2.1: Selective Schools and Holistic Admissions

Alex Usher (AU): Hi Everyone. I’m Alex Usher and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast.

This is our first pod back from summer break. And although it’s back to school time for the entering class of 2023, it’s also when final year secondary school students in North America have to start thinking about the process of applying for fall 2024. Even though the next class is a year away, the recruitment, application and admissions cycle is already in high gear.

In most of the world, the application and admissions story is told mostly from the student’s point of view: in particular, the difficulty of succeeding on one’s exams, be they France’s baccalauréat, Italy’s matura, China’s gaokao or India’s National Eligibility cum Entrance Test. It is never told from the institutional point of view because institutions are not really seen to have any agency: they simply pick the students with the highest examination marks from among those who applied go them.

Most of the world: but not the United States of America. There, at least for that fraction of institutions known as “highly selective” – that is, expensive privates and flagship publics, the story of admissions is almost entirely institution-centric, where academic excellence is increasingly downplayed as a factor in what are known as “holistic admissions”, and where individual expressions of excellence are at least to some degree secondary to the somewhat more nebulous concept of “crafting a class”.

With us today to talk about all this is one of my favourite American education writers, Jeff Selingo, author of a number of books but most notably Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, which I named my 2020 Higher Education Book of the Year. Jeff spent a year — pre-COVID of course — embedded in a number of admissions offices across the US, and the picture he paints of how the system work is a vivid and extraordinary one, maybe the most important thing any non-American can read to understand how strange and uncanny the American higher education system really is.

If you’re not American, listen hard to this podcast. Drink in all the weird details about the admissions process, and the amount of effort selective institutions put into identifying things which are not academic achievement but which are nevertheless similarly correlated to wealth and privilege. These are then put to use not to measure individuals against according to a single, blended single standard of but rather to create some strange “collective” vision of merit which applies to entering classes as a whole rather than to individuals. Is this still, as many critics and cheerleaders alike claim, a “meritocracy”? I think you’ll enjoy Jeff’s answer. Let’s go to the interview.

Alex Usher (AU): Jeff, your book is about selections and admissions, not at universities generally, but rather at what are called “selective schools” or maybe even “highly selective schools”, or sometimes we're using the term “highly rejective schools” these days. But these are only a small fraction of institutions. How many schools are like this and how did they get this way?

Jeff Selingo (JS): There's about 200 schools that we could classify as selective, and there's varying degrees of selectivity. So how it's normally defined is they accept fewer than 50% of students who apply. So, you could have a school 45%, or you could have an ultra-selective institution like a Harvard or a Yale, which is under 5%. But they all kind of fall under this category of selective colleges and universities. Which again, 200 out of thousands of colleges and universities in the US means that they really are the minority of institutions in the United States. How they got this way is because they want to be this way. Largely they stayed the same size even as the population wanting to go to college, not only in the US but around the world grew and their selectivity became more of a feature rather than a bug. As a result, they became known as elite, as highly selective, as good name brands, highly ranked, and largely though because they decided that unlike a lot of other colleges and universities, including many publics in the US, rather than increase the size of their student body as the population and as demand grew, they decided to stay the same size in their freshman class, and their popularity just grew over time.

AU: Interesting. Well, what makes your book so interesting is the extent to which institutions gave you access to their side of the process and I'll come back to that in a second. But tell me, how does this look from the student side of things, the whole application process, which I guess is starting right about now in in the United States. What are the hoops that students have to go through to make it through this system to actually get to a highly selective institution come next fall?

