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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Employ a stream of consciousness narrative style.

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

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

1. KISS (Keep it simple, Sir)

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

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

Admit………….NOW!

1. Offer explanations or excuses where necessary.  Examples:

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

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

1. Be appreciative of your reader’s time.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

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

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Bennington "Late Decision" Update

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

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

Proxy Music

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

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

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

    The August 7 Presidential Memorandum

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

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

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

    The Bondi Memo

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

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

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

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

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

    New Data For IPEDS

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

• Admissions test score quintile

• GPA quintile

• Family income range

• Pell Grant eligibility

• Parental education

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

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

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

Merit-Based Admission

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

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

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

Proxies in Admission

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

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

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

ECA Referenced in Chronicle of Higher Education

Earlier today the Chronicle of Higher Education posted an article on the increased and late use of waitlists by elite universities like Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and Rice. The article includes a reference and link to the previous ECA post. We are always grateful for those who read the blog and the recognition it receives.

Waitlist, Waitlist, Don't Tell Me

Last week Duke University’s student newspaper, The Chronicle, reported that Duke just admitted 50 students off its waitlist. The move comes two months after Duke declared the waitlist closed back in June and less than two weeks before the August 16 move-in date for freshmen.

Duke’s interim dean of undergraduate admissions told The Chronicle that the decision to reopen the waitlist was made to grow the size of the freshman class from 1720 to 1750.  She also indicated that the move was not based on worry about a decline in international student enrollment.

Duke is apparently not alone in turning its waitlist into a latelist.  In a recent post on LinkedIn, author Jeff Selingo named Harvard, Stanford, and Rice as other elite universities which have recently admitted students off waitlists.

Duke’s move, while apparently unprecedented, is not all that surprising. There has been speculation dating back to the spring that there would be far more waitlist activity this admission cycle.  These are fraught and unsettling times for higher education, with government attacks on research funding for universities and the number of international students on college campuses.  In normal times places like the Ivies and Duke are relatively immune from the challenges faced by most institutions in most years.  These, of course, are not normal times. Yesterday the Chronicle of Higher Education questioned whether two of the historical strengths of the Ivy-plus research universities, access to federal research funding and uber-selective admission, are now weaknesses.

Duke’s action raises some interesting questions.  Is it ok to take students off a waitlist this late in the admission cycle? Is Duke engaging in a form of poaching, recruiting students already committed to or enrolled at another institution? Duke certainly has the right to reopen the waitlist, but does that make it the right thing to do?

First of all, Duke has not broken any rules, because there are none.  The National Association for College Admission Counseling’s ethical standards are now best practices rather than required for NACAC members.  That change came about after NACAC entered into a consent decree with the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.  One of the provisions in the since-renamed Code of Ethics and Professional Practices that aroused scrutiny from the DOJ prohibited poaching students after May 1. 

I have often used a quote generally attributed to Immanuel Kant as a definition of ethics, “Ethics begins where self-interest ends.” (I say “generally” attributed to Kant because I have googled the quote before and found it attributed to me.)  Ignoring the origins of the quote, I think it’s a useful definition and true to Kant.

It seems clear that Duke’s decision to reopen the waitlist this late in the summer is motivated by financial self-interest.  Earlier this year, it instituted a hiring freeze, and this summer nearly 600 staff members have taken voluntary buyouts to help lower expenses. Involuntary reductions may be soon to follow. Given Duke’s sticker price of just over $92,000, adding 50 students brings in $4-5 million in last minute revenue. 

Just because Duke is acting out of self-interest doesn’t necessarily mean it is acting unethically. The revenue serves an ethical purpose if it benefits students or saves jobs. If ethics begins where self-interest ends, then it can be argued that at least some decisions based on self-interest exist outside the realm of ethics.  There also happens to be an ethical theory, ethical egoism, that argues that what is ethical is what produces the most good for you.  That sounds a lot like a justification for self-interest.

There are at least several parts of this story with ethical ramifications.  One is admitting students off the waitlist after previously announcing that there would be no more waitlist action.  That change of heart/change of policy could be construed as reneging on a promise, although whether closing the waitlist constitutes a promise is debatable.

For Kant keeping a promise is a paradigmatic act, ethically important even when inconvenient or not in one’s self-interest.  Keeping promises is essential to establishing truthfulness and trustworthiness, two values that seem old-fashioned if not extinct in today’s political climate.

Duke’s late waitlist reversal runs the risk of appearing desperate.  Many years ago I had just been hired as Director of Admission at a small independent school. Two weeks before the start of school, enrollment had not hit even the minimal budget predictions, and some board members wanted me to begin cold-calling prospective families.  I refused, stating that once word got out that we were desperate we would never recover.  I somehow kept my new job.  The reality is that Duke’s brand won’t be damaged by admitting 50 students off the waitlist two weeks before move-in day.  Only a losing basketball team could do that.  

What about the timing of Duke’s decision? Students were contacted on July 29 and given 24 hours to reply that they wished to be considered, and those admitted were given until August 4 to deposit. Students “dying for Duke” were probably not bothered by the quick turnaround time, but is that timetable reasonable?  Ethics is about ideals, about how we should act. Admitting students off the waitlist at the last minute and giving them almost no time to decide in no way represents how college admission should work.  Even for those students overjoyed to get the admission offer, the onboarding process for Duke is compressed, with housing options and course registration limited.  

Do colleges have ethical responsibilities not only to students but also to other institutions? Like it or not, there is a pecking order in higher education, and the decisions made by elite institutions have ramifications that are both wide and deep.  It has been said that when Harvard itches, everyone scratches.

