Some thoughts about transparency in college admissions

I gave a keynote speech at the annual conference of the Center for Enrollment Research Policy and Practice last month, and it occurred to me that some of you might find it interesting. The following is the text I talked from (with one joke that I extemporated added to the text because I remember it – there was several others that went down well, but they are lost to posterity).

I should start by saying I’m not an expert on the admissions process or on enrollment management, although thanks to my association with the Center and attending this conference a few times I know much more than a normal professor would. Or should. I’m not an administrator.. I’m a college teacher and a philosopher, and those roles each give me different reasons for humility when addressing the people who take real responsibility for managing our institutions. So please don’t take what I am going to say as criticism or as telling you how to do your jobs. It’s neither. (I know when people say that you shouldn’t take what they are going to say as criticism that usually means they are going to criticize you but…. well, I’m not). What we try to do as philosophers is offer intellectual resources to people to help them see problems slightly differently, and thereby perhaps to find better solutions – not to tell them what the solutions are. And it’s a good thing our job isn’t telling people what the solutions are since I don’t know what they are. As you’ll see.

I was asked to talk about transparency in admissions, and I’m going to do that, but I am also going to talk a little bit about transparency in other areas of our shared enterprise.

One of the immediate triggers for the theme of this year’s conference was the Varsity Blues scandal. On the one hand the scandal was… scandalous…. On the other, it involved behaviors that, while they fell the wrong side of the line we draw between legal and illegal behavior, reflect an underlying view, held not only by the perpetrators, that the line is kind of arbitrary. What the frauds wanted was to be able to buy places at the colleges their children wanted to attend. Most things can be bought, and the rich are used to being able to buy them.

One, tempting, riposte to their thought would be ‘Places cannot be bought; they can only be earned through merit”. But our existing practices already violate that principle. To some extent, subject to some threshold of “merit”, and only at high price, places can be bought, directly. But, also, to some extent, with a certain level of probability, so can “merit”, as it is standardly understood: you can buy high quality tutoring for the SAT, expensive places in private high schools, expensive piano, violin and acting lessons, and, even if your child attends a public school, off-season participation in the sports success in which helps in admissions. Whatever talent you have, money helps you make the most of it. It helps quite a lot. I’m not asking you to be especially sympathetic, but it is surely not surprising, in the current social and political environment, that highly privileged and entitled people who are used to buying what they want feel slightly miffed when the college place of their choice isn’t directly purchasable. Maybe they think that fudging a bit on the application forms isn’t so different from fudging a bit on their taxes, which they are confident that many of their friends are doing, and quite possibly, some of them do occasionally. (When I say ‘fudging’, by the way, I mean…lying. And when I say ‘a bit’ I mean…a lot.[1]

Most of you were not shocked by the scandal. But a lot of people who don’t know our industry well were shocked, not just because the behavior was scandalous, but because the scandal highlighted some of the many ways in which individual “merit” is superseded by other factors in admissions, factors that we take for granted but, to others, seem surprising at best and shocking at worst. I was struck last semester by the excitement a group of my freshmen, one of whom had acquaintances caught up in the scandal, displayed as they shared stories of the various, they think nefarious, ways that candidates gain preference in the admissions system.

In other words – it shone a light on our industry in a way that made us, briefly, more transparent than we usually are.

Let’s talk a bit about transparency. Transparency’s not an all-or-nothing matter, but it comes in degrees. Suppose your windscreen is fogged up on the inside, and a bit dirty on the outside. Put on the defogger, and it becomes less opaque, but not fully transparent. Clean the outside and you have something approaching full transparency. Paint the window black, and you can’t see a thing, even if your defogger is great.
Transparency not only admits of degrees, but is relative to the observer. It’s more or less difficult to see through something depending on where you are in relation to it and how good your eyesight is. And, we see anything better if we’ve have seen before, and if we’ve been trained to look at it. The glass covering the Mona Lisa is just as clean for me as it is to an art historian, but even so we register different things. To me, it’s just a picture of someone with an unnerving smile. We’ll see why this matters soon.

