Admissions Frenzy Useful Data From Colleges Would Help Applicants

Admissions Frenzy - Useful Data From Colleges Would Help Applicants

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Our most recent engagement with this topic has given us an unexpected feeling of solidarity with U.S. News & World Report. When defending its much-criticized rankings, U.S. News routinely makes the point that, from the public's point of view, "more information" about higher education "is always better." We have not joined U.S. News in the business of ranking colleges, but we do have new reason to echo its underlying point.

In our current issue (November), we publish our first annual "College-Admissions Survey." The idea behind this package of articles was to explore the tension at the heart of today's admissions process. "Here is the problem with the college-admissions system," the special section begins. "It is a vast and intricate bureaucracy designed to do one thing, and it does that very well; but it is under intense social and economic pressure to do something different -- something more or less directly at odds with its supposed goal."

What the admissions process is supposed to do, we emphasize, is the complex and subtle work of matching millions of students with thousands of colleges. That is what most admissions officers and guidance counselors think is their real function -- and on the whole, they are successful in what they achieve. The American higher-education establishment is more open, varied, accommodating, and flexible than any other country's. Most students instinctively understand that; as we point out, no more than 10 percent of each year's graduating high-school seniors are involved in the competition for places at selective colleges.

The problem is what happens with that 10 percent. For some of them (and their parents), the admissions process is not simply the search for an institution at which to study; it is also the hunt for an impressive trophy. The contrast between the "real" admissions system and the trophy hunt was the organizing principle of our discussion:

"The real admissions system is creative in finding room for everyone. The trophy admissions system is a you-versus-me competition for a limited number of spaces at a handful of schools. The real system emphasizes how many places a student might be happy. The trophy system emphasizes how few. The real system puts its greatest stress on what a student will do after he or she starts college. The trophy system cares only where he or she gets in."

As a specific way to explore the distortions created by the trophy hunt, one of our authors, Don Peck, concentrated on the concept of "selectivity" -- a word often used as popular shorthand for the idea that the harder it is to be admitted to a given college, the better that college must be. Valuing goods for their exclusivity is an innate human trait, but it seems to have gone further in college admissions than in many other realms. How admissions-mania could have become so ferocious for some Americans, while leaving most others uninterested, has yet to be fully explained. Perhaps it reflects the fanciful belief that attending a name-brand college ensures a happy life and successful career. No doubt it involves many other knotty connections between education, money, and status. In order to demonstrate the flaws in "selectivity" thinking, we produced a one-page list of colleges ordered simply on how difficult they were, on average, to get into -- and then undertook to explain why that very list illustrated the inherent slipperiness, and unhelpfulness, of the selectivity concept.

For instance, the average selectivity of a college reveals little about any individual student's prospects for admission; selectivity may vary significantly depending on whether the applicant is male or female, or has applied early decision or not, or according to many other characteristics. Selectivity can also be affected by factors that have no bearing on education at all -- such as whether college applicants in general are trending toward urban or rural campuses. In short, the article portrays selectivity as a very muddy metric that offers only limited insight into individual colleges or how they compare with one another. "There is something inherently attractive about trying to rate schools based on their selectivity," the article concludes. "Such a rating seems to provide clarity. But the clarity is an illusion." The article itself is titled "The Selectivity Illusion."

In a variety of other ways, the magazine's college-admissions package explores the problems with a trophy approach to college admissions or a "ranking" approach to colleges. Oddly, our effort was introduced to the world, in a prominent New York Times article published just before The Atlantic's issue came out, as if it were a fresh entry into the rankings derby. The headline of the article was "A New College Ranking System, Wanted or Not." After citing admissions officials who worried that, whatever the disclaimers, only the chart would get attention, the article went on to implicitly illustrate the danger, describing the chart at length while making only incidental reference to the argument that accompanied it. Oh, well. We received many expressions of alarm from members of the admissions community who knew about our special section only from the initial reports. We have heard back from many of those same people, who have by now seen the real thing -- and, having seen it, say they will distribute it to their staffs.

The episode certainly offers a lesson with regard to best-laid plans. But the remaining question is what colleges can do about the powerful impulse toward trophy thinking, and the rankings that are both its fuel and its consequence. Neither of those phenomena will go away. One of us (Fallows) has seen this firsthand, from a two-year stint as the editor of U.S. News. The college rankings are so fundamental to that magazine's identity and franchise that there is no chance of their being abandoned. They have steadily been refined and improved -- most notably with the recent, welcome decision to drop "yield," or the percentage of admitted students who actually enroll, from the equation. (Whatever reasons colleges have for going overboard with binding early-decision plans, they can no longer blame U.S. News.) And the popularity of that and similar rankings indicates an undeniable demand for "hard" information about how colleges compare.

The demand for "accountable" information is present in every other part of society. The recent best seller Moneyball is about a new and radically more accurate way of predicting how baseball players will perform. Medical professionals are subjected to nationwide statistical comparisons -- about the drugs they prescribe, the fees they charge, the way their patients fare after operations. Even European universities are being asked to come up with quantifiable measures of their performance.

American universities can either rail against this trend or take steps to bring out its most positive and productive sides. The trophy-hunt view of higher education can't be tsked-tsked away. It must be responded to with better, more useful information about the standards by which colleges really hope to be judged.

It's not hard to imagine what kinds of information could provide the basis for an alternative approach. Despite differences in their emphasis, two informal affiliations of mainly selective colleges, the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, have amassed extensive data on their member institutions. NSSE and COFHE themselves obey strict guidelines not to release information about specific colleges. But there is nothing preventing individual institutions from more freely publishing data that would give students (and their parents) a better sense of which college would be the right match for them. For instance:

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  How financial aid in the second and later years compares with first-year offers.
  
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  The real costs of attending (including textbooks and, where appropriate, off-campus housing).
  
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  "Persistence" (remaining enrolled) and graduation rates for enrollees, and how those rates compare with what might be predicted from the entering class's demographics.
  
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  How often the institution uses its own resources for student research grants, whether for laboratory science or overseas study, instead of expecting students to apply for outside support.
  
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  Rates of placement in graduate schools.
  
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  Indicators of student engagement and enthusiasm about the institution, such as extent of interaction with professors and availability and quality of campus activities.
  

Granted, there is a risk that someone would scrape together such information to create yet another ordered ranking (although the sheer diversity of sources and formats would make that difficult). Even so, an ever-wider range of metrics would eventually dilute the power of any one "best colleges" list. It's also true that such disclosures might never become universal. The greatest resistance might come from some of the most "desirable" universities, which may look better when judged by input -- the traits of their admittees -- than by measurable output.