When an institution like Duke goes to its waitlist, it starts a chain reaction affecting other colleges and universities.  I remember the Dean of Admission at a public Ivy, upon hearing rumors that a peer institution might be going to its waitlist, state that she needed to go to the waitlist earlier, anticipating summer melt.  June summer melt is bad enough, but August summer melt leaves damage that is too late to mitigate.

Does Duke’s use of the waitlist constitute poaching? Admitting students off a waitlist was always a recognized exception to the prohibition on poaching students after May 1. But it is one thing to be offered a spot off a waitlist in May or June, and another in July/August. Poaching is usually associated with offering “merit” scholarships or other inducements.  Is Duke introducing a new kind of poaching, offering as bait prestige rather than money? Is one any better than the other?

It can certainly be argued that Duke’s action is not the new normal but an anomaly, a response to exigent circumstances and dark threats to higher education and American society.  I hope that’s the case.  Our response to unlawful and unethical policies shouldn’t be as distasteful as the policies themselves.

Best Practices

Beginning tomorrow, members of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, better known as NACAC, will be invited to participate in the association’s annual member vote.  Between July 16 and September 5, NACAC members will have the opportunity to vote to elect a new chair-elect of the Board of Directors along with three new directors.  They will also be asked to vote on two proposed changes to NACAC’s by-laws.

Those two by-law changes, if successful, could make this vote the last of its kind.  Don’t panic, NACAC is not abolishing voting.  One of the proposed by-laws would change the Board of Directors to Board of Trustees, meaning that this could be the last time members vote for “directors” rather than “trustees.” The other proposed change would give the board rather than the membership the responsibility to elect the board chair, making this the last time members will have input in electing the organization’s top officer.

I am not a by-laws geek (those who know me will point out that I qualify for geekdom in a number of other respects), but I have nevertheless followed the proposed changes with great interest.  I am a Past President of NACAC, and as a result the organization’s welfare is important to me.  I am a language stickler, believing that precise communication and argumentation are important.

The by-law changes are being presented as “critical and necessary.” That may be the case, but I have found the rationales provided to be underwhelming and unconvincing. This post will attempt to examine and deconstruct the arguments presented for the two proposed changes. 

Let me be clear on two things. First, I do not presume to tell anyone else how to vote.  I trust the collective wisdom of NACAC’s members.  Second, my comments are not intended as criticism of the current board or the NACAC staff.  I appreciate those willing to step up and serve the association in leadership, and I respect Angel Perez as a strong voice for our profession and a prominent national face for NACAC.

These are perilous times for organizations like NACAC.  The association had to pivot over the past five years, with the pandemic resulting in a significant reduction to its most significant revenue stream, the cash cow that was the National College Fair program.  That has impacted NACAC’s ability to develop new programming initiatives.  Even more impactful is the Trump Administration’s attack on higher education, from DEI to research funding to accreditation, posing unprecedented challenges to individual institutions, to our work, and to our country’s future.  These times require NACAC to be nimble and innovative.  That may include changing by-laws.  I’m just not sure these particular changes are necessary or allow NACAC to better serve its members or the profession.

The overriding justification for the by-law revisions is to align NACAC with “best practices” in the non-profit and association world.  The best practices argument can be both convincing and convenient.  Who could possibly be against best practices?  At the same time, a counseling friend of mine has dealt with a school principal who used “best practices” as a device to shut down any questions raised about policies or procedures.

I have asked several times exactly what those best practices are and how NACAC is in non-compliance, and I have yet to receive an answer.  In the member webinar there was a mention that the changes have been inspired by several ad hoc committee reports, including a 2017 ad hoc committee on governance restructuring.  When I asked if it was possible to see that committee’s report, I was told that there was no report, just recommendations communicated to the board, and that the board would have to decide whether to release those recommendations.  Am I the only one who finds it odd that the work of a NACAC committee is not available to the membership? Isn’t transparency a best practice?

These proposed by-law revisions follow a major by-laws revision several years ago.  If the changes reflect universally accepted best practices, why weren’t they part of the changes at that time?  Or have the best practices changed?

Let’s look at the specific proposed changes, beginning with the proposal to have the chair-elect selected by the board rather than the membership.  Investing the vote in the membership is a recent phenomenon, corresponding to the change from electing a President-elect for the association to electing a Chair-elect for the board. That change came with the abolishment of the NACAC’s legislative body, the Assembly.  Its duties included electing the directors and president-elect.

Giving the election of board members and the President-elect to the membership was seen as a way to open the door to a broader spectrum of NACAC members to serve in national leadership and to make the organization more democratic (small “d”).  As I recall it was even promoted as a “best practice.”  So what’s changed?

The argument for moving to board election of the chair-elect, which apparently generated “robust” conversation, is, to quote the email announcing the proposed change, “By selecting its own chair, a nonprofit board strengthens its governance, aligns its leadership with organizational needs, and ensures an accountable and effective leadership structure and succession.”

It’s not clear why that is.  How is a more insular selection process stronger? Has moving to a popularly-elected chair resulted in leaders who are not aligned with organizational needs?  And to whom should the leadership structure be accountable?

