Many questions about the admissions process start with same three-letter word. Why did this applicant get accepted, but not that one? Why did the college admit so many legacies? Why didn’t my kid get in? Why, why, why?
For as long as teenagers have cried over rejections from their dream schools, people have tried to explain outcomes that seem mysterious. When Noble Jones dug up decades of scholarly articles, journalistic reports, and first-person accounts, he found many renderings of why selective colleges accept some applicants and deny others.
But Jones, an admissions officer who became an academic researcher, wanted to understand something else: How were all those decisions made in the first place?
The question inspired his doctoral dissertation, a case study of the admissions process at an unnamed liberal-arts college in the Northeast. He attended admissions committee meetings, observing votes on more than 600 applicants. He also interviewed admissions officers and examined documents they used during evaluations.
The findings appear in Jones’s informative and amusingly titled paper, “Inside the Black Box: The Garbage Can Model of Decision-Making in Selective College Admissions.” He concluded that time and competing demands constrained admissions officers, whose attention and energy ebbed and flowed as they worked to meet not just one goal but many competing goals. Also, each decision had a bearing on another: One can’t view a given acceptance in isolation.
Jones, who graduated from the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education this summer, is now a postdoctoral research associate at the university. He spoke with The Chronicle about the ambiguity of admissions work, the needs it serves, and the humanity at its core.
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You focused on “how,” not “why.” Why?
There’s been terrific work explaining why certain groups of students are treated differently than others during the admissions process. What was lacking was a framework to understand how those decisions were made.
As I entered the graduate classroom after years as an admissions practitioner, I was frustrated that I did not encounter a theory to explain the ambiguity of what I had experienced. There’s just so much happening at that moment of decision, and I wanted to find a way to study it. The best way was to be present for the moment that vote is taken, and the resources of the institution are committed to a particular student.
The “garbage-can model” you describe made me think of Oscar the Grouch, but it’s just a metaphor for a system in which problems (institutional needs) and potential solutions (applicants) are all mixed together. What else can you tell us about this framework?
It’s a theory for organizational decision-making proposed in 1972. It explains how decisions are made in modern, complex organizations, such as universities and hospitals, in which those decisions happen under conditions of an organized anarchy.
An organized anarchy?
It’s vital to understanding the organization itself. There’s so much to know about applicants, little time, and much energy required. Decision makers are limited in their ability to make a fully informed, rational decision. That doesn’t mean they’re making irrational decisions; they’re trying to make the most informed decision they possibly can under tight time constraints.
But they’re limited in terms of the number of spots they can offer. They might also be limited by the amount of financial aid they can offer. There is organization to the chaos. If you want to be a good practitioner, you have to be comfortable with this ambiguity. You’re not always going to make a perfect decision given the constraints with which you’re operating.
One characteristic of the garbage-can model is the “fluid participation of actors.” In your study, decisions are made by an ever-changing lineup of admissions officers, who sometimes couldn’t participate in committee discussions because of other duties or personal matters. Did any of that variability surprise you?
The variability I observed astounded me. The admissions office had 13 committee members, but I didn’t see them all convened simultaneously to vote. I saw as few as three and as many as seven committee members meet at a given time.
My first vignette begins with a committee of five people, including the dean and one of his assistants, who immediately get called away for something. By design, there were five people in the room, and it immediately got 40 percent smaller.
Do you think that fluidity matters?
It absolutely matters, inasmuch as it is likely to affect, at least to an extent, how an application is read and heard at the committee table. My findings suggest that there are very real implications for the mix of participants present at a given time. My data can’t say, and I won’t argue, that an outcome for an applicant might have been different. But the window is certainly there to ask: Does this matter? Do decisions change based on who’s in the room?
Also, the admissions officers all had responsibilities to keep the bureaucratic process flowing, like calculating grade-point averages on the fly, noting applicants’ interests, and recording the committee’s votes. How well are they able to focus on decision-making while being responsive to the needs of the process?
I don’t think it’s something that one can necessarily correct. It’s very difficult to silo an entire office and expect that its attention be 100-percent devoted to this decision-making process. It’s a reflection of the very real complexity in the profession.
I was struck by the fuzziness of terms, like “good fit” and “intellectual fire,” that the admissions officers used to describe qualities they seek in applicants. There’s no exact way to objectively measure those perceived virtues.
Absolutely. That’s a finding that supports another condition of the garbage-can model: the use of “unclear technologies” in decision-making. “Fit” is a subjective and fluid term. It changes from application to application, and from person to person.
This is a fundamentally human process. It’s data-informed, it’s computer-managed, but humans are making the decisions along the way. There’s no universality in determining how an essay was read, or what student meant when they said this.
A lot of what admissions officers evaluate is unclear, and that’s not going to make many people feel very good. How well can we assess the potential of a student to contribute to a community? Or benefit from time on the campus? Those are really hard things to measure going forward, because within an applicant pool, you have thousands and thousands of lived experiences.
Admissions officers strive to know as much as they humanly can about an applicant, but they’re clearly limited in that. They’re trying to understand a student’s context for the performance presented in the application. That leads to heightened ambiguity for people on the outside, looking in. The more selective the institution, the more the ambiguity increases.
That ambiguity came up in the Harvard admissions trial this fall.
The subjectivity captured in my data is echoed in that testimony. That’s where some frustration resides. You can’t point to a decision made by a computer. There are many competing priorities that every admissions office is trying to balance. Why a decision was made in the moment might not be obvious later, when one is devoid of the context for that decision.
It was fascinating to read your description of how one student’s acceptance can affect another student’s chances. Everyone’s kind of connected.
The extent to which dynamic linkages exist between applicants surprised me a bit. The decision made about one applicant may affect the outcomes of other applicants, and vice versa.
Also, over time, there’s a progression of the committee. The needs of the institution may have already been addressed by prior admissions decisions. This adds to the ambiguity. Right now the institution might have 10 trombonists on the campus, so it’s not a dire need to admit another one to keep the band rolling.
The context of each decision is not just, Where is the student applying from? It’s also, Contextually, where does that applicant fall within all the other characteristics of the applicant pool right now?
What questions should admission officers ask themselves?
One question is: How well am I negotiating my own biases, assumptions, and understandings of students and their experiences? Every applicant is coming from a different background, with different resources. We must strive to understand the context from which a student is applying.
Another takeaway: Admissions officers must be cognizant of how their own attention and their energy levels might affect the decisions they make, so that there’s integrity in how this process unfolds.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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.
