Are Schools Misleading Students?

The US News and some other places that rank schools use various sets of numbers to determine how selective a school is in admission and these are used as a part of the formula to rank schools. One of the easiest ways to show the world that a school is selective is to boost the number of applications. The more applications that flow in the more this will show up as “very highly selective” in the rankings. Since most of the highly selective colleges and universities have not increased the size of their incoming classes by any dramatic number, the increase in applications means that the percentage of students getting accepted must drop. For the schools themselves, this is good news. For the students applying, however, this means that getting in to schools with under a 30% acceptance rate is a long shot at best. Most of the Ivies and other top schools have under a 10% acceptance rate. These schools (and virtually every college and university) however, still continue to spend significant sums to recruit students from all over the US and all over the globe. In addition, schools now use a much more sophisticated set of tools to reach out to students to encourage them to apply.

While the schools at the top of the rankings get most of the press, the schools below them are doing as much or more (given budget constraints) to encourage students to apply. Moving up in the rankings increases prestige and creates a feedback loop in which students tend to apply to schools with high rankings. To give you some idea how this all works I will quote from a recent article on the dramatic move of Northeastern up in the rankings. The entire story is eye-opening; it focuses largely on how the school and its leadership gamed the ranking system in order to improve its standing:

Because schools reap benefits from a high spot on U.S. News’s list, he says, it makes sense for them to continue to throw money at the metrics. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, for instance, to lure students with high GPAs and SAT scores, private four-year schools increased spending on merit-based aid from $1.6 billion to $4.6 billion. Studies show that for every 10 merit-based scholarships, there are four fewer need-based scholarships. That’s because schools often base merit on test scores, and students from lower-income families generally don’t test as well, largely because they spend less on tutors and SAT prep. Tuitions rise to help universities keep pace, further reducing middle-class access to a top-flight education.

In an apparent effort to score rankings points by lowering the percentage of accepted students, NU’s admissions department received a mandate: Increase applications at home and abroad. Northeastern’s new science and engineering complex, colorful Adirondack chairs throughout campus, and star faculty members like Michael Dukakis are all intended to advance reputation and lure top students. “They poured a ton of money into admission recruiting,” says a former NU admissions officer. “We had amazing amounts of latitude to travel overseas. We worked really hard, and we traveled like crazy.”

There were other tricks, as well. In 2009, NU stopped requiring SAT scores from students attending international high schools. By removing a barrier to foreign students, who typically score lower if they take the SATs at all, NU boosted its application numbers without jeopardizing its overall testing average. Those foreign students, ineligible for federal aid, also tend to pay full freight. Since 2006, the percentage of international undergraduates has jumped from just under 5 to nearly 17.

Last year, Northeastern received its highest number of applications, almost 50,000 for 2,800 spots. That’s nearly five times more than in 1990. Enrolled students were more qualified than ever before, with average SAT scores up 22 points from the previous year.

I don’t know of any other school that has this kind of what some would call “success” in the rankings game. While Northeastern is at the end of the bell curve for schools moving up in the rankings by gaming the system and diagnosing the analytics that are used by US News, they are anything but alone in trying to move up the ladder. Many school have at least one and some have teams who are tasked with analyzing ways for the schools to move up in the rankings. Most in the admission world know this, but a lot on the outside don’t know how persuasive it is and how it leads to things that affect a student’s chance of getting in.

A number of schools in the past several years have done more than just gaming. They have altered the numbers they submitted to US News, often by leaving out groups of students whose testing or some other rubric would negatively impact their rankings. The effort that schools make to rise in the rankings comes in part from pressure on schools (by the governing boards, by the President and others) to compete with their peer schools: “The rankings are one of the main ways that alumni and trustees keep track of their school's progress and they are an indicator of the status society attaches to their degrees.”

It’s a bit like college sports. Schools want to beat their rivals. And like college sports there are some bad things going on at many schools. Many in education know that data schools submit has been massaged, at the very least, but some of the data get the equivalent of steroids to help enhance performance. No one really knows how many schools fudge numbers but surveys indicate the administration thinks many schools (themselves excepted).

