panels on that topic and using that language. But it took going to Disney World to confirm that I was on to something.

My Disney epiphany didn’t come from seeing Mickey assaulted by frantic parents demanding a picture or autograph for their three-year-old, nor did I witness a fight when someone tried to cut in line for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. It came during a professional conference held at Disney World in February of 1999.

The conference was a joint meeting of the Middle States and Southern regions of the College Board. My session on “Working with the High Maintenance Parent” was scheduled for 3:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon, a time slot suggesting that the conference schedulers didn’t see the topic as much of a draw. It was also 75 degrees and sunny outside. Those of us on the panel prepared for an empty room, because we would have picked enjoying the weather over the session ourselves.  At 3:30 we were shocked that the room was packed. Before we had even finished our introductory remarks, the audience hijacked the session and a lively, passionate discussion broke out. We had touched a nerve.

Unfortunately “High-Maintenance Parent” ended up losing out in the marketplace of ideas to “Helicopter Parent,” a metaphor with a better visual. I became Elisha Gray losing out to Alexander Graham Bell, Netscape Navigator losing out to Internet Explorer, MySpace losing out to Facebook. Call me Deacon Blues.

I have since been fascinated by parenting metaphors. Most, but not all, fall into two categories.

The first category is machine-based metaphors. In addition to the helicopter parent, so named for the ability and tendency to hover, there is the “stealth bomber” parent, who lurks in the background then swoops in to attack when their child doesn’t get the lead in the play. Then we have “snowplow” parents, also called “lawnmower” or “bulldozer” parents, who attempt to clear a path forcefully to remove all obstacles and prevent their children from experiencing adversity, struggle, and disappointment.

The second category of parenting metaphor revolves around animals. The best known is the “tiger” parent, more often than not the tiger mom. This parenting style resembles the stereotypical stage mother driven for their children to make it in show business. At the other end of the spectrum are “jellyfish” parents, who lack backbone, have few rules and expectations, and avoid confrontation. In between those two extremes we have “elephant” parents, who may like peanuts and never forget, but are nurturing, protective, and more concerned with child’s well-being than success. We also have “dolphin” parents, who are firm but flexible. They have rules and expectations for their children, but parent by being role models.

There are other parenting metaphors that don’t fit into either category. There are the “lighthouse” parents, who strive to be beacons of light for their children to follow, showing the way and protecting them from crashing into the rocks. 

Then there are “free-range” parents, or what when I was growing up would have been called simply “parents.” Free-range parenting is a throwback to the 1950s, when children left the house early in the morning and didn’t return until dinner time, and were unsupervised by adults the whole time.  Free-range parents can be seen by other parents as negligent, and there are examples of neighbors calling the police when free-range parents allow their children to walk to the store by themselves.

The newest addition to the list is the “Operation Varsity Blues” parent, named for the parents involved in the 2019 admission scandal, who were willing to go to any lengths to obtain admission at prestigious colleges, from hiring stand-ins to take the SAT and ACT to bribing coaches to falsifying student credentials and accomplishments. Those parents were spoofed in an episode of the Simpsons, which had one such parent going to “photoshopping camp” as a means of getting her child into the University of Southern California.

Finally, we have my favorite parenting metaphor, one that is particularly relevant right now during the Winter Olympics. It is the “curling” parent, named for the winter sport that resembles bocce ball or shuffleboard on ice. Curling is the Rodney Dangerfield of Winter Olympic sports, in that it doesn’t get any respect. In the past week I have heard several different commentators either question curling as a sport or complain that during the Winter Olympics curling, like Law and Order reruns, seems to always be on TV.

Curling parents, like the sweepers in curling, move ahead sweeping away all impediments. Curling parents are thus not all that different from snowplow or lawnmower parents, but the curling metaphor is more fun. I wish I had come up with it.

So which parenting metaphor best captures your parenting style? And what kind of parent do you wish you were?

It is worth thinking about curling parents (as well as the other metaphors for parenting) not only because we are in the midst of the Winter Olympics, but also because we are in the midst of the college admission season. Parents of seniors are fairly far along in that journey, while parents of juniors and younger students are early in the process.

I firmly believe that the college process is harder on parents than it is on students. That is true for several reasons.

First is the existential challenge of being a parent. I learned early on that I derive far more pleasure from my children’s successes, and feel more pain from their disappointments, than anything that has happened in my own life. 

That is entirely normal. Where it crosses the line is when parents live vicariously through their children.  In the college admissions process it is easy to confuse what is best for your child with your own desire for status.  Taken to extremes, the college your child attends can become a measure of your success as a parent.

There are other factors at work as well.

The college process can be your last chance to influence your child’s future in a significant way. You will never have the same role and influence once they leave home.

It is also the case that the tables may turn in our relationship with our children during the college process.  They now exercise power over us by controlling information and communication, and for many of them non-communication can be an art form. They may also have learned to manipulate us and push our buttons.  I have heard numerous parents during the college process express a similar sentiment about their children —“They think we’re stupid.”  No, they don’t, but they’re certainly happy to let us believe that.  And that may actually be their job as they transition into becoming their own person.

That last phrase, “their own person,” is important. The college search is an important developmental step on the journey from adolescent to adult, and where our children end up in college should be their choice (so they can’t blame us for the choice) and their victory. The adults in their lives, both parents and counselors, should be support personnel, trail guides.

I recently read an interview with Rick Bischoff, the new senior vice president for enrollment management at Chapman University in California after a long tenure at Case Western Reserve. He was asked about his approach to the admissions process as a parent, and he stated that he and his wife (a respected college counselor) stayed out of it. They set parameters about cost and then let their son do his thing. They trusted their child to be able to handle the process while being readily available to help if needed. That’s a good model for all of us.

How can you best support your child’s journey? First, recognize the warning signs of parental college admission overinvolvement. One early sign is excessive use of the word “we,” as in “we’re applying to.” I know better, and yet I’ve fallen into that trap. If you find that all of your conversations with other parents are about college, that’s not good. And if you find yourself spending hours late at night on College Confidential or photoshopping your child’s head onto an internet photo of an athlete in a sport your child doesn’t play, seek help immediately.

Here are some tips on avoiding becoming “that” parent and supporting your child:

• Focus on helping your son or daughter figure out who they are and what they care about.

• Cultivate ownership and responsibility.  Let them take care of business whenever possible.  They should be fully capable of asking for transcripts, registering for tests, and even scheduling college visits.  Don’t enable them by doing things just because it’s easier.

• Schedule an agreed-upon time when you will discuss college, and stick to that.  You may get a glimpse into your child’s mind if you catch them off-guard during unscripted times in the car or while doing something together, but otherwise don’t bring up college except during the negotiated time.

• Be an asker of questions rather than a provider of answers.  (That may be hard.)

• Recognize that you may be a source of stress.  Your children want to please you and make you proud.  If you are uptight about college, they’ll sense it and will be uptight.

• Practice informed consent.  Don’t give your consent until you are informed.  In thewords of the Russian proverb borrowed by Ronald Reagan, “Trust but verify.”

• Don’t believe all the Suburban Legends you hear.

• Focus on what you control rather than worrying about what you don’t.

• Don’t let college admission get in the way of your relationship with your child.  It’snot worth it.

• Above all, let them know that you love them and are proud of who they are.  Learn from the wisdom of a parent who said at the end of her son’s senior year in highschool, “I wish I had appreciated who my son is rather than focus on what he is not.”

Regardless of whether you prefer the University of Alabama or Wake Forest educationally or athletically, as a parent you want to be the Crimson Tide and not Deacon Blues.

College Admission and the Epstein Files

I’m always on the lookout for news items tied to college admission, and earlier this week discovered one in an unlikely place, the Epstein Files. More on that in a minute.

The latest, and apparently last, release of the files connected to Epstein and his sex trafficking ring dropped last Friday. Epstein’s victims will apparently not receive any justice from the Department of Justice, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche stating that it’s not a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein. The conspiracy theorists among us are left to wonder what hasn’t been and never will be released.

The most recent file drop brought to mind two movies. One is the Woody Allen movie Radio Days. In the final scene the radio personalities who populate that film all turn out to be having holiday dinner together, all part of the same club or clan. The circle of billionaires, celebrities, and political leaders for whom Epstein was the epicenter doesn’t seem all that different.

The second is the movie Con Air. Why Con Air? Because of a classic quote from that movie. No, not “put the bunny back in the box.” The quote is from Garland Greene, the character played by Steve Buscemi. As the plane commandeered by criminals takes off playing the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “Sweet Home Alabama,” Greene observes, “Define irony. A bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song made famous by a band that dies in a plane crash.” Criminals on a plane–define irony.

So what does that have to do with college admission and the Epstein Files? A story this week in the New York Times reported that Soon-yi Previn, wife of Woody Allen, had sent an email to Jeffrey Epstein thanking him for getting her adopted daughter, Bechet, admitted to Bard. Previn is 35 years younger than Allen, and became involved with him when he was the partner to her adoptive mother, Mia Farrow. Define irony.

It is far from clear how much influence Epstein actually had. Epstein contacted long-time Bard President Leon Botstein (who had sought to cultivate Epstein as a donor to the college) about setting up a visit for Allen’s daughter, but how much of a difference did that make? In a statement, a Bard spokesman said, “The applicant referenced in the emails was accepted on the merits of her own qualifications for admission. Bard had already provided a welcome community for two previous family members, and no introduction was needed from the likes of Epstein.”

I believe and hope that’s the case. Bechet Allen was the daughter of a well-known celebrity who attended a prestigious New York independent school (Brearly), and apparently already had family connections at Bard. ECA does not know, or want to know, anything about her credentials as a Bard applicant, but it is hard to believe that Epstein would have tipped the admission scales. Every college applicant, including Bechet Allen, deserves for their college acceptance to be their accomplishment, their victory, alone.

The broader issue here is whether college presidents should intervene in the admissions process. Once again, there’s no evidence that President Botstein played any role in admission, but he did extend favors to a wealthy family in a way that I’m guessing was not available to the average Bard applicant. He is neither the first or the last college president to give special treatment to the family of a celebrity or potential donor, but there is something at least a little unsavory about presidents’ offices taking a role in the admissions process.

After seeing the Times story, I did a quick search on the DOJ Epstein files site for other mentions of college admission. There are some duplicate files, but I found four distinct mentions with some relation to admission. Two involved either Bard or Soon-yi Previn. Define irony.

One involved Epstein’s foundation, which among its projects supported several secondary schools around the country. Those included three Bard Early College high schools located in Manhattan, Queens, and Newark, New Jersey. Another school Epstein supported was the charter school in D.C. named for poet Maya Angelou.

The second was a mysterious email exchange between Soon-yi Previn and Jeffrey Epstein following the 2019 Operation Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Previn sent Epstein an email on March 27 with a link to a story about Yale revoking the admission of one of the Operation Varsity Blues students whose parents had bribed Yale’s women’s soccer coach to get a place on the team. Epstein responded with a one-word reply, “yikes.” Does anyone else find that intriguing, even suspicious? Is there some kind of a story there?

