During my time as a teacher, both with high school and college students, I always found it a good idea to begin class by reviewing what we had covered previously. I will follow that practice leading into the second part of this two-part post.
Most of part one was devoted to examining the issues in college sports, where two prominent championship coaches (Dan Hurley and Nick Saban) recently called for commissioners in their sports to rein in the chaos arising from the transfer portal and payment of athletes. We observed that there is an increasing chasm between the “college” and “sports” in college sports, and pointed out that big-time college sports are really part of a university’s advancement arm rather than its educational arm. We also expressed skepticism that the appointment of a commissioner would have the desired impact, that a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions underlying college sports is what is really needed.
Despite the clickbait title of this post, I believe that college admission needs a commissioner less than college football and basketball. The issues aren’t as severe–yet, although the coming demographic cliff and increased government interference on college campuses with regard to research funding and international students may create a Hunger Games environment for certain segments of higher education. College admission has historically been built upon a culture of ethical professional practice, and the optimist in me wants to believe that will continue. The realist in me recognizes that foundation is fragile and requires constant vigilance and preventive maintenance.
My original plan for this post was to stop at this point and invite you, the reader, to weigh in on the essay prompt, “If I were the commissioner for college admission, I would…” I’m interested in your answers, and hope they will result in a future post. But an email from a reader convinced me that there are some bigger issues worth investigating here.
Reader Carter Delloro from Marymount School in New York sent me a thoughtful email responding to my “Early Decision: End or Mend?” post. In that piece I poked fun at the writer of a New York Times op-ed who argued that Congress should abolish early decision programs. My retort was that the author wasn’t paying attention to how little actual legislating our current legislators do and that he must have watched too many movies starring Jimmy Stewart or appearing on the Hallmark Channel.
Carter called me out for making light of the op-ed’s call for Congressional action to eliminate early decision, calling it “fatalism” (I prefer skepticism), correctly pointing out that the proper solution for an inept Congress is electing new members of Congress. He didn’t point it out, but I was also unfair to Jimmy Stewart and Hallmark. He stated, “If you feel like a congressional law is not the most effective path forward, that’s one thing.”
That is the thing. That is in fact my position. I don’t see Congressional action as the most effective path forward.
I would be thrilled to see our elected representatives actually read the Constitution they carry as pocket ornaments. I would love to see Congress step up as a co-equal branch of government rather than serve as a rubber stamp for the Executive Branch (that’s true whether we have a Republican or Democratic President). I want our elected representatives to act in a bipartisan fashion to protect us from out-of-control masked marauders creating chaos on our streets. But I don’t want Congress dictating the admission policies that colleges must use (but regulation through legislation is preferable to regulation through executive orders).
We can certainly debate what is the appropriate role for the government with regard to college admission. The government should regulate practices that are discriminatory (but may disagree about what those are). At the other end of the spectrum, the government shouldn’t be dictating that colleges must require standardized test scores for admission. Falling into the gray area in-between are things like legacy admission (hard to defend if racial preferences are illegal) and filling large portions of the student body through early decision (creates two-tiered preferential admissions process that advantages applicants who are already privileged).
The question is, if not government regulation, then what? Carter identified the larger issue as what he described as the “collective action problem.” He argued, “Why would a college be the first to implement your suggestion when it would make their jobs more challenging and their institution's future more precarious?...When there is a collective action problem, the system constraints and incentives must change to elicit action. Otherwise, none will be taken.”
I think those are good points. The other side of the coin, though, is that institutional success is reliant upon public trust and confidence. We already know that we have a growing skepticism about the value proposition of higher education. That will only increase as we face a future where a college diploma is no longer a clear path to economic security. Our inability to rein in self-serving and manipulative practices could actually make our jobs more challenging and our institutions’ future more precarious. Can we sacrifice narrow institutional interest for the broader public interest, recognizing Benjamin Franklin’s sage advice during the Continental Congress that “we must all hang together, or we will all hang separately”?
We already have a model for what voluntary collective action might look like. For years NACAC’s ethical standards filled that need. NACAC members (which included the vast majority of colleges) agreed to ethical principles and rules intended to protect vulnerable students from coercion and manipulation. We understood that certain things that might be in my best interest are not necessarily in our best interest. Adherence to the Statement of Principles of Good Practice was voluntary; no one was forced to be a NACAC member. And it generally worked. The Admission Practices Committee monitored and enforced the standards, but most complaints were resolved amicably.
That ended when the U.S. Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation into NACAC. The DOJ interpreted prohibitions on colleges poaching students committed to or enrolled at other colleges and incentives for early decision applicants to be anti-competitive. The DOJ saw NACAC as a cabal controlling college admission, which is laughable for those of us who know how hard it is to get those in our profession to agree about anything. It also interpreted our ethical standards not as protecting students, but as preventing them from getting the lowest price, an interesting take given that most questionable practices serve institutions much better than they serve students. But the real objection may not have been the principles themselves, but the attempt to police them. There are certainly some of us who thought it was worth fighting the DOJ, but NACAC chose to settle, paying attention to the truth found in the 1960s hit song, “I fought the law–and the law won.”
It was not apparent at the time, but the DOJ investigation was part of a larger cultural shift. It was the beginning of a movement away from a social order based on rules. Today we see that impacting college athletics and even the post-World War 2 international order. It is easy to blame that on Donald Trump, but he may be a symptom rather than a cause. Today we have a generation of leaders who think that attention to rules reflects weakness, that the only law worth paying attention to is the law of the jungle. It’s a view articulated by a school administrator I know who was famous for saying “rules are for clerks.”
I have been described as being much better at asking questions than I am at providing answers. That is true with the collective action problem described by Carter. We have three options.
Allowing college admission to devolve into the Wild West is not a good answer. Neither is abrogating our responsibility to allow government to regulate college admission due to our own inaction. Are we willing to have decisions about our work made by those guided not by educational best practice but by a partisan political agenda. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in his speech at the world Economic forum at Davos several weeks ago, “If you are not at the table, you are probably on the menu.”
That leaves reaching agreement on what we stand for and translating that into a student-driven college admission process. I believe that it is possible to agree on a set of ethical principles that protect students without hurting institutions. Ethics is about ideals, what we believe should be the case. The college admission process should be an important developmental step in a student’s personal journey from adolescent to adult. How can we be educators and not just salespersons? We don’t need to police our principles in order to assert our principles.
If we aspire to be at the table rather than on the menu, it’s time to make our collective reservation and figure out what we want to order. We may not need a commissioner, but we do need to be committed–to our students and to each other.