Admissions into elite colleges, for the elites, by the elites

I was only 10 years old when my sister got into MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). At that time, I obviously knew very little about elite US colleges and was clueless of the feat she had achieved. When I was 14, I flew to the US for the first time to attend my sister’s graduation. Listening to the stories of my sister about how employers look for students and not the other way round at MIT, and how she got to work with professors with Nobel prizes and truly great individuals like Noam Chomsky, and how X, Y or Z was invented by former MIT students, I realized what it means to study in one of the best universities in the world. It opens a vista of opportunities unheard of. It gives you the passport to joining the privileged few: the elite class. From that moment onwards, I felt some unconscious pressure at the back of my head to follow in the footsteps of my sister. Coming from a small island with a population of 1.2 million people, with corruption deeply entangled within all public entities and discrimination against the 1% Sino-Mauritians minority, I knew that staying in Mauritius was not an option. Hence, I spent all my "free" time building my resume over the following years in the hope that it would stand out among the overwhelming pool of applicants. Yet, I did not know exactly what the admission officers want of me. This was so frustrating. Even after getting admitted into Stanford, I still could not answer this question as my overqualified friends did not make the cut. Where could they have gone wrong? Were they not a good fit for the school, or was it just bad luck? If that were the case, it would be alarming because such bad luck also meant that they would not enjoy the same privileges as I would. In this essay, I will discuss why attending an elite college matters a lot. Most importantly, I will try to demystify the current admissions process in elite colleges to show that it has certain flaws regarding who deserves to attend such colleges, and then provide some humble suggestions to fix those flaws that can be fixed.

THE STATUS CONFERRED BY ELITE COLLEGES

Elite colleges are like no other colleges by the way they produce the elites of society – those who hold positions of leadership and power in society. Their graduates are clearly overrepresented in the ruling class. Every U.S. President since George H.W. Bush attended an Ivy League school at some point; every Supreme Court justice save one obtained their undergraduate degrees from an Ivy League or Stanford (Walsh 2018). Indeed, just the educational background of a person can give you a lot of information about that person's status, which is the amount of privilege that the person enjoys over other people. The thing about being able to give one person status is that it is synonymous to taking it away from another person. And since status is conferred by those who already have it (as in elite colleges), they would gladly bestow it upon themselves as long as the ways of doing it is legitimate in the eyes of the have-nots. As Karl Marx pointed out in his reproduction thesis, powerful groups inevitably create social and cultural systems that make others believe that their own class advantage is legitimate and deserved (Stevens, 11). Elite colleges thus receive a lot of criticism for participating in this subtle, self-serving system, by accentuating social inequality and contrasting with the principles of equality and democracy. This holds true based on the fact that they emphasize qualities, thinking styles and knowledge associated with upper classes in a hierarchical society, tend to accept many more students from the elite class, and all this results in a very exclusive group from which those in other socio-economic classes are barred entry (Trow 1976, 361). Obviously, we cannot say that elite colleges act as vehicles of social mobility when 38 American colleges, five of which are Ivy Leagues, have more students from the top 1% of the income scale than the entire bottom 60% (Aisch et al. 2017). Instead, they reinforce social strata. The more status those elite colleges can confer, the more prestigious they become, and same goes the other way round. Hence, they always want to make their numbers look as good as possible, and present themselves in the best possible light for ranking lists and university profiles like the ones produced by the US News & World Report. As the admission rates fall every year, those colleges can boast of their high selectivity and ability to select the best brains of the world. The acceptance rate at Stanford University last year was at its lowest, at a ridiculous 4.5% (Delano et al. 2018). Hence, when someone says they are from Stanford, they are immediately validated and perceived at having succeeded at life. It is really not about having the best faculty or the best classes. As Caroline Hoxby, a Harvard Economist who researched college outcomes put it, “higher-status schools have more resources and better networking opportunities, and surround top students with other top students” (Easterbrook 2004). She estimates that three quarters of what a student gets from their education is through their own efforts and talents, and the remaining quarter is decided by the status of the school. Other research point towards how this status can be tied to economic prosperity in the future. Apparently, 10 years from graduation, the graduates of the most competitive colleges earn 8 % more than those from slightly less competitive ones, and 19 % more than those from colleges not competitive at all (ibid). Hence, getting into an elite college is more like a rat race for a big prize of status and future wealth, rather than for an immersive, world-class educational experience. From my own personal experience, even before I started studying at Stanford, my admission here earned me an internship in a prestigious Mauritian law firm that had never accepted any intern before; it also gave me enough credibility to negotiate with top executives at Halo Top and Arctic Zero even if I had zero experience in starting a retail chain before. This says a lot about how the prestige of an elite college and the status it confers matter a lot – more than what you even make out of it.

