M y mother is hyperintelligent and insightful; throughout my childhood she was also depressed, and we were impoverished. During the 80s we lived in some of New York’s worst neighborhoods, including a several-year stint in a notorious Times Square drug den — a welfare hotel called the Holland. Still, she provided me with an ethical foundation, and exposed me to as many books and as much culture as she could. I remember an art book she brought home once, which had a discussion of Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to repaint the same thing over and over again. To bring it back, my mother said, to think of it in a new way.
Her care, intelligence, and determination helped me chart a course that reads like American Dream propaganda: homeless in the 80s; graduate of a prep school; recipient of a degree from an elite university; holder of an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Exactly who that narrative belongs to, and what it means, didn’t become clear to me until I became an assistant dean of admissions in 2003.
Each time I picked up an application, my mother’s words echoed in my mind. Bring it back ... think of it in a new way. The university’s approach to evaluating candidates — at least in theory — was holistic. There seemed a nobility to the work — helping to curate the ranks of future difference-makers, giving shape to a community of learners, strivers, and activists with a shared sense of decency and justice. Reading and re-reading applications felt honorable. I was happy to be part of a significant process.
America likes to see itself as a meritocracy, and college as an engine of social mobility. In reality, writes Richard V. Reeves, “higher education has become a powerful means for perpetuating class divisions.” How did that happen, and what can colleges do about it?
It was a process that kept teaching me as it unfolded, and it quickly became clear that few people understood it — even those of us making the decisions. The goal was to evaluate each student in her individual context. If that sounds absurdly vague, I sympathize. It is nearly impossible to meet the puzzle of an application on its own terms. With thousands of applicants and a relatively small staff to vet them all, it’s easy, over the course of consecutive 16-hour days, to lose your bearings.
It is also Sisyphean to mesh the idealistic language of admissions with the practical goals of a university hoping to maintain its tenuous spot in the rankings; to contextualize the relative strengths of various high schools, student achievement, intellectual curiosity, leadership qualities, drive, and character while making sense of standardized scores (spanning different regions and economic backgrounds) that are within a 150-point range. Admissions at elite institutions can make a fool and a liar out of anyone.
So I was skeptical, indignant, and bemused this past August when The New York Times reported on an internal memo declaring the U.S. Department of Justice’s plan to root out “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.” Study after study has clarified the stark gap in wealth between white and black, uberwealthy white and working-class white, yet a depressing number of people still demonstrate a reflexive fealty to both a naïve notion of meritocracy and a paranoia that “the black kid stole my kid’s spot,” both of which blind them to the perpetual grift before their eyes. It’s a grift that disproportionately cheats the white middle and lower classes and frequently disadvantages women of all classes and backgrounds. It’s unlikely that the Department of Justice will do anything but exacerbate that grift.
E lite-college admissions is at root a story of class warfare. This is not directly attributable to any fault or desire on the part of admissions deans, it’s simply a byproduct of the parameters within which the system operates.
My three years in the admissions process made it depressingly clear that it exists chiefly to replicate the elite, privileged class of society. There were, of course, exceptions (like me) — but those exceptions, as they say, proved the rule. As an admissions officer, I often felt that I was less an evaluator than a rubber-stamper for the children of the wealthy. The good and interesting work I did was often incidental, and usually had more to do with an image the institution wanted to project than any noble commitment to ideals.
The system of affirmative action in place for wealthy white people (especially white men) is so well-oiled that few would even know to name it. You’d have to pay attention to factors well before college. It’s societal and holistic, and goes far beyond clichéd (though fair) talking points about legacy admits. Those are the tip of the insidious iceberg.
Early decision, for instance, does a lot more to favor wealthy white kids than any affirmative action favors students of color or first-generation college students. My university (and others) pitched early decision as a means for making ideal matches between applicant and institution. That’s true, so long as you accept a cynical definition of “ideal.” Universities benefit from early decision because it guarantees the base of their yield rate, which they want to keep high because selectivity conveys status in the U.S. News & World Report rankings (which every admissions official I ever met agreed are rooted in junk science). Because of the unpredictability of the regular decision process, early decision allows colleges to lock down a significant percentage of the class.
Early decision can also solidify the SAT median — which is to say, early decision is a way to admit wealthy, undistinguished white students with often not much more in their favor than high SAT scores. That’s not to say they are weak candidates; they just wouldn’t stand out in the general pool. These students tend to have savvy private-high-school counselors who understand that the early-decision applicant pool is weaker and the acceptance rate higher. These students also tend to be from wealthier families who got a head start on the college search: They could afford campus visits the previous summer; financial aid isn’t an issue, so they don’t have to wait for and weigh packages; their scores are high enough they don’t have to wait to take a test again. Disproportionately, they come from elite feeder schools that have slickly tailored their students to suit the admissions standards at top colleges. Whether at the top of the class or more toward the middle, on paper they look prepared for the rigors of coursework at an elite university.
