Participating in the annual gossip that spreads in my hometown with news of college admissions decisions has had me thinking a lot about admissions lately. In doing so, I’ve been surprised to find that, having seen its outcomes, I’m less a fan of the process now than I was as a high school senior facing the uncertainty that it brings.
It isn’t hard to see that the admissions process fails to select for the traits which truly make one suited for a top-quality undergraduate education. Penn and other peer institutions have significant populations of students for whom acquisition of knowledge and mental self-betterment are not top or high priorities, let alone passions. If the admissions process at a university can accomplish anything, it should be to detect applicants who are interested in close scrutiny and critical appraisal of their own lives and screen those who are not. I suspect that the admissions department at Penn and other institutions would agree that selecting students with a deep and genuine dedication to learning and excluding those who lack such drive is a fundamental goal of their office. The methods they use, however, fail to achieve this proper goal.
That the college admissions process is flawed is hardly an original insight on my part. For instance, it has already been argued that a disproportionately large percentage of students admitted to top colleges and universities come from a disproportionately small number of American high schools, that standardized admissions tests are a better predictor of current wealth than future performance and that the “holistic evaluation” rewards resume-padding over genuine engagement. These are all true to some degree, but I would argue that they are all symptoms rather than root causes of a flawed system.
The current admissions process’ fundamental flaw is that it is almost entirely paper-based, and the qualities which make a good university student cannot be expressed on paper alone. For example, a student deeply committed to community service doesn’t look much different than an ambitious student determined to look committed to community service in order to get into college. Likewise with academics — the difference can only be discovered by coming to know the applicant on some deeper level.
Companies seem to recognize this, as they base their hiring decisions on a series of substantive interviews. Colleges ought to do something akin to this. In order to make the task manageable, the first step in a college admission process should be making a simple binary decision about whether an applicant is qualified to attend or not. These standards should be transparent and published. Unlike the mysterious “holistic evaluation,” colleges should set minimum GPA and coursework requirements which are known to potential applicants ahead of time. This would ensure that the applicant pool is small enough that each applicant can be evaluated thoroughly and fairly. The practice of using marketing to bait unqualified students into applying in order to boost selectiveness percentages is disgusting and should be abandoned wherever it is used.
Following this initial cut, an earnest effort should be made by admissions officers to get to know the students about whom they must make a decision. Such a process would also better address educational diversity concerns, as the extent to which an applicant’s life experience has been affected by their ascriptive identity could be more accurately determined and accounted for in a process which relies less heavily upon cookie-cutter-on-paper categories.
As an institution which strives to be a hub of social innovation, Penn should strive to position itself at the head of an effort to develop a better, fairer and more honest application process that is actually capable of selecting students who can and will contribute to a diverse environment of intellectualism and critical inquiry.
This may seem like a daunting task. However, given the ease of communication in the digital age, given the awesome responsibility of admissions officers at elite colleges to act as de facto gatekeepers to a broad range of privileges and given the staggering wealth of such institutions, there is no excuse not to make a gargantuan effort to do better. The task at hand demands it.
ALEC WARD is a College sophomore from Washington, D.C., studying history. His email address is alecward@sas.upenn.edu. “Talking Backward” appears every Wednesday.
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