Essays, Editors, Ethics Part 2: A Brief History of the World (of Admission)

 In Part I of my answer to the question posed on Quora.com about how much help a student should get with admission essays, I described the pluses and minuses of some of the people who help: parents, peers, teachers and college counselors.

But there are still a few groups of people I have yet to mention who have, in the past decade or so, become major players in editing business. There is a great deal of misinformation about these groups and while it would take a book to address the many issues surrounding them, I will try to use both data and personal narrative to support what I assert.

In the second of this ongoing series, I give a brief history behind the forces that have, in turn, given rise to the much more controversial participants among those that help students with essays: independent/private counselors and agents.

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According to a recent report, 26% of students now work with independent counselors to help them through the application process. (I know that in some counties, towns, and schools the percentage of students using independent counselors is actually much higher than this.)

For some, this stat seems startlingly high, and represents a worrisome number. It indicates that a significant percentage of students are paying people money to help them in ways that most of those at the low end of the economic spectrum cannot afford.  Many educators worry that those with the means to get help will then ‘earn’ a disproportionate number of spaces to highly selective colleges and universities in ways that do not seem equitable. They argue that the odds are against low-income students to begin with and having the ‘privileged’ employ private help will only add to the disparities in education in the country.  Some also argue that the whole process of applying to schools has now become much more complicated, stressful, and unfair. These points should be the topic of discussion and so too should the reasons that students and families find themselves paying money for help which largely did not exist when the parents themselves applied to schools just a generation ago. Why did this rapidly growing profession come into existence? More importantly, should those who work as independent counselors be looked at by educators in secondary schools and colleges and universities as adding to the many problems listed above?

A brief history might help give some context to answer these questions.   When I started as an admission dean way back in the 80’s there were, so far as I know, virtually no independent/private counselors.  Why? The world was much smaller and the rankings had yet to become the new way schools could be measured against one another. This period, the mid-80, began a shift in admission that has had, not surprisingly, a lot of unintended consequences. 

But before the US News, before the Common Ap, before the introduction of enrollment managers in place of admission officers, the way schools selected students and the way students applied to schools was far different than what it is today. In the 50’s and 60’s admission was not all that complicated; more importantly, getting in, even to the best of schools, was not even remotely close to the competition that students face today.  Way back when, admission to selective schools was based in part on long-term connections with certain secondary schools and regions. The vast majority of the students who applied were often attending strong private, boarding, or highly ranked public schools in certain suburban areas, many located in the Northeast.  Students rarely ventured all that far from home in part because transportation was limited and in part because the local was the familiar. The schools at the very top had an aura and mystique, but nothing like the way schools are grouped into categories of the elite now. Admission was far more regional and far more collegial. There were feeder schools, good old boys, and phone calls from secondary school counselors advocating for students from the schools. There is still a vestigial remnant of this today, but it scarcely makes a dent in the overall flood of applicants from around the US and the world.  Going Global was not yet a meme that passed the lips of admission deans.

The 70’s and early 80’s changed the landscape, in two important ways. First, some schools that had been all male opened up their doors to women. This, in essence, doubled their applicant pools and increased selectivity significantly. In addition, schools became much more proactive in seeking a diverse student body. Affirmative action became a good faith effort on the part of schools to make campuses reflect the racial make up of the US as a whole. Both of these changes made it more difficult for students to get accepted to the most elite schools and thus the market for those in the know to help students get into elite schools began.

Far more important, however, to the world of admission as we know it today, has to do with the introduction of the US News rankings. Bob Morse and Al Sanoff created the rankings as a way to provide good information for those students looking for the schools that seemed, according to their rubrics, to be the most elite in terms of students and in some ways in terms of academics.  As we now all know, rankings have become ubiquitous. There are ranking of all sorts—from academic rankings to best buy for the money to best party schools. A new ranking of some sort seems to come out each week. The rankings have made what were once a somewhat bespoke sets of schools become front-page news. The rankings themselves became the headlines in many forms of media.

Why are the rankings so important to changing the way admission worked? Because now schools had a specific set of numbers that affected their standing. Now there was data. And data can change and changing data changes the rankings. (The importance of data shows up each year when a few schools get caught fudging their data.)  The number of applications, the number of those who accepted offers, average SAT scores and the percentage of students in the top 10% of the class were now quantified for all to see. As a result, schools began to raise their rankings by raising these numbers. And so the growth in applications began to expand.