Any admissions dean experienced in the art of spin will explain the higher early-decision acceptance rate as a factor of the strength of the pool. Yet despite the strength of the pool, the dean will say, the acceptance rate will only be slightly higher: say, 35 percent in early decision as opposed to 25 percent in regular admissions. During my time in admissions, however, there was never a cycle when the early-decision applicants were stronger than the strong applicants in the regular pool. Not once. And the acceptance rate was selectively calculated: Many of those counted as not admitted during early decision were deferred and ultimately gained admittance. One year a colleague and I did the rough math — the eventual acceptance rate was closer to 50 percent. It’s a staggering number.
Some private schools provided no grades at all, just platitudinous fluff.
Elite private high schools believe (and make a convincing case) that the middle of their classes are better than the top of most public-school classes. Our decisions spoke loudly in agreement. This is a racket that should inspire the vast majority of white people who can’t afford to send their children to private school to raise hell. I can’t count how many times I watched valedictorians and well-rounded students with flawless transcripts meet the “deny” pile because the quality of their schools raised questions about preparedness, or their SAT scores were 10-40 points lower than an undistinguished peer from a private school.
Many of the top private schools manipulate their school profiles, a fact sheet provided by high schools that puts the applicant in context (percent of student body that goes to college, number of students, GPA range, details of curriculum, etc.). An admissions dean will know who ranks in the top 5-10 percent of the class, but the bulk of students will be grouped in one broad block. I often couldn’t tell if an applicant was just outside the top 10 percent or closer to the middle of the class. Some private schools provided no grades at all, just substituting platitudinous fluff for any indication of measurable achievement in the classroom.
And that’s the rub. Private schools create applicants who are difficult to reject: The candidate is “prepared” (the assumption is the courses at private schools are more rigorous), has a relatively high SAT score (a reflection of parents’ incomes and education levels), and is touted by carefully crafted letters of recommendation from counselors who have many fewer students and far more resources than their public-school counterparts. After a while you could predict the hyperbole and buzzwords in each letter from a private-school counselor, some of which ran three pages; public-school applicants often got a paragraph that made it clear their recommender barely knew them. Neither recommendation told me much about what the student might contribute to the campus, but both provided a clear lesson in how expensive it is to not be wealthy.
M y mentor once cautioned me about department politics: “The lower the stakes,” she said, “the more disproportionately deep the investment.” When I asked why this was the case, she sighed as if to suggest the answer was beside the point. The same can be said about liberal-arts universities and Division III athletics. I think about “early decision II,” which tended to favor — in shocking and undeniable fashion — underqualified white men because they might (no “athletic scholarships” at the D-III level, so no binding commitment) flex their so-so, non-revenue-producing athletic talents. We applied lenient standards to those with high athletic ratings (a coach would assign a ranking, much like a music professor might rank a prodigious violinist, or the development office might rank an applicant’s parents’ potential to be megadonors). Those with high rankings but academic credentials far too substandard to gain admission by committee often disappeared from the pile entirely, to be vetted by a separate “committee” that consisted of fewer deans, one of whom served as a liaison to the athletic department. Here the coaches would use what we called “tips”; if a coach needed an athlete who was clearly unqualified for admission, the coach could “tip” that athlete into the class.
Practices that perpetuate a culture of privilege, mediocrity, and entitlement are tucked away, out of sight and out of mind.
This system favored underwhelming white male candidates more than anyone else. White female athletes who were unspectacular candidates were still generally qualified enough to get admitted the traditional way in a pool as diluted as early decision II. I witnessed the cynical and manipulative strategy of deferring black male athletes to general committee, their cases then championed on the grounds of increasing diversity. This saved tips in the athletic committee for more underqualified white men, while robbing black students in the regular committee who didn’t run, dribble, or tackle of a terrific opportunity, thus dealing a double (or is it triple? quadruple?) blow to the spirit and integrity of the entire process while subverting the purported standards of the institution.
What value should be ascribed to athletic prowess at a liberal-arts university? Does athletic talent justify undermining the admissions process, and displacing a significant number of better-qualified applicants who are more in step with an institution’s mission?
The notion of value is a peculiar one when it comes to the relationship between applicant and university. What should an institution value in an applicant? A reflection of its own broad ideals? Proof of drive, innovative thinking, creativity? Demonstrated leadership? A willingness to engage and contribute to the community?
In theory, our office valued a little bit of everything; in reality, standardized-test scores, class rank, and private schooling (interchangeable, really, with “preparedness”) ruled.
Though standardized tests successfully predict little aside from first-year college academic success and retention, some people still point to a correlation between SAT scores and future earnings. But using the SAT to predict income is a chicken-and-egg riddle, since family income and education level so reliably predict SAT scores, and class movement in America is so stagnant. That’s not to say that someone who scores in the bottom 10 percent is indistinguishable from someone who scores in the top 30 percent. But none — absolutely zero — of my personal or professional experience has legitimized the notion that an applicant with a 1440 is going to be a better classroom presence, savvier student, or more worthwhile citizen of the world than an applicant with a 1370, or a 1250.
Standardized tests are less illuminating than they are cancerous to the admissions process. To a significant extent, they obfuscate what an institution values. Heavily weighting tests consigns to the “deny” pile an enormous number of candidates who boast invaluable and varied talents, and too often validates acquiescent approaches to learning rather than intellectual curiosity, creativity, and inventive problem-solving.
