Canada Strikes Back

Is college admission about to become ensnared in the Trump administration’s trade war with Canada? Will students flee to Canada to escape the culture war against normalcy and competence just as students in the 1960s went to Canada to dodge the draft and escape the Vietnam War?

Those questions are raised by two recent announcements by Canadian universities.  Both McGill University in Montreal and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver have signaled that they are open for business for students applying from the United States.

Stating that “Concerned American families have reached out, and we have listened,” McGill announced at the beginning of April that it was reopening its application until April 15. The extension applied to students in American high schools as well as students currently enrolled at American colleges and universities wanting to transfer to an undergraduate program at McGill.  

Unlike McGill, British Columbia is appealing to American students interested in graduate programs.  It is reopening applications to selected graduate programs for U.S. applicants for possible September enrollment. UBC declared the week of April 14-18 to be US Applicant Week.

So what should we make of the two announcements? We have become accustomed to American colleges and universities finding themselves in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.  The assault has been multi-pronged.

• Billions of dollars in research funding have been cancelled or frozen, including more than two billion dollars at Harvard alone.  That jeopardizes America’s global intellectual leadership in the same way that shutting down USAID has diminished our global humanitarian leadership.

• According to Inside Higher Ed, as of April 22 more than 1700 international students from more than 260 colleges and universities in every state but Maine and Mississippi have had their student visas revoked.  That endangers an important source of revenue, intellectual vitality, and diversity on college campuses.

• The straw man attack on DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) has not only closed down offices and programs all over the country, but led Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to order the Naval Academy to remove 400 books from its Nimitz Library. Midshipmen can no longer check out Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf passed Hegseth’s muster and remains on the shelves.

That list doesn’t even take into account the shuttering of the Department of Education.  What will happen to the collection of education data and the distribution of financial aid in the wake of the DOE’s demise?  Will we soon look back on last year’s FAFSA fiasco as the good old days?

The involvement of the two Canadian universities is harder to fathom.  McGill’s language about listening to pleas from American families is strikingly similar to the language used by colleges that need to extend their deadlines, but it is hard to imagine that either McGill or UBC has a shortfall of students.  Perhaps the announcements are shots across the bow, the college admission equivalent of Canadian fans booing the Star Bangled Banner at hockey games to show their displeasure over American policies.

Why are we picking a fight with Canada in the first place? You can’t have a good neighborhood without good neighbors, and like a good (next-door) neighbor, Canada is there. I recently talked to an American couple who are taking a river cruise in Europe this summer.  They anticipate that they will encounter hostility from Europeans because of the actions of our government, so they are planning to pose as Canadians instead, because everyone likes Canadians. They are already practicing saying “oot and aboot” for “out and about.”

I am proud to be an American, but not proud of the behavior of our government towards our neighbor.  What message are we sending by jacking up tariffs on Canada but sparing Russia and North Korea?  When President Trump talks about making Canada the 51st state, Canada’s counteroffer should be to invite us to become its eleventh province.

There are two larger concepts that provide context for the McGill and British Columbia announcements.

The first involves trade.  Placing tariffs on imported products is ostensibly a way to address trade deficits and protect the domestic manufacturing sector. But will tariffs result in more plants built and products produced in the United States? Are Americans willing to pay higher prices for products, whether caused by tariffs or by the higher wages paid to American workers? And would new factories result in blue collar jobs, or would those factories be staffed by robots and artificial intelligence instead of humans? 

The global economy is as much about knowledge and services as it is about products.  That’s where higher education comes into play.

A recent Washington Post op-ed by columnist Catherine Rampell argued that access to a college or university education is among America’s top exports, with three times as many international students coming to the United States as we send abroad.  In 2024 higher education brought in approximately 56 billion dollars, more than natural gas and coal combined.

So there’s the dilemma. The administration is imposing tariffs to reduce the trade deficit at the very same time it is attacking one of the sectors that most helps the trade balance. There is an underlying, and perhaps irreconcilable, conflict between two values.  The administration wants increased trade revenues, but not if it means bringing more international students to our shores. To be clear, I am not arguing for tariffs on imported tuition dollars.

The second issue is about the nature of power.  Attracting international students and scholars is, like foreign aid, a form of soft power.  The term soft is unfortunate, because the administration seems to see “soft power” as a form of weakness.  But what has made the United States the most powerful nation on earth is not being feared for our strength, but being admired for standing up for what is right.

Yogi Berra supposedly said, “It’s like deja vu all over again,” a more elegant way of saying that history repeats itself.  That may be true in this case in two different regards.

Will Americans going to Canada for college be a 2020s remake of 1960s Americans going to Canada to dodge the draft? We’re not just talking about students leaving. Three professors from Yale recently announced that they are leaving New Haven to go to the University of Toronto.

Perhaps McGill’s location suggests a more creative metaphor.  Maybe we’re about to see Canada’s revenge for the “Montreal ScrewJob.”

For those of you who don’t follow professional wrestling, the Montreal ScrewJob was an infamous World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment) championship match held in Montreal in 1997.  In that match the world champion, Canadian hero Bret Hart, lost when the ending was changed without his knowledge. He was scheduled to give up the belt to move to a rival wrestling promotion, but didn’t want to lose his last match in Canada.  That incident remains controversial and elicits bad feelings among many Canadian wrestling fans to this day.

What is the relevance of the Montreal ScrewJob for today? The villain in the Montreal ScrewJob was the owner of the wrestling promotion, one Vincent J. McMahon.  His wife, Linda, is now the Secretary of Education in the Trump cabinet, the person charged with dismantling the DOE. At a recent education summit she suggested that students need to be exposed to “A1” as early as kindergarten, apparently confusing artificial intelligence with steak sauce.

I have no opinion on which condiments kindergarten students should be exposed to.  But if history repeats itself, I hope that the Montreal ScrewJob will not ultimately be seen as the second biggest screw job perpetuated by a member of the McMahon family.

Late Decsion

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed om April 7, 2025)

“It gets late early out there.”   Yogi Berra

Does college admission need another application plan? We already have early decision and early decision 2, both binding, and early action and restricted early action, not binding. There is rolling admission, where students receive a decision once their application is complete, and on-site admission, where students present their credentials and receive a same day decision either during a campus visit or at their high school.  Of course we still have regular decision, although there is some debate about how regular it is these days.

The question about whether we need another admission plan is begged by the recent announcement by Bennington College that it will offer a “late decision” plan this spring.  Students who apply to Bennington by April 8 will receive an admission decision by April 17.  May 1 will continue to be the deadline for submitting an enrollment deposit, but students applying under the late decision plan may request an extension. Bennington is “guarding” 15 spaces in the freshman class, “including proportionate merit- and need-based financial aid awards,” for late decision applicants. 

The Bennington announcement raises some interesting questions.  What’s the genesis of late decision? How do the 15 reserved late decision slots impact decisions for applicants in regular decision or off the wait list? And is late decision a gimmick or the beginning of a trend?

Bennington provides two justifications for the new plan.  It references calls from college counseling counselors it receives “every spring” inquiring about the possibility of a late application for students not satisfied with their options. It also alludes to students who are “reconsidering where they want to learn and live for college altogether given the changing political, social, and physical climates.”

There have always been students who get to the end of the process and aren’t satisfied with their choices, There are also plenty of colleges with space available at this time of year that will gladly accept applications, and there are plenty (and perhaps a growing number) of colleges that will work past May 1 and through the summer to lock down the entering class.  

As for the “ripped from today’s headlines” rationale, I wonder: Will the political and cultural division in our country impact where students choose to apply to and enroll in college? I have heard from colleagues who are seeing parents not willing to allow their children to attend colleges perceived as not confronting antisemitism aggressively enough, and I have also heard accounts of students ruling out colleges because they are located within red or blue states.

So is late decision something different or just a way to signal that “even though our application deadline has passed, we’re still soliciting, and hoping for, additional applications”? One of the downsides of setting an application deadline is that once the deadline passes, students are unlikely to apply. If an institution doesn’t receive enough applications by the deadline, it may find itself requiring life support.  

There is an etiquette for colleges that find themselves needing applications post-deadline.  You never want to look desperate (even if you are) and admit that your application numbers aren’t promising.  

There are two common strategies.  One is the “by popular demand” approach, where the application extension is said to be a response to public pressure. Bennington uses a version of this in stating that it has received numerous inquiries from college counselors regarding students who are interested in applying late to Bennington. 

The other strategy is to tie a deadline extension to some newsworthy event, preferably weather-related.  If you are a college needing to extend your deadline, hope for a volcanic eruption in Iceland. That is not the same thing, of course, as extending deadlines for humanitarian reasons, as happened this year for students impacted by Hurricane Helene or the California wildfires. 

The most fascinating aspect of the Bennington announcement is that it plans to reserve 15 spaces for late decision applicants. Bennington states that “holding space for competitive students coming to our process late is part of an accessible, holistic, and supportive admissions process.” 

That makes me wonder just how many applications Bennington thinks it will receive through the late decision plan. Obviously at least 15, if they are guarding that many spots. If one of the drivers of the new program is calls from counselors with students interested in applying to Bennington, how many of those calls are they getting?

According to Bennington’s 2023-24 Common Data Set, its admission yield rate was 16 percent.  At that rate Bennington would need almost 100 applications to enroll 15 students.  We can anticipate that the yield for late decision applicants would be substantially higher, but even at 50 percent Bennington would need to generate 30 new applications. Is that reasonable? Bennington is a unique place that would probably not be a fit for just any student.

There is also a question about how late decision will impact regular decision applicants.  Is Bennington less likely to use its waitlist as a result of guarding the 15 spaces for late decision? According to the Common Data Set, Bennington admitted only six students off the waitlist for the fall of 2023.  More surprising, it offered waitlist status to only 77 of the more than 1400 students it didn’t admit outright. That is a strikingly tiny waitlist. By contrast, another Vermont liberal arts college, Middlebury, had more than 2000 students on its waitlist. There has always been a debate about what message being placed on a waitlist sends. The most common interpretation is “We’d like to admit you, but don’t have space.” Being waitlisted might also mean, “We don’t really want to admit you, but might need to.”

So is late decision a gimmick or the beginning of a trend, even a movement? If Middlebury or Bowdoin or Williams had announced that they were reserving 15 admission slots for late applicants, that would be newsworthy, even revolutionary, because those places are all highly selective and don’t need a late admission plan to fill their freshman class.  Bennington is selective, but not at that level.  Will this make a difference for Bennington, and will other places follow? Or will late decision be more like the tuition resets, where a college announces a revolutionary lowering of price (with a corresponding lowering of financial aid), steps out to lead the parade, and finds that few or none are following?

The tallest man-made structure in the state of Vermont is the Bennington Battle Monument.  The 306-foot-high obelisk commemorates the 1777 Revolutionary War Battle of Bennington (which actually took place about five miles away in New York state). If late decision catches on and changes college admission, the battle may become the second most revolutionary thing the town of Bennington is known for.

NACAC Launches Ethical Practices On-Demand Courses

The National Association for College Admission Counseling is launching three new on-demand courses devoted to ethical practices in the college admission counseling profession. There is a course for admission professionals,  another for school and college counselors, and a third for independent educational consultants.

I was asked by NACAC to serve as program director to develop the new courses, and I worked with a team of four subject matter experts, all members of NACAC’s Admission Practices Committee.  Jessica Morales Maust, the Vice President for Enrollment Management at Marian University in Indianapolis, was the subject matter expert developing the content for the admission officers course. Chantelle Jackson-Boothby from the Canadian International School of Hong Kong and Joseph Miller from The Comprehensive College Check in Texas oversaw development of the course for IECs, and I worked with Dana Lambert, counselor at West Milford Township High School in New Jersey, on the content for the course for secondary counselors.  Katie Maenz from the NACAC staff guided us and supported us in making the courses a reality.

The new offerings replace a previous on-demand course devoted to professional ethics that dates back to 2019.  That course largely responded to issues raised by the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.  The new courses are built around the guiding principles in NACAC’s Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission:

• Truthfulness and Transparency

• Professional Conduct

• Confidentiality

In addition, recognizing that changes in technology often create new ethical challenges, each course includes a section on AI.  We know that the tools are evolving rapidly, so we recognize that this part of the course may quickly become outdated, but we attempted to lay out appropriate and inappropriate uses of AI.

Ethics is about ideals, about how we should act, but ethics should also be pragmatic.  We hope that the courses will touch on issues that professionals deal with in their daily work.

The primary audience for the courses is practitioners who are early in their professional career, but as a “has been” with more than 45 years in the college admission counseling profession, I learned a lot from my colleagues during the development of the course materials.