Some argue that the gaming efforts take away from the legitimate academic mission of the school. For example, if schools design classes to come in under the “under 20 group” that gets tallied for the US News, then they may do so by creating a significant number of smaller classes of this size and one or two huge classes that cover the same material. While the example I have just cited falls, to me at least, under the sketchy approach to education, the more important part of the rating game has to do with marketing.

Many students, at earlier and earlier ages, receive contact from colleges and universities. This contact comes in many forms, from glossy brochures to emails to tweets and everything in between. All of this attention may be flattering and may convince a student or her family that the school wants the student to enroll. After all, the words on the emails and letters and other sources are positive and encourage the student to apply. Who would not feel wooed?

But wooing and following through on a long term (or at least 4 year) commitment often don’t go together. In fact, for those schools at the top of the rankings, they rarely do. It’s true that some students get into great schools and turn them down, but the ones who suffer most often are students who have done well in virtually every measurable way, but still end up with the equivalent of a Dear John letter: “We regret to inform you that our admission committee has decided not to offer you a place in our incoming class.” There are tears and “whys” and “it isn’t fairs” echoing across the globe in the month of March. A number of people who have experience helping students or in the field of admission see that spending great sums of many, manpower, and effort to get more and more applications is anything but useful for the students and to a large degree for academic quality of the student body. Lynn O’Shaunessey tells it like she sees it on her blog:

Encouraging Pointless Applications

A big culprit in this phenomenon is the schools themselves. The institutions work hard to encourage students to apply to produce their fear-inducing rejection figures.

Many elite schools strive to attract as large an applicant pool as they can by encouraging students who have ZERO chance of getting admitted to their institutions to send in applications.

I can’t emphasize enough that if your child gets literature from an elite school, it means N-O-T-H-I-N-G. It certainly doesn’t indicate that he or she has better odds of getting into the institution.

You can’t sit down on a couch with a bag of potato chips without eating most of the bag. You hate yourself for it, but you can’t resist. And that’s how it is for elite schools that tease students for purposes of their own self-aggrandizement.

Pleasing U.S. News

The intent of this craven practice is to burnish their images, impress families, please college presidents and boards of trustees and, of course, curry favor with U.S. News & World kingmakers. U.S. News gives brownie points to schools that reject more students. Higher rejection rates also help a school’s bond ratings.

One of the legends in admission, Fred Hargadon, says what many say behind closed doors in the world of admission who have been around for a while. The increase in applications does little to improve the overall quality of the class: “Fred Hargadon, former dean of admissions at Prince-ton and Stanford, doubts that more and more applicants make for a stronger class. "I couldn't pick a better class out of 30,000 applicants than out of 15,000," he says. "I'd just end up rejecting multiples of the same kid."”

A glance at the numbers and the offers extended at the ivies may make converts of many who thought that increasing numbers increased quality.

The materials sent to many students underscore how great the education at the school will be for each student. There is precious little information sent out from the most selective schools about how incredibly hard it is to get in. It is not in the school’s best interest to discourage applicants and so they tend to send materials to many students whose chances of admission are slim at best. The number of applications filed to selective schools has soared. Part of this is due to the way schools now can use all sorts of data and all sorts of resources to find names and addresses and email to reach out to students. Some schools have changed the name of the person who leads the admission process to the director of renamed the person in charge of admission the director of enrollment management. The name speaks loudly: the focus for these schools is on making sure the numbers work. This might mean getting enough students to fill bed, or enough students who can pay, or getting students who are at the top of the applicant pol from around the world. Enrollment managers are supposed to use data and marketing and effective recruitment strategies to meet the institutional priorities set forth by the leader of the schools. Boards have become much more proactive in telling universities how to run the school and they want to see results. Demonstrating to the boards that applications have soared, SAT scores have risen, and selectivity is up will earn both praise and a raise. Trying to demonstrate that students have unique voices, backgrounds and interests sounds good but aren’t quantifiable. This means that fighting for a student whose numbers might not be great can be more difficult than it was before the rankings existed.

