An Idealist Set Out to Change College Admissions. It Was a Long, Lonely Quest.

Leah Nash for The Chronicle

Lloyd Thacker pulled an armful of overstuffed folders from a closet and spread them on his dining-room table. “I don’t know why I keep all of this,” he said one morning in late March. He shuffled through handwritten notes, old handouts, and dog-eared copies of speeches he had written. Each page was a remnant of his former life — the life of a professional idealist.

Thacker long tried to reform college admissions, a process that often grinds ideals to dust. For 15 years he gave talks, held summits, wrote op-eds, and oversaw research projects. Then, in December, he shut down his one-man nonprofit group, the Education Conservancy. At 64, he felt ready to retire.

But there he was this spring, picking through a past he couldn’t quite leave behind. Just two weeks earlier, the nation had learned all about the biggest admissions scandal ever: For years, an independent college consultant had bribed college coaches and testing proctors to get the children of wealthy clients into big-name institutions. The news hit Thacker in the gut. He saw it as yet more evidence that the whole system was a mess of misplaced priorities and warped values, just as he had often proclaimed.

Thacker, a tall fellow with waves of white hair, still speaks with an activist’s high-voltage urgency. He retains the habit of concluding his assertions with an emphatic “Right? Right?!?” Sitting in the quiet of his dining room, he reflected for hours on the admissions realm, where he had worked in one capacity or another since 1982. He was finding it hard to stop thinking about that realm, especially because reporters kept calling him for interviews.

For 15 years, Thacker challenged the status quo. He questioned institutional policies and practices — standardized-test requirements, legacy preferences, and the relentless pursuit of more applications and higher rankings — that worry many college officials who would never admit to it publicly. Sure, plenty of people share admissions gripes at dinner parties or in College Confidential’s anonymous forums. Thacker stepped onto the public stage and asked how colleges, high schools, and parents might make the process fairer and saner, more ethical and humane.

All along, he carried doubts. Not about his message so much as his ability to deliver change. Starting a quest, he learned, is easier than completing it. Especially when you’re tilting at windmills in a land of bottom lines.

Courtesy of Lloyd Thacker

The thoughtful young man from Canoga Park, Calif., wasn’t shy. During his sophomore year at the University of California at San Diego’s Revelle College, in the early 1970s, Thacker and other students became concerned that the curriculum was outdated. So he surveyed 800 of his peers to learn more about the changes they wanted to see. Then he presented their responses to the dean, who created a curriculum committee.

Thacker was the lone student to serve on it. He attended meetings in flip-flops, if he wore shoes at all. Eventually, Revelle made at least a few of the changes students sought, like more options within the required six-quarter humanities sequence. The lesson Thacker saw: If a college isn’t meeting students’ needs, someone had to speak up.

Years later, Thacker worked in admissions offices at two private colleges. One was the University of Southern California, where his boss gave him a copy of Dress for Success, John T. Molloy’s 1975 best seller about the power of clothing in business and personal life. That turned him off, and so did the university’s embrace of strategic-marketing plans to attract applicants. What many admissions officials saw as a necessity in an increasingly competitive field, he saw as the growing shadow of commercialization.

In the late 1980s, Thacker took a job as a college counselor at Jesuit High School, in Portland, Ore. There, he sought to foster a passion for learning among students, the kind of passion he had as a kid who was always building stuff and rarely watched television.

Then, in 1997, Thacker, unapologetically starry-eyed about education, read an article in The Chronicle that alarmed him. It was about the growth of big-time college athletics, aided by Nike’s growing investments in sports teams, such as those at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was disturbed by what the late Michael K. Hooker, then the university’s chancellor, had to say about the trend.

“It really is all out of proportion to any reason or reality. …,” he told The Chronicle. “It’s bizarre. But it is part of the American culture, and there is nothing I can do to change that. What I can do is maintain a program of integrity. It would be quixotic for me to think that I could say anything to affect the national psyche.”

That prompted Thacker to type a critical letter, on his high school’s stationery, that he mailed to Chapel Hill. He called the chancellor’s comments “intellectually bankrupt.” He railed against the “rot” of college athletics and its financial entanglements with Nike. He cited the university’s mission statement, which described the importance of fostering “enlightened leadership.”