At one point there was a suggestion in one of the webinars that it is challenging and perhaps unfair to expect a board chair-elect who has not already served on the board to get up to speed.  I’m sorry, I don’t buy that.  I became President-elect of NACAC shortly after the board expanded to include at-large directors, and I think the expectation was that only previous board members would move into the Presidential cycle.  I proved that wrong, and didn’t find my lack of NACAC board experience an issue (Joyce Smith may choose to differ).  I have always thought it is healthy for NACAC to bring fresh perspectives onto the board.  As for serving in the chair-elect role, that’s why there is a chair-elect, to give the next chair a year to observe and participate in the work of the board and prepare to step in and lead.

Then there is the proposal to change from Board of Directors to Board of Trustees.  Does that represent a meaningful change?

The email announcing the proposed by-law changes stated that “the change in nomenclature aligns and communicates the board’s fiduciary function,” while an email from NACAC’s governance department responded to a question by stating that “the work of the board aligns most accurately with a board of trustees.  A board of directors is more often associated with corporate or for-profit entities.”

The fiduciary responsibilities of the board were mentioned several times as an important consideration in the changes.  Some quick research into non-profit governance suggests that in some states having trustees rather than directors is necessary for legal reasons, but a board of directors has the same fiduciary responsibility as a board of trustees.  

It is also not the case that boards of trustees vs. boards of directors is a function of non-profit vs, for-profit.  The College Board, CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education, for which Angel Perez is a Board member), and ACCIS (Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools) all have boards of trustees, but reputable non-profits such as the American Council of Education and the American Red Cross have boards of directors. And an article about non-profit governance by a Georgetown professor who consulted with NACAC talks solely about boards of directors.

I hope that the change isn’t as simple as the belief or hope that board members who are trustees are therefore more trustworthy than directors.  I also hope that the name change isn’t masking a more significant change.

Is NACAC becoming a fundamentally different organization?  The non-profit website boardeffect.com has said that one key difference between board of directors and boards of trustees is that “A board of trustees primarily operates in an advisory capacity leaving decision-making to the senior leadership, whereas a board of directors is responsible for decision-making.” In the past five years NACAC has abolished both the Assembly and its standing committees, a structure that allowed members to serve in leadership roles.  The reality is that NACAC can no longer subsidize that kind of structure, but the consequence is that NACAC has become less a member-driven association and more a board-driven and staff-centric inside-the-Beltway association, increasingly disconnected from membership in decision-making.  I hope this isn’t another step down that path.  I found one comment made during the June 9 webinar for members troubling.  Members were encouraged to “learn more about the candidates and how their experience and expertise will serve the Board of Directors.”  Shouldn’t the focus be not on serving the Board, but rather serving the membership and the profession?  That’s a small but meaningful distinction.

The proposed by-law changes may be necessary, but I’m far from convinced they’re good.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back In the Water

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed on July 14, 2025)

I am not currently on a 12-step program of any kind, but recently I felt the need to seek forgiveness for a transgression committed 50 years ago.  This summer is the 50th anniversary of the release of Jaws, the movie that redefined the definition of blockbuster and made a whole generation think twice before stepping into the ocean for a quick dip.

I took my little sister to see Jaws that summer, having already seen it.  As big brothers do, I waited until the exact moment when the shark leaps out of the water while Roy Scheider is casually ladling chum into the ocean behind the boat, and either grabbed or pinched her.  All to make the movie-watching experience more realistic, of course.

A recent article in The Washington Post explored why, despite three sequels, Jaws never became a money-making franchise in the way that Star Wars or the Marvel movies have.  The obvious reason is that Steven Spielberg elected not to be involved after the original movie. Thus, while I find myself humming John Williams’ simple but ominous theme music every time I read the latest news, the only thing I remember from any of the other three movies is the tagline for Jaws 2, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

I thought about that tagline from a college admission perspective last week when I learned that Cornell College (the one in Iowa, not the Ivy) has launched what is either an innovative financial aid initiative or a gimmick. 

As detailed by several other publications, Cornell College emailed 16,000 soon-to-be high school seniors in its inquiry pool.  Nothing unusual about that.  What was different about this email was that it included a link to a personalized estimated financial aid package.  Sending out financial aid offers/estimates to students who haven’t applied for financial aid or admission is the new twist in what Cornell calls its “Save Your Seat” initiative.

If you are wondering how Cornell was able to send an estimated aid package to students who haven’t completed a FAFSA, the college started by mining ZIP code data for its inquiry pool.  The nine-digit ZIP+4 code in student addresses provides precise information about where they live and allows Cornell to guesstimate a family’s economic circumstances.   It might therefore be more accurate to say that the estimated financial aid package is individualized rather than personalized, because there is an element of geographic or ZIP code profiling taking place. The ZIP+4 information is supplemented by aggregated data provided by College Raptor, the consulting firm engaged by Cornell, along with historical internal data on financial aid packages.

There are some kinks to work out and questions to be considered, of course.  How will Cornell factor in Pell Grants and other governmental financial aid? Will the college make up the difference if the student’s SAI (Student Aid Index) turns out to be higher than Cornell’s estimate?  Apparently Cornell did some testing using applicants from last year and found that the estimates were reliable in the vast majority of cases.

The Save Your Seat financial aid package for every student includes a $33,000 National Academic Scholarship covering nearly half of Cornell’s list price.  To guarantee access to the aid, Cornell is asking students to apply by the end of this month and submit an enrollment deposit by September 1. As The Chronicle of Higher Education explains, “students who apply by the end of July and submit a deposit by September 1 are guaranteed to receive the $33,000 scholarship, plus any institutional need-based grants for which they might qualify, based on their estimate. They will also get first dibs on housing and first-year seminars. (Those who deposit by November 8 will get the same deal, minus the guaranteed need-based grants and priority registration for the seminars.)”

