Improving College Admissions: 5 Ideas
Holistic admissions. This stale phrase has my my vote for the most hackneyed in the college admission lexicon. Folks thoughtlessly invoke this phrase like an incantation to guard against claims their admission process isn't fair or to deflect specific questions on what it takes to get accepted. But my main problem, having practiced holistic admission for a year at Stanford, is that it allows too much subjectivity into the process. And the more subjective the process--the more a decision turns on the proclivities of one or two admission readers--the less fair. But selecting the students who get to attend Stanford or Harvard is hard. And it's easy to complain without offering solutions. Here are five ideas on how we might make college admissions less subjective, more objective, and ultimately, more fair.
1. Academic competitions and awards: Every student should know about every major competition that admission offices find impressive. From Regeneron to Olympiads to the Concord Review. If you win or place in those competitions, that's objective data of excellence. Details like that were in Stanford's handbook they gave to admission readers to rate applications. But how many kids have heard of the Concord Review? Maybe the kids at Phillips Academy. Probably not the kids at Andover High. I've had many parents and students thank me for doing a TikTok alerting them to these competitions. Think about that: Kids have to find out what specific competitions colleges value because I happened to make a TikTok video? That's nuts.
2. Testing: We need to reinstate some form of standardized testing. There's a reason a school like MIT went back to it. I understand all the debate around the current tests. At Stanford, when a non-URM student scored high, many viewed it as indicating privilege. When a URM student scored high, many viewed it as indicating intelligence. Look: Whether you view the tests as a measure of privilege, intelligence, racism, sexism, nationalism, or some combination--put that to the side. We have very bright people in this country. I don't believe that we can't put together some expert committee that can come up with some consensus on a fair, uniform, national college test. And then make sure all kids in all zip codes have what they need to prepare for it and take it.
Asking admission officers to evaluate every applicant based on their unique academic setting isn't realistic or efficient or fair. Unless you're using some form of objective, uniform scoring--SAT, ACT, AP, IB--how can you have any confidence that an A at some school in Boston means the same as an A at some school in Bakersfield?
3. Make the writing more objective: I see two issues here. First, one random admission officer with their own biases is often the only person to speed-read through applications and assign ratings. Many applications never make it past that first read. A few applicants get a second reader. But in my experience, no one--ever--stops a committee meeting to give a fresh read from front to back on an applicant. Because there are so many applications and so few admission officers, the process forces admission officers to rely on the judgment of one or two speed-readers assigning ratings.
Harvard apparently denies this practice. But if you listened to the #SCOTUS oral arguments in SFFA v. Harvard, you might recall Harvard admitted it has "one of the 40 admissions officers" go through an application and assign a first set of ratings. Harvard claimed that first set of ratings had "no effect" on admission decisions. Alito asked the obvious question: "Then why do you do it?" Harvard's response was incoherent: "We do it as a matter of triage" but it has "no effect" on decisions. (Tr. 59:1-19, 60:1-20). You don't have to be a constitutional lawyer to see the problem here. And I can tell you, at least from my experience at Stanford, it's as inane as it sounds. When you have a small staff reading 60,000 applications (UCLA is reading 150,000), you better believe many applicants are getting tossed by a quick read from a single reader. Check out Jeff Selingo 's work Who Gets In And Why and you'll see this does't just happen at Stanford and Harvard but at schools like Emory and University of Washington too.
Second, it's unfair that holistic admissions lets admission officers--with no testing, and often Pass/Fail grades from Covid--now rely even more on essays to "get to know a student" and decide if they deserve admission. How much were these essays edited? What if the kid is a math genius but a bad writer? What if the student doesn't have a good mentor and writes about a terrible topic?
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To counter those problems, I'd try out a few ideas: Have all kids take a proctored essay with one question: Why do you want to go to college? That's it. Then have some board rate it like the APs do, or have a college committee with at least three or more people all read it--including a faculty member. Or have kids submit a one-page, graded writing sample. But there's got to be a better way than having kids write ten essays for a random speed-reading stranger to evaluate and use as a major factor in deciding if that kid gets to go to Stanford.
4. Top % Programs: I know less about these, but in states like Texas or Florida, if a student finishes at the top of their class, it's an auto-acceptance. Applying to college is like a part-time job for many students. Programs like this get rid of that uncertainty and all the extra work of applying to 20 schools. I defer to the experts on these programs, but they at least seem like one way to eliminate the subjectivity of holistic admissions.
5. Unrealistic Big Reform: We should move to a uniform national curriculum like the IB program. We need lots of reform for what and how we teach high school students. But SCOTUS wrongly decided Rodriguez back in '73. Leaving K-12 public education up to the states and property taxes and all that has led to de-facto segregation. All Americans should have access to a public option that offers the same quality education from pre-K-12. Every American should have a shared set of basic facts about our history, how our government works, personal finance, etc. If you're rich and you want to pay for a private high school? Go for it. But if you care about having a country with educated citizens who all share a common set of knowledge, supporting first-rate public schools should be a bipartisan, no-brainer, equality of opportunity issue. How? You pay teachers more money than any other entry-level job coming out of college. How? You Get the money from our massive national defense budget. The education of our young citizen's is a national security issue.
My bottom-line: It's bizarre to tell kids: "We practice holistic admissions. There's no formula." If there's no formula, how are kids supposed to know what to do to get into top colleges? They seek out people like me--former AOs on TikTok--to provide insight that colleges won't. That's an absurd state of affairs.
I blame colleges. Because they won't be transparent with kids. They won't share their Ratings Guides; they won't tell students the specific competitions and activities that will advance their applications; they won't video the full process of reading, rating, and voting on applicants. If we made no other reforms, at least that would give kids a more specific idea of what they need to do if they want to attend college. That might make holistic admissions a little less subjective and a little more fair.
M.C. Short