A concern for ethical practice has been at the heart of NACAC’s work since its founding, and our commitment to acting ethically, no matter what side of the desk we sit on, builds trust and confidence in the college admission process.  Several members of the team developing the course content described the work as “cathartic,” renewing focus on why we do what we do, and that adjective captured my experience exactly.

The new courses can be accessed through NACAC Learn on the NACAC website.

Navigating Ethics

I am always looking for variety in the issues and topics I write about for ECA. Recently I have felt like I spent far too much time digging into admission-related court cases. I am not a lawyer, nor have I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express in recent memory, so trying to plough through arcane legalese gets tricky–and old.

The Potomac and Chesapeake Association for College Admission Counseling (or PCACAC, pronounced “pack-ack”) produces a monthly educational offering called Ethical Navigation. Ethical Navigation presents a case study to shed light on the principles embodied in NACAC’s Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission (or GEPCA). The series was created by my friend (and loyal ECA reader) Jake Talmage, the Director of College Counseling at St. Paul’s School for Boys in Baltimore. Jake is a Past President of PCACAC as well as a former chair of its Admission Practices committee.

The February case study for Ethical Navigation (the March edition is now out) was devised by Jake in conjunction with PCACAC’s current AP chair, Kathleen Voss from Georgia Tech. It focused on the evolution of NACAC’s process for adjudicating ethical issues. 

NACAC was founded back in the 1930s by a group of colleges in the Midwest, and concerns about ethical practices were raised as early as the organization’s second meeting.  There were three original issues of concern. From the beginning NACAC asserted that admission officers should be seen as counselors rather than salesmen or recruiters, not compensated on a per head basis. The other two original ethical concerns are interesting. One was how college day /night events at high schools should be conducted, and the other was trying to rein in high schools from promoting need-based financial aid received by their students as honor or merit scholarships.

Like many professional associations, NACAC had a code of ethics, the Statement of Principles of Good Practice (SPGP). Unlike many other organizations where ethics codes were aspirational, NACAC enforced the SPGP through its national and affiliate AP committees.

That ultimately got NACAC into trouble. In 2017 I was part of a task force appointed by NACAC to develop a document to replace the SPGP to reflect the changing college admission landscape. The process to develop the new document was an example of NACAC at its best, with transparency and opportunities for member feedback throughout, and the membership ultimately passed the new document unanimously.

Shortly afterward NACAC received notice that it was being investigated by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ claimed that several provisions in the new code, including NACAC’s prohibition on poaching students who were committed to or enrolled at another institution, constituted restraint of trade on colleges. It is not clear whether the investigation was prompted by a college not wanting to play by the rules or a DOJ employee disgruntled over their child’s college admission experience. Ultimately the issue for the DOJ wasn’t the prohibition on poaching as much as the attempt to police the ethical code. Rather than put its existence in jeopardy by going to court, NACAC ultimately entered into a consent decree, and made its ethical principles best practices rather than mandatory..

That leads to this month’s Ethical Navigation case study.  Val Heart from Cupid College (pun names are a regular feature), the chair of her regional organization’s Admission Practices Committee, is contacted by her friend Phil from Punxsutawney Prep. One of his students has received an email from a college promising first choice in campus housing if the student deposits by Presidents’ Day. Phil wants to file a complaint over the college’s practices.

As the discussion for the case study makes clear, the switch from mandatory to best practices has been accompanied by a switch in the role of Admission Practices from enforcement to education. There is no longer a mechanism for filing complaints.

I happen to think that’s unfortunate. Even if NACAC can no longer enforce its ethical code, that doesn’t mean that the NACAC Admission Practices Committee, as part of its educational mission, shouldn’t reach out to colleges whose practices are questionable.  Even in the days of enforcement and formal complaints, most issues were resolved amiably. NACAC should stand up for its principles and reach out to educate colleges whose practices are ethically questionable even if it can’t enforce its code. 

While the Ethical Navigation scenario is focused on the role that NACAC and its affiliates’ Admission Practices play, for the purposes of this post I am more interested in the ethical issues related to the case study itself.  What are the issues in this case?

The fundamental ethical principle here is that students should have the right to make a college choice free from manipulation and coercion, and that requires that they not be asked to make an enrollment deposit until they have received decisions from all of their college options. That principle underlies the traditional May 1 National Candidates Reply Date, designed to place some structure in place to protect students.  Thankfully most colleges and universities continue to respect May 1.

The case study does not specify whether the college is setting Presidents’ Day as an enrollment deadline or just providing first choice access to housing on campus as an incentive to deposit early. The advice given to counselor Phil from Punxsutawney Prep to encourage the student to ask for an extension suggests the former. 

Does that make a difference? I would argue not.  In the wake of the DOJ investigation colleges have not moved to earlier deadlines, but NACAC’s prohibition on enrollment incentives was one of the things cited by the DOJ as restraining colleges’ ability to recruit students. Some colleges have no problem with offering preferences in housing or parking or course registration, but those are unquestionably coercive, warning not so subtly, “If you don’t order now…”  The college might be on slightly firmer ground if it makes deposits refundable until May 1.

Is the college acting ethically? If you accept as a definition of ethics I have attributed to Kant (and Google has attributed to me), “Ethics begins where self-interest ends,” then the answer is no.  The offer is first and foremost based in institutional self-interest, not in the best interest of the student.

How should counselor Phil at Punxsutawney Prep react to this situation when there is no longer a formal complaint procedure?  Ethical Navigation suggests that Phil give the student a copy of GEPCA and encourage them to contact the college to request an extension.  I agree that encouraging the student to take the lead is desirable, good preparation for navigating the bureaucracy the student is likely to encounter once on campus.

Ethical Navigation also states that Phil might reach out to the college “if he felt it was prudent.”  I would go a step further.  As a counselor I would reach out to the college to support the student and call out the college for putting students in a difficult position with this offer.  I have only had to do this a handful of times in my career, but righteous indignation can be an effective tool in pointing out practices that are unfair or manipulative.

There is one other issue here, and that involves what a deposit means in cases like this. As a counselor I have always advised students that an enrollment deposit should be taken seriously, and the conventional wisdom in college admission is that there is no greater sin than double depositing.  But the actions of the college here call that into question.  

The relationship between student and college in the admission process should be based on trust and truthfulness, and incentivizing or requiring a student to deposit earlier than they are ready damages that trust. In my opinion students are within their rights to deposit to hold their housing option and then deposit elsewhere. Unfortunately that disadvantages students who don’t have the wherewithal to lose a deposit, and that raises fairness concerns. 

Let’s acknowledge that this case study is not purely hypothetical.  There are universities that won’t allow a student to apply for on-campus housing until they submit an enrollment deposit, with housing filling up long before May 1.  

A colleague once said that in any interaction with a student someone needs to be the adult in the room.  The college admission process is confusing at best and mysterious at worst. Adults in the admission process should also be the adults in the room.

A Valentne's Day Card Without the Love

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions News Update” on March 10, 2025)

During my elementary school days I always looked forward to Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day.  On that day we would suspend normal school in the afternoon to have a party. It was innocent fun, because we would have freaked out had we grasped the romantic overtones of the holiday. 

Every member of the class would receive a Valentine card from each classmate. And of course there was candy, especially the little “conversation hearts” with messages like “Be Mine.” It’s been a long time, but I understand that conversation heart messages have evolved to things like “GOAT.” Back in my day (a phrase I try to refrain from using,) we would have thought we were being compared to the animal, not our favorite athlete.

On Feb. 14 this year, America’s schools and colleges received a Valentine from the U.S. Department of Education in the form of a “Dear Colleague” letter from Crag Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the department.  “Dear Colleague” is neither a message found on conversation hearts nor the kind of salutation one normally sends to those they love, The tone of Trainor’s letter is not exactly romantic, containing the phrase “morally reprehensible” in the opening sentence. 

The purpose of the “Dear Colleague” letter is to outline the obligations that educational institutions receiving federal funds have to avoid discriminating with regard to race. It gives colleges and schools a two-week window (since passed) to correct their practices, without specifying exactly what they must do.  At the end of two weeks, the Education Department subsequently sent out a list of frequently-asked questions that toned down some of the rhetoric found in the original letter.

The letter invokes the potential threat of revoking federal funding. If the “Dear Colleague” Valentine included a conversation heart, the message wouldn’t be “You’re so fine” but rather “You’re so fined.”

I will leave it to others to weigh in on the legal issues raised by the letter and how colleges and universities (and schools) should respond. I am more interested in the issues and assumptions underlying the letter itself, particularly those impacting admission.

It can be argued that the “Dear Colleague” letter is guilty of burying the lede.  Buried in a footnote is what is perhaps the most important statement in the letter, “This guidance does not have the force and effect of law.” Even that may overstate the gravity of the letter. Its author is an acting assistant director in an office (Civil Rights) that is being dismantled in a number of agencies throughout the government. And how seriously should we take threats from a department that seems to be on a fast track to being eliminated? 

There are several examples of false equivalence within the document. It states that “In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and lower-income families.” It is also true that many do not come from those backgrounds, but why does that matter?  Is this “discrimination” equivalent to the racial discrimination against non-whites in earlier times?  

Similarly, there is a contention that smaller racial or ethnic graduation ceremonies, conducted in addition to, not in lieu of, the overall ceremony, are “a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history” encouraging “segregation by race.” Is the Education Department claiming that this is the same thing as segregation before Brown v. Board of Education?

“Dear Colleague” relies on an expansive interpretation of the Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard, stating that federal law prohibits consideration of race not only in admission but also in “hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies.”  Clearly all or many of those areas are likely to be litigated in the wake of the Harvard case, but that decision had only to do with admission, and even with regard to admission Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion was focused on colleges sculpting their classes to achieve a desired level of racial balance, not their ability to consider race as a factor in evaluating individual applicants.  

There are two broader issues here. One is whether diversity is an intrinsic value, good in itself, or an instrumental value, good because it helps accomplish another value.  I think colleges have treated diversity as intrinsically good, worth pursuing for its own sake. I think that’s a mistaken view. Diversity is valuable when it allows for a better educational experience, helping students to understand and appreciate viewpoints and experiences other than their own.

The second is whether race is a foundational component of an individual’s experience and perspective.  Of course it is–how could it not be? Many of my male students of color had to worry every time they drove about being stopped by police for no apparent reason in a way my white students didn’t. The danger lies in assuming that all members of a particular racial or ethnic group automatically have a common experience or perspective.

Perhaps the most questionable assertion in the Dear Colleague letter is that even race-neutral programs can be in violation of the law.  The letter argues that “a school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students.”

In ethics, intent is always a key component. It is certainly possible for colleges to guess at a student’s race based on where they live or went to high school or what they choose to write about in a personal essay.  Seven or eight years ago, when many colleges added a “personal identity” essay to their applications I wondered if they were preparing for a Supreme Court overturning of precedent regarding race-based admission. Colleges shouldn’t use essay questions as a subterfuge to determine an applicant’s race, but it is different when a student volunteers information about race in sharing their story. The relevant principle is that every applicant should be considered as an individual, with all that entails, including race.

Another statement in the “Dear Colleague” letter is particularly interesting, contending that it would “be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.” Why pick standardized testing as an example? Disregarding the fact that the statement assigns testing a respect and power that is unjustified, is the Education department presupposing that test-optional admission is solely about race?  Would it also be unlawful for an institution to add standardized testing to decrease racial diversity? What about if decreasing diversity is an unintended consequence of  adding testing?

The “Dear Colleague” letter includes the requisite bashing of DEI programs, arguing that they “teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not.” If that is indeed true, who does that refer to? Is the burden referred to borne by whites who are descendants of those who practiced both de jure and de facto discrimination, or is the burden on those who were victims of that discrimination? There are certainly excesses under the umbrella of DEI, but it has become a straw man blowing a dog whistle.

Admissions Armageddon

Early in my career, I spent a year as a college philosophy instructor. It seems like yesterday, so it is sobering to realize that it was actually more than 40 years ago.

It was a magical year.  I had never taught before, so I lived each day on the edge of my skis, preparing for the next day’s classes. That last-minute approach would not have been sustainable, but that “rookie year” was fresh and exhilarating, almost like first love.  

And the reviews were good. Early in the fall a senior administrator who later became a college president told me that student leaders had praised the class discussions in my courses, and by the end of the year my classes had some of the highest enrollments of any courses offered at the college. When the president held a mid-year open forum with students, the most contentious topic was the administration not allowing me to return for a second year. In all fairness, I was just finishing my Master’s, and while I was willing to teach and pursue a Ph.D. at the same time, both my well-being and my marriage would have been jeopardized.. It hurt at the time, but in retrospect the college did me a favor.  I can imagine an alternative career history as a college professor, but college counseling was a better path for me..

