PR Circus

Should a college counseling office serve the educational part of a school’s mission or the advancement part of its mission?  I remember discussing that question several years ago with a friend whose school was considering placing the college counseling office organizationally under the same umbrella as the development and admissions offices.

I argued then, and continue to believe today, that college counseling is first and foremost educational, that the college search is ultimately about students figuring out who they are and what they care about. I also recognize that it’s not that simple.

Early in my career, I remember a strategic planning process where I fought for my office’s work to be described as “counseling” and not as “placement.” I argued that language is important, that “college counseling” is about process, about helping students find the right college fit, while “placement” is about results and suggests that a school places students in the way that a Hollywood agent or corporate recruiter places clients. I lost the battle but stuck around long enough to ultimately win the war.

I particularly think about the two conceptions of college counseling at this time of year. Later this week my school will hold commencement exercises marking the end of each senior’s high school journey. At a school that describes itself as a college preparatory school, part of that journey is preparing students for admission to and success in college.

At the same time, this time of year can easily deteriorate into seeing college choices as public relations opportunities.  The communications office at my school always publishes an ad in the local newspaper celebrating our graduates, a practice begun by our sister school. The ad focuses on the colleges where the graduates will matriculate.

At least the ad lists all the colleges where graduates will attend. Once upon a time the ad cherry-picked the college list to highlight the “prestigious” names. I argued that we should be proud of every student’s college choice, that we should celebrate going to college rather than going to certain colleges. But I also recognize the reality that people in our community draw conclusions about the school and about the college counseling program based on the college list.

I have been considering this issue in a new light in the wake of the news about the student from New Orleans who applied to more than 200 colleges and received more than $9 million dollars in scholarships, leading the school to put in a claim with Guinness World Records.  I wrote about that issue in my last post, but it may also become the poster child for a school losing sight of the point of the college process.

Last week there were two interesting developments in the case. The student in question went to D.C. with his family and the head of the school and received a tour of the U.S. Capitol as well as several congratulatory tweets from his Congressman. And I received an email from someone who works at the school.

The email indicated that the concerns expressed in the last post were shared by many of the faculty and staff at the school. They feel that the attention given to the one student in his quest to set the “record” came at the expense of other seniors at the school. 

The email alleges that adults at the school were responsible for preparing many of the 200 applications, and that the school’s priority on advancing the scholarship narrative meant that other seniors didn’t receive time, attention, and the help they needed.  The correspondent suggested that one of the school’s conscious PR strategies is to identify one “golden child” and relentlessly promote them at the expense of other students.

I am not part of the school community, so am not capable of judging what is true and what is not. I did go to the school website, and immediately saw a pop-up that takes you to a page all about the student’s achievement, including the opportunity to donate for the trip to Washington, D.C.

Some of the allegations in the email are troubling. If the student was able to apply to 200 colleges and for all of the scholarships only with major assistance from adults at the school, that’s ethically questionable or wrong, depending on the level of assistance. If the effort to set a record was a conscious PR stunt, then both the student and his classmates are being taken advantage of by adults.

It’s easy to pass judgment on the school in New Orleans, but I prefer to focus on the larger issue of how we make sure as counselors and educators that our motives are pure and in a student’s interest rather than our own.  In any given year, I might have a handful of students with the potential to be admitted to a prestigious, “rejective” college. I know how hard those acceptances are to earn, and I know that my school (and perhaps the College Counseling Office) looks good when we have success with those schools.

The question is what we do with that knowledge.  Obviously we want to support those students who face a higher bar, but are we doing that for their benefit or ours? And do we end up treating those students differently than their classmates who will end up at less “glamorous” college destinations?

I hope not. I believe that my job as a counselor is to provide every single student with the same level of “customer service” (a term I hate), helping them achieve their dreams and serving as a trail guide on their journey. I believe that the college search should be about fit rather than prestige, but I also know that the prestige world-view saturates our culture and can be hard to inoculate yourself from. I hope that being aware of the trap helps keep me from falling into the trap.

Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship is an important concept in counseling, calling on us to value the dignity and worth of those with whom we interact and treat them as subjects rather than objects. We have to be particularly careful of that in college counseling, given how easily a student’s college destination can become a stand-in or metric for qualities that are otherwise hard to measure.

In the last post I made a point to congratulate the student in question for an impressive accomplishment. My beef is with the adults. I’m not sure that they have sent either the student or the rest of us messages that we should feel good about. The student recently announced that he will be attending Cornell. I hope and trust that Cornell won’t become another ring in the PR circus this has become.  

World Record

I am a year older than the Guinness Book of Records, founded back in 1955.  I became aware of the book about a decade later, and I was fascinated by the idea of world records, although not enough to want to hold a world record myself.

Eventually I lost interest as more and more bizarre activities got on the list of world records. Do we really need to know the record for farthest tightrope walk while wearing high heels or who alphabetized the letters in a can of alphabet soup the fastest? Should we care that someone in Malaysia set a record for assembling Mr. Potato Head in 5.43 seconds or that someone in Nebraska has paddled a boat made from a hollowed-out pumpkin more than 37 miles? 

I have asked before whether we measure the things we value or value the things we can measure, and the inflation in Guinness world record categories suggests the latter. At some point the Guinness Book of Records moved from journalism to entertainment, from a digest of notable human accomplishments to a raison d’etre for all sorts of frivolous pursuits for the sole purpose of setting a world record. We might even say that the Guinness Book of Records, now known simply as Guinness World Records, at some point became a parody of itself, or at the very least a marketing ploy to sell beer.

Not all world records are equally important. The world record for the mile run? Important. The world record for pushing an orange with one’s nose for a mile? Maybe not. 

So where does the record for most scholarship dollars won fit on that spectrum? A couple of weeks ago there were several news stories about a high school senior in New Orleans who has been accepted by more than 170 colleges and earned more than $9 million dollars in scholarships. At the time of the stories, the week before May 1, he was awaiting decisions from at least 30 other colleges and was hoping to get his scholarship haul above the $10 million mark.

So how should we respond to this news?

First of all, we should offer congratulations to the young man in question.  He is obviously a motivated student with an outstanding high school record, and I’m happy for him that he has lots of college options as well as the funding to make college affordable for him.

He may be the only one deserving congratulations. On a more global level, I think this news is not something to be published or celebrated.

There is no world in which applying to 200, or even “only” 170, colleges comes close to making sense. It totally misses the point of what applying to college is about. The college process isn’t about collecting acceptances or scholarship dollars but rather about finding a college fit. 

A few years back I had a senior come into my office and tell me that he had applied to 17 colleges on Sunday afternoon. When I asked him why he told me his dad “went crazy” and made him.  Months later, after the student had been admitted to most of the 17, I ran into the dad. He shook his head in embarrassment, and said, “Please don’t tell anyone we did that.” 

Applying to 17 colleges is too many, reflecting an inability to apply thoughtfully. Applying to ten times that number is absurd, and maybe obscene. I don’t blame the student, but rather the adults. It is a truism in schools that in any interaction between students and adults, someone has to be the adult. It is unclear who fills that role in this situation. 

Did anyone at the school try to put the brakes on this? A CNN article reported that school officials declared the world record and had reached out to Guinness to receive official confirmation. It can be argued that encouraging a student to apply to 200 colleges is a form of child abuse. Were the adults at the school innocent bystanders or willing co-conspirators? In either case there is negligence in allowing this.

But does this case do any real damage? I think it does. How much time did it take to complete 200 college applications, and how could that time have been spent more productively? And what about staff time processing transcripts and letters of recommendation? How many students could have benefitted from the $9-10 million in scholarships racked up by this student?

I also blame the journalists who thought this was newsworthy. I’m sure they will argue that they were just reporting a human interest story, but making a big deal about this encourages other students to try to beat the record. That’s not reporting, but rather making, news. This story is an example of the media focusing on the sensational at the expense of the significant. It sends the wrong message about what the college search should be about. There are far more important stories about college admission that need to be told.

Just once I’d like to go through an admissions season without the annual “this student got admitted to every Ivy” story, the “millions of dollars in scholarships” story, or the “this has been the toughest admissions year in history” story. I’d love for once to see a story about a student whose life trajectory has been changed through receiving the opportunity to attend college at a good place that isn’t a “name” school.

Now that would be one for the record books.

A Short History of Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court--DeFunis

(This is the first in a series of posts looking at the history of court cases involving affirmative action in college admission.)

The 1978 Bakke case is generally listed as the first case in which the United States Supreme Court considered the use of race-based affirmative action in college admission, but the Court had actually previously considered the issue four years before in the case, DeFunis v. Odegaard. Why doesn’t the DeFunis case get more attention? Because ultimately the Court decided not to decide, ruling that the case was moot.

Marco DeFunis applied for admission to the University of Washington Law School in 1971 and was denied admission (actually wait listed). He then brought suit in a state court asking for an injunction ordering the law school to admit him, claiming that “the procedures and criteria employed by the Law School Admissions Committee invidiously discriminated against him on account of his race in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The trial court granted the injunction, and DeFunis enrolled in the UW Law School in the fall of 1971.

A year later, the Supreme Court for the state of Washington reversed the lower court’s ruling, holding that the Law School admissions policy did not violate the Constitution. DeFunis then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, and Justice William Douglas stayed the judgment of the state Supreme Court pending consideration of the case by the federal Supreme Court. By that time DeFunis was in the fall semester of his final year of law school, and one question was if the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Washington Supreme Court, would DeFunis be able to finish or be forced to reapply for his last semester.

When the case came before the entire Supreme Court, DeFunis had registered for his final term at the law school. Because DeFunis had filed his lawsuit on his own behalf and not as a class action suit, the majority of the Supreme Court concluded that the case was moot, no longer within the Court’s purview given that its decision would not change DeFunis’s ability to graduate.

Justices William Brennan and William Douglas voted in the minority that the case was not in fact moot, and Justice Douglas issued a written dissent. It is that dissent that constitutes the most noteworthy aspect of the DeFunis case.

Douglas began his dissent with an explanation of the law school’s admissions process.  It received 1601 applications for 150 spots, and offered admission to 275 applicants in order to yield the 150.  37 of the admission offers, 18 of whom enrolled, came as a result of a minority admissions program. Eligibility for the minority admissions program was solely determined by an applicant’s answer to an optional question asking if their “dominant” ethnic origin was “black, Chicano, American Indian, or Filipino.”  

To make admission decisions, the law school calculated a Predicted First Year Average index for each applicant incorporating two components, grades from the last two years of college and score on the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT.  The highest average was 81, and based on previous years the law school Admissions Committee determined that applicants with averages above 77 were strong candidates for success. Every applicant with an average above 78 was admitted, and 93 of 105 applicants with averages between 77 and 78 were admitted. Applicants with averages below 74.5 were generally rejected. Marco DeFunis had an average on the index of 76.23, placing him the group taken to “committee,” and he was ultimately wait listed.

Students in the minority admissions program were evaluated separately. 36 of the 37 minority applicants had averages below DeFunis, with 30 having averages below 74.5. There were also 48 nonminority applicants admitted with averages below DeFunis, half of them veterans, another group receiving special consideration.    

Justice Douglas ultimately concluded that it was not clear that the admissions policy of the University of Washington Law School violated the Equal Protection Clause by excluding DeFunis. However, he differed from the Court majority in arguing that the case should be remanded for a new trial to investigate the legitimacy of the minority admissions process that admitted applicants with credentials lower than DeFunis.

Douglas’s dissent raised some larger issues that are still relevant today, both with regard to selective admission and with regard to race-based affirmative action.

The first has to do with institutional discretion regarding admission policies and procedures. Douglas argued that the educational policy choices made by institutions regarding admission should not in ordinary circumstances be a subject for judicial oversight. Subsequent court cases have upheld that principle, and yet that precedent is in jeopardy in the Harvard and UNC cases given the current composition of the Supreme Court.

A second issue is the predictive ability and limitations of testing. The LSAT was a major part of the index used by the law school to sort applicants, with possible exception of applicants in the minority category. Douglas called into question the reliance on testing, in particular asking whether one’s score on the LSAT is predictive of success. He argued that tests “do not have the value that their deceptively precise scoring system suggests.” 

The debate over how much value tests add to admission prediction continues today. Do we believe that tests measure the qualities we look for in lawyers (or students), or do we value tests because they give us a number to simplify the evaluation? Do we measure the things we value, or do we value the things we can measure, even imprecisely?

A related philosophical issue is whether the admissions process is designed to reward past performance or to predict future success. Are those the same thing, and if not which of those do test scores measure? Answering that question becomes more complicated when you are talking about professional schools like law or medical school, where predicting future success as a lawyer is not the same thing as predicting future success as a law student.

