Last fall, more than 100 admissions leaders, policy makers, and researchers gathered in Washington, D.C., to discuss the system that just about everyone thinks is broken but no one is quite sure how to fix.
The summit was part of Hack the Gates, a yearlong initiative to reimagine college admissions, sponsored by Admissions Community Cultivating Equity and Peace Today, known as Accept, and the Race and Intersectional Studies in Educational Equity Center at Colorado State University at Fort Collins. Heavy on small-group brainstorming sessions, the two-day event was meant to drive potential answers to a big question: How can the process better serve low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented minority students?
Those discussions inspired eight new research briefs that were published online on Tuesday. Each contains recommendations that were previously shared with admissions officials, who gave feedback on their practicality. “We hope to develop pilot programs for the papers and take the ideas for a test drive,” said Marie Bigham, Accept’s founder and executive director. “Radically reimagining admissions requires creativity, openness, and courage from all of us in the college-admissions ecosystem, and Hack the Gates will keep pushing.”
Taken together, the briefs offer some provocative recommendations for promoting racial and socioeconomic equity within a system that in many ways works against it. Here’s a snapshot of some key themes.
It’s time to rethink recruitment. In “Reimagining College Fairs for Equity: The Role of High Schools and Postsecondary Education,” Adrian H. Huerta, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, proposes a checklist that high schools and colleges can use to foster college-going knowledge: “The pandemic era challenges the college-access field … to reconsider and rethink how they design and facilitate socially distanced and post-pandemic programs for prospective students.”
Ted Thornhill, an associate professor of sociology at Florida Gulf Coast University, argues that colleges must ensure that admissions offices are free from racially discriminatory policies, practices, and personnel. In “Communication Equity Audits: Eliminating Racialized Responsiveness Among College Admissions Counselors,” he writes: “Scrutinizing the email and other recruitment and outreach practices of these organizational gatekeepers can help create a more transparent and anti-racist admissions process.”
There’s a better way to match students and colleges. In “Dismantling the Hunger Games: Exploring a Match System in Selective Admissions,” OiYan Poon, an associate professor of higher-education leadership at Colorado State, suggests an alternative to the selective-admissions process that would emphasize students’ educational interests, and be publicly managed with oversight by the U.S. Department of Education. One goal: reducing the role of a student’s ability to pay in admissions outcomes. “It’s time,” Poon writes, “to reject and rebel against the cultural and structural norms of domination and oppression in the current systems of selective college admissions.”
Test-optional is just a start. Dominique J. Baker, an assistant professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University, and Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy and advancement at the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, wrote “In a Pandemic, Test-Optional Admissions Is Necessary but Insufficient,” which describes how “traditional measures of ‘academic success’ will likely be less accurate during the pandemic.” They offer advice on three concerns relating to test-optional policies: states that require students to take the ACT or SAT for high-school graduation; the pandemic’s effect on recent-term high-school grades; and the speed with which many colleges have dropped testing requirements.
“As admissions professionals evaluate prospective students, it will be important for them to keep in mind things like layoffs, infection rates, and deaths from the pandemic,” the authors write. “Providing deep contextual information to admissions professionals can help them to evaluate applicants more thoroughly.”
