Let’s consider, just for a minute, the toad. Go on, imagine one sitting right there, all lumpy and leathery-skinned. To understand the college-admissions process, flawed and often frustrating, it helps to ponder this awkward amphibian.
Don’t just take my word for it, take B. Alden Thresher’s. In his 1966 book,College Admissions and the Public Interest, the longtime director of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that predicting which students will succeed is imprecise work. After all, colleges know only so much about a given applicant’s potential. Mr. Thresher summed up the profession’s limitations in a sentence: "One cannot tell by looking at a toad how far he will jump."
A half-century later, that’s still true. The way selective four-year colleges look at a student — primarily, at her high-school grades and standardized test scores — can’t tell them how far she will go, whether she will study hard, get good grades, stay enrolled, contribute this or that to her campus, earn a degree, and prosper down the road. Evaluations are educated guesswork. "It’s our dirty little secret," says Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University. "There’s very little we collect at the point of admission that tells us how someone will do, but we repeat the process over and over again for absence of a better solution."
What would a better solution be? Is there a way — a plausible way — to improve a system that admissions leaders themselves describe as antiquated, cumbersome, and unfair to all but the wealthiest applicants? Nobody’s quite sure, but some think it’s time to find out. In an era of experimentation with new ways of teaching, granting academic credit, and balancing budgets, most colleges still evaluate applicants as they have for decades, using the same handful of measures, the same gauges of merit, the same familiar calendar.
Sure, technology has transformed how institutions recruit today’s hyper-digital students, who search for and apply to colleges far differently than their parents did. But the tide of change has stopped short of the admission committee’s door, behind which all those crucial evaluations happen. Colleges are using this century’s tools to attract prospective students even as they use the last century’s formula to select them.
Why? In a field defined by age-old rituals, many elements resist innovation. Although colleges compete with one another, they also move like great herds through each recruitment cycle, bound together by common deadlines and practices, like early-decision agreements. There’s comfort in conformity. As higher education confronts growing uncertainty — revenue shortfalls, demographic shifts — many admissions officials are reluctant to embrace even more of it. Still, some concede that sooner or later, something’s got to give. "Kids are changing, the world is changing, so we have to change, too," says Heidi Fletcher, vice president for enrollment management at Notre Dame of Maryland University. "We’re just not sure what to do."
Frustrated, some scholars and pundits have called for a revolutionary overhaul, like an admissions lottery or a selection process determined by applicants’ performance in massive open online courses. But such shifts aren’t realistic, at least not anytime soon. Many enrollment leaders anticipate small, scattered, gradual changes. It’s one thing to flip a classroom, another to upend the admissions office, weighed down, always, by the wants and needs of an entire campus and the expectations of so many people beyond it.
Instead of prognosticating, let’s look at the pressures holding the current system in place. How can we describe admissions today?
Like a machine Rube Goldberg might’ve built if he’d been really, really mean. For colleges aspiring to greater selectivity, the system’s undeniable inefficiency is by design. Each year, four-year institutions everywhere spend a fortune buying tens or hundreds of thousands of high-school students’ names from testing and other companies, and bombard those "suspects" with letters and emails. The hope is that, as they move through the recruitment funnel, enough of them become interested "prospects," then, ideally, applicants, at which point the bulk of colleges, tuition-dependent and not world-famous, scramble to admit and enroll a certain number (to meet their enrollment and revenue goals), while the wealthiest, choosiest institutions use elaborate criteria to whittle down vast numbers in an intensive exercise known as crafting a class. That’s an artful term for how colleges satisfy their many interests, for this much tuition revenue and that much diversity, this many legacies and that many goalies, and enough engineering majors to keep the program strong.
These days, students file more and more applications to hedge their bets on where they’ll get in and, unknown until very late in the process, how much it’ll cost them. Meanwhile, colleges only increase the suspense for all involved by chasing more applicants and placing great numbers of them on wait lists, drawing out a months-long process even more. Makes sense, right?
Application inflation is, in part, a result of colleges’ own marketing prowess. As more students all over the globe submit more applications, many institutions have seen their numbers of prospects expand significantly, a goal some have worked hard to achieve, at great expense. That record-breaking trove of files, often touted as affirmation of ever-rising popularity, might seem damn impressive until it’s time to wade through it. Enrollment managers haven’t figured out how to add more days to March, so they need to sort fast.
Large volumes of applicants — some serious, some frivolous, and some weighing financial-aid offers until the last minute — make predicting outcomes more complicated. Many colleges have seen their yield, the percentage of accepted students who enroll, decline sharply. In the fall-2013 cycle, the average institutional yield rate was 36 percent, down from 49 percent in 2002, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Meeting those crucial revenue goals, long a challenge, is now even iffier.