The two most troubling of the four other mentions of college admission in the Epstein files are two of the legal complaints filed by “Jane Doe” accusers of Epstein. Both spell out Epstein’s sexual abuse in similar fashion, but also include reports that Epstein promised both help in the college admissions process in exchange for submitting to his and Ghislane Maxwell’s orders. 

In each case Epstein had the girls fill out application materials and give them to him for review. He promised that admission was a “done deal” given his connections if they complied with his instructions, but also threatened to ruin their lives if they didn’t comply. Ha apparently never followed through. In one case, the student’s high school transcript was among the materials found by police in a search of Epstein’s mansion. There may be no crime as despicable as sex trafficking and taking advantage of vulnerable young people, but ruining hopes and dreams isn’t far behind as a form of abuse.

We can only hope that Epstein’s victims get the justice they deserve, either through our justice system or in the next life. The same goes for all those who took part in and covered up Epstein’s crimes.

Does College Admission Need a Commissioner?: Part 1

Does college admission need a commissioner? That may seem (or be) an odd question, but I have found myself pondering it as a result of two recent events.

The first was an email exchange I had with a friend and loyal reader after a recent post about early decision. During the back-and-forth one of us began a sentence with the clause “If I were the commissioner.”

The other, more substantive cause has been the mayhem in college sports. Two legendary college coaches who have each won multiple national championships recently called for the appointment of a commissioner to reign in the chaos in their sports. 

Retired Alabama football coach Nick Saban called for a college football commissioner to reign in the changing rules (or lack of rules) regulating payment of players and transfers. More than 6000 Division One football players, close to half of those on D1 rosters, entered the recent transfer portal. One of those was Duke quarterback Darian Mensah, who entered the portal at the last minute after previously announcing he was returning to Duke and apparently signing some kind of agreement.  That happened a year after he transferred to Duke from Tulane. Duke and Mensah looked like they were going to court, but ultimately reached an agreement, allowing him to move to Miami (Florida), where he will make too much money to afford to turn pro. If three colleges in three years sounds like a lot, it is, but it is also not unusual. The transfer portal has turned into a kind of free agency for college football players. A recent article in The Athletic highlighted a quarterback who will be at his seventh university in seven years next fall.

College basketball seems determined to make college football seem rational, leading University of Connecticut coach Dan Hurley to call for a commissioner. That came in the aftermath of the NCAA declaring a former NBA draft choice who had played professionally in Europe eligible to play at Baylor. Since then we have seen another player who had signed an NBA contract but not appeared in a game declared eligible to play at Alabama by a state court judge who just happens to be an Alabama athletic booster. And now a former UCLA player who has played in the NBA wants to be declared eligible to play in college again. What’s next? LeBron has college eligibility, doesn’t he?  

The issues in college sports have been well-documented. The introduction of payment for college athletes and liberal transfer rules have created a more even playing field for both athletes and teams, as illustrated by the fact that Indiana won the national championship in football, something that would have been unthinkable two years ago. It’s also created a widening chasm between the “college” and “athletics” in college athletics. 

I won’t weigh in on whether the changes have improved college sports, other than to note that I am not nearly the fan I used to be, but there is no way they enhance the education that athletes are receiving. The reason for the portal frenzy in college football at this time of year is driven by the need to replenish rosters but also to have players enroll at their new institution in time for the second semester. Transferring mid-year does not make for a smooth academic transition, but the need to have players on campus in time for spring practice trumps any academic issues.

I wonder what the transfer portal will do to graduation rates for athletes. It’s probably too early to make sense of the data given how new the portal and mass migration phenomena are. But even if students who attend three or more institutions are ultimately getting college degrees, are they receiving any semblance of a college education or a legitimate college experience? I also wonder how much scrutiny transfer athletes receive in the admissions process. I recognize that admission for athletes is its own process at most institutions, but is anyone evaluating transfer credits for all the football and basketball players changing colleges through the transfer portal? Is there any attention given to the educational needs of the student, or is it all about eligibility?

I am sympathetic to the calls for commissioners to come in and restore order to college basketball and football, but don’t think that’s a viable solution. For one thing, modern sports commissioners are not czars protecting the “good of the game” but rather corporate CEOs. Think Bud Selig, not Bart Giamatti or Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Second, if there were a commissioner, his or her edicts would most likely be taken to court by the losing party in our litigious society.  Most important, the only problem big enough to justify a commissioner would be a huge loss of revenue. The money in college sports drives everything.

Arkansas basketball coach John Calipari recently published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for restoring sanity to the collegiate athletics landscape. You are not alone if you find that ironic, given Calipari’s central role in the “one-and-done” phenomenon, where basketball players spend a year in “college” before turning pro. Calipari’s ideal solution, which he recognizes as unlikely, is for Congress to pass antitrust legislation allowing the NCAA to create “effective rules.” Barring that, he calls on athletic conferences to form alliances and engage in collective bargaining with athletes “as a special class of nonemployees” and regulate things like multiple transfers and age-eligibility requirements.  

Calipari’s solution doesn’t go far enough. It fails to rethink the assumptions that serve as the foundation of college athletics. It’s time to stop pretending that college sports are about the educational side of higher education and move them to the advancement side of the house. Let college teams, at least in the revenue sports of football and basketball, be recognized as vehicles for fund-raising and the players as university employees. If the players want to take classes and seek a degree, let them, but end the pretense of the student-athlete. If LSU wants to keep a university employee as football quarterback for nine years, let them.  That proposal has its own issues, but it’s better than the fiction we have now.

And what about college admission? The issues in the admission world are nowhere near as dire, largely because there is a history within the admission and counseling profession for ethical professional practice. But we have learned all too well how fragile norms and precedents can be. Culture is only as strong as the individuals that buy into the culture, and as a new generation of enrollment management professionals take positions of influence at institutions, will they be as committed to the shared values of the profession? It is also the case that pressure and interference from federal and state governments in combination with the coming enrollment cliff create the conditions for college admission to turn into the Wild West.

When I originally envisioned this post, I was going to have the college admission piece be merely an invitation for readers to answer the question, “If I was the commissioner of college admission, I would…”  And, dear readers, I invite you to submit your thoughts to me at jimjumpcollege@gmail.com. I’ll devote a future post to your suggestions.

But a communication from a reader convinced me that there are larger issues here. If you’ve read ECA for any length of time, you know that we love larger questions. This post is long enough (you may think too long), so I’ll address the larger questions in Part 2.

Suburban Legends: Harvard and Hockey Goalies

(Welcome to Suburban Legends, an examination of the “truths” about college admission heard in the checkout line at the grocery store, in the stands at high school sporting events, and at any social gathering of parents with children about to apply to college. Unlike myths, Suburban Legends are plausible, and some may even be true. They are most likely to be believed by those who are educated and affluent, and they are always passed on by someone you trust but never happen to anyone you know.)

If you were in Davos, Switzerland last week for the World Economic Forum, you probably aren’t reading this (and it’s your loss). But you may have seen, whereas the rest of us had to listen to or read about, the remarkable speech given by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. In a rational, honest, and powerful address, Carney described what he termed a “rupturing” of the rules-based international order that has guided the world since World War 2. He called on countries that are “middle powers” to assert their autonomy by banding together in values-based alliances, making the point that “if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” If one chooses to interpret the speech through the metaphorical lens of Canada’s national sport, he was offering strategy on defending power plays.

Carney’s speech was in stark contrast to other presentations at the summit that were more hyped. His courage and honesty made Canadians proud and citizens of other countries jealous.

Listening to the Canadian leader’s words, one would be tempted to think that he had been educated at someplace like Harvard. And in fact he was. Carney graduated from Harvard in 1987, a third-string goalie on the ice hockey team.

It is that last factoid that leads into today’s Suburban Legend.

SUBURBAN LEGEND: There’s a hockey goalie in every Harvard freshman class.

The rumor that Harvard admits a hockey goalie every year has been around at least as long as I have been in the college counseling profession, which is closing in on a half century. That’s staying power (for the rumor, that is). It’s plausible for at least three reasons.

Ice hockey is a sport that Harvard takes seriously.  It competes with three other Boston-area universities (Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern) in the Beanpot tournament held each February in the TD Garden (pronounced “Gahden”). Only eight other universities have made more NCAA tournament appearances than Harvard’s 26, and it won the NCAA national championship in 1989 before the tournament was rebranded as the “Frozen Four.”

There are only 60 colleges that compete in Division One ice hockey, one-sixth the number that have D1 basketball teams. Statistically, nearly five percent of high school hockey players go on to play in Division One, higher than for any other sport (for all sports it’s about two percent). It makes sense that colleges would recruit goalies at an even higher level, given the importance of the position and the specialized skills required.

For the conspiracy theorists, the most intriguing explanation for the hockey goalie Suburban Legend is that Bill Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s legendary Dean of Admissions, was a hockey goalie during his student days at Harvard. That leads to speculation that he must look out for the ice hockey program while sculpting (but not ice sculpting) each year’s freshman class.

Alas, it’s not the case that every Harvard freshman class includes an ice hockey goalie. What is accurate is that most Harvard classes contain a hockey goalie.  If you look at the rosters for the men’s ice hockey team for the past 25 years, in approximately one-third of the years there are four goalies on the roster, but not necessarily one from each class. In nearly two-thirds of the years there are three goalies, and there were a couple of years (including the current one) in which there were only two goalies. The Harvard hockey program did not respond to a request for comment about their goalie recruiting strategy.

Even if not literally true, the hockey goalie Suburban Legend is truthful.  It captures an important truth about the role that athletics plays in the college admissions process at most colleges and universities, including Harvard.

You may be surprised to learn that Harvard offers more varsity sports (42) than any other NCAA Division One college or university. A 2019 Washington Post story revealed that Harvard had more varsity athletes than athletic powerhouses like Stanford, Notre Dame, UCLA, Michigan, Texas, and UNC-Chapel Hill, and more than twice as many as the Universities of Georgia and Florida.

The athletes who populate those rosters don’t just show up; they are almost all coach-recruited. Being a recruited athlete may be the best of all admissions hooks. Author Jeff Selingo has suggested that while the admissions process for highly-selective colleges and universities is similar to a lottery, for athletes it is more a matching process. Discovery in the court case filed against Harvard by Students for Fair Admissions indicated that 86 percent of applicants with a top athletic rating are admitted. That’s substantially better than the overall 4 percent admit rate. It is estimated that close to a quarter of the students at the Ivies are recruited athletes. At the liberal arts colleges in the NESCAC (New England Small College Athletic Conference) it may be closer to a third.

If you are a coach-recruited hockey goalie applying to Harvard, you are not competing with every other applicant, just every other recruited hockey goalie.  If you are the best goalie and also qualified academically, there is an 86% chance that there is a spot at Harvard waiting for you, while your high school classmates with stronger grades and scores but no hook have less than a 1% chance.

(Parents, if you are dying for your child to go to Harvard,  don’t rush out and buy your child hockey skates and pads and sign him or her up for goalie lessons.  That Zamboni has probably already left the arena.)

