The Bribery Scandal Revealed Holes in Admissions Oversight. Now Some Professors Want to Take Back That Role.

The Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal brought to light glaring loopholes in colleges’ oversight of how students are accepted and enrolled. Now, at two of the universities involved, faculty members are exploring whether they should take on a greater role.

At Yale, the Faculty Senate recently approved the creation of a committee on admissions to improve faculty awareness of the process. John Geanakoplos, chair of the Senate, told the Yale Daily News that the committee had been proposed before news of the Varsity Blues scandal broke, but that the scandal had “stimulated” more attention to the idea.

The scandal led to the resignation and guilty plea of Rudy Meredith, a longtime women’s soccer coach at Yale. Meredith admitted that he had accepted bribes to portray prospective female applicants as soccer players. The scandal has also touched the University of Southern California and Stanford and Georgetown Universities, as well as other institutions.

Admission Through the ‘Side Door’

Dozens of people, including famous actors, college coaches, and a university administrator, have been charged by federal prosecutors for their alleged roles in an admissions-bribery scheme involving Yale, Stanford, and other elite institutions.

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At Southern California, faculty members have called for better oversight of the admissions process but have yet to see concrete policy changes. In a memo to Carol L. Folt, the university’s president, who will be inaugurated next week, the Concerned Faculty of USC wrote: “There must be a faculty-led, transparent investigation of the recent admissions scandal, with accountability to the USC community and the public, so as to rebuild trust in the integrity of our process, including a frank admission of where we went wrong.”

The memo demanded that faculty members have “oversight authority over the admission and education of student-athletes” in light of the university’s central role in the Varsity Blues scandal. “We’re still waiting to hear back about our proposal,” said Ariela Gross, a law professor who leads Concerned Faculty of USC, in an interview.

Gross added that Southern California already has a faculty committee, the Oversight Committee for Athletic Academic Affairs, that monitors athletics admissions, but that its influence has been curtailed. “That’s essentially our No. 1 ask, to give that committee real oversight power,” she said. Also, unlike at Yale, USC professors are looking for direct oversight of athletics admissions, including meeting with coaches and reviewing potential athletes’ admission files, not just increased awareness for the faculty.

At Yale now, faculty members may serve as voting members of the admissions committee, and nearly three dozen did so last year, according to Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid. Yale also has a standing Faculty Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid, which provides recommendations on the admissions process and receives admissions updates and financial-aid data.

Margit A. Dahl, Yale’s director of undergraduate admissions, said in a written statement that Yale “incorporates more faculty in more substantial ways in the undergraduate-admissions process than any other comparable institution.”

Faculty involvement in admissions has longstanding precedent in higher education, and faculty members were the primary decision makers in admissions at many institutions’ founding. That began to change in the early to mid-1970s as the profession of enrollment management expanded, according to Stefanie D. Niles, vice president for enrollment and communications at Ohio Wesleyan and president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Vestiges of those early faculty-run days often remained in the form of committees or faculty readers, but by and large, 21st-century institutions have adopted data-driven models to evaluate prospective students.

Nowadays the faculty role in admissions runs the gamut, from evaluating applicants with admissions officers at the California Institute of Technology to little involvement beyond advising on admissions guidelines at the University of San Diego.

Colleges that retain a direct faculty role in evaluations, like the Juilliard School and the Olin College of Engineering, have unusual admissions cultures. Juilliard requires all applicants to audition before its Committee on Admissions, which consists of faculty members. Olin hosts Candidates’ Weekend, during which prospective students interview with professors and complete a group exercise that faculty, staff, and current students supervise.

While Emily Roper-Doten, Olin’s dean of admission and financial aid, has seen faculty members embrace their roles in admissions despite the additional time commitment, Olin enrolls a new class of fewer than 100 students each year, so Roper-Doten is skeptical about whether a similarly hands-on admissions process could work at larger institutions.

“From a scalable sense, we are very lucky that we are so small that we can pull this off,” Roper-Doten said. “We are practically at capacity for what we can do and not take a semester to a screeching halt.”

Niles said how faculty members are involved in the admissions process should be highly specific to each institution. “When I think about the complexities of the enrollment process and the challenges that we face,” she said, “I believe that many faculty members recognize that while there’s an important role that they can and they should play in the admissions process, it isn’t always having a level of oversight.”

David Burge, immediate past president of the admissions counselors’ group and vice president for enrollment management at George Mason University, said faculty involvement in admissions should orient the process to best inform applicants of what their student experience will be. Admissions processes, he said, should be an extension of the institution’s curriculum.

“My opinion on this is you have to have a good, strong connection between the faculty and the admissions office,” Burge said. “I wouldn’t want to undersell just how important it is to get this right.”

Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.