Things We All Love to Hate: College Admissions

Families can spend thousands of dollars for students to earn competitive scores on the SAT and Advanced Placement exams, fueling a multibillion-dollar testing industry. The College Board, the nonprofit that administers the exams, has more than $1 billion in cash and investments, with millions stashed in Caribbean tax havens. Students who come from low-income families who can’t afford extensive test prep — disproportionately Black and Latinx students — tend to perform worse on the exams, a critical component of college admission.

For decades the U.S. News rankings of colleges and universities has dominated the discussion of college quality in America. But 80% of the ranking is based on information reported by the university itself, and the rankings create powerful incentives for institutions to manipulate data and inflate their scores. A recent investigation of Columbia University, which has surged up the rankings in recent years, by one of its own math professors found that “key figures supporting Columbia’s high ranking are inaccurate, dubious, or highly misleading.”

Having a parent who attended a college can go a long way to increasing a student’s odds of admission, especially at some of the most selective schools in the country. A recent study led by a Duke economist found that legacy applicants to Harvard, predominantly white and wealthy, were admitted at a 34% rate, compared to 6% for non-legacy students. The advantage for student athlete applicants, also disproportionately privileged, was even higher at Harvard, with an average admission rate of 86%!

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Elite colleges have long privileged students from wealthy white backgrounds. For decades, men from such backgrounds were virtually the only ones considered. When elite schools opened their doors to a broader segment of society in the early 20th century, they soon regretted it. For example, by the early 1920s, Jewish students made up 21% of students at Harvard and almost 40% at Columbia, prompting school officials to consider limiting Jewish admissions to preserve the status quo.

As Malcolm Gladwell once wrote, once administrators at places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton “realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit.” And so the modern college admission system was born, one which relied on standardized tests and subjective indices of “character” and background to evaluate candidates, and provided for preferences for legacies, donors, athletes and children of faculty.

The wealthy and well-connected have enjoyed a clear leg up in such a system. Not only can they afford to send their children to private schools, but they can also shell out for exam preparation courses and tutors to help their kids write college admissions essays. They can also afford for their kids to learn to play sports (often more fringe ones like fencing and water polo) and pursue other activities (documentary filmmaking, overseas humanitarian work) that give them advantages in the admissions process.

Admission rates at Ivy League colleges continue to get more selective. For example, just 3.4% of applicants to Harvard were admitted in 2021 (down from 4.9%) and just 3.7% to Columbia (down from 6.1%).

Other colleges are not as selective. More than two-thirds of first-time applicants were accepted by four-year colleges in the U.S., and around 80% of schools accepted more than half of applicants.

The average student loan debt in America is around $30,000, but some 85% of students are typically awarded financial aid of some sort.

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Not long ago, two liberal arts schools, Bates College and Bowdoin College, were the only major colleges to not require SAT or ACT scores from their applicants. Today around two-thirds of colleges and universities, including the eight Ivy League schools, are or are expected to be test-optional or test-blind in their admissions.

Recently, Johns Hopkins University announced that it had quietly phased out using legacy preferences because of the advantage it provided to students from wealthier backgrounds. As a result, the university claims that it has achieved a much more diverse and equitable student body — with, for example, the number of Pell Grant-eligible students rising from 9% to 19%.

With the Supreme Court preparing to hear a case that could decide the future of race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard — and in U.S. higher education more broadly — many are wondering whether it’s time to consider jettisoning race-based affirmative action in favor of class-based. Despite affirmative action policies, students from the bottom-income quartile still make up about 3% of enrollment in the most competitive U.S. colleges, while those from the top-income quartile make up 72%.

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On his podcast Revisionist History, author Malcolm Gladwell dove deep into U.S. News’ top-secret ranking formula before turning his attention to how to help a deserving school like New Orleans’ HBCU Dillard University climb the rankings.

What do you think about the college admissions process? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected].