"Make college admissions a crapshoot"

asteriskea · March 20, 2007, 6:02am

Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, thinks that students trying to get into the best college and colleges trying to admit the best students is a fool’s errand.

Top schools are already too selective, so why not draw names from a hat?

SPRING IS HERE, and along with the crocuses comes the annual admissions panic. High school kids get anxiety attacks as they approach their mailboxes. And in some parts of the U.S., parents stress as they await a phone call from their preschool of choice. The high school kids have tortured themselves to build up stunning credentials and then communicate those credentials strategically in a college application. And the parents of toddlers have struggled to find a way to distinguish their 18-month-old from all the rest.

To today’s high-achieving high school students, the future seems to ride on getting into selective institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford or my own institution, Swarthmore, where almost every one of the applicants is good enough to succeed but only one in 10 will be given the chance. And so the competition trickles down: The road to Harvard goes through the “right” high school, the “right” elementary school, the “right” preschool. Thus the anguished “admissions essays” from the parents of kids still in diapers.

We all know this process has gotten crazy. I believe that it has bad effects on winners as well as losers. I’m not just talking about the financial strain on parents, who can spend as much as it costs for a year at these elite universities on SAT prep courses and personal tutoring, on private college counselors and now on “getting-into-college” summer camps, costing as much as $3,000 for two weeks. And I’m not just talking about the stress on students. It’s what the competition itself is stealing from our most talented youth.

Students choose classes that play to their strengths, to get easy A’s, rather than classes that might correct their weaknesses or nurture new interests. They sacrifice risk-taking and intellectual curiosity on the altar of demonstrable success. Moreover (as documented by a great deal of research), because students are doing the work they do in and out of school for the wrong reasons ? not because they are interested in learning ? the intense competition undermines their motivation to continue to learn for the sake of gaining understanding. As a result, even those who excel enough to get into Harvard, Stanford or UCLA are likely to be less inspired students once that goal has been achieved. By making themselves so competitive, our selective institutions are subverting their aims…

We like to believe, in our least cynical moments, that the U.S. is a meritocracy. Success is about talent and hard work. Luck has nothing to do with it. This attitude may well contribute to a lack of sympathy, sometimes even bordering on disdain, for life’s losers. I believe that this attitude is profoundly false. It is not the case that people always get what they deserve. There just aren’t enough top rungs on the Ivy League’s (or life’s) ladders for everyone to fit. If talented and hardworking people are forced to confront the element of chance in life’s outcomes when they (or their kids) fail to get into the “best” college, they may be more inclined to acknowledge the role of luck in shaping the lives of the people around them. And this may make them more empathic toward others ? and a good deal more committed to creating more room at the top.

<a href=“http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-schwartz18mar18,1,5194971.story[/url]”>http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-schwartz18mar18,1,5194971.story</a>

holymomma · March 20, 2007, 6:41am

While I’m not sure if I agree with his “modest proposal”, I thought this paragraph was 100% correct:

which makes this thread <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=313156[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=313156</a> pointless.

07DAD · March 20, 2007, 6:54am

This article brings into focus that the process of selection by the students and the colleges is hardly science. It also correctly points out that admission is no true indicator of succcess once at an institution. Some students (half) once admitted will not “test out” as strong as the others.

That is why I think the elusive “fit” is more important although it may also be a crap shoot for most 17 and 18 year olds trying to make this guess.

marite · March 20, 2007, 8:50am

I can’t link to the rest of the article, so I don’t know if the author proposes that students draw the names of schools to which they should apply out of a hat or if schools should draw the names of applicants who should be admitted out of a hat.

I’d hate for my S to have drawn SLC or Bard out of a hat. They’re both great schools, but not for my math-loving S. It will be argued that SLC or Bard should not have been part of the pool. Right. So we’re back to making lists.

As for colleges, they may be happy to have all percussions and no violins in th orchestra, or only econ and premed majors and no one wanting to study Classics or Sanskrit as a result of this lottery. Not.

bluebayou · March 20, 2007, 11:29am

marite:

The author suggests that college adcoms separate their school’s applicants into admit and deny, and then randomly draw from the admit pile to fill the class. So, yes, the classics or other department could be short a few students while econ and premed are overloaded.

