When I first started my college counseling career 40 years ago, a public university in my state was notorious for the seeming randomness of its admissions decisions. It wasn’t uncommon for its admissions office to deny a student with a 3.7 GPA and admit a classmate with a 2.4 GPA. If the goal was uniting the school counseling community by being a lightning rod for frustration, it worked like a charm.
My predecessor had been among those who had issues, and so one of my first jobs was to try to make peace, which became even more pressing because the university was the first choice of my boss’s daughter. She was a top five student in the class, so shouldn’t have had any issue, but who knew (no, I’m not channeling Walmart Walton Goggins)?
When the rep visited our school that fall, we had a conversation that diplomats would describe as “frank and constructive.” The admissions officer predictably told me that they thought that they should receive more of our top applicants, but I remember two things from the conversation.
One is that when we discussed the headmaster’s daughter, the rep contradicted his party line about expecting top applicants, asking in all seriousness and seeming bewilderment, “Why would she want to go to …?” The other was his more philosophical question, “Why do you care so much about consistency?”
I received some insight into his second question the following spring when he invited me to come to campus to review my list of applicants (back in olden times, that was sometimes a practice). The admissions office was located in an old house, and two weeks before decision letters were going out, admission folders were laid out in piles by decision on tables in the attic. Of course, my school’s decisions lacked both consistency and rhyme or reason. We then reviewed around 30 folders for admitted students and another 30 denials, and many of the in-state denials had substantially stronger credentials than out-of-state admits. He kept saying, “I wonder how that one got in there.”
I was reminded of that experience after a recent conversation with several counselor friends. All are veteran, first-rate, perhaps even legendary college counselors, and there was a consensus among the group that it has never been harder to counsel students about what options are likely, realistic, or even possible. They reflected on this fall’s early results and saw an increasing number of instances where students seem to check every box except the one that says they are admitted.
Has predictability become the new consistency? Why do we care so much about predictability? And should we?
The essence of college counseling lies in the ability to guide students and parents to make thoughtful decisions about their futures. That requires information, empathy, and wisdom.
College counselors already have to deal with the burden of the “Hollywood agent” Suburban Legend, the expectation from students and parents that we have the power to advocate for students and cut deals with colleges. That belief manifests itself in ways both understated (“You had a really good year”) and overstated (“Can you please call the dean and advocate for my daughter?”) I always went out of my way to confront that Suburban Legend in my presentation to parents, and it always provoked laughter, but nervous laughter. Parents prefer the myth to the truth.
In an article titled, “Fenced In by Delusions,” the adolescent psychologist Michael Thompson called the Hollywood agent Suburban Legend the “Relationship Delusion,” the belief that schools have special relationships with certain colleges such that a college counselor can just pick up the phone and call a buddy in the admissions office at Duke, and with a word (or a Jedi hand wave) get a student’s decision moved from deny to admit. He argues that the real value of college counseling lies not in relationships or salesmanship but rather in experience and knowledge in how the college process works.
Those qualities are harder to summon when decisions are less predictable. I used to tell my students that it was okay to be disappointed, but I didn’t want them to be shocked by decisions. But it is hard to prepare our students to have a balanced list when we ourselves are shocked or don’t know what to expect.
That makes it more difficult to put together lists of colleges to investigate for students. There is already an inherent challenge that, in trying to develop a list with balance, we will be seen as being “that” counselor who doesn’t believe in the student and undershoots in recommending schools. A friend of mine is the college counselor for my daughter’s step-daughter (which makes her my step-granddaughter, I suppose), and the girl recently shared the list that he had prepared for her. Whereas once upon a time the list would have been divided by “Reaches,” “Reasonables” and “Safeties” (a term that should be excised from the lexicon of college counseling), the list visually resembled a maze or puzzle. It had arrows running in multiple directions and categories within categories. I thought the counselor’s list captured the complexity of predicting and categorizing options exceptionally well.
The larger question here is whether college admission offices and college counselors value predictability equally. That is actually part of a larger question about whether the college and high school sides of the desk are part of the same profession or are two different professions, perhaps a topic for another post.
Several years ago the Vice President for Enrollment at a public flagship university stated that he (or at least the university) wanted admission decisions to be unpredictable. They didn’t want students (or counselors) to know what to expect about the likelihood of admission.
Unpredictable is not the same thing as random. I have actually argued for many years that the highly-selective admissions process is a problem of distributive justice, of how to allocate a rare good or service (in this case college admission) fairly. The fairest process is through a lottery among all those applicants judged as capable of being successful. That idea has never caught on because it would mean that colleges and universities would have to give up their ability to craft a class. It is also the case that many students want to believe that they were admitted to an Ivy-plus not through good fortune, but because they had more merit or were more deserving than those not admitted. But if we see justice as one of the goals of the admissions process, random selection is fair in a way that the current process isn’t.
Being described as “predictable” can be an insult, a synonym for “formulaic” or “obvious.” But saying that predictability is important in admission decisions is not calling for certainty, but rather rationality. In his powerful speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney used the word “predictability” to describe the rules-based international order that the United States seems to be abandoning. Similarly, predictability in admission decisions is part of a larger order within college admission.
Predictability is part of college admission’s obligation to the principle of transparency. Ethics is an expression of what should be the case, and what shouldn’t be the case is an admissions process that is mysterious and confusing for students–and for their college counselors.