The Ideal Student, Part 2: "Consequences of Pragmatism"

In Part I of a philosophical examination of how schools choose an ‘ideal’ student I questioned the usefulness of holding up an impossible Platonic model for students to compare themselves to.

Plato was around for 2000 years before the US came into being. But the latecomers to the world of thinking came up with something I would encourage schools, students and just about everyone else to think about.  C.S. Pierce and William James, a little over a century ago, founded a school of philosophy called Pragmatism. They dismissed the Platonic ideal as an unsuccessful and at times harmful way to measure the world. Instead of playing with Plato, they dismissed his Ideal and posited a new approach: is something, even something imperfect, as all things in the world must must be, useful to a task or thought? If so, then it does not matter whether it is even ‘true’ let alone an ‘Ideal'.

Why this mini-lesson in philosophy? Admissions officers are, or at least should be, pragmatists rather than Platonists. Most admission deans do not bother to look for the impossible—the ideal student—since he or she does not exist. Instead they ask: Is this particular student useful to our institutional needs?  This questions leads to decisions and thinking at odds with those who search for an ideal.

Let’s start with the basics. Admission officers work for a particular school and the school has concrete needs. What these various and at the same time specific needs consist of will largely determine the kinds of students they accept.  The needs vary from school to school, but here are a few that almost all selective schools pay attention to:

                                                            Richard Rorty

Pointy

Is a student smart? Smart is not easily defined but in college admission it still gets quantified. As student taking challenging course, earning top grades and doing well on a range of tests (SAT or ACT or AP or IB or A level etc.), with strong teacher recommendations and strong support from a school counselor ends up in the smart pile. Those having the top scores, programs and performance are often accepted to selective schools largely based on academic potential.

But there are different ways of demonstrating intellectual promise and the old standby cliché ‘academic passion’. A student who has done exceptionally well in the sciences, has performed research and taken part in science competitions and received recognition often is not a great athlete will stand a great chance of getting into top schools which offer engineering or research based science. Almost all Intel semifinalists end up with great places to go whether or not they’ve done all that much except prepare for this competition.

 Sometimes this happens but it is rare. But admission officers are, as I have said, pragmatic. They look at what strengths a student brings and evaluate them. If the school wants great future scientists, then they may accept a student who has never participated in a sport or never done all that much outside of his or her passion.  The common terms for this kind of student is pointy, not as in the pointy-headed intellectual as pointy describes other kinds of students too.

Instead, they create a class of student with different talents, backgrounds, and worldviews. A student who is remarkably gifted as a writer will be not be expected to be a science whizz kid too. But this writer must compete against all the other students who have been identified as great writers and must be near the top of the stack.

In other words, an applicant pool does not exist as an aggregate to an admission office. This highly selective admission process should be, at least in some ways, reassuring to students. One never competes against the whole applicant pool. Rather one competes in the group one is placed in.

Specials

On the other hand, some groups are much better to be in than others. Legacies, under-represented students, all, to a lesser degree students who demonstrate ‘grit tend to get a significant boost in the admission process—just look at the acceptance rates for these groups for proof.

For example, a student who is a reasonably good student, but who has the talent to bring home a championship in a sport the school loves, will then go to the top of the pile of that subset of students.

Unspecials

Membership in some groups also means that the chances of being offered admission to highly selective schools will be even harder than the published school profiles often indicate.

Here are just two examples:

A person in admission for 3 decades I know well used to joke, politically incorrectly, about how bad it was to be a “girl from New Jersey” when applying to selective schools. It was not that he disliked the Garden State or females. Instead, demographics came into play. There are thousands of great female students in New Jersey who attend at great secondary schools. Females do better than males academically and New Jersey is densely populated but does not have a large number of state schools to keep them near home.  Colleges cannot admit that they practice a form of affirmative action for men but an article in the New York times from an admission office at a liberal arts school admission officer admitted as much. Schools want to keep a balance between males/female ratios even if this means that they may hold females to higher academic standards. The same thinking goes into school’s efforts to get geographical diversity. Schools who want a national reputation need to show on their profiles that they draw students from all across the country. 

A student from Montana (the typical State named in discussions about this form of grouping) stands a better chance of admission that a student with virtually the same academic credentials from New Jersey. The thinking goes like this: a student is more than scores. Growing up on Montana will affect the thinking, experience, and outlook of an individual. Having people from different places will make the overall educational conversation on a campus more inclusive and wide-ranging. Whether this actually is measurable in any way is another matter. Or whether someone from Montana is inherently more diverse than someone from Teaneck or Trenton is a subject for debate, but at least at present the place someone lives does affect the chances for admission. Given that very few students apply from certain states to schools far away from hone means that they will be measured against the best students from their state rather than simply against the whole applicant pool.  Some schools pay far more attention to geography than others, but the chances of being admitted from Montana with somewhat lower academic credentials are verifiable should the schools release the data.

Students from China applying to Ivies face enormous challenges. The stats show that Asians as a group have to earn significantly higher scores on test in order to be accepted. But it doesn’t stop there for students from China. Because schools limit the overall number of international students they admit, those who apply from countries with huge numbers of applicants face greater challenges. In some cases the acceptance rate for Chinese students to some schools are under 1%. Schools will not publish this information as then fewer students would apply and that would possibly mean they would miss out on a great student they wanted. Or more realistically, it would mean their application numbers would drop and this would hurt their selectivity ranking in the US News.

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Lots of people do not like the fact that schools choose students based upon groups. But schools are not alone in favoring groups. We all do it at some level whether in terms of friendships, jobs, or life partners.

Colleges and universities stress that the admission process is based on an assessment of each applicant as an individual. What I have written here would seem to undermine this assertion, but things are not quite so simple. Students are looked at as individuals but they are looked at as individuals who are also part of groups.

The groups are divided in ways I have outlined but within the groups students are given a close look for individual achievement and abilities.  I have said  here before that the world exists far more on the axis of both/and rather than either/or and in the case of groups vs. individuals I would again ask that people looking to critique or learn about admission understand that there is room for paradox and overlapping yet differing approaches.

Mutually exclusive thinking rather than pragmatic compromises often predominates political thinking these days but the challenge of trying to do many things well—bringing in lots of different great students with great being defined differently, seems a good way to, as the pragmatist philosopher said repeatedly affirmed, muddle through the infinite complexities of issues and life.

In part 3 of this overview of what makes the best students  I will attempt to examine another admission paradox: for richer for poorer.