“What about the leadership of colleges, which have become advertising arenas,” Thacker concluded, “for the commercial interests of cultural wizardry?”

The letter went unanswered. But it distilled Thacker’s thinking. His missive was over the top and self-righteous, a rejection of the realities that Hooker had matter-of-factly described. It was a plea from a purist who believed in higher education’s loftiest ideals. And it was an early glimpse inside the mind of the man who would one day leave his job to lead a full-time campaign in support of what he called studenthood.

As a college counselor, Thacker used to look into teenagers’ eyes five days a week. He was often troubled by what he saw: anxiety, uncertainty, fear. All because of the pressure many students felt to take all the toughest courses, to play sports they didn’t necessarily like while participating in activities they didn’t necessarily care about, to get into a highly selective college. That pressure, he thought, robbed them of the joy of learning.

College presidents and admissions deans, Thacker believed, were largely responsible for that. After all, they used tactics like early decision to compete with rival institutions, and those tactics took a toll on kids. He saw a disconnect between the messages colleges gave applicants (Load up on all the Advanced Placement courses you can!) and what colleges claimed to value in their mission statements (creativity, curiosity, passion). He wanted to remind presidents that they were stewards of the public good, and not just chief executives bent on being The Best, as defined by their institution’s admissions rates and median test scores.

So in 2004 Thacker quit his high-school job and founded the Education Conservancy. His first project was to edit and self-publish College Unranked: Affirming Educational Values in College Admissions, a book of essays by counselors, deans, and college presidents. The book assailed the status quo, combining critiques of the College Board, a vivid rendering of hysteria among students at a college-recruitment session, and recommendations for easing the pressures on applicants.

Soon, Thacker was in demand, if not always well prepared. Early on, a producer with NBC’s Today Show called. Could he appear on the program the very next day? He grabbed some clothes, rushed to the airport, and got to New York at 2 a.m. Only when he opened his garment bag did he realize that he had packed his suit coat — but not his pants.

So he wore jeans to the studio. Anxious on camera, he struggled to reduce his core message to sound bites during his one-minute interview. An enrollment official who had seen him on TV told him he needed to practice his messaging.

So he did. He wrote pithy statements on index cards and kept them in his briefcase. When journalists requested interviews, he was ready.

One day, Jay Mathews, a prominent education reporter, called and asked, What are the answers, Lloyd? His reply: If I had the answers, they wouldn’t be the answers. He preferred to ask questions that might inspire people to think for themselves. To some listeners, that was refreshingly humble; to others, it was annoyingly vague.

Speaking invitations kept coming. One year, he gave 80 talks, at colleges, high schools, and education conferences. At each stop he asked what made a “great college,” and attendees offered many different answers: A big campus! No, small classes! Diversity! Wait, hands-on learning. He challenged the notion that there was one fixed definition of great.

A student’s curiosity and engagement, he said over and over, mattered more than the name of the institution on the diploma. Hearing that, a mother at one school, who identified herself as a headhunter for Fortune 500 companies, raised her hand and said, “You’re exactly right!”

College counselors lined up to meet him and thanked him for giving them a voice. Teenagers told him that his words had helped their parents get off their backs about where to apply. Some admissions deans wrote checks to support the organization, and a handful became its unofficial advisers.

One of them was Robert J. Massa, then vice president for enrollment management at Dickinson College. “Sometimes in our field there’s a tendency to be more concerned about the bottom line than about the individual applicants,” he said. “That magic of Lloyd was that he infused in us a greater sensitivity to the needs of students and families.”

From the start, Thacker envisioned the Education Conservancy as a stage where many stakeholders could share ideas. He had a knack for enlisting the help of influential people — presidents, philanthropists, scholars. Long before his book, Thacker wrote to Michael S. McPherson, an economist and a former president of Macalester College, to introduce himself and ask for guidance.

“It’s difficult to have power without position, but Lloyd became a power center,” said McPherson, a longtime confidant. “There was something admirable about his quest. The note he struck was distinctive, human.”

Even as Thacker’s profile grew, he never thought he was doing anything remarkable. Other people had been talking about many of the questions he was asking aloud. “I just found a clever way to knock on the door,” he said, “the door of conscience.”

But after knocking on the door of conscience, what, exactly, should you do next?

