Colleges Debate Whether Dropping the SAT Makes Them More Competitive

There’s almost a schizophrenia in college admissions,” says Dan Lundquist, vice president and dean of admissions at New York’s Union College.

“There’s this mercenary instinct to put your colleges at the best possible advantage. At the same time, most of us are educators who are against that kind of crude positioning.”

Nowhere is that clash of values more evident than in how administrators view their favorite whipping boys, the U.S. News & World Report college guide and the SAT. If one could find a way to use the test they love to hate to improve their standing in the rankings they love to hate, the result might prove irresistible.

The thesis, first stated last year by The New Republic, is that colleges are being less than honest about why they abolish requirements that applicants submit their SAT scores. Behind the rhetoric about “enhancing diversity” and creating a more “holistic approach” to admissions, the theory goes, many colleges “go optional” on the SAT to improve their rankings. The logic is rather simple: At an SAT-optional college, students with higher scores are far more likely to submit them, raising the institution’s mean SAT score and hence the heavily test-influenced rankings.

Additionally, more students will apply to an SAT-optional college, and thus a lower percentage will be admitted, increasing its “selectivity rating.”

“People will do what they have to do to stack the deck,” explains John Maguire, an admissions consultant and former admissions director at Boston College.

Not that anyone admits to it, of course. It’s those other colleges that do it. “It’s a nervous topic,” concedes an admissions director at a large Midwestern university, asking not to be named. “Nobody wants to be accused of picking on people.”

The cunning scheme seems so perfect that it has quickly taken on the character of an urban legend in some admissions circles, its truth rarely questioned.

The relationship between going optional and improving a college’s average test score is unquestionable. Almost a decade ago, when Ann Wright was an admissions dean at a Northeastern liberal-arts college, she sought a consultant’s advice on how to increase the college’s mean SAT score. “He told me that if we were really interested in raising our SAT’s, we should make our scores optional,” says Ms. Wright, now vice president for enrollment at Rice University.

The link between going optional and rising in the rankings is not so clear. What is amazing, given how often they complain about the seemingly mystical formulas that constitute the rankings, is how many admissions directors buy in to the quick-fix idea.

The New Republic article noted that in 1996, Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College went optional and catapulted itself from the third tier to the second in the U.S. News rankings of liberal-arts colleges. That is true. But what the article did not say is that Muhlenberg reports an “all-inclusive profile” of its students’ scores, requiring those applicants who did not originally submit scores to do so after they enroll and counting the results in its overall tally. Christopher Hooker-Haring, dean of admissions and financial aid, cites the usual reasons for going optional -- the ability to “coach” to the test and the disproportionately lower scores among some minority groups, for example -- but emphatically states that “the rankings had absolutely nothing to do with our decision.”

Other colleges cited in the article, including Dickinson and Franklin & Marshall, may regret going optional, if a rankings boost was their true aim. Franklin & Marshall went optional in 1990, when its rank was 27th among liberal-arts colleges, and its listing has been lower ever since. It is now 36th. Dickinson was 40th when it went optional, in 1995. Since then, its ranking has dipped below that every year but one. It is now 44th.

Robert Morse, director of data research for the U.S. News rankings, explains that many admissions deans use gimmicks to improve their ratings without understanding how the list works. “If these are the same admissions deans who think that going early decision will improve their yield, and advance them in the rankings, their level of information is just irresponsible. They’re certainly kidding themselves if they think that going SAT-optional alone will move them in the rankings.”

One reason is that factors in the rankings sometimes work at cross-purposes. A college could go optional on the SAT but find that its retention rate suffers because of lower-caliber students. And despite what many academics think, it is very difficult to move far in the rankings, Mr. Morse says. A college would have to improve 40 percentage points in yield -- the proportion of admitted applicants who actually enroll -- in order to move more than one spot in the rankings by yield.

“I get the impression that it takes a stick of dynamite and whole lot of money to move in the rankings,” says Union’s Mr. Lundquist.

But that doesn’t mean more colleges won’t try. In the end, the scheme may say more about the insanely competitive world of university admissions than about either the SAT or the rankings.

“It’s one of those soft-underbelly issues,” says the president of a liberal-arts college, who continues to doubt the motives of colleagues who go optional. “The market considerations are more pronounced than they once were, and we might not be as noble as we’d like to think.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Page: A14