Flipped Admissions and the Collusion We Need

Today in modest proposals for getting into college

Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash

Via Matt “Dean Dad” Reed, I read this story in Inside Higher Ed about a new-ish “flipped admissions” company that’s looking to match students to universities who need them. The idea is that students fill out a relatively simple profile with their grades and interests, then those profiles have the names removed and are sent to universities using the service, who make admissions offers based on that information. This is free to students (the colleges using the service pay per admitted student) and ideally simpler than the current system where students would need to identify and apply to these schools directly.

This deliberately excludes the highly selective institutions— the Ivies, NESCAC, top public universities, etc.— that have tens of applicants for every spot in their entering class. That’s a Good Thing, as those schools serve a small fraction of the total college population, though they have an outsized influence both on the discourse about higher education and on political culture generally. The kinds of schools involved in the pilot program are facing challenges that are pretty much the inverse of those in the highly selective tier— they need help enrolling enough students to keep the school open, and if this helps bring them to the attention of a broader population than they ordinarily would’ve attracted, it may well be worth paying to play.

Reed, understandably given his position, is concerned that the system doesn’t include community colleges. Given that one of the main selling points of the CC system is geographic— allowing students to save money and stay connected to their support networks by staying at home— I’m not sure how much sense it would make to include them. He also raises some concerns about pricing and middleman effects that probably need a serious look, but there are some intriguing ideas here.

This also serves as an excuse for me to repeat one of my long-standing crazy ideas about academic admissions at the highly selective end, which is that a lot of the problems that drive the toxic discourse around higher education could be ameliorated by allowing more collusion between institutions. Specifically, students should be able to apply to groups of schools, who should then discuss how to divide up the applicant pool themselves.

The logic here is that a lot of the really contentious arguments about higher education are primarily driven by the angst of marginal applicants to the elite, highly selective schools. These are students who would probably do fine, but are right on the edge of being admitted or not, who can be tipped either way by relatively small factors and preferences, and there’s at least a hypothetical way in which these students are ill-served by having all the individual colleges make their admissions decisions in isolation.

So, imagine a large number of such students all applying to the same group of schools, each of whom want to admit just enough students to make their class, but also keep their selectivity as high as possible for reasons of status and rankings. If all the decisions are made independent of one another, you’re inevitably going to have some of these students get into all the colleges of interest, and another set who get shut out of all of them. But each of those admitted-to-all students can only go to one school in the end, which means that the other schools would’ve been better off not admitting them and taking one of the admitted-to-none students instead. But they can’t talk to each other about the decisions in a way that would allow that more optimal allocation of admissions offers.

I suspect (but can’t prove) that these marginal students who catch a bad break are responsible for a lot of the angst and drama around elite college admissions. They would probably do fine at some college in the tier they’re interested in, but the way the process works means they can get shut out of all of those schools through no particular fault of their own. Which leads some of them to bitterness about their exclusion, in extreme cases to the level of filing nasty lawsuits. It also leads other students to stress and burnout through to trying to reduce the probability of ending up in the admitted-to-none pool by applying to ridiculous numbers of colleges, at high cost in terms of both application fees and the effort needed to do all those essays. And, of course, those extra applications only make the underlying problem worse.

Group applications could fix this: if you let students apply to, say, the NESCAC colleges as a bloc (maybe with some preference ranking so that nobody has to be admitted to amherst if they don’t want to), they could deal with those marginal admits collectively in a way that would reduce the probability of a given student falling just on the outside for all of the schools individually. Rather than some students randomly getting into all 11 colleges and some being denied at all 11, you could have all of these students admitted to, say, 3-5 of the schools in question. This would reduce the angst on both sides— there would be fewer students admitted to colleges they were never going to go to (making the lives of admissions deans a little happier) and also fewer who feel aggrieved by getting shut out of the process. And each student would only need to do a single application, rather than 11 different ones for the 11 different schools.

This is, of course, currently illegal in probably six different ways, and also probably disincentivized by the existing prestige ranking systems. But, you know, the Internet is a place for throwing out crazy ideas, and this is one of mine.

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