Do college admission offices have an ethical obligation to be transparent with applicants and the public?
At first glance that seems like a softball question with an obvious answer. The field of ethics is about ideals, about how we should act. Colleges are in relationship with prospective students, a relationship that should be grounded in trust and respect. Treating students and their families with trust and respect would seem to imply being transparent about our policies and procedures. That is especially the case if we think of colleges and universities as institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and truth.
Of course it’s not that simple. Higher education is also a business and, at times, seems to be mostly a business. During the lower court trial in the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case that may be decided by the Supreme Court as early as tomorrow, one of Harvard’s arguments was that its admission procedures were proprietary, the equivalent of industrial secrets. That may have been a mistake, because it made it look like Harvard had something to hide. We talk about practicing what we preach, but shouldn’t we also preach what we practice?
As businesses, colleges have ethical obligations to multiple constituencies–prospective students, current students, alumni, faculty and staff, and the communities where they are located and are often major employers. Perhaps the strongest of those ethical obligations is staying in existence.
I have been thinking about this since hearing the news last week that Cabrini University outside Philadelphia will be closing at the end of the 2023-2024 school year. Cabrini is one of a number of institutions struggling to stay afloat, and it most certainly won’t be the last institution to close. My heart goes out to everyone in the Cabrini community as they go through a mourning process and try to figure out what comes next. Villanova will take over the Cabrini campus, and apparently Cabrini is working with other area institutions to place current students. Just yesterday LaSalle University added a page to their admissions website devoted to Cabrini students who may want to transfer.
I recognize that those in charge at Cabrini are scrambling to figure out and close the loop on all the consequences of the closing, and in looking at the Cabrini website there is a new page on the Cabrini legacy, including FAQs on what the closing means. But as of this morning, the admissions page for Cabrini doesn’t mention the closure, and still lists ways to apply to Cabrini. I assume that is in the process of being corrected, but should Cabrini appear to be soliciting applications from new students when it will be out of business a year from now?
Going back to the question raised at the beginning, the real question may be not whether a college should be transparent, but rather how transparent.
My previous job (now 30-some years ago) was as the admissions director at a struggling independent school. When I was hired my boss somehow forgot to tell me how bad things were. I got my first inkling when I was invited to attend a board meeting before starting the job and noticed that the minutes from the previous meeting included a note that a motion to fire the headmaster, the person who had just hired me, had failed.
The school was hemorrhaging enrollment, and no one seemed to know why. When I was hired the headmaster told me that they had prepared budgets at three different enrollment levels, yet when I arrived for work on my first day a month before the start of school and counted up the bodies, the enrollment was 40 fewer students than the bottom figure. No one at the school had any clue.
The school had not so much an admissions process as a registration process. On my first day I met with a prospective senior transfer from another school. We obviously could have desperately used him, but in looking at his transcript I had concerns about whether he could succeed academically and graduate, and advised him to stay where he was. My secretary informed me that the school had never before discouraged a prospective student. That may have contributed to the fact that the attrition rate was something like 17 percent, making it nearly impossible to recoup the enrollment loss from attrition and graduation.
The school had been founded as an 8-12 school because three feeder schools were K-7, but two of the three had closed, and the third had just announced that it would be adding an eighth grade the following year. I successfully argued that we shouldn’t try to go to war with the remaining feeder school for students, that we should play the long game and make ninth grade the major entry year, planning for one section of 21 eighth graders and then expanding to 60 for ninth grade.
The only problem with that plan was where the one section was going to come from. At the beginning of the following summer, we had three enrolled eighth graders, and to make things worse, the main academic building was closed for asbestos removal so I couldn’t even give prospective families campus tours. When families called and asked how many eighth graders were enrolled, I was faced with an ethical dilemma. How transparent should I be?
My answer was always that we anticipated enrolling 21 in the eighth grade. I was uncomfortable with that lack of transparency, but I also knew that we might lose those who had enrolled if they knew there were only three enrolled as of early June. The school was probably closer to having to fold than I knew, but I recognized we needed every student we could enroll for survival. In most cases existential survival is ethical.
I was fortunate. We somehow enrolled 22 eighth graders by the time school opened. Today the school is thriving. But I still wonder if my responses to the question, “How many do you have enrolled?” were misleading and unethical.
That brings us back to Cabrini. It is one thing to conduct admission as usual when an institution is struggling and in danger of having to close. It is another to solicit or welcome applications when the decision to close has already been made and announced. I recognize that it’s been less than a week, that the Cabrini community is reeling and trying to figure out the next steps. In the interest of transparency I hope that one of the first steps will be removing any reference to applying from the Cabrini website.