With rising chaos, colleges cling to tried-and-true measures, grades and test scores, to compare applicants. Radical departures tend to be rare and small-scale. Last year Bard College carved out the time to read four 2,500-word research papers from each of the 41 students who chose that new option in lieu of sending test scores. Even if colleges’ "holistic" reviews do go beyond the numbers, most still crave easy, uniform markers of merit.
There’s faith in the familiar, especially when time is scarce. By the end of one recruitment cycle, the next is well underway, leaving few hours for reflection or retooling the enrollment rocket ship, always accelerating.
"The pressures have never been harder, stronger, and heavier to make the class," says James A. Goecker, vice president for enrollment management at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, in Indiana. "If you try something different, there’s risk involved, and for most institutions, the risks outweigh the need to have something new."
Even a modest change can take a while to hatch. For years Mr. Goecker thought about new ways of measuring potential. Why is it that two students with identical test scores, he wondered, fare so differently? Because colleges are using conventional metrics to judge them, he concluded. "We’re missing a measure of a piece of their humanness."
A few years ago, Rose-Hulman started giving freshmen a battery of true-or-false statements designed to reveal how much control they think they have over their own destinies. "I would like to graduate from college," one prompt says, "but there are more important things in my life." Students who succeed there, the institute has found, tend to have a strong "internal locus of control," meaning they believe they can shape their own futures. For the first time this fall, Rose-Hulman will include the instrument as an optional part of its application. The answers, says Mr. Goecker, should influence only some admissions decisions.
Assessments of noncognitive attributes — leadership, creativity, determination — represent a promising innovation in admissions. The Posse Foundation, which sends cohorts of urban high-school students to selective colleges each year, uses a nontraditional process to identify those who are strong leaders, good at working in teams, and motivated to succeed. A handful of colleges use noncognitive tools to evaluate undergraduate applicants; some law and medical schools are assessing candidates’ emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, and problem solving. Although a wide body of research shows that such qualities affect a student’s success, gauging them reliably can be tricky and time-consuming. So far, few campuses have tried, and the places that have have seen mixed results.
It took a few years of data suggesting the change would be worthwhile to make Mr. Goecker comfortable adding that wrinkle to Rose-Hulman’s application. Still, he has no plans to drop the institute’s testing requirement. For one thing, the average test scores of incoming classes are a point of pride for professors, he says, and resonate with the public. "Could we live without the SAT?" he asks. "Yeah, but it’s not hurting us."
Hampshire College decided that conventional requirements weren’t helping, so it made a relatively bold move.
After studying its high-achieving third- and fourth-year students, the small liberal-arts college found no correlation between their ACT or SAT scores and their subsequent performance. Of those who struggled academically, some had high scores, others didn’t. "There was a mismatch between what test scores told us," says Meredith Twombly, dean of enrollment and retention, "and what we needed to know."
When colleges say test scores help them predict success, they usually mean first-year grades, a limited definition. Hampshire, in Western Massachusetts, doesn’t give letter grades, so it tracked students whom professors had identified as creative, motivated, doing great work. Last June the college, which had never required the ACT or SAT, announced it would no longer consider test scores even if applicants sent them.
Hampshire also created a new application with five essay questions meant to illuminate whether applicants had qualities its most successful students did: empathy, an interest in social justice, and a stomach for challenge. "Knowing we would probably scare off a bunch of people," Ms. Twombly says, "we made our application more difficult, exactly the opposite of what many would tell you to do." The college received 20 percent fewer applications this year than last. But its yield rate increased to 27 percent, from 19 percent, a welcome trade-off.
Going "test-blind" had another consequence, one that would be a deal breaker for many colleges. By ditching a prominent measure of institutional quality, Hampshire stripped itself of a key variable used in rankings. As the college had anticipated, U.S. News & World Reportdropped it from the list of top liberal-arts institutions. Even though Hampshire’s known as an outlier, Ms. Twombly says, "it was a big risk — that’s a huge chunk of free publicity to forgo."
In the complex college-admissions ecosystem, each metric has internal and external significance. The markers admissions officers use to evaluate applicants also inform public perception of that institution’s quality. An audience — trustees, bond-rating agencies, the press — is always watching the numbers, searching for meaning in them.
Want to break the mold? Fine, but someone won’t like it. Each move an admissions office makes, each departure from the herd, has repercussions. When Goucher College announced last year that applicants could send two-minute videos instead of test scores, transcripts, and recommendations, some observers applauded the change of pace. But Brian C. Rosenberg, president of Macalester College, was troubled by the notion that a student’s academic achievements didn’t matter. In The Chronicle, he called the video option "absurd and dangerous."
Adhering to the same old admissions practices, one could argue, might prove absurd and dangerous — for colleges and students alike. That’s not to say other campuses should emulate Hampshire or Goucher or any other place with a newfangled application. But to serve an increasingly diverse population of collegebound students, some enrollment leaders say institutions must find more nuanced means of gauging their potential.