REPERCUSSIONS ON STUDENTS APPLYING TO ELITE COLLEGES

Because of the craze surrounding elite colleges and the unprecedented advantages they confer for life, who gets into them matters a lot. The admissions process is the one thing that decides who will join the cream of society, and who will have to climb through more rungs of the hierarchical ladder to reach the same status. Unfortunately, the admissions process is not very clear. Both students and parents often find themselves at a loss about how many classes and extracurriculars should be undertaken, which ones are the most impressive, and how other factors like class and race increase or decrease the chances of getting in. College counselling centers have mushroomed across the US and the whole world, thriving on such confusion and desire to attend elite colleges. Yet, it is students who bear brunt of this fierce competition as from a very young age they feel pressured to do as much as they can during their “leisure” time, from competing in a sport to playing a musical instrument, to building robots and apps. Sadly, too often, those efforts do not pay off in the end. This is a big source of frustration and disappointment for students who have done everything that was “required” to get in and yet are denied spots at their dream universities. They often think that they were not good enough, or were just unlucky. Yet, as we shall see, there’s more to hard work, talent and luck that determines if one secures a place in an elite college.

WHO GETS INTO ELITE COLLEGES AND WHY

There are two ways to view the college admissions process: from a student-centric perspective or an organization-centric perspective (Killgore 2009, 470). The questions about who deserve to get in and what college is for varies a lot depending on which perspective we adopt. Focusing on the student only and based on the concept of merit that “if you have the most talent or work the hardest you will succeed”, many would agree that students who have achieved the most in their lives should get into the most prestigious colleges. To give such achievement a score (because humans are so fond of scores for making our decisions easier), several college universities use around five scales to evaluate a student's academic merit, non-academic merit and other qualities which are desired by the universities. Academic merit is based on both a person’s past academic achievements and future academic potential. Conversely, non-academic merit is determined extracurriculars, community service, science projects, arts, internships and athletics. After sending a FERPA request and being granted permission to view my admission records, I found out that at Stanford University, students are assessed on 1) standardized testing (SAT or ACT), 2) high school record, 3) support (letters of recommendation), 4) extracurriculars, and 5) self-presentation and intellectual vitality (curiosity and enthusiasm to learn and promote learning). Yet, Stanford amongst others cannot just take anyone who excels in those meritorious scales, especially because they have far fewer seats available than applicants. This is where the university-centric concept of merit comes in.

