Let’s talk about fairness, the word no one can quite pin down. It echoes in high-school hallways and campus quads, in editorial pages and judicial opinions — wherever people have something to say about college admissions.
But what is fairness, really?
Ask the applicant, for whom an admissions decision from a selective college arrives like the last judgment. An acceptance rewards years of studying deep into the night, excelling in extracurriculars, and shelling out for those SAT-prep courses. And rejection is condemnation.
Meanwhile, for the admissions dean, there’s not one verdict but many. The job requires meeting the college’s various wants and needs by selecting the best assortment of applicants, as defined by many different attributes. Rejection is part of the procedure.
The ritual’s participants just don’t share the same expectations. So when they talk about fairness, they may not even be talking about the same thing.
Years ago, Christoph Guttentag would tell families that admissions officers weighed “all things equally.” Later he realized that wasn’t quite right. After selective colleges identify a chunk of applicants with outstanding credentials, he says, evaluations take a different shape: “Academic differences become less meaningful, and personal differences become more meaningful.”
These days Mr. Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions at Duke University, describes three facets of his work. One is understanding an applicant’s personal achievements. Another is understanding those achievements in context: “Fairness isn’t a matter of considering everybody by the same yardstick,” he says, “because people are coming from such different levels of advantage and disadvantage.” Then there’s fairness he owes to the university: making decisions that best serve its goals.
Riffing on fairness goes way, way back. Confucius did it. So did Plato. Arthur Dobrin, who teaches ethics at Hofstra University, offers three definitions. “Sameness,” the idea that everyone should be treated equally. “Deservedness,” the belief that some people, because of smarts or hard work, deserve more than others. “Need,” the notion that we should help those who are less fortunate.
Go on, apply each one to the admissions process. A selective college that prioritizes athletes and donors’ children isn’t treating each applicant the same way, is it? Because a selective institution can accept only some of the well-rounded students who’ve studied their tails off, its choices complicate the expectation that we get what we deserve. Admissions officers who weigh a poor applicant’s academic record against his hardships work in a realm of contradictory criticisms: They’re doing too little to help the have-nots, they’re doing so much that it’s hurting everyone else’s chances.
When applicants complain that admissions is unfair, though, they’re usually talking about an outcome: They didn’t get in. Colleges have an implied obligation to be fair in admissions, but it concerns the process, not the results, says Peter Corning, author of The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice.
Colleges could reduce misunderstandings by explaining more explicitly how they make their decisions, Mr. Corning says by email. And, he adds, by adhering “as closely as possible” to the process they’ve laid out, ensuring “procedural fairness.” Perhaps, he says, colleges should even add a disclaimer noting that their decisions involve professional judgment.
James W. Jump agrees that colleges could try harder. To the uninitiated, it seems as if every applicant competes against all the rest, says Mr. Jump, academic dean and director of guidance at St. Christopher’s School, in Richmond, Va. In reality, the competition is fractured: Admissions offices compare students with those who bring similar things to the table. Not everyone, in other words, has an even, 5.9-percent chance of getting into Harvard.
What admissions offices prize most highly, Mr. Jump says, is what is rare. “The more you look like lots of other applicants,” he says, “the less admissible you probably are.”
Without seeing the whole pool, one can only guess at what stands out. But in such company, the quality that selective-college applicants might be best known for in their high schools — academic dominance — probably just blends in.
Preference for the rare plays out on many fronts. A college where applicants are disproportionately women will wind up using “stiffer” standards to admit them, as Kenyon College’s then admissions dean explained in The New York Times nearly a decade ago. “Because young men are rarer,” she wrote, “they’re more valued applicants.”
That leaves counselors like Mr. Jump with a two-part message to convey: “Having the grades and scores and courses is necessary to be competitive,” he says. “But it’s not sufficient.”
Fairness in admissions is not a new question for Mr. Jump. Back in 1988 he wrote an essay for The Chronicle titled “The Only Fair Way for Elite Colleges to Choose Their Freshman Classes Is by Random Selection.” It did not win him many friends. Admissions officials hated the article, Mr. Jump recalls, and students even wrote to The Chronicle to complain. Applicants don’t want to be admitted randomly, Mr. Jump learned. They want to believe they have bested their competitors.
By that logic, though, those who don’t get in think they are lesser students. So some college counselors try to strike a balance, urging students not to attach great meaning to admissions outcomes and yet not to think of them as meaningless. “You want to tell them admissions is not random,” says Mark C. Moody, co-director of college counseling at the Colorado Academy, in Denver.
Early on, he tries to manage their expectations by reminding them that nothing’s written in stone about who deserves a spot. “There’s no universal concept of merit,” he says.
