Early Decision: End or Mend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So You Want to Be a Millionaire Master of Early Decision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Raccoon in the Liquor Store: A Personal Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ECA Book Club: Dream School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LSU's Trump Card

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current and former coaches:

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

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

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

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

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

Lee Corso–Could wear LSU Tiger head while coaching.

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

Some Other Candidates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tulane Highway*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Pointy-Headed Compact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Employ a stream of consciousness narrative style.

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

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

1. KISS (Keep it simple, Sir)

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

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

Admit………….NOW!

1. Offer explanations or excuses where necessary.  Examples:

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

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

1. Be appreciative of your reader’s time.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

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

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Bennington "Late Decision" Update

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

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

Proxy Music

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

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

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

    The August 7 Presidential Memorandum

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

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

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

    The Bondi Memo

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

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

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

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

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

    New Data For IPEDS

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

• Admissions test score quintile

• GPA quintile

• Family income range

• Pell Grant eligibility

• Parental education

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

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

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

Merit-Based Admission

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

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

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

Proxies in Admission

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

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

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

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.