A third issue involves how to ensure that there is equity in the admissions process. The dean of the Washington Law School talked about wanting a class with a “reasonable representation” of students from a diverse group of ethnic and other backgrounds, making clear that was not the same as a quota. That issue has been an on-going discussion, with the University of Texas in the 2016 Fisher case talking about the desire for a “critical mass” of students from different groups.

That concern is elevated given the history of race in this country, a history that most of us believe is far from resolved. Douglas pointed out that “The years of slavery did more than retard the progress of blacks. Even a greater wrong was done the whites by creating arrogance instead of humility and by encouraging the growth of the fiction of a superior race.” He also pointed out that, “A segregated admissions process creates suggestions of stigma and caste no less than a segregated classroom” and “One other assumption must be clearly disapproved; that blacks or browns cannot make it on their own individual merit.” 

But does it matter how one goes about achieving a goal that is laudable? Should students have been designated as “minority” students solely based on their answers to an optional application question? 

One of the meta issues in ethics is whether the end justifies the means, and that applies here. In his DeFunis dissent Douglas suggested that the law school was in effect conducting dual admission processes, and in the 1978 Bakke case the Supreme Court stated that a separate minority admission process is unconstitutional.  Skeptics of race-based affirmative action have alleged that colleges still have quotas, but have learned to use different language.

The final issue raised indirectly by Douglas involved whether colleges should be admitting individuals or a class. Douglas stated of DeFunis, “Whatever his race, he had a constitutional right to have his application considered on its individual merits in a racially neutral manner.”

I happen to agree with that sentiment in principle, but it seems almost quaint today. Selective institutions today are looking to craft a class through the admissions process rather than admit deserving individuals, with diversity being one of the institutional priorities. Is that at odds with Douglas’s views in the DeFunis case? I have argued before that much more than race-based admission is on trial in the Harvard case, that admission conventions such as the “best class” paradigm and the idea of holistic admission are also on trial.

Justice William Douglas was seen as the most liberal of the judges on the Supreme Court during his tenure, and yet his views in the DeFunis dissent seem almost conservative in the present day (not conservative in the way the present Court is, if in fact the “conservative” majority on the court is truly conservative).  I wonder what that says about the evolution of the debate over race-based affirmative action over the past 50 years. Perhaps we can investigate that in future posts.

The DeFunis case has been largely forgotten. Marco DeFunis ended up practicing law in the Seattle area before dying of a heart attack at age 52. Many of the issues contained in the Douglas dissent should still guide consideration of the issue today. 

Let's Chat(GPT)

Recently I experienced what it must be like to be a losing contestant on the television show “The Weakest Link” (even though I have never watched the show, have no idea how it works, and didn’t know it was still on).

I was asked to organize a session at the Potomac and Chesapeake Association for College Admission Counseling conference on ChatGPT and how it might impact the college admissions process. “Jim Jump” and “technological savvy” are generally not found in the same sentence, but I was asked to lead the session because I had been interviewed by Forbes for an article about whether AI will kill the college essay.

The key to a successful conference session is having the right panelists, and I was fortunate to enlist David Mabe, the Director of College Counseling at Woodberry Forest School outside Orange, Virginia (previously in admissions at Davidson and Bowdoin), and Amy Moffatt, the Assistant Vice President for University Admissions at Towson University outside Baltimore.  Both did an awesome job of preparing and presenting, and multiple times during the session I found myself thinking that I should go sit in the audience and soak up their wisdom so as to prevent me from opening my mouth and demonstrating my ignorance. 

There has been a lot of discussion and speculation about the threats posed by Artificial Intelligence, including ChatGPT. Is this one of those inventions, like the printing press, automobile, and mobile phone, that will change and make our lives easier in revolutionary ways? Is it another example of science fiction becoming reality, or another chapter in the “Fad of the Month Club”? Or, to repeat a question asked in an earlier column, is this the first step in our subjugation by our smarter, and hopefully benevolent, machine overlords?

My initial reaction to ChatGPT focused on risks to the application process, particularly the student essay. How can we trust that an essay was written by the student and not the chatbot, and can we require essays when we can’t verify authorship? I have already seen proposed solutions including handwritten essays and proctored essays. I’m sure David Coleman and his College Board mavens are hoping that one consequence of ChatGPT will be bringing back the SAT essay to increase testing numbers. None of those excite me.  

In putting together the session, we decided that we wanted to focus not only on challenges presented by the technology but also the opportunities it might afford.  

The first of those opportunities is the ability to save staff time on mundane tasks. Amy experimented and found that ChatGPT can be used effectively to compose boilerplate language for any number of tasks ranging from marketing content to job descriptions and staff surveys to travel planning.  One particularly interesting use was having the chatbot generate multiple polite ways to end difficult phone conversations.

ChatGPT is not as good with writing that requires creativity, context, or nuance. There have also been examples of cases where the chatbot confidently and even obstinately asserted as true things that were demonstrably false (this is not an actual example but along the lines of “The War of 1812 took place in 1953”). 

I asked it to compose the introduction to our session in the style of this blog. It did so, but failed to capture my wit and sense of humor. Or maybe it captured my lack of wit and feeble sense of humor all too well. I’m sticking with the former.

On the college counseling side, Dave experimented with using ChatGPT to build college lists, including asking it to recommend ten colleges similar to Duke but not as selective. He then asked it to make a table with information for each college, estimate chances of admission of each, and then asked it to plan a hypothetical college trip to several of the schools.  

He also found that ChatGPT is particularly good at summarizing things.  He sees an opportunity for admissions offices at large universities that receive lots of applications to use the tool to generate a dispassionate summary of recommendation letters in less than 100 words, pulling details, anecdotes, or quotations.

There is also an opportunity to address equity in the admissions process. Counselors in schools with huge counseling loads might be able to generate more substantial recommendation letters than they are currently able to with assistance from ChatGPT (not the same thing as having AI write the letters).

Concern for equity is also one of the challenges. Will access to ChatGPT, particularly as free versions disappear, increase the digital divide, hurting students and counselors without access?

Another challenge for both sides of the desk is change management in our offices. How do we incorporate the new technology into our work, and how do we bridge the divide between generations and between those who embrace ChatGPT and those who fear or loathe it?  

ECA is always most concerned with ethical implications, and there are several with ChatGPT. The equity issue raised above leads the list.

ChatGPT makes it easy for students to “cheat” on college essays, missing the point that the essay is not about finished product but about process. The real value of the college essay is as a means for introspection.  An antidote for cheating might be programs developed by a Princeton student and by turnitin.com to detect the use of ChatGPT, but those have a success rate of 98-99 percent. Is that enough to risk falsely accusing a student of cheating?

One of the unanticipated consequences of ChatGPT is that the ability to have it summarize and even rate applications may encourage application “gluttony,” the quest to increase applications without increasing staff. In a profession where people are already being stretched thin and where staff burnout is an increasing concern, that would be cruel at best and unethical at worst.

The ultimate ethical issue is one found with any new technology, including genetic engineering. Just because we can do something, does that mean that we should do it? The rapid evolution in ChatGPT and similar technology can very easily outpace the development of ethical and appropriate use guidelines. Just in the past few weeks the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has proposed a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and the European Union has proposed a regulatory framework for the use of Artificial Intelligence. Both are important steps, as there is much we don’t know about both the opportunities and the dangers associated with AI.

Dave Mabe proposed one more opportunity afforded by ChatGPT that I hadn’t considered. Its successful use requires careful and deliberate question-building, and Dave sees that as leading to a new profession, “Prompt Engineer.” 

I have been accused multiple times of being really good at posing questions and not as good at providing answers. I now recognize that, like Jimmy Buffett, my occupational hazard has been that my occupation’s just not around. Prompt Engineer might be the career I’ve been waiting for all my life. It certainly beats being a losing contestant on “The Weakest Link.”

Early Decision 2: A Case Study--Principle or Pragmatism

Is it ever appropriate for a student to renege on an Early Decision commitment? And how should a college counselor respond when a family wants to game the system or play fast and loose with the rules?

Those were just a couple of the questions I found myself contemplating during my Spring Break while sitting on the deck sunning myself and enjoying the view of the Currituck Sound. For those of you wondering, “What’s wrong with you?”, that’s an essay question rather than a short answer and a topic for another time. 

Like most college counselors I am “on duty” even during off hours. I chuckle to myself when my school talks about “work/life balance,” because I understand all too well that schools and colleges operate on an economic model that relies on hiring those of us who are workaholics and lack balance. I also wonder if the next generation of college admission officers and college counselors will be as committed/neurotic as most of us are.

In this instance there was method to my madness.  I had just gotten off a phone call with a college counseling friend who had asked for a consult and a second opinion on an ethical dilemma involving a student.

Like many students who had to navigate high school and college during COVID, the student in question had dealt with academic and mental health challenges, including changing schools halfway through high school and also being home-schooled at one point. As a result their transcript did not match up to their college aspirations.

In middle school and early high school the student had been a champion distance runner until burning out and giving up the sport, at which point they threw their energy into year-round competitive swimming. That included joining a high-end club program known for not only producing Division One swimmers, but Olympians and even Olympic champions.   

Despite the serious commitment to swimming, the student ended up being one of the only team members without Division One interest. The student also went out on a limb and applied to a Restrictive Early Action university, only to be denied.

When the school returned from the Christmas holiday break the counselor learned that during the break the student had reached out to the track coach at a high-academic institution to inquire about potentially running there.  The coach had one spot left, and after the student was vetted by the coach and the admissions office, they applied Early Decision 2 and were admitted.

So far, so good. But as the deadline approached for depositing at the ED2 college, the student and family started getting cold feet. They submitted the deposit, but almost immediately inquired about perhaps deferring admission for a PG year. My counselor friend worried that the motivation wasn’t as much an extra year to solidify readiness for college as buying time to look for other, more palatable options. What made that particularly worrisome was that the counselor’s school has a long-standing, healthy relationship with the university in question.  All of this led the counselor to ask for my thoughts.

In case studies like this one, ECA is always more interested in looking for larger themes and issues. So what are some of those issues?

The first has to do with the increase in colleges offering and students choosing Early Decision 2 options.  I have seen a dramatic increase in the number of my students going the ED2 route, sometimes immediately upon being deferred or denied in ED or Early Action.

Is that a good thing? It’s probably good for colleges as part of an enrollment management plan, but what about for students? Rushing into an ED2 commitment feels a lot like jumping into a romantic relationship immediately after being dumped by one’s ex.

At the same time, I understand the motivation. The growth in early admission options, whether Early Decision or Early Action, can make a student feel like the admissions process is a game of musical chairs where you don’t want to be without a chair when the music stops during regular admission. I wonder, in fact, if “regular admission” may be an endangered species.

With many institutions admitting more than half the freshman class through Early Decision, ED is coercive.  I used to advise students that they shouldn’t apply Early Decision unless they had done thorough research and had a clear first choice, but that train bearing that advice has left the station, along with the larger idea that a college choice should be thoughtful. Today the subtle (and maybe not so subtle) message is similar to that in the old Ronco commercials for must-have products like the pocket fisherman and ginsu knives (technically not a Ronco product). Only instead of “if you order now,” with regard to Early Decision the message is “if you don’t order now.”

I am also seeing more colleges with both Early Action and Early Decision encouraging students deferred in EA to switch their applications to ED2.  That is certainly a way of measuring demonstrated interest, and I’m okay with that as long as colleges are transparent about their practices, but it also encourages students to look at the decision to apply ED as about strategy rather than commitment. What I have grave concerns about is a situation I recently heard about where a university encouraged a student deferred during Early Decision to switch their application to ED2, whereupon the student was denied outright. That’s indefensible.

I think this case also raises questions about the nature of the Early Decision commitment and the inequality in the relationship between college and applicant. There is an old joke that when it comes to a bacon and egg breakfast, the chicken is interested but the pig is committed. When it comes to Early Decision, the college is the chicken and the student is the pig. The student is expected to commit fully at the time of application, but the college bears no obligation other than agreeing to provide a decision at an earlier date.

I would never encourage a student to enter into an Early Decision application without understanding that it is a binding commitment, but I also wonder how defensible that position is. Parents who are lawyers will often ask what is keeping them from breaking the Early Decision commitment, and there is certainly nothing legally binding.  The statistics I’ve seen indicate that the Early Decision yield rate nationally is more like 89 percent than 100 percent.

In this case I also wonder if the college believed that student had committed by applying through Early Decision 2. Its behavior would suggest not. The college required an enrollment deposit from the student, and yet if the student is considered to have committed at the moment of application, a deposit is unnecessary.

The final set of issues have to do with when, if ever, it is appropriate to withdraw from an Early Decision agreement.  In this particular case the family submitted the deposit, then had second thoughts about whether a PG year would better meet the student’s needs. The ethical issues would have been lessened had that come up prior to depositing.