One of the most opaque features of selective higher education is its mission. It’s opaque partly because there is real disagreement among the stakeholders, and even within each group of stakeholders, about what our purposes are; partly because ‘mission statements’, which have numerous purposes apart from stating what the mission is, try to paint the institution in the best possible light; and partly, because ideology plays a convenient role of rationalizing behaviors that aren’t entirely honorable. There’s a cultural assumption, for example, that higher education is a means to equalizing opportunity and facilitating social mobility. For individuals, selective higher education is indeed a valuable way of moving up, but as a whole we do not seem to play that role for society. To have any chance of doing so the socio-economic profile of our student bodies would have to be the exact inverse of what it is, because we’d have to be moving massive numbers of students up the ladder that wealthier families have all sorts of ways to prevent their children from falling down. Our enrollment practices would have to change drastically. If you tried to do that, you’d be stopped, by leaders, by alumnae, and, let’s not forget, by professors, who, at least those that do much undergraduate teaching, are quick to complain if their students have nor already received the kind of massive investments that, in our society, are not available to most middle and lower income children.
I’m not complaining about the fact that we do not facilitate social mobility. We could do more good in that respect, and less harm, than we do, but not much, because we are not ivory towers insulated from the real world; but framed by a social environment that has unequal opportunity built into its fabric. I’m just pointing out that the myth of social mobility fogs up the windscreen, making our mission itself somewhat opaque.

Others will say more about this tomorrow, but I’d like to propose that we try to be more transparent about one element of our mission: The duty we have to attend to the public good. At minimum, we are recipients of considerable public largesse — even private colleges receive large amount of public money, some of it opaquely in the form of tax credits and tax free growth of 529s and endowments. Selective public institutions enroll future public servants – nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers, social workers, counsellors – and, in particular, they enroll large numbers of the future leaders of those fields. The same is true of professions which, though mainly pursued in the private sector, have important impacts on the public good – human resource managers, accountants, and, depending on your viewpoint, maybe bankers and professional investors. Even if we understand how limited our capacity is to facilitate social mobility, seeing our mission as guided substantially by the public good helps us think a bit differently about merit – which, according the principle I entertained – but did not endorse! — earlier, should be the sole basis of admissions.

Because instead of seeing merit as something possessed by the applicant, we see it as something possessed by the cohort that we create, in relation to the institution they inhabit, and the public good to which, in concert, they can contribute.
Demographic changes are well under way in America that mean that increasing number of college enrollees will be Hispanic, increasing numbers will be working class, and increasing numbers will come from low income families. The public is changing, and our enterprise should be calibrated better to serve the good of that public.
This gives us two kinds of very good reason to seek to create access for members of these growing populations. One is so that the internal diversity of the class prepares all the students, including those who are not from those populations, better to serve them. The other is that we have reasons for conjecturing that, on average, members of those new populations are more likely to use the gains they make from higher education for the public good.

So that’s how we should redefine merit – not in terms of past achievement but in terms of the optimal prospective contribution that our educational resource can make to the public good. (Note, optimal, not maximal, because the public good isn’t everything we should care about).

Optimal prospective contribution is a property of the cohort not reducible to the properties of individuals, because of interaction effects. But also because, for all but the wealthiest institutions, their ability to enroll one kind of student is limited by the enrollment of other kinds of student. Specifically, students who can pay more than the cost of enrollment can cross-subsidize those who cannot pay as much as the cost of enrollment. Students who can afford to pay more the cost of enrollment will, on average, anyway, succeed in the competition for positions that affect the public good, so we have to enroll some of them so as to improve the quality of their influence. As well as because they contribute the resources that enable us to equip other students better to serve the public good.

With all that said, let’s return to transparency and opacity.

Opacity of at least three kinds works against the new populations. You’ve all thought a lot about the first two, but my guess is that you’ve thought less about the third.

i) In admissions processes – they need to know what they need to do, and need to know that, in fact, the institutions are actually accessible to them, otherwise they won’t apply. And transparency is not just a matter of stating average SAT/ACT scores, GPAs, etc, and saying that we seek diversity, and stating that legacies, and athletes, get preference, and publicizing the price at which admissions standards are lowered. There are other ways of being opaque. Consider this Columbia admissions question which a counsellor vented about on twitter a couple of weeks ago:
“what exhibits, lectures, theatre productions and concerts have you liked best in the last year?”