Basically, this means that the university would define merit in a way that attends to their own organizational interests and needs, such as prestige, financial stability and public legitimacy (Killgore 2009, 470). Usually, students would receive tags for being angular in some particular field that is desired by the university. This means that such students have really digged into that field and are experts. For instance, a student can be “tagged” for being an exceptional musician with a Grammy Award, for being a professional athlete ranked in the top 10 of the country, for being the founder of a startup, or for having a burning and cultivated interest in astrophysics. Those tags make it seem fair to everyone including the admission officers themselves, to accept those particular kinds of students that in turn help the university gain prestige. For instance, the enrolled athlete would in turn help the university maintain its supremacy in sports; the musician would probably attract popular singers to the university to give a performance or a talk; the entrepreneur would help build an entrepreneurial ecosystem in which startups can flourish; the exceptional student will attract Nobel Prize faculty who want to work with intellectually passionate and smart students. Students from the lower socioeconomic backgrounds and minorities may also be tagged because they add to the public image and legitimacy of the university especially among the middle and lower classes by proving that universities care about social justice and meeting the social goals of society. At the same time this increases diversity on campus which fosters a better learning environment overall. Universities would even go on to forgive the weaknesses of an applicant for the sake of their organizational needs (Killgore 2009, 480). For instance, if the coach of the varsity soccer team tells the admission officers that the team needs a new goalkeeper, the admission officers then would have to choose one of a few applicants who all have this desired characteristic but score relatively low on the academic scale. In fact, the student would only have to be "'admissible,' that is, that their academic accomplishments are either within, or not far below, the College’s typical admission profile" (Stevens 2009, 117). In such cases, “the specific talents are rationalized, not as supplemental to academic excellence, but as equal in merit" (Killgore 2009, 480). For instance, striving for excellence in sport would be described as similar to striving in academic excellence, in the sense that the mindset is to excel is there.

Hence, the student-centric perspective and organization-centric perspective of merit conflict fundamentally as they evaluate students differently. Eventually, it is obviously the latter perspective which predominates in elite colleges as they use the admissions process as another way to compete with other schools for prestige. Consider varsity sport for example. The Ivy League which is a collegiate athletic conference is today known much beyond the sport context as the peak of elitism in American higher education. Being better than rival schools at collegiate games, especially in football, has high stakes as the winning team brings not only the trophy but most importantly the prestige home. Another compelling reason why organizational-centric perspective has more weight is because universities have to satisfy their key organizational need of securing their financials from wealthy students and legacy students paying all their tuition fees and likely to later donate to the university. This way, they can enroll those who cannot pay but add to diversity, and also provide the best resources to the privileged few who get in. I acknowledge that this system still provides opportunities for people of color and minorities to get out of the poverty trap and be better represented in society, but it inevitably gives a much bigger advantage to the traditional white wealthy students who win at a race mostly decided by the amount they can pay the university. In light of the recent $25M cash-for-admissions scandal whereby parents bought seats for their children at the likes of Yale and Stanford, this could not have been more true. Besides, the majority of student athletes are again White and from affluent families. Therefore, we can fairly argue that elite universities are not fair to the whole pool of applicants as some get a headstart in the race while others are burdened with sand bags, which is mainly because elite colleges make and break the rules of the race to their whims. Can we do anything to fix the flaws of this rigged system?

HOW CAN WE MAKE THE ADMISSIONS PROCESS BETTER

First, we should stop pretending that the system is transparent and fair. All admission committees advertise that whether you get admitted depends whether you made the most of the opportunities available around you. It depends totally on you; you decide your own fate. And it is really because the system seems all meritocratic that it hurts students so much when they end up in the "waitlisted" or "deny" pile. They believe that they were not good enough and did not deserve to get in, when in fact it could just be a misalignment of interests of the university and those of the student. The interviewees of the study conducted by KIllgore reveal that indeed "students’ accomplishments provide merely the baseline for consideration for admission" (Killgore 2009, 484). Therefore, it is important to tell students clearly that their admissions is decided by a lot of external factors beyond their control, just like life in general.