Two recent news items made me think back on that year.  The first was the tragic plane crash in DC.  The previous air disaster on the Potomac River near National Airport occurred during my year as a college faculty member, when an Air Florida plane clipped the 14th Street bridge and crashed during a snowstorm.

The second was seeing the obituary for the author Tom Robbins, who passed away a couple of weeks ago at the age of 92.  For those of you not aware of his work, his New York Times obituary describes his comic novels as “the perfect accompaniment to acid trips, Grateful Dead shows and weekend yoga retreats, long before those things became middle class and mainstream.” While I never indulged in any of those, I nevertheless came to appreciate his writing, perhaps confirming a statement I once made at a party in college, “I don’t need to get high. I‘m a philosophy major–my head is already messed up naturally.”

What’s the connection between Tom Robbins and my college teaching experience? The final unit of my Intro to Philosophy classes involved having my students read a work of fiction, Robbins’ first novel, Another Roadside Attraction. I can’t begin to do the plot justice, if indeed there is a plot. Robbins’ writing ranges from funny to weird to thought-provoking, with interesting reflections on art and religion. It was a perfect denouement for the course, pulling together the philosophical themes we had covered.

Each class had a similar reaction to the book. For the first 100 pages or so, they ranged from skeptical to “What is this ….?” But then they were sucked into Robbins’ tale of intrigue involving the Vatican and a roadside hot dog stand in the Pacific Northwest and his interesting perspective.

As much as I loved Another Roadside Attraction, I have read only one of Tom Robbins’ other books. When I had knee replacement surgery in 2014, my office colleague, Scott Mayer, gave me Robbins’ “un-memoir,” Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, to read during my recovery. If only my body had recovered as quickly as I raced through the autobiography.

So why haven’t I read any of Robbins’ other books? I wonder about that myself.  It probably reflects something twisted in my soul, but my rationalization is that I fear that none of his other books would live up to the pleasure of the first one. In any case, working my way through Tom Robbins’ oeuvre is on my to-do list for 2025.

Given that ECA focuses on college admission issues, what’s the connection to Tom Robbins and Another Roadside Attraction? The only college reference in the novel is that one of the main characters is a former Duke football player whose tenure was short-lived because his playing field expanded from the gridiron to the backfield coach’s wife. His journey takes him to a monastery in the Pacific Northwest which houses the Roman Catholic Church’s fictional (we think) equivalent to the CIA and then to the Catacombs underneath the Vatican during an earthquake.. Robbins’ own journey took him to the Skagit Valley of Washington state, where he lived for most of his adult life, but he grew up in the South, attending Washington and Lee University (where his college newspaper editor was none other than Tom Wolfe) and eventually graduating from the precursor to Virginia Commonwealth University.  

One of the fascinating digressions in Another Roadside Attraction is a discussion about Armageddon, the final battle for dominion over what’s left of the Earth after mankind is extinct, whether by nuclear war, artificial intelligence, or nature’s revenge for our leaders who continue to pretend that climate change doesn’t exist. Robbins (or one of his characters) identifies two primary candidates to make it to Armageddon, the ultimate reality show.

In one corner we have the sexually-transmitted disease gonorrhea. Gonorrhea was the bane of public health officials, back when we had public health officials, for its efficient means of transmission among sexually-active young people ranging from soldiers to hippies. It is a hard bug to eradicate because it quickly develops resistance to every new “cure.”

In the other corner we have the cockroach, which Robbins refers to as a “repulsive little geek.” (In keeping with the ethical obligation to be truthful and transparent, I must admit that during college I was a propriator of an annual “Cockroach Festival,” featuring decorated cockroaches, a cockroach derby, and the presentation of the “Franz Kafka Memorial Award,” given to the human costumed to look like a cockroach.) 

According to Another Roadside Attraction, the cockroach has been on earth longer than any other creature, and except for the fact that cockroaches are good at keeping themselves hidden in out of the way places, we might imagine that Adam and Eve may have shared the Garden of Eden with cockroaches and that Noah took two (and probably more) cockroaches on the Ark. The cockroach has minimal needs, and like gonorrhea it is adaptive and resistant to attempts to extinguish it.

Robbins’ character concludes the meditation this way.

Years after man, over some childish politico-economic understanding, has obliterated himself

and turned the green Earth into a cinder ball, then the real battle will begin. Gonorrhea and

the cockroach fighting it out for ultimate domination of the universe. Now there’s your Armageddon.

The cockroach vs. gonorrhea.  Let’s get ready to rumble.

Suppose there were a college admission armageddon, with two entities competing to be the last standing. Who would they be? Your answer may depend on what you think the necessary qualities to win (if, by winning, we mean survive) are. Is success measured in strength, intelligence, or resilience (the same question asked about selective admission)?

ECA has always been more about asking questions than providing answers, and that is true in this case.  At one time I would have said the College Board and Hobson’s, back when Hobson’s had acquired Naviance and other admission-related products. The CB has to be a leading candidate, but who else is in contention? U.S. News and its ranking guru, Bob Morse? Common App? The Ivies? Private equity firms like the one who purchased ACT?

What are the college admission equivalents of gonorrhea and the cockroach? And which entity will be the last one standing?

David Brooks on "Meritocracy"

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on January 27, 2025)

Are many of the ills that plague American society caused by Ivy League admission policies?  That is the premise of David Brooks’ cover story for the December issue of The Atlantic, “How the Ivy League Broke America.” Brooks blames the Ivies and “meritocracy” for a host of societal problems, including:

• Overbearing parenting

• Less time for recess (as well as art and shop) in schools

• An economy that doesn’t provide opportunities for those without a college degree

• The death of civic organizations like Elks and Kiwanis

• The percentage of Ivy League graduates who choose careers in finance and consulting

• The rise of populism based on “crude exaggerations, gross generalizations, and bald-faced lies”

Brooks somehow left the decline of small town mom-and-pop businesses and the popularity of reality television off his laundry list.

You may be wondering how the Ivies contributed to or caused all these problems. The essence of Brooks’ argument is that every “coherent” society has a social ideal, “an image of what the superior person looks like.”  His hypothesis is that America’s social ideals reflect and are determined by the qualities that Ivy League universities value in admission.

One hundred years ago the Ivy League social ideal was what Brooks terms the “Well-Bred Man,” white, male, aristocratic and preppy, athletic, good-looking, and personable. What was not part of the ideal was intellectual brilliance or academic prowess, and in fact those who cared about studying were social outcasts. Applying to the Ivies resembled applying for membership in elite social clubs.

That changed starting in the 1930s when a group of educational leaders, the most prominent being Harvard president James Conant, worried that the United States was not producing leaders capable of dealing with the problems it would face in the future. Their solution was to move to an admission process that rewarded intelligence rather than family lineage. They believed that intelligence was the highest human trait, one that is innate and distributed randomly throughout the population. Conant and his peers believed the change would lead to a nation with greater opportunities for social mobility.

Brooks seems far from sure that the change was positive for America. He acknowledges that “the amount of bigotry–against women, Black people, the LGBTQ community–has declined” (that might be debatable given the current political climate), but observes that the previous ideal produced the New Deal, victory in World War 2, NATO, and the postwar world led by America, while the products of the ideal pushed by Conant have produced “quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.” Those examples seem cherry-picked.

In the essay Brooks cites a number of troubling societal problems and trends, all supported with extensive research, but the weakness of his argument is that he tries to find a single cause to explain all of them. That common denominator is what he calls “meritocracy.”

Meritocracy, a society with opportunities based on merit, is an appealing concept in theory, but defining merit is where things get sticky. Merit may be similar to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s description of pornography, in that you know it when you see it.  Does merit consist of talent alone? Talent combined with work ethic? Talent, work ethic, and character?

Merit is in the eye of the beholder. If I were admitted to an Ivy League university, it was obviously because I had merit. If someone else, especially someone from an underrepresented population, got the acceptance instead of me, factors other than merit must have been at play. If two candidates have identical transcripts but different SAT scores, which one possesses more merit? Complicating the discussion is the fact that many things cited as measures of merit are in fact measures of privilege.

For Brooks, Ivy League meritocracy involves an overreliance on intelligence and academic achievement, to the detriment of noncognitive skills that are more central to success and happiness in life. He argues that “success in school is not the same thing as success in life,” with success in school being individual, while success in life team-based. He quotes Adam Grant that academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. 

Ultimately, he argues that “meritocracy” has spurred the creation of “an American caste system,” one in which “a chasm divides the educated from the less well-educated,” triggering “a populist backlash that is tearing society apart,” yet Brooks’ beef is not so much with meritocracy as it is with a mindset that he attributes to Conant and his brethren. He equates meritocracy with a belief in rationalism and social engineering that assumes that anything of value can be measured and counted. What he is criticizing is something different from meritocracy, or at least reflects a narrow definition of meritocracy.

Even if we don’t agree with Brooks’ definition or that Ivy League admission policies are responsible for the ills of society, his article raises a number of important questions about the college admission process at elite colleges and universities.

Is the worship of standardized testing misplaced? The SAT became prominent in college admission at the same time that Conant and others were changing the Ivy League admission paradigm. They believed that intelligence could be measured, and latched onto the SAT as a “pure,” objective measure of aptitude. Today, of course, we recognize that test scores are correlated with family income and that scores can be manipulated through test preparation. And the “A” in SAT no longer stands for aptitude.  

Do we measure what we value or do we value what we can measure?  Brooks criticizes the Ivies for focusing on academic achievement in school at the expense of non-cognitive skills that might be more important in success in life after college, things like curiosity, relationship-building skills and work ethic.  He’s right, but there are two reasons for the current emphasis.  One is that going to college is going to school, so an admission process focused on scholastic academic achievement is defensible. The other is that we haven’t developed a mechanism for measuring non-cognitive skills.

That raises a larger question. What do we want the admission process to accomplish? The SAT is intended to predict freshman year college GPA (in conjunction with high school grades). Is that a satisfactory goal? Shouldn’t we have a larger lens, aiming to identify those who will be most successful at the end of college or after college? Should we admit those with the greatest potential, those who will grow the most from the college experience, or those who will make the greatest contribution to society after college?

Brooks questions elite colleges’ preferences for “spiky” students over those who are well-rounded.  Is a student body full of spiky students really better? An even more important question arises from a distinction Brooks made some years ago between “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” 

Does the elite college admission process as currently constituted reward and encourage students who are good at building resumes? A former student attending an elite university commented that almost every classmate had done independent academic research and started a non-profit.  Do students aspiring to the Ivies choose activities because they really care about them or because they think they will impress admission officers, and can admission officers tell the difference? What is the consequence of having a student body full of those who are good at playing the resume-building game?

There is one other issue raised by Brooks that I find particularly important. He argues that those who are successful in the elite admission process end up possessing greater “hubris,” in that they believe their success is the product of their talent and hard work rather than privilege and luck. Rather than appreciating their good fortune, they may believe they are entitled to it. That misconception may also fuel the populist backlash to elites that has increased the division within our country.

I don’t buy Brooks’ definition of meritocracy or his contention that the Ivy League “broke” America, but his article nevertheless merits reading and discussion.

Are Elite Colleges Engines of Social and Economic Mobility?

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on December 9, 2024)

What explains the fascination, perhaps even obsession, with attending an elite college or university?  It may be our culture’s fixation on luxury brands of all kinds, exemplified at this time of year by television commercials telling us that the best way to get in the spirit of the holidays is buying or leasing a Lexus or two. Or it may lie in the fact that almost all news coverage of college admission focuses on a small group of highly-selective institutions as if they represent the entire universe of higher education. When’s the last time you read an article in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal about Rhodes College or Southeastern Oklahoma State University?  

The most likely answer, however, is the widespread belief that attending an elite college is an express lane to economic success and happiness (with the two often seen as being connected or even the same thing). 

A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that elite colleges remain enclaves of economic privilege rather than engines of economic and social mobility, with levels of socioeconomic diversity relatively unchanged from where they were 100 years ago.  The paper, “The G.I. Bill, Standardized Testing, and Socioeconomic Origins of the U.S. Educational Elite Over a Century,” was authored by researchers Ran Abramitzky and Jennifer K. Kowalski of Stanford University along with Santiago Pérez from the University of California at Davis and Joseph Price from Brigham Young University.