When I read this article I thought about a student who applied to Penn ED and was deferred, but yet received an early write from Dartmouth in the RD round. Perhaps the RD app was much stronger since the student won an award or other such honor, but its examples like these that give admissions an air of “randomness.”

marite · March 20, 2007, 11:43am

I understood that bit. I also understood that the classics department would not only be short a few students but might not get ANY. I suspect a lot of colleges could fill their classes entirely with students wanting to major only in econ, premed or English. But I would not like to attend such colleges.

mini · March 20, 2007, 12:01pm

That was a truly ignorant article. Does the author have any idea how hard the admissions office at his own institution works to ensure the best possible class - for him to teach, and for students so they can best learn from each other?

There is absolutely NOTHING random about admissions offices’ quests to build the best possible class. I may have problems with the criteria they use, and, perhaps with the fact that 70% of the student bodies at the COFHE schools come from the top 20% of the U.S. population income (though it is their money, and they can do what they want with it), but it is far, far from a “crapshoot”, and to suggest it is is to devalue the work of an entire class of highly trained, educated, experienced, and dedicated professionals.

dstark · March 20, 2007, 12:12pm

Mini, I think the problems the Swat professor addressed were right on target.

Maybe, the solutions weren’t the best, but it was not an ignorant article.

drb · March 20, 2007, 12:19pm

You are missing the point, which is that gaming the system to gain admission has become an end in itself, to the detriment of the educational mission. The author is not saying the process IS random, rather, he is asserting that by ADDING randomness to the process (above demonstration of a certain minimal competency), one might discourage the tendency to “sacrifice risk-taking and intellectual curiosity on the altar of demonstrable success.” I don’t know that this is correct, and it certainly will never happen, but I share the author’s sentiment, as I see far too many undergrads whose major aims are to check off the boxes they perceive as useful for career advancement.

BurnThis · March 20, 2007, 12:22pm

What a cynical article. Most adcoms are savvy enough to identify the packaged candidates who take all the right classes to get just the right grades but aren’t truly intellectually curious. The author certainly doesn’t trust his brethren to make decisions that are in their institution’s best interest. Perhaps Swarthmore doesn’t have to worry about being flooded with engineering or econ students and having a lopsided class and so maybe for them the hat is the best method. I think the real purpose of the article was just to have his school mentioned in the same breath as HYS.

curious14 · March 20, 2007, 12:24pm

The article is more interesting for what it says about the politics of the author, and college profs generally, than for the practical value of the suggestion.

mini · March 20, 2007, 12:26pm

The vast, overwhelming number of students aren’t doing anything like that described by Schwartz, and for those who are, there is no evidence whatsoever that they are “less inspired students once that goal has been achieved” (well, maybe at Swarthmore…;))

He is describing the difficulties of the sons and daughters of a very small number of the nouveau riche. And even then, his “solution” is both an absurdity, and disrespectful, both to students and to the institution at which he teaches.

dstark · March 20, 2007, 12:38pm

Mini, he is describing the difficulties of the nouveau riche because the article, in part, is about the nouveau riche.

Articles about the difficulties of the nouveau riche are allowed.

I don’t see the disrespect at all.

If 8,000 people apply to a school and 1,000 are accepted, it isn’t disrespectful to the 1,000 who got in to say the other 7,000 could have done just as well at the school.

You read all the time that Princeton, Harvard, even UCLA, can duplicate their student bodies with people they rejected.

It would be interesting to see if that was true.

The actual choosing of a class by random is not really the main point of his article.

It’s really about the fool’s gold and the insanity of trying to differentiate the schools and the students, and the use of such minute details and meaningless measurements to do this.

You know that and I’m a little surprised by your posts.

mini · March 20, 2007, 12:41pm

“If 8,000 people apply to a school and 1,000 are accepted, it isn’t disrespectful to the 1,000 who got in to say the other 7,000 could have done just as well at the school.”

He’s pandering. (It’s not about who could have done “just as well” - Gordon Winston indicates there are three times as many low-income students, most of whom don’t even apply, who could have done “just as well”.) It is about the school doing its best to build the best possible class to fulfill its institutional mission.

The overwhelming majority of high school students don’t have an experience anything like that which he describes.

asteriskea · March 20, 2007, 12:48pm

Is Prof. Schwartz’s call for top colleges to select randomly from a pool of ‘Good Enough’ disrespectful? It is, no doubt, designed to push quite a few buttons - he is a psychologist after all. His proposal to honor the “good enough” tackles the concept of “best fit” head on and also promises to virtually do away with the concept of “reach, match, safety” - and yes, it brooks no exception for special talents etc. I remember a few years ago, several students competed for a coveted local academic award and, unable to decide between 3 brilliant students the teacher decided to resort to a tirage au sort and the name of the winner was literally plucked out of a hat. Really though, it is not hard to imagine the upshot when word leaked out that the final choice was based on chance - most felt cheated.