If being a recruited athlete can make the admissions process easier, it can also make it harder. Being an athletic recruit can seem a lot like trying to get a date to the prom. On one hand, there is your dream date, someone you would love to go with, but they have no interest in you.  There are others you know would go with you in a second, but you are not sure you want to settle.  You may see others being asked out even though you are better looking and more personable.  And your biggest fear is that you end up with no date at all.

Athletic recruiting accelerates the admissions process. If you are fortunate enough to have an offer for a scholarship or a place on a team, you will probably have to decide whether to accept it without knowing what other opportunities might be out there.   To return to the prom date metaphor, coaches’ jobs are dependent on their ability to find the right date, and if it’s not you, then they need to move on and find another date. Athletes at the Ivies and NESCAC are generally expected to apply through Early Decision, meaning you have to commit and close off other options by November 1. The system generally works well, but I have seen cases where a student commits by applying ED, ends interaction with other schools, and then is not admitted., leading to a last-minute scramble for another option.

The ultimate issue is that playing a sport should be a consideration in the college search, but not the only consideration. Are you okay with sitting on the bench or playing for a team that always loses? What happens if you get hurt and can no longer play? What happens if the coach who recruited you leaves for a better job or is fired? What happens if the college drops your sport? Is your college choice still the right fit? Be thoughtful about what’s important to you and take ownership of the recruiting process, with help from parents, coaches, and college counselors. 

As a former Harvard hockey goalie has observed, if you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu. That’s good advice not only for “middle power” nations, but also for college applicants.

Predictability

When I first started my college counseling career 40 years ago, a public university in my state was notorious for the seeming randomness of its admissions decisions. It wasn’t uncommon for its admissions office to deny a student with a 3.7 GPA and admit a classmate with a 2.4 GPA. If the goal was uniting the school counseling community by being a lightning rod for frustration, it worked like a charm.

My predecessor had been among those who had issues, and so one of my first jobs was to try to make peace, which became even more pressing because the university was the first choice of my boss’s daughter. She was a top five student in the class, so shouldn’t have had any issue, but who knew (no, I’m not channeling Walmart Walton Goggins)?

When the rep visited our school that fall, we had a conversation that diplomats would describe as “frank and constructive.” The admissions officer predictably told me that they thought that they should receive more of our top applicants, but I remember two things from the conversation. 

One is that when we discussed the headmaster’s daughter, the rep contradicted his party line about expecting top applicants, asking in all seriousness and seeming bewilderment, “Why would she want to go to …?” The other was his more philosophical question, “Why do you care so much about consistency?” 

I received some insight into his second question the following spring when he invited me to come to campus to review my list of applicants (back in olden times, that was sometimes a practice). The admissions office was located in an old house, and two weeks before decision letters were going out, admission folders were laid out in piles by decision on tables in the attic. Of course, my school’s decisions lacked both consistency and rhyme or reason. We then reviewed around 30 folders for admitted students and another 30 denials, and many of the in-state denials had substantially stronger credentials than out-of-state admits. He kept saying, “I wonder how that one got in there.” 

I was reminded of that experience after a recent conversation with several counselor friends. All are veteran, first-rate, perhaps even legendary college counselors, and there was a consensus among the group that it has never been harder to counsel students about what options are likely, realistic, or even possible. They reflected on this fall’s early results and saw an increasing number of instances where students seem to check every box except the one that says they are admitted.

Has predictability become the new consistency? Why do we care so much about predictability? And should we?

The essence of college counseling lies in the ability to guide students and parents to make thoughtful decisions about their futures. That requires information, empathy, and wisdom.

College counselors already have to deal with the burden of the “Hollywood agent” Suburban Legend, the expectation from students and parents that we have the power to advocate for students and cut deals with colleges. That belief manifests itself in ways both understated (“You had a really good year”) and overstated (“Can you please call the dean and advocate for my daughter?”) I always went out of my way to confront that Suburban Legend in my presentation to parents, and it always provoked laughter, but nervous laughter. Parents prefer the myth to the truth.

In an article titled, “Fenced In by Delusions,” the adolescent psychologist Michael Thompson called the Hollywood agent Suburban Legend the “Relationship Delusion,” the belief that schools have special relationships with certain colleges such that a college counselor can just pick up the phone and call a buddy in the admissions office at Duke, and with a word (or a Jedi hand wave) get a student’s decision moved from deny to admit. He argues that the real value of college counseling lies not in relationships or salesmanship but rather in experience and knowledge in how the college process works.

Those qualities are harder to summon when decisions are less predictable. I used to tell my students that it was okay to be disappointed, but I didn’t want them to be shocked by decisions. But it is hard to prepare our students to have a balanced list when we ourselves are shocked or don’t know what to expect.

That makes it more difficult to put together lists of colleges to investigate for students. There is already an inherent challenge that, in trying to develop a list with balance, we will be seen as being “that” counselor who doesn’t believe in the student and undershoots in recommending schools. A friend of mine is the college counselor for my daughter’s step-daughter (which makes her my step-granddaughter, I suppose), and the girl recently shared the list that he had prepared for her. Whereas once upon a time the list would have been divided by “Reaches,” “Reasonables” and “Safeties” (a term that should be excised from the lexicon of college counseling), the list visually resembled a maze or puzzle. It had arrows running in multiple directions and categories within categories. I thought the counselor’s list captured the complexity of predicting and categorizing options exceptionally well.  

The larger question here is whether college admission offices and college counselors value predictability equally. That is actually part of a larger question about whether the college and high school sides of the desk are part of the same profession or are two different professions, perhaps a topic for another post.

Several years ago the Vice President for Enrollment at a public flagship university stated that he (or at least the university) wanted admission decisions to be unpredictable. They didn’t want students (or counselors) to know what to expect about the likelihood of admission.

Unpredictable is not the same thing as random. I have actually argued for many years that the highly-selective admissions process is a problem of distributive justice, of how to allocate a rare good or service (in this case college admission) fairly. The fairest process is through a lottery among all those applicants judged as capable of being successful. That idea has never caught on because it would mean that colleges and universities would have to give up their ability to craft a class. It is also the case that many students want to believe that they were admitted to an Ivy-plus not through good fortune, but because they had more merit or were more deserving than those not admitted. But if we see justice as one of the goals of the admissions process, random selection is fair in a way that the current process isn’t.

Being described as “predictable” can be an insult, a synonym for “formulaic” or “obvious.” But saying that predictability is important in admission decisions is not calling for certainty, but rather rationality. In his powerful speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney used the word “predictability” to describe the rules-based international order that the United States seems to be abandoning. Similarly, predictability in admission decisions is part of a larger order within college admission. 

Predictability is part of college admission’s obligation to the principle of transparency. Ethics is an expression of what should be the case, and what shouldn’t be the case is an admissions process that is mysterious and confusing for students–and for their college counselors.

Early Decision: End or Mend?

Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year! Whether you celebrated a Merry Christmas (no war on Christmas here), a Happy Hanukkah, a Joyous Kwanzaa,  or a Festive Festivus, I hope you had a “December to Remember.” Before exiting the holidays altogether, may we all take to heart the inspirational words from Tiny Tim (the Dickens character), who asked, “God bless us, every one” as well as those from Tiny Tim (the ukulele-playing novelty singer) who implored us to “tiptoe through the tulips.”

“Tis the season” has its own meaning for those of us in the world of college admissions and college counseling. It means early decision season, when many students receive notification from their first round of applications. Those that are successful win the opportunity to pay for a luxury brand as expensive as the cars that we should apparently buy as Christmas presents if we truly love our spouses. Others receive the proverbial lump of coal (hopefully “clean, beautiful” coal) and have to pivot before the end of the calendar year to complete another round of applications. Is the release of decisions days before Christmas cruel or an introduction to adulthood?

Just as the holidays are defined by traditions, including the lighting of the menorah during Chanukah, Black Friday shopping deals for Christmas, and the airing of grievances for Festivus, early decision season has its own traditions. It wouldn’t be early decision season without calls for colleges to abolish early decision programs altogether. 

The most recent addition to that list was a New York Times op-ed by former Education Department official Daniel Currell. The headline labelled early decision as a “racket.” and Currell called on Congress to pass legislation to “forbid binding early decision agreements” for any tax-exempt college or university receiving federal aid. He argued that early decision forces students to make “life-altering” decisions before they are ready and also “reinforces a cynical, transactional approach to higher education that cheapens both students and institutions.” He also suggested that ending early decision will result in “revitalizing a culture of learning on our campuses.” I’m all for that goal, but it is not clear how or why that ending early decision brings that about.

I happen to agree with many of Currell’s criticisms.  Early decision serves colleges’ self-interest well, which is why college officials are never part of the chorus proposing to abolish ED. It doesn’t serve the public interest nearly as well.

Early decision disproportionately benefits students from wealthy families and well-resourced schools. With an increasing number of elite colleges and universities admitting between 40-70 percent of their classes through early decision, students are being sent a coercive “if you don’t order now” message. And the early frenzy is at odds with the idea that the college search is a developmental odyssey through which young people find out who they are and what they care about.

I disagree with Currell on two points.  One is his call for Congress to legislate ED out of existence.  That is on one hand a throwback to a now defunct college admission tradition where members of the profession would cry out, “Why doesn’t NACAC do something about…? in response to any admission practice perceived to push up against ethical boundaries.  NACAC no longer has that power in the aftermath of the consent decree it signed with the government after the DOJ antitrust investigation of NACAC’s ethical code.  Is Congress a better traffic cop? Currell’s faith in Congress to pass legislation is either quaint, laughable, or a sign that he watches too many movies that appear on the Hallmark channel or that star Jimmy Stewart. Has 2025 taught us anything about whether we really need more government interference in the college admission process?

I am also far from convinced by his conclusion that early decision must be abolished altogether. That may qualify me as an optimist–or a fool.

I’d rather see us think about “mending, not ending” early decision. “Mend, not end” was the language used by Bill Clinton when he was President with regard to race-based affirmative action, back in the days before his current role as the poster child for Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche’s false flag operation to divert attention away from President Trump’s Epstein Files issues. 

What would mending early decision look like, and what would it require? There are three different components in early decision programs as currently constituted, and not all are equally problematic.

The first is the single-choice nature of early decision. For those of us who believe that college admission should be a matching process or about finding fit, early decision provides a mechanism for students to declare that one institution is their first choice, and for colleges and universities to know that a student wants to attend. The ability to declare a first choice eliminates the need for the guessing game and use of algorithms that take place under the rubric of “demonstrated interest.” If you believe that interest should be a legitimate factor in the admissions process (and I do), early decision provides the clearest way for students to communicate their interest and institutions to know that a student is seriously interested.

The more interesting, and more troubling, aspect of early decision is the binding commitment expected on the part of students. That, of course, is what makes ED appealing to colleges. Students, parents, and counselors are asked to sign off on an early decision agreement at the time of application, committing to enroll if admitted and to withdraw other applications. Interestingly enough, there is no comparable commitment from the college.

