College Is Not What You Think It Is
Really.
A few weeks ago, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases about the use of race in college admissions, which dominated the conversation in academic spaces for a while. It’s been largely displaced by talk of the recent election, but remains very much on the minds of most faculty and administrators as pretty much everyone in elite higher ed expects the court to overturn the current standards, and a lot of how we construct our classes and our self-image is bound up in that. So it will be back as a topic, with a vengeance, whenever the Court actually issues a ruling.
In the window when this was the hot topic, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic put out a call for reader suggestions on how to reform elite college admissions, and compiled a bunch of the responses. I’ve kept this open in a tab even as the general topic receded a bit, not because it has any startlingly innovative ideas about practices that ought to be adopted, but because as with many such pieces, it paints a picture of elite higher education that seems, from the standpoint of someone very deeply embedded in this world, completely batshit. Some of the things his readers say about what they think we ought to be doing don’t make a lot of sense, and don’t really line up with the reality of college, or even the non-college world.
To some extent, this is a matter of selection bias— Friedersdorf is a writer putting together a newsletter, so he’s naturally going to tend to pick the most interesting emails to excerpt, which is going to tend to make the whole thing skew weird. At the same time, though, a lot of these suggestions seem rooted in fairly common misconceptions about what elite colleges are, how they work, and who attends them. So it’s probably worth calling out a few of these, in the interest of giving a slightly more accurate picture of what we’re actually dealing with.
— Legacies Are Not That Numerous: A lot of the responses went on about the evils of legacy preferences in admissions, in ways that suggest they believe that two of every five students at elite schools got in because their parents donated a building. That’s way off— when I wrote about this last year, I had figures for three institutions, all of which put the fraction of students with family connections to the school in the 10-15% range. And keep in mind that “Parents went to an elite college” is not the same as “Parents are fabulously wealthy”— my kids will be counted as legacies if they apply to Williams, but I’m not going to be having my name put on any campus architecture any time soon.
That number isn’t nothing, but it’s not something that’s going to transform the landscape of elite-college admissions, either, especially because:
— Legacies Are Generally Not Idiots: The other main assumption buried in arguments about legacy preferences is that these students are otherwise unqualified for admission. Again, that’s just not true— I can think of a handful of examples of students who were widely regarded as dolts whose parents bought them a spot, but they’re memorable because they stand out. For most purposes, the legacy students are indistinguishable from all the others.
So, again, this is not a preference whose elimination will radically transform the landscape of higher education, because a bunch of students who are getting the legacy preference would get in anyway. And as pointed out in this piece from a few weeks ago, those students are substantially more likely to actually enroll than students without a family connection. Roll it all together, and I suspect you’re looking at a shift of maybe five percentage points in the legacy fraction of the student body— something like “a bit under 15%” to “a bit under 10%.”
Again, that’s not nothing, and it’s probably worth doing just for the PR value of taking this argument off the table. But if you think this is going to radically change the character of the student body at elite colleges, you’re wrong.
— The Same Goes for Athletes and the Super Rich: If you look at the numbers from the NBER paper analyzing data from Harvard, you’ll see that the number of “Dean’s Interest” applicants (that is, children of big (potential) donors) is just over half of the number of legacy applicants (see their Table 1). The number of recruited athletes is half of that. And these are overlapping categories— if you add up all the numbers in Table 1, the total is bigger than the total in Table 2, so some of these students are counted in more than one category.
And, again, these are not generally unqualified students— the vast majority of the admitted students from the preference categories still come from the highest couple of categories in the academic rating (Table 2). So not only are their numbers on the small side in absolute terms, a good number of them would get in anyway. You could still make a case for eliminating these preferences on a PR basis, but it’s not going to reshape the campus population in any significant way.
—Lotteries Are Not the Answer: There are a lot of suggestions to randomize the process at some level— impose some sort of threshold for “Good enough academically” and then select randomly from that pool. This kind of misunderstands the scale of the system. That paper looking at Harvard considers just under 150,000 applicants, of whom just under 10,000 were admitted. Even if you restricted your lottery to the top 10% of academic performance, you’ve got half again as many students as you need to fill the class, so 29 out of 30 applicants are going away unhappy.
And the lottery idea definitely doesn’t help with the diversity issues (though I realize this probably isn’t actually a top priority for those proposing it). At best, it gets you a collection of winners who closely resemble the applicant pool in a statistical sense, but given the many and manifest inequities of the pre-college education system, any threshold you apply is going to leave you with a pool that skews white and Asian.
—Iconoclastic Autodidacts Are Super Rare: The responses Friedersdorf published go pretty heavy on a kind of disdain for the current college population as unoriginal rule-following careerists, which tells you a lot about the psychology of the kind of weirdos who read and reply to online newsletters. This is a very pervasive idea online— that our educational system is not recognizing the truly original thinkers who chafe at the constraints of convention, and should be comprehensively reorganized to better serve those folks.
Here’s the thing: The number of people who think they are unconventional autdidacts whose brilliant ideas are underappreciated is at least an order of magnitude larger than the number of people who actually are brilliant in that particular way. Probably closer to two orders of magnitude. Even among faculty, who are the remnant of a remnant who survived a winnowing process that’s supposed to select for originality, the vast majority of people are boringly conventional thinkers (albeit based on a slightly different set of conventions than those in play in wider society).
And at the end of the day, brilliantly original thought is not just rare, it’s overrated relative to the boring ability to buckle down and get shit done. You can have all the inspired ideas you like, but if you don’t put in the work to at least communicate them to others (let alone put them to use), they’re worthless. Steady plodders have done vastly more good for the world than lazy geniuses, and it’s entirely reasonable to set up systems that reward them.
—Modern College Is Not an 80’s Comedy: This isn’t in the responses to Friedersdorf, but it comes up a lot in other contexts, so I’ll throw it in here: If your picture of campus life looks like Back to School or Animal House, you’re way out of date. The current generation of traditional-age college students is vastly less prone to risky behaviors around alcohol, drugs, and sex than back when I was a student. They’re also just better people than we were— the biggest douchebags I’ve dealt with as a professor would’ve been above the median for decency when I was an elite-college student in the early 1990s.
That’s not to say that there’s no party scene, or no inappropriate behavior, but it’s way less of a problem than a lot of the people who opine about college think it is. This is particularly true of the Covid cohort— talking to friends who work in student life, their current struggle isn’t to get student to stop doing risky things, but rather to get them to go out and do anything at all. It’s a very different world now, but a lot of the mental images people have remain stuck in the distant past.
So, that’s some more academic inside baseball. If you like this kind of thing, here’s a button:
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“Stuck in the distant past” is how I feel about a lot of the social discourse these days. Like, who are you arguing against? A Wall Street executive from 1986? A mid century literature professor?
Yes especially on the "brilliant autodidactical iconoclasts". It's not just that they're incredibly rare, but also that most of the people who fit that description don't become that until they've lived a lot longer and done more things than any 18-year old. Moreover, the few people who do fit that description at an early age *don't need college* as such. They may need a mentor or access to infrastructure, etc., but not a full-service curriculum. They wouldn't qualify for the description if they did need it.
The lottery idea I think is appealing because it gets college admissions offices out of the business of the exquisitely overtuned kind of social engineering that many of them are on the edge of and it acknowledges the arbitrariness of the selection process where two essentially identical students are considered and only one gets in.