Besides, elite colleges simply have too many overqualified applicants such that there is practically no difference between those who make the cut and those who don't. As Janet Rapelye, former dean of admissions at Princeton said, "we could have admitted five or six classes to Princeton from the [applicant] pool (Spensley 2017).” Hence, one simple solution seems that elite colleges should take in more applicants, since they already have the money and resources for it. Yet, why would they do that if elitism is a product only a handful of colleges can offer? Indeed, the ridiculously low acceptance rates and high rankings in the US News & World Report is what that elite colleges compete for to gain prestige. They would surely not want to give up on it. What they can do however is at least make sure that all those who apply - and spent their life preparing for this moment - are carefully considered as they should. Indeed, Rapelye notes that one of the biggest challenges is that they had to deal with increasing volume of applications with the same staff size, all in a very small time frame (mid-February to end of March). There is obviously lots of chances that all the life achievements of a qualified applicant just get a quick skim-over by the officer reading it. The worst is that only one reading is guaranteed for any applicant, unless you are a legacy student (Freedman 2013). Your chances of getting in depend totally on that one person who reads your application and advocates for you in the decision room. One solution could be an increase in number of staff to ensure that more than one admission officer reads the application of a student to avoid bias and misjudgements. This also prevents the officers to get overloaded and overwork, as the study of Israel judges approving parole showed that humans are more likely to stick to the default position (denial in our present context) as their mental resources diminish with increasing work time (Dazinger, Levav & Avnaim-Pesso, 2011). The element of chance is thus reduced.

While changes to the admissions system mentioned above are helpful to all applicants, they do not change the fact that white wealthy students still end up taking the lion's share of the seats in elite colleges. Here, I believe we have two options to give everyone a fair shot at this game - currently a gamble for the rich. The first one is to root for more affirmative action, which is already a common practice at top-tier institutions. Although it is true that many students from disadvantaged backgrounds do not apply in the first place and thus affirmative action can be considered a measure taken too late, I believe it still important to help those who apply. Today, affirmative action is usually race-based, which means that students from some under-represented minorities and races, notably black African Americans, are given some preferences over the others, so as to remedy a history of past discrimination and to increase diversity in the student body. While some people say that race should no longer be a factor in the admissions process, Khiara Bridges articulates beautifully in her paper on "Class-Based Affirmative Action, or the Lies that We Tell About the Insignificance of Race" that "it is quite disturbing that efforts to repair the damage caused by this country’s history of racism and exclusion can only be justified by not making reference to this country’s history of racism and exclusion” (Bridges 2016, 108). She is right. Until society stops judging people by the color of their skin, we cannot be blind to colors. Yet, race-based affirmative action only solves half of the problem, that is racial discrimination. The other half, that is class discrimination, can instead be solved by class-based affirmative action. This is important for those underdogs from disadvantaged backgrounds, not necessarily racial minorities as commonly assumed, to have an equal chance of succeeding at life. Some scholars like Kahlenberg, author of the book "The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action", even argue that class-based affirmative action should instead be the norm as it helps those who are truly disadvantaged, as evidenced by the fact that 71% of black and Latino students at Harvard have wealthy backgrounds (Kahlenberg 2018) and “whites are twice as likely to attain a bachelor’s degree as blacks… but students from educated affluent families are seven times as likely to receive a bachelor’s degree as those from low-income less educated families” (Kahlenberg & Potter 2012, 5). This is why I believe that perhaps the fairest form of affirmative action would be a race-within-class model, which was also proposed by Sigal Alon in his book "Race, Class, and Affirmative Action." Because only the poor minorities get an edge in admissions, it would favor those who actually need help, not the wealthiest among them who would likely get in anyway. Others like Kahlenberg suggested the “Top 10 Percent Plan.” The Bill was actually passed in Texas in 1997 and required that public universities admit any student who is in the top 10 % of their graduating class. Students from disadvantaged schools with usually lower test scores can thus get admitted and at the same time the system increases representation of minorities. UT Austin was in fact able to increase representation of African American and Hispanic representation to 21.4% compared to 15.3% for a class-based system and 18.6% for a race-based system (Kahlenberg and Potter 2012, 9). Hence, this is definitely another option to consider as a form of affirmative action that can kill two birds with one stone.