It’s not legally binding, and Currell argued that colleges are guilty of “substantial misrepresentation” in implying that the ED agreement is a legal contract.  I don’t agree with him on that point.  In my experience most families understand what they are getting into when they apply through early decision. Legal or not, colleges take the ED commitment seriously, treating it as a moral transgression. Recently Tulane punished students at schools where last year students reneged on the early decision commitment. Now that’s a moral transgression.

That use of the term “moral” raises a question that falls into ECA’s purview. Is the binding nature of early decision ethical?

The prima facie answer is yes, that both parties enter into a contract that, even if not legal, involves a commitment. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that keeping a promise is the paradigmatic ethical duty. Certainly as a counselor I would never encourage a student to apply early decision if they did not intend to live up to the commitment. But is asking the student to commit ethical?

My go-to definition of ethics is “Ethics begins where self-interest ends,” which I believe is a quote or paraphrase from Kant, although Google has also credited it to me. Early decision as currently constituted clearly serves colleges’ self-interest in at least two ways. It allows them to spread out the reading of applications, and the binding nature of early decision means that colleges know up front that almost any early decision applicant that they admit will enroll.  In reality the yield is not 100 percent; a presentation several years ago at the College Board Forum suggested that ED’s actual yield is closer to 90 percent. Kant’s definition doesn’t mean that actions done for self-interest are necessarily unethical, and in fact there is an ethical theory, ethical egoism, that says that what produces the most good for you is what is ethical.

With regard to the binding nature of early decision, the question is not that simple. (WARNING: We may be about to get into the weeds–if, that is, you don’t think we entered them already.) At what point does the commitment on the part of the student kick in? Is it when the application is submitted? If so, the student and family are being asked to commit without knowing what the cost is.  Is there any other instance of a transaction where that would be acceptable? Does the commitment kick in at the time of acceptance, or at least once the student has received a financial aid package?

Or should it be even later? Other major purchases (appliance, automobile) almost always have a time frame for the buyer to opt out. That’s for adults; shouldn’t it especially be the case for 17- and 18-year olds making a decision that is not only expensive but life-changing? 

For that matter, don’t colleges already implicitly recognize that early decision applicants aren’t committed by the fact that they require an enrollment deposit? If they believed that the student was already committed by virtue of having been admitted through early decision, there would be no need for a deposit to hold a place. 

Here’s a modest proposal to end early decision as a term and mend early decision as a practice:

1. Change “early decision” to “first choice admission.” Give students the option of designating one college or university as their first choice during the time frame now used for ED.

1. Rather than being binding, first choice admission would be designated as a “limited time offer.” Students admitted to their first choice would have several weeks to decide (probably by January 15) whether to accept the admission offer and financial aid package, but the acceptance offer would no longer be valid after the commitment date. A student who chose not to accept the first-choice offer could in theory continue to have an active application with the institution in regular decision.

Under this proposal colleges lose a little of the certainty and control they have with early decision, but they will still be able to manage enrollment through the regular admission process, knowing by mid-January how many spots they need to fill. Colleges that use early action or don’t have an early application option have been doing that for years. For students the new plan allows them to designate a first choice college and receive an earlier decision without the trauma and gamesmanship that currently mark binding early decision.

The proposal isn’t perfect because it doesn’t address the high percentages of early decision admits that many colleges are currently taking. The ethical principle here is the goal of a level playing field. Having an admission plan where it is four times easier to gain admission simply by when you apply is not a level playing field. It’s a side entrance to admission open to only some. And if you are admitting more than 50 percent through early decision, shouldn’t you be referring to that as “regular” admission?

Ethics is about ideals, about what we believe the college admissions process should represent.  It shouldn’t be just about institutional interest, but about the public interest. It’s easy to get caught up in things because they are traditions, but we need to reimagine our admission practices to reflect our values and not be hesitant to “tiptoe through the tulips” to devise a college admissions process that is better and more just.

So You Want to Be a Millionaire Master of Early Decision

One of comedian Steve Martin’s bits early in his career was “So You Want to Be a Millionaire.” The punch line was “First, get a million dollars.” The premise seems quaint today, when only billionaires are invited to the cool kids table or the White House ballroom. 

An article in last week’s New York Times seems to reframe Martin’s joke within a college admissions context.  Author Ron Lieber dubbed two enrollment managers, Satyagit Dattagupta at Northeastern and Jim Nondorf at the University of Chicago, as the “Millionaire Masters of Early Decision” based on their compensation packages and strategic use of ED.

Their salaries place them in rarified air in the enrollment management world, although their deals pale compared to the money being paid to football coaches who leave their teams for greener pastures right before the playoffs and those leaving in mid-season because they have been fired. Shouldn’t securing enrollment be more important to a university’s well-being than football? If you answer yes, you qualify as an optimist, maybe even a Pollyanna. In any event, more power to Dattagupta and Nondorf for being appropriately compensated for holding down the “hottest seat on campus.”

While the article is ostensibly a profile of the two admissions deans and an exploration of how Tulane (where Dattagupta worked prior to moving to Northeastern) and Chicago have pursued early decision as a path to enrollment success, it also raises some interesting larger questions and issues about the practice of college admission. 

How much of Tulane’s and Chicago’s success is attributable to early decision? Both have been beneficiaries of a larger trend extending from the beginning of the century until the onset of Covid where national universities saw a dramatic increase in application numbers, especially in the decade from 2009-2019.  Tulane and Chicago are part of a group of urban universities, once upon a time considered the next level below the Ivies, that saw the greatest increases in application numbers and selectivity. In the Ivies, Columbia and Penn saw the greatest increases, and other universities in the group include NYU, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Washington University, and Southern Cal. Chicago was the biggest mover, with application numbers increasing nearly seven times from 2000-2020, but the biggest factor was its adoption of the Common Application in 2007.

Tulane has received plenty of attention, scrutiny, and criticism for its use of early decision, and the Times article states “Its leaders knew that early decision could attract teenage true believers.” But are those who apply early decision “true believers” or more like Black Friday shoppers or those who respond to “and if you order now” commercials, looking for a deal and worried that time will expire? And does Tulane or any other institution care?

It is hard to know how much early decision benefits Chicago, because it refuses to reveal what its ED numbers are.  I find that lack of transparency indefensible.  Applicants have a right to know the rules of the game, and institutions have an obligation not only to “practice what they preach,” but also “preach what they practice.”

A couple of Chicago’s practices described in the article provide hints that early decision is very important at the university formerly known as “the place where fun goes to die” (my favorite unofficial school motto of all time).  One is its controversial contacting some deferred early action applicants inviting (or inciting) them to move their applications into the early decision 2 pool.  The other is a newer gimmick creating an “early” early decision option for students attending some summer programs.  For years I cautioned students (and parents) that they were mistaken believing that attending summer programs would give them a leg up as an applicant. Now that is apparently no longer the case at Chicago. I wouldn’t characterize that as “wrong,” just “sketchy.” It creates a new kind of “side door” admission.  All side doors to college admission are inherently dubious, but especially one that requires payment for a summer program. 

Tulane and Chicago are far from alone in heavy reliance on early decision as an enrollment strategy.  According to the Times article, there are 73 colleges and universities that admit more than 40 percent of their freshman classes through early decision.  That’s great for the universities as an enrollment management tool, but is it good for students and for society?

I want to believe that there is a role for early decision in a rational admission process, but what we have now doesn’t meet that low bar. It benefits students from schools with savvy college counselors and those who don’t need to compare financial aid offers. With so many institutions admitting a large part of their class early, it puts pressure on students to declare a first choice before many of them are ready.  It accelerates the application process, may increase stress and mental health issues, and it impedes the developmental value of the senior year of high school. 

For students hoping to attend a selective college or university, applying Early Decision maximizes their chances of admission.  Because applying early to one place in effect closes 

doors to other selective colleges, to quote the medieval knight from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “You must choose. But choose wisely.”  That’s not to say that admission to an elite college is a Holy Grail or that college choice is a life or death decision.  You probably won’t turn to dust if you choose “poorly.”

Years ago I heard a college president announce that his university would only admit students in early decision and early action, while his admission staff stood in the back of the room cringing because the deadlines for both had already passed.  I worry that the heavy investment in early decision could lead to the death of regular admission at many institutions.  We may already be there.  I recently saw an infographic prepared by Moore College Data showing nearly 25 prominent national colleges and universities that enroll between 1 and 4 percent of students who applied through a non-binding program. Applying ED may or may not be advantageous, but applying regular decision is clearly disadvantageous.  That fact, combined with the restrictive nature of early decision programs, makes me wonder if ED policies aren’t ripe for an antitrust complaint on behalf of students or other institutions.

The other issue raised by the article is whether the practice of college admission is a business or a profession. I asked that question in an article in the Journal of College Admission back in 2004. My answer then was that it is clearly a business, but hopefully more than just “the Sales Department of the Enrollment Management Division of Higher Education, Inc.”

The question is more pertinent today than it was then.  Colleges and universities face an existential crisis from the confluence of the demographic enrollment cliff and the federal government’s attack on higher education. That puts increasing pressure on drivers that generate revenue. Hitting enrollment goals is about more than filling classrooms and dorms. It’s about saving colleagues’ jobs at the institution and preserving the economic stability of the surrounding community.

There has always been a tension within college admission between sales and counseling, but I worry that tension is disappearing because college admission offices do relatively little counseling these days. Are college admission and college counseling part of the same profession or two different professions? Should NACAC rebrand itself as “NACACEM” (National Association for College Admission Counseling and Enrollment Management)?

I am happy for, and trying not to be envious of, colleagues who have achieved “Millionaire Master of Early Decision” status, but I hope that we will keep the counseling in college admission counseling.  The only way most of us will become millionaires is to follow Steve Martin’s advice, “First, get a million dollars,” but helping young people discover who they are and what they want from their lives is a far more satisfying reward.

The Raccoon in the Liquor Store: A Personal Reflection

We all desperately need a news story that will raise our spirits and make us feel good. Last week we had just such a story, except it happened to be about raising spirits and then feeling bad. The best story of the week was the report that a raccoon broke into a liquor store in Virginia, leaving a trail of broken spirits that broke his spirit. The raccoon binged on rum, vodka, eggnog, moonshine, and peanut butter whiskey, producing a result that many of us know all too well.  

While we don’t have confirmation of the raccoon’s gender, for the sake of argument we’ll refer to it as a “he.” He got drunk, then he got sick, and while he had the good sense to rush to the bathroom, he ultimately ended up passed out face down on the floor next to the commode 

It’s the kind of raccoon interest news story we need more of, especially because it has a happy ending.  The raccoon’s escapade set off the security alarms, bringing first police and then animal control 911 to the scene.  He was taken not to jail but to a shelter, and after a hangover lasting approximately an hour and a half (!) was released upon his own recognizance back into the wild, chastened but probably no wiser.

The news reports leave inquiring minds with more questions than answers.  How did the raccoon break in? Did he target the store because it had liquor or was that an unexpected surprise? Can there be such a thing as an expected surprise? What was his favorite spirit? 