Now, I know that you can all think of excellent counter-cultural answers to that question that you would reward with lots of admissions points. But many of those we need to enroll see that question and think – wrongly, but not absurdly – that it requires them to have gone to exhibits, lectures, theatre productions, and concerts, because, although it is transparent to us, it is not transparent to them. They look at the question the way that I look at the Mona Lisa, whereas we look at it the way that an art historian looks at the Mona Lisa. And the way I look at the Mona Lisa is entirely sensible!

ii) Financial aid. What someone with the relevant background sees as a discount-able sticker price, a student from a low-income family see as the price they’d have to pay. I regularly teach students who should have gone to SLACS where I know they’d have incurred less debt than at UW Madison: when I ask why they didn’t, they just say ‘my family couldn’t afford it”. The net price calculators improve matters, but they are challenging to use: for many prospective students the net price calculator is a defogger for a windscreen the outside of which is really filthy.

iii) Third, and this is what you’ll have thought less about, though I obsess about it: The quality of instruction. There’s a lot of bad teaching, and avoiding it requires institutional knowledge that more advantaged students have more access to (and less advantaged students have less access to). “Take the teacher not the class”. “Take smaller classes” ; “Find professors who like teaching” “Go to office hours” (‘what do I say there?”). “Take classes you’ll enjoy”. If your parents or siblings or uncles or aunts attended a selective college, or if you’re in the Greek system, or if you have had the right advice in high school, or if you aren’t too worried about getting a major that enhances your earning power, you are much better placed to navigate the problem of instruction than otherwise. High quality instruction is a scarce resource on a campus. I’m convinced that the worst instruction has negative effects on enrollment, especially of the more vulnerable students¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬, at least in the Midwest, because, especially for less advantaged students, the response to poor instruction is, too often, a sense of personal failure, rather than of justified anger.

Would transparency improve things? Greater transparency of the kinds I’ve described in admissions and financial aid would enhance our ability to enroll new populations, by enhancing their ability to see opportunities that they really want. And I have complete confidence that if we could achieve a modicum of transparency about the quality of instruction, low quality instruction would become less common and high quality instruction less scarce. This is because it would be easier for all stakeholders to hold faculty accountable to a standard that all stakeholders think they should meet and that even faculty themselves, when they talk about these things in public, endorse (even if they resist being held accountable).

Is transparency generally better for accountability? I think the answer to this is yes. So the scandal that broke last year made vivid all sorts of admissions practices that, despite the resentment of some of those who engaged in fraudulent behavior, enhance access for people like their children: preference for athletes, legacies, the existence of Chancellors or President’s discretion, even (though not at UW-Madison I am glad to say) the children of faculty. To the extent that powerful stakeholders (which for my institution, includes legislators and the general public) disapprove of these practices, transparency will hold them in check.

But transparency – like the accountability it facilitates – is a double edged sword. If the public disapproves of preferences on the basis of race, transparency around those preferences, by making us more accountable, makes it more difficult for us to do. And then there is cross-subsidization. Think of university budgets in which colleges and units cross-subsidize. University budgets are remarkably opaque, and it is their very opacity which helps prevent net revenue-producing units, and colleges, from lobbying effectively to undermine the units and colleges that are net consumers of revenue. Of course, some of those cross-subsidies are indefensible. But others — in my institution I’m pretty sure that Philosophy subsidizes less frequently taught languages, and I know that it subsidizes the School of Education — which are extremely valuable, might not be accepted by whole faculties that really understood their extent. They might! But transparency is risky.

Let’s finish by returning to transparency in admissions. Now we understand that transparency facilitates accountability. Whether accountability leads to better outcomes depends on the will and the competence of the principals who are able to enforce it. Some admissions practices that work against the public good are, probably, dependent on opacity, because the people with the power to hold us accountable would frown on them: for example, preference for faculty members. Others – I’m reasonably confident that legacy preferences work against the public good – may be less vulnerable when light is shone on them. But we should also be concerned about the admissions practices that do serve the public good, and whether they would survive the glare of transparency given the will and competence of those in a position to hold us accountable. To give my own institution as an example: I wouldn’t want to make the extent of racial preference in admissions too vivid for our legislators, because I’m not confident they’d support it to the extent they should; similarly, I’m happy for the faculty – and the suburban population – not to understand fully the extent to which we give preference to rural students (and, by extension, that we deny opportunities to students from Madison itself).

I wish I had a conclusion! Admissions should be holistic, and largely geared to the good of the public – because that is the core of our mission. Transparency is good insofar as it helps us to do this, and not insofar as it inhibits us. It is, like all swords, double edged: maybe we should just be careful which edge we sharpen!

[1] This was the joke I extemporized. A young African-American woman in the audience, an undergraduate who works in the Office of Admissions at her college, and had been brought along by her Dean, shouted out “Lying” and “a lot” in unison with me, which I thought was bold, but rather magnificent, in a room of 100 or so senior professionals.