The second option is to make changes within the evaluation process itself. To start with, we need to question what those admission officers are assessing students on. Are they just looking at whether one student has scored perfect SATs, whether they were on the US sailing team, or whether they won an Oscar? They are really not. They are actually looking at the prior assessments which have been made on the student. Indeed, admission officers never assess a student directly when they are reading their application, because "the college application is the paper trail of this widely dispersed evaluative work" (Stevens 2009, 188). The problem is that the system is in such a way that those prior assessments are just another subtle form of class privilege. This comes as no surprise as it has been put in place by the elites themselves. Indeed, most of time, test scores merely reflect whether a student was provided with the adequate resources like private tutoring and SAT books to prepare for the tests. As for extracurricular achievements, they also just indicate whether a high schooler had the time and resources to play a competitive sport, or whether they had to to look after their young siblings every day after school. True, there are some exceptionally capable students who can overcome dire circumstances and still compete with much wealthier kids, but this is not the common rule. It would probably be a bit demanding to expect a student who is naturally talented at painting but lives in slums of India to know that there are painting competitions that actually exist and are in fact organized by the elite class just so that the skills of their children can be translated into extracurricular achievements. Now, I am not advocating for those who have the saddest stories about their misfortune to share with admission officers. What I advocate for is that admission officers evaluate students more in terms of what personal qualities can be inferred from what they do contextually, rather by what they do do. For instance, working part-time at a coffee shop to provide for a family should add the same weight to a college application as running a school club, in the sense that both show the student's sense of responsibility. This is why the abovementioned "Top 10 Percent Plan" has an appeal of its own, since academic achievements are evaluated wholly in the context of the student's high school and environment. Doing so prevents the wealthy from playing their own game and from imposing it on everybody else too.

Lastly, since elite schools are meant to stay (and stay the same) at least for the many years to come, ideally we should change its goals so that the privilege of an elite education of a few eventually flows back to benefit those who got a mass elite education. As mentioned beforehand, an elite education is much more than a gain of knowledge and skills. Because of the prestige attached to it, it is a gain of status and positional power in society. Because of that, one person attending an elite college means a decline of socioeconomic prospects of another person (Anderson 2007, 595), and this is one of the root causes of social and economic inequality. Some say that it is thus necessary to constrain the educational investments of the state and even parents into our children, for the sake of equality and meritocracy. Yet, I agree with Elizabeth Anderson in saying that we should never aim for the lowest common denominator for the sake of those (Anderson 2007, 615). Development of human talents is an intrinsic good and should be encouraged. Those people will in turn be able to help other people. In fact, in a democratic society, elites must be so constituted that they will effectively serve all sectors of society, not just themselves. If the elites genuinely work for everyone's interests, it is okay to have people with more education than the average person. That way, everyone is happy.

To tackle a problem, we must first acknowledge that there is a problem. As discussed, the fact that elite college admissions is not as fair to students as they purport to be, is often because the elite colleges have their own organizational needs which then form the basis of their own definition of merit, which in turn favors a particular type of students that is predominantly already from the elite class. Students have to be aware of this in the first place, as they embark upon this inevitable, long journey of college applications. Most importantly, incremental changes have to be made to the system to make it fairer for everyone. As soon as the percentage of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and from diverse communities enrolled at elite colleges increases, we will know that the admissions committee is doing a better job at defining what true merit is. Even then, there will still people who will contest that the system is unfair because they or their children did not get in despite being overqualified. Indeed, most people don't get in, which will always be a reality. As for those who do, it is important and perhaps morally binding to be able to recognize the powers that have been conferred and to know how to use them wisely. As I bike to class every day under the warm Californian sun, I sometimes stop and look for Hoover Tower, one of Stanford's iconic landmarks. It simply reminds me how lucky I am to be in this place. I feel chosen. I feel compelled. Not to succeed, but to give back to those who did not and will not make the cut.

References:

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Kahlenberg, Richard D. "Affirmative Action Should Be Based on Class, Not Race." The Economist. September 04, 2018. Accessed February 19, 2019. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/09/04/affirmative-action-should-be-based-on-class-not-race.

Kahlenberg, Richard D., and Halley Potter. "A Better Affirmative Action: State Universities That Created Alternatives to Racial Preferences." October 3, 2012. Accessed February 18, 2019. https://tcf.org/assets/downloads/tcf-abaa.pdf.

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