So what should we make of Save Your Seat? Is Cornell College on to something, or is this another marketing gimmick intended to differentiate Cornell from the mass of small, liberal arts colleges? (Its one-course-at-a-time curriculum already distinguishes it.) 

I applaud Cornell for trying to introduce some transparency about cost up front.  We know that affordability is both a major concern and a major impediment for many families in considering colleges, and particularly private colleges.  Having a way to estimate cost early in the college search rather than at the very end is potentially a huge step forward for college admission.  Cornell’s initiative might be thought of as an updated version of the Net Price Calculator, with someone else doing the calculations for you.  Save Your Seat might also be seen as the next iteration in the direct admission movement.

But let us stop for a moment to acknowledge that Cornell’s new initiative, while more transparent, isn’t truly transparent.  It does nothing to illuminate the high-cost, high-discount model that higher education relies on.

There are good reasons for that.  There have been several colleges that have tried to lead a movement to reset tuition, substantially reducing their sticker price but also substantially reducing discounts. They learned two things.  The first was that they were willing to lead,  but other colleges were not willing to follow.  

The bigger issue is that they learned that families are more than happy to pay lower tuition, but are not happy to lose their “merit” scholarships.  As it turns out, merit scholarships are among the least transparent and most misunderstood contrivances in college admission, perhaps deliberately so.

Just last week I spoke with someone who was surprised that a nephew had been admitted to college and then shocked when he received a merit scholarship.  That conversation brought to mind a phone call I had with the mother of one of my students years ago.  The son was a good kid but not a strong student, and he had just received merit scholarships to two different colleges.  I finally figured out that the point of her call was to ask what was wrong with the two colleges that were awarding her son merit scholarships.

The $33,000 National Academic Scholarships offered to every Save Your Seat email recipient might be thought of as the higher education equivalent of Oprah’s “You get a merit scholarship! You get a merit scholarship!” Cornell is far from alone in giving a discount to most or all students, but the potential pickle in which it finds itself is a situation where it tells students they are not admitted after already telling them they have won a merit scholarship.

That is far from the biggest ethical issue raised by the new plan. If the move toward greater financial aid transparency, at least in theory, is a positive step, asking students to apply by the end of July and deposit by September is anything but.

When the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) was forced to abandon key aspects of its code of ethics as part of a consent decree with the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, there were fears that college admission might deteriorate into a lawless “Wild West,” with colleges coming up with new strategies and incentives to coerce vulnerable students into decisions they weren’t ready to make.  Thankfully that hasn’t happened to the degree predicted.

Cornell’s decision to tie the Save Your Seat financial offers to an earlier application and enrollment deadline represents another leap forward in the acceleration of the college admission process. Who thinks that’s a good idea for students?  It ignores the fact that many high school counseling offices are closed during the summer and won’t be able to send transcripts (perhaps Cornell will use self-reported grades).  It is also significantly earlier than the provision in the now-defunct NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice prohibiting an application deadline before October 15.  Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

It’s not clear to me why the earlier deadlines are necessary for the program to work.  It’s clear that there are benefits for Cornell, but students should be allowed to choose where to go to college thoughtfully and freely, without coercion or manipulation.  Whose seat is being saved here?

Prestige, Fit, and the Million-Dollar Softball Pitcher

If you are a softball fan, you know that the college world series was held a couple of weeks ago in Oklahoma City.  If you are not a softball fan, the college world series was held a couple of weeks ago in Oklahoma City.

The tournament attracted a record number of TV viewers and featured several compelling storylines.  The University of Texas won its first national championship, ending the four-year championship run by the University of Oklahoma. The Sooners didn’t go easily.  Down to their final strike in an elimination game against Texas Tech, their number nine hitter hit a dramatic game-tying home run, only to see Texas Tech score the winning run in the bottom of the seventh.  

Texas Tech’s ascendence was the big story line in the tournament, showing that the changing landscape of intercollegiate sports have, depending on your viewpoint, either embraced or infected college softball.  On the very night that Texas claimed the championship, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken signed off on a settlement allowing colleges to pay athletes directly (since 2021 college athletes have had the ability to be paid by third-party entities for use of their names, images, and likenesses, or NIL).  Under the terms of the new settlement, colleges will be able to pay up to a total of $20.5 million to athletes over the next year, with the amount increasing in future years.

As someone who has always been a college sports fan, I have to admit that the new world of intercollegiate athletics has diminished my interest. It’s not the money.  I don’t object to college athletes being paid, given the time they put into their sports and the revenue they produce for universities and others.  

I am far more bothered by conference realignment that results in there being 18 schools in the Big Ten conference and Cal and Stanford being part of the Atlantic Coast conference, and also by the transfer portal that has become a form of free agency for college athletes.  2700 men’s basketball players entered the transfer portal this off-season, nearly half of all D1 players, and it is not uncommon to hear of players competing for their third or even fourth different institutions.  I’m a former college professor and coach and believe that athletics provide a classroom, but it’s hard to imagine that the transfer portal has enhanced the educational experience for college athletes.  Perhaps it’s time to discard the fiction of the student-athlete and admit that college athletes are employees within the advancement arm of colleges and universities.  But that’s a discussion for another time.

