Ethics 101 for Admissions Officers

Michael Gibbs for The Chronicle

Students going through the college-application process might be surprised to learn that some colleges charge more to those they are confident will accept their offer of admission. Basic econometric analysis allows colleges to produce a formula that assigns to each applicant the probability he or she would come if admitted. Colleges don’t even have to dig for the information that helps them make that prediction. Applicants themselves provide the necessary information for free, without knowing how it will be used.

Data on academic performance, race, gender, geographic origin, high-school quality, extracurricular activities and interests, connections to the institution, and financial situation are all easy to collect. So is the demonstration of a student’s interest as indicated by whether she signed up at the admissions office before a campus tour or met with an admissions officer at her high school. Companies in other industries must surely be envious of how colleges and universities are privy to such a range and depth of information.

Is this practice legal? Sure. Is it ethical? That is not so clear.

A college might do such an analysis for several reasons, and some raise no particular ethical problems. Such a formula would allow a college to anticipate the size of its incoming class and of its financial-aid budget. Both are valuable to know.

But some colleges find it all too tempting to use these estimates for other purposes. If you think that an applicant is coming anyway, why give him a generous financial-aid package? Here is where economics might easily collide with ethics. If we are talking about merit aid, this approach might just be reasonable. Merit discounts are aimed at enrolling students by cutting the price below what their families could afford. So if an applicant from an affluent family is ready to enroll if admitted, why charge him an amount that is less than he is willing to pay and less than his family has the wherewithal to provide? On the other hand, this entails treating people of equal academic merit differently.

And doesn’t transparency — or its lack — matter in determining what is right? What if it were publicly known that an especially talented student was charged more because, among other factors, his dad attended the college and he was naïve enough to go on the tour? To take the point one step further, what if this type of economic analysis were applied to the allocation of need-based aid?

Need-based aid is determined by what parents can afford. If an applicant is from a low-income family, to charge her more based on her demonstrated interest strikes us as a position that is impossible to defend. Sure, it would mean that colleges would have additional money to spend for other good purposes, but only because students such as this one are forced to take out more debt than our aid formulas suggest is prudent.

In short, using this type of information to allocate merit and need-based aid poses ethical challenges. With need-based aid, the ethical objections seem all the stronger.

Finally, there is a related application of this type of analysis that is also morally troubling. Many colleges work hard to minimize their “admit rates” — that is, the percentage of all applicants who are admitted — acting on the premise that, to the outside world, increased selectivity equates with higher quality.

This prediction formula provides a great way to lower a college’s admit rate. Focus on admitting those students who are highly likely to attend (for example, a student with a 90-percent chance of accepting an offer), and, for those with low probabilities (a student with a 10-percent chance), either reject them or place them on the wait list. When you limit admission offers to those who are likely to attend, you don’t have to admit very many to fill your class. But that means not admitting students who get the highest test scores and grades but who may be more likely to attend an even more prestigious institution than your own. If that happens, the more qualified the student, the less chance of his being admitted. Not exactly what the public is led to believe about how the admissions process works.

How do you morally justify accepting an inferior student whom you know will attend over a stronger student who probably will not? We can picture the outrage should such a practice become public. And there is another ethical problem here: When you manipulate statistics such as your admit rate, you mislead those who rely on that information. Yet, over the past few decades, it seems to have become more common for colleges to reject (or place on the wait list) students who are “too good” to come if admitted.

It used to be that the concept of a safety school was a simple one. Just as students apply to a “reach” college that is unlikely to admit them, they also apply to others that are very likely to accept them. Not today.

If colleges were open about what they were doing, at least the deception would disappear. However, other ethical problems would remain. To secure acceptance from some of the most desirable colleges, students would do best to learn not more math and history but more about the techniques institutions use in manipulating a complex system of selective admissions. Is that the kind of extracurricular activity we want them to engage in?

Hardly. We in higher-education administration would do well to remember that when the use of economic tools has the potential to lead us into ethical hot water, we must think long and hard before employing them. Approaches that are commonplace in the business world often have no place in the world of higher education.