The researchers compiled a dataset of records for 2.5 million students attending 65 elite colleges between 1915 and 2013.  The 65 colleges include the 12 “Ivy-Plus” institutions (the eight Ivies plus Duke University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and the University of Chicago), 15 Northeastern liberal arts colleges, eight historically women’s colleges, and 31 public universities that have been listed as “public Ivies.” (If you are counting, that adds up to 66, but Vassar is included in both the liberal arts and women’s colleges groups.) The researchers tracked down college yearbooks and institutional records to determine enrollment for individual students, and then used Census data to identify family backgrounds for those students.

The paper concludes that for all the changes in American society and access to higher education over the past century, including increased opportunities for women and students of color, the representation of lower-income students at elite colleges has remained essentially unchanged. Elite colleges have become more racially and geographically diverse, but not more economically diverse. The representation of Black students at elite colleges has increased 4-5 times since the 1920s, and the percentage of students attending an elite college in a different part of the country has about doubled, from 30 percent to 60 percent at elite private colleges since 1950, and from 10 to 20 percent at elite public colleges since the 1960s. Meanwhile the percentage of low-income students attending elite colleges has been stable–and low.

In the early 1920s, 8 percent of those attending college (any college) came from the bottom 20 percent of family incomes. Today the percentage of college students coming from the bottom income quintile is 20 percent for women and 13 percent for men. The percentage for the elite college group, however, has remained essentially flat, at between 3-5 percent for elite private institutions and 5 percent for elite publics (the proportion is higher for the women’s colleges, which saw the most change over time). 

This trend holds even at the wealthiest universities, with the paper reporting that “the share of lower-income students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton has been less than 5 percent through the entirety of the last century.” Duke’s percentage dropped from 8 to 3 from the 1920s to the early 2000s, while liberal arts colleges Bates and Colby dropped from 8 to 2. Those numbers are consistent with the conclusions of a 2017 study by Raj Chetty and colleagues, which reported that 38 elite colleges enroll more students from the top one percent of incomes than from the bottom 60 percent.

As the title of the paper indicates, the study gives special attention to two developments that are widely believed to have broadened socioeconomic diversity in colleges. The first is the G.I. Bill providing educational and other benefits to World War II veterans.

One of the interesting nuggets in the research is that there is a dramatic difference in the likelihood of serving in World War II between those born before the last quarter of 1927 and those born after, in 1928, who would have come of age after the end of the war. Those born before the last quarter of 1927 were 40 percentage points more likely to have served. That hit home for me because my father was born in December of 1927. 

The researchers used the gap between the two groups to determine if there is a significant difference in the socioeconomic status of those attending elite colleges, and they concluded that the difference was almost negligible.  The G.I. Bill did not produce a cohort of veterans from lower- or even middle-income families attending elite colleges through their veteran’s benefits. The report offers two possible considerations.  One is that the percentage of WWII veterans from the bottom socioeconomic groups had a much lower high school graduation rate (35 percent) than those from the top 20 percent (closer to 65 percent), meaning that they lacked the academic credentials to attend an elite college. The authors also posit that the very experience of being in the war could have interrupted an individual’s educational plans.

The second development discussed in the paper is whether standardized tests help elite colleges identify talented students they otherwise wouldn’t find, the so-called “diamond in the rough” hypothesis.  That was one of the original justifications for the SAT, and it was used last spring by places like MIT and Dartmouth College as a reason for reinstating testing requirements.

The paper looks at the socioeconomic composition of the student bodies at elite colleges both prior and following their adoption of the SAT, and concludes that the introduction of standardized testing “was not associated with persistent changes in the socioeconomic mix of students at elite colleges in general, with even more limited effects when focusing on private colleges.” The researchers admit that they can’t assess how the introduction of standardized testing may have influenced applicant pools, giving students from non-traditional educational or low socioeconomic backgrounds the confidence to apply to an elite college, but the evidence in this study doesn’t back the idea that testing helps broaden economic diversity at the Ivies and other elite places.  If there is evidence to the contrary that drove a number of elite colleges to return to requiring testing, I’d love to see it.

So what conclusions should we draw from this study?

First of all, the idea that any institution or industry is largely unchanged and serving the same clientele as 100 years ago is shocking, and something to be embarrassed about.  That is particularly true for higher education, which is predicated on giving individuals the tools to transform their lives. The potential good news is that the most recent data used in the study is from 2013.  Recently we have seen initiatives to make attending elite colleges more affordable for the middle class. Could those make a difference?

Second, there is a conflict here between self-interest and the public interest. Elite private colleges certainly have a right to admit whomever they choose, but given their outsized role in American society they have a duty to serve the public interest as well.  At a time when higher education and other institutions and norms are already under attack, failure to do so will increase scrutiny from forces skeptical of the value of college.

Finally, we need an ongoing conversation about what we mean by calling a college or university “elite.” Are colleges considered elite because they offer a superior education or because they are socially and economically exclusive? Should elite colleges reflect the culture or strive to be counter-cultural?

Legendary football coach Bill Parcells said, “You are what your record says you are.” The record of elite colleges in promoting economic and social mobility over the past 100 years isn’t pretty. It’s time for that to change.

Trans-actional

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on November 11, 2024)

Depending on your point of view, I had either the good fortune, or the misfortune, to live in a swing state during this election year.  In an Electoral College world, my vote actually counted for something, unlike Republicans living in blue states or Democrats living in red states.  The price I had to pay is the number of campaign ads I had to watch every time I turned on my TV.

In recent weeks I noticed that Trump campaign ads increasingly focused on two issues as “threats” to America, immigration and transgender issues, finding creative ways to interweave the two. Based on the ads you might very well come to believe that a Harris administration would have moved the Statue of Liberty from New York harbor to the Rio Grande and changed the inscription to “Give me your insane, your criminals, your huddled masses seeking a new gender.” Apparently, if elected, Vice President Kamala Harris would have invited undocumented immigrants to storm across the border to picnic on pets and overrun our cities and small towns. Those imprisoned would be able to get free gender-affirming surgery so they could use your child’s bathroom and play on your daughter’s sports teams when they were released. 

And now there’s more.  According to comments made by Vice-President-elect JD Vance late last month on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, becoming trans may be the new strategy for getting into Ivy League colleges.

“Think about the incentives,” Vance told Rogan, “If you are a, you know, middle-class or upper middle-class white parent and the only thing you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like obviously, that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper middle-class kids, but the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans, and is there a dynamic that’s going on where, if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege.” 

Vance, of course, provided no evidence to support that claim, probably because there is none. And given that both Rogan and his audience love conspiracy theories, he didn’t need to.

I’m less interested in the politics associated with Vance’s claim and more interested in the assumptions and broader questions underlying it.

The Common Application has a required question about a student’s “legal sex” as listed on government identification documents like birth certificates and drivers’ licenses. It’s required due to state reporting requirements, with some states mandating that colleges report students using the binary “male” or “female” designation. 

Gender identity, not necessarily the same thing as legal sex, is an optional question on the Common Application, with the following options:

• Female

• Male

• Nonbinary

• Add Another Gender

IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) began collecting data on gender beginning with the 2023-2024 academic cycle, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

One’s legal sex is not a choice.  But what about gender identity? Implicit in Vance’s claim that becoming transgender may be a college admission strategy is the assumption that individuals can change their gender identity like they change hair color.  A fundamental principle of ethics is that we shouldn’t pass moral judgment on someone over a characteristic or behavior they didn’t freely choose, so those who want to demonize transgender individuals have to believe that gender identity is a choice.

I don’t claim to be an expert on gender identity and formation, but I have worked with several transgender students and read accounts of those who found themselves trapped in a gender identity that didn’t fit them, and those accounts all involve struggle and guilt as they try to come to grips with who they really are.  Even if being transgender provided an Ivy League admission advantage, it is hard to imagine that someone would falsely present as transgender given the bullying and other obstacles that transgender students face.

A second assumption worth examining is Vance’s contention that “turning trans” is an issue just for upper-middle-class white families.  He argues that “the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.”

There is a lot to unpack in that statement, beginning with the suggestion that colleges and other institutions are run by a DEI bureaucracy.  The MAGA movement has seized on DEI as a powerful malevolent force. 

Colleges certainly value diversity as an important priority for a couple of reasons. In the 1978 Bakke case, Justice Lewis Powell argued that increasing diversity in the classroom was a compelling state interest and the only justification for race-based affirmative action.  It is clear that being exposed to students with a diverse set of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives is educationally enriching. 

But is diversity an end in itself or a means to an end, competing with other values? It is certainly possible to have a diverse student body where there is little interaction among different groups in the classroom or at the lunch table.  There are elements in the DEI movement that I find extreme, but the notion that there is a “DEI bureaucracy” is a classic straw man argument.  

I am also not sure that children from upper-middle-class white families are as disadvantaged in the Ivy admission process as Vance seems to assume.  In a landscape where 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 applicants are admitted, the odds for every applicant are slim, but wealthy white applicants continue to benefit from legacy preferences at many elite colleges. They benefit even more from preferences for recruited athletes in “country club” sports where the overwhelming number of participants are white and grow up in families with the means to pay for travel teams and personalized coaching and instruction.

Even if Vance is right about becoming trans being an Ivy League admissions strategy, why should that apply only to upper middle-class white applicants? The currency of selective admission has always been uniqueness.  The rarer any talent or quality, the more valuable, and vice versa. The more applicants playing “the trans card,” the less successful it is likely to be as a strategy. But wouldn’t a Black or Asian or Latino applicant who is also trans be even more attractive as an applicant, bringing multiple kinds of diversity?

Vance sees becoming trans as a way for young people to reject their privilege. I don’t think colleges are looking for applicants from privileged backgrounds to reject privilege as much as to acknowledge their privilege.  That raises a question about whether privilege is one of those things one doesn’t choose and shouldn’t be judged for. I remember one of my students writing an essay about facing adversity during a dysentery-filled family trip to Machu Picchu. It was a well-written essay that answered the question, but an admission officer commented that if the family could afford to go to Machu Picchu, the student didn’t know what adversity was.  I thought that was harsh.

Finally, Vance’s comments shed new light on a claim made by his running mate throughout the campaign. Donald Trump has stated without evidence or a single example that schools are doing gender-affirming surgery during the school day, such that a child goes to school as a boy and returns as a girl. Based on Vance’s hypothesis, if that were happening all the schools would be doing is trying to improve their students’ college outcomes.

We need to support young people who question and struggle with their gender identity, and for some of them there are good reasons for embracing a gender identity other than that on their birth certificate or seeking gender-affirming health care.  Getting into Harvard and Yale are not among them.

A Mysterious Disappearance

The previous post (which was published in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed) commented on a recent class action lawsuit claiming that noncustodial parents are being treated unfairly by the requirement that they must report income and assets for many colleges using the CSS Profile to evaluate eligibility for institutional financial aid.

The lawsuit was filed against 40 national universities and the College Board, and alleges that an agreement reached back in 2006 to establish a common methodology for dealing with noncustodial parents was a conspiracy.

Late last week, as that post was in the editing process, I came across a mystery.  One of the notes in the court filing (#74) names seven institutions that were almost immediate adopters of the new methodology.  What was interesting was that two of the institutions named are not among the defendants in this case, Colgate and the University of Chicago.

Colgate is considered a national liberal arts college rather than a national university, so that explains why it is excluded.  Both I and my editor at Inside Higher Ed checked and double-checked the list of schools using the CSS Profile on the College Board website, and Chicago was listed as requiring the Profile but not asking for information from noncustodial parents.

Late Friday afternoon, after I thought the piece was put to bed, I received an email from my editor with interesting news.  The CSS Profile list no longer included Chicago, whereas it had just 24-48 hours earlier.  Why the sudden disappearance?

I reached out to the University of Chicago to see if there was an explanation, and a spokesman responded that they aren’t sure why the disappearance happened.  For at least five years Chicago has only required the FAFSA.  I also contacted the College Board but haven’t received a response.

I’m not alleging anything nefarious, but it is odd at best and mysterious at worse.  

Noncustodial

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on October 28, 2024)

Does the financial aid methodology utilized by a number of elite colleges constitute price-fixing?   That is the claim in a class action lawsuit recently filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The suit names 40 highly-ranked private national universities and the College Board as defendants.  Those universities all require financial aid applicants to complete the College Board’s CSS Profile in addition to the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) in determining eligibility for institutional funds.  Whereas the federal methodology utilized by the FAFSA takes into account only the income of a student’s custodial parent, the CSS Profile allows colleges to ask for more detailed information about a family’s assets.

That includes the option to require income and asset information from non-custodial parents, and that practice is at the heart of this lawsuit.  The lawsuit alleges that the Financial Aid Standards and Services Advisory Committee of the College Board worked with colleges in 2006 to adopt a common methodology for capturing information about the income and assets of noncustodial parents, and describes that as a “conspiracy” that has “substantially raised” the costs that the plaintiffs have had to pay for college.