Back to softball. Texas Tech’s emergence in a single year as a softball powerhouse after never before having made the World Series was built on the back of a new coach and a large number of transfers, the most prominent of which was star pitcher NiJaree Canady.  Canady transferred to Texas Tech from Stanford, where she had been the 2024 national player of the year, after becoming college softball’s first recipient of a million-dollar NIL deal.  Many observers believe that NiJaree Canaday could become softball’s equivalent of Caitlin Clark, drawing a new generation of fans to the sport.

A recent article in The Athletic detailed the recruiting process that led Canady from Stanford to Texas Tech.  As is often the case (maybe “sometimes” is more accurate), the comments were more interesting than the article itself.  What caught my eye was a question raised by several different commenters, a question that leads to one of the great debates within college admission.

Was Canady foolish, even misguided, to give up the opportunity for a Stanford diploma as opposed to one from Texas Tech?  Several commenters were incredulous that she would have even considered that, Others pointed out that, if she ultimately wanted a Stanford degree, she could go to Stanford for graduate school and that her million dollar deal from Texas Tech would cover the cost very nicely.

Answering that question requires answering a broader question about what is most important about a college education.  There are two schools of thought, or what philosophers call “world-views.”  World views are grounded in a combination of fact and faith.

In one corner we have what might be called the “Prestige” world-view.  That school of thought sees the value of college as deriving from the name on the diploma.  The “best” college is the one that is most prestigious, and prestige is often correlated with selectivity, wanting us to believe that the harder a place is to get in, the better it must be.  In the prestige world-view, college choice is objective, with the U.S. News college rankings serving as its bible.

The alternative is what might be called the “Fit” world-view.  For those of us who believe in fit, what is most important about college is not the name on the diploma, but rather the college experience one has.  The fit world-view sees college choice as subjective and personal.  What is right for me may not be right for you. 

The prestige world-view is based on the assumption that there is a secret sauce in attending a prestigious college, an added value that improves an individual’s likelihood of success after college. A simplistic framing of the Stanford vs. Texas Tech question could lead to a conclusion that NiJaree Canady should have stayed at Stanford.

But it is not that simple.  The argument for added value from prestige is based on studies from researchers like Caroline Hoxby and Raj Chetty showing an earnings differential for those who graduated from prestigious institutions.  But differences in earnings are related more to what one majors in than where one goes to college.  I don’t know what Canady is majoring in, but engineering graduates from Texas Tech will in most cases earn more than Art History or Philosophy majors from Stanford do.

That ignores a more important question.  Are earnings a proxy for success?  If a college or university produced an uncommon number of teachers or Peace Corps volunteers rather than investment bankers and consultants, would the lower earnings mean that the college or its graduates were less successful?  Do we use earnings as a metric of success because they measure what we value, or do we value them because they are easy to measure?

There are two other issues to consider here.  One is the million-dollar deal Canady received from Texas Tech.  Even if Stanford graduates earn more than Texas Tech graduates over their lifetimes, is the difference one million dollars?  Aren’t NIL deals a form of merit scholarship, designed to entice students who otherwise wouldn’t consider a particular place?

The other was pointed out by another commenter on The Athletic article.  Canady’s success is driven not by going to Stanford, but rather by being talented enough to have been admitted to Stanford.  That is the argument made in several studies done by Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale.  They matched students who had attended a prestigious college with those possessing similar credentials who were admitted but attended public flagship universities instead., and concluded that “It’s not U., it’s me” that leads to success.

In terms of Canady’s college experience, at least on the softball field, it’s hard to parse the difference between the two schools.  At both she led her team to the college world series, but Texas Tech made it to the final game.  At Stanford, Canady was the national player of the year, whereas this year she was a finalist for the award but didn’t win.  We can assume that she has no regrets about the decision to switch, because she is returning to Texas Tech for another season (and another million-dollar deal).  

It should be her call, because she will be the one living with the consequences of the decision.  Let’s hope her choice is about fit rather than about the money.

The Masked Singer Redemption Tour

Are we in the midst of a Rick Singer redemption tour?  And do we really need Rick Singer to return, triumphantly or otherwise, as the public face of college counseling?

Last August, Singer, the mastermind behind the 2019 Operation Varsity Blues scandal that garnered national headlines and rocked the college admission world, was released after spending 16 months in a federal work camp in Florida.  He has since been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Fox News, and People.  What’s next? Will we soon see Rick Singer appear on “Dancing With the Stars” or perhaps more appropriately, “The Masked Singer”?

The most recent Singer sighting (or, in this instance, hearing) was last week when he was featured on the Chronicle of Higher Education podcast, “College Matters.”  I must admit mixed feelings about the decision to feature Singer on the podcast.  

On the one hand, I thought reporter and host Jack Stripling did a good job of asking Singer tough questions and challenging his answers.  The Chronicle has a right to choose what topics it chooses to cover, as Stripling pointed out when I reached out to him to ask if the interview had been initiated by the Chronicle or by some PR firm attempting to salvage Singer’s reputation (it was the Chronicle).  Both the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed have earned deference based on their track record covering higher education.

At the same time, that track record makes the interview with Singer even more disappointing.  We expect a certain kind of coverage from People  and Fox News, but not from a respected higher education publication. I have a hard time with Singer getting media attention rather than the many honorable and ethical college counselors who are devoted to helping young people, not just children of the wealthy, make decisions about their futures.  Where are their stories? That reveals a lot about the click-bait nature of journalism and the state of our culture.

That’s all I have to say about the decision to interview Singer.  I am more interested in several larger issues and questions that popped up in the interview itself.