"As demographics change, you might not have that plethora of fancy grades and test scores that you did a decade ago," says Todd Rinehart, associate vice chancellor for enrollment and director of admission at the University of Denver. "The valedictorian who maybe has a 21 on the ACT" — a mediocre score out of a possible 36 — "how do you judge that?"
Standardized-test scores have been found to correlate with socioeconomic status. More first-generation applicants probably means more applicants with lower scores than their affluent peers’. And Hispanic students, a fast-growing share of high-school graduates, don’t do as well on the ACT or SAT, on average, as white and Asian-American students do. "It’s unfair to expect an age-old system to measure students’ ability to succeed today," says Satyajit Dattagupta, vice president for enrollment management at Washington College, in Maryland. "People brag about test scores, but using them as such an important factor doesn’t serve our market or our college very well."
Since arriving at Washington two years ago, Mr. Dattagupta has changed the evaluation process, reducing the weight of test scores by half, and increasing that of the high-school transcript. His staff is also paying more attention, he says, to "who is beyond the numbers." All applicants are now strongly encouraged to participate in a 20-minute interview, face-to-face or via Skype. About a third of them did so this year, which meant a lot of work for admissions officers, who rated each student’s ability to think critically and the ease with which he or she answered questions, including one about an innovation worth discussing with George Washington.
The exchanges give both sides valuable information, Mr. Dattagupta thinks. And by taking the time to engage, a student conveys some degree of interest in attending the college. "Getting someone to listen to you for 20 minutes in a world where it’s hard to get someone’s attention," he says, "it’s invaluable."
If the current admissions system is inefficient by design, with traditional metrics a way to keep it running, Washington College’s interviews are meant to slow it down. There’s more than one way to think about efficiency, Mr. Dattagupta says: Too much is no good.
Some futurists want to automate college matches. Yet the recruitment process, tedious though it is, allows for personal interactions that help applicants form crucial opinions of colleges. When institutions make it easier and faster to apply, it can be hard for one party to know how seriously to take the other. Although conducting five interviews in a row can be draining, they help admissions officers understand the applicant, who, Mr. Dattagupta says, might otherwise be "just this abstract individual."
Truly evaluating students — contextualizing the numbers and letters in their files — requires personal judgments. "It’s a people-intensive process," says Andrew Flagel, senior vice president for students and enrollment at Brandeis University. "If you want fairness, it’s hard to imagine an efficient system."
Kyle Wray agrees. As vice president for enrollment and marketing at Oklahoma State University, he’s thought a lot about how the land-grant institution might better serve the state. "We need more college graduates," he says, "and we know there are talented students out there who bring things to the table other than ACT or SAT scores."
For years the university has used Panorama, a set of essay questions designed to measure applicants’ analytical, creative, and practical skills. The questions, known as the "fourth door," offer applicants who don’t meet any of the three assured-admission criteria — all based on grades and test scores — another chance to show their potential. Scholarship committees also consider applicants’ responses, which have taken various forms, including artwork, original songs, and architectural blueprints.
"The student from a first-generation family who’s sitting at the kitchen table, trying to scrounge money together for a one-time shot at the SAT, has just as much of a right to get a chance at higher education as any other," Mr. Wray says. "If we’re so busy talking about efficiency, we’re not talking about that family."
The fourth door opens each year for a small group of students who lack glowing credentials. Some are smart kids who’ve had few opportunities. Some are creative types, or bright students who were bored or unmotivated in high school, or those who, for whatever reason, says Mr. Wray, "have the ability but don’t believe in themselves."
When something’s broken, people try to fix it. So it’s only natural to look at what’s wrong with higher education and ask how we might one day change the way everyone gets into it.
Dreaming up a bright, sparkling future is fun. Otherwise we wouldn’t have loved the Jetsons, the cartoon family living in a world of push-button convenience. The TV show offered a comforting glimpse of the future: wondrous technology delivering progress.
Jetsonian thinking has informed many visions of a new and improved college-admissions system. In 2011, for instance, Washington Monthlypublished an article proclaiming "the end of college admissions as we know it," about ConnectEdu, a website designed to match students and colleges. The platform, with its powerful algorithm, would transform the admissions process much like Match.com has changed dating. Such a shift would benefit less-savvy applicants in particular, the article said: "Everything you’ve heard about getting in is about to go out the window."
ConnectEdu filed for bankruptcy three years later. Though the reasons were complicated, one lesson was clear: Just because an entrepreneur has a big idea and a high-tech plan doesn’t mean the status quo is crumbling. Although other companies still provide similar matching services, the traditional process endures.
Donald E. Heller has studied the admissions systems in other countries and thinks ours looks pretty good by comparison. For one thing, students generally make their own choices about where to enroll and what to major in.
