It’s time for innovation in admissions
You might have seen Raj Chetty’s new study on inequality in selective admissions, out last month from his research group, Opportunity Insights. But what can higher-ed leaders actually do to level the playing field, especially if they don’t work at one of the country’s 12 most selective institutions?
Last week I asked Chetty — an economics professor at Harvard University whose “mobility report cards” for colleges are searchable via The New York Times — for practical ways all leaders can reform a system that clearly still favors the privileged.
His answer: more experimentation and information-sharing in admissions. Higher-ed leaders are uniquely positioned to drive mobility in this country, he said, and should not be afraid to find better ways to recruit and enroll students.
“You can’t entirely fix the economic-mobility problem in America by changing higher education,” he said, “but you can do a significant chunk, and I think we could be doing a lot more than we are currently doing.”
Chetty, who was a keynote speaker at this year’s meeting of the community-college network Achieving the Dream, is turning his attention to open-access institutions. Retention and student success at those campuses will be the focus of his group’s next major research study, he said.
Here are four of his thoughts on how to give more opportunity to lower- and middle-class students:
Run your admissions office like a laboratory — and share findings. The Supreme Court’s striking down the use of race in admissions means some college leaders are deeply rethinking aspects of how they recruit and evaluate applicants. This is an opportunity to try other tactics to improve equity, Chetty said, and then share ideas, observations, or even data with the rest of the industry, or with researchers. Sharing information is, of course, a controversial topic in admissions, but Chetty emphasized its potential, saying his researchers could draw meaningful conclusions only because they were able to merge powerful data sets: anonymized college-admissions records, Department of Education statistics, tax returns, and SAT scores.
“Being able to systematically document what happens with these longitudinal data that we have assembled is a game changer,” he said. Without measuring or sharing the results of experimentation, the efforts are “lost knowledge.”
As part of its study, the Opportunity Insights team released college-level data for 139 selective institutions. That research can help campus leaders diagnose their weak points in enrolling diverse classes, he said, whether certain groups are not applying, are not admitted, or are not graduating. Chetty mentioned the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s HAIL program, which gives low-income students a four-year scholarship without requiring that they complete the federal student-aid form, a way to combat the institution’s finding that low-income students were often not applying.
Use data to reconsider admissions tactics. Chetty’s research has found a significant correlation between academic ratings (like grades and test scores) and outcomes later in life, he said. That suggests that, despite equity advocates’ pushes and colleges’ moves away from standardized testing, the hard numbers in an application can be a more important signal, and achievements like extracurriculars raise their own questions. “I honestly think,” Chetty said, “that actually it’s the other way around.”
Reframe your admissions philosophy. Many colleges focus on identifying prospective students with strong academic potential, Chetty said. What about instead looking, he asked, for those for whom the college represents the “greatest value added”? That philosophical shift could lead you to consider different factors that might favor more low- and middle-income students.
Look out for a new study on student support at open-access institutions. Chetty has come to recognize the importance of wraparound services for student success at open-access colleges and universities. His group’s next study will examine, over the next two years, which colleges provide the best upward mobility. It will also try to understand for whom college is most valuable, and what changes colleges can make or practices they can deploy to increase that mobility.