JS: I think that's the one of the issues with it: we call it a system and it is not a system, right? We have thousands of colleges and universities, all of whom essentially run their own little fiefdoms when it comes to admissions. Now, many of them, a thousand plus schools are on the common app but many of them ask supplemental questions on that common app. So, even if you have one application, you're still doing extra things for these institutions. They have multiple deadlines. Their websites are incredibly confusing. It's not a great user experience, especially for something that you're only going to buy once or twice or maybe three times in your life. It's not something that you buy all the time. So you're coming to this really confused about the environment and the landscape that you're applying to. We have big publics and small public colleges and privates who discount tuition and sometimes they're cheaper than publics, right? So, there's all this confusing information about colleges and universities, not only from the perspective of the colleges themselves, but also in terms of the consumers and what they're getting from US News and World Report and other rankings and so forth. So, it is an incredibly inefficient system, and I use the word small ‘s’ in system. As a result, students apply to 10, 12, 15 schools and they don't really know which ones they're going to get into. They find out eventually over time, and then they have to make a decision, usually within a couple of weeks with very limited information until the last minute on how much it's going to cost them. So, the entire system is really geared towards the college and university. It's really on their side. They have all the advantages in this game and students have very few.

AU: Let's turn to the university side. You explore maybe in more detail than anyone I've ever seen the mechanics of crafting a class. Now, this is not a notion that exists outside the United States. So, for our non-American listeners, what does that mean exactly? And why do institutions think this way?

JS: Institutions have a bunch of priorities that they want to see going forward. They may want students from all 50 states or multiple countries. They may want full pay students. They have athletics and teams to fill. They might have a great debate team. So, they have all of these priorities that are fulfilled by the admissions office. So, unlike some other countries where you can take a test and you have a grade point average and you take so many classes in high school and that gets you into a university. Here in the US, it is not a meritocracy like that. It's never been and it never will be. If you apply to a college that has a 25% acceptance rate, as I always remind students, that doesn't mean you have a one in four shot of getting in. You might have a 90% shot of getting in if they have, if you have what they really want in terms of their priorities or you might have a 0% shot if you're bringing everything to the table that they that they already have in other applicants. So, a lot of this is really around building this community of not only students, like we have a mixture of majors, we have a mixture between men and women, we have a mixture between race and ethnicity, which now is a little bit more complicated in the US because of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but that's how they're trying to build this class. Then under all of this is this specter of money and how much it's going to cost for them to enroll this class. So, at some universities where they have more money than they know what to do with, that's less of an issue. But at most colleges and universities, it's a nice mixture between those who can easily pay those that they want and they could find more money for somewhere and those that come with money in some form and they get a discount on tuition.

AU: Precisely because a class is meant to be balanced on various dimensions that you just outlined, the definition of merit becomes very multifaceted, right? An institution's got to look at a lot of different things. You can look at musical talent, athletic talent and you're also trying to balance things across race, historical discrimination, hardship, and this is what they call holistic admissions. But I'm curious, what's the relationship between holistic admissions and crafting a class? Would holistic admissions exist even if the notion of crafting a class didn't?

JS: I doubt it because there has to be some crafting because even at a place like Harvard, if you just lined up everybody from 1-2000 or however many students are in their first-year class, you're still going to have way too many overqualified students for that, right? So, you can't just base it on a test score and a grade point average and say “everybody above that gets in and everybody below it doesn't get in” because you would still have too many applicants. So, you would still have to take other things into consideration, in which case holistic admissions comes into play. But you would at least start with some sort of bar that they have to get over and that doesn't really happen in holistic admissions. The year I was at Emory University, they had 30,000 applicants, and they don't put them through a system that says, ‘okay, everybody below x and y gets over the bar and then we look at them,’ they look at everybody. So, that's why you might have a point where a 1600 on the SAT is rejected, as I saw, which is a perfect score of course and a 1200 on the SAT gets in. Because that is what they're trying to build, they're trying to build that class. There’s been a lot of proposals around the idea of a lottery system in the US and that maybe we need to just move to a lottery. In that case, they would have a system where you would have to get over a minimum bar, probably again, combination of GPA and testing or some other sort of academic bar and then everybody would go into a pile. So, you would just basically pick out your class that way. That's been proposed hundreds and hundreds of times in the US and I highly doubt that's going to go anywhere because again, well, what if you pick every non-athlete, then how is a college, for example, supposed to fill 24 teams?