Here is the essence of the complaint, although the lawsuit does not connect all of the dots together particularly well.

• The cost of higher education and the level of student debt has increased substantially, with tuition, room and board increasing 169 percent, in constant 2019 dollars, between 1980 and 2020, and student debt more than tripling between 2006 and 2024.

• Worries about debt levels lead to a number of other problems for students, ranging from mental health concerns to food insecurity and homelessness.

• The Agreed Pricing Strategy (APS) used by the defendants for noncustodial parents has “exacerbated” student debt by raising prices for families which have to report two sets of incomes.

• The use of the APS is anticompetitive because it “constitutes an agreement between horizontal competitors related to price.”

Price-fixing is a common claim in antitrust cases, and this is not the first time it has been raised with regard to higher education.  In the early 1990s a group of 23 Northeastern colleges known as the Overlap Group were accused of antitrust violations for their practice of agreeing on common financial aid offers for individual applicants. They claimed it was to remove cost as a major factor in college choice, but in retrospect it is hard not to see the practice as price-fixing.  

More recently, in 2022, a class action lawsuit was filed against members of the now-defunct 568 Presidents Group over their common financial aid methodology. That methodology was developed in the aftermath of the Overlap Group case when colleges were granted an antitrust exemption to collaborate on financial aid guidelines as long as they were need-blind in admission.  The suit claimed that the institutions in question were not truly need-blind in certain areas, like in offering admission off wait lists or to transfer students.  The colleges involved denied any wrong-doing, and yet many of them have already settled. 

There are also two other examples. In 2019, the Department of Justice found that the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s ethical prohibition on poaching students committed to or enrolled in another college was non-competitive because it prevented colleges from offering students lower prices.  Worried that legal fees might bankrupt the association, NACAC signed a consent decree and removed the standard from its code of ethics. And three days after the most recent lawsuit was filed, a federal judge in Connecticut dismissed a suit claiming that the Ivy League’s prohibition on athletic scholarships is anticompetitive and a tool for fixing prices.   

The plaintiffs in the case against the College Board have asked for a jury trial, undoubtedly hoping that a jury will be more sympathetic than a judge.  I am not qualified to weigh in on the legal issues here, but here are some ethical questions and issues to consider.

Is an agreement on a financial aid methodology the same thing as price-fixing? It is certainly possible that a group of institutions might agree on a methodology knowing that it will produce a particular result, but I don’t find that here. The plaintiffs argue that, absent the Agreed Pricing Strategy, each individual college would unilaterally develop its own “fair” formula.  But would that be better than a common methodology? That could force families to complete different forms and report different information for every college where a student is applying.

Plenty of colleges don’t use the CSS Profile at all, and a number that require it don’t ask for information from noncustodial parents. For example, Vanderbilt (not a defendant) uses the CSS Profile, but does not require information from noncustodial parents. Another CSS Profile user, Colgate University (also not a defendant), does require information from noncustodial parents, but it is classified as a National Liberal Arts college rather than a National University.  In its attempt to allege a “horizontal” conspiracy within a “relevant market,” the lawsuit argues that universities and liberal arts colleges are fundamentally different kinds of institutions. I don’t find the attempted distinction convincing.

During the nearly half-century that I have worked in college admission and college counseling, the language and goals around financial aid have changed substantially.  Higher education is one of the few commodities where different consumers pay different amounts according to their financial situation. That qualifies as morally praiseworthy but not necessarily morally obligatory. It would be defensible for colleges to set a sticker price and provide no aid, but fortunately they haven’t gone that route because they believe in access and fairness as institutional goals. Today those goals compete with the goal of maximizing revenue. The use of institutional funds is tied less to a family’s ability to pay and more to its willingness to pay. 

The lawsuit contends that “Absent this agreement the University Defendants would have competed in offering financial aid in order to enroll their top candidates.”  I wonder if that is actually the case. A lot of institutional aid is what has traditionally been called “merit” aid, used to entice enrollment from applicants who otherwise wouldn’t choose a particular college or university. My rule of thumb has always been that you don’t receive merit aid at any college where you are fortunate to be admitted. Most of the 40 defendants don’t need to buy students with financial aid, for reasons identified later in the complaint.

One is selectivity.  Elite colleges have large enough applicant pools that they could admit multiple freshman classes with little change in the class profile. Given how selective most of the defendant universities are, there would be very few students admitted to multiple institutions and able to compare price. Secondly, among students considering those universities, brand preference is as important a factor as cost.  I have certainly had parents state that they were willing to pay for Dartmouth College, but not for a comparable institution not as high in their pecking order.

From an ethical perspective, the real issue here is what obligations do noncustodial parents have for their children’s college educations and what obligations do colleges have to noncustodial parents.  If I were a noncustodial parent, I would certainly want colleges to take into consideration only the income from the custodial parent, especially if it just happens to be the lower income. That would be especially the case if I had a divorce settlement or prenuptial agreement specifying that one parent would be responsible for college costs.  But do I have a right to expect that, and have I been wronged if the methodology used by a college or university requires financial information from noncustodial parents?

I think the clear answer is that a student’s family bears the primary responsibility for paying for college. That should be determined by the ability to pay rather than the willingness to pay, and colleges have the right to know what assets a family actually has, especially since the college is being asked to contribute its own funds to make the student’s attendance possible.

Is that fair? I don’t know.  It clearly imposes an added burden on students who have parents who aren’t in the picture or refuse to participate, and I would hope there are procedures to help those students. It is also the case that there is no such thing as a financial aid methodology that doesn’t benefit some and penalize others. The clearest example of that is back in the day when families who saved for college actually lowered their eligibility for aid compared with those who were spenders.

I’ll be interested to follow this case as it progresses.  I hope the plaintiffs have a stronger case than what I see in the filing. 

Fix the Damn FAFSA!

Several weeks ago my sister happened to visit friends in Chimney Rock, North Carolina, a small town 20 miles from Asheville.  From the cabin where she was staying she could look down on Chimney Rock’s charming main street, and on Wednesday she spent the afternoon exploring a number of its shops. Two days later downtown Chimney Rock no longer existed, the only remnants a debris field that had been washed into Lake Lure by raging storm waters from Hurricane Helene.

During her last reelection campaign, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer adopted a simple campaign slogan that turned into a meme, “Fix the Damn Roads!” The slogan came from a constituent’s response when Whitmer asked what government could be doing to help the average person.

The notion that elected officials should be focused on solving problems and governing well seems quaint and almost unrecognizable in our current political climate, where partisan posturing and political theater have become the dominant values. But we have two recent examples of why we need government leaders to adopt the problem-solving mindset.

Disaster relief falls at the top of the list. Only the federal government has the resources to respond to the devastation wreaked upon the Southeast by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The unprecedented size and reach of both storms makes that abundantly clear. We knew that the coastal areas of Florida were imperiled, but no one foresaw that Asheville, North Carolina would end up being the epicenter of hurricane damage.

You would think that if there is an issue that could unite us as a country, it would be assisting those dealing with a tragedy like the hurricane.  And you’d be wrong. In the aftermath of Helene we have seen an explosion of storm-related conspiracy theories and lies. FEMA is not confiscating your house if you sign up for assistance. Chimney Rock was not destroyed to mine lithium.  “They” don’t control the weather.

Of even greater concern are attempts to weaken government’s ability to respond to disasters like Helene. Plans like Project 2025 propose cutting back disaster relief funding for FEMA and privatizing some of the functions traditionally taken on by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service. Why? Because acknowledgment of the need for those agencies as we seem to be experiencing “thousand year” weather events annually makes it harder to deny climate change.

The second recent issue was a Government Accounting Office report to Congress on the issues underlying the rollout of the “new and improved” FAFSA last year. That also qualifies as a disaster, but a man-made one.  The GAO found numerous examples of incompetence and failure to anticipate and address problems led to the numerous roadblocks encountered by students, their families, and financial-aid professionals.

In case a GAO report is not your idea of light reading, you have a nerdy friend in the blogosphere who has perused the report. What follows is a quick summary of the issues (with apologies to those of you who encountered them first hand in working with students or at an institutional level and remain traumatized).

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The issues identified by the GAO fall into two categories.  There are technical issues, most of which shouldn’t have been a surprise.  The Department of Education had identified 25 “key requirements” for the launch of the new form, but when it was released 18 of the 25 had not been met. Two of those included the ability to determine an applicant’s final federal-aid eligibility and the capability to send results to college financial-aid offices.  Both of those would seem rather important.

By last March the DOE had identified 55 unresolved technical defects, some of them categorized as “critical,” but twenty remained unresolved as recently as early September. 

A number of parents couldn’t get past the first section of the application, meaning that students had to submit a new form.  As of early September, that hadn’t been fixed.  Other students and parents returned to a saved application only to discover that their signatures had disappeared (also not resolved). And until March 8, 69 days after the FAFSA went live, for some reason students born in the year 2000 couldn’t complete the application beyond a certain point.

The students experiencing the greatest difficulties were those with parents or spouses without a Social Security number. Not only were more than half in that group rejected for missing signatures, but they were also required to go through a manual verification process to determine their eligibility for federal funds.  There were two major manual verification issues.  One is that the office overseeing the FAFSA dramatically, maybe even unbelievably, underestimated the number of students who would require manual verification.  The government’s estimate was 3500, whereas the actual number ended up being 219,000.  The other issue was that families had to email documents rather than upload them onto an online portal, which does a better job of identifying documents and evaluating clarity.

I am not a techie, so I have some sympathy for the technology challenges.  The GAO suggests that in the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA)’s haste to meet the Congressionally-mandated deadline for releasing the updated FAFSA, it failed to develop either an infrastructure or a timeline to test adequately the various components.  In particular, the GAO stated that the FSA failed to “ensure bidirectional traceability between high-level and lower-level detailed requirements.” I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound good.

I have far less patience with the second set of issues related to communication.  As early as August of 2022, the FSA knew that the 2024-25 release would likely be delayed, but it didn’t announce that publicly for another seven months. That is inexcusable.  Being forthright about the delays earlier may not have made the rollout any easier, but it would have led to more realistic expectations and less frustration.

The FSA contracted with four vendors to staff call centers for those needing assistance, but during the first five months the call centers were supposedly up and running, four million of the 5.4 million calls went unanswered. It is estimated that more than half of those attempting to seek help did not have at least one call answered. Even when they got through, call center representatives were advised to tell students to “try again later” rather than taking steps to notify them when a particular problem was resolved.  The Department of Education did not inform any of the 3.5 million who initially submitted the FAFSA until February of 2024 that their forms had not been processed.  There seems to have been no plan in place to communicate with those already in the system about their status or issues that had been corrected.

Providing timely and accurate information would seem to be the minimal expectation for government in serving constituents.  In the case of the FAFSA, that is even more important, for three reasons.  The students and their families needing help and accurate information include many who are vulnerable and don’t understand a process that is confusing and anxiety-producing. For many students, the ability to access financial aid is essential to their ability to go to college. And a failure to communicate accurately and effectively empowers those who seek to wreak havoc with conspiracy theories.

Last week former President Trump talked about abolishing the Department of Education if elected, perhaps maintaining a Secretary who would be concerned with whether English and arithmetic are being taught and “wokeness” not taught.  In such a scenario, what happens to federal education funding, including fixing the FAFSA process?

The GAO report included seven recommendations moving forward. It appears that many of them are already in the works as the FSA engages in early testing of the system it never did a year ago.

1. Develop an outreach strategy to identify and connect with students who did not submit a FAFSA during this cycle.

1. Address remaining technical issues and streamline process.

1. Make identity verification more efficient for students who have a parent or spouse with no Social Security number.

1. Improve translation services and support for languages other than English and Spanish.

1. Hire sufficient staff to increase call center capacity.

1. Develop plan to provide FAFSA applicants with timely updates on status of applications and technical solutions.

1. Communicate more effectively with colleges and other stakeholders.

The GAO recommendations all make sense, but could be boiled down to one simple slogan borrowed from Gretchen Whitmer.  Something like “Fix the damn FAFSA.”

California Dreaming

“I’d be safe and warm if I was in L.A.”

California Dreaming, The Mamas and the Papas (1965)

Later this week, 7000-8000 of my closest friends will congregate in Los Angeles for the annual NACAC Conference.  Going to NACAC has always been an important part of my fall, signifying the end of the opening month of school and the beginning of the deadline-to-deadline slog from October 15 to January 15 when college counseling and rec writing become real and consuming. Due to retirement, this is the first time in 40 years I haven’t faced that burden.  I don’t think I’ll miss it.