It is unclear whether Singer feels any remorse over his Operation Varsity Blues role.  He says the right things, admitting that he was wrong and that he knew it was cheating. At the same time, he states that he doesn’t, or at least didn’t at the time, see what he did as a “big deal,” because “people cheat all the time.”  He “repurposed” a student’s picture ID by replacing the student’s picture with that of one of Singer’s employees who took the SAT claiming to be the student.  And when asked if he felt shame, he answered yes, but not the way most people understand shame.

Singer seems to feel that his crime was being ahead of his time.  Referencing the role that payments to college athletes for NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) now play, he stated in the podcast that he got in trouble for what they’re doing legally.  He also claims that within three days of his release from prison camp, he had received calls from 20 NIL collectives wanting him to help raise NIL money.

It is sad to acknowledge that he may be right.  In an era where white-collar crime seems to be a low priority for the FBI and the Department of Justice, it is not hard to guess that Operation Varsity Blues would never be prosecuted or even investigated in 2025.  

Another of Rick Singer’s claims, that he gave not bribes, but donations, fits a 2025 world view where bribes are “repurposed” as gifts.  What’s the difference? Accepting a bribe is illegal, whereas it’s impolite, even “stupid,” to turn down a gift. 

That distinction, between bribes and donations, is relevant not only for Singer’s rationalization of his actions but also a challenge for higher education, specifically college admission.  Should donors get admission consideration for their children or grandchildren?  Even if “pay to play” has become a norm in other parts of our culture, shouldn’t college admission seek to be countercultural?  Perhaps colleges shouldn’t accept donations from those with relatives about to hit the admission process, or perhaps those gifts shouldn’t be tax deductible.  Donations in search of a quid pro quo aren’t really philanthropic in nature.

There are two other claims made by Rick Singer in the podcast that deserve scrutiny.  One is his justification for his actions that the students he helped were “qualified,” given that they graduated. Interestingly, he then states in a throwaway line that beneficiaries of race-based affirmative action were not qualified.  But if they graduated, doesn’t that prove that they were qualified?

But whether his clients were qualified isn’t the issue.  The issue is fairness.  Admission to the kinds of elite institutions where Singer’s clients wanted to go isn’t about being qualified, it’s about being selected from among a huge pool of qualified candidates.  To borrow a term from logic, being qualified is “necessary, but not sufficient.”  Highly-selective admission is a zero-sum game.  A student who is admitted is taking a spot from another qualified applicant.  For a college counselor to encourage a student to cut in line by having someone take the SAT for you or offering bribes, er, donations to college coaches is indefensible, whether or not the student is qualified.

During the interview Singer also claimed that his success, compared with “most of these other people who claim they’re college counselors,” lies in the relationships he built with admission offices.  Each summer he visited 50-60 colleges, and he claims that he got to know admission officers, international admission officers, members of the president’s staff, and the dorm people on each campus.  As a result he could pick up the phone and call people on campus on behalf of his clients.

I am not capable of judging the truth of that claim, but I’m skeptical.  It is a version of the “suburban legend” that college counselors are like Hollywood agents, able to cut deals with admission offices for their students.  It is what psychologist Michael Thompson called the “relationship delusion,” the belief that a college counselor can pick up the phone, call his buddy at Brown, and with a word or a Jedi hand wave move an application into the admitted pile.  

That suburban legend is particularly pervasive in independent schools. I know a school head who claimed that when she visited a college campus she always made sure she talked with the “top people.” What she didn’t say, and may not have known, was that the top people didn’t want to talk with her. I used to go out of my way to confront the Hollywood agent myth in meetings with parents, and it always got laughs, but nervous laughs. 

I have been around the college counseling block a time or two, and the power of relationships is overrated.  That may make me naive, because there is a suspicion among long-time counselors that while they don’t have the ability to make the kind of calls Singer is claiming to make, there may be a secret society that does have a hotline connected to Ivy League admission offices.

I’m also skeptical about Singer’s claim because of the fact that no admission officers were implicated in Operation Varsity Blues.  Singer’s schemes involved test site administrators and athletic coaches and administrators.  I hope that means that they weren’t taking his calls.  If they were it may not have been a criminal scandal, but it would be a scandal of a different type.

Rick Singer has paid his debt to society, with the exception of the $10 million he still owes the government, and he deserves the right to restart his life.  I wish him good luck, but more importantly, good judgment.  I just don’t want him to be seen as representative of the college counseling profession.  

The End of the Morse Code

In 2025 we have learned to expect the unexpected on a daily basis.  Much of that is thanks to the Trump administration, which seems determined to disassemble much of what has made the United States the world’s greatest country, from the economy to moral leadership on the world stage to a system of higher education unmatched around the world.  Or choose your own examples.

Not all unexpected news, even all the news out of D.C., comes from the world of politics, of course.  Last week we learned that we are about to see the end of Morse Code.

No, not that Morse Code.  Cargo ships being attacked by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea and fishing boats stranded in the Gulf of Mexico can still send SOS distress calls by telegraph (if anyone still sends telegrams, that is).  What is about to end is Morse Code, the column written by U.S. News and World Report rankings guru Bob Morse.  U.S. News  announced last week that Morse is retiring after 49 years with the magazine (which is actually no longer a magazine).

Bob Morse has been the “man behind the curtain” throughout most of the 42 years that U.S. News has been in the college rankings business.  As such he has been one of the most influential figures in the college admission world throughout most of my career.  He has been a controversial figure but also respected and maybe even feared, a posture incongruous with his unassuming personality. On visits to Washington by college presidents, stopping by Bob Morse’s office to bend the knee, kibbitz, and lobby was as important, perhaps more important, than similar time spent with members of congress.