"Where it all breaks down is we have a higher-education structure that leads to a lot of stratification," says Mr. Heller, dean of the college of education at Michigan State University. "If you’re wealthy and/or white or Asian-American, you’re more likely to be at a selective four-year college," he says, than if you’re poor, black, or Hispanic. As colleges focus more on completion and not just access, he suspects many will re-examine their admissions criteria. "If the concern is not just getting them in the door but out the other end," he says, "it will force colleges to take a look at their requirements."
Some proposals out there are pie-in-the-sky silly. Others are thoughtfully provocative. One professor suggests turning to assessment centers, where prospective students would spend a day demonstrating their "social, emotional, and creative capabilities," to give colleges a broader view of their promise. Other scholars have proposed an elaborate matching system, much like the one medical schools use, that would guarantee qualified applicants a spot at one of a consortium of selective colleges.
A more likely change is what constitutes an application. As The Chroniclefirst reported last year, dozens of high-profile public and private institutions known as the Coalition are planning to create a new shared application. A draft brochure says the online platform will "recast the nature of applying to college in the 21st century," a bold claim that some experts doubt.
Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale University, says the group wants to let students start building an admissions portfolio, perhaps allowing them to submit video and examples of their work, well before their senior year of high school. "There’s a future in which the application is not as transactional as it is now," he says, "where a student can be engaged for a longer amount of time."
To deal with the uncertainty of vast applicant pools, colleges might embrace anything that helped them identify candidates with genuine interest. A company called InitialView, which conducts brief interviews of foreign students and transmits the video to U.S. colleges, now allows those applicants to assign a virtual "star" to the two institutions they most want to attend. The company is considering a similar service for the domestic market.
Although predictions keep flying, David A. Hawkins isn’t buying most of them. "For all the breathless proclamations that the revolution has arrived, I’m not seeing the evidence," says Mr. Hawkins, executive director of educational content and policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. What he expects is gradual diversification in admissions requirements. "There’s been a lot of emulation going on, and everyone has felt this pressure to look and feel like the Ivies," he says. "Some institutions are deciding that they have to make their own way in the world, to articulate what they’re really about."
For years Tufts University has experimented with ways of measuring applicants’ creativity and analytical reasoning, inviting them to send videos and write short essays in response to carefully crafted questions. Integrating such components into the conventional admissions process is exciting but daunting, says Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admissions. How much time should a staff devote to holistic evaluations in a world where conventional statistics have great power? Colleges must grapple with that question, he believes, if they ever want to transform the process. "It requires a collective will to say, as we move into this brave new world, how will we measure our work, our success," he says, "if we’ve taught ourselves to value this data point, this percentage, this criteria, as important?"
That conversation extends beyond the confines of campuses. "There are very disparate people and institutions using the work I do as measures of quality and achievement, saying that Tufts is better or worse because of our admit rate," he says. "Nobody’s saying to me, What’s the creativity quotient of this year’s freshman class?"
Mr. Boeckenstedt, at DePaul, thinks the most disruptive move to college admissions could come from the federal government.
Right now, parents complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in the spring of their child’s senior year of high school, after typical application deadlines have passed, often estimating their tax information for the previous year.
But a proposed policy change would allow future applicants to use two-year-old tax data to complete the form, giving families an earlier, clearer picture of their college bills. That way cost could fold into students’ college search like never before, perhaps prompting them to apply to fewer places. Mr. Boeckenstedt says. And the change could shake up the traditional admissions calendar, in which applicants find out how much they’ll have to pay at each college shortly before the May 1 deadline for choosing where to go.
A change that happens to colleges is perhaps easier to imagine than disruption from within the system. Visions of the latter seem to assume, unrealistically, that colleges will readily take a brilliant new idea and tear up the old rules. Would the big power brokers of the existing system — the colleges with the most applicants, the greatest demand, most impressive admissions metrics — really want to change how the game’s played tomorrow?
No matter how the admissions process evolves, surely it will continue to serve, at its core, the interests of the colleges that run it. Even with new tools, longstanding institutional goals surely will endure. "Stronger data than standardized tests wouldn’t necessarily mean that we change our process," says Mr. Flagel at Brandeis. "I’d still be thinking about balancing the class — the number of oboe players, geographic diversity."
That brings us back to Mr. Thresher’s toad, to the mystery of an applicant’s potential. Let’s not get too romantic, though. Selecting a class isn’t just about predicting which students will succeed, of course. Colleges may hope the toad before them performs well, but they also care about how much it can pay, who its parents are, what it plans to major in, and how its various attributes might otherwise benefit the campus.
Then again, the inscrutable toad reminds us that nobody really knows the future, which could surprise us or not deliver much new at all. Tomorrow’s enrollment leaders have a chance to reshape their field. Maybe — who knows? — they’ll jump pretty far. Then again, they might just sit there, perfectly still, content with how it all works.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/College-Admissions-Frozen-in/230363