How Applying to College Shapes Students

Study finds ‘formative experience,’ frustration, for brightest applicants

Rachel Weisel learned a lot when she applied to college. The admissions process taught her how to express herself during interviews, how to describe her best qualities in application essays.

But she also learned how it feels to stare at the ceiling: Many nights during her senior year of high school, she would lie awake, thinking about which college she should choose. “It was always lurking in the back of my mind,” she says, even while she was playing tennis, taking piano lessons, or editing her high-school newspaper. “It took away my concentration.”

Now a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Weisel says she often reflects on that experience. She grew wary of college marketing campaigns, in which “everyone wants to tell you that they’re the best.” She believes that the large role played by standardized-test scores and grade-point averages in admissions leads some deans to see students as statistics, not people.

And she is of two minds about one question: Is the admissions process fair to students?

Similar concerns have prompted Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education Conservancy, to develop plans for a major research project to explore the messages that selective colleges send to prospective applicants, and how those messages influence the attitudes and behaviors of high-achieving students. The Education Conservancy is a Portland, Ore., group that opposes commercial influences in college admissions.

The findings of a preliminary, qualitative study, “College Admissions: What Are Students Learning?,” are a mosaic of widespread frustrations. The results suggest that college applicants absorb both good and bad lessons, which may shape how they see themselves and society.

The nonprofit group, which planned to introduce the study at this week’s annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, in Austin, Tex., describes the study as a glimpse into the minds of students — one that could help colleges and universities identify and solve problems in the admissions process.

For some students, applying to college may seem like passing through a storm: It’s a tense, even fearful experience, but also a fleeting one, ending as soon as one or more thick envelopes arrive. Why should anyone study this rite of passage?

Mr. Thacker believes that as admissions has grown into a large, complex system, it has become a formative experience for many young people, a time when they must confront issues of fairness in a system full of inequities. “It’s a singular developmental moment,” he says, “and the educational impact of this seminal moment needs to be understood.”

Padding Résumés

To that end, Mr. Thacker and a handful of higher-education researchers devised a list of questions, including “Why is the college admission process so important?” and “Is there anything you have done … just to enhance your admissions probabilities?”

A Bethesda, Md.-based research firm, JBL Associates Inc., recently took those questions to eight high schools, public and private, in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. At each stop, researchers posed the questions to chosen groups of 12 high-achieving seniors, all of whom had applied to selective colleges. Their 90-minute discussions were recorded and transcribed.

Among the positive findings was that the admissions process gives students opportunities for self-examination and personal growth.

But the students in the study tended to believe they had to make many sacrifices when applying to colleges. Because they felt pressure to be well-rounded, for instance, many said they had participated in some extracurricular activities solely to improve their admissions prospects. That discouraged those who had forfeited time they could have spent pursuing their real passions. Such trade-offs, said a draft report of the firm’s findings, were accompanied by “considerable anguish.”

Larry H. Litten, an independent researcher who worked on the project, wrote a separate analysis of the sessions. In his write-up, Mr. Litten, a former director of institutional research at Dartmouth College, concluded that colleges may do some things that elicit, or reinforce, lying, cheating, and cynicism among potential applicants. For example, he wrote, aggressive recruitment efforts might convince students that colleges are self-serving businesses, not institutions with educational missions.

“College marketing,” he wrote, “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 of colleges, “they are trying to sell to us, and we are trying to sell to them.”

Mr. Litten also speculated that standardized tests may promote dishonesty and resentment among students who think the requirement overshadows their creativity, hard work, and motivation. He likened students’ perceptions of the SAT to how colleges view the use of institutional rankings by students, calling both a “reductionist mechanism for making spurious, but convenient, distinctions.”

A Deeper Look

Mr. Litten noted that his statements were based on comments from a small sample of students, and that more comprehensive research could provide better insights. The Education Conservancy plans to turn the project into a broad, longitudinal study.

One potentially fruitful question is whether negative admissions-related experiences continue to affect students after they enroll in college. The study might try to examine whether elite institutions take too much blame for applicants’ competitiveness, anxieties, and tactics, which may amount to a reflection of human nature as much as a result of systemic flaws in admissions. It’s also fair to guess that some teenagers would complain about the unfairness of any test or the injustice of any stress-inducing experience.

Some higher-education experts believe that Mr. Thacker’s project could hold a much-needed mirror up to the admissions industry.

Richard A. Detweiler, president of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, says colleges would benefit from hearing what more students have to say about practices such as early decision and mass marketing. “Some students have learned not about education or how to think, but about how to build a résumé,” says Mr. Detweiler, who has advised the Education Conservancy on the study. “What are colleges helping them to learn?”

He concedes, though, that admissions officials may have trouble swallowing the study’s implication that they are doing something wrong. After all, Mr. Detweiler, a former president of Hartwick College, insists that he has yet to meet a dean who does not care deeply about students’ well-being.

“It’s hard,” he says, “to accept that things we’re doing with good motivations may be sending bad messages.”

Ms. Weisel, the Penn student, recalls getting some discouraging messages from colleges. But she also attributes some of her admissions anxiety to her own inability to make a decision. After receiving her acceptances, she opted for Penn, then chose another university, only to change her mind again the day after Penn’s deposit deadline.

Ms. Weisel thinks the experience has helped her understand the causes of her indecision. She figures she will know for sure in a couple of years, when it’s time to choose from among all those highly competitive graduate schools.

http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 54, Issue 5, Page A1