AU: One thing you talk about in your book is that holistic admissions is not static. Over time it's been drifting away from the academic part of the holistic criteria has been de-emphasized and it's moving towards other parts of the student profile. You said in your book that this is because of increasing numbers of applications that each institution is receiving but that seemed very counterintuitive to me. Why would institutions double down on an ever more complicated and expensive ways of judging students when application volumes are going up?

JS: It’s a great question. It’s because for most of these colleges, they're not just judging students necessarily on who is going to succeed there, but who's actually going to show up there too. Remember, even at a place like Harvard, 25% of students who get accepted then turn them down and don't go. So many of these schools are also trying to protect and project their yield rate, which is the number of students they accept who end up coming. Why is that important? Because the higher your yield rate, the lower your acceptance rate could be. If your yield rate is high enough, you know you're comfortable enough in rejecting a large number of students. But if you're not really confident in your yield rate and that more students might turn you down because you're the second-choice school for them, then you have to accept more students and that makes you look less selective. So, it's kind of this vicious circle in many ways. So that is why schools are always trying to figure out questions like: who really likes us? who's a really good fit for here? who's more likely to come here? They're always trying to look for these clues in the admissions process. In fact, Davidson College, which was one of the institutions that was profiled in my book, they had a term for this process. It was called LTE or Likelihood To Enroll, and it was something that they scored students on during the admissions process - what is their likelihood to enroll? Because if their likelihood to enroll is low, we're just going to reject them.

AU: That’s an interesting point and it was one of the more interesting points in the book, I thought, because at a certain level you can't craft a class. Tt's a crapshoot. Most schools are going to have 6-7 out of 10 students that they admit say no to them. Maybe not Harvard, maybe not Stanford, and those kinds of places. But at most of the selective institutions, it's going to be somewhere between 3-5 or 5-10. You don't know which of the students that you've enrolled in this carefully crafted class and then half of them - and who knows if it's the right half, or the wrong half, or the athlete half - say no to you. Why waste all this time on what is, in the end, still going to be a crap shoot?

JS: It is, and it's why I actually think that it's a little disingenuous of colleges and universities to talk about this idea of crafting a class and building a community. At the end of the day, all they're sending out, as I note in the book, are invitations. Some people will RSVP no to that in invitation, right? But they have become much more sophisticated. Data plays a much bigger role in college admissions than it did 10 or 20 years ago. And they become much more sophisticated now. It's been a little messed up, I will be honest with you, the last couple of years in post-covid and the increase of things like test optional admissions. Data's only as good as what you put into the system, right? Colleges had great data for years and that they could project pretty accurately. That is one of the more amazing things that I discovered during writing this book, I kept asking them, “but how do you know? How do you know? How do you know?” And they just kept saying, the data really shows us every year that this is who's going to come and who's not going to come. They know down to the dollar sometimes how much more money they have to give this student to get them to say yes. There was a real science to it. Then in 2020, the whole thing kind of blew up and they've been trying to figure it out. I think they're getting a little bit better at it now, three or four years later, but one of the factors that went into their data systems were SAT and ACT scores were test scores. Then, in the spring of 2020, all these schools went test optional. All these students were now applying to more schools, and applying to schools they never applied to before and wouldn't have applied to before, and they didn't have a test score, so the systems didn't quite work the way they were supposed to which is why we saw at some schools, they over-enrolled students because they didn't quite know exactly who was going to show up. But it is both an inexact and exact science, depending on who you talk to.

AU: Let me bring us back to holistic admissions for a second here. In theory, it's about seeing beyond achievement, and you make that distinction between achievement and merit. And that is, it's about understanding things about a student's context and background that allows one to see potential rather than privilege. I thought that was an interesting point. So, you go beyond the GPAs, you go beyond the SATs, which we know are biased towards family income and wealth and those kinds of things. But most of the ways that institutions have to look at those things like extracurricular records, personal essays, they're also kind of skewed towards wealth, aren't they? So how well do these measures work at counteracting privilege? And is there an institution out there that you think does it right?