BTW, mini - I am surprised by your posts as well and agree with several other posters above that the gist of the article is not that the admissions process is a crapshoot. Yes, just like the NYS lottery, you have to be in it to win it - low income kids who are qualified should be encouraged to apply in greater numbers. But, doesn’t Schwartz just take the rather hackneyed message we get just about every year when it is time for wait lists to come out one step farther, which is that for every class of students holding a coveted admit there is a more or less equal number of equally qualified students who are certainly “good enough” and could (and sometimes do) fill a spot in that class?

In the college-admissions game, both the applicants and the institutions are behaving like what I have elsewhere called “maximizers.” Both believe that only the best will do. Research by my colleagues and I has shown that such maximizing is a self-defeating strategy…

Many years ago, the social scientists Detlof von Winterfeldt and Ward Edwards articulated what they called the “principle of the flat maximum.” The principle asserts that in many situations involving uncertainty – and college choice is certainly such a situation, from the perspectives of both applicants and institutions – the likely outcomes of many choices are effectively equivalent. Or, to put it perhaps more accurately, the degree of uncertainty makes it impossible to know which excellent school (or student) will be better than which other excellent school (or student). Said another way, there are many “right” choices.

Uncertainty of outcomes makes the hair-splitting to distinguish among excellent colleges or students a waste of time and effort. There is more uncertainty about the quality of the student-college match than there is variation among colleges – at least within the set of excellent, selective colleges. So once a set of “good enough students” or “good enough colleges” has been identified, it probably doesn’t matter very much which one you choose; and if it does matter, there is no way to know in advance (because of the inherent uncertainty) what the right choice is.

Given that both institutions and students are distorting their goals in what amounts to a fool’s errand, is there anything, other than hand-wringing, to be done? After all, selective colleges can admit only so many students; if 10 times that many seek admission, competition seems inevitable.

Not so. There is a simple step that selective institutions can take that will sharply reduce competition and thus change the distorted adolescence that many of our most talented students now experience. All that is required is this: When Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Swarthmore get their applications, they can scrutinize them – using the same high standards they currently use – and identify students good enough to be admitted. Let’s assume that would cut the pool by half or two-thirds. Then the names of all the “good enough” applicants could be placed in a metaphorical hat, and the “winners” drawn at random. While high-school students might have to distort their lives to be the “best” to gain admission to Harvard, they won’t have to distort their lives nearly so much to be “good enough.” The only reason that would remain for participating in all those enrichment programs and attending high-powered pre-schools would be interest, not competitive advantage.

This modest proposal may seem preposterous at first blush, but it isn’t. There is little doubt that any random fifth of the applicants who might survive an initial screening would make a fine first-year class at Harvard. Stanford could fill its entering class with applicants who had near-perfect scores on their SAT’s and still have plenty with such scores left over.

Further, while admissions people like to believe that they have the discernment to look at 8,000 wonderful applicants and pick, with high accuracy, the 1,600 “superwonderful” ones, there is a huge literature on decision making, much of it reviewed in a classic article in Science 15 years ago by Robyn M. Dawes, David Faust, and Paul E. Meehl, which makes clear that people in such positions are much more confident of their abilities than the data warrant. In other words, picking a fifth of the 8,000 at random might be just as good a way of producing a great class as the tortured scrutiny of folders that is the present practice.

It is easy to understand why admissions officers might deceive themselves into inflating their powers of discernment. After all, every year they admit a class, and it does just fine – even better than fine. So they must be doing something right, they tell themselves. That is an example of what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” The real test of discernment would be to admit the near-miss rejects and see how well they do. To my knowledge, no one has done that particular experiment.

In discussing this proposal with friends and colleagues, I have heard several objections. First, people argue that in a meritocracy like ours, anything as important as college admissions should not be determined by a roll of the dice. To that I have two responses: If you accept the principle of the flat maximum, which particular selective school a student attends is not that important. And if you accept how imperfectly admissions are currently done, it is largely a crapshoot already. We just pretend that it isn’t.

Second, people argue that all a proposal like mine does is focus competition on getting to the right side of the cutoff line between good enough and not. As long as the competition continues, and applications keep looking better and better, the cutoff line will be nudged upward and nothing will have been accomplished. To that, I also have two responses: Nothing short of total randomness in admissions decisions can eliminate competition completely. And admissions professionals must resist the temptation to keep adjusting their criteria upward. If they have a sound idea of what a “good enough” applicant looks like, there is no reason why they should change it because some applications appear to exceed it by a wide margin. For my proposal to work, colleges must honestly adhere to the “good enough” criterion.

