Subjective admissions

How do you win admission to the college of your choice?  Bookstores are full of advice, and an entire industry has evolved devoted to helping kids take standardized examinations, get high grades, and prepare winning applications.

In yesterday's New York Times, Ruth Starkman talks about it from the Admission Office's point of view.  A couple of years ago, Starkman became an "outside reader" of applications for admission to Berkeley, one of seventy persons not otherwise affiliated with the university who handled one early phase in establishing rankings of Berkeley's 53,000 applications. 

Berkeley, like many schools, uses a "holistic" approach to admissions, meaning that admissions aren't based simply on a mathematical calculation of GPA and SAT numbers.  The university seeks to achieve "diversity" -- which now must be diversity of socio-economic background, rather than race -- as well as to achieve a balance among various student interests, personalities, and talents.  Berkeley, and the UC schools in general, thus attempt to apply the same subjective approach to admissions that has long been used by most upper tier private schools.

Starkman found the process confusing and not only subjective, but uncomfortably subjective.

My job as an application reader — evaluating the potential success of so many hopeful students — had been one of the most serious endeavors of my academic career. But the opaque and secretive nature of the process had made me queasy. Wouldn’t better disclosure of how decisions are made help families better position their children?

She didn't volunteer for a second year.

Long ago, I was the beneficiary of such a holistic approach by the university of my choice.  I had extremely high SAT scores.  I had a good -- but, certainly by today's inflated numbers, not spectacular  -- GPA.  I was rather active in the sort of student activities (the nerdy sort, like writing and drama) in which I was active.  I would have scored no points whatsoever for athletic prowess.  I had no obvious musical or artistic talents.  If we had ever heard of start-up companies, I wasn't the sort of high school geek who might have started one up.  I came from a small town, outside the state of California, and from a high school that was decent, but with no pretensions of excellence.

I never took a course to help me write an application essay.  Indeed, I reached the post office with my application in hand, realized that I still hadn't filled in the essay portion of the form, and dashed one off with a post office pen. 

Somehow, in balance, something about my application appealed to someone who counted, and my particular combination of qualities filled some sort of niche -- facts for which I've been forever grateful.  Would I have been admitted on strictly quantifiable data?  Maybe. Who knows?  I recently read an article by a fellow graduate of my university, now a prominent writer, who recalled spending four years as an undergraduate praying that whatever error had led to her admission would not be discovered until after she had graduated.

I knew the feeling.  And I know I wasn't alone.

But I digress into reminiscence.  Starkman's primary concern, I think, is that the subjectivity of Cal's admissions process leads to "unfairness" in admissions.  For a private school, this is less a concern.  Harvard and Yale can decide what kind of student body they want, and admit whomever might help them achieve that goal.  If that means admitting an excellent oboeist whose grades are lower than many unsuccessful applicants -- well, that's their prerogative.  No one has a right to be a Harvard grad.

For public universities, funded by the public and subject to suspicious observation by the legislature, the situation is a bit dicier.  The cry -- expressed by some comments to the Starkman essay -- is for a return to a mathematical cut-off, with no subjectivity.  If schools were to rely solely on SAT scores, uniform across the nation, this might be feasible, but no one wants to admit students based solely on their arguably innate abilities.  The best indication of whether an applicant will successfully complete his degree is what he has done with those "abilities" throughout four years of high school.

But once we start looking at the more reliable numbers of GPA, we re-enter the world of subjectivity.  A 4.0 average from a big city school with some selectivity (or self-selectivity) -- like Garfield in Seattle -- is not necessarily the same as a 4.0 from a small rural school in northern Idaho.  And the fact that many GPAs are today adjusted to recognize good work in AP classes -- so that a 4.40 average is now quite possible -- may increase the fairness of comparisons between students from different schools in some respects, but also prejudices kids applying from smaller schools unable to offer AP classwork.

I suspect "fair admissions" is an illusory goal, and the term is more useful as PR, a term designed to placate the tax-paying public.  Like private schools, public schools are forced to decide the kind of student body they seek, and to admit students who help achieve that goal.  That doesn't mean that the Cal student body would ideally be the same as the Stanford student body.  Being a public university system does force the UC schools -- politically -- to work harder in seeking representation from diverse factions of the state. 

 But the "disclosure" that Starkman believes the university should make to parents and their children should be an honest disclosure that admission is not a reward for doing everything right, or evidence that the admittees are "better," "smarter" or "more worthy" than those denied admission.  Admission from that large pool of students who are all obviously capable of university level study should be viewed as a lottery, an act of grace, one that serves the needs and goals of the university rather than rewards the unquantifiable merits of the applicants.

Such a disclosure would be honest and it would be transparent.  But it probably wouldn't be acceptable to a public that firmly believes in a hypothetical system capable of judging one 18-year-old as being more or less worthy than another for college admission.  And it might not, in the long run, be advantageous to a university that holds itself out as not only being diverse and representative, but also being highly meritocratic, the crown jewel of the California system of universities.

Continued reliance on a certain degree of hokum and bunkum in discussing college admissions, in other words, may be to everyone's advantage.