For those who make it, the agony is worth the effort: to be accepted to one of our best schools these days is to be virtually assured of graduating. As many as 90 percent of the students admitted to the top colleges and universities can make it all the way through. Because initial acceptance has become an almost automatic ticket for a degree, admission committees have become more important than faculty in deciding who goes through life with a Harvard or Wellesley B.A. or a Stanford M.B.A.
I have run the game myself as a business-school dean and a college president. I now believe that it’s wrong to put such a tight tourniquet on numbers that to schools let in and to assume that such large percentages should graduate. In the name of fairness and opportunity, we need a different approach.
Our best schools should admit 25 to 50 percent more people than they expect to graduate, then tighten grading for the first half of their programs. Increase the risk of flunking out. Make true again the warning once given new students on many campuses: “Look to your right. Look to your left. Work hard. One of the three of you is not likely to make it to graduation.”
Such a change moves toward honesty about admissions. The idea that elite schools now pick the best from their pools of candidates is a myth. The more qualified the pool, the more likely it is that many who are turned down are as good as or “better” than others who get in.
Studies on how the admissions lottery is working are not reassuring. They show only modest power to predict an applicant’s grades for even the first year after entry and almost no ability to identify who will stand out as scholars or leaders or contributors to society later in life. Whether dominated “by the numbers” of grades and test scores or “sensitive review” and interviews, admissions choices are more chance than science.
The game is expensive. Candidates invest heavily in both time and money to maximize chances of getting on sometimes 10 or more different prospect lists. They or their parents pay for campus visits, aptitude-test cram courses and application fees. They all assume that the longer a list is relative to planned enrollment, the greater an institution’s “quality.” Perversely, competitive efforts to increase reputations by inflating applicant lists also inflate tuition charges. Schools today spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars on promotion and admissions for every student enrolled.
When acceptance or denial has such deep consequences, controversies about admissions practices are bound to turn ugly. Does Berkeley unfairly limit admission of Asians? Does Georgetown’s Law School give undeserved breaks to blacks? Was the Washington Monthly magazine right to charge that worse concessions are made in the Ivy League to underqualified children of wealthy alumni than to minorities in the name of affirmative action?
I am not advocating open admissions. Today’s most sought-after schools would still be, relatively speaking, the hardest to get into. But they would improve access and opportunity by letting more good applicants prove their potential and by insuring that earned degrees reflect performance on campus, not anointment at time of admission. If some special concessions do get made to blacks, alumni or candidates from Nepal, reactions ought to be less heated since more candidates will get in and because everyone faces tough screening for a degree.
The changes will not come easily. In exchange for greater access to the toughest programs, applicants must accept larger risks of flunking out and finishing on another campus. Yes, students will face greater competitive pressures from their peers; but coping will prepare them more realistically for the “weeding out” experiences that jobs and life hold in store after graduation.
Faculty will have to apportion more of their teaching time to first-year classes. But for the kind of schools which should lead this change, taking in more from good pools of applicants should not make classes any less fun to teach. Grading papers will take more time, but we might see an end to grade inflation.
Students who do not “make the cut” need help to take failure in stride, Reaching, trying and not succeeding ought not to carry a stigma. Schools should improve arrangements and networks which already exist to counsel and to facilitate transfers to other campuses. If schools grade and counsel responsibly, society should restrain temptations to make flunking out another occasion for legal challenges.
America is meant to be a place where one can scramble for chances to perform and make performance count. Yet today, the pursuit of reputations for “quality” puts too much weight on the credentials of students coming in, not educational accomplishments on campus. Our best colleges and universities risk being more gatekeepers than facilitators of social mobility. A move to give more candidates a chance to show their potential and to test all admitted students more rigorously on eligibility for degrees would be a step forward toward both quality and opportunity.
