Down the College Admissions Rabbit Hole...and a Simple Solution for Digging Our Way Out

The Varsity Blues scandal isn’t the only sign that the American dream of access to higher education is turning into a nightmare—for students, for their parents, and even for the our nation's most coveted universities.

In addition to the substantial networks of bribery and racketeering uncovered by the Varsity Blues investigation, recent news also includes lesser known college admissions stories. Harvard and the University of California Regents are both contending with lawsuits or potential lawsuits alleging discriminatory admissions practices. Finally, there are a growing number of reports about students already in college, and students aspiring to college, suffering from unprecedented rates of anxiety, depression and other stress-related illnesses…

First the admissions lawsuits.

Both suits seek to protect the interests of Asian American applicants, even though this group is significantly over-represented at both Harvard and UC Berkeley. Most observers agree that this round of litigation will likely trigger more lawsuits too.

Furthermore, the present suits signal a backlash from an earlier generation of admissions-related legal contests, first to instate affirmative action, and then to reverse affirmative action.

[In 1978 (UC Regents vs. Bakke) the US Supreme Court upheld the practice of affirmative action. In 1996, Californian’s passed Prop 209 prohibiting preferential admissions treatment based on race, ethnicity or gender. In 2016 the Supreme Court allowed only for narrow uses of race in admissions policies under the umbrella of a vague notion defined as “holistic” admissions criteria.]

This is one rabbit hole—endless litigation…

As soon as one racial or ethnic group gains ground, alternate groups see a new threat to their own families’ interests, and so new rounds of lawsuits make their way to the courts.

The competing principles—equity-based preferential treatment (“affirmative action”) on the one hand, versus the notion of individual merit and equal rights under the law on the other—foster a cycle of endless litigation.

Admissions competition at the most coveted schools results in a zero-sum war between social groups, as positive educational aspirations and opportunities turn into drivers of social animosity rather than social cohesion and tolerance. Applicants and courts become pawns of larger racial tensions; our best institutions of higher learning become the targets.

The other rabbit hole is the cycle of endless hyper-competition.

Indeed, recent news includes frequent reports of a mental health crisis affecting students already in college and those aspiring to get into their top choice schools.

While macro demographic trends are shrinking applicant pools overall—and many colleges actually have very low barriers to admission—the demographics of those completing high school is also impacting admissions numbers regionally at different schools. Some schools are threatened with closure, and others contending with more and more applicants.  

As such, the bar for entry at the most coveted schools is edging higher and higher as more students already suffer growing anxiety.

Students in college, stressed by ballooning student loan debt and fears about outsourcing and automation, experience growing pressure to perform at the top of their class.

Meanwhile, younger students, especially girls, as early as middle school, are also suffering from stress due to anxiety about excelling both in school and at extracurricular pursuits. (Ironically, the Harvard suit alleges that admissions officers actually lower Asian “personal traits” scores because Asians are perceived—stereotyped?—as being excessively competitive and achievement focused!)

The crisis is one where the tail wags the dog—our nation being the dog, and outdated admissions practices and norms (including “legacy” privileges and the myth of objectively measured “merit”) being the tail.

Rich people and well-connected alumni getting their kids special access with influence or money is not new, but spending tens of thousands of dollars or more in bribes, risking career and reputation—that’s a sign of how distorted the admissions process has become. The problem will only intensify as students strive to be ever more competitive in relation to their peers.

It’s a rabbit hole for in-demand universities too—

they spend valuable resources vetting thousands of applications every year and striving to give the inherently biased “holistic” selection process a veneer of objectivity and fairness, an impossible goal.

Here’s how one admissions application reader summed it up:

“In principle a broader examination of candidates is a great idea…some might say it’s an ethical imperative….In practice, holistic admissions raises many questions about who gets selected and why….First and foremost, the process is confusingly subjective, despite all the objective criteria I was trained to examine.” (Starkman, Ruth. “Confessions of an Application Reader,” New York Times, 8/1/2013)

The ambiguities and subjectivity of the process leave schools susceptible to new cycles of litigation.

How can anyone devise an “objective” scale to measure and rank things like athletic accomplishments and music ability and so forth?

Is playing the violin worth more points than playing the ukulele? Is a track ribbon worth more than a scuba diving certification? Where does cheer leading rank compared to studying French abroad? How many application readers do schools need to hire and train every year to do this work?

Even if we could make some imaginary admissions yardstick from all this data, do we really want to telegraph to our kids exactly what criterion is worth how many points, further fomenting an unhealthy race to the top?

Even reliance on “quantifiable” measures—test scores and GPA calculations (cheating aside)—raises questions about objectivity and fairness. Many experts claim standardized exams themselves are culturally biased, and we know that grades in high school can be assigned according to idiosyncratic criteria that vary from teacher to teacher, school to school, and district to district.

It’s clearly time to take two steps back from the accepted college admissions practices we have chained ourselves to and find a way forward that respects our most common values—work ethic, self-discipline, creativity, diversity of all kinds, and, yes, in due measure, “merit” too (the brightest, the fastest, the highest scoring…). We need to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but clearly there’s a deep crisis in plain view.

Here’s one simple solution we can use for admissions, modeled on a well-established practice…

Take for example the practice used to deal with the scarcity of affordable housing… Why couldn’t universities with highly competitive applicant pools select some portion of students using a random lottery?

The highly competitive schools could rely exclusively on a lottery system or opt for a gentler transition away from traditional applicant rating practices by awarding some portion of their open seats, say 25% to 40%, by lottery, to all applicants who meet qualifying academic benchmarks set by the respective university.

To be an applicant in the lottery, therefore, would require meeting all qualifying criteria the school set as a baseline for eligibility.

For more elite schools, such criteria would likely be more stringent, but based on a limited set of quantifiable indicators nonetheless (diploma, GPA, prerequisite courses, SAT scores…) and measured against a fixed benchmark, not a “curve.”

There would be no “protected category” requirement to be in the lottery (like the income qualification in a housing lottery)—equal access and an equal chance to be selected for all who met the published eligibility requirements (regardless of race, income, gender, disability, personality traits, etc.) should be the norm. (Schools may need to limit how many “need-based” applications can be admitted through the lottery and include some baseline financial ability requirements for applicants.)

Once the first x% of seats are filled by lottery selection, admissions officers would award the remaining seats using the kinds of “holistic” schemes they use presently, as laws allow.

There are still some winners and losers based on chance, but across the board many more students could look forward to seeking entry to their top choice schools based on strong qualifications but without facing a spiraling, hyper-competitive contest with their peers and regardless of their cultural traits, hobbies, athletics, etc., and regardless of gender, race and ethnicity and free from suspicion about the biases of admissions officers.

Even a partial use of a lottery system would be a great pressure relief valve at this time in our nation’s history.

Colleges would have an alternative to flawed “holistic” practices and a simple tool, insulated from litigation risks, for fostering a truly diverse student body.

Finally, implementing a substantial lottery system means America can free itself from manic race-to-the-top pressures and free our country and its best schools from admissions-based racial animosities. And, who knows...isn’t it conceivable that admissions lotteries will prove to have other unexpected benefits, when a more random cross section of American families get sustained access to the best schools?

Image for this post: compliments of Gerd Altman, Pixabay.com