The family asked the counselor about the possibility of deferring admission for a year in order for the student to do a PG year at a boarding school, but it was not clear if they really wanted to defer admission at the ED2 school or buy time to shop for a “better” option a year from now.  I think that makes a difference. Given the student’s background, including both academic and health concerns,  buying time with an extra year may very well be in the student’s best interest academically and personally. I also think that backing out of ED to attend boarding school is not the same thing as backing out to attend another college. But deferring admission should be used only if the student intends to matriculate a year from now.

So what is the counselor to do? Families may not know, or care, that their decisions impact not only them but future applicants.  In this case the counselor has to worry about potential damage to the relationship between the school and the university. I would probably urge the family to contact the college and be honest about their hesitancy to continue the commitment, and I hope the college would allow that. There is no benefit in having a student on your campus who doesn’t want to be there. I also urged my counselor friend to find an opportunity after the fact to communicate with the admissions office that the school was not complicit, or even aware, of the family’s decision-making process.

The college process tests what we believe–about college, about parenting, and maybe about life.  There is a tremendous temptation to look for ways to game the system, and the college admissions process doesn’t necessarily discourage that.  In my opinion we are always better off choosing principle over pragmatism.

Random Questions

This blog has always been more about raising questions than claiming to have answers. Here are some random questions I’m contemplating as we hit the end of February. None of them are keeping me up at night, and none are probably deserving of their own post. I hope they won’t come across as rants or the kind of airing of grievances you might hear from Frank Costanza during Festivus or at any Donald Trump rally.

Question 1: Does February need a rebranding?

We all know that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, and that April showers bring May flowers. What is February’s niche or tagline? It begins with Groundhog’s Day, where Punxsutawney Phil either sees his shadow or doesn’t, and we have six more weeks of winter regardless. The Super Bowl is played during February, Valentine’s Day happens during February, and February is Black History Month (which should last longer than a month). Despite all of these, the closest thing February has to a brand is “the shortest month that seems like the longest.” Can we do better than that? Perhaps the same marketing people who do ads for avocados or Geico can come up with a branding campaign for February.

Question 2: When does Early Action become late action?

We are at the end of February (“the shortest month that seems like the longest”), and I am aware of several colleges that have just released Early Action decisions, barely a month before regular decisions are due to be released.  What gives? Clearly Early Action is designed for the benefit of the institution, allowing it to space out application reading and manage enrollment, but when is Early Action no longer early? And is “regular” admission soon to be a thing of the past?  In the words of Yogi Berra, “It gets late early around here.”

Question 3: Why do brochures for summer programs include a list of colleges attended by “graduates”?

This is the time of year when my office receives a number of emails and brochures promoting summer program opportunities. I was looking at one last week for a program sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Urbanism. It’s a program in Italy called the Center for Introduction to Architecture Overseas (if you haven’t noticed, the acronym is CIAO), and having spent a month nine summers ago living in the small Tuscany city of Lucca, it caught my eye. My attention was drawn to  one piece of the brochure, where it says “Program alums have been accepted to.” 

Is listing the colleges attended by those who attend  summer programs a form of false advertising? Is the message intended to be that attending a summer program like this will result in acceptance to college? Maybe I’m naive, but I think that colleges look at these kinds of summer programs as “It’s nice that your family can afford to send you to a program like this.” My students who have attended these kinds of pricey summer programs generally have a good experience, but I don’t think attending a summer enrichment program improves students’ college admissions chances. Can we get summer programs to market the quality of the experience and not the promise of college admission benefits? In the spirit of full disclosure, I recognize that schools, including mine, are also guilty of publishing college lists in marketing materials, and I’m not totally comfortable with that either, but a summer program advertising where its alumni have gone to college seems even less defensible.

Question 4: If there were an Advanced Placement multiple choice question regarding the back and forth between the College Board and the administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the proposed AP course in African American Studies, the issue would be best described as:

1. The College Board standing up to DeSantis

2. The College Board kissing up to DeSantis

3. Political theater related to DeSantis’s presidential ambitions

4. A pissing contest

5. All of the above    

I have been following and trying to make sense of the issue, as well as trying to determine who is the good guy in all of this.

In case you have spent six months vacationing at the International Space Station or trying to shoot down Chinese weather balloons and unidentified flying objects, here’s a quick summary.

For a number of years the College Board has had plans on the drawing board for the new AP course. After the murder of George Floyd by police in the summer of 2020 and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests, plans ratcheted up to introduce the course, and this year there is a pilot of the course in 60 high schools around the country.

In January the Florida Department of Education rejected the AP course as violating state law related to the teaching in public schools of race-related issues and as lacking educational value. Gov. DeSantis, whose first job after college was teaching U.S. History at the Darlington School in Georgia, described the proposed syllabus as “woke.”  

On February 1, the first day of Black History Month, the College Board announced a revised curriculum for the course, removing some of the topics that Florida and conservatives had objected to. The immediate conclusion from many of us was that the College Board was responding to the criticism leveled by the DeSantis administration, but the CB maintained that the changes had been in the works prior to the objections raised by Florida. That claim was called into question by a timeline released by Florida officials showing on-going negotiations between the state and the College Board over the course.

So what are we to make of this? Should we blame the College Board for engaging in dialogue with Florida, given that the Advanced Placement program is its largest single source of revenue and that Florida is the third highest state in terms of AP participation? At the same time, are Florida’s objections educational or political in nature? 

Governor DeSantis is clearly gearing up for a Presidential run, and his schtick is using the culture wars as a campaign platform. As Republican politicians go, his style is more bully than bully pulpit. Just this morning I read about a proposed Florida law that would establish authoritarian control over higher education in a way that is unprecedented. He has already attempted to turn New College into Hillsdale South and punish Disney for supporting LGBT rights. First Mickey Mouse, now the College Board. Will he target apple pie (or at least Apple), motherhood, and the National Football League next?

As for the College Board, is the introduction of the African-American Studies course filling a void in AP offerings or a way to increase revenue in the wake of declining SAT numbers? As a white observer rather than an African-American Studies scholar, I think there is clearly a need for more education about race and its role in American history and culture. The debate should be about what the focus of such an AP course should be. 

I wonder if the AP course should be African-American “history” rather than “studies.” In many academic disciplines there is a fine line between scholarship and activism. A few of the topics removed from the original draft look like doctoral level work rather than topics high school students need to be aware of. One such topic was Queer Studies. Is that essential to understanding the African-American experience? I’ll leave that to others to answer, but from a historical perspective it is relevant that Bayard Ruskin was forced to take a back seat as a leading voice in the civil rights movement because he was gay.

Many of the topics and readings removed from the updated course are secondary sources that students may now study as part of a project that will make up 20 percent of their AP score. The in-depth project may be a good idea, but as far as I know no other AP course has a similar project component.  Is the project unique for this course or part of the future of many AP courses?

More questions than answers, and some of the answers are troubling. At least we know that March is about to come in like a lion, only to leave like a lamb.

(Re)Commended

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” January 30, 2023)

In case you missed it, there was a bizarre news story coming out of the D.C. area a couple of weeks ago. “So what’s new?”, you might ask, noting that the phrases “bizarre story” and “D.C. area” in the same sentence are normally not newsworthy. 

This particular story had nothing to do with the 15-round lightweight fight which resulted in Kevin McCarthy at long last achieving his life’s dream of being Speaker of the House of Representatives, although it did take place in the same time frame. It involved an investigation, but not into Hunter Biden’s laptop or whether Dr. Anthony Fauci created COVID.  The investigation was not federal, but rather conducted by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares.

What caught my attention were both the target of and the reason for the investigation. The target is the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Northern Virginia, ranked by U.S. News as the top high school in America. We (that’s an editorial “we”) mention that factoid only to make the point that TJ is widely considered as one of the best secondary schools in the country, not because we consider U.S. News’s rankings either valid or meaningful.

What really raised my eyebrows, though, was the issue creating the need for the investigation. The school is being investigated for having failed to inform students that they had been recognized as Commended Students in the National Merit Scholarship Competition. 

“Commended Student” is one of two levels of recognition in the National Merit program. Students who score in the top one-half of one percent on the PSAT taken in the junior year, the qualifying test for National Merit. Semifinalist slots operate on a state-by-state quota system (a topic for another time). Those who score among the top 50,000 students nationally (approximately the top 3 percent of test takers) but do not qualify as Semifinalists, receive Commended Student recognition.  

Miyares has taken up the mantle for a group of TJ parents who are claiming that the failure to notify their children of their designation as a Commended Student has harmed them in the college admissions process.  In a press conference Miyares talked about children denied their dreams and that the failure may constitute a civil rights violation.  But is that the case?

I know that “unpack” is one of those words that has become a cliche and everyone is tired of, but there’s a lot to unpack here. 

It’s unclear whether this was an administrative oversight or a deliberate decision to avoid sharing the information, and that makes a difference. Intent is a key factor in making judgments about the ethical implications of a situation. I saw one claim that National Merit may have sent the package with the Letters of Commendation with insufficient postage, delaying its receipt.  In philosophy Occam’s Razor is a principle that one should always look for the simple explanation first, and just as a doctor might want to rule out obvious diagnoses before looking for the rare disease found only on hospital shows, we should make sure that this is not a case of simple error or oversight.

There is also some irony in that this is an issue at TJ (several other Fairfax County Public Schools have been named as guilty as well).  TJ had 131 National Merit Semifinalists this year, almost 30 percent of the senior class.  To put that in context, only one other high school in the country had more (Stuyvesant High School in New York City), and TJ has in its senior class more Semifinalists than 14 states. Given that number, putting too much emphasis on the 240 seniors who were recognized as Commended Students runs the risk of creating a three tiered student body with regard to National Merit.  I have never been to TJ (where the average SAT score according to the school profile is 1531–yes, you read that right), but are Commended Students picked on by Semifinalists? And what about the approximately 80 students who don’t qualify for either? I am not defending the failure to dispense the recognition, only pointing out that TJ is far from a normal school.

I learned early in my career as a counselor that the issue presented by a disgruntled parent is rarely the real issue, and suspect that is true here.  The focus on the National Merit issue is being seen as evidence that Thomas Jefferson (the school, not the President) is abandoning its roots as an elitist school in its quest to embrace an equity agenda. Attorney General Miyares’ investigation seems to be much more about the change in TJ’s admissions process away from admissions testing in order to diversify the student body, which is approximately two-thirds Asian. Those of us who are cynics, or rather realists, may wonder how much of this is a real issue as opposed to political theater.

ECA is not interested in litigating the cultural wars, but rather looking at the broader underlying questions. There are several that have not been addressed sufficiently.

The first is whether the students affected have been harmed or discriminated against. Several articles have mentioned that they were unable to list Commended Student on early college applications. But that assumes that colleges value National Merit recognition. That is debatable with regard to Semifinalist status, but if there are colleges that see being a National Merit Commended Student as a deciding factor in admission, I’d like them to contact me and let me know. Being a Commended Student is not meaningless, but it’s also not particularly meaningful. I was a Commended Student years ago when the National Merit exam wasn’t tied to the PSAT (it apparently changed a year later), and it’s unlikely that I will list that honor on my resume–or my tombstone. 

The second question is, should it be a school’s job to inform National Merit recipients? National Merit has always been behind the curve when it comes to technology.  Long after all colleges had moved to online applications and typewriters had all but disappeared, the National Merit application remained a paper application requiring a typewriter.

There has to be a way for National Merit to inform students directly about recognition.  The obvious one is to notify students using their accounts with National Merit’s PSAT partner, the College Board. The College Board informs students of their PSAT scores by sending them an email. What can’t Semifinalists and Commended Students be informed the same way?

This is part of a larger issue where agencies like the College Board and National Merit want schools to do their work for them. The College Board has pushed the School Day SAT, and I expect it will want the new digital SAT to be administered through schools. But the College Board has in the past refused to pay those who proctor during the school day because the proctor is already being paid by the school and a stipend would constitute double dipping. But test proctors, and school officials expected to dispense National Merit certificates, are agents of the College Board or the National Merit program, not of their schools. If you want those of us in schools to do your work, you should be compensating us. 

The final larger issue, and the hardest to navigate, has to do with the nature of merit.  George Will wrote a column about the TJ situation in which he stated, “The opposite of an equitable society is a meritocracy.”

But are equity and merit at odds? Both are important values (not everyone will agree), and there is a tension between them. They are also concepts that can arouse political emotions.

The challenge may be in how those concepts are defined. There are certainly those who are suspicious of equity as a way to water down merit, but equity doesn’t mean equality of result but rather equality of opportunity.  Much of what we have traditionally referred to as merit is really privilege in disguise. The National Merit program defined “merit” as how one does on one three-hour test, and we know that standardized testing correlates strongly with family income. Test scores measure merit imprecisely, and only in context. Two identical scores don’t mean the same thing if one student spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on test prep and the other didn’t. Which of the two is more meritorious?