The rise in applications also has another significant effect on the evaluation process:

“Given the number of applicants to colleges and businesses today, it is virtually impossible to make viable distinctions based on the limited data spectra generated by resumes, GPAs, cover letters, SAT/ACT scores, professional references and personal recommendations that all tend to look and read the same. While technologies such as the Common Ap and online job boards have widened the entry funnel, the lack of investment to strengthen the backend review processes has overwhelmed the system resulting in a tangible loss of quality evaluations.”

While schools have invested a great many resources into marketing and increasing applications not nearly enough has been spent in increasing the size and scope of those reading applications; I have mentioned this before: Despite the humanist narrative that is often told in information sessions at selective schools in which, once upon a time, great amounts of time and effort were put forth in the evaluation process of individual applications, the math doesn't add up. What does this mean? If an admission officer has to evaluate 25-50 applications a day (and this is fairly standard at selective schools) how much time can one devote to each applicant? Let's say that the officer needs to evaluate 30 applicants a day (and this is a fairly low number). How long would this take? If the admission officer is focused and devotes 15 minutes to each application then the answer is 7.5 hours.

Of course, an admission officer is doing more each day than reading applications. There are emails, and meetings, and a whole host of other duties an individual admission officer might have. Any time devoted to other than reading or eating will extend the day well beyond 8 hours. And this is typical. Reading season is long and arduous, but admission people learn, early on, to make quick reads. For those applicants who do not have the numeric rubrics and are not in a special recruiting group, 15 minutes is often a luxury. In other words, all the hours of classes, tests, test prep, essay writing, activities and much else is evaluated in the time it takes to watch the latest Daft Punk video on YouTube. If this sounds cruel it is not meant to be, just informative. People make more important decisions in even quicker blinks of the eye than this. Resumes do not take nearly as long to evaluate.

There are a number of other factors that go into making the numbers game even more complicated for the typical student who has done exceptionally well in and out of the classroom that I have addressed previously: geography, economic class, and special category students.

I hope that by this point I have convinced you that the landscape of selective admission contain many large obstacles that most in the world do not know that much about. I may also have convinced you that colleges and universities are losing their ethical and education mission in pursuit of rankings and higher numbers. Now it is time to try to show why this narrative as set forth in only one part of a much more complicated story.

This is your third school you have visited in 2 days. The car ride has been filled with conversations about APs, testing, essays and lots more. In between there are tense silences too with everyone plugged in to a device listening to their own music. You arrive at the information session and an admission officer welcomes you and then at some point talks about admission:

X is one of the most selective schools in the world. We pride ourselves on having some of the strongest students in the world enter our campus each year? Are you good enough to be one of these students? Here is what you will need. You should have a boatload of AP classes starting from grade 9 or 10, you should heave virtually all A's, you should have testing that is above at least 700 on each of the sections of the SAT (above 750 would be better). You should have a record of significant accomplishments in and out of school. You should have recognition from State, National or International competition. You should have essays that demonstrate your voice is unique. You should have recommendations that say you are among the best students ever from your school and you have the potential to be a Nobel winner or the founder of a billion dollar start up, or a Wall Street Tycoon. You should have done significant service that has changed lives. You should be able to speak comfortably to all kids of people alone or in an interview or in front of a group like this with well over 100 people intently listening to your wisdom.

How would you feel after listening to this? If you are one of the chosen few who has fulfilled most of the rubrics set forth you should be feeling pretty good, but in a room of a hundred this might come to about 3 people. The vast majority of those in the room will leave thinking "I don’t have a chance and should look elsewhere". If admission officers at highly selective school put forth the numbers and stats and expectations in this way many fewer applicants would try to apply. My question is whether this is beneficial to the students’ and parents? Will this tough love approach save needless heartache in March and April?

Imagine instead you have arrived at the school and the admission officer says something like this:

X is one of the most selective schools in the world. It is hard to get in, no doubt about it. But you should know that we are in the business of trying to create a class of students who have different backgrounds, talents, and lived experiences. We expect you to have done well, in and out of class and we expect that most of you will present strong testing and a record of activity that predicts you will be a success academically, socially, and in your activism. We don’t have cut off scores, we don’t have quotes, and we look at the individual applicant. We pride ourselves on our holistic approach to admission and if you like what you see and hear today we encourage you to apply.