My first NACAC conference was in 1978 in Miami Beach.  I was a young admission rep, and there are a couple of things I remember.  One is that many sessions were held outside around the pool, and dress was casual.  As a result, when I attended my next NACAC twelve years later I packed nothing but shorts, and found myself dramatically underdressed for the occasion.  The social was held at the Botanical Gardens, and on the bus I sat next to Joe Monte, having no clue that he was a legend in the profession who would become a close friend. A huge storm blew in and blew up the social.

Since 1990 I have missed fewer than a handful of conferences.  The hardest was the 2001 conference in San Antonio, several weeks after 9/11.  I was President of Potomac and Chesapeake ACAC, and one of my closest friends, Arlene Ingram, was a candidate for NACAC president-elect. But on a Sunday afternoon ten days before the conference, my two children announced that we needed to have a family conference and told me they didn’t want me to go. I stayed home, and it was the right call, but I regret not being there to support Arlene. 

Sadly, I won’t be in L.A. this week, except in spirit.  Six months ago I moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, looking forward to an idyllic combination of relaxation and time to devote to some writing projects.  Less than a month later I received a phone call from my primary care physician telling me I needed to go to the emergency room immediately.  After nearly ten days in the hospital, I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease.  I seem to be responding to treatment, and the prognosis is good, but I spent a good part of the summer feeling pretty crappy, and it eventually became clear that I wouldn’t be ready to travel cross country or handle the rigors of the conference.

On Saturday I will be recognized as the 2024 recipient of NACAC’s John B. Muir Excellence in Media Award. I’m obviously grateful for and honored by the recognition, because writing about the intersection of ethics and college admission for the past twelve years has been perhaps the most rewarding part of my professional life.  But I’m also a little embarrassed.  I have been very fortunate to be recognized in various ways during my career–elected, published, quoted, and yes, subpoenad.  I’m embarrassed because I know how many colleagues in the profession are doing the right thing every day in challenging times without support or affirmation. I thank them, I salute them, and I stand with them.

I hope that concern for ethical practices will always be at the heart of NACAC’s mission. Ethics reflect our ideals, how we should act, and it was a concern for ethical professional practices that led to NACAC’s founding.  

Following the DOJ investigation, I sensed that NACAC felt like it needed to downplay ethics as its central tenet.  I understand that, but think it’s a mistake.  The real issue with the DOJ was about our ability to police ethical standards, not our ability to advocate for ethical behavior.  We can certainly highlight best practices, and we can certainly call out colleagues who may be pushing ethical boundaries or are being pressured to do so. I hope that NACAC will always be a strong voice for ethical professional practice.

I will miss seeing all of you in L.A. this week, and I will find myself California Dreaming.  What I will miss most is the conversations I have each year at the conference with readers of this blog, both old friends and those I have never met.  Your devoted readership and kind words mean a lot.

MIT's Diversity Decline

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on September 3, 2024)

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Admissions Office recently released the profile for its incoming Class of 2028.  The announcement garnered national coverage in publications including The New York Times seen as a first glimpse into how last summer’s Supreme Court decision on race-conscious admission has impacted diversity at elite colleges and universities.

The headline emanating from the profile release was that Black and Latino enrollment at MIT has dropped precipitously in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in the cases filed by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Whereas the combined percentage of Black, Latino and Native American and Pacific Islander students had in recent years accounted for a quarter of the entering classes, the percentage dropped to 16 percent for the Class of 2028.  The percentage of Black students in the entering class dropped from 15 to 5 percent, and Latino students from 16 percent to 11 percent.  The percentage of Asian American students increased from 40 percent to 47 percent, while the percentage of white students remained steady (37 percent compared with 38 percent a year ago).

So MIT finds itself in a situation where, just one year after the Class of 2027 had the highest proportion of students from historically under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds in the institution’s history, the Class of 2028 has one of the lowest proportions in decades, on par with MIT classes from the late 1980s and early 90s.  

And since MIT released its freshman profile, two other highly selective institutions, Amherst College and Tufts University, have released data showing similar declines in the proportion of first-year students who are students of color.

Should we be surprised by the decline? And what’s the explanation?

The decline in diversity was anything but surprising. MIT’s experience mirrors what happened at public universities in states like California and Michigan after race-based affirmative action was outlawed in those states.

The materials posted by MIT in connection with the class profile included a detailed blog post written by long-time Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill. I appreciate his taking time to try to lay out the issues, and both MIT’s institutional commitment to diversity and his personal passion come across clearly. I subsequently reached out to him with several questions, and he responded promptly and thoughtfully.

Schmill’s blog asserts that the diversity decline is solely explained by the impact of the Supreme Court decision.  That is an obvious conclusion.  In philosophy there is a principle known as Occam’s Razor, named for the 14th-century philosopher William of Occam (or Ockham). Occam’s Razor argues that the best explanation is usually that which is simplest.

Then again, Occam never watched police procedurals or suspense movies with surprise twists and endings. In this case, there are a couple of factors besides the Supreme Court ruling that could be impacting the MIT decline.

One of the unknowns is whether the applicant pool this year looked substantially different from that of previous years. The New York Times reported that MIT does not know whether fewer Black and Latino students had applied this year because they didn’t ask applicants about their race. MIT is certainly not unique in that approach, as collecting that information would have opened colleges to charges that they were continuing their efforts to craft a class with a certain look despite the Court prohibition on doing so.

But there is another issue that is glossed over in the MIT materials that deserves scrutiny.  Two years ago, MIT returned to requiring applicants to submit standardized test scores, a move that has been followed this spring by other highly-selective universities.  A common theme in their announcements has been the argument that internal institutional research proves that standardized test scores serve as an aid to achieving diversity, but if there is clear evidence supporting that, I’ve missed it.

A footnote in Schmill’s blog post states that the reinstatement of the testing requirement played no role in MIT’s decline in diversity. But compared with all the rich discussion about diversity, there is little detail about how the reinstitution of the test requirement impacted the admission process, other than the assertion that it “helped us identify objectively well-qualified students who lacked other opportunities to demonstrate their preparation,” resulting in the university admitting its most racially and ethnically diverse class ever last year, the first year of the return of testing.

That may serve as prima facie evidence that the reinstatement of required testing did not contribute to this year’s decline, but it’s not that simple.  The weight and influence of test scores in a holistic admission review without the ability to consider factors such as race and ethnicity is far more pronounced, and more dangerous.

Interpreting test scores requires context.  As an admission officer I may have more confidence in a student with a 1500 SAT than one with a 1300, but it makes a difference if the higher score reflects multiple times taking the test or thousands of dollars spent in test prep.  That doesn’t even begin to get into inequalities in family income and high school quality. Without that context it is easy to assign test scores a false precision and see them as some sort of objective measure of ability.

There are also some broader philosophical questions about the role of test scores.  Are test scores a tool of identification (who belongs in the pool), or a tool for selection? Should they be used to identify who is qualified, or who is more qualified? Is a student with a 1530 SAT a better, more deserving candidate than one with a 1470, and is a student with a projected GPA of 3.9 more deserving than one with a projected 3.3?

There are two other things in the MIT materials that caught my attention.  In another blog footnote, Schmill states that “we cannot reliably predict academic success at MIT without relying on standardized testing.” I wondered about that. How did MIT predict academic success during the years when it was test-optional? Was there less academic success during that period? In his email response to that question Schmill observed that MIT didn’t admit anyone without some sort of testing, using Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate scores for students who didn’t submit SAT or ACT scores.  I wonder how the more liberal scoring of AP exams and the changes in format for the SAT and ACT would impact that. 

In a different footnote, Schmill points out that none of the quantitative measures used by MIT predict any difference in academic outcomes between the Classes of 2027 and 2028, but states that there may be “qualitative” differences. I asked him what those qualitative differences might be, and he answered that the decline in diversity numbers presents not just a quantitative difference for an institution like MIT, but a qualitative difference.

I am grateful to MIT for publishing the blog post. The interplay between testing and diversity is mysterious and controversial, and it’s an important conversation for both our profession and our society.  I’m also sensitive that dealing with these issues is far more complicated when you are charged with helping an institution like MIT achieve a complex number of institutional imperatives. 

The ultimate question is how we should feel about the decline. Is the change in the diversity numbers a good thing? That is a much harder question to answer. Not surprisingly, Edward Blum from SFFA sees the change as a positive course correction to the policies that led to the lawsuit in the first place.  But for many of us, an elite admissions process that produces substantially less diversity seems neither “fairer” nor in the nation’s best interest.

Recruiting Priorities

It has been just over a year since the Supreme Court decision in the cases filed by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In that year we have a much clearer view about the direction of the Court–its disregard for ethical standards that guide other jurists and public servants, its lack of concern about public trust and the appearance of impropriety, its willingness to abandon the concepts of precedent and “settled law,” and its definition of “originalism” that is, well, original. 

As Eric Hoover pointed out in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, it is far less clear how the Supreme Court decision has changed the admission landscape.  That is not surprising.  Until we have finished a complete cycle we won’t have enough information to know how admission offices have coped with reading applications without awareness of race in individual applications or the ability to sculpt the class at the end of the process.

There is another factor, of course.  The impact of the Supreme Court ruling has been put on the back burner by a more immediate crisis. In 2019 our attention was on the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, but a year later the issues arising from the Covid pandemic turned OVB into a distant and vague memory. The FAFSA fiasco has had the same effect this year.

We may be starting to see how some colleges are changing policies and practices against the backdrop of the court decision. Recently a loyal ECA reader forwarded me an email she had just received from a highly-selective college.  The email reported that the admission office had conducted an audit of its admission visit programming and would be making some changes for the coming year.

One is abolishing the three-day fly-in program the institution has used to bring prospective students, many of them from diverse backgrounds, to its rural campus.  It intends to replace that program with increased opportunities for school and CBO counselors to visit the campus and expanded travel assistance for accepted applicants from low-income backgrounds to attend the yield open house in April.

There were two other statements in the email that caught the counselor’s attention–and mine as well.

The first promised that counselors would receive “consistent outreach” throughout the year.  Describing outreach as “consistent” would seem to be a low bar, as it describes a wide spectrum of possible responses.  I am not accusing the university in question of planning to do this, but providing no outreach whatsoever would technically qualify as “consistent.”  We have certainly seen a number of colleges, especially those that are most selective, abolish the counselor call to discuss the applicant pool in the name of “equity.”  There were clearly equity issues present in that practice, but it is also possible to define the equity justification as “treat everyone equally badly.”

The more newsworthy nugget was that the institution’s fall and spring travel will “prioritize” CBOs, Title 1 schools, and “feeder school connections.”  That’s an interesting combination, and a more interesting message.

First of all, colleges have a right, and perhaps even an obligation, to determine what is the most efficient and effective use of their resources for recruitment purposes. The experience of Covid, when many schools were virtual and many college campuses closed to visits, forced admission offices to be creative in how they interacted with prospective students. That inevitably led to discussions about whether traditional tools like high school visits are as effective or necessary as they once were.  At one level that is all that the email is communicating.

At the same time, the decision to prioritize CBOs, Title 1 schools, and feeder schools can be read as shifting the institution’s focus on diversity and family connections from the admission process itself to recruitment. The Supreme Court decision outlawed racial preferences in the selection process to achieve a certain mix of students, and one consequence of that decision was renewed scrutiny on legacy preferences.  The court did not speak to preferences in recruiting.  

The term “affirmative action” has encompassed two different paradigms in the past.  One of those involves expanding the pipeline of talent by broadening outreach.  The other is giving advantage in the selection process for underrepresented and desired groups. The court cases involving affirmative action in college admission, dating back to the 1978 Bakke case, have always been about the latter. 

The attention to CBOs and Title 1 schools is about the former, and makes sense from both a pragmatic and an ethical perspective.  Community-based organizations play an increasingly important college counseling role as school counselors are burdened with duties that prevent them from assisting students with the college process. CBOs provide an entree to a group of students that higher education hasn’t effectively reached in the past.  We need colleges, and especially selective colleges, to provide leadership and public service by adopting and supporting CBOs and schools they have historically overlooked.

The outlier here is the focus on “feeder school connections.” Recruiting priority for feeder schools is not the same thing as admission preference for legacy applicants, but what they have in common is that they benefit groups who are already members of the club or college family.  Neither group expands the college’s outreach.

The definition of “feeder school” is a school that consistently and regularly sends students to a college.  They feed the college, but do they also need to be fed? Are they like Seymour, the plant from “Little Shop of Horrors,” screaming “Feed me!”? Do they require special care and attention from an admission office? I certainly hope that it is not the feeder schools pressuring the admission office for special attention.