That tension between merit and equity will be one of the most important philosophical societal issues of our time. Finding the right balance between the two is what we should be investigating. 

"I Am Not a Robot"

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider on January 9, 2023)

“I am not a robot.” How many of us have been asked by Google or other websites to prove that? It is tempting to say that being forced to check the “I am not a robot” box is dehumanizing, but it’s actually humanizing. 

The “I am not a robot” checkbox is an example of a captcha (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Humans and Computers Apart), a tool designed to filter out spam and bots. I prefer to think that it’s real aim is to inconvenience me. Having to find the kitty pictures among a mass of images is annoying, although it’s still an improvement on having to type distorted text into a box. Does the fact that I have a hard time determining whether that’s a 0 (zero) or a capital O mean that I’m not human or that I might need glasses?

Will “Are you a robot?” soon be a required question on college applications? That question is raised by the recent introduction of ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence app that interacts conversationally, giving it the ability to “write.” A New York Times article describes ChatGPT (the GPT stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”) as “the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public.” More than one million people signed up to test it in the first five days after its release.

To borrow from the title of a recent ECA column, it’s “too early to tell” what this means. Is this another example of technological advances making our lives both simpler and simultaneously more complicated? Another instance of science fiction turning into non-fiction? Another chapter in the age-old philosophical debate about what qualities distinguish us as human? Or the next step down the road leading to servitude to our smarter and hopefully benevolent machine overlords?

ChatGPT poses particular challenges for those of us who love the written word and those of us who work in education.  The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni asked in his most recent column whether ChatGPT will make him irrelevant. (I’d like to think not.) What happens to take-home essay assignments when you can’t be sure that the essay was written by Johnny and not his AI app? In higher education the humanities are already under threat. What happens to the humanities when the human component is removed? “Machinities,” anyone?

That brings those of us in the college admissions and counseling worlds to consider the college application essay. Does ChatGPT signify the end of the application essay?

I was interviewed for a Forbes article with the title “A Computer Can Now Write Your College Essay–Maybe Better Than You Can.” Forbes fed ChatGPT two college essay prompts, one the 650-word Common Application prompt, “Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story,” and the other the “Why Wisconsin?” essay from the University of Wisconsin-Madison supplement.  According to the article, each essay took ChatGPT less than ten minutes to complete. That is both far less time than we hope students would spend composing essays and far more time than most admissions officers spend reading essays.

I was asked to weigh in on whether the AI-produced essays were convincing, whether they looked similar to essays from actual high school seniors, and whether anything in the essay suggested that they were written by AI rather than a human being. My answer was that I probably couldn’t detect the AI authorship, but that I also wouldn’t label the essays as convincing.

I found both essays to resemble cliche essays, with neither answering the prompt in a convincing way.  They also didn’t sound like an essay a teenager would write, but rather an essay a teenager might write with major assistance and editing by an adult.

The Forbes reporter, Emma Whitford, had provided ChatGPT with the following factoids for use in the “identity” essay–competitive swimmer who broke his shoulder in tenth grade, interested in majoring in business, parents from Bangalore, India who now own a restaurant in Newton, Massachusetts.  ChatGPT threw all of that at the wall in formulating the essay, with some interesting creative embellishments. The writer began swimming competitively at the age of nine, the broken shoulder came in a swimming accident, and the interest in business came from working in the family restaurant, where he helped his parents with “inventory management, staff scheduling, and customer relations,” as well as marketing and advertising and developing new menu items.

The “identity” essay did exactly what many student essays do, throwing out lots of things in hopes that something will stick. But it didn’t really address the prompt. The weakest part of the essay, in fact, is the part dealing with the student’s Indian heritage. It consists of vague generalities about “a deep appreciation for Indian culture” and “the challenges and opportunities that come with being a first-generation immigrant,” but there is nothing in that paragraph showing how coming from an Indian background has influenced the student’s experience or world view. Can I imagine a student writing such an essay? Yes. Are my standards for what makes an essay compelling too high? Possibly.

The “Why Wisconsin?” essay had similar characteristics. The information provided to ChatGPT included an intended major in Business Administration and Marketing, part-time work at the family restaurant, and a love for Badger football. Again, the bot showed some creativity in expanding on those themes. It referenced the student’s starting as a dishwasher and progressing to researching the restaurant’s competition and identifying its “unique selling points,” and included a Camp Randall Stadium reference. But, like many student first drafts of the “Why…?” essay, there is nothing that shows any real familiarity with the university or that would prevent one from inserting any other university’s name into the essay.

Nevertheless, the quality of these essays is either impressive or scary, depending upon your perspective. This seems like a major leap beyond learning that a computer could defeat a human world champion in chess.

So what are the ethical implications? That, after all, is the focus of ECA.  

The low-hanging fruit answer is that it is clearly unethical for a student to submit an essay written by ChatGPT. The more complicated question is whether it is unethical for a college to require an application essay or make the essay a significant factor in evaluating a student’s application. How can you use an application essay to help make admission decisions when you can’t tell whether the student actually wrote the essay?

Then again, in how many cases is an essay determinative for an admissions decision? I think essays, like test scores, are overrated by the public. Personal statements and essays are important for some students at some colleges. Most colleges are not selective enough to give attention to a student’s essay unless it contains some kind of red flag. It is only at the very highly selective/rejective colleges and universities, where the vast majority of applicants have superb transcripts and scores, that the voice piece of the application, including essays, becomes important and differentiating.

It is already clear that ChatGPT is capable of composing a passable essay, and that may be enough to augur the end of the personal essay as an admissions factor. Just how good an essay AI can produce may be dependent on the quality of information given it. My father was a pioneer in the computer field, and I learned early the concept of GIGO–Garbage In, Garbage Out.

I’m far from convinced that ChatGPT can produce great college essays. Great essays have a spark to them that is not about the ability to write but rather the ability to think. Great personal essays are clever and insightful, with an authenticity and a sincerity that’s–well, personal. As Roger Ailes once said about public speaking, you either have to be sincere or fake sincerity, and it’s very hard to fake sincerity. 

That skepticism toward ChatGPT’s writing abilities may label me as either a dinosaur or a dreamer. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I’ll take either over being a robot.

Coming Attraction--A Note and An Apology

Last week I was quoted in a Forbes article about Artificial Intelligence and its ability to write college essays.  As is often the case, the reporter picked up just one of the things I had said about the issue, which was that the essay examples the reporter had sampled using AI were “cliche” essays, hard to distinguish from student essays I’ve seen written with help from some essay consultants. Unfortunately I didn’t specify “some.”

The quote from the article appeared in this morning’s Today in College Admission, published by NACAC.  I was contacted shortly thereafter by Chris Reeves, counselor at St. Henry District High School in Kentucky and a former member of the NACAC Board of Directors. Chris pointed out that the quote appeared to disparage all Independent Educational Consultants.  That was not my intention, and I apologize if it came across that way.

I plan to write more fully about the AI issue in early January, but didn’t want to wait to clarify.

In Memoriam: The NACAC Assembly

Last week Vern Granger, Chair of the Board of Directors for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, better known as NACAC, announced the results of a special member vote to amend the organization’s bylaws.  By a margin of nearly 9-1, the membership of NACAC approved amendments that removed all references to the NACAC Assembly, the organization’s legislative body.

It was no surprise that the proposed amendments passed. The only suspense, in fact, was whether there would be a quorum (10 percent) of members voting. That may have something to do with why the deadline to cast votes was extended to November 30.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I was on the losing side of the vote, for reasons I will discuss later in this post.  I purposely waited to write on this topic until the vote results were reported out, because I didn’t want to appear like I was trying to tell anyone else how they should vote. But I think it’s appropriate to take a few minutes and eulogize the Assembly.

The NACAC Assembly succumbed around November 30 after having been in failing health for a number of years. Like many of us, the Assembly experienced a decline in strength and executive function in recent years. There are no immediate survivors, but the Assembly was preceded in death by its close relative, the NACAC Standing Committees. 

College admission and counseling professionals who remember the Assembly from its more vibrant days are saddened by the news.  Count me among them. 

The NACAC Assembly personified the strengths and weaknesses of representative democracy. At its worst it could be mundane. That wasn’t always a bad thing. As President of NACAC in 2010, I had to run both the Assembly and the General Membership meeting, and I was perfectly happy that no big, unexpected controversies reared their heads.  There were certainly a few delegates each year who opened their delegate handbooks for the first time as they were walking into the ballroom where the meeting was about to start.

It could be chaotic, with behind-the-scenes political maneuvering and chicanery.  At one time the Assembly met twice during the national conference, with a potential third session if needed following the Saturday afternoon business meeting. The expectation was that proposed motions would be put forth during the first session and then voted on in the second session, but in many years delegates played their cards close to the vest, waiting until the second meeting to spring motions requesting NACAC to address some problem in the profession.  I have helped other delegates wordsmith on the fly after they’ve offered a motion that wasn’t clear, well thought out, or even grammatically correct.

At one time the Assembly had three major responsibilities.  It approved NACAC’s budget before that responsibility was moved to the Board, and there were delegates who picked apart different line items, asking questions like whether NACAC was spending too much on pastries. (I might have been among them–former NACAC Treasurer Jim McCoy probably groaned whenever he saw me come to the microphone.) It elected the Association’s officers, a responsibility that was moved to the entire membership in 2021. And until the DOJ investigation of NACAC’s ethical rules, the Assembly was the body that amended the Statement of Principles of Good Practice (SPGP) and its successor, the Code of Ethics and Professional Practices.

At its best the Assembly was a forum for passionate debate on the great issues facing our profession.  I have been an Assembly delegate during discussions about need-blind admission, Early Decision/Early Action, the use of agents to recruit internationally, and a number of other issues that are fundamental and profound to those of us who love college counseling. In those years the energy on the Assembly floor was electrifying. I wonder where that debate will take place moving forward.

Serving as an Assembly delegate might have been the best elected position I ever held. The first time I ever spoke at a NACAC meeting was during the debate about need-blind admission during the Assembly in Pittsburgh in 1993 (yes I am that old–if you weren’t even born yet, or were still in elementary school, I don’t want to hear about it).  At that time the SPGP required colleges to be both need-blind in making admission decisions and also to meet the full need of applicants. Today, given the realities of funding higher education, it’s hard to fathom that was an issue. A number of good private institutions argued that confluence of policies wasn’t institutionally sustainable, and the debate within the Assembly was intense. I stood up during the debate, pointing out my previous life as an ethics professor, and argued that the ultimate principle was transparency about our practices.

Transparency in governance was one of the arguments made by NACAC for abolishing both the standing committees and the Assembly, along with inclusivity, alignment with peer associations, and industry best practices.  I am willing to grant that the changes might be necessary, and I support Angel Perez’s leadership and vision of the organization. 

But is NACAC being truly transparent about the changes? Not everyone thinks so. A friend and long-time leader within the profession told me that he “threw up in his mouth” after the third use of “transparency.”  I would characterize the governance changes, especially when defended as “industry best practices,” as translucent rather than transparent. What would be transparent would be for NACAC to admit that it can’t afford the old governance structure in the wake of revenue losses during COVID, or to come out and state that it is pivoting to being a different, inside-the-Beltway, professional association. 

In the past two years NACAC has radically changed its governance structure, abolishing standing committees and the Assembly. The demise of both those entities concentrates power in the Board of Directors and in the staff, an Executive Branch without checks and balances. 

Ethics is not only about what you do, but how you do it. The governance changes may be necessary, but have felt rushed, without a clear plan for engaging the membership in the leadership of the organization moving forward. 

Voting for officers has been extended to the entire membership, and that’s a good thing, but far fewer NACAC members will be active participants in the work of the Association.  The loss of the standing committees and the Assembly mean fewer opportunities to grow the next generation of leaders, although Vern Granger’s email indicated that the board has directed the staff to work with affiliate leaders to create a professional development program to develop newer leaders. I’m glad to hear that.

Not everyone will be sad to see the demise of the NACAC Assembly, but I hope all of us will take a moment to celebrate its life and mourn its death. RIP–you will be missed.

Too Early to Tell

When I am asked how I am or how my day is going, my standard response is “too early to tell.” That retort usually elicits a chuckle the first time I use it and quickly devolves into eye-roll territory with subsequent uses.

If my friends and colleagues wish I would use “too early to tell” less, I wish others would use it more, especially the pundits whose job it is to ascribe significance to events in real time. The 24-hour cable news cycle has created a need to fill time and space with analysis from panels of “contributors” who are labeled as “experts” but more resemble talking heads. Most of them are quick to draw conclusions in real time, and most of them are ultimately proved wrong.

“Too early to tell” is probably the correct reaction to most events in the news. With the exception of cataclysmic events like 9/11, we rarely have enough perspective to determine when history is being made. It is too soon to conclude whether an item in the news is an isolated incident or the beginning of a movement.

So it is with three recent announcements in the college admissions world. 

The first is Purdue’s recent announcement that it will resume requiring applicants to submit test scores beginning in the Fall of 2024. Is this a foreshadowing of the triumphant return of testing?

I’m thinking not. At a Board meeting at school last week, prior to the Purdue announcement, I was asked if I thought that many colleges would return to requiring test scores. I replied that the colleges and universities I was aware of that had returned to requiring testing had done so for reasons that may not translate to other institutions. MIT did so because it has a need to identify the kind of high-end math students it is seeking. Public universities in states like Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee have done so not at the behest of admissions offices but rather the political appointees on state governing boards who apparently consider test-optional policies part of the woke movement.

I could certainly be wrong, but I’m thinking that the test-optional movement is unlikely to go away. While some uber-selective (as opposed to Uber or Lyft selective) universities can require anything they want from applicants, most colleges run the risk of a decline in application numbers if they go back to requiring testing. That is especially true for colleges that rely on enrollment from California, given that the UC and Cal State systems are ending the use of test scores in admission altogether. I suspect that application numbers are an even more important metric than test scores for most institutions.  

The second news item is that several colleges and universities, including Washington & Jefferson, Colby-Sawyer, and Lasell, have recently announced tuition resets.  W&J is reducing its tuition by 44 percent, Colby-Sawyer by 62 percent, and Lasell by close to a third.

A Hechinger Report article (also published in the Washington Post) quoted a Vice President of NACUBO (National Association of College and University Business Officers) as predicting that as many as 100 colleges may move to lower their prices. I’d like to see that happen, because I’d like to see “counterprogramming” to the high tuition, high discount model that has prevailed in higher education. (I’d also like to see more “counterprogramming” with regard to a variety of admission practices.)

I wish those institutions well, but the history of tuition resets isn’t promising. Previous instances of colleges and universities hoping to lead a movement to lower prices (and lower the amount of aid they offer) have found themselves without followers, and there is a danger that lowering tuition may lead the public to see the lower price as a sign that the institution in question is in trouble. The broader issue, of course, is that we have to come to grips with growing public discontent about the cost of higher education. Those costs are spotlighted at a time when there is concern about inflation, especially given that the price of attending college has risen faster than any other sector over the past generation. Can we justify what we are charging for our product?

The most interesting story is that eleven law schools have announced that they will no longer participate in the U.S. News rankings. The group includes Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Penn, Georgetown, Michigan, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, UC-Irvine, and the University of Washington.

The law schools all provided similar arguments for their decisions to no longer participate in the rankings.  They argue that the ranking metric–40 percent reputation, 26 percent, placement, 21 percent selectivity (including LSAT scores and college GPAs), and 13 percent faculty and library resources–discourages law schools from encouraging graduates to pursue careers in public service, and that the debt metric ignores loan forgiveness programs for students who bypass corporate law and earnings or who pursue other graduate degrees after law school.  They also suggest that the rankings metrics incentivize law schools to provide merit aid to students with high grades and test scores.

The larger question is whether the withdrawals portend the end of the influence of the U.S. News rankings, as suggested by articles in both Inside Higher Ed and The Nation, not only for law schools but perhaps for undergraduate institutions as well.  The answer depends on which sports announcing legend you choose to quote.

If you are an optimist or a baseball fan, you might prefer to channel legendary St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs (as well as several other teams) play-by-play announcer Harry Caray. While best known for his rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch, his home run call began with “It might be, it could be.” If, however, your tastes run more to football or skepticism, you might turn to the wisdom of analyst and former college coach Lee Corso, fond of saying, “Not so fast, my friends.”

Is this the beginning of the end for U.S. News? It may be more appropriate to answer that question not with sports quotes, but rather with metaphors from the entertainment world. The rankings are, after all, far more about entertainment than they are about journalism. They attempt to make news rather than break news.

I wonder whether the law schools in question will discover that U.S. News’s rankings are the higher education equivalent of the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” where you can check out any time you want but you can never leave. In the past colleges that have attempted to withdraw from participation in the rankings, most prominently Reed College in Oregon, have not only been unable to opt out but have also been punished by U.S. News with a lower ranking. Will the withdrawing schools, many of which are universally considered top 14 law schools, face the same thing? Or will we see undergraduate institutions find the courage to follow in their footsteps and stop cooperating with the rankings?

U.S. News has already announced that it will continue to rank law schools out of “concern for students” rather than the revenue or publicity that the rankings brings to what once upon a time was a weekly newsmagazine. But are colleges obligated to help U.S. News with data collection when it could publish rankings based on publicly available information? As ECA has asked previously, how much does U.S. News vet the information it receives from colleges? And is U.S. News “too big to fail”? 

Will we see a Netflix documentary or a major motion picture “inspired by a true story” based on the clash between law schools and the rankings? I can envision Bob Morse as the evil genius in a suspense or horror movie who won’t die, coming back to life just when the heroes think they’ve finally vanquished the threat to civilization and we assume the closing credits are about to roll.

Might there be an Oscar in his future? It’s too early to tell, but you heard it here first.

.

"We're Missing..."

In early November each year I experience a college admissions form of post-traumatic stress syndrome. I am recovering–physically, mentally, spiritually–from the October slog of writing recommendations for the huge number of my students applying early with deadlines of either October 15 or November 1. I warn those around me–students, colleagues, family members–that I am likely to be grumpy, or perhaps more accurately, grumpier than usual. T. S. Eliot described April as the “cruelest month.” He obviously never worked in a college counseling office. 

I tell my students that all it takes is one thing added to one’s plate to become overwhelmed instead of simply whelmed. That’s true for us as well. Over the past week or so there have been three admission practices that have gotten me exercised, perhaps even overwhelmed. What the three pet peeves have in common is that they get in the way of a college admissions process that is rational and easy to navigate.

The first is received-by deadlines.  There is nothing inherently wrong with having a received-by deadline, other than the fact that almost everyone else has a submit-by deadline. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” but having consistent definitions for what an admissions deadline means is anything but foolish. Students (and counselors) deserve consistency in admission requirements, and that includes deadlines. Colleges with received-by deadlines, if you want to stand out from the crowd, find a different way to do it. Or if received-by is necessary for some reason that none of us can fathom, make that case.

The second is the increasing trend on the part of a number of large public universities that require students to self-report grades, with a transcript required only after the student enrolls. While the college counseling dinosaur in me yearns nostalgically for the good old days when I (or, in the interest of truth, my administrative assistant) automatically sent a transcript, letter of recommendation, and school profile with every application, I actually think that putting the onus on students to report their grades makes sense. 

What I find objectionable is that there are too many different ways colleges have to self-report. Last year one of my students applied to four large public universities in the South that required applicants to self-report grades, and he had to self-report four different ways. One required submission of the Self-Reported Academic Record (SRAR), another required the grades to be reported on the Common App itself, another wanted an unofficial transcript uploaded to its student portal, and there was a fourth way I can’t remember. 

The Common Application, and later the Coalition Application, were established to make it relatively easy for a student to apply to multiple colleges. Having multiple ways to self-report grades is at odds with that principle. Can we please find a common method for self-reporting grades? I’ve never been one to ask, “Why doesn’t NACAC do something about this?”, but I’m tempted to make an exception in this case. 

Number one on my current list of pet peeves (subject to change at any moment) is emails sent to students telling them that certain documents are missing from their applications. Like the other examples listed above, these serve a valuable purpose in theory. They help an applicant make sure that his or her application is not incomplete, which is a valuable thing to know. The problem is how and when these reminders are sent, and the lack of sensitivity attached to them.

The “We’re missing…” email is not received by students and parents as a helpful reminder, but as a cause for panic. The first, and natural, thought is “my stupid school counselor didn’t even bother to send my transcript.” That can certainly happen, especially in these days when a student can apply without counselors even knowing and when some students prefer to communicate telepathically. We are certainly capable of making mistakes during the hectic days leading up to November 1.

What is annoying for counselors is when emails alleging that school materials are missing are sent when document platforms such as Naviance or SCOIR show the documents as not only having been sent but also received and uploaded by the college. My administrative assistant is wonderful about calling to check in the wake of the “We’re missing…” communications, and invariably the materials are there, either not yet logged onto student portals or in rare cases misfiled. I don’t blame colleges for either of those.

But sending those emails prematurely is another thing altogether, creating unnecessary stress and anxiety in students and parents, which creates unnecessary stress and anxiety in college counselors.  Students and parents assume that when something is sent electronically, it is received instantaneously. They don’t understand what goes on behind the scenes in a college admissions office to process applications.

What is especially problematic is colleges that aren’t transparent about the fact that it may take several days to reconcile documents and show them as received. At one point it seemed like some institutions sent the “We’re missing…” email as an acknowledgement that the application had been received. Thankfully that practice seems to be disappearing.

Recently a university in the Midwest that will remain unnamed (but is the alma mater of Tom Brady, Gerald Ford, James Earl Jones, and Madonna) caused a stir by sending notices of incomplete applications listing missing documents. What it failed to admit was that the admissions office was 10-12 days behind in processing documents submitted in the days immediately preceding November 1. Is it ethical to send a “We are missing…” notice when you have no way of knowing whether the documents in question are actually missing?

The Scottish philosopher W. D. Ross (not to be confused with WD-40) said that ethical obligations arise out of relationships. In any given ethical dilemma each relationship creates what Ross referred to as a prima facie (first glance) duty. For example, as a college counselor I have a relationship with my students, with my school, with my profession, and with myself as an ethical individual. Each of those relationships creates an obligation or duty. Ross believed that we could determine our actual duty in a given case by identifying and weighing the various prima facie duties present in any situation.

Colleges are in relationship with their applicants, and also with feeder schools and the counselors who reside in them. Those relationships create ethical obligations. First and foremost among those obligations would seem to be not scaring the begeezus out of any of them.

That seems to be something we’re missing.

Preferences On Trial

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admission Insider” on November 7, 2022)

You are likely aware that the Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in the twin cases, filed by Students for Fair Admissions, challenging the use of race-based preferences by Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill.  What is unclear is whether the five hours spent on the two cases, two hours longer than planned, was anything other than political theater. The consensus of those who followed the oral arguments is that the justices on the Court had most likely already made up their minds.

The consideration of race in college admission is only one of the things on trial in these cases.

If race-based preferences are on trial, that certainly opens the door to questioning other admission preferences as well. While I am not aware that Students For Fair Admissions has ever filed lawsuits challenging legacy, athletic, or donor preferences, perhaps suggesting that it thinks those are fair, those preferences will inevitably come under scrutiny as well.

During oral arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked what would happen if athletic and donor preferences disappeared, concluding that “We would just have a crummy squash team and no art museum. Then what?” Then what, indeed. Are we willing to give up our climbing walls and lazy rivers as well?

Legacy preferences have already come under attack, most recently in a report issued a couple of weeks ago by James Murphy, Senior Policy Analyst at Education Reform Now. We’ll come back to legacy preferences.

What else is on trial? Judicial deference to institutions to determine what their student bodies look like. In past cases involving college admissions and race, previous Supreme Courts have deferred to institutions. It’s not clear that the current Court will follow stare decisis, the precedents established over the past 45 years going back to Bakke, the first case involving college admission and race.

That means that the Court itself is also on trial. On the heels of overturning Roe v. Wade as well as fifty years of what several justices described during their confirmation hearings as “settled law,” the Court is at risk of exposing itself as no longer impartial umpires calling balls and strikes, the metaphor used by Chief Justice John Roberts back in 2012, but rather ideological politicians who happen to wear robes.

It has been suggested that the leader of the current Court is not Roberts but rather Justice Clarence Thomas. After the decision overturning Roe, Thomas suggested that he would be open to repealing previous Court precedents on issues ranging from gay marriage to privacy in consensual sexual relationships. To no one’s surprise, he stopped short of arguing that Loving v. Virginia, the case prohibiting states from outlawing inter-racial marriage, should be overturned.

Justice Thomas has been a consistent opponent of race-based preferences, and to be fair to him, the issue is personal to him in a way that it isn’t for most of the other justices (with the exception of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, who has proudly admitted that she is a beneficiary of affirmative action, and of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson), or most of us. He wants (and has a right) to believe that he has earned his success on his merits rather than because of his race. Certainly he understands all too well the stigma attached to successful African-Americans that their success is a product of affirmative action. That’s misguided and unfair, especially since none of us can claim that our success is something we have earned without any help whatsoever.  

The other admission practice that is on trial is holistic admission. During oral arguments there were two statements that caught my attention.  The Washington Post reported that Patrick Strawbridge, the attorney for Students for Fair Admissions, argued that considering race alone in making admission decisions is not consistent with the Constitution.  In another exchange, Chief Justice Roberts told the attorneys for Harvard that they needed to establish whether granting a “credit” based “solely” on skin color is based on a stereotype.

I found both those comments odd. Surely they don’t believe that students are admitted to Harvard based solely on race (please avoid the “don’t call me Shirley” response). I think they are suggesting that holistic admission, especially in combination with uber-selectivity, provides cover for institutions to admit the classes they want to achieve institutional priorities, including racial diversity, without any way to criticize a particular admission decision. They think, or suspect, that race is not one among many factors in admissions decisions but a determinative one, or at least weighing more than other factors.

The irony, of course, is that it was Harvard’s amici curiae brief back in the Bakke case outlining a holistic process where race was but one among many factors that Justice Lewis Powell cited as exemplary in his majority opinion. Some on the current court are skeptical of that approach, with Justice Samuel Alito asking during oral arguments, “Did Harvard sell Justice Powell a bill of goods?”

As suggested by its title, Ethical College Admissions is less concerned with the legal and political implications of preferences than the ethical considerations (recognizing that there might be considerable overlap). One of the guiding principles in ethics is “Treat like cases alike.” Returning to legacy preferences in light of the current Supreme Court cases over racial preferences, do those two types of preferences constitute like cases? If we abolish one, must we abolish the other?

I would argue that they aren’t like cases. Legacy preferences and racial preferences present different kinds of ethical issues. But I have to conclude that legacy preferences are less defensible than racial preferences.

Legacy preferences serve as a means to preserve privilege.  The argument for legacy preferences is that a college or university is a kind of family, and that loyalty to the family is a good thing. (The other argument that I’m not capable of judging is that the pool of legacy applicants is stronger than the overall pool.) I don’t disagree with loyalty as a value, but should it outweigh other values? Should an applicant receive preference because of who his or her parents are rather than who he or she is? That turns admission into college into membership in a private club, passed down from generation to generation. Several years ago I described legacy admission, later quoted in a New York Times editorial, as a transfer of property.

Even if you accept the family metaphor, there is the question of what best serves or strengthens any family. I have been fortunate to work in a school with an exceptional sense of community that is almost family-like, but I have always believed that what best serves the family is expanding the family by bringing in new blood. A family that is too loyal becomes insular and inbred, like the royal families of Europe in the 19th century, and inbreeding inevitably produces genetic mutations that weaken and endanger the family.

The weakest argument for legacy preferences is tied to alumni philanthropy, the notion that alumni will support a college or university only if their children receive preference in admission. The experience of places like Johns Hopkins that have abandoned legacy preferences suggests that a decline in alumni support is not inevitable. But even if it is, is alumni giving in hopes of an admission quid pro quo really philanthropic or a subtle form of bribery? That’s exactly the argument that Rick Singer and his clients made to justify their criminal conduct. 

Racial preferences are different in that the goal is noble and laudable, to redress past discrimination and increase access to elite education. The ethical question is whether that end justifies the means. Does it matter how we achieve the goal of greater equality and access?

I think it does, although I don’t claim to have the answer for how to accomplish that. The Bakke case involved the medical school at the University of California at Davis setting aside a certain number of places for applicants of color, and the Supreme Court found that racial quotas were unacceptable. Critics of race-based preferences argue that the practices are similar today, only shrouded in appeals to holistic admission and diversity.

Ethics are about ideals, and an admissions process and a society where, to quote Martin Luther King, applicants are “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is ideal. But is it purely aspirational in 2022? Ethics must also be practical, and the practical consideration is that American society is still dealing with race as an issue. I wish that consideration of race wasn’t necessary, but we’re still dealing with 300 years of racial injustice, and forcing colleges to abandon all consideration of race isn’t a viable solution to that larger issue. 

At the same time, I’m not comfortable with the proposition that racial preferences must always be with us any more than I bought the idea that American forces must remain in Afghanistan for 75-100 years.  In the Grutter case Justice Sandra Day O’Connor talked about racial preferences remaining for 25 more years. We’re five years away from that timeline, and it’s not clear that five more years is enough. But we may not have five more years. 

Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides with regard to Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill, our profession needs to be thinking about an exit strategy for preferences of all kinds.   

Admission Without Application

Should a student be admitted to college without ever applying to college? Until recently that question would have seemed absurd, perhaps even a joke. But the idea of having to apply for admission has become the newest front in the debate about whether we need a new college admissions paradigm.

Back in the summer I wrote a column suggesting that it may be time to re-think some of the conventions of the admissions process, many of which date back nearly a century.  There has already been considerable debate about the role of standardized admission tests, with the pandemic strengthening and emboldening the test-optional movement and some colleges, such as the University of California system, abandoning the consideration of test scores altogether. It seems unlikely that college admission offices will ever worship at the altar of standardized testing the way they once did.

While testing has received the most attention, it is not the only piece in the admissions process that is receiving scrutiny. The legality of race-based admission preferences to achieve diversity will be determined by the Supreme Court later this year.  Last spring there were several voices arguing that reliance on letters of recommendation needs to be re-thought, as they advantage students who are already advantaged by attending schools with low student-counselor ratios and cultures where college advising is the primary responsibility for counselors, rather than an afterthought. I have to admit that during the month of October I find the idea of getting rid of recommendation letters particularly appealing. More recently, a report argued that colleges should give less credence to calculus as an expectation for applicants. 

Is the next big thing making “applicants” an outdated term?  Probably not, but there is a movement afoot to change the relationship, and maybe even the power dynamics, between colleges and prospective students.

Several weeks ago, during the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference in Houston, the marketing and enrollment services vendor EAB announced that it had acquired Concourse. Concourse is one of several players trying to develop a direct admissions process where students wouldn’t apply to college but would rather post academic and personal profiles that would be reviewed by admission officers at partner colleges, resulting in admission and financial-aid offers. Concourse aims to be “flipping the script on traditional admissions.” EAB’s purchase of Concourse suggests that direct admission is not a whim and that there is money to be made.  

In 2021, EAB and Concourse worked together on a pilot program, Greenlight Match, where first-generation and low-income students in the Chicago area created free profiles on the Concourse platform, generating offers of admission and aid from eight partner colleges. An EAB press release about the acquisition of Concourse reported that more than 650 students received nearly 2000 admission offers and more than $135 million in scholarships and financial aid.  The plan is to expand Greenlight Match to benefit 13,000 students next year by adding six other cities–Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York, and Philadelphia.  Concourse has also had a similar arrangement for international students.

Is this the future of college admission? It’s hard to imagine that elite, selective colleges will abandon requiring students to complete applications for admission. But direct admission is an interesting idea that may work for students lacking access to savvy college counseling and colleges struggling to expand their outreach.

But is it a good idea? Answering that question requires determining what the college admissions process should represent.

I have always believed that the college search and application processes should be part of a larger journey of self-understanding and discernment, where a student has the opportunity and obligation to determine who they are and what they want from life.  The student is going to live with the consequences of college choice, so they should be the ones taking ownership of the decision.

I recognize that may be aspirational, and perhaps even delusional.  Several loyal ECA readers have argued that it is ridiculous to expect teenagers to determine the right college fit, that they lack the maturity, self-knowledge, and experience to do so. I don’t want to believe that, but will also be the first to admit that I may be either a Pollyanna or a dinosaur. I also recognize that I have worked mostly with students from privileged backgrounds and that a different kind of admissions process may better serve students from families where going to college is not easy or even expected.

Is this truly a radical change, or is it an instance of college admission catching up with changes in technology? I remember when we moved in a very short period of time from paper to online applications and how strange that felt. Now I wouldn’t know how to deal with a paper application. We now have apps that have changed how dating and job-hunting take place.  Should admission be any different?

Is dating an appropriate metaphor for the college admissions process?  We can certainly argue that applying for college is similar to dating.  Curated applications resemble dating profiles designed to create an image that may be an idealized portrayal of reality to impress colleges with more suitors than spaces on their dance card. The vast majority of colleges that are not highly rejective spend millions of dollars on marketing and tuition discounts to get students to “swipe right.”  Will platforms like Concourse make that mating dance simpler and less costly for all involved?

I will be interested in seeing how well Concourse and its competitors work as they move beyond pilot programs.  The promise is that direct admission is also more equitable admission, but it is too early to tell whether tuition-driven colleges struggling for survival will seek out students from economically-deprived backgrounds or make direct admission offers primarily to students who help them meet their revenue objectives.  I hope the latter is not the case.  If platforms like Concourse can connect students with colleges more effectively and equitably than the current admissions process, that would be a welcome change, or at least addition.

Is it time to flip the admissions script? I have always believed that applying to college and college admission should be “Goldilocks” processes, neither too hard nor too easy.  The current application process seems too hard and unwieldy, but direct admission seems too easy.  Can we devise an application process that’s “just right”?

Admission By Major

Last week’s “Admissions Insider” in Inside Higher Ed contained an interesting article about colleges and universities that admit by major.  The article was inspired by and a summation of a session at the recent NACAC conference in Houston organized by my friend Phil Trout, a past NACAC President and college counselor at Minnetonka High School in Minnesota.  I first met Phil many years ago when he spent a year embedded in the Admissions Office at the College of William and Mary. 

The session brought together admissions officers from three Big Ten (which somehow includes 14 members, with at least two more to follow) universities, Purdue, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. All admit their freshman classes by major.

One of the objectives of the session was to illustrate that published admit rates for a university may vary dramatically by school or by major, thus rendering the published admit rate for the university as a whole meaningless, or at least unhelpful.

At Illinois, for example, 45 percent of the more than 63,000 applicants were admitted last year. But that number tells you little or nothing about an admissions process that is much more complex. If you are among the 16 percent of applicants who apply for Computer Science, the admit rate is 7 percent.  For Business the admit rate is 28 percent; Education 52 percent; Agriculture and Environmental Studies 43 percent; and for Liberal Arts and Sciences, 50 percent (the article points out that there is considerable variance among majors within that category).

The article didn’t provide as much data for the other two universities, but at Minnesota the overall admit rate is 74 percent, but only 30 percent for Nursing and 33 percent for Business. Purdue admitted 53 percent of its more than 68,000 applicants, but the number was lower for signature programs like Engineering (41 percent), Computer Science (33 percent), and Aviation (28 percent).

The session and the article raise two important questions. The first is whether colleges and universities should be more forthcoming with this kind of information.  I think the answer is a clear yes.  Transparency should be one of the ethical principles guiding college admission. Students should make decisions based on information and knowledge rather than hope. They deserve to know how factors such as major, in-state/out-of-state, and applying early action/decision vs. regular affect one’s chances of admission.

Following the appearance of the article, I reached out on a whim to a flagship public university that admits by major and has been accused of wanting its admission decisions to be unpredictable (a discussion for a different day). I asked if the institution would consider making similar information available.  

Within fifteen minutes the Director of Admissions (actual title “Associate Vice Provost for Enrollment and Degree Management and Director of Admissions”) called and let me know that admit rate information by major was available on the university website, but wasn’t easy to find. I really appreciated his call and the fact that the information was accessible. One of my pet peeves is college websites that are marketing pieces with lots of graphics but where information, even basic information, can be challenging or impossible to find. I’d like to see admit rates for majors and other relevant admission distinctions be as easy to find and navigate as Net Price Calculators are (at least in theory).

The only argument I can think of against transparency is that having that kind of information available may empower and embolden those who want to game the system. We shouldn’t make that easy, but increasing knowledge about the process at any given institution outweighs that concern.

The second, more fundamental, question is whether universities should admit by major at all. The article makes a strong case that admission by major is an enrollment management tool for those universities.  It quotes Andy Borst, the Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Illinois, arguing that the practice allows the university to align faculty hiring with the needs in various academic departments, which guarantees that students can get the classes they need and earn degrees in an efficient way. He also states that admitting by major allows Illinois to enroll 30 percent more Hispanic and African American students than it would otherwise.  I’m not clear why that’s the case.

Those purported benefits are outweighed by a single data point reported by the National Center for Education Statistics.  80 percent of college students change their major at least once. The average student changes three times.

Those stats suggest that admission by major ignores the fact that the great majority of students applying to college aren’t developmentally ready to declare a major at the same time they are applying to college. How many of us knew what we wanted to major in and what we wanted to do with our lives when we were freshmen in college? Fifty years later, I joke that I still don’t. I know all things I don’t want to do, but am still figuring out what I want to do, although it may be getting late on that front. I feel fortunate that I fell into a profession that is a great fit for my talents and values.

What happens to the students who are admitted to a particular major and then want to change? How easy is that to do, and does it result in students paying more because they can’t graduate in four years?

Clearly there are fields where college major is important, even essential. And there are people who at an early age know exactly who they are and how they want to spend their lives. If you are one of them, perhaps you can give the rest of us pointers. But if 80 percent of college students change their major at least once, admission by major might serve an institution well but students poorly.

And that would seem to be a major problem.

Ten Years of ECA

This week marks the tenth anniversary of this blog–hard to believe.

Ten years ago I began exploring the intersection of ethics and college admission.  At the time I wondered whether I had the discipline to write on a regular basis, whether I had anything worth saying, and whether anyone would read it.  

Thankfully none of those proved problematic.  I have written close to 350 posts during that time, and the blog has led to a number of interesting opportunities, including a collaboration with Scott Jaschik and Inside Higher Ed.  One highlight was reading a lead editorial in the Sunday New York Times and suddenly realizing that the blog was being quoted.

It’s been a good run.  I am grateful to all of you who read the blog and those of you who reach out by email or in person.  Thanks for your support. I hope to run into many of you in Houston later this week.

Shortcuts

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider”)

Is taking calculus overrated, or at least overvalued, by college admissions offices?

That question is at the heart of two reports issued this year by the non-profit group Just Equations in conjunction with the National Association for College Admissions Counseling.  Just Equations “reconceptualizes the role of math in ensuring educational equity.”  

The first report, “A New Calculus for College Admissions: How Policy, Practice, and Perceptions of High School Math Education Limit Equitable Access to College,” was issued in January, and examined the value that admissions officers place on a student taking calculus in high school.  The second report, issued a couple of weeks ago, was a companion looking at how school and independent counselors view the same issue. In last week’s “Admissions Insider,” the co-authors of the two reports, Just Equations Executive Director Pamela Burdman and research associate Veronica Anderson, wrote an op-ed arguing that calculus acts as a gatekeeper for many admissions offices.

The Just Equations reports suggest that the love affair admissions offices have with calculus as a high school course is misplaced, serving as a barrier to students who attend the 50 percent of American high schools where calculus is not offered. It also argues that many students not planning to major in STEM fields would be better served by taking a course in statistics or data science rather than being herded into calculus. 

The debate over the role that calculus plays in admission to college and  preparation for college is a new battleground in the larger re-examination of college admission conventions and how they may impede equity. During the summer I wrote a column asking if it is time to re-think the admissions process, given that college admission may be a major contagion in teen mental health.  We are in the midst of a potentially seismic shift in the role that admission tests play in the process.  We have also seen recommendation letters questioned as an admission tool, and of course both legacy admission and race-based affirmative action are under attack.

The reports reveal a discrepancy in perceptions among high school counselors and college admission officers on the benefit of having taken calculus in the admissions process.  93 percent of the counselors surveyed believe that calculus improves a student’s chances of being admitted, compared with 53 percent of admission officers. At the same time 79 percent of admission officers believe that having had calculus in high school makes a student more likely to succeed in college.

The Just Equations reports argue that the reliance on calculus is an equity issue, given that only 16 percent of high school graduates in 2019 had calculus on their high school transcripts.  Broken down by race, 46 percent of Asian-Americans and 18 percent of white students had calculus, compared with only 6 percent of Black students and 9 percent of Latinx students.  The reports also point out that places like Harvard and Stanford don’t explicitly require calculus, and that back in 2012 the Mathematics Association of America and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a joint position statement that taking calculus should not be the “ultimate goal” of the K-12 math curriculum.

ECA is always interested in probing broader underlying issues, and I think there are several in this debate.

The first is what mathematical preparation students need today to be educated citizens.  Calculus has been the gold standard in the math curriculum, but does it promote mathematical literacy? Do today’s students need more training in data analysis and understanding how algorithms work? Is this an issue where what a student needs to be educated is not the same thing he or she needs to get into a competitive college?  

Is the issue calculus (or “the calculus,” as it was called by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who independently developed it), or is the issue the value of rigor? The 79 percent of admission officers who believe that having had calculus in high school makes college success more likely suggests it is the latter.  

I reached out to Dr. Richard Light at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to ask about a statement I remember (or think I remember) from years ago that indicated that math professors at Harvard find that students have had calculus but don’t particularly have a good grasp of algebra.  Does anyone else remember something like that? I thought it might have come from his book, Making the Most of College.  He didn’t recall that or think it is true.  He is a statistician by training, but he commented that a student taking calculus is a “proxy for being willing to tackle tough challenges.” He also observed that nearly all entering Harvard students have taken calculus.

Colleges may not require calculus, but that doesn’t mean they don’t prefer it. Calculus may not be as valuable for its own sake as it is as a reflection of strength of schedule.  Is this an issue where what is equitable and what is predictive for success in college come into conflict? 

On the equity front, the operative ethical principle in this instance is that you should never penalize someone for something they don’t have the ability to choose.  Students who attend high schools where calculus is not offered can’t be held responsible for not having taken calculus. It is also the case that the path to being able to take calculus is often determined as early as middle school.  We know that there are students who may not be developmentally ready to tackle Algebra 1 in middle school but may be able to handle complex math a couple of years later.

But what about students who attend schools where calculus is offered but haven’t taken it? I would be doing a disservice to my students who are able to handle calculus and aspire to a selective college if I advised them that they don’t need to take it. My flagship state university, one of the nation’s preeminent public universities, rarely admits one of my students who hasn’t made it to the second year of Advanced Placement Calculus.

One of the reasons for the perceived value of calculus may be the lack of viable alternatives.  How many of us would argue that AP Statistics>AP Calculus or even that AP Statistics=AP Calculus? The most recent report indicated that only 5 percent of counselors recommend statistics as equal, although many said they wish they could. The growth of data science as a field is an encouraging step.  Can we develop a data science or statistics course as rigorous and predictive of success as calculus?

The most interesting thing I found in the two reports was a quote from an unnamed dean of admissions at a selective, private university.  He said that “Calculus is the gold standard that people in this business use as a shortcut.”

That led me to think about other admission shortcuts. One that rears its head annually at this time of year is the U.S. News college rankings.  The rankings exist as a shortcut from a thoughtful comparison of the experience a student will receive at different places.  The rankings aren’t about experience or fit, but rather random metrics that may or may not tell us something about the kind of education a student will receive. Some of those metrics, such as alumni giving, are themselves shortcuts for alumni satisfaction.  Do alumni giving rates tell us about the quality of an institution or the sophistication of its advancement arm?

While on the subject of rankings, the big story last week was Columbia’s drop in ranking from 2nd to 18th following acknowledgement that the university had provided inaccurate data.  That is clearly wrong on Columbia’s part, but does the corrected data justify the dramatic drop given that Columbia has ranked in the top ten for more than 20 years? Is U.S News arbitrarily punishing Columbia, or does this indicate that the distinctions among top 25 universities are miniscule? Does anyone think there are 17 national universities better than Columbia? If Bob Morse would care to take me through the math, I’d be happy to do a column making transparent how the Columbia fall happened.

Test scores are shortcuts. So is the AP brand, providing a shortcut for evaluating strength of curriculum. Selective colleges want us to believe that admit rates are a shortcut for educational quality, and graduates’ earnings are used as a shortcut for return on investment, despite the fact that the most important benefits of a college education are intangible.  Are there other college admission related shortcuts?

Do we need to get rid of the reliance on calculus or do we need to get rid of admission shortcuts?

Air Travel, College Rankings, and Class Action Lawsuits Against Columbia

I spent last week in Maine visiting a couple of college counseling friends who either live or are spending the summer there.  In doing so I got off the college admissions grid as much as I ever do (I am nerdy enough–or neurotic enough–that I check email even when supposedly on vacation).

I really wanted to go, but figuring out how to get there was the obstacle.  It’s a long drive, and I didn’t trust my car with 180,000 miles to survive that kind of trip.  Renting a car was prohibitively and equally expensive, whether for the entire trip or flying into Boston and then renting. And there have been almost daily stories about the horrors of air travel this summer.  I ultimately decided to take an early, direct flight into Boston and then take Amtrak’s Downeaster to Maine.

It was a fun, relaxing, and rewarding week–until I tried to return home. My return flight was late Friday night, and it was the part of the trip I most dreaded. That turned out to be appropriate anxiety. My train arrived back in Boston around 6, and as I arrived I received a notification that my 10:40 flight was delayed until 11:15.  That didn’t concern me, as I had been tracking the same flight for a couple of weeks and that delay was typical. However, there were storms up and down the East Coast.

I arrived at the gate in time to see an earlier flight to Richmond board and take off.  Over the next several hours my flight was delayed even later, as were a number of other flights.  Those flights ultimately took off, leaving mine scheduled to depart at 2 a.m.  Those of us waiting patiently but anxiously were assured multiple times that our crew was at the airport and that our flight would definitely go as soon as an aircraft arrived from LaGuardia.  That plane arrived, but at 3 a.m. we were told that the flight was canceled, leading to a rush downstairs to try to rebook.

The JetBlue help desk wasn’t particularly helpful.  I was told that the best they could do was put me on a flight nearly two days later connecting through Fort Lauderdale, a little out of the way. They weren’t willing to provide lodging or help with booking through other airlines. So at 4 a.m. I went to a quiet corner of Logan Airport, pulled out my phone, and was able to book an 8:30 a.m. train home.  It was a 12-hour trip, but I like traveling by train, and it was good to get home on Saturday night rather than spend 36 hours in the airport.

While I was in Maine one piece of breaking news in the college admissions world was that two class action lawsuits had been filed against Columbia University seeking damages in the wake of questions about the accuracy of Columbia’s reported data for the U.S. News rankings. Columbia mathematics professor Michael Thaddeus raised questions about the validity of the data back in February, especially with regard to metrics such as class sizes and spending on instruction. At the end of June Columbia announced that it was withdrawing from this year’s rankings, where it was slated to earn a ranking of #2, while it conducted an internal investigation. To add insult to injury, U.S. News subsequently placed Columbia in the rankings equivalent of “timeout.”

So what are we to make of the lawsuits? Has the kerfuffle about Columbia’s ranking damaged the two plaintiffs, both former students at Columbia, as well as others who might sign on to the class action, or is this an example of a frivolous lawsuit looking to make a buck off of this situation? You may remember that immediately following the public announcement of the criminal complaints in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, several Stanford students instigated lawsuits claiming that the value of their degrees had been damaged by the revelations about Stanford’s sailing coach being involved in the scandal.  As far as I know, those lawsuits went nowhere. 

The two lawsuits against Columbia are remarkably similar, in fact word-for-word similar except for the different plaintiffs.  That may be because both plaintiffs are represented by the same attorney.

I am not a lawyer, nor have I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express recently, but here is the essence of the suit.

• The misrepresented data violates Section 349 of New York’s General Business Law.

• The violations were “immoral, unethical, and unscrupulous.”

• Columbia breached its agreement with the Plaintiffs and each Class member by representing to U.S. News that it possessed “certain characteristics, qualifications, requirements, benefits, and levels of attainment that it did not actually possess.”

• The misreporting was necessary for Columbia to retain its “extremely high ranking.”

• The U.S. News ranking enabled Columbia to increase its enrollment.  

• The Plaintiffs and other students enrolled at Columbia “largely due to the prestige associated with Columbia’s extremely high USNWR ranking.”

• The Plaintiffs would not have applied to Columbia if aware of the data misreporting.

• The misreporting raises “grave concerns” about the value and legitimacy of a Columbia degree.

Let’s try to evaluate some of these claims and look at the larger underlying issues.

First of all, misrepresenting data is indefensible.  The college admission profession should stand for truth and transparency.  It is too early to know whether the misrepresentation is an error or intentional, and obviously the second would make the offense worse.

It is not only Columbia that is on trial here.  The U.S. News rankings are on trial as well.  Are the rankings designed to be a source of news, or a source of entertainment in the same way that professional wrestling is sports entertainment rather than a sport? 

The rankings purport to be newsworthy, and yet U.S. News makes little attempt to verify the data reported by colleges, relying instead on an honor system.  That would by itself be questionable, but given the numerous examples of colleges fudging data through the years it is inexcusable. Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice… Either U.S. News is negligent in ranking colleges based on unverified information or it should admit that its rankings are for entertainment purposes only.

It may have already admitted the latter.  At a conference years ago, U.S. News’s ranking guru Bob Morse described the ranking as a “good product.” He bristled when I asked if it was good journalism. But that remains an essential question, and is central to the claims made in the lawsuit. 

There is one claim in the lawsuit that seems false, misunderstanding selective admission.  It is not the case that Columbia has increased its enrollment due to the rankings.  It has instead increased its number of applications and its ability to be “rejective.”  Columbia has the largest percentage increase in applications since 1989, increasing its applicant pool sixfold. During that period its admit rate has dropped from 27% to 6%.

That raises another, “chicken or egg,” question.  Does Columbia’s prestige arise from its ranking or does Columbia’s ranking arise from its prestige? 

That question is relevant to several other claims made in the lawsuit, including that the misreporting was necessary for Columbia to maintain its high ranking, that the “value and legitimacy” of a Columbia degree is called into question by the concern about the information, and that the plaintiffs wouldn’t have enrolled at Columbia if they had been aware of the misrepresentation.