In The Genius in All of Us, David Shenk writes about the psychologist Lewis Terman’s yearslong study of 1,500 children in California with abnormally high IQs. Terman thought he was documenting this select group’s inevitable ascent as elite intellectuals and artists. “His subjects only grew less and less remarkable as time wore on,” Shenk writes. “None won Nobel Prizes, though two who were specifically rejected for the study — William Shockley [who later became notorious for his views on IQ, race, and eugenics] and Luis Alvarez — did, both in physics. None became world-renowned musicians, though two other rejects — Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin — did, for their virtuosic violin-playing.”
I t is fascinating to observe people’s attitudes about who deserves what, and why. The truth is that the bulk of incoming classes at top liberal-arts colleges are interchangeable. It’s never really clear which candidates are more qualified, better fits, sharper thinkers. Even less clear is who deserves a spot in the class, and how anyone could comfortably determine such a thing. The bulk of those credentialed enough to be seriously considered for acceptance are in that position because of circumstance and wealth. As William Munny said to Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
But try to get someone who has benefited from circumstance to sincerely accept their interchangeability, and you’ll meet with a resistance that can border on violent. Acknowledging the luck of birth undermines the key cog of the American Dream machine: the myth of the self, which reduces the built-in advantages of children of the wealthy to irrelevant biographical footnotes, while transforming the disadvantages of everyone else to personal faults. It’s not exactly news that people reinterpret facts and events to create a narrative that reinforces their own delusions, clinging to whatever version of the truth allows them to maintain a feeling of self-respect and to dodge accountability.
My own honors, awards, and degrees tell very little about me or the attainability of the American Dream. They constitute my personal mythology, and to some degree they suggest an incomplete if not downright false story of upward mobility. My mythology reflects little of who I am, nothing of what I deserve, and only so much of what I earned. In context, it speaks to fortuitous circumstance, rare opportunities, access to powerful social networks (one of the strongest justifications for actual, meaningful affirmative action), and three women — my indefatigable, loving mother, Gloria; a wonderful junior-high-school teacher, Geraldine Charney; and a generous, brilliant professor, Gayle Pemberton — who at different points and to different extents rerouted and saved my life.
If I can — with my origin story — accept that I am no more special than any number of people I’ve known, no more deserving, but simply more fortunate, why is it so difficult for the wealthy and their children to do the same?
Wrestle with that question long enough, and you get a terrifying glimpse into the soul of our self-congratulatory, self-satisfied, self-appointed American elite. As a society, we’ve abided the creation of a system of credentials that keeps the wealthy in place. It is the wealthy who teach the middle class the checklist for success in college admissions and whom to blame when they can’t attain those things, engendering a deep suspicion that some aspect of their birthright is being curtailed for the gain of an underserving “other.” In this way, the politics of fear informs the politics of fair. The majority of white Americans are, in fact, right to be afraid. But those justifiable fears are perpetually exploited to serve the aims of the very people holding them back. The definition of “fair” now belongs to those who reshape it to ensure their self-interests are disguised as the greater good.
Working in admissions revealed to me how inequality can be perpetuated by those espousing high-minded ideals: a bunch of ostensibly decent people divorce themselves from their actions (sometimes subconsciously, for self-preservation), and their actions from the resultant consequences — until everything is so blurry that we substitute vague and hackneyed talking points for clear-eyed discourse. Eventually, most people come to believe the talking points; they have to: They’ve invested entire careers in a system buoyed by them, a system that can either collapse on itself or continue to benefit only a select few.
To read this as an exposé of the university where I worked would be myopic. We were undoubtedly doing a better, more comprehensive, more humane job of evaluating applicants than most universities. Rather, this is an indictment of the admissions process. I respected and in some cases admired my colleagues. I’d like to say they can’t help that the system is broken; but the system is running just fine, as intended. And it makes participants complicit by necessity, despite our best intentions.
The illusion of rigged-game-as-fairness will continue to stand in for actual fairness, as well as govern the way we talk about it. The already unbridgeable chasm between the haves and have-nots will continue to widen. And the discourse around elite-college admissions will continue to mirror the very different ways we discuss personal dysfunction among the wealthy and the poor: Unlike the poor, whose missteps are constantly on display and come to mark them (allegedly symptoms of cultural and racial pathology), the missteps of the wealthy can be hidden until some form of rehabilitation runs its course. Moreover, preferences for certain minorities will continue to dominate the discourse of fairness, while the most insidious practices (those that perpetuate a culture of privilege, mediocrity, and entitlement) are tucked away, out of sight and out of mind, carried out by normal people in spacious offices in old, charming houses with windows overlooking bucolic campuses.
My years in admissions taught me this: We sacrifice integrity when we prioritize the preservation of a system over individual and societal health; when we rationalize endlessly and rob words of meaning, inverting concepts — like fairness — that are central to a decent society. We need to bring it all back, and to think of it in a new way.
Jason England is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University. Follow him on Twitter @Trillharmonic