The answers to those questions depend on what you think the point of school visits is as part of a recruitment strategy.  Is it about expanding outreach or nurturing existing relationships (it can certainly be both)? Should colleges do school visits to expand their outreach and visibility into new markets, or is it important to visit schools where the college is already known and popular? And what about schools that don’t fall into either category? Are they not important? How does a school become a feeder school if it is starved for attention?

There obviously aren’t easy or right answers, but how and whom we choose to recruit sends a clear message about institutional values. Priorities matter. Prioritizing CBOs and Title 1 schools in recruitment makes sense. Prioritizing feeder school connections may not pass the smell test. 

The College Board is Going to Rescue the FAFSA, But Can It Rescue Itself?

The U.S. Department of Education is turning to two executives at the College Board to fix the problems that have plagued the launch of the “simplified” Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a launch that turned out to be anything but simple. College Board President Jeremy Singer will be the new FAFSA czar (his official title seems to be FAFSA executive adviser). He will be joined by Jeff Olson, the CB’s Chief Information Officer, who has overseen the Bluebook technology that has allowed for a transition to a digital SAT.

The announcement has received mixed reviews. Singer and Olson are high-profile, respected names providing confidence that the Office of Student Federal Aid is serious about addressing the issues that continue to frustrate students, counselors, and financial aid professionals.  

At the same time many in the financial aid community have concerns about the College Board’s new role and influence because it is the owner of the College Scholarship Service Profile, a competitor to the FAFSA.  That creates concerns about actual or potential conflict of interest, since neither Singer nor Olson is actually leaving the College Board or their lucrative compensation but will rather be on loan to the Department of Education.  

The word “loan” implies a payback.  What does the College Board get in return? The same experience and expertise that make Singer and Olson ideal mechanics of the new FAFSA also give them the ability to understand its inner workings in a way that strengthens the market for the CSS Profile. How will they navigate their roles as government contractors versus their roles as employees of the College Board? None of us will be surprised that a College Board spokesperson declined to comment when asked about conflicts of interest by Inside Higher Ed.

I’ve been trying to envision how this arrangement might work, and I realize that the scenarios in my head come from television shows and movies. One has Singer and Olson ripping off their jackets and ties to reveal Superman-like costumes, emblazoned with the College Board acorn (trademark included) in place of the “S.”  In the other they are secret agents in an early Bond movie, with David Coleman as M outlining their mission, except that Coleman for some reason morphs into criminal mastermind Ernst Blofeld holding a cat. 

In my opinion there is a far more compelling reason to be concerned about the hirings than the potential conflict of interest.  How can the College Board expect to fix the FAFSA when it doesn’t seem to be able to fix its own problems delivering its signature product, the SAT?

Recently there has been considerable discussion about the difficulty students in certain areas of the country have had being able to take the SAT in June or for the upcoming August administration.  A recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times written by a student living in the San Francisco Bay area indicated that the nearest available test center for August was 400 miles away, and compared registering for the SAT in the Bay Area to scoring tickets for a Taylor Swift concert. The student and his family ended up flying to Dallas to take the test. Several posts from counselors on the NACAC HiveMind also exhibited frustration with the limited number of test spaces and how quickly they filled up as soon as they were made available.

The College Board has what is referred to in other industries as a supply-chain issue.  It has difficulty getting its product to customers, and that’s a sign of a business in danger. It also seems absurd that major metropolitan areas like the San Francisco Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest near Seattle are “testing deserts.”  Given that the challenge with the FAFSA is making it accessible to those who need it, how does hiring two executives from the College Board inspire confidence that they have what it takes to rescue the FAFSA when the SAT availability issues persist?

That may be unfair to Singer and Olson.  The CB is a large organization (perhaps even “too big to fail”) with a number of silos (admission testing, Advanced Placement, CSS), and perhaps problems in one area do not suggest problems across the board.  But the problems in test delivery are not new, but rather rooted in the College Board’s business model.

That model has always relied on high schools doing the work of administering the SAT by serving as test centers. The College Board collects the money, and the schools do the work.  The SAT Suite of Assessments page on the College Board website argues that schools becoming test centers provide students with “familiar surroundings and easy access” and foster “a college-going culture.” They also foster a test-taking culture.

At some point the College Board moved from relying on the kindness of strangers to expecting the kindness of strangers.  Over the past few years it has pushed for school-based testing administered during the school day.  A presentation at the NACAC Conference in Baltimore last fall reported that 65 percent of testing is now school-based.  

There are a couple of issues with school-based testing, but the primary one is the presumption that high schools are agents of the College Board and that administering the SAT is a legitimate part of the high school curriculum rather than an add-on.  Schools and school counselors have probably fed this assumption through the years by administering the PSAT and AP exams in school, but we don’t exist to relieve the College Board of its responsibility to make its products available to customers.  The time has come to re-think the business model.

The College Board’s supply-chain issues have surfaced at a time when a number of elite colleges and universities have returned to requiring applicants to submit test scores. Those institutions share the blame for the mess.  Adding the requirement without taking responsibility for how students will fulfill the requirement constitutes what is called in government an unfunded mandate.  From an ethical standpoint, if I impose a requirement I should provide the means to satisfy the requirement. If test scores are essential parts of admission review for elite colleges, those colleges and universities should become or sponsor test centers.

That’s a justice issue, but it’s also an equity issue.  Wealthy families can afford to drive hundreds of miles and stay in a hotel or fly out-of-state to take the SAT.  And yet the “diamonds in the rough” from less privileged economic backgrounds, the very students that elite colleges claim are identified by and benefit from test scores, don’t have that luxury. Do we really want another admission practice that advantages the already-privileged? 

I hope the College Board executives can fix the problems with the FAFSA.  I’d feel more confident about that if the CB would fix its own problems first.     

A Financial Aid Portal, or Isn't It Ironic?

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on July 15, 2024)

Inside Higher Ed recently reported on a survey conducted by the enrollment management consulting firm Ellucian on how college choice is impacted by a student’s financial aid experience. Ellucian surveyed 1,500 students, 58 percent of them working adult students and the remaining 42 percent traditional-age students.

According to the survey, 76 percent of those responding indicated that where they enrolled was impacted by their financial aid award.  But the size of the award was only part of their decision-making process.  They were also focused on the quality of their interactions with institutions.

Twenty-two percent indicated that they would be inclined to change their college choice if it took longer than two weeks to process the financial aid paperwork. That increases to 73 percent after more than four weeks and 92 percent after more than eight weeks.  Forty-four percent of the respondents also indicated that they would most likely hang up after being on hold with a financial aid office for fifteen minutes. 

Laura Ipsen, Ellucian’s CEO, told Inside Higher Ed that “‘It’s not just ‘Am I going to get the financial aid I need?’” She also pointed out, “The report showed that students are also basing their decisions on ‘What’s my digital experience with this institution?’”

She may very well be right, but that conclusion should be taken with a grain of salt.  It’s self-serving, because Ellucian happens to be in the digital experience business (it owns Banner).

Still, as someone focused on the intersection between ethics and college admission, there was one statistic in the Ellucian survey that got my attention.  Forty-four percent of respondents indicated that they would switch their top college choice if offered an additional $5,000 in aid from another college.

Whether and to what degree net price should be a factor in college choice is not a new issue. Back in the early 1990s, a group of elite colleges known as the Overlap Group compared and adjusted financial aid packages for individual applicants applying to multiple institutions within the group.  Their argument was that students should decide between institutions without being influenced by differing financial aid packages. That view was not shared by the antitrust division of the U.S.Department of Justice, which saw the Overlap Group as engaging in price-fixing and restricting competition.

More recently, the Justice Department sued (and settled with) the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), which agreed in 2019 to alter its Code of Ethics and Professional Practices (CEPP) to delete a section prohibiting poaching, or attempting to recruit students committed to another college, after the May 1 “National College Decision Day.” Sweetening an existing financial aid offer or offering a new scholarship is the most common practice used to initiate poaching.  

I was a member of the task force that developed the CEPP, and the rationale for the prohibition was protecting students from predatory practices by colleges.  The Justice Department saw things differently, interpreting NACAC as interfering with institutions’ ability to compete, and by extension preventing families from paying less for higher education.

I have spent most of my professional life believing that, in a perfect world, choosing a college shouldn’t be first and foremost an economic decision.  But we don’t live in a perfect world, and my view on that issue may be softening.

In ethics, there is an inherent tension between what is ideal and what is practical.  Ethics is normative, about how we should act, but any ethical principle that isn’t pragmatic is worthless.

Back in the 1990s, the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice (the SPGP, a precursor to the CEPP) required members to practice need-blind admission.  That encompassed two different pieces.  One was making admission decisions without consideration of financial need, and the other was meeting the full need of admitted applicants.  There came a point where a number of member institutions argued that they could no longer do both of those, and the SPGP was amended after a contentious debate.

Are we at a similar inflection point when it comes to offering additional scholarships and financial aid to entice students to switch enrollment?  That practice doesn’t pass the smell test, but we are entering a new paradigm for both applicants and colleges.  We know that the cost of higher education is a huge issue for families, especially those for whom the biggest impediment to going to college is financial, and if the Ellucian survey is even close to accurate, nearly 50 percent of students are open to changing their first-choice college  for as little as $5,000 in additional aid.  At the same time, this year’s FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) fiasco has placed many tuition-driven colleges in existential jeopardy.

I’m not arguing that this is a good idea, but I am wondering if there is a way to match students needing (or at least wanting) additional financial aid with colleges willing to provide it without college admission deteriorating (further) into the Wild West. 

From an ethical standpoint, it makes a difference who initiates a scholarship offer or request.  It is kosher for the family of a prospective student to inquire about additional aid, especially if the student is already an applicant. For a college to make an unsolicited scholarship offer is more questionable.

If there is a growing population of students willing to change their first-choice college for an additional $5,000 and a growing cohort of colleges needing and willing to accommodate them, perhaps we need a mechanism to bring them together. And, as it turns out, there is a model in place, albeit an imperfect one.

Perhaps we need to establish a financial aid portal along the lines of the athletic transfer portal currently in use to match athletes looking to transfer with college coaches looking for an infusion of new talent. Families desiring to signify their willingness to switch college allegiances in exchange for additional aid could register with the portal, giving colleges a chance to reach out to students who have initiated the process.

There are obviously some details to be worked out, and I’m happy to leave those to others.  How might we prevent this from deteriorating into an arms race of desperation? Would $5,000 be the threshold or could families register for higher amounts? Should the original college choice have the ability to match any offers?

The biggest issue, of course, is the irony of adopting the athletic transfer portal as a model. It may not compare with rain on your wedding day or a free ride when you’ve already paid, and it falls short of Steve Buscemi’s definition of irony in the movie Con Air, “a bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.” But establishing a financial aid portal to prevent college admission from turning into the Wild West modeled after a process that has turned intercollegiate athletics into its own Wild West would be the ultimate example of “Define Irony.”  

The Other 21 Percent

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on June 17, 2024)

We will be hearing a lot about polls this year in conjunction with the presidential election. We’ll hear far less discussion about whether covering elections like horse races is a good idea, or whether the votes cast by those who live in one of the three to five “battleground” states should count more than everyone else’s.

I am a skeptic, and perhaps even a cynic, when it comes to polls and survey results. I have never been contacted by a pollster, nor known anyone who has, and I’m not sure I would be forthcoming about my opinions.  I suspect I’m not alone. The polling industry underpredicted Donald Trump’s election performance in 2016 and overpredicted the Republican “red wave” that never materialized in 2022.

That doesn’t mean I’m not fascinated by some of the nuggets that can be found in survey results. For many years I taught a class in public speaking, and I always began the course by referencing a famous survey on things people fear. The survey dated back to the 1970s, and I always cautioned my students that some of the things that might appear on a list today–things like climate change, global pandemic, and threats to American democracy– were not in anyone’s consciousness when the survey was done. The number one fear in the survey was public speaking, and in fact the survey results indicated that by a two-to-one margin people were more fearful of speaking in public than of dying. That always seemed a bit extreme.

There was one answer in that survey that always baffled my students and made them wonder about those being surveyed. One of the fourteen answers, receiving something like five percent of the vote, was “escalators.” That always led to a discussion about how escalators are probably more dangerous than they appear. 

I had my own “escalators moment” the other week when I looked at the results of a recent survey conducted by the Associated Press in conjunction with the University of Chicago’s NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The survey examined attitudes on public policy issues, especially those related to education, of a group of 1,068 AAPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) adults.