I don’t know Bob Morse, nor could he pick me out of a police lineup. I have been in his office as a member of one of the early iterations of a counselors’ advisory group.  My participation was short-lived because I pushed for systemic change in the rankings rather than tweaks to the methodology. On the occasion of his retirement announcement, here are some personal reflections on Bob Morse, his legacy, and college rankings.

First of all, I probably owe Mr. Morse an apology, perhaps even several.  I seem to recall a blog post in which I posited Bob Morse as a movie villain, and more recently I listed him and his rankings as finalist candidates for an Admissions Armageddon, the ultimate battle for dominion over the world of college admission.  The armageddon metaphor was a reference to author Tom Robbins’ contention in Another Roadside Attraction that the ultimate armageddon for earthly domination would be a contest between gonorrhea and the cockroach. I apologize if any reader falsely jumped to the conclusion that I thought Bob Morse resembled either of those.

At a NACAC conference session a number of years ago, I aroused Bob Morse’s ire when, after he described the U.S News rankings as a “good product,” I asked him if he thought it was good journalism.  I continue to believe that’s a valid question.  Do college rankings break (report) news or make news?  Each fall when I see the perennial newspaper stories announcing that some university rose two places in the rankings, I wonder whether the real news is actual change in the quality of the institution or merely a tweaking of the ranking methodology to justify producing annual rankings. 

That leads to a larger question.  Do college rankings reflect changes in college admission or contribute to creating those changes?  I think it is unfair to blame U.S. News for all the unsavory trends in college admission, but the rankings are also not blameless.  The emphasis on selectivity as a measure of quality has led to measures ranging from “recruit-to-reject” to admitting large swaths of students in Early Decision, all in the name of lowering admit rates and raising yield (those are no longer major components of the rankings.) A number of institutional strategic plans and presidential compensation packages are built around the rankings.

The very fact that Morse was at that NACAC session speaks to one of his admirable qualities.  He has always been unafraid to face and engage in discussion with his critics.  U.S. News has made major changes in its ranking methodology in recent years, adding output metrics and trying to reward institutions that are instruments of social and economic mobility.  There is nothing phony about him; he is a true believer in rankings and in data.  He deserves a ton of credit for his role in helping develop the Common Data Set.

If one’s strengths can also be weaknesses, he may be too trusting, to the point of naivete.  He genuinely believes that metrics like alumni giving actually measure satisfaction with the college experience, and he always seems shocked and disappointed when colleges are shown to have misrepresented their data and attempted to game the rankings.

Former U.S. News editor Brian Kelly wrote an appreciation of Bob Morse on its rankings website, calling him “the godfather of college rankings” and quoting the Washington Post’s description of Morse as “one of the most powerful wonks in the country.”  It is a fitting tribute, but there are two statements in it that I can’t agree with. 

One is that Kelly credits Morse with “an obsession with ‘getting the numbers right.’” On one level, that may be right that Morse was addicted to data, but on another, U.S. News has never made more than minimal attempts to verify college claims.  There are several small regional colleges that have for years reported seven percent admit rates and 100 percent yield, something anyone in the admission world knows is possible only with creative accounting.  U.S. News treats the information colleges submit as an honor system, trusting but not verifying.

Kelly also makes the claim that Morse and the rankings are committed to a “best fit” approach to choosing a college.  There are two competing worldviews when it comes to college choice, fit and prestige. Fit sees choosing a college as subjective, as intensely personal, tied to the experience one has in college.  What is right for me may not be right for you.

The U.S. News rankings pay lip service to fit, especially in the articles published in the annual rankings publication.  But everything about the rankings themselves, from the name of the publication, “America’s Best Colleges,” to the false precision (is #7 that much better than #23?) is grounded in a belief that college selection is objective, based on proxies for quality. Many years ago the cover of “America’s Best Colleges” stated, “Let a computer choose the best college for you.” Today that would be “Let AI pick the college for you.”  None of those have any resemblance to a commitment to “best fit.” 

I started out stating that this would be a personal reflection, and here’s where it gets really personal.  Several weeks ago I was part of a discussion about how one knows that they are getting old.  Is it related to hitting a certain age milestone? Those of us who once didn’t trust anyone over 30 changed our tune once we turned 30.  50 and 60 seemed old, until they didn’t.  Is getting old a function of life circumstances, like when your friends start becoming grandparents, you realize that there are no major league baseball players as old as you, or you have no idea who any of the Grammy nominees are?

For a brief moment last week I had a new, unnerving, definition.  In skimming through Kelly’s tribute to Bob Morse, I saw a reference to him being 66 years old.  Talk about unexpected news!  I long ago came to grips with being older than dirt, but older than Bob Morse?  SOS!

In reading the article more carefully, I discovered that the reference to Bob Morse being 66 came from a 2014 article.  He is, indeed, older than I am, and I am no longer panicking about my perception of reality.

The philosopher Wlliam James said that each of our lives is a moral experiment in seeking what is true and what is right.  I profoundly disagree with Bob Morse about college rankings and his assumptions about them, but I also respect him for living out his beliefs.  I hope he will find retirement both relaxing and rejuvenating. 

