Perhaps more so now than in the past 30 years I have been in
education, there are myths abounding about college admissions that are not only
misleading, they are simply wrong.
1) Admission into
college, particularly the most selective, is capricious and random.
Actually, college admission is more systematic than it has
ever been. For one, it is much easier to
predict inadmissibility than ever before.
When the most selective colleges are routinely admitting fewer than 10%,
and recently, under 6% of the applicants who apply, there are few outside of
the "hooked" students (under-represented students, legacies and
athletes) who are admitted who are not in the top 2 or 3 of their graduating class
and under 2250 on the SAT's or 35 on the ACT.
And those students have to in some way have distinguished
themselves. Unfortunately for those applying,
what determines admission is not random, it is just unknown to those who
apply. The unknown is the "shopping
list", the institutional priorities that determine who gets admitted and
who does not. Some shopping lists are
known and public. When the President of
Vanderbilt was quoted in a 2002 Wall Street Journal article that "we are
targeting Jewish students," it was a clear statement of something that was
on this university's shopping list. Most
of the time, it is less clear or direct.
It was not hard to surmise that Columbia, after almost setting an NCAA
record for consecutive losses in football, probably had a strong quarterback
high on its shopping list. Sometimes
colleges want to bolster their strengths, like women in the sciences at some
all-women's colleges, whereas others want to address their needs, like classics
majors at Johns Hopkins. The point is
that college admissions is systematic and nuanced, and can more often be
inferred than known or predicted.
2) Admission to a
prestigious college is an important credential that will virtually guarantee
career success. College Admissions
has become the Cargo Cult of the modern age.
The most selective colleges can nearly guarantee success of their
students because they have the freedom to exclude students who present any
risk. They choose an incredibly
homogeneous student body that has endured a virtual academic boot camp to meet
the minimum standards for admissions.
In their seminal paper a decade ago, Krueger and Dale found that
students, who were accepted into the most selective colleges and chose not to
go, were as successful at those who chose to go to the more selective
colleges. In a follow up study a couple
of years ago, they found that those even those students who applied to the most selective colleges,
whether admitted or not, were also as successful at those who attended the most
selective colleges. The conclusion of
both studies is that it is the qualities of the students, not the colleges, which determined success. Yes, all other things being equal, a student
entering the investment banking industry right out of undergraduate school may
have a leg up coming from an Ivy League college. But in most other circumstances, whether
applying to graduate school or entering the work force in most other fields, it
is much easier to distinguish oneself by presenting Ivy League credentials from
a less prestigious school. My son, a
Presidential Scholar at Rutgers University, won a prestigious Critical Language
Learning Fellowship to study in Turkey this summer, being selected over many of
his peers who attended more prestigious colleges. The other students had many fewer
opportunities to distinguish themselves among such a large group of high
achieving students that they virtually cancelled each other out in the
competition.
3) Selectivity is an
indication of quality
I read a comment on the NY Times college admission blog The
Choice that said " It is one thing for De Beers to artificially inflate
the price of diamonds by constraining supply. It is quite another thing for the
Ivy League et al. to do the same." Wearing
and owning diamonds is about prestige. No one would say possessing and wearing
diamonds is anything other than a display of wealth, prestige and standing. It
all gets mixed up with college admissions, because there is a confusion of
selectivity with the quality of education. If anyone really believes that
because a college becomes more selective it becomes better, they do not have a
firm grasp of reality. It is a sign of it being more desirable and nothing
more. It is about power, not education. No one is forcing people to go to one
of these ridiculously competitive colleges, and, in reality, most provide an
education where graduate students and professor research trumps undergraduate
student engagement and learning. But we can’t stop people from wanting diamonds
and Ivy, but we can make choices for ourselves that there is really no virtue
in either.
4) It is harder than
ever to get into college.
A 2009 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.23.4.95)
found that only 10% of colleges are more selective than they were in 1962 and
the vast majority of colleges are substantially less selective.
5) Costs have risen
dramatically at the more selective colleges.
In the article referenced above, it was shown that subsidies
for those at the most selective colleges have increased 8-fold since the early
1960's and the average tuition paid, in real dollars, has declined by over 25%
in the past 45 years. The category where
costs have risen the greatest is public colleges, though the average cost of
tuition and fees at public colleges ($8655) and community college ($3131)
remains affordable and can be covered in full by the maximum 2013-14 Pell Grant
($5635) and subsidized (3.4% interest rate) Stafford Loan ($3500 for freshman).