The survey results for the most part contain few surprises. The attitudes of the AAPI adults surveyed don’t vary significantly from those of the population at large, and party affiliation tends to explain differences on specific issues. Compared to the general public, the AAPI respondents are more likely to see parental income and the community one grows up in as “integral” factors contributing to individual success. About half of AAPI adults viewed state and federal governments as having a large responsibility for the financing of higher education.

My focus is on college admissions, and as a result I was particularly interested in what the survey said about the use of various admissions criteria.  It asked the following question: “Do you think it is fair, unfair, or neither fair nor unfair for colleges and universities to make decisions about admitting students based on the following factors?”

Here are the results:

Factor: % Very/ % Neither Fair % Somewhat/Very

Somewhat Fair Nor Fair Unfair

High School Grades 79 15 5

Standardized Test Scores. 65 19 14

Hardship or Adversity 45 30 23

Athletic Ability 24 32 42

Ability to Pay 23 28 48

First Generation 19 27 54

Race and Ethnicity 18 27 53

Legacy Status 9 20 69

At first glance there is nothing surprising in the relative rankings for those criteria, but there was one survey result that captured my attention.  79 percent of  those surveyed considered high school grades either very fair or somewhat fair as an admissions factor.  That’s four out of five, which seems impressive until you think about it.  Why isn’t the percentage higher? Where are the other 21 percent? 

The “four out of five” statistic is similar to one used in a 1970s ad for Trident sugarless chewing gum, where the claim was that “four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” In both that ad and the AAPI survey, what is significant is not what is said, but what is left unsaid. Why would one out of five dentists think that gum with sugar in it is just as good for you as sugarless gum, and why would 21 percent of survey respondents be less than enthusiastic about high school grades as a criteria for college admission?  

Perhaps the most interesting statistic is that five percent of the survey respondents view the consideration of high school grades to be somewhat or very unfair.  There is no such thing as perfect admissions criteria, and rampant grade inflation and the challenges of educating and evaluating students post-pandemic certainly make high school grades less reliable than once upon a time, but if high school grades are unfair, what would you substitute for them? Test scores were never intended to take the place of academic performance in high school, but rather to provide a standardized context for students coming from very different academic backgrounds and experiences. As the survey results suggest, other possible criteria are far less appealing.

Going to college is first and foremost going to school, and it would seem that, even if imperfect, the best predictor of future success as a college student is a student’s past record as a student.  That’s true even for those who prefer to avoid polls, escalators, and sugarless gum.

A Year Unlike Any Other

Will anyone mourn the end of the 2023-2024 admission cycle, if in fact it ever ends?  The sportscaster Jim Nantz loves to describe the Masters golf tournament as a “tradition unlike any other.” For colleges this year has been a year unlike any other.

That, of course, begins with the fiasco (fiasco is probably not a strong enough description) surrounding the rollout of a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The problems with the FAFSA proved once again that things advertised as “new and improved” are rarely both.

We know that financial aid professionals continue to be stretched thin and stressed out from having to process the new FAFSA Student Aid Index under a time crunch. We know that admission offices at tuition-driven institutions are trying to meet budget goals without full information for applicants requiring financial aid to attend college, and that deposits are running behind at a number of places.  

We also know that there are a number of colleges whose very existence is in jeopardy. Ten days ago the University of the Arts in Philadelphia announced without warning that it would close, joining other colleges including venerable places like Birmingham Southern in Alabama, founded in 1856, and Wells College in Upstate New York, which dates back to 1868. I previously wrote about Birmingham Southern, which since closing on May 31 has become the answer to a trivia question.  Its baseball team made the College World Series for Division 3 (including eliminating my alma mater), meaning that its baseball team outlived the institution.

Wealthy, elite colleges and universities that don’t have to worry about making their classes have had their own issues this spring in the form of student unrest and protests arising from the situation in Israel and Gaza.  I talked with an admission dean friend earlier this year who talked about his staff members being hesitant to come into the office because of demonstrators taking over campus spaces located next to the campus welcome center, and I know counselors who report that some Jewish parents will not allow their children to consider certain elite universities where they perceive that there is a strong streak of anti-Semitism.  

The undercurrent of hate in the protests is troubling and hard to fathom. Is this another consequence of the impact of COVID on this generation of students’ educational experience during high school and college? I have certainly observed an increased emotional fragility in my students since 2020, perhaps a sign that COVID impacted their emotional development far more than their educational development. Do students have an inability to deal with moral complexity? Is the selective admissions process a contributing factor? That’s a discussion for another time. 

While the issues on the college side of the profession have received the most attention, college counselors in schools face new challenges in advising students. The immediate focus this past year has been in trying to support students facing problems in filing the FAFSA, but there are also counseling challenges posed by the changing landscape of higher education.  For example, there are an increasing number of universities that admit applicants but not for the main campus they applied for.  Northeastern University’s satellite campus in Oakland (what used to be Mills College) may be located in the northeastern part of the San Francisco bay area, but isn’t exactly what students hoping to attend Northeastern are expecting. Penn State satellite campuses like Hazleton and Ogontz (today Abington) are not the same as Happy Valley. 

While college closures have received the most attention, there are a number of other institutions that are eliminating jobs and programs. On May 30 the University of Lynchburg in Virginia announced that it was cutting 40 staff positions effective immediately, including five of nine VP positions, and also phasing out twelve undergraduate programs and five graduate programs. Brandeis is cutting 60 positions, and Delta State in Mississippi plans to eliminate 21 of 61 academic programs, including English, history, and chemistry.

Those retrenchments in academic offerings and staffing have immediate and real consequences for the students and employees impacted, but they also impact college counselors. Trying to help students find the right college fit now requires knowledge about the financial health and viability of colleges in a way it hasn’t.  That’s challenging because the information tends to be closely guarded by struggling colleges and universities.

Last fall I met with a senior who was seriously considering depositing at a small college where his credentials would have placed him among the top students. There is certainly an argument to be made for going to that kind of situation.  In many ways the college was a perfect fit.  It was located geographically close to property owned by his family in a place he loves and may want to settle permanently.  He would receive a significant merit scholarship, would be able to play a sport in college, and had made a connection with a professor in his area of interest who might serve as a mentor for him academically.

I wanted to have a conversation on two fronts.  I supported his reasons for being interested in the college, but worried about whether he would be challenged academically, and encouraged him to spend several days on campus attending classes and seeing how he fit academically with the students there. I also wondered about how stable the place was financially, but my research didn’t reveal any issues.  He ended up picking a different place that was a good fit for him in different ways.

Good college counseling requires knowing your students, knowing the right questions to ask, and knowing what’s happening at colleges.  That’s more challenging than ever before in a time of social and financial unrest, a year unlike any other.  Let’s hope that what we’ve encountered this year isn’t the new normal.

Diversity Without Affirmative Action

Back in March the New York Times published an interactive piece entitled, “Can You Create a Diverse College Class Without Affirmative Action?”  The article, by Aatish Bhatia and Emily Badger, examined a study conducted by Stanford researchers Sean Reardon and Demetra Kalogrides to determine whether alternatives to race-based admissions preferences could increase diversity at elite colleges and universities.

Reardon and Kalogrides ran simulations for four scenarios to calculate how each would impact the racial composition of a class, the percentage of low-income students, and the average SAT score.  Utilizing real-life academic and demographic information from the high school class of 2013, they developed models for an institution with a five percent admit rate, where 500 of 10,000 applicants would be admitted.   

Scenario one involved giving students from low-income backgrounds a boost equivalent to 150 points on the SAT. The second scenario added a second, 150-point boost for students coming from high-poverty high schools.  Scenario three was based on finding “outliers,” students who outperform their peers from similar backgrounds. Dartmouth used the outlier theory as one rationale for its return to requiring test scores. The final scenario involved expanding the applicant pool by identifying qualified students who aren’t applying to elite colleges. The authors of the study report report that scenario four produces the biggest shift toward low-income students, with Hispanic students benefiting the most.

So how did each scenario impact the composition of the projected entering class?

Scenario % Black/Hispanic % Low Income Avg. SAT

One 13 10 1390

Two 18 11 1380

Three 25 17 1340

Four 32 23 1320

The models above demonstrate the complex relationship that different levers have on the composition of a desired class.  Making progress in one area carries with it a cost in another. Hoping to increase the percentage of diverse and low-income students will probably lower the average SAT score of a class.  Admission offices have to decide which institutional priority takes precedence.

ECA is always interested in underlying assumptions, and there are several in this study worth examining..  

The researchers state that they “use SAT scores as a simplified measure of academic merit.”  I wonder if that holds up to scrutiny.

Clearly one appeal of SAT scores as a metric is that they are simple, a way to categorize a student in four digits. I have questioned before whether we measure what we value, or value what is easily measured.

But are SAT scores a measure of academic merit?  I have never found SAT scores to be random.  With rare exceptions my good students scored well and weaker students didn’t. But does a strong test score indicate “academic merit” or the ability to test well?  

The “academic merit” arguments hearken back to a century ago when testing was seen as an objective way of measuring human potential. Today we know how flawed and even ignorant that was, with subtle ties to the eugenics movement. Even David Coleman would have a hard time making the argument today that SAT scores measure “academic merit.” An individual’s score is influenced by the environment he or she grows up in, both at home and at school. In addition, the ability of wealthy families to pay for test prep and multiple test administrations means that identical scores don’t mean the same thing.  SAT scores may be simple, but not a measure of academic merit.

The Stanford study makes an important distinction between race and income.  It states that, “Income is a relatively weak proxy for race in admissions. A preference for lower incomes produces just that: students with lower incomes, not necessarily a much larger share of Black or Hispanic students.” It points out that one criticism of race-based admission preferences was that the Black and Hispanic students admitted under those policies were “overwhelmingly middle- and upper-income students.” Of course the elephant in the room is that admitting more low-income students carries with it the obligation to provide more financial-aid resources. 

The boost given by the researchers to low-income students (150 points on the SAT in scenario one and 300 points for students from high-poverty schools in scenario two) would seem to come into conflict with the “diamond in the rough” theory advanced by some of the Ivy League institutions that have reinstated their test score requirement. The argument is that the SAT identifies students who would otherwise be overlooked as applicants for the nation’s elite colleges.  

But how many diamonds in the rough are out there? According to the 2022 annual report for the SAT “Suite of Assessments,” one percent of African-American test takers scored above 1400 on the SAT, or about 2000 students nationally. For test takers self-identifying as Hispanic, it was two percent, or approximately 8000 nationally.  Those numbers aren’t broken down by income, but it’s a very small pool even if everyone in it is from a low-income background, and that’s likely not the case. So does the SAT serve to find diamonds in the rough, or do students from low-income backgrounds and schools require a significant boost because their test scores are an impediment to admission?

That leads to the biggest flaw in the Reardon/Kalogrides study. They begin with a desired result, a certain composition of the class, and then attempt to reverse engineer the admissions process to produce the desired outcome. Is that any different from what highly-selective/rejective colleges did with regard to race and other factors in “shaping” a class? Probably not. Critics of race-based affirmative action were convinced that colleges were putting a thumb on the scale to achieve a certain level of diversity.

If I were an admissions dean, charged with helping my institution achieve a variety of strategic goals through the admissions process, I’d be tempted to do the same thing.  But admitting a class rather than admitting students as individuals serves institutions much better than it does students. Every applicant deserves equal consideration, and that doesn’t happen in an admissions process that is reverse engineered to produce a previously desired outcome.  Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion in the Harvard/UNC cases finds that race can be taken into account as part of the evaluation of an individual’s qualifications, whereas setting goals to achieve certain levels of diversity within the entire class is impermissible.

There are certainly challenges to that approach. How does a college or university handle a situation where its diversity numbers drop precipitously from year-to-year?

Perhaps the most interesting idea in the Stanford study is that the ultimate solution is expanding outreach and identifying students we are now missing.  That’s a huge challenge at any time, but especially this year when the FAFSA rollout fiasco has challenged colleges’ ability to enroll their classes for this fall.  We may agree that higher education has an obligation to serve the public interest and not just institutional interest, but according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs it’s hard to worry about self-actualization when you are worried about where your next meal is coming from. When you are on a flight and the emergency oxygen masks drop down, you are supposed to first put on your own mask. 

There is, however, a group of colleges that do have the opportunity to make a difference. That, of course, is the group of “elite” colleges and universities that admit a minuscule percentage of applicants, the kinds of places that receive the vast majority of attention from media outlets like the New York Times.  We need that group of colleges to step up and lead with a sustained commitment to do pro bono work long before students enter high school. It also requires from all of us a more sustained effort to identify the qualities, both academic and non-academic, that lead to success.  It won’t be easy, but the things in life that are most valuable aren’t easy.