Something I've Never Seen Before (or at Least Since Yesterday)

Most of those who knew me during my “formative years” were convinced that I was destined for a career as a baseball play-by-play announcer.  I was fascinated by baseball statistics and history back when most of my peers were still playing with army men or dolls. I am far less fanatical today, but still enjoy a hobby my wife refers to under her breath as “stupid.”  I think I could have been good at announcing, and it would have been fun, but it ultimately didn’t meet my need for purpose and wanting to make a difference.

I recently read an article that stated that baseball announcers (as well as players and umpires) have a chance in every single game to see something they’ve never seen before.  That happens often enough to be fodder for sportswriter Jayson Stark’s regular “Weird and Wild”  column for The Athletic.  One of the things I loved about college counseling was that my days were always unpredictable.  I might start the day with one thing I hoped to accomplish, then never get to it because of other issues and crises that popped up.  But, after years in the profession, I wouldn’t have said that on most days I was likely to encounter something I’d never seen before.

I wonder if that’s changing.  Last week on back-to-back days I encountered something I’d never seen before, and it was the exact same thing.  (Yes, I am fully aware that the second occurance no longer qualified as “never seen before.”)

Last Thursday, the day before May 1, I talked with a counseling friend.  That afternoon two of her students had received unexpected good news.

The first was the kind of feel-good story we all love at this time of year.  The student received a call from her dream school informing her that she had been admitted off the waitlist. The only thing keeping the moment from being perfect is that the young admission officer who facilitated the acceptance and made the call is leaving the profession to go to law school in the fall.  My friend considers him a rising star, a future Dean or VP for Enrollment, and is glad for him but sad for our profession. College admission and counseling are people-driven professions, dependent on attracting quality people into the field and then holding on to them. That’s a topic to be explored in a future ECA post.

The news received by the second student caught the college counselor off guard.  At 1:00 p.m. on April 30 the student received an acceptance letter and a $25,000 scholarship from a selective university on the East Coast.  The letter at least recognized that the student might need time to process the offer in the hours before May 1, messaging a version of “operators are standing by” to offer help from admission staffers.

The second example differed from the first in one important way. What was surprising was that the student had been denied outright several weeks prior by the same university after having previously been deferred in Early Action.  The student hadn’t appealed because he had great other options that were higher on his list. So, in essence, the student was admitted off the waitlist without ever having been placed on the waitlist.  My friend, a college counseling legend, declared that she had never seen that before.  And neither had I.

Until less than 24 hours later, that is.  On Friday evening my wife was catching up on some of the shows she watches on a regular basis, one of which is “The Equalizer,” starring Queen Latifah as a former CIA operative now in private practice as an–well, equalizer.  One of the secondary plotlines this season has been that the equalizer’s daughter, Delilah (or Dee) is applying to college.  One episode included a scene that could have been an infomercial for attending an HBCU, and in another episode she was traumatized by receiving a rejection from her “safety school,” leading her to question whether whether she would be admitted anywhere and whether her commitment to her studies and extracurricular activities had been worth it.

In one of the opening scenes of last week’s episode, Dee receives a letter from UCLA informing her that a space has become available and offering her admission.  While being congratulated she remarks that she had already been rejected by UCLA.  In a 24-hour period, something I had never seen before happened twice, once in real life and once on a television show.

So what’s going on here?  Is this now a thing? Is life imitating art (if a drama like “The Equalizer” can be considered art) or art imitating life? Am I more out-of-touch than I think I  am?

Even though the UCLA example was fictional, I reached out to a friend at UCLA to see if it was plausible. They responded that their initial reaction was “No, that would never happen,” but that the answer is more nuanced than that.  UCLA and other schools in the UC system have a provision that allows students to submit an official appeal to an admission decision. An application can be reconsidered if there is new and compelling information (updated grades and activities don’t count). In any given year a handful of appeals might be successful, less than one percent of those submitted. So there is an avenue where a student who had been denied at UCLA might subsequently be accepted.  The Equalizer plot involving the daughter was a secondary plot in the episode, but there was no suggestion that the original decision had been appealed. The UCLA acceptance came out of the blue.

We might excuse Hollywood for playing fast and loose with the truth about college admission, but shows about doctors, police, and first responders all have technical advisors to make sure that the scripts don’t bend the laws of reality.  I don’t know why the same can’t be true for college admission, and I would be happy to start a new phase to my career consulting with film and television producers on whether a plot connected to college admission sends the right messages.

The real-life example (I am not naming the institution) is harder to explain away. Why would a university admit on April 30 a student it had previously denied? The first answer that comes to mind is difficulty making the class. The university in question is not a place I think of as struggling, but it is also among a growing list of places where the market does not match their self-perception. I have read that the institution in question fell 350 short of its enrollment goal last fall, a shortfall that translated into a loss of $20 million in revenue.

That doesn’t explain why the university would begin accepting students it had already rejected.  One of my friend’s office colleagues wondered if the institution was acknowledging it had made a mistake, because the student’s credentials made him a solid, even strong, candidate.  TV shows may use the term “safety school,” but college counselors know there is no such thing. The student is local, and hadn’t bothered to visit, so may have been a victim of a demonstrated interest/likelihood of enrolling algorithm.

And why send an acceptance 12 hours before May 1? In college admission May 1 (or May Day) is the National Candidates Reply date, when many admission offices celebrate the completion of the admission cycle (there are many others where May 1 is just a date in an on-going process). But May 1 is also May Day!, the international distress call, and distress is the emotion felt by any college that hasn’t made its class.

It has been said that the first time you see something it’s innovation, and the second time is tradition. Is reject then admit something new in college admission, or have I just missed it? In either case it makes me want to cry out, May Day! May Day!

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.