Rejecting the Wrong Kids: Zakaria on College Admissions

The evolving criteria for college admissions has long been an area rife with controversy. But it is most controversial when it reduces the influence of objective measures of merit in favor of social, financial or prejudicial considerations that either favor or exclude groups of applicants disproportionately to their objective measures of merit. Sometimes there is good social and educational reasoning that motivates it, or at least there are assumptions of good intentions. But this is not always true, and sometimes it is clearly not. Sometimes it reflects social prejudice, financial or other values inconsistent with the notion of merit, either objective academic merit or social merit. As is often the case, Fareed Zakaria makes us think about things that are not so easy to hear, and less easy to remedy.

 

In an article for Time magazine, Mr. Zakaria identifies a few such areas that, by implication, are worthy of our attention. The first mentioned is state universities’ and colleges’ financial preference for out of state students.

State universities--once the highways of advancement for the middle class--have been utterly transformed under the pressure of rising costs and falling government support. A new book, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, shows how some state schools have established a "party pathway," admitting more and more rich out-of-state kids who can afford hefty tuition bills but are middling students. These cash cows are given special attention through easy majors, lax grading, social opportunities and luxurious dorms. That's bad for the bright low-income students, who are on what the book's authors, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, call the mobility pathway. They are neglected and burdened by college debt and fail in significant numbers. 

---“The Thin Envelope Crisis: America’s universities are rejecting the wrong kids--and undermining the idea of merit,” by Fareed Zakaria, Time (3.15.2013)

But what of all the financial aid provided by most universities and colleges to accepted students with financial need? A point of pride in the provision of equal educational opportunity to a diverse college population, these values have not been abandoned have they? No, but there are apparently many more such students and much less money to offer them. And then there is the issue of admissions limiting quotas for Asians. Mr. Zakaria:

The Country's best colleges and universities do admit lower-income students. But the competition has become so intense and the percentage admitted so small that the whole process seems arbitrary. When you throw in special preferences for various categories—legacies, underrepresented minorities and athletes—it also looks less merit-based than it pretends to be. In an essay in the American Conservative, Ron Unz uses a mountain of data to charge that America's top colleges and universities have over the past two decades maintained a quota—an upper limit—of about 16.5% for Asian Americans, despite their exploding applicant numbers and high achievements.

[…] Two Ivy League admissions officers estimated to me that Asian Americans probably make up more than 20% of their entering classes. Even so, institutions that are highly selective but rely on more objective measures for admission have found that their Asian-American populations have risen much more sharply over the past two decades. Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, are now about 40% Asian… The U.S. math and science olympiad winners are more than 70% Asian American. In this context, for the U.S.'s top colleges and universities to be at 20% is, at the least, worth some reflection.

Test scores are only one measure of a student's achievement, and other qualities must be taken into account. But it's worth keeping in mind that the arguments for such subjective criteria are precisely those that were made in the 1930s to justify quotas for Jews. In fact, in his book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, scholar Jerome Karabel exhaustively documented how nonobjective admissions criteria such as interviews and extracurriculars were put in place by Ivy League schools in large measure to keep Jewish admissions from rising.

A margin note in Mr. Zakaria’s essay states that a 2009 study reported that Asian Americans on average needed SAT scores 140 points higher than white students to have the same chance of admission to elite private universities. But that isn’t the most troubling merit issue in college admissions, not according to Mr. Zakaria’s data. That distinction, in surprisingly disproportionate numbers and percentages, belongs to college athletes. From Mr. Zakaria:

Then there's the single largest deviation from merit in America's best colleges: their recruited-athletes programs. The problem has gotten dramatically worse in the past 20 years. Colleges now have to drop their standards much lower to build sports teams. These students, in turn, perform terribly in classrooms. A senior admissions officer at an Ivy League school told me, "I have to turn down hundreds of highly qualified applicants, including many truly talented amateur athletes, because we must take so many recruited athletes who are narrowly focused and less accomplished otherwise. They are gladiators, really." William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, has documented the damage this system does to American higher education—and yet no college president has the courage to change it.

Another margin note informs us that athletes make up 25% to 40% of the student body at Division III colleges, and 20% to 30% at Ivy League universities. And we all know why no college president has the courage to change it. The alumni. They love their alma mater’s athletic teams, and their alma mater, too, when they are successful. And when they are, so many alums are disposed to be their most generous. College athletics are also considered by many an important part of the experience of college life. In traditional, residential colleges, particularly those with successful athletic programs in major sports, that is not likely to change soon.

 

Mr. Zakaria closes by reminding us that the decline in America’s economic mobility is the most troubling trend in recent years—and that our colleges and universities play a leading role in opening the doors of opportunity to new generations of Americans. But if they are not providing access based on merit, at least in large part, then economic mobility in America will continue to decline, and the American dream will continue to be more likely realized elsewhere. But his conclusion sounds to me more like a portentous pronouncement, an elegiac epitaph, already written in different ways by so many others. And while the problems of American higher education are considerable, and the challenges formidable, the intersection of need and innovation has already brought the power of creative and corrective forces to bear on reimagining higher education.

 

So, if it all sounds a little too defeatist, a little too despairing, it is. Allow me to offer another perspective, one elaborated on in my last post, “The Future of Higher Education,” Hyde Park’s Corner (4.4.2013). American higher education is already well into a process of change, some would fairly assess it as a process of “disruptive innovation.” Central to the coming changes are the continuing improvements and innovations in on-line education—and more recently the evolution of massive, open, on-line courses (MOOCs) and works-in-process like continuing education through just-in-time mini-courses.

 

That doesn’t mean the complete demise of traditional, residential colleges, especially the well-heeled elite schools. But it does mean that many if not most will change dramatically or fail, that many will evolve hybrid programs, and that the new mainstream will likely be a very effective and cost-efficient set of on-line alternatives offered in a variety of settings for a variety of purposes. I can’t speak to the future of college athletics, but I find it hard to conceive of it surviving in anything like it’s current role or status. Yet, access will not be denied for any of the reasons that so rightly concern Mr. Zakaria. There are no physical limits or created barriers that would deny merit or broader access a place at this new table.

 

I have often referred to the evolution of this range of on-line higher education possibilities as the affordable education lifeboat for the nation’s lower- and middle-income students and families who can no longer afford the traditional, residential college experience. But it could be much more than that, more and better. Early research indicates that on-line education is very quickly becoming much more effective and efficient than most people understand, and that on-line students perform every bit as well and often better than students in traditional, residential classrooms. And it will only get better and more cost-efficient.

 

Yes, it will take time. And the changes, the failures and dislocations, will be as painful for many as the new alternatives are hope-filled and promising for so many more. Buckle-up, pilgrim.