This article has been updated (4/9/2018, 10:05 a.m.) with additional comments from Terry Hartle, of the American Council on Education, and a statement from NACAC.
Don’t look now, but the federal government is scrutinizing another aspect of the admissions process. As Inside Higher Ed first reported on Friday, the Justice Department is investigating whether colleges violate antitrust laws by exchanging information about applicants admitted through early-decision policies.
The behind-the-scenes practice, which some colleges have long engaged in, is meant to ensure the integrity of so-called binding early-decision programs, admissions officials say. Under those plans, students commit to enroll if accepted. At that point, they are supposed to withdraw all other applications to colleges. Some institutions see fit to help one another do some double-checking, and that’s apparently what caught the attention of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency.
Late last week, the Justice Department sent letters to several colleges instructing them to preserve communications, including emails and other documents, pertaining to formal or informal agreements to share the identities of accepted early-decision applicants.
Among the documents the government seeks are “records of actions taken or decisions made based in whole or part on information received from another college or university about the identities of accepted students.”
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government relations and public affairs at the American Council on Education, told Inside Higher Ed that he didn’t think admissions officials participated in the practices about which the Justice Department is apparently seeking evidence. “I can’t imagine,” he said, “circumstances under which a college or university would share with another college or university the names of students they have admitted.”
Yet the longtime practice is alive and well among some colleges with early-decision programs, three admissions officials told The Chronicle on Sunday. Speaking on condition of anonymity because of the pending investigation, two enrollment leaders at private colleges described similar arrangements at their institutions
Each college annually shares, with a dozen or so competing institutions, a list of accepted early-decision applicants who have submitted admission deposits. Typically those exchanges occur before regular-decision acceptances go out.
Now and then, those communications reveal that a student who’s been accepted early by one college has yet to withdraw an application from another. One or both of those institutions would then contact the student and ask him or her to withdraw the pending applications. On rare occasions, students found to have been accepted early-decision to two colleges — a no-no in the admissions realm — might see both acceptances withdrawn.
“It’s a very informal I-show-you-mine, you-show-me-yours kind of thing,” one of the enrollment officials said of the sharing of early-decision lists. “We don’t want to put out offers of admission to students who’ve committed to other places. This process is just verifying that somebody hasn’t been admitted to another college under a binding early-decision program.”
The other enrollment official said, “There’s no admissions information, like grades or test scores, that gets shared. It’s just names.”
In an interview with The Chronicle on Monday, Hartle, at the American Council on Education, described additional information he had gathered about the practice over the weekend. “This is the ultimate first-world problem in higher education,” he said, “involving a small number of students at a small number of schools.”
Hartle echoed the observations of admissions officials who said early-decision candidates know what they’re getting into when they apply. “The student who applies early-decision signs an agreement, countersigned by parents and the high-school counselor, that explicitly tells people their names may be shared with other early-decision institutions,” he said, “though some colleges make it a practice not to share this information.”
Most colleges don’t engage in the practice, according to several admissions experts. There are simply too many other institutions with early-decision plans to compare lists with. But for some colleges within a given state or region, especially those with great numbers of overlapping applicants, the exchanges have long made sense.
And there’s no harm in that, according to one long-serving enrollment official. “The purpose of this is to make sure that students are living up to their end of the bargain with early decision,” he said. “It’s not impinging the student’s access to educational opportunity. I can’t understand why the Justice Department is concerned about this.”
Legal questions aside, some admissions experts call the sharing of lists a questionable practice. “It’s a great example of how colleges can abuse market position and market power to restrict competition among themselves,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University. “I don’t blame them for doing so. College admissions is highly competitive, as is the higher-education industry. The question is really why this was ever considered OK. Lack of competition is bad for students and parents. Period.”
The practice is just one facet of the admissions process that the Justice Department is examining. In January the National Association for College Admission Counseling revealed that the department was investigating whether the organization’s revamped ethics code violates antitrust laws. The code bars colleges from requiring an application before October 15 and requires them to give regular-decision applicants until May 1 to make a final choice.
In an email to the association’s members on Monday, David Burge, NACAC’s president, wrote in part that “We have no reason to believe that this new inquiry is connected to the Justice Department’s recent requests for information about our [ethics code].”
And in November, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department was looking into Harvard University’s consideration of race in admissions and was accusing the institution of failing to cooperate with the investigation.
That comes with territory. “Admissions officials can’t be afraid to have their practices held up to public scrutiny,” Hartle told The Chronicle on Monday. “The investigations are fundamentally different, but they’re all dealing with the same issue: admission to highly selective colleges and universities. When you’re dealing with something highly desirable, scarce, and subjective, these kinds of things are easily second-guessed.”
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.