Schools began to travel more and to many more places. They got big recruitment and marketing budgets. Admission grew from a fairly low profile part of colleges and universities to one of the top topics talked about by governing boards and administration. As schools thought of by administrators and governing boards as ‘the competition’ poured resources into increasing applications and rankings they too pushed for and got huge increases in resources. An arms race began that has not slowed down, although some schools, lacking funds, may have to think about the wisdom of doing things to keep up with multibillion dollar endowed schools. (The Soviet Union found out it could not keep up with the richest guys on the planet; some schools might learn a lesson or two from this.)

There has been significant growth at schools since the 80’s. Some of the growth comes from students, but relative to the population, student growth has not increased all that much. And there has been little growth in faculty. The great growth has been in administration. Recent reports say administrative growth has more than doubled in the last 25 years Another report puts this growth into the context of what has happened to the faculty: "College enrollment may be plateauing, but that hasn’t stopped the growth in university administrative positions. They increased 28 percent between 2000 and 2012, according to a report released by the Delta Cost Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts research on college finances. And they have been increasing for the past two decades.The number of faculty members per administrator also decreased by 40 percent. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the ratio of faculty members to administrative professionals is now about 2.5 to 1."

 Among the administrative group, the increase in the number of people working in admission offices has been significant. (It used to be, in times way back when,  admission officers were also a part of the faculty who had teaching experience. Today almost all those who work in admission have rarely had college or university teaching experience.) As applications have dramatically increased, more admission officers and staff were needed. As target groups were identified (under-represented students, low income students, international students) even more staff was hired to focus on recruiting students who are members of these groups. In addition, some universities--especially those in California-- dramatically increased the number of application readers when they implemented a holistic evaluation process.)

 During the deluge of applications and administrators, Dr Jack McGuire coined a new term for what used to be called admission.  Many schools no longer had an admission dean;  instead (or in addition to), they have a VP  for 'enrollment management'. The name itself underscores the move to admission as a part of the university set apart from the teaching faculty. Admission was now a business. It had goals and rubrics—not profits and losses but application increases and decreases. Jobs depended on demonstrated growth, increased scores, and a ‘better’ class of students each year. (Better is of course subject to debate. Is a class with a 3-point increase in SAT scores better than it was before? SATs predict well at the ends of the spectrum but tiny increases don’t have any real predictive value. Does increasing the percentage of students in the top 10% significantly change the preparation and success of the students? I have not seen studies that document this. And yield rates for accepting offers of admission have little or nothing to do with predicting access success.)

The use of the top 10% rank in class data also altered the landscape at the vast majority of secondary schools that sent the majority of their students to selective schools. Rank in class was dropped, first at small privates and boarding schools, and then filtered down to virtually all the top suburban high schools across the US. These schools could see that students out of the top 10% were being turned down even if their performance was as good or better than students who had applied and been accepted in previous years. Since colleges and universities were ranked according to this percentage of top 10%, secondary schools opted out of ranking altogether. Most secondary schools that continue to rank are often in areas that send few students to highly selective schools. The majority of students accepted to top colleges and universities now come from secondary schools that do not rank.

Many top colleges and universities (and quite a few not highly ranked too) now have multimillion dollar marketing and enrollment management budgets: this money goes toward recruitment of all sorts—buying names of high scoring students from the College Board and ACT, traveling all over the globe to the best schools or cities and attending college fairs and making presentations, getting high end marketing firms to design a brand and then creating lovely brochures that are sent to untold thousands,  designing websites that attract hundreds of thousands of hits, and growing the size of the staff. Not surprisingly, all the marketing and all the media hype around rankings has led to dramatic increases in applications at the most selective and most well funded schools. Marketing, as we know, works. In the last decade, some of the most selective schools have seen 100% increases in applications.

But there is still one more player that has led to where we are now. The Common Application was once limited to a few schools. It took many years for public schools to be admitted to the club. But now things have changed. Most of the top ranked schools use the Common Ap. The reason? Students could now fill out one form and apply to many schools, saving time and money. (At least that’s the theory. The roll out of the new version of the Common Ap this year led to some significant problems for students and schools.)  It’s now became possible for students to apply to many more schools with just a click of button and a credit card. The average number of applications submitted by students has risen and the average number submitted by students to highly selective schools has risen even more as the landscape for predicting who gets in to selective schools has become much more difficult to navigate with any hint of certainty. It is common knowledge that most top ranