President’s speeches, letters, and articles
Subject: Never Waste a Crisis: Steps to Repair College Admissions
Date: March 22, 2019
By: Hugh Porter, Acting President
The admissions cheating scandal has rocked the American higher education sector. The scandal gives further credence to the suspicion that money and competition trump principles in college admission. Preferences for the children of alumni and significant donors are common concerns. In this iteration of the scandal, we learned of efforts to manipulate another well-known preference, namely, special admission for athletes. However, I believe that the most influential factors are systemic. Underlying this scandal is the increasing competition for admission to a small number of the most desired schools—a scramble that creates a mix of confusion and disillusion, certainly for families for whom paying any tuition is a hardship but also for those who are better able to afford a college education. While competition plays a healthy role in both American business and higher education, it is time for those of us in higher education to rebalance our quest for prestige with our commitments to access and quality education, working more collaboratively to address a dysfunctional system.
A chief driver of both healthy and unhealthy competition has been the advent of college rankings, now more than forty years old. On the positive side, these publications encourage colleges to understand the ways they compare in important areas, such as degree completion. Unfortunately, these rankings have also encouraged colleges and consumers to believe that there is, in fact, a short list of “great” colleges and universities rather than a diverse collection of institutions offering a range of compelling approaches to undergraduate education, from open-ended coursework that challenges students to design their own paths to structured curricula curated by faculty to career-oriented programs. Rankings lead students away from discerning the college characteristics they seek and that contribute to educational success, for example, finding a mentor, opportunities to interact with peers in intellectual settings, and the chance to complete a significant independent project. Instead, this struggle for position within rankings both drives and is driven by large numbers of applications to a few schools and the resulting deluge of rejection letters. As Lani Guinier has pointed out, rankings encourage colleges to focus narrowly on easily defined data of the entering class, such as test scores and GPA, rather than on the ways their educational programs can develop students’ talents.
Secondly, the decline in state funding has further disrupted the market for public colleges and their students. This has led state-based schools to increase tuition, driving significant efforts to recruit students from out of state and abroad who can afford higher tuition bills. This decline in funding risks turning public institutions away from their primary mission of prioritizing largely in-state students, particularly those from modest circumstances, and toward the competitive and expensive admissions practices of private higher education institutions. All higher education institutions are increasingly competing for the same students—college-ready applicants from families able to pay some or all of their tuition and living expenses.
Such factors have led to a collapse of the admissions market. The announcements that some private institutions will extend their deadlines for applications highlight the continuing demise of a market that ideally would successfully match applicants and institutions. Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth characterizes the dynamics of failing matching markets as marked by increasingly frantic strategizing by both buyers and sellers to get their desired results. On the collegiate side, we see a widening array of early enrollment strategies, especially ones that bind applicants to particular institutions before they have a chance to consider all their options. On the applicant side, students struggle to match their abilities to pay, academic records, and levels of interest with a wide range of schools. Increasingly, students understand that their ability to pay tuition and their expressions of interest, through efforts such as campus visits, might be as important to their being accepted as traditional college qualifications. Colleges continue to compete for students over the summer, creating another round of uncertainty for students waiting to be invited off wait lists and for colleges that wonder until the middle of August about the size and character of the entering class. Applicants and colleges increasingly understand that extending the application process both earlier and later contributes to adverse outcomes for both parties. However, as Jeffrey Selingo pointed out in the Atlantic in April 2018, any effort to change this competitive dynamic has been discouraged by antitrust enforcement efforts at the Department of Justice, based on the belief that college collaborations in admission and financial aid necessarily lessen consumer access and choice.
To repair the college admissions system, we must take this moment to consider implementing salutary changes in the ecosystem of American higher education that will increase access by a wide range of students and lessen the anxiety of both applicants and colleges. Firstly, resist rankings and the artificial prestige they promote. Secondly, minimize athletic and other merit-based preferences. Finally, restore funding for public universities.
These steps will require a collaborative approach, which is critical to addressing the distortions highlighted by the current scandal. Higher education in America is still the envy of the world and plays a significant role in the expansion of the US economy, scientific discovery, social mobility, and the intellectual and artistic life of the nation. This crisis represents an invaluable opportunity to fix and strengthen what is broken and irreplaceable.