Then there are more substantive questions.  Is peanut butter whiskey actually a thing? Smooth or crunchy? Skippy or Jif? What is the raccoon’s secret for curing a hangover?    And, for fans of alternative history, what if Otis, the town drunk in Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, had been a raccoon? How would Barney Fife, Floyd the barber, and Goober have dealt with that plot twist?

I’m as much a sucker for a good drunk raccoon story as the next guy, but this particular story was personal for me. 

The raccoon episode took place in Ashland, Virginia, the town where I went to college (Randolph-Macon) and then lived and worked after college. I don’t know that I ever crossed paths with this particular raccoon, but I have been to that very liquor store, or at least its previous location. 

On my 21st birthday my friends celebrated the occasion not by singing “Happy Birthday” but by asking “Will you buy me booze?” My first legal alcohol purchase took place at the Ashland ABC store. The old location was next door to the local newspaper office, and so I walked past it nearly every week after late nights laying out the college newspaper.  I never noticed any nocturnal critters running through the empty store.

In case you are wondering what a drunken raccoon in a liquor store has to do with college admission, other than taking place in a college town, at some (probably tenuous) level it is a case study in managing reputation and brand as well as how first impressions can impact perceptions.

I remember a trip with a couple of counselor friends to visit several college campuses.  One of the visits was to one of the nation’s best liberal-arts colleges. The campus was impressive and beautiful, but during a three-hour visit we never saw a single person talking to another human being, and that became our snap judgment on the institution’s culture and sense of community. At another campus on the same trip, one of my colleagues noticed a condom lying on the floor during our tour of a residence hall, and henceforth that became her word association answer for that university. Obviously both of those first impressions could have been totally off-base.

In the aftermath of this story, many will worry about what this will do to the reputation of raccoons as a species.  Raccoons are often characterized as criminals because of the bandit masks around their eyes and their propensity for rummaging through trash cans. Legendary hunter Elmer Fudd would have described them as “wascally” (and would also have called them “waccoons”). Will this news story reinforce that image or soften it, making them more empathetic and lovable?

As a former Ashland resident, I am concerned about how the raccoon in the liquor store will impact the town’s brand. I love small towns, but small towns are an endangered species across America, struggling to carve out a distinctive identity that will enable them to survive (the same is true of small colleges).

Ashland has navigated that landscape better than most.  It is a bedroom community for its larger neighbor Richmond, but Ashland has maintained its small-town feel through annual events like its “Olde Time Holiday Parade” and a community variety show.  It also benefits from being a college town and from the fact that it is located adjacent to Interstate 95 and that the main north-south Amtrak route bisects Railroad Avenue, one of Ashland’s two main streets along with England Street, which doesn’t connect Ashland with England. The newest addition to Ashland’s downtown is a statue of Secretariat, the greatest race horse ever who was born a few miles outside the town. Ashland’s greatest burden is its own presumption, describing itself as the “Center of the Universe.”

So is there a possibility that the “drunk raccoon in the liquor store” narrative becomes what Ashland is known for?  The story got national publicity, including coverage by Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live.  How many small towns would die for that kind of publicity?

I hope that Ashland will not shy away from its “brush with greatness” but rather embrace the raccoon story. The animal protection program has already raised more than $150,000 from the sales of drunk raccoon-themed swag. There are two simple steps I hope Ashland will consider. One is to revise the town motto. “Center of the Universe” is a hard claim to live up to, but there is now ample evidence for Ashland’s claim as “Drunken Raccoon Center of the Universe.” 

Even better, the town should pair the Secretariat statue with a companion statue featuring a drunken raccoon passed out face down next to a toilet. That would not only turn Ashland into a tourist destination, but might increase East Coast train travel enough to make Amtrak profitable.  

ECA Book Club: Dream School

I have long contended that the college admissions process is a great topic for a best-selling non-fiction book.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I made this argument because I hoped to be the one to write such a book.)

With two million families navigating the transition to higher education every year, there is a built-in and replenishing market consisting of families thirsting to understand a process that is mysterious and anxiety-producing. Going to college may be the closest thing our culture has to a coming-of-age rite of passage, and college admission is also the playing field for public policy issues including access to opportunity, affordability, merit, fairness, and the role of sports.

So why hasn’t the great book about college admission been written up to now?  It may be because “the market” for such a book may be in fact three different markets, seeking different genres of college books.

There is the “secret handshakes of getting into Harvard” genre, typically written by a recent Ivy alum whose expertise consists of having been accepted themselves or a former admission officer who spent two years as a junior staff member at one institution.  Of course, if there were secrets and they were published in a book, they would no longer be secret, negating their value.  In the selective admissions process, the rarer a skill or quality, the more valuable it is, and the more people who possess knowledge or talent, the less valuable those become. 

A second genre consists of college guides and rankings.  Each fall we have “America’s Best Colleges,” the U.S. News & World Report publication that has outlived the news magazine itself and that reputedly outsells the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Other books in the genre include The Fiske Guide to Colleges, Colleges That Change Lives, and The Princeton Review Best (however many it is this year) Colleges. All are predictable.  The descriptions in Fiske and Princeton Review will never vary significantly from a college’s stereotype, while the U.S. News rankings, based on assumptions that are questionable and a weighting formula that is mysterious, will always be topped by Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.

The third genre, generally the most interesting, are books that look at college admission from a big picture lens, identifying broader trends and issues.  Typically written by journalists, they often attempt to debunk the infatuation with prestige and name colleges, as in Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be. A sub-genre is the “year in college admission” book, exemplified by Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers and Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets in and Why. 

Selingo’s new book, Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right For You, has received more attention than any college admissions book I remember.  It debuted at number 7 on the New York Times best seller list, and Selingo has been making the rounds promoting the book in major media outlets ever since its publication.

Dream School is a worthy addition to the cohort of books about college admission.  The breadth and depth of research underlying the book is truly impressive, and Jeff Selingo is widely-known and well-connected within higher education. I learned that first-hand in 2020 when he and I co-presented at a conference of college presidents.  I will always remember the date because it was barely a month before Covid invaded the country (not to mention the rest of the world). While riding the Washington Metro that weekend, I noticed a woman wearing a face mask, and for the first time I wondered if Covid was something I needed to worry about.  Little did I know.

Jeff was clearly the draw and I an afterthought. If we had been professional wrestlers, he would have been Hulk Hogan, while my role was to be a jobber like the Brooklyn Brawler or Iron Mike Sharpe. If we had been Fox News hosts, he would be Sean Hannity to my Alan Colmes. The person organizing the session seemed surprised, perhaps even disappointed, that Jeff Selingo knew who I was and that we largely agreed regarding the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.  

The essential argument in Dream School is that dream schools may not live up to the dream, with numerous anecdotes from students and parents demonstrating that Plan B ended up being a better choice than they would have imagined.  The book is divided into three major sections plus an appendix with a list of 75 “New” Dream Schools.

The title of part one, “Why Your Assumptions About Elite Colleges Are All Wrong,” is self-explanatory, showing why the prevailing wisdom about elite colleges is based on misconceptions. He argues that Plan B often turns out to be Plan A, sometimes by necessity due to the uber-selectivity at the top end of the pecking order and other times because your backup option ends up providing a better experience.

I find the second section, “Mapping the New Admissions Landscape,” to be the strongest part of the book. Selingo tracks some of the changes in the college admissions world since Covid, including a migration to public flagship universities, especially in the South, and a changing economic landscape that is causing families to choose value over prestige. One particularly memorable part of this section was a tutorial from Rick Bischoff (about to move from Case Western to Chapman) about how Case uses tuition discounting as part of its enrollment management operation.

Part Three, “What to Look For in Your Dream School,” is the how-to section of the book, providing advice on sources of information, the importance of relationships with faculty and peers as part of the college experience, and how to evaluate the return on investment in terms of employment after college. The most compelling story in this section is the demise of Birmingham Southern as a cautionary tale about the rapidly changing financial landscape for colleges and universities. Helping our students and families understand that some colleges are strapped financially, eliminating faculty and staff positions and majors, is a new challenge for those of us doing college counseling. My daughter’s stepdaughter just asked me to review a list of colleges she is considering. She described my response, which included that warning about financial stability, as “thorough,” a polite way of saying that I gave an essay answer to her short-answer question. That will probably not surprise regular ECA readers.

For all that I like about Dream School, there were two things that didn’t sit as well with me, making me wonder if they were part of Jeff Selingo’s original vision for the book or were negotiated or imposed by the publisher.  I reached out to Selingo to ask, but received a response from his office that he is busy promoting the book and probably wouldn’t be able to answer.

One is the list of “new” dream schools. The genesis of the book seems to be requests from parents to provide a list of colleges that are good but not generally considered “elite.” He explains his methodology well enough for his lists of “Hidden Values,” “Breakout Regionals,” and “Large Leaders,” although an earlier chapter describes his frustrations at identifying and weighing what data points are relevant in curating the list.  

There may be some irony in a book that starts by arguing against fixating on “name” colleges ending by providing an expanded list of “name” colleges.  Certainly the emails many of us received following publication of the book trumpeting some institution being recognized as a “Dream School” bore a remarkable resemblance to the emails we receive each fall about a college being ranked by U.S. News.  

Of the schools on Selingo’s list, he deserves credit for acknowledging his ties to two of them (Arizona State and Ithaca), and there is no reason to suspect that either made the list because of those ties.  Of more concern, the New York Times just reported that another of Selingo’s Dream Schools, Montclair State in New Jersey, is essentially abolishing academic departments as part of an organizational restructuring.  That is either a revolutionary new direction or a warning sign for higher education, but it is also a reminder that the aforementioned now-defunct Birmingham Southern was one of the original Colleges That Change Lives. 

My other concern has to do with the title.  Is it misleading given the thrust of the book? I have been told that publishers are not willing to publish a college book that doesn’t play into the perceived market seeking insight into gaining admission into elite colleges.  “Dream School” as a title seems designed to catch the eye of that audience, and yet the book itself argues for redefining  the “dream school” concept away from prestige and toward the quality of the experience.

Jeff Selingo deserves congratulations for both the book itself and the acclaim it has received.  Both personally and professionally, I hope the success of Dream School will inspire the publication of other college admission books.   

LSU's Trump Card

What do corn dogs, Shakespeare, LSU football, and World Peace have in common? For all of you who lay awake at night pondering that question, we have answers.

This fall college football’s coaching carousel turned into a Tilt-a-Wheel, where you are spun around and turned upside down and filled with regret about the corn dogs and funnel cake you just ate.  It used to be rare to fire a coach in the middle of the season, and yet this fall a record twelve FBS coaches were replaced before the end of October..

That list includes two names that no one would have foreseen at the beginning of the season.  Penn State came into the fall as a leading national championship contender, but coach James Franklin, already under fire for his team’s inability to win big games, found himself out of a job when they couldn’t win the little games either. He has since landed on his feet at Virginia Tech.

LSU fired coach Brian Kelly midway through his fourth year in Baton Rouge, the day after a home loss to Texas A&M punctuated by Aggie fans doing mock cheers in the near empty LSU student section. LSU’s fan base lost patience with Kelly when he failed to follow in the footsteps of his three predecessors by winning a national championship.  