How much would the corrected information change Columbia’s ranking?  It had been ranked third the previous couple of years, and had been ranked in the top 10 among National Universities for more than 30 years. Is its ranking likely to drop that much with corrected data? And how much difference is there really between being ranked second and being ranked tenth? Does this situation change anything about the value or substance of a Columbia education?

I am skeptical that this situation renders Columbia’s degree any less valuable or legitimate, just as I am skeptical that the plaintiffs wouldn’t have enrolled at Columbia. When my flight was canceled at 3 a.m. last Saturday morning, I would have signed on to a class action lawsuit in a second, but I wasn’t harmed as much as inconvenienced.  I’m not sure there is any difference with Columbia’s rankings problems.

The College Board's "Streamlined Reporting"--Euphemism or Doublespeak?

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider” on August 1, 2022)

What’s the difference between euphemism and doublespeak? There’s probably a fine line between the two, and the dividing line is intent.  

One uses euphemisms as a polite way to hint at things others may find unpleasant. We say that someone is “under the weather” rather than “sick,” but in truth we are all under, or at least surrounded by, the weather.  When we say that a student has passed, that’s a good thing, whereas when someone my age has “passed,” it’s not nearly as positive, akin to “swimming with the fishes.” And does anyone (other than coke addicts) actually “powder their nose” when they excuse themselves for that purpose?

Doublespeak, in contrast, is language designed to deceive, and is usually associated with governmental and corporate entities. In 2017 United Airlines forcibly removed a passenger from an overbooked flight.  The only thing worse than the action itself was United’s description of the event as “re-accommodating” the passenger. That same year White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was the recipient of the Doublespeak Award presented by the National Council of Teachers of English for her reference to “alternative facts” to defend Donald Trump’s false claims about crowd sizes at his inauguration. That claim, made on the first day of the Trump presidency, turned out to be prophetic about the Trumpian attitude to truth and facts both during and since his term in office.

Recently an Inside Higher Ed article pointed out that the College Board is no longer making public data about the performance on Advanced Placement exams by different racial groups. The article quoted Jon Boeckenstedt, Vice Provost for Enrollment Management at Oregon State University, who on Twitter wrote that what the College Board is calling “streamlined reporting” is actually withholding data.

The CB’s action raises several questions.  Since we’re referring to the College Board, let’s pose the first of those questions in a College Board-friendly format.

In the passage above, the term “streamlined reporting” is:

1. a euphemism 

2. Doublespeak

3. Both of the Above

4. None of the Above

Jon Boeckenstedt’s answer would seem to be b), as his tweet described the CB’s change to “streamlined reporting” as “the most 1984-esque example of College Board-speak I’ve seen in a while.”  If I had to answer that question on a standardized test I’d probably skip the question until I could answer some additional questions.  Given the College Board’s willingness and haste to answer questions about “streamlined reporting,” I’d probably need to qualify for unlimited additional time.

There are far more interesting and important questions than whether “streamlined reporting” qualifies linguistically as euphemism or doublespeak.

The first is why stop reporting the data.  What has changed that makes the data no longer relevant or publicly available? It is true that the 2020 AP exams were a different instrument, only 45 minutes in length and taken online, and the general perception was that those scores were higher. It is also the case that the College Board argued to both students and colleges that the scores for the 2020 tests were just as valid as the three-hour exams given in previous years.  

I don’t fault the CB for the changed format in the middle of the pandemic, but I wonder about the claim that an exam that lasts only a quarter as long produces equally valid results.  If that is the case, why revert to the longer, traditional format? 

The conspiracy theorists among us will probably jump to a conclusion that the “streamlined reporting” is all about hiding data related to race or ethnicity that the CB finds embarrassing or fears may harm its business model, given that it is more reliant on the AP program for revenue now that the test-optional movement has reduced the revenue it receives from the SAT.  But the racial/ethnic score discrepancies are not a new phenomenon.

One of the challenges for the testing industry has always been the disparity in scores among different segments of the population.  Critics of testing such as Ibram Kendi have argued that the disparity in scores among different racial and ethnic groups serves as evidence that the tests are biased.  Others argue that the disparities merely reflect larger issues of inequality in our society, and that differences in scores are correlated more with income than racial or ethnic background.

I sympathize with the College Board if they fear that releasing the data will embolden the political forces looking to turn back the clock on attempts to make America a multicultural society and to increase opportunity for historically underrepresented populations.  But as a college counselor I have always believed in reality therapy, that students, parents, and counselors should make decisions based on good information rather than hope.  If standardized test scores are lower for some groups, then we are better off knowing what we’re dealing with. We need to figure out what the score discrepancies mean rather than pretend they don’t exist. By removing the data the College Board opens itself to criticism that it is “woke” or “politically correct” (both terms I abhor).

Perhaps there is a good reason for the decision, and I reached out to the College Board for an explanation.  I received a response that the Communications Office would find out the answer and get back to me, but there has been no followup response. I’m glad I wasn’t holding my breath.

Even if there was a good reason for not reporting data for the past couple of years, why scrub the historical data from the website? That’s harder to defend, given that the data was public.

The operative ethical principle here is transparency.  Those of us in the college admissions counseling profession (which includes the testing industry) should be transparent about what we do and why we do it.  Underlying that is respect for students, parents, and the public to be able to handle the truth, whereas withholding information reflects either paternalism or arrogance. College Board President David Coleman has been quoted as saying “We prefer transparency.” Just not in this case, apparently.

The other question here is existential. Is the College Board a corporate entity or a membership organization? The “streamlined reporting” suggests that the CB considers the data proprietary, which is an attitude that is corporate.  The College Board is nominally a non-profit membership organization (although a very lucrative one), but did it consult members about this change?

“Streamlined reporting” feels like a euphemism for “executive privilege,” where the concern is not national security but rather embarrassment.  Whatever the rationale, it doesn’t pass the smell test. Please excuse me while I powder my nose.  

Keystone Keynote, Part 2: Is Professional Ethics An Endangered Species?

(Originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s “Admissions Insider on July 11, 2022.)

Is professional ethics an endangered species?  That was the focus of my keynote address at the Pennsylvania Association for College Admission Counseling conference on June 20 in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The speech was focused more specifically on the ethics of the college admission counseling profession.  Is ethics an endangered species now that the National Association for College Admission Counseling no longer polices its ethical standards following a consent decree with the Antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice?

That question begs a more fundamental question.  Does college admission counseling qualify as a profession?

Those of us who work in college admissions and college counseling have historically thought of ourselves as a profession.  That suggests a higher calling than mere fealty to our employers, serving not only institutional interest but also the public interest.  Is that still the case given the increasing commercialization of college admission/enrollment management?

The concept of professional ethical standards is embedded in the definition of professions. In his Pulitzer Prize winning history of the American medical profession, Paul Starr identified three defining characteristics of professions.

• Professions claim authority based on technical, specialized knowledge

• Professions are oriented toward service rather than profit

• Professions are self-regulating, with standards of good practice and a code of ethics 

How does college admission measure up to Starr’s definition?

Of the three tenets of professionalism, the claim to technical, specialized knowledge is the weakest for college admission.   Despite numerous attempts to institutionalize credentialing for college admission officers and school counselors, there is not a clear path for entry into the admission field, and we are still fighting the school counseling establishment to acknowledge that courses in college counseling should be a required part of graduate programs. 

Once in the field, training and professional development are haphazard.  The practice of college admission and college counseling remains more art than science, and it’s never been rocket science.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  

That might also be changing. Both college admission and college counseling require far more knowledge and skill than when I started my career.

Is college admission oriented toward service rather than profit?  That’s a harder question to answer, and it might not be an either/or question.  There is no question that higher education is an industry, with the admissions office functioning as the sales/marketing division.  Admissions offices help colleges and universities achieve institutional goals ranging from revenue to diversity to mix of students.

I hope we are more than that.  Saying that we are a profession means that we have a higher calling, that we serve not only our institutions but society at large. We help students make life-changing decisions about their futures, and that is noble work. We are educators rather than salespersons, colleagues rather than competitors.

The value of being a profession became clear over the past couple of years as COVID forced us to retreat into our homes and offices.  College admission and college counseling can be lonely jobs.  No one on your campus or in your building knows exactly what you do, but they all think they do.  More than anyone else at my school, I have a network of colleagues on both sides of the desk that extends not just locally but nationally.  I can reach out to those colleagues with a question or to vent and they will understand.

I worry that may be endangered.  Are we one profession with two sides of the desk or are college admission and college counseling becoming two different professions?  I hope that Angel Perez and NACAC will give attention to that issue.

The third tenet of Starr’s definition of professions is being self-regulating, with standards of practice and a code of ethics.  For decades NACAC’s foundation was its commitment to and enforcement of ethical standards for college admission.  In fact, one of the reasons NACAC was founded 85 years ago was to ensure that admissions officers were not compensated on a per head basis.

But what happens when a professional organization can’t enforce ethical standards?  In 2016 NACAC appointed a Steering Committee to take a fresh look at its Statement of Principles of Good Practice (SPGP) first adopted in 1960.  The SPGP was a set of rules rather than a statement of principles, amended annually (sometimes on the fly) in response to colleges pushing the envelope on recruiting practices.

I was a member of the Steering Committee, and I consider its work an example of NACAC at its best–thoughtful, deliberative, with lots of input from the membership.  The result was a new document, the Code of Ethics and Professional Practice (CEPP).  The CEPP was passed unanimously by both the NACAC Assembly and the membership.  Anyone who has spent any time in NACAC knows that is rare, maybe even unprecedented.

Not long after the CEPP was passed, NACAC was the target of an inquiry, and later an investigation, from the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.  The DOJ alleged that NACAC’s ethical rules prohibiting incentives for Early Decision and prohibiting poaching of students already enrolled at another institution unfairly restricted colleges from recruiting.

I would argue that the issue was not as much those prohibitions as the fact that NACAC was policing and enforcing its ethical standards.  One of the first issues discussed by the Steering Committee was enforcement, and the consensus of the group, propelled by several members who had chaired NACAC’s Admission Practices Committee, was that mandatory ethical rules enforced by the organization were important.  At the time NACAC was one of the few professional organizations enforcing ethical rules.

In retrospect it is clear that NACAC and the DOJ were operating from different assumptions and interpretations.  NACAC saw its ethical code as protecting students from coercion and manipulation, while the DOJ saw NACAC as hurting students by limiting institutions’ recruiting practices, which in turn would result in students paying less for college.  The DOJ seemed to see NACAC as a cartel controlling college admissions rather than a voluntary membership organization.  NACAC’s enforcement of its ethical code rarely if ever resulted in penalties to institutions, as most AP inquiries were resolved amiably.

Nevertheless, the DOJ investigation shook NACAC to its core.  The NACAC leadership determined that fighting DOJ could jeopardize the organization’s existence, and entered into a Consent Decree.  There is now a successor document to the CEPP, the “Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission.” It does not differ dramatically from the CEPP, but has made the various tenets Best Practices, removing any reference to monitoring or compliance.

So is professional ethics an endangered species post-DOJ and post-Operations Varsity Blues?  I would argue that a commitment to ethics is more important than ever before.

Changing from mandatory to best practices doesn’t have to change the way we conduct ourselves.  “Best practices” are just that, and whether or not the rules are policed, the ethical principles underlying them are still compelling, calling us to act honorably and truthfully in our professional work.  Just because something is permissible doesn’t make it a good idea.

Ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning distinguishing character or guiding principles.  Ethics is about ideals, and is normative or prescriptive, asking “How should we act?”

So what are the ideals guiding the college admission/counseling profession?

• Commitment to truth and transparency

• Commitment to equity and access

• Respect for every individual, recognizing their worth and dignity, and treating them as subjects not objects.

• Honesty and integrity, inspiring trust that we are honest brokers acting out of concern for students’ best interests.

That last one has been imperiled by the revelations coming out of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.  Even though no admission officers were implicated, the colleges involved looked less like victims than unindicted co-conspirators.  OVB reinforced the idea that the college admissions process rewards the already privileged.  Are we okay with that?

The good news is that a majority of those in our profession are committed to acting ethically and professionally.  But we can’t take the health of our profession for granted.  Ethical common ground is more like a beach than a rock.  All it takes is one major storm to do permanent damage.

We need to be ethical conservationists, and we need to voluntarily keep our house in order.  Failure to do so may further erode public trust in what we do.  In my speech last week I quoted a famous Pennsylvanian, perhaps the most famous Pennsylvanian.  In discussions preceding the Declaration of Independence, he said, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we will all hang separately.”

Words for our profession to live by.  

ECA will be on summer hiatus until late August unless provoked by some news story that requires comment.