How would you feel after hearing this? Would you be encouraged to apply? I think many would. Is it wrong f the admission officer to avoid the harsh stats in order to encourage student to apply? Some, if not many, might vote that this merely encourages applications from students whose chances of admission are slim to none. And I would agree with those who would say this.

But, and this is an important but, I would still encourage schools to give speech number 2 over number 1. Why? It isn’t that I want schools to continue to get more applications. I agree with Hargadon and others that there are more than enough great students to choose from with 15,000 applications instead of 30,000. The reason I would argue for number two is that there is a likelihood that in any group of people there is an outlier. By outlier I mean a student who does not fit the typical description of a student who gets into a very highly selective school. It might be a first generation student who has had to work multiple jobs to help the support the family and as a result the course load he or she takes might be a bit light. Low-income students typically have lower testing too, but that does not mean they aren’t smart and could not do very well at a selective school. Or there could be a star athlete in the audience whose numbers are low but whose process on the playing field will help win the homecoming game. Or it could be a student whose essay demonstrates a way of viewing the world will change those around her. Or it could be a student from an under-represented group whose scores might not be astronomically high but who nevertheless has all the numbers that predict success. His or her background and experience will add to the conversations in and out of class. I could go on for quite some time about the possible exceptions to the stats that apply to the vast majority of applications.

In essence, what I am arguing for in for schools to ignore the utilitarian approach. If highly selective schools wanted to provide the most useful information for the greatest number of applicants they would emphasize just how hard it is to get in. But in doing so they would miss the reaching out to the few who will get in who many schools want to have as a part of their class. Steven Pinker, a genius scientist at Harvard, has written recently that Harvard and others should give a test and forget everything else when it comes to admission. I think and have written that he is wrong about this.

I do think schools should try to reach to students who aren’t a part of the typical admit group. The most selective schools often have the best financial aid packages so they can enroll these students and support their education so students graduate without debt. The schools provide a social good but it comes at the cost, so to speak, of giving the cold hard truth to many others.

The last point I want to address are the cliché that many use to talk about getting into highly selective schools. It’s random, it’s a crapshoot, it’s unfair , and it’s a black box . No it isn’t. The other cliché that gets thrown around from the admission side is that i t is an art rather than a science and that too needs some revision. Schools are numbers oriented in lots of ways. Thee are de facto limits with respect to how man students from a given place, school or country a college or university will take, there are some academic thresholds that exist for most of the students who apply. But not all. The process, by becoming increasingly based on numbers, may make it true that it is heading toward the science end of the spectrum of big data. But its not there yet and won’t get there unless inker an other have there way. There is room at schools for the atypical student, just not a lot of room. But that does not mean students till should not try if they do have something that will stand out in ways that go beyond the numbers.

The most important things that often get left out of discussions about admission: who are representing? Admission officers can be passionate advocates for student of all kinds, but at the end of the day, they work for a university. The university has its won institutional priorities. It may be they want to increase the number of STEM students. This will alter the chances of admission for many students. Or it may be they want to increase the percentage of low income students (in some cases up or for cash strapped schools, down), or it may be they want to make sure they have a nationally ranked athletic team. They might want all of these things. The institutional priorities determine the way applicants will be evaluated. While schools will not be as forthcoming as they should about these priorities some of them I have listed here are often a part of the mission of most selective schools. Their approach is calculated, vetted and highly scrutinized. For some the take way from this is that admission is not fair. Of course it isn't. Life isn’t either. But it is not completely unfair by any stretch. Admission officers clock innumerable hours trying to pick the best students as the school they work for has defined it. Should there be a great deal more transparency on the part of schools to release data that would help most families? Absolutely, but they should not put this in every brochure or email they sent out to students who may be one who fits in to their mission.

Like most things in life, admission is anything but perfect and could be improved. Families and students should also do more research to get beyond the raw numbers listed on profiles and in rankings. My last piece of advice for finding out the inside story is to suggest that everyone watch a YouTube video by Brian Wright. His TEDx talk on why no student deserves a place at a highly selective school should make some people look at the admission process with a new set of eyes and expectations.