If Shakespeare were to write a tragedy centered on college football, Brian Kelly would be a good choice as protagonist.  Kelly is the poster child for the coaching version of the Peter Principle, that combination of hubris and restlessness that prevents coaches from appreciating how good they have it, leading them in an on-going odyssey until they land in an environment where they are no longer successful. 

Kelly’s coaching journey has revealed both his strengths and tragic flaws. He won two national championships at Grand Valley State (a name straight out of a Chip Hilton novel), but at Cincinnati chose the banquet celebrating an undefeated season and Sugar Bowl bid as the perfect time to announce that he was leaving immediately for Notre Dame. 

His Notre Dame tenure began with genuine tragedy (a student filming practice was killed when a hydraulic lift overturned in 60 mph winds) and ended with Kelly announcing that he was taking the job at LSU to compete for a national championship, something he implied wasn’t possible at Notre Dame.  In a plot twist filled with Shakespearian irony, Notre Dame made it to the championship game last year while LSU missed the playoffs altogether.  

The saga has only gotten more juicy since Kelly’s firing. Enter Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, the Falstaffian comic relief if this was a play and not real life.  LSU football is a key part of Landry’s political agenda, and last fall he arranged to have a live Bengal tiger on the sidelines of the Alabama game. 

Landry inserted himself into the drama over Kelly’s firing during a press conference on another subject.  He railed against agents and the extravagant buyout packages attached to coaching contracts, one of several tawdry trends that expose the increasing dissonance between college football and higher education. There is something wrong with a system where college athletes can’t afford to turn pro because they are making too much money playing in college, and where the highest paid employee in the entire state is a football coach.

At that point the governor seemed like a voice of reason. But, channeling Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friends.” Landry went on to say that he would trust Donald Trump to hire LSU’s next coach more than Athletic Director Scott Woodward. It is not clear if that was intended as a compliment for the President or an insult to the Athletic Director, but 24 hours later Woodward was no longer employed at LSU.

Depending on your perspective, Donald Trump choosing the next LSU football coach is either intriguing or terrifying.  If one’s strengths are also weaknesses, his strengths are his willingness to hire outside the box.  Who else would appoint a suspected Russian propagandist as Director of National Intelligence, a Director of Health and Human Services who collects roadkill and swims in sewage-contaminated creek water, and a Fox News host (weekend, no less) to oversee the nation’s defense? Also, like Brian Kelly, the President knows first hand how quickly fans turn on you and stop tolerating your personal baggage once you stop winning.

LSU wants its next coach to be a winner.  The ideal candidate would have head coaching experience, be offensive-minded, and have familiarity with the SEC.  They want a “name,” with Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin the leading target.

Donald Trump’s priorities are similar. He doesn’t like losers, and he likes hiring those who are offensive. He values loyalty more than competence, and he is a sucker for guys who look good on TV.  He also has a thing for bad boys with a history of alcohol and sexual harassment issues.

What would a Donald Trump coaching search look like? Given what we know about his cabinet choices, here is a list of candidates a Trump coaching search might produce.

Current and former coaches:

Nick Saban–LSU says it’s looking for a “name,” and this is the name they’re looking for. They want to find the next Nick Saban, but might take the original.  Would Nick Saban give up shilling for Aflac and VRBO to return to LSU? He already has the backing of powerful alums such as Shaquille O’Neal, star of “Shazam” who played basketball at LSU.

Urban Meyer–the only coach other than Saban to win national championships at multiple schools. Perhaps more important, has served as a Fox Sports commentator. Still young enough for another run, but how would a coach named Urban play in rural Louisiana?

Tommy Tuberville–perhaps the inside candidate.  Coached in the SEC and has the loyalty thing down pat.  Knows X’s and O’s well enough (just not the other letters of the alphabet). Overmatched in his current job, so may be ready for a new opportunity.

Joe Moglia–Trump has a fondness for hiring billionaires, and the former Coastal Carolina coach also served as chief executive at TD Ameritrade. 

Hugh Freeze, Bobby Petrino–both have SEC experience and both fit the bad boy model.

Lee Corso–Could wear LSU Tiger head while coaching.

Brian Kelly–Yes, he was just fired, but bringing him back as his own replacement would be Trumpian.  His contempt for the press might make White House press secretary a better fit.

Some Other Candidates

Herschel Walker–a longtime Trump favorite, dating back to the USFL and Celebrity Apprentice.  No coaching experience, but won a national championship in the SEC as a player. His only downside is that he might be labelled a DEI hire.

Gary Busey–another Celebrity Apprentice alum, has played a football coach in a movie.

Billy Bob Thornton–played a football coach in “Friday Night Lights.” Better Southern accent than Brian Kelly, and “Sling Blade” character evokes memories of Ed Orgeron.

Mark Sanchez–former NFL quarterback has not coached, but has been a Fox NFL analyst and contestant on “The Masked Singer.”  Currently unemployed, and pending felony charges for assault could move him up the list of candidates.

Joe Exotic–If a live Bengal tiger is going to be on the sideline, the Dr. Oz of tigers would be a reassuring hire.

King Alexander–the former president of LSU understands Louisiana politics and the LSU fan base. Naming him would also troll the No Kings movement.

Mike Johnson–LSU alum who knows Louisiana politics and is a master of shutdown defense mechanisms.  Has been on vacation all fall so wouldn’t have to give up current job, although might want to.

Marco Rubio–Trump’s go-to whenever a job needs to be filled.

“Bark Boy” or “The Guy Caught Stealing Cotton Candy from a Child on the Stadium Cam”–Both made Allstate, if not All-State, and clearly no regard for norms.  

All of those are viable candidates, but is it possible that President Trump has already hinted at whom he would support for the LSU job?.  He has recently talked multiple times about his desire to “promote world peace.” Most observers have interpreted those comments as part of Trump’s relentless campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize, but what if he is referring to not “world peace” the concept, but rather the athlete formerly known as Metta World Peace? 

Metta World Peace checks a lot of boxes. He is a fighter, having served the longest suspension in NBA history for his role in basketball’s equivalent of January 6, the “Malice in the Palace” riot. He has been convicted of domestic abuse, and has appeared on not one but multiple reality shows (Dancing with the Stars, Celebrity Big Brother, The Masked Singer) as well as serving as executive producer of his own. About the only drawbacks for World Peace’s candidacy are that he endorsed RFK Jr. for President in 2024 and his lack of football experience.  The first might be a dealbreaker, but Trump has never let a lack of experience or competence cloud his hiring judgement.

Both world peace and World Peace may be longshots, but which is more likely? You may scoff all you want, but when you see the announcement on Truth Social, remember you heard it here first. 

Tulane Highway*

* The title is a play on an album title and song by the band Pure Prairie League

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on November 3, 2025)

Tulane University’s admissions office has banned students from four high schools from applying to Tulane through early decision this fall, according to reporting from The New York Times. Though three of the schools have not been publicly identified, the one-year ban (or “suspension”) for Colorado Academy comes after a student from that school backed out of the early decision agreement they signed when they applied to Tulane last year.  

For those who aren’t card-carrying college admission geeks like I am, early decision is an application option and enrollment management strategy in which students apply earlier and promise to enroll if admitted, in exchange for receiving an earlier decision offer. The binding nature of early decision means that a student can apply to only one college through early decision.

In most cases students applying through early decision are asked, along with a parent and their school counselor, to sign an early decision agreement attesting to their understanding of the commitment to enroll if admitted. Early decision is in no way legally binding, but colleges take the early-decision commitment seriously, and are appalled and disgusted when students back out of the commitment. The one agreed-upon reason for backing out of an early decision commitment is when an institution can’t meet a student’s financial need (as determined by the college’s financial aid formula, not what a family thinks it can pay).  

I have had admission deans tell me that they would hold it against a school whose students did not follow through on the early decision commitment, but Tulane is the first college I’ve seen publicly penalize schools. The Tulane ban raises some interesting and thorny ethical questions.

The most obvious is whether it is permissible to punish students in the class of 2026 for offenses committed by students in the class of 2025.  Retribution may be fashionable these days, but punishing the innocent because you have no way to punish the guilty is not retribution, just wrong.  

But that may be just me.  The National Association for College Admission Counseling has an “Ethical Dilemmas in College Admission” page on its website that includes a hypothetical case study in which a student wants to back out of an early decision commitment. Among the suggested advice for counselors is to caution the student and parents that withdrawing could have negative consequences for future applicants from the school. Even if that might be the case, that’s terrible advice from NACAC, making it seem like colleges punishing future applicants is acceptable and normal.

At least Tulane is being transparent with its early decision ban for the schools.  As bad as that is, there is a scenario that would be worse, if Tulane ostensibly welcomed early decision applications from the four schools when it had no intention of admitting any of them.

The Times article didn’t provide any details about the circumstances leading up to the ban for the four schools, but Tulane’s position seems to be, as the Times paraphrased it, that the schools “failed to uphold the expectations of the early decision agreement.”  Let’s examine that claim a little more closely.

What is a school’s responsibility in advising students wanting to apply early decision? As a counselor, I always advised students and parents that it was a binding commitment, not to be taken lightly.  I don’t remember any of my students backing out of an early decision commitment, but on several occasions I had students who told me they planned to apply early decision to one college on Friday, and then a different college on Monday. My response was that they were not ready to apply early decision at all if their thinking was that fluid. 

It’s hard for me to imagine how the schools would have failed in their responsibilities.  The counselor part of the early decision agreement states, “I have advised the student to abide by the early decision commitment outlined above.” As long as they have done that, are they responsible for policing the student’s actions? The school could withhold sending transcripts to other colleges, but in today’s litigious environment could face legal action from parents for doing so.  I have learned that parents who are lawyers are especially skeptical of the early decision commitment. If the student wanted to renege on early decision, I would require the student to inform the college. An applicant owes the college that courtesy. Beyond that, schools can’t be expected to enforce early decision.

There are several other issues that deserve scrutiny.  One is Tulane’s claim in a statement to the Times that “A last-minute withdrawal without explanation unfairly impacts other applicants who may have missed opportunities due to the limited number of early-decision offers a university can make.” Excuse me, my BS detector is going off.  Tulane has no restriction that I am aware of in the number of students it can admit through early decision, as suggested by the fact that, in recent years, it’s admitted more than 60 percent of its freshman class using early decision, and it has other opportunities to make up for any loss through early decision 2, early action and regular decision.

There is also an interesting philosophical question about the nature of the early decision binding commitment.  At what point does the binding commitment kick in? Or, more to the point, when does Tulane believe that the commitment is binding?

The common understanding across the world of college admission is that students take on the binding commitment either as soon as they sign the early decision agreement, or at least as soon as they are accepted.  Tulane’s application instructions state that early decision is binding and that students are expected to withdraw all other applications once accepted and issued a financial aid offer, but there are two other points in the same instructions that bring into question whether Tulane really believes that students are committed as soon as accepted.  

