Inside American Education (20 page)

This collusion process has been made easier by the remarkable similarity of tuitions among those in the cartel—despite
differences in urban or rural location, endowment income per student, local cost of living variations, the size of the student body over which the institutional overhead was spread, and other such economic considerations which normally lead to price differences. A Carnegie Foundation study found “widely different costs per student” among institutions.
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Yet in 1989-90, for example, the variation in tuition among the eight Ivy League colleges was less than 5 percent from the most expensive (Brown) to the least expensive (Cornell),
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even though Ivy League colleges are scattered from Manhattan to rural New Hampshire.

Officials of some colleges and universities admit not only to sharing information on financial aid offers to specific students but also to sharing information on pending tuition increases and faculty salaries.
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This has all the appearance of a multidimensional “price-fixing system that OPEC might envy,” as the
Wall Street Journal
characterized it
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—and a clear violation of American anti-trust laws when businessmen do such things.

THE ADMISSIONS PROCESS

As college and university admissions have become a major operation, especially in large and selective institutions, they have often become the province of administrators more so than faculty members. Moreover, even at elite colleges, the personnel attracted to college admissions are seldom themselves part of the intellectual elite. Yet their job is to select students unlike themselves, to be taught by professors unlike themselves, for careers unlike theirs. It can hardly be surprising that admissions personnel are drawn toward non-intellectual criteria and toward ideas not unlike the notion of judging “the whole person,” as found among educators at the pre-college level. Over the years, all sorts of criteria from popular psychology and sociological speculation have assumed increasing weight visa-vis such standard intellectual criteria as academic records and test scores.

The net result has been that the highest test scores and even a perfect 4.0 grade point average in high school are no guarantee of admission to colleges where other students are accepted
with uninspiring high school grades and SAT scores hundreds of points below the school average. At Amherst College, for example, among those applicants from the class of 1991 who scored between 750 and 800 on the verbal SAT, less than half were admitted—while 26 other students who scored below 400 on the same test were admitted.
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A very similar pattern is found at Stanford University, which rejected a majority of those applicants who scored between 700 and 800 on the verbal SAT, while admitting more than a hundred other students who scored below 500 on the same test.
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Duke University likewise rejected 35 applicants who scored 750 and above on the verbal SAT while accepting 293 students who scored more than 200 points lower.
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Among the non-academic criteria which help explain such anomalies are personal qualities (real or imagined by the admissions committee), geographical distribution, alumni preferences, and ethnic “diversity” or racial quotas, however one chooses to phrase it.

The general mindset behind the weight given to non-academic criteria was expressed by the dean of admissions at Harvard:

… the question we ask is: how well has this person used the opportunities available to him or her? A young man from the Canadian prairies will have different opportunities and challenges from those faced by the young woman from a selective suburban high school. The committee’s task is to understand—in the context of the candidate’s interests and talents—how well he or she has risen to challenges and taken advantage of opportunities.
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In other words, the admissions committee takes on not only the task of judging “the whole person,” but also of judging the whole person’s whole context—a task which some would have left to God on Judgement Day. Nothing daunted, the admissions director declared, “we are trying to assess character and other personal qualities such as energy, self-discipline, and generosity.” To this end, they require the student to write “a comprehensive self-portrait” and to have “a personal interview with one of our alumni/ae and/or a member of our staff.”
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Columbia University’s distinguished dean Jacques Barzun long ago saw through this kind of “passion for fuzzy psychologizing” and declared: “No human being at any age should be asked to
display worthy motives on command.” In such a competition “the advantage goes to the precocious worldling who has found out ‘the ropes,’ or the instinctive hypocrite.”
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If this judgment seems harsh, consider the recent case of a criminal fugitive who gained admission to Princeton under an assumed name by claiming to be “a self-educated ranch hand whose mother was dying of leukemia in Switzerland.” He, in fact, graduated from Palo Alto High School, across the street from Stanford University.
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He knew the ropes.

Putting aside the very large question whether any admissions committee could possibly accomplish the task of assessing how well individuals have utilized their varying opportunities, the question remains: What purpose would that serve anyway? It might well be more of a personal achievement for a boy from an utterly blighted family, growing up in desperate social conditions, to have taught himself the rudiments of reading and writing than for a privileged lad from an expensive boarding school to have mastered Einstein’s theory of relativity. But is college admissions a reward for past moral merit or an assessment of future intellectual accomplishment? It is by no means clear that most admissions committees have chosen the latter—or have even distinguished the two in their own minds.

Emphasis on non-academic criteria has in some colleges and universities led to friction between the faculty and the admissions offices that determine which of the applicants become their students. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, faculty complaints that the students they were receiving were not as sharp as in earlier years were confirmed by data which showed that the admissions office was admitting a smaller percentage of the top-scoring students than they once did. Back in 1968, nearly two-thirds of all applicants who scored between 750 and 800 on the quantitative SAT were offered admission to M.I.T. By 1987, less than two-fifths of such students were being offered admission.