JS: I don't think there's an institution that does it right. I think they try really hard in the recruitment process in going to high schools that have low numbers of students who go to college. We're starting to see this UVA, for example, just recently announced that they're going to essentially double down on schools in the state of Virginia that historically haven't sent many students to the university. I think that's where it starts, right? Because if the application never shows up in the admissions office, you can never even evaluate that student for admissions. But you're right, we talk about these holistic admissions and that again, dropping test scores which were largely advantageous to people who had money suddenly now equals the system out is obviously a false narrative because the entire thing, as the Dean of Admissions at Emory, John Latting, told me, the entire system can be really gamed when you think about it, right? So, in grades you have great inflation. In high school, you have teacher and counselor recommendations and nobody wants to give a bad recommendation. You have activities that, again, students who come from a privileged background could do multiple activities because they have a lot available to them. When you do have testing, you could get test prep. Essays, right? Essays could be coached. They largely are coached, they're edited, and now we have chat GPT right? So, there's all these things and you really never get a sense of the real student on the other side of the desk. I'm not quite sure unless you go into and meet all these students in person or you go to some sort of matching system, how we really kind of dispel all that or how we get rid of all that. No matter what new part of the application you come up with, someone's always going to try to figure out how to game it.

AU: In terms equaling out over privilege, you gave an example, I think it was from the University of Washington, where on the personal scale, I think it's called, people got points for coming from an underprivileged background, from coming from an underrepresented minority group, or for overcoming specific types of hurdles. I read that passage and I thought “hey, these are all really good ideas that could really even things out” but then I thought, “well, actually, selective schools have holistic admissions and they've been around for a couple of decades and they aren't making these elite institutions any more inclusive.” Why doesn't it work?

JS: Two reasons. One is in the case of the University of Washington, for example, that personal score, like it is at many universities, is only one part of the score. So, you might get a lot of plus points to be an underrepresented minority, for example, but then you might get dinged on the other side of the application when it comes to academics or test scores or things like that. So, the issue there is that there's a lot of things that are going obviously into the holistic admissions. While you might get gain on one side, you lose on another side. The other issue though, as Tony Jack who has written a couple books is constantly reminds us is that admissions is not access, financial aid is. So, even though you might get into some of these schools the ability to pay now at some of these very wealthy, very selective schools, they obviously will usually give you the money you need to go but that is not the case at the majority of universities in the country. So even if you get accepted, and I met many students who were accepted, they just couldn't pull it off financially. Even if they could pull it off for one year, and many of them tried, one of the biggest reasons, and Paul Tough will say this in his book, the number one predictor of success in college is family income, right? The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to graduate.

AU: In our last episode back in June, our guest was Zach Bleemer talking about the SCOTUS decision. So this is my obligatory follow-up question here, how much do you think the June Supreme Court decision will affect holistic decision making and class crafting?

JS: I don't actually think it will impact it that much. I will be very surprised. I think the numbers might decline a little bit when you look at the first-year class next fall at some of the most selective colleges, because I think they'll be still figuring out. But I think what they're going to do is moved to a system where they are increasing the top of the pipeline, which they can still do. There's a lot of outreach they can do at the beginning that they're still allowed to do. I think they will do that, and thus they will have more qualified underrepresented minorities in the applicant pool than they had before. My take is that in a year or two the numbers will be very similar to what they are now. Even in talking to some deans there's not as much concern as I think there is in the media about what's going to happen here. Now, again, we all could be wrong. We won't know for a year. Trust me they still wanted it. They wanted the Supreme Court go in the other direction because it makes their jobs a lot easier. But you know, I once asked a dean of admissions at a place where affirmative action was banned, how they did it, in terms of getting a very diverse class. He answered one word “work,” they worked at it. I think a lot of colleges and universities, and I know this is not a popular opinion, we're pretty lazy about recruiting pretty diverse classes. And they kind of leaned on the ability of using race in the admissions process. And now that they don't have to, they have to look for other ways to do it, and it can be done legally. We'll see how it works out in a year.