The first bullet point in Tulane’s instructions for early decision defines it as an “application timeline for students whose first choice is Tulane and who are prepared to enroll soon after (italics mine) being admitted and receiving a financial aid offer.”  The use of the phrase “soon after” suggests that there is a period of time after acceptance when the student is not yet committed. 

In addition, Tulane expects accepted early decision applicants to submit a $1,000 enrollment deposit by January 15. Asking for a deposit is not unique to Tulane, but if the student is committed to attend Tulane as soon as they sign the early decision agreement or upon acceptance, why require an enrollment deposit? If a student is accepted early decision but doesn’t then make the deposit, have they broken the commitment or does that commitment only kick in with the deposit? Am I the only one who sees a contradiction here? (The answer may well be yes, and it wouldn’t be the first time.)

The broader issue here has to do with early decision itself.  Early decision has been around since the 1950s, and it’s controversial.  The early decision “bargain” can be argued to benefit both colleges and students, but it is far more beneficial to institutions as a way to manage enrollment.  It doesn’t work well for students for whom financial aid is essential or those who come from schools without savvy college counselors who understand the early decision “game.”

Tulane is the poster child for how colleges and universities use early decision to manage both enrollment and prestige.  Its admit rate has declined precipitously in recent years largely through strategic use of early decision.  According to its most recent Common Data Set, about 63 percent of the freshman class was admitted through early decision (that’s assuming a 100 percent yield rate for early decision admits).  That may actually understate the impact of early decision. Another 20 percent of the class was admitted off the wait list (the CDS shows the number of students admitted off the wait list but does not break it down in terms of enrollments, but there are universities that only admit students off the waitlist if they know they will enroll, almost a form of “early decision 3.”)

The heavy use of early decision means that there is a huge variance in the admit rates for early decision and other admissions plans at Tulane (it also has non-binding early action). According to the Common Data Set, the admit rate for early decision was 59 percent, compared with 11 percent for all other options.  That’s not new.  A 2022 Inside Higher Ed article reported that Tulane had admitted only 106 students in regular admission. In any case, the numbers suggest that not applying early decision is hugely disadvantageous at Tulane, which makes the ban even more punitive.

I am trying to be sympathetic to Tulane’s hurt feelings over being dissed by students they admitted in early decision, but I would hope the university’s admissions office will take to heart the wisdom of Gilbert and Sullivan as well as the Ramones and “let the punishment fit the crime.”

A Pointy-Headed Compact

Back in the 1960s the favorite target of Alabama governor George Wallace during his presidential campaigns was “pointy-headed bureaucrats with thin briefcases full of guidelines.” One can only imagine what he would think about the heads and briefcases of the new breed of bureaucrats who devised the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”

The Compact is the latest shot across the bow in the Trump administration’s assault on higher education. On October 1 nine universities were sent letters with a memo listing conditions for institutions to receive priority in federal funding.  

The nine universities reportedly include three members of the Ivy League (Brown, Dartmouth, Penn); three other prestigious private universities (MIT, Southern Cal, Vanderbilt); and three flagship public universities (Arizona, Virginia, and UT-Austin). Why those nine were selected (or targeted) is not clear, but in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, May Mailman, senior adviser for special projects at the White House, described them as “potential good actors,” with a “president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education.” Unlike all the other universities that don’t care about “higher-quality education,” presumably.

Calling the memo a “compact” is an interesting choice of words, a potential triple-entendre.  Is it a compact as in “formal agreement,” a play on the verb that means compress or squash, or a device that attempts to cover up that which is ugly?

Some of the conditions laid out in the compact, such as freezing tuition for five years and ending grade inflation, are hard to oppose.  Others, such as the mandate to limit international students to no more than 15 percent of the student body, will spark debate about whether they serve or hurt the national interest.  

Still others seem to contradict themselves.  The compact calls on universities to “Ensure a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus” but also requires them to shut down departments that punish, belittle or spark violence against conservative ideas.  Does that mean that non-conservative ideas are still fair game for punishment or belittling? Under the conditions laid out in the memo, institutions wouldn’t take stands on societal issues and would restrict individual employees from exercising their free speech rights to express political opinions.

I’ll leave it to others to analyze the entirety of the compact.  I want to focus on and dig deeper into the very first bullet point in the compact, “Equality in Admissions.” 

The memo takes aim at what it calls “discriminatory” admissions policies, stating “Treating certain groups as categorically incapable of performing–and therefore in need of preferential treatment–perpetuates a dangerous badge of inferiority, destroys confidence, and does nothing to identify or solve the most pressing challenges for aspiring young people.”  I hope that statement is intended to call out those who want to label certain groups of faculty hires or admitted students as beneficiaries of DEI policies. 

Alas, the more likely intent is to cast aspersions on efforts to increase access and opportunity for traditionally underrepresented groups. Colleges are certainly open to criticism to the extent that they reverse engineered the admission process to sculpt classes with a particular mix of students, the essence of Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion in SFFA v Harvard, but accusing them of believing that “certain groups” are “categorically” incapable of “performing” is a gross misrepresentation, a straw man argument. A more reasonable interpretation would be that colleges believed that the metrics used in admission didn’t accurately predict how “certain groups” were capable of performing. 

According to the memo, universities will not consider the following factors, or proxies for them: sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations.  It allows “due exceptions” for religiously-affiliated and single-sex institutions, presumably only for religion and gender rather than having free rein with the other factors.

The compact calls for admission decisions “based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the university website.” That would seem to be a veiled call for universities to adopt a formulaic admission process rather than using holistic review. Holistic review can certainly be maddenly frustrating for applicants (and counselors) because there is no way to know why one applicant is admitted and another isn’t, but most people don’t believe that personal qualities should be irrelevant in admission.

The notion that admission decisions can somehow be measured against objective criteria reveals a thorough misunderstanding of selective admission. Take grade point average as one example.  How do you compare two identical GPAs for students coming from different high schools with different grading scales and grade distributions? More to the point, say you have two students from the same high school with the same transcript and same GPA. One worked hard to produce her grades while the other succeeded with minimal effort. Which of the two has more merit, the one who is maximizing her ability or the one who has fuel left in the tank? And which is more deserving? Are those the same thing?  Those questions become much more complex when dealing with applicant pools where three times as many students may be superbly qualified for admission as there are spaces available.

The most perplexing aspect of the section related to admission is the requirement that “institutions shall have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT, ACT, CLT).  What’s behind the reverence for testing?  Has the College Board invested in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture? Are there SAT score reports in the Epstein files?

The compact’s focus on test scores assigns an authority to standardized testing that is unwarranted. The SAT was originally marketed as a test of aptitude, but today SAT is a brand rather than an acronym. The appeal of both the SAT and ACT has always been their false precision, a way to simply categorize a complex individual as a “1350” or a “29.”  But the standard error of measurement (approximately 30 points for the SAT and 3 for the ACT) means that there is little meaningful statistical difference across a range of scores.

That precision is further compromised by the impact of test prep.  To return to our GPA examples from above, if two students have identical scores on the SAT, but one spent hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on coaching to achieve that score while the other didn’t, do the scores mean the same thing? Which student possesses more merit? 

The SAT was originally designed to assist, in conjunction with high school grades, predicting freshman-year college grades. Nicholas Lemann’s book, The Big Test, points out that as early as 1960 the president of the College Board stated that the SAT should be used as a tool for guidance, not selection. Today there is debate about how much predictive value is added by test scores. Many colleges and universities see test scores as having little added value, whereas Dartmouth returned to requiring scores because internal research determined that test scores were more accurate predictors of student performance at Dartmouth than grades.

The testing mandate implies that test-optional admission policies are proxies for race.  But the test-optional movement is more than 50 years old, dating back to its origins at places like Bates and Bowdoin.  The rapid growth in test-optional colleges was driven by students not being able to test during the pandemic.  Many institutions discovered that test scores didn’t make much of a difference in whom, or how well, they admitted.

The ultimate issue with having colleges require all applicants to submit standardized test scores is that it restricts freedom for both institutions and individuals. At the same time we’re no longer requiring children to be vaccinated against things like measles and whooping cough in order to go to school, we’re going to force them to take admission tests to go to college? Colleges and universities, particularly those that are private, should have the freedom to determine what their admission requirements will be. Students should have the right to decide whether or not to submit test scores.  

While we’re on the subject, requiring test scores from all applicants qualifies as an unfunded mandate as well as a tax on families with children applying to college. If the federal government is going to mandate testing, it should pay for the tests.

Not only are the new breed of bureaucrats are far more pointy-headed than their predecessors, they also just don’t get the point.

The College Recommendation as Literary Genre: A Not So Modest Proposal

For the past five years I have participated in a weekly Zoom/Microsoft Teams call with four friends from the profession.  It started during Covid as a way to connect with and check on each other in the midst of professional and personal isolation, and it has since become one of the cornerstones of my week.

From week to week the conversations range from challenges in our personal lives to the changing college admission landscape to deep concerns and fears about the direction of our country.  We have shared with each other life transitions, moves, job changes,  and battles with illness in ourselves and in our loved ones.

Currently one member of the chat is living through a milestone that several of us have already passed, the last fall of writing recommendation letters. I am probably not as empathetic and supportive as I should be.  Given how much time and energy I devoted to writing rec letters throughout my career, and how much satisfaction I felt when I captured a student’s story, I don’t miss that part of my life at all.  I don’t know if that means I was not as devoted a counselor as I would like to believe or that when the game ended I left it all on the field (or the desk).  As I have told several former colleagues, I could claim that I miss it, but my school has an honor code.

Watching my friend live through the last rec writing season has led me to reflect again on the recommendation letter as art form and college admission convention.

Years ago I received a phone call from the Director of Admission at a flagship state university in the South.  He had the admission file of one of my students on his desk, along with a note from one of his staff members who had read the application with a single word, “Why?”.  He went on to say that he had read my rec letter and thought he should give the student a chance.  I kept waiting for the “but.”  He finally said the best he could was offer the student summer admission.  I was ecstatic, until he closed the conversation by asking, “Have you ever thought about being a creative writer?”

That question does not necessarily suggest that recommendations are akin to fiction, but rather that they are an art form.  The recommendation letter serves several purposes in the admission process.  It is part legal brief, making the case for a student.  It is part character sketch or word portrait, providing a glimpse into the human being behind the application.  And, if we think of a transcript as a primary text, the rec letter serves as the scholarly footnotes that provide context and explanation.

College counselors, particularly at independent schools, find themselves in a loop of cognitive dissonance existing between internal and external constituencies.  When I was first hired many years ago, it seemed like the only relevant college counseling skill was the ability to write “The Letter,” being able to generate novelesque prose capable of captivating admission readers and sweeping a student’s application into the admit pile. The recommendation letter is certainly part of a school’s ethos/branding about knowing their students.  But the impact of rec letters has become a victim of college admission’s “dirty little secret,” the reality that colleges spend far less time reading a student’s application (including rec letters) than students spend preparing the application.  

Do rec letters even get read these days, other than a perfunctory skim? One of the participants on the weekly call recalls working as director of admission at a college where, out of a concern for fairness, counselor letters were removed from application files prior to reading.  He also referenced a colleague who had worked at several Ivies stating that a counselor letter hadn’t impacted a single admission decision during her tenure.

