Introducing After Words: Notes from the Office of College Guidance
September 27, 2019
First, some background.
When I was a student at Browning in the late 1960s, the field of college guidance did not really exist. Clair J. Smith, our beloved and devoted Head of Upper School, was also our college “advisor,” but students, at Browning as elsewhere, mostly had to fend for themselves. Back then, the application process was straightforward and just that, a process.
In 1983, U.S. News & World Report, a highly respected business magazine debuted its annual college rankings issue. Six years later, when I took the helm of the Office of College Guidance, college admissions was being referred to as a “business.” For the first time, colleges were being rewarded for denying applicants, regardless of their qualifications, and they were being punished for admitting students who did not matriculate. The calculus of “admit rate” and “yield” (much more on both of these in future posts) was beginning to drive decisions that used to be based solely on pedagogy. U.S. News was relying heavily on these statistics to distill a four-year educational experience into a simple number. And, more disturbingly, bond rating agencies began using admit rate and yield in the calculation of colleges’ credit-worthiness.
“The jargon of college admissions carries powerful metaphors that need to be exposed, understood, and sometimes purged. ‘Accept’ and ‘reject’ are the first to go.”
In the 1990s, as the number of available 18-year-olds began to decline, colleges began an aggressive campaign to increase the percentage of those kids who were applying to college. So rather than drying up, college applications, and the selectivity of the process, surged.
On May 29, 2001, “demonstrated interest” entered the lexicon when Franklin & Marshall College made the front page of The Wall Street Journal by wait-listing 140 of its strongest applicants. The students had never had any contact with the school before filing their applications, so F&M surmised, and rightly so, that the kids had their sights set on other institutions and were using F&M as a “safety.” By not offering them admission, F&M was able to improve its status in the rankings without any impact on the quality of its incoming class.
Around the same time, Harvard, perhaps noting that its prized #1 position in U.S. News was in jeopardy, admitted 50% of its freshman class early decision. Other institutions, realizing that they, too, could effortlessly—almost magically—enhance their admissions statistics, and therefore their perceived value, followed suit. Colleges began moving their application deadlines up, both to appear more selective and to give themselves more time to read the increasing number of applications, and “Deadline Creep” was born.
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded much of New Orleans. Tulane University was spared significant physical damage but nonetheless faced a public relations nightmare. To stave off a potentially existential crisis, they hired a marketing guru as Director of Admissions. The gambit proved highly successful as admissions numbers returned to pre-Katrina levels within one admissions cycle.
The gloves had come off. In the quest for rankings gold, colleges, eyeing the obvious success of tactics that skirted the boundaries of longstanding ethical practice, such as “Priority” applications, already filled in by the college and with no required essay or fee, crawled to or jumped on the bandwagon. Marketing companies and hungry young entrepreneurs pounced, and the “process” that had become a “business” was now a full-fledged “industry.”
Organizations from third-party vendors to the colleges themselves are seeking to benefit, so “vested interest,” another topic I cover frequently in my college prep classes, is everywhere. Families are desperately searching for the magic wand or the secret sauce and there is no shortage of both honorable, informed people and snake oil salesmen who are willing to oblige, for a price.
College admissions is a particularly juicy topic for the popular press, and reading about it will only aggravate any anxiety. So if you are delighted by the oddities of the admissions world, read anything you like. My advice to the rest of you, however: stop reading articles about college admissions. Stop! Read Frank Bruni, and anything in the Atlantic, which also offers sane analysis. If I come across a worthy article in another publication, I will recommend it. If you come across an article of merit, feel free to recommend it to me, though you will have blown your cover!
There is no magic wand, no secret sauce. At its core, college admissions is still a process, a journey of self-reflection and self-discovery. My goal here will be to try to demystify it; to prepare students and families for the process and for what comes after Browning.
In this blog there will be announcements: of the PSAT, parent events, and looming deadlines. There will be practical advice to students and parents. There will be travel diaries: of the College Trip and of visits I make to colleges. There will be vocabulary lessons. The jargon of college admissions carries powerful metaphors that need to be exposed, understood, and sometimes purged. “Accept” and “reject” are the first to go. The images they carry are anathema to the process, not to mention intrinsically unhealthy.
I hope this blog will be informative, I hope it will spur discussion, especially at the dinner table, and I hope it will be fun.