Advertising is all about promises — the bolder, the better. A new detergent with its super-enhanced formula will leave clothes cleaner and brighter than ever, changing the way you think about laundry. The new application system that more than 80 high-profile public and private colleges announced this fall delivered the same kind of dazzling pitch.
The Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success said it would “recast” the admissions process, making it more “engaged, ongoing and educationally affirming"while helping more low-income and underrepresented-minority students enroll at highly selective colleges. The only thing missing was a jingle.
Although the system won’t go live until next year, the debate it has ignited continues. Skeptical enrollment officials, questioning the depth of the group’s commitment to access, have called it a cartel and a charade. Some college counselors see the plan as ill-conceived and misguided. Even a few admissions deans at participating colleges are not sure if their group can deliver on its promises.
Fall is the season for admissions conferences, and the coalition is making the rounds. This week its representatives plan to promote the new application at the College Board’s annual forum, in Washington. If a recent presentation is any indication, plenty more gripes and tough questions will arise.
It’s not just bickering over the whims of big-name colleges, though. The controversy over the coalition stirs up some of the most important questions in college admissions.
Will a hidebound profession embrace real innovation? How can higher education best reach a diverse cohort of teenagers, especially those from underprivileged families? And will the colleges now proclaiming to want more such students accept the trade-offs that might prove necessary to enroll more of them?
A Search for Alternatives
In a field defined by age-old rituals, the coalition has, at the very least, inspired a conversation about how the experience of applying to college could be different. “Except for going from paper to online, the admissions process hasn’t changed that much in 50 years,” says James G. Nondorf, dean of admissions and financial aid at the University of Chicago and one of the leaders of the coalition.
Like it or not, the group represents collective action not seen since the Common Application was formed, in 1975. That once-tiny consortium grew into a juggernaut, with more than 600 member colleges worldwide. Two years ago, frustrations with the Common App — technical glitches, strict membership rules — prompted admissions officials to envision alternatives.
Some eventual members of the coalition saw a chance to innovate. In a 2013 interview with The Chronicle, John L. Latting, dean of admission at Emory University, imagined a shared application with an educational component. A big group of institutions, he said, could use such a platform to help high-school students plan for college well before they applied: “Why doesn’t the Common App start when you’re in your freshman year, and you’re saying, ‘I want to go to college — teach me how to do it?’ "
That question foreshadowed the coalition’s plan to pack college-planning tools into its application system, letting students create profiles as early as ninth grade. The platform is supposed to include links to information about financial aid and fee waivers, as well as “interactive academic course paths” for high schoolers.
There are important caveats to consider, though. Students won’t necessarily know how to use the new tool, or have anyone to show them. And attracting more underserved applicants — if that happens — is one thing, but accepting them is another.
Technology alone will not open the doors to the most competitive colleges, says Elizabeth Morgan, director of external relations at the National College Access Network, whose input the coalition has sought. “We applaud the interest in supporting high-achieving, low-income students, and the best way to do that would be to admit a higher percentage of Pell Grant students,” she says. “It’s not about the tools or what an app asks for. It’s about admissions offices creating incentives for their institutions to enroll these students. Why work hard to find them if the reality is you’re not going to admit them, because you really don’t have the budget for it?”
Just Step One
The brilliant kid who goes from poverty to Princeton has become an irresistible story. The coalition sprang from the same soil as the national conversation about “undermatching": students’ choosing colleges less selective than their grades and test scores suggest they could. Students from the lowest income quartile make up less than 4 percent of the enrollment of the country’s most selective colleges.
A national push to get more needy students to apply to such institutions has commanded a lot of attention. As well-meaning as that goal may be, it’s a narrow way to frame access to college. Fretting over who is or isn’t applying to top-ranked institutions can also obscure deeper questions about what the campuses with slim admission rates are willing to give up — legacies? second-string goalies? — to make more room.
Some of the coalition’s leaders insist they’re eager to experiment with new strategies for increasing socioeconomic diversity. Since The Chronicle first reported on the coalition’s formation, last fall, dozens of colleges have joined. Some admissions deans see great potential in the platform. Others say they’ve signed on, in part, because they (or their presidents) couldn’t refuse a chance to associate with the likes of Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.
Yet Trinity College, in Connecticut, has declined to join. Why? When the invitation arrived, Angel B. Pérez, vice president for enrollment and student success, saw the promises but no finished product, no platform to test-drive.
Mr. Pérez, the first in his family to attend college, had misgivings about joining a group that trumpets access even though its members do not serve the bulk of the nation’s low-income students. “The minute access became the marketing twist on this application, that was disingenuous,” he says. “I thought, You’re trying to sell me tap water in a Fiji bottle.”
Exclusivity is a powerful force, especially under the banner of a noble cause. Like officials at other colleges that chose not to join, Mr. Pérez has fielded many questions about that decision. Alumni, faculty members, and trustees have asked him: Does Trinity not care about access?
“Some of us have been taking a lot of heat for not joining,” he says. “I feel like I’ve had to come up with my own marketing campaign to explain why we’re not in it.”
The coalition limits membership to colleges with a six-year graduation rate of at least 70 percent. That allowed the University of Florida to join. But what about the University of Central Florida, which is also one of the nation’s largest public institutions? It enrolls more than 52,000 undergraduates, 40 percent of them Pell-eligible, and 25 percent of them first-generation students. The university recently received a national award for its commitment to diversity and inclusion. But its six-year graduation rate is 69.7 percent, just below the cutoff.
Officials at Central Florida said the university did not receive an invitation.
The tricky thing about graduation rates: They reflect the socioeconomic profile of the students who enroll. A broadly diverse campus, in many cases, isn’t going to have the high rate that a place with mostly wealthy students will. Which one is doing more to promote access? Who should get to be in the “access” club?
Mr. Nondorf, at Chicago, says he understands such questions. He suggests that the new application’s membership requirements could change over time. “We hope the coalition and how it thinks of itself will evolve,” he says. “There might be other criteria … to enhance the mission or impact.”
Perhaps that’s a useful reminder: The lofty experiment is a work in progress. “It’s important for people to realize this is just step one,” says Mr. Nondorf. He envisions other strategies, like the deployment of volunteers in underserved high schools, to complement the application system.
And he hopes the coalition’s efforts will prompt other institutions to innovate. “Maybe this will inspire them to come up with something else,” he says, “to create another group.” A group with similar goals might have trouble deciding what to call itself, though. The “access” brand has already been taken.
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