That’s depressing for those of us who spend hours each fall trying to tell our students’ stories. At the same time, rec letters are one of the college admission conventions that expand the gap between students with privilege and those without.  The artificial elephant in the room is AI, which has the potential to allow counselors with huge student loads to craft more personal rec letters more efficiently.  AI also brings with it its own set of ethical challenges (a topic for another time).

The real question is whether colleges should continue to ask for recommendation letters.  If you believe in holistic review and that the more information about a student, the better, then yes.  But requiring recommendation letters also seems like a relic from the days when applying to college was comparable to applying for membership in an elite social club.

The eternal debate regarding recommendations within college admission is about length.  I know some legendary counselors who were renowned for writing three-page, single-spaced letters.  Readers of ECA know all too well that brevity is a challenge for me, but I tended to write a page and a half.  Many admission reps think anything more than a page is too much, leading to creative formatting. One friend admitted to using seven-point font and narrow margins to keep her letters to one page.

The most popular antidote to concerns about length and whether our letters are read is the bullet point recommendation, which reimagines the rec letter as concise memo rather than flowing literary essay.  I know a number of colleagues who have moved to the bullet point format, and their argument is that any piece of writing should ultimately be guided by the needs of the reader.  I was either too set in my ways or too in love with my own verbiage to adapt the bullet point rec format, but I did move in recent years to “front-loading” my rec letters.  The first paragraph would seek to make the case for the student, serving as an abstract or executive summary in case the admission officer didn’t read the whole letter. The rest of the letter would flesh out the case, and I rarely worried about coming up with a catchy conclusion.

There is one other possible literary genre that might be a way to make recommendations shorter and more punchy. It’s revolutionary, perhaps even insane, but has anyone considered writing rec letters in the style of the Truth Social posts popularized by President Trump? (For those of you recoiling at the suggestion because of your political views, let me observe in the name of “both sidesism” that California governor Gavin Newsom has also found the format to his liking.) 

What are the keys to writing a Truth Social rec letter?  I’m not a subscriber to Truth Social, so as James Taylor says about Mexico, “I’ve never really been, so I don’t really know,” but here is what I’ve been able to gather about some of the necessary literary devices.

1. The recommendation is only partly about the student.  It’s also about you.

Use the opening paragraph (if you even have paragraphs) to establish your credentials.  This is not the time to be modest. For those who believe that it’s not polite to brag, come join us in the 21st century. Have you been described as a “stable genius,” even if only by yourself? Do you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? Did you ace your cognitive exam? Did you have an uncle who taught at an elite university? The legendary character actor Walter Brennan played a character whose catch phrase was “No brag, just fact.” He was prescient, because today there is a thin line between the two.

1. Employ a stream of consciousness narrative style.

The more spontaneous, the more genuine the letter will seem.  Don’t worry about 

spelling and grammar conventions.  The best way to accomplish this is to compose when the mind is most unfiltered, between 1 and 5 a.m. 

1. KISS (Keep it simple, Sir)

Throw that thesaurus away, and employ a simple and direct vocabulary. Pay homage to Strunk and White by avoiding needless words. In my freshman college English class (Honors, I’ll point out, in keeping with rule 1), the professor took off a point for every word he deemed needless in our essays.  We all started off with a grade of 100, and many of us ended up with a negative grade.

1. For emphasis, use plenty of…capitalization and be creative with………. ellipses.

Admit………….NOW!

1. Offer explanations or excuses where necessary.  Examples:

“The teacher who gave him a D in Chemistry was a LOW IQ individual!”

“His suspensions for cheating and assaulting a teacher are FAKE NEWS!”

1. Be appreciative of your reader’s time.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

The Truth Social template for college recommendations may be an idea whose time has not come, but it’s worth considering. It would certainly make your recs stand out. If anyone has already adopted this approach, I’d love to know.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Bennington "Late Decision" Update

Back in the spring ECA reported on a new admission initiative from Bennington College referred to as “Late Decision.” Introduced in March, the Late Decision option was intended for students not happy with their options and interested in filing a late application. Students had to apply by April 8, received admission decisions on April 17, and had until May 1 to enroll. Bennington was hoping to enroll 15 additional students through the plan.

So how did that turn out? At the end of August, Bennington issued a press release announcing the results for its Class of 2029. According to the release, Late Decision resulted in an additional 240 applications, and Bennington hit its goal of enrolling 15 students through the program.

Proxy Music

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on September 2, 2025)

The Trump Administration has stepped up government scrutiny of college admission. Settlements reached with Brown and Columbia included a requirement that they pursue “merit-based” admission policies.  On August 7, President Trump issued a memorandum requiring colleges and universities to submit data to IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) demonstrating that they are not considering race in admission decisions.  The Department of Education has since published in the Federal Register details about the planned data collection, with the public having 60 days to comment. Attorney General Pam Bondi has entered into the fray by publishing a memo outlining what constitutes unlawful discrimination. 

I will leave it to others to rail against the unprecedented federal attack on higher education and the incursion into admission policies at individual institutions.  I would prefer to examine some of the issues and underlying assumptions suggested by these documents. 

    The August 7 Presidential Memorandum

Trump’s memorandum calls for increased transparency to expose practices that are “unlawful” and to rid society of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies.” For some reason it doesn’t say that all racial hierarchies are shameful and dangerous.  Is that an oversight or a meaningful omission? The memorandum also asserts without explanation that race-based admission policies threaten national security.  

The call to get rid of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies” is ironic.  It is easy to imagine previous administrations using the same phrase to defend the very race-based admission policies that the executive order now seeks to abolish. Shameful and dangerous are in the eye of the beholder, and may not be color-blind.

What is not clear is how the administration intends to collect and analyze the data, given its efforts to gut the Department of Education. As Inside Higher Ed has reported, the National Center for Educational Statistics had been decimated, with a staff of more than 100 reduced to a skeleton crew of three employees.

    The Bondi Memo

Attorney General Bondi’s July 29 memorandum offered guidance to federal agencies about practices that may constitute illegal discrimination at colleges and other entities receiving federal funds.  A lot of it is rehashed, targeting popular straw men/persons like DEI programs and transgender athletes (and bathrooms).

What is interesting is Bondi’s take on what she calls “unlawful proxy discrimination,” defined as the use of “facially neutral criteria” that function as “proxies” for race or other protected characteristics. Per the memo, examples in higher education may include things like requiring diversity statements in hiring or essay questions asking applicants to reflect on their unique identity or to write about obstacles they have overcome.  

On a surface level, Bondi is right that those can become back doors to identify an individual’s race. At the same time, knowing the obstacles an individual has overcome is essential to understanding his or her unique story, and race would seem to be one of the factors that can heavily influence that story.

Where Bondi goes off the rails is in maintaining that what she calls “geographic targeting” may constitute a potentially unlawful proxy. She is suggesting that recruitment or outreach in schools and communities with high levels of racial minorities may be illegal.  That is preposterous.  Trying to expand access to education through outreach is in no way comparable to reverse engineering an admission process to arrive at a desired class composition.  

Taken to its logical extreme, Bondi’s guidance would prevent colleges from recruiting not only at inner-city schools with a large percentage of Black students, but also at suburban schools with a large percentage of affluent white students. Both could be examples of what she calls “geographic targeting.” For that matter, colleges might be in violation for asking for an applicant’s address, since ZIP code information can be used as a proxy for determining race and socioeconomic status. 

    New Data For IPEDS

As for data collection for IPEDS, the administration has  proposed a new “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement,” or ACTS. ACTS will require targeted colleges and universities to report data in the following categories, disaggregated by race and sex:

• Admissions test score quintile

• GPA quintile

• Family income range

• Pell Grant eligibility

• Parental education

It will also ask for information to be broken down for early decision, early action, and regular admission as well as institutional need-based aid and merit aid. What’s missing? Legacy status and athletic recruits, both categories that benefit white applicants.  At some of the Ivies, between 10 and 20 percent of the undergraduates are recruited athletes, many in “country club” sports where most of the competitors are wealthy and white, and the proportion of athletes is even higher at the highly selective liberal arts colleges that make up the New England Small College Athletic Conference.  Discovery in SFFA v. Harvard revealed that recruited athletes had an 86 percent admit rate.  You don’t have to have had an uncle who taught at MIT to know that is substantially higher than the overall admit rate. 

ACTS will apparently apply only to “all four-year institutions who utilize selective college admissions,” which the administration maintains “have an elevated risk of noncompliance with the civil rights laws.”  That may at first glance seem to be singling out elite, “name” colleges, and that’s probably the intent, but it also reflects a recognition that the vast majority of institutions couldn’t practice race-based admission even if they wanted to because they are too busy filling the class to worry about crafting the class.

The focus on selective institutions will both make it easy to score political points and hard to derive meaning from the data.  Selectivity, especially at the 5-10 percent level, makes it impossible to know why any individual is or isn’t admitted.  Admission deans at the highly-selective (or rejective) universities report that they could fill several additional freshman classes from among those applicants who have been waitlisted or denied.

Merit-Based Admission

The real target of the push for “merit-based” admission may be holistic review.  A holistic admission process allows colleges to take into consideration nuances in an individual’s background and life experiences. It can also be frustrating for applicants, since different individuals are admitted for different reasons.  The government may be pushing consciously or unconsciously for a more formulaic selection process.

But would that be any better?  Even if you focus only on grades and test scores, should you put more weight on a three-hour test or on four years of high school? How do you compare applicants from schools with different grading scales and levels of academic rigor? Should a test score obtained after thousands of dollars in test prep count the same as an identical score without coaching?

How do we distinguish between merit and privilege? Those who have strong test scores may be more likely to believe that test scores are a measure of merit, and yet test scores are strongly correlated with family income. Those who are born into wealth and privilege may come to believe that their good fortune is a proxy for merit, buying into a perverse and self-serving interpretation of John Calvin’s doctrine of the elect.  They may see themselves as deserving rather than lucky. 

Proxies in Admission

We need a larger discussion about proxies in college admission.  Advanced Placement courses are a proxy for a rigorous curriculum. GPA is a proxy for academic accomplishment, and yet means little without understanding context. Similarly, SAT scores are often seen as a proxy for ability, despite the fact that the College Board long ago abandoned the pretense that the SAT measures “aptitude.”  The U.S. News college rankings have always relied on proxies, such as alumni giving as a proxy for alumni satisfaction when it may be more a measure of the effectiveness of the development office. Selectivity is a proxy for academic quality, feeding into the belief that the harder a place is to get in, the better it must be.  Are proxies for race any more problematic than these other proxies?

The larger question here is what should the selective college admission process be a proxy for. Should we seek to reward students for past performance? Predict who will earn the best grades in college? Identify those students who will benefit the most from the college experience? Or predict who will make the greatest contribution to society after college?

I’m waiting for an executive order or memo or even a discussion among college admission professionals about what the selective admission process should represent and what proxies will support those goals.