AU: I think you're saying you don't think the outcomes will change much, but the process might have to change?

JS: The process will have to change. Yes. The process, especially in what I would call the pre-application process, they're going to have to be much more ambitious about recruiting students who will fit what they need.

AU: I get how private universities might have chosen to go for the whole crafting a class thing, that makes sense to me. The restriction of opportunity or keeping opportunity scarce because that increases the value. Kevin Carey had a good article in the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago and he pointed out that a lot of flagship publics do exactly the same thing. So how did that happen? Didn't any state governments just stop their universities and say, “hey, wait a minute, maybe this is not a great idea”?

JS: No. The states loved it because they didn't have to pay as much money to the universities, right? This was a response largely by the publics of cutbacks in state funding to public universities. So, these public universities said we have to look elsewhere for students, international students and out-of-state students who could pay more to make up for the decline in state funding. My co-host of the Future U Podcast, Michael Horn, will argue that it's not just cutbacks in state funding, but all these universities also had these grand ambitions: more buildings, more academic programs, more amenities, things like that. Somebody had to pay for those. The state wasn't going to pay for them. The in-state residents weren't going to pay for them. So, they had to basically charge a lot of money to out-of-state residents. So, in many ways these public universities have become a lot like privates in that they're scarce resources for in-state students who pay less in tuition.

AU: I was reading another book about selections recently. It's called Meritocracy and the University: Selective Admissions in the US and the UK, and it's by Anna Mountford Zimbars. She contrasted the UK and US system this way: she said in the UK, the system is built to try to be fair to the student and in the US, it's about being fair to the university. Is that a fair characterization of the US system?

JS: I think it is. I think you will have every admissions dean now writing to me saying it isn't. Trust me, I think these are good people, but they are put in impossible positions. They are essentially selling a very expensive product to an increasingly skeptical public who doesn't have a lot of money. And at the highly selected places, they are trying to fit highly talented students into a small number of seats. So, no matter where they are, they probably sleep better at night at highly selected places because they don't have to worry about filling those seats, they're going to fill those seats. Where at other places they worry about actually literally filling them. But in either place they go into the job with eyes wide open, wanting to do the right thing, but the pressures from above, meaning presidents and boards, and the pressures from the outside, meaning politicians and the public and money, all push them in the direction as you say, of worrying much more about the institution than the student, and it's unfortunate.

AU: Last question. You said earlier in our discussion that you didn't think US universities were or ever had been meritocratic, so what are they?

JS: They're businesses. They're businesses that have to have a bottom line and have to make the budgets work every year, that operate large athletics and entertainment facilities, do research, and every year sell their product to students. It may be cynical but it is, it's a business and it's unfortunate. If we had fully publicly funded universities that didn't have to answer to that kind of really commercial entity then maybe things would be different. But we don't. Again, I think enrollment officers and admissions deans are put in sometimes very difficult positions to try to make everything work, to try to fill a class, to try to make it diverse, to try to please the baseball coach, to try to please the Chair of the English department, to try to please the donors and the chair of the board of trustees and the faculty who want ever better students and also to come in on budget. The list is never ending. When they don't make it work, there’s consequences. I have a lot of friends in the business, including some who lost their job over the last couple of years because they couldn't make all the numbers work.

AU: That's all the time we have for today. Jeff, thank you so much for being with us and good luck for the next until we meet again.

JS: It was great to be here. Thank you.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, the listener, for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for future podcasts, please get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be remaining as Minister of Education Ligia Deca, and we'll be talking about all things higher education in that country, as well as Ligia's own journey from being a student leader to being in charge. Bye for now.