The difference between the two responses to my essay “The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions” helps illustrate the point I wished to make. The response that comes from outside the paradigm of “holistic admissions” is detailed, grounded in evidence, and thoughtful, while the one written from within that world conveys the incoherence, cynicism, and bureaucratic entitlement that I became gloomily familiar with while researching selective admissions.
Regarding the first response, I share with Rebecca Zwick a sense that admissions lotteries are a nonstarter on practical grounds. Lotteries at a few schools wouldn’t solve the problems I discuss, and individual colleges would gain nothing from defecting from the current system to adopt them, while a single lottery encompassing many or all of the most selective colleges (which the colleges would in any event never accept) would probably run afoul of anti-trust law. Indeed, in my book I concede that rather than a real-world solution, the idea of lottery is best treated as a heuristic device that helps us see the pathologies of the present system.
Even so, Zwick’s dismissal of the idea of lotteries, by downplaying the significance of the many perversities of selective admissions, makes the substantive case against them seem stronger than it is. (I don’t have space to address all of her points, most of which are directed at arguments for lotteries that I don’t make.) If, as she concedes, core features of the current system such as “continuously shifting admissions criteria” and “carefully crafted ‘authenticity’” deserve the scornful treatment I give them, then the value of radical proposals such as admissions lotteries, imperfect as they are, needs to be recalculated.
I’m not a psychometrician, as Zwick is. I write as a parent, and a political theorist, and, for me, in both of these roles, a system of selection that purports to judge the moral worthiness of its aspirants based on criteria that change according not to any refinement in moral understandings but to the evolving bureaucratic challenge of making those aspirants as legible as possible is an insult both to moral logic and to my duties as a parent. The standard of “carefully crafted ‘authenticity,” which the leaders of the current system propagate, is likewise a logical and moral absurdity. These are the sorts of intellectual vices I try to help my children identify in dinner-table conversation. The idea that, starting in a few years, I should have them imbibe those vices as a sort of teaching, in the name of “good character” and under the rubric “higher education,” is so bizarre and bitter and contrary I can barely get my head around it.
Who in America has as much direct, intimate leverage over the attitudes and activities of as many people — people impressionable both in their inchoate youth and in their felt need to meet the terms of such a high-stakes quid pro quo — as the admissions personnel of selective colleges? A vivid illustration of this power passed through my Twitter feed not long ago. It was a screenshot from a high schooler’s Facebook notifications page showing, in two columns, perhaps 10 or 12 or 15 requests for him to “like” the nonprofit organizations his friends and classmates had founded. Why had so many organizations been founded out of thin air, by the friends of just this one kid? Because admissions personnel had started saying that merely volunteering somewhere isn’t enough to show real commitment anymore. It’s better to found something. And just by snapping their fingers, as it were, admissions people brought forth into the world, in performances of moral compliance that they call “leadership,” an untold number of superfluous NGOs.
If we pause to think of the system of selective admissions in these terms, the tripwire readiness of teenagers to react to new signals from this half-hidden machinery, the deeper influence that reaches into families and changes how even young children are raised, we might want to turn some of our curiosity more directly upon the people who run that machinery and emit those signals, upon their morals, the quality of their thinking.
On this score the second response to my essay, is a depressing document. In addressing my arguments about the disturbing power conveyed through admissions signals, Robert J. Massa, Bill Conley, and David Holmes of the Character Collaborative manage to beg the question with a non sequitur: It was always thus, they point out, citing a 1966 book on college admissions. Whether plying leverage to change the attitudes of teenagers was actually justified in 1966 is something they merely assume, but the larger problem with their argument is the inaptness of the precedent. B. Alden Thresher yearning for more virtuous matriculants in the early 1960s, when his school, MIT, admitted roughly half of its applicants, only highlights the incomparable power admissions personnel wield today, when the admissions rates of MIT and similar schools are one-tenth what they were back then, and when the entire culture of middle-class adolescence has been remade by competitive feedback loops generated and shaped and perpetually refueled by signals from the admissions world. That my correspondents can look at the abyss that separates Thresher from themselves and see fresh pavement over unbroken terrain is a convenient bit of misperception.
Admissions people not only revise the field of perception as it suits them. They also have a conveniently flexible sense of the moral rules that apply to it. This latter tendency finds startling expression when Massa, Conley, and Holmes address the question: Are students merely gaming the system of “authentic admissions,” and thus making a mockery, a self-contradiction of it? It seems a real problem, but they have a breezy response: “What if students attempt to ‘game the system’? If by doing so they become more caring for others ….” It does not seem to occur to them that the true lesson they may be imparting to young people isn’t “become more caring for others,” but rather “game systems!” Or, more disturbingly, the lesson may be that moral character and gaming systems go together — harmonious elements of the same personality. That they can propagate this moral absurdity as a homey lesson in common sense, while presenting themselves as educators, gives a measure of the dark predicament we’re in.
It is in their own formulation that we see the cynicism that suffuses the world of selective admissions. Authentic admissions, they insist, “means... colleges don’t want students painting a false picture of themselves or doing things they’re not interested in,” and also, who cares? Who cares if they game the system? Who cares if applicants are concocting things to appear to be “interested in” to please admissions officers? Who cares if authentic admissions is obviously and necessarily inauthentic?
This indifference in argument, the tolerance for open incoherence in their own case, is pretty much what you’d expect from an institution that wields such entrenched and intoxicating power. Such florid cynicism about the process is a way of declaring its inviolability. I take no solace in noting that this proves my point.