It was not that there was a decline in the number of applicants to M.I.T. with such high performances. On the contrary, there were even more students scoring in these lofty ranges who applied to M.I.T. than before. The admissions office just did not admit as many of them.
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Although the M.I.T. admissions director raised questions about the validity of SAT
scores, the faculty complaints originated from their own observations of “a progressive decline in the quality of the performance of students, as compared with classes of earlier years.”
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In other words, the test scores and the faculty observations both told the same story, even if the admissions director did not want to believe it.

At Harvard, the faculty has likewise been at odds with the admissions committee.
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Despite the committee’s enthusiasm for non-intellectual criteria, based on psychological and sociological speculation, there has been no empirical evidence asked or given to substantiate the predictive validity of those beliefs.
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One study of the admissions committee itself characterized its members as people who had
not
been “brilliant students” themselves, nor “truly original and independent and imaginative minds,”
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but they shared a belief that they could “identify the nuances in individual character and ability,” while seeking students with “academic competence rather than academic superiority.”
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As Harvard’s dean of admissions put it:

We want to serve the best students from all backgrounds and we’re trying to choose people who will be leaders later on. … If we’re driven exclusively by academic qualities, we would have a much less rich and interesting student body than we currently have.
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What will look “rich and interesting” to superficial people can of course differ greatly from what scholars who are masters of their respective intellectual disciplines will find to be students able to plumb the depths of what they have to offer. Dulllooking nerds can revolutionize the intellectual landscape and produce marvels of science, even if their life stories would never make a good movie or television mini-series.

Nothing in the literature generated by admissions committees at other colleges and universities suggests that they are fundamentally different from Harvard’s admissions committee. This literature abounds in statements about seeking students with “leadership” potential, “commitment,” or other elusive non-academic qualities, which will supposedly make them valuable assets to the larger society in later years. Typically, not a speck of evidence accompanies such sweeping assertions. It is a field with “an abundance of hunches and
impassioned beliefs,” as one study concluded.
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Empirically, however, none of the assertions tested had any predictive power when it came to measuring the later-life impact of individuals.
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As David Riesman has noted, in a study of American higher education for the Carnegie Foundation, deans and admissions officials “are rarely familiar with institutional research” and rely instead on selected anecdotes about the success of some “high-risk” student, while ignoring “the students who quietly drop out or who stick it out in bitterness and humiliation.”
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Historically, elusive concepts like “leadership,” “character,” and the like were among the ways used to reduce the proportions of Jewish students admitted to Harvard and other selective institutions. Today, similar concepts are used to increase or decrease the enrollment of whatever groups the admissions committee wants increased or decreased, whether for the committee’s own reasons or in response to various outside pressures. An outgoing dean of admissions at Stanford quipped, “If we only admitted students based on SAT scores, I wouldn’t have a job.”
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There was more truth than humor in this remark. Sweeping presumptions about what admissions committees are capable of judging not only justify a costly administrative empire, with far-flung operations extending across the country and overseas, but also feed the egos of those who imagine themselves to be performing a difficult and vital task.

Self-delusions may be no more peculiar to academic bureaucrats than to business executives. However, the delusions of the latter receive swift and brutal correction from the marketplace, whether in the form of red ink or takeover bids. It is the insulation of academia from such forces which allows individual or collective delusions to persist, and fashions to flourish virtually unchecked.

Admissions Tests

Although the frantic pressure of students trying to gain admittance to a relative handful of prestigious colleges and universities is a phenomenon less than half a century old, there were standards of admission, even back in the days when virtually all applicants met those standards and virtually all were
admitted. Dartmouth has been credited with setting forth the first explicitly articulated set of admissions standards in the early 1920s,
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but even before then some colleges had their own entrance examinations or required certain grades in high schools, and in some other colleges the registrar simply decided unilaterally whom to let in. Harvard and Yale, for example, gave their own tests back in the nineteenth century.
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Nationally, the picture was one of chaotically varying standards and some leading institutions were clearly insular and inbred. Harvard’s students once came predominantly from elite preparatory schools and, up to the end of World War II, one-fourth of entering freshmen were the sons of Harvard parents.
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One of the major factors in breaking the near-monopoly of private preparatory schools in supplying students to the elite colleges was the development of a nationwide, standardized, college entrance test. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is the best known and most widely used of these tests. It is taken bv more than two and a half million high school students annually. The American College Testing program examination (ACT) is taken by several hundred thousand students annually. These standardized tests made it possible to compare students from coast to coast, from the most diverse schools, with radically different standards. They enabled elite colleges, especially, to select more socially diverse students, who were at the same time an elite of ability. As college attendance expanded substantially between the 1950s and the 1960s,
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use of the Scholastic Aptitude Test increased approximately ten-fold—from more than 80,000 test-takers in 1951 to more than 800,000 in 1961.
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Since the 1960s, much controversy has developed around standardized admissions tests, with the SAT being the prime target, as befits the leading test. Various critics have claimed that such tests are not good predictors of academic success or life success, in general or especially not for disadvantaged minorities; that they have cultural bias, or that they test quick, superficial thinking rather than penetrating analytical reasoning. Although there has been a vast outpouring of writings on both sides of these controversies, there is no reason why some of these issues must be settled by debate. It should be axiomatic that the SAT, like everything human, is imperfect, so that the
relevant practical question is how it compares to alternative tests (ACT, IQ, etc.) and to other criteria, such as high school grades and teacher recommendations.