Many activists confront the same fact: Passion takes you only so far. Thacker excelled at raising questions and stirring emotions. But as one adviser told him, he needed “deliverables.” Only he lacked a nose for business, hated asking for donations, never wrote a press release. And he often doubted his ability to turn ideas into results.

Sometimes, momentary success made those doubts grow stronger. In 2007 he spoke at the Council of Independent Colleges’ annual Presidents Institute. He laced his talk with questions. Does the current college-admissions system resemble one that we as educators would design? At the end, many presidents stood up and applauded.

But that applause felt like a burden, too. That people saw potential in him meant that he had to produce something. But what? He invented his job as he went along.

The Education Conservancy sponsored several research projects. A preliminary study called “College Admissions: What Are Students Learning?” was especially illuminating. Based on interviews with college applicants in three cities, the findings were a mosaic of frustrations. Students said they would like to take more courses that interested them but felt that doing so would harm their chances of getting into college. They felt pressure from colleges to be well rounded, which discouraged them from pursuing a passion.

Colleges’ aggressive recruitment, an independent scholar wrote in his analysis of the research, can convince students that institutions are merely self-serving businesses: “College marketing models a type of exaggerated puffery that appears to be adopted by students, but which can produce a cynical response.” As one student in the study said, “they are trying to sell to us, and we are trying to sell to them.”

The research encouraged Thacker, but his plans to broaden it fell through. Other reports he helped produce — one on presidents’ views of student-aid policies, another describing experts’ ideas for what an exemplary admissions system might look like — contained intriguing insights but garnered little attention.

Some experiments got a lot of media attention. In 2007, Thacker helped organize a campaign urging colleges to distance themselves from U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings, which, as he saw it, skewed institutional priorities. About 60 presidents ultimately signed a letter stating that they would stop completing the peer-assessment survey, which the magazine uses to gauge administrators’ opinions of other colleges. The presidents also vowed to stop promoting their colleges’ rankings or refer to them as indicators of quality.

Over the last decade, the number of administrators completing the survey has declined sharply, a trend that might owe something to the publicity the letter generated. Otherwise, the push, Thacker said, was no more than a “symbolic gesture.” The rankings rolled on, and though some colleges stopped touting their place on U.S. News lists, many others did not.

Thacker did leave tangible achievements behind. His book, which sold 5,000 copies before being reprinted by Harvard University Press, still gets passed around. The handout he helped create — a list of level-headed advice for applicants and parents — still hangs on the walls of college counseling offices. “BigFuture,” a robust, interactive college-planning website he brought to life in collaboration with the College Board, still gets plenty of clicks.

As the years passed, though, the Education Conservancy got less and less attention from the news media. Supporters often expressed interest in the issues Thacker raised but then stopped short of discussing next steps. Over the last decade, demographic changes and growing financial challenges have limited the kind of big-picture thinking that he often promoted.

“It’s easy to get people talking, but even where people had a sense of ought, there was very little will,” Thacker said. “My goal was to inspire leadership, and I’m not sure how much I inspired.”

Then again, maybe idealists are too hard on themselves. Maybe there’s more than one meaningful way to measure the worth of any venture.

First, let’s be clear: Lloyd Thacker didn’t start a revolution. Hordes of highly selective colleges didn’t discontinue their early-decision programs, or stop giving advantages to legacy applicants, or drop their testing requirements, or do just about anything else that he had urged them to do in the name of fairness and calm. By such a measure, he failed.

Moreover, the possibilities Thacker saw often conflicted with reality. Even some of his biggest fans thought that he lacked a full appreciation of the cross-cutting pressures that most presidents and admissions officials think about each day. “There was an impracticality to being as pure as Lloyd was asking colleges to be,” said Richard A. Detweiler, a former president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association. “A president who doesn’t balance the budget is not going to be president for long.”

Where Thacker often saw a clear-cut problem, institutional leaders saw something more complex. He often railed against merit-based aid, for instance, describing it as a wasteful means of competition. Yet many college officials have described tuition discounting as an essential strategy that allows them to serve students with financial need and, yes, balance their budgets. It’s a morally conflicted system, always has been.

Still, Thacker asked institutional leaders to think about the world beyond their own strategic plans, their own college’s wants and needs. He appealed to something deep in the hearts of presidents, and some were moved by that.

Detweiler, a former president of Hartwick College, was amazed the first time he heard Thacker speak at a conference. To Detweiler’s ears, the man sounded like a forthright prophet, a passionate storyteller. He recalled Thacker asking the audience, Why are you in higher ed? Are you there to maximize revenue and prestige, or are you there to make a difference in the world?

“Lloyd challenged the notion that the process should be just this competitive chase for the college and the student,” he said. “Before it was always the institution saying, ‘Here’s all the ways in which we’re the greatest.’ Now there’s more willingness to say, in our admissions materials, in the way we talk to prospective students, ‘Here are things that happen at our institution that can make a difference for you.’ That’s not a revolution, but it’s revolutionary.”

Thacker’s messages endure, often in small and subtle ways. Some college counselors insist that his rendering of what matters when choosing a college gave them the words to reframe conversations with stressed-out students and parents who think nothing counts more than an institution’s prestige.

Several admissions officials say he helped them see how the process tends to emphasize the quantity, and not the quality, of an applicant’s extracurricular activities — and how that can harm students. Affirming the importance of sustained service is among the goals of Turning the Tide, a campaign to promote ethical character in admissions that Thacker helped get off the ground.

Frank Bruni’s 2015 book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania, preaches calm and perspective. It’s full of the messages that Thacker had been spreading for years.

Ellen Falduto, chief information and planning officer at the College of Wooster, first heard Thacker speak at a conference he convened at Yale University in 2007. “He inspired me to really think about the intersections of who we are reaching and what they value, to really get at nonquantitative insights,” she said. “Many institutions have gotten far more savvy about thinking about who students are. We’re all realizing that we can’t be everything to everybody.”

What did Lloyd Thacker achieve? Maybe the best answer is that he put a voice in people’s ears, a voice that any profession needs. He prodded convention. He asked, “Why not?” He changed the way some people thought of themselves.

Thacker’s words helped inspire Jennifer Delahunty, a former editor, to get into the field. She later became dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, where for 11 years she was an outspoken member of her profession. “Keep being the squeaking door, the thorn in the foot, the burr under the saddle,” she once wrote to Thacker in an email. “For change to occur, there has to be someone like you.”

McPherson, the former Macalester president and co-author of Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, admired Thacker’s often-lonely crusade, even though he didn’t approve of everything the Education Conservancy did. For one thing, he wished Thacker had spent more time talking about the vast majority of college applicants whose anxieties are nothing like those of affluent, high-achieving students fretting over top-25 colleges. “Theirs is a real boutique-y problem,” he said, “relative to students who are lucky to get in anywhere.”

As Thacker was considering retirement last fall, though, McPherson wrote him an email. “You may not have always been right (in my view),” it said, “but you have always been on the side of right.”

Just because a man decides to retire doesn’t mean he’s ready to do it.

Last December, Thacker filled out the required state forms indicating that he was shutting down his nonprofit organization. He put them in a stamped envelope, which he set on the kitchen counter. A week passed.

Finally, he took the envelope to the post office and dropped it through the slot. He felt the way he used to feel after saying goodbye to a favorite student.

For two months, Thacker played his guitar, worked in his woodshop, and hung out with his wife, Lori. He tried not to think too much about all the issues that once filled his head at every waking hour.

Then the big bribery scandal broke, and all the ills of the admissions process flooded his thoughts. The details of the story were outlandish, but the themes were familiar. Greed. Self-interest. Unfair advantages. Parents who saw a superselective college as a prize to win at any cost.

For days Thacker kept thinking about how the scandal had presented colleges with an opportunity to re-examine the fairness of their admissions practices, including those that favor athletes and wealthy applicants. A national moment of moral outrage was a good time to ask how well your selection process serves the public good. He would have said that in his next speech, but there were none on his calendar.

One night, after coming home from dinner, Thacker played a new voice-mail message. An author in California had just snagged a contract to write a book about the scandal. She wanted him to help her understand the story’s deeper context. He rubbed his forehead and sighed. The subject was right up his alley.

But Thacker called the writer back a few days later to say he couldn’t really help. For one thing, the scandal had opened a door that he was trying to shut.

By then he had cleared the dining-room table of the many papers from his 15-year quest, tucked them all into folders, and stacked each one behind his bedroom door. He just couldn’t bring himself to throw any of it away.

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.