Third, people point out that an admissions procedure like mine would have no effect unless many, if not all, selective colleges adopt it. That is true, and since colleges and universities are not permitted to collude in setting admissions procedures, one can only hope that many institutions would see the good sense in the proposal and embrace it…

<a href=“http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i25/25b02001.htm[/url]”>http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i25/25b02001.htm</a>

dstark · March 20, 2007, 12:50pm

I disagree with you.

I liked the article a lot.

I have to go.

interesteddad · March 20, 2007, 1:13pm

Schwartz and one or two other professors at Swarthmore have trotted out these kinds of suggestions from time to time. Another (I can’t remember his name) suggested that holding pre-frosh visit weekend to boost yield was a waste of time…just go down the list until the class is filled.

I think these profs are a little spoiled by the students they get the pleasure of teaching and therefore have trouble appreciating the efforts of admissions office to find, attract, and yield those students.

1) He dismisses with the back of his hand some fairly fundamental attributes of the student body he teaches. For example, the percentage of Latino/Hispanic, Asian American, and African American students would drop significantly if admissions were random. Would his classes be the same if the school were lily white? I don’t believe so. Would his classes be the same if the relatively high percentage of public school students declined?

2) He dismisses the role that informed self-selection plays in shaping the student body he teaches. His own Admissions Dean has emphasized repeatedly the importance of the “Why Swarthmore?” essay in the admissions process at the school. Simply put, students who have researched the school, understand what differentiates the school from others, and communicate an enthusiastic preference for that specific style of education get accepted at much higher rates than those who don’t. That self-selection and shared appreciation for the unique qualities of the school is fundmental to the campus culture of the school. Rather than random selection, the system might be better served by more schools being upfront about their own unique personalities rather than the bland “all things for all students” that permeates admissions literature.

3) His description of a desperation for elite college admissions starting in kindergarten certainly does not describe my Swarthmore daughter. And, from her peers that I have met, I dare say that it is wide of the mark for many Swarthmore students. In fact, it is difficult to get accepted at Prof. Schwartz’s college with a cookie-cutter high-achiever SAT/GPA application. It has been my observation that presenting something “interesting” above and beyond or tangential to the cookie cutter stuff is almost essential for an acceptance letter. It is precisely that “interesting stuff” that the admissions office works to identify. If it were simply SAT and GPA calculations, a couple of Swarthmore computer engineering majors could write a program to handle admissions. Oh, but wait, there probably wouldn’t be an Engineering Department at Swarthmore with random admissions. Ooops.

mini · March 20, 2007, 1:51pm

“But, doesn’t Schwartz just take the rather hackneyed message we get just about every year when it is time for wait lists to come out one step farther, which is that for every class of students holding a coveted admit there is a more or less equal number of equally qualified students who are certainly “good enough” and could (and sometimes do) fill a spot in that class?”

But it’s a lie. They ARE less qualified. Not less qualified in terms of their paper credentials. Less qualified in terms of the admissions department’s need to fulfill the institution’s mission of building a class. Lots of hard work built on years or even decades of experience go into this exercise, and the admissions folks build the BEST qualified class that they can (having studied everything from yield to the impact of having too many low-income students on budgeting to the need to make sure there are enough classics majors to the need for a backup quarterback.) Those rejected ARE less qualified, not compared with the individual student next to them, but in terms of what they offer the school in fulfilling its mission.

asteriskea · March 20, 2007, 2:04pm

If anything, the OP article has made be more aware of the difficulties adcoms face to choose a class and more respectful of their difficult task - what must gall a lot of folks out there, though, is the idea that the admissions process is being played as a game and, by a not far stretch of the analogy, there are clear “winners” and “losers”. In many respects, this attitude does not have much to do with the adcoms final decision to admit, reject, or wait list. A lot of it has to do with a mind-set and an assumption that certain kids are “can’t miss” or on the flip side “less qualified”- I think we do know that most adcoms and individual admissions officers are extremely thoughtful people who put a great deal of effort into building a class that they fervently hope will turn out to be a vibrant college community - it is also true that some students don’t fulfill their promise just as others exceed it far beyond anyone’s expectations - this isn’t win-lose, it is just life.

mini · March 20, 2007, 2:09pm

It sure would matter to him if they selected a class without any psychology majors…or if they were all white top 3%ers in income.

“Surprisingly”, he doesn’t see it.

(I expect, of course, that he does, which is why I say he is pandering.)

"Make college admissions a crapshoot"

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