1. You’re not going to get
accepted into a top university
on merit alone
December 13, 2017 9.21pm EST
Author Natasha Warikoo
Associate Professor of Education, Harvard University
More and more students at Harvard are examining their admission files to try to understand
how they got in. The U.S. government is also plans to examine the files as part of a
discrimination case filed by 63 Asian- American groups. Shutterstock.com
After weeks of negotiation, Harvard University recently agreed to provide the
Department of Justice access to its admissions files. The department is
reopening a complaint by 63 Asian-American groups that Harvard
discriminates against Asian-American applicants. The complaint was
previously dismissed under the Obama administration. Many worrythat
government lawyers plan to use the case to argue that all race-conscious
admissions – including affirmative action – are a violation of the Civil Rights
Act.
Separately, Harvard undergraduates have recently begun to take advantage of
their right to view their own admissions files, often only to become frustrated
in their efforts to pinpoint exactly why they got admitted.
2. The inquiries of the Department of Justice and the curious Harvard students
have something in common: Both are unlikely to turn up any evidence of why
some applicants make the cut and others don’t. That’s because both inquiries
rest on the faulty assumption that admissions decisions are driven by an
objective, measurable process that will yield the same results over and over
again. As a Harvard professor who has studied and written a book about college
admissions and their impact on students, I can tell you that’s just not how it
works. I am not speaking officially for Harvard and I am not involved in
undergraduate admissions.
Elite private universities have made clear time and again that their admissions
decisions are made through a holistic decision-making process that involves a
series of discussions among the admissions team. This means, for example,
Harvard rejects 1 in 4 students with perfect SAT scores. The University of
Pennsylvania and Duke University reject three out of five high school
valedictorians. Despite universities like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford
having closely aligned admissions criteriaand similar rates of admission, just
because an applicant gets into one school does not mean the applicant will get
into another. That’s why it makes headlines when a student is reported to have
gained admission to all the Ivies. This is a rare, unexpected event.
What a holistic approach entails
So, how do universities make admissions decisions? William Fitzsimmons,
dean of admissions at Harvard, writes of an “expansive view of excellence.” This
includes “extracurricular distinction and personal qualities” in addition to test
scores and grades. Evaluating applications is a long process. At Harvard, it
involves at least two readers of each file. It also involves discussions among a
subcommittee of at least four individuals that last up to an hour. The process is
similar for other selective colleges. Admissions officers at the same university
often differ about which students to admit. The process is more art than science.
Holistic evaluation allows admissions officers to take into account
opportunities, hardships and other experiences that may have affected an
applicant’s grades and SAT scores. They may also consider how those things
affected their participation in activities outside of school. Nevertheless, the
outcomes of admission to the most elite colleges are unequal. In fact, while 37
percent of young adults in the United States are black or Latino, just 19 percent
of students at the top 100 colleges in the country are.
In addition, while only one-third of American adults have a bachelor’s degree,
a review of Ivy League universities’ published data reveals that about 85 percent
of students have a parent with a bachelor’s degree. So, even if holistic evaluation
does a better job than looking at test scores and grades alone, the process still
concludes by systematically undervaluing working class, poor, black and Latino
young men and women. That is, if we assume that talent and “personal
qualities” are equally distributed in our society, this disproportion should tell
us something is amiss.
In addition to the holistic evaluation process, admissions teams need to
consider the needs of specific groups on campus. These needs vary from campus
3. to campus and from year to year. Coaches can recruit top athletes for positions
on their teams played by graduating seniors, and those recruits enter the fast
lane to admission. And, just as the baseball coach can recruit a shortstop, the
orchestra director may request a top bassoon player to fill a missing part in the
orchestra. Since needs of campus organizations and teams vary from year to
year, you can’t glean much from admission files in isolation like the DOJ and
curious students hope to do.
Merit is overrated
Are there any discernible patterns between who gets in and students who were
seriously considered but rejected? Probably not. Harvard President Drew Faust
has said that Harvard could fill its incoming class twice with high school
valedictorians.
In fact, we should discard the notion that admissions is a meritocratic process
that selects the “best” 18-year-olds who apply to a selective university. When we
let go of our meritocracy ideals, we see more clearly that so many talented,
accomplished young people who will be outstanding leaders in the future will
not make it to the likes of Harvard, Stanford and Yale. There simply are not
enough places for all of them at those universities. Further, many more
disadvantaged young people have never had the opportunity to cultivate talents
because their parents did not have the resources to pay for private music lessons
or a pitching coach. In fact, the gap between what wealthy and poor parents
spend on extracurricular activities has dramatically increased in recent years.
So looking for explanations for why you did get in, or whether some groups are
favored over others, misses the broader picture of the lack of clarity on what
gets anyone into elite colleges. It also ignores the unequal opportunities young
Americans have in the process.
One way forward for college admissions, which I have suggested as a thought
experiment in my book, “The Diversity Bargain,” is to take all qualified students
for a selective college and enter them into an admissions lottery. The lottery
could have weights for desired characteristics the college deems important,
such as social class, geographic diversity, race and intended major. This method
would make clear the arbitrariness in the admissions process. It would also help
students admitted — and those not admitted - understand that admission —
and rejection — should not hold the strong social meaning in American society
that it does today. In “The Diversity Bargain,” I show the downsides of
maintaining students’ beliefs that college admissions is a meritocracy. Most
students expressed strong faith in a process that ultimately underselects black,
Latino and working class applicants, among others. They will take these
understandings with them as they ascend to positions of power and make hiring
decisions, design tax policies and shape media discourses.
Until the Department of Justice and admitted students understand the
arbitrary nature of how admissions decisions at elite colleges are made, they
will be perplexed by the complex art that is elite college admissions.
