The admissions scandal is a big one, all right. But what lessons does it hold?
Many admissions officials throughout the nation asked themselves those questions after hearing Tuesday’s big news. Federal authorities charged 50 people who participated in fraudulent schemes that got wealthy students into big-name colleges through a “side door.”
None of the people involved are, or were, admissions officers. Those who received bribes or payments for committing fraud were athletics coaches or exam proctors hired by testing agencies — people who play a role in the process but who aren’t the decision makers. Then again, those decision makers get paid to oversee the integrity of the whole operation.
So the unfolding story puts the profession in a bind. At a time of immense scrutiny and public skepticism of the way high-profile colleges select applicants, this controversy erupts in the admissions realm, raising familiar questions about its commitment to fairness. The challenge, some admissions officials say, is to take stock and learn something from the moment, even if, in fact, no one in the field did anything wrong.
Stefanie D. Niles, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, acknowledged the complexity of that challenge. “Indeed, this is an admissions scandal,” she said. “But there are nuances.”
Dozens of people, including famous actors, college coaches, and a university administrator, have been charged by federal prosecutors for their alleged roles in an admissions-bribery scheme involving Yale, Stanford, and other elite institutions.
One nuance is that admissions officials apparently were duped by their own colleagues in the athletics department. The mastermind of the scam understood that on many campuses, coaches have a good deal of leeway, often enough to get the applicants they want through the door, especially in nonrevenue sports. Generally, if the tennis coach says that Johnny Smith is a good fit, Johnny Smith gets in. Whether Johnny Smith has ever picked up a racket isn’t something an admissions dean would know.
“This has certainly exposed some vulnerabilities in the process,” says Niles, vice president for enrollment and communications at Ohio Wesleyan University. “There is more we can do to educate members so that the integrity we ask of ourselves as admissions professionals applies to our coaches as well.”
Niles and her colleagues meet regularly with campus coaches to compare notes on how and where they’re recruiting, as well as characteristics of students who tend to thrive on her campus. Those conversations, Niles says, help build relationships between the two departments: “It gives us a common understanding of ethical responsibilities.”
The trick is that each college must define those responsibilities. After all, the admissions realm has no sheriff. Sure, NACAC has a set of ethical guidelines for the profession, but guidelines aren’t laws.
Should admissions deans now follow up to make sure that walk-on athletes from Kalamazoo ended up joining the team and competing months later? That’s up to you, colleges.
“Besides the federal government, there really is no governing body to manage or oversee things like this,” says Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University. “Each contractor does things his or her own way, and there is only so much a voluntary organization can do to police that.”
‘Damage Being Done’
For all the jaw-dropping revelations, the scandal turns on questions of wealth and privilege that have long dogged the admissions profession.
“The admissions system is rigged in favor of privileged students before any bribing or donating takes place to rig it more,” says Nancy Leopold, executive director of CollegeTracks, a nonprofit group that advises low-income and first-generation students in Maryland. “It’s easy to miss that in the sensationalism of the eye-popping amounts of money and the celebrities.”
That’s important. The admissions industry more or less tolerates all kinds of unfair advantages.
Multimillion-dollar fraud is easy: Everyone surely agrees that it’s wrong.
OK, but what about this high-school senior over here who’s had 12 weeks of high-end test-prep and that one who’s had none? This applicant whose high school offers a dozen Advanced Placement courses and that one whose school offers two? This student who demonstrated leadership on a service-learning trip and that one who couldn’t afford to go?
In recent years, Todd Rinehart has seen what he describes as a “genuine shift in sentiment and effort” among admissions officials to examine the barriers many applicants face. After the news of the scam broke on Tuesday, Rinehart, vice chancellor for enrollment at the University of Denver, was encouraged to see many of his counterparts on social media vowing to double down on their pledges to examine and remove barriers for low-income students.
“As deplorable as this current scandal is, the silver lining may be that colleges take an even more rigorous approach in examining the inequities that exist in their respective processes and procedures,” he says. “Where admission professionals can continue to make a difference is examining the factors we value in the admission process and how privilege and resources can influence these results.”
What colleges value matters. The way their leaders define institutional greatness matters. And how admissions officers convey those messages to an attentive public matters.
Nobody forced any of the parents implicated in the scheme to commit crimes. But colleges themselves have in many ways contributed to the environment in which those crimes occurred — an environment in which an institution’s low acceptance rate matters a lot.
“There’s damage being done to the profession, and, frankly, some of it is earned,” says James Miller, director of admissions at the University of Washington’s Bothell campus. “We have played up and played into the overall value of selectivity, and this idea that ‘OMG, I have to land at this college or my life will be over.’ If we say that our college is special, that what you get here is unlike what you can get anyplace else, then we have to accept some responsibility for people actually believing it.”
That’s not to say colleges’ chase for prestige should excuse dishonesty among applicants and their parents. It doesn’t at all, Miller says.
But the way applicants behave often reflects the messages colleges send about what’s important. “Their behavior is a reaction to a stimulus,” Miller says. “It’s not just what we say but what we point to as a measure of how good we are. So by pointing to some national ranking, we are saying ‘This is what we view as quality.’ That, in turn, creates a measure that people understandably chase.”
That dynamic was also prevalent in another recent scandal. Last November, The New York Times reported extensively on how a predominantly black Louisiana school had abused students, falsified their transcripts, and lied about their personal stories, all in an effort to get them into elite colleges. The fraud included doctoring some students’ application essays to play up their hardships.
“They were evil geniuses, because who doesn’t love a good rags-to-riches story?” a former admissions officer told The Chronicle at the time. “The kid who came from nothing but then went to Harvard. These are feel-good stories that everyone wants to read.”
Admissions offices are powerful. When they ask for something, they get it — and, sometimes, unintended consequences, too.
Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