Here’s where one thorny word entangles with another. Conceptions of fairness have a lot to do with merit, which Americans have been thinking about for centuries.
The nation’s founders believed that merit alone should determine who advances. Joseph F. Kett, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Virginia, traces the evolution of that belief in Merit: The History of a Founding Ideal From the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century. Forget birthrights and nepotism: In a brand-new nation, one’s achievements mattered most.
Yet notions of merit — “a quality deserving of reward” — have long conflicted with other American ideals, especially equal rights, Mr. Kett writes: “Merit implies difference, while equality suggests sameness.” Our attempts to reconcile merit with other principles have long shaped how we think about just about everything, especially education. Over the last few decades, Americans have come to define merit more and more in terms of “intellectual ability and academic achievement.”
Along the way, the nation embraced standardized testing as a means of drawing small distinctions among many people, of revealing merit hidden by the luck of birth. “In a nation whose values were antithetical to assuming that a citizen’s social trajectory was fixed by birthright,” Mr. Kett writes, “the promise of mental tests to forecast destinies was irresistible.”
Today, of course, students’ performances on the ACT and SAT reflect longstanding socioeconomic disparities. Circumstances beyond one’s control — such as parental income — remain significant obstacles on the road to higher education. Such conditions, Mr. Kett writes, have inspired a prevalent criticism: “Because we cannot choose our parents or our IQs, even the fairest application of merit-based selection cannot overcome the legacies of birth.”
Nancy Leopold worries about that. To her, fairness means having as much of a shot as another applicant with similar high-school credentials, test scores, and extracurricular activities. For students with many disadvantages, she says, “that definition of fairness doesn’t work.”
Ms. Leopold, executive director of CollegeTracks, a nonprofit group in Maryland that helps low-income and first-generation students get to college, sees a stacked deck. High-school students who struggle with English. Who lack access to rigorous courses and college counseling. Who can’t participate in after-school activities because they’re watching younger siblings or earning money for their families.
Those circumstances, she believes, guarantee that many students won’t excel according to conventional measures of merit. “Scoring better on those measures is largely beyond their control,” she says. “Until the measures change, there is no hope of fairness for them.”
Measures of merit are made in the image of their creators. Standardized tests, for instance, are designed primarily by intuitive men — and test-takers who are intuitive men do particularly well, says Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University.
And metrics can carry you only so far. When parents ask him how selective admissions works, Mr. Boeckenstedt uses an analogy. Imagine you are hiring someone for a job, he’ll say. Some applicants can be eliminated easily. A few rise to the top. But how do you decide from there? “Sometimes,” Mr. Boeckenstedt says, “it boils down to something really ridiculous.”
For decades, colleges’ pursuit of greater racial and ethnic diversity has inspired legal challenges, prompting courts to weigh one idea of fairness (merit) against another (equity). Around the time of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Hopwood v. Texas, in 1996, the debate over race-conscious admissions policies leapt into the court of public opinion, says Arthur L. Coleman, a former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Since that era, Mr. Coleman believes, the public has grown more skeptical of the admissions process. “Those of us who defend the system are saying ‘trust the system,’” he says, “in a culture increasingly suspicious of systems they don’t understand.”
Mr. Coleman, a managing partner and co-founder of EducationCounsel LLC, thinks colleges could do more to challenge the idea that merit and equity are contradictions. How? By telling better stories.
He carries around a copy of the University of Michigan Law School’s admission policy, upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003. The comprehensive document, which explains the school’s interest in enrolling a diverse class, describes several applicants who were admitted despite low test scores. Like the Argentinian immigrant who came to the United States at 21, and raised a child by herself while attending the University of Cincinnati, where she earned all A’s, participated in student groups, won glowing praise for her intellect, and graduated summa cum laude.
Would it have been fair to reject her application because her LSAT score was in the 52nd percentile?
What makes talk of fairness in college admissions so hard is that most applicants to a place like, say, Bucknell University could succeed there under the right circumstances. That, says Rob Springall, dean of admissions there, makes it hard to explain why any particular one didn’t get in.
“It really does come down to very fine details that, to an individual applicant, would be really hard to discern,” he says, “or not very fulfilling as an answer.”
But the quest for answers continues.
Earlier this year an anonymous student group at Stanford University encouraged students to request their admissions files under federal privacy law. With those documents, they thought, they could reverse-engineer how they’d gotten in. The group’s premise? Elite admissions is “biased towards those that are in the know.”
Later a reporter who’d been covering the story for BuzzFeed gained access to her admissions file from another elite college. Her article about the experience describes the clues she uncovered about why she had gotten in, as well as her mixed feelings about them.
Even armed with an admissions file, the curious can only make an educated guess about why an applicant was admitted.
Figuring out if the process was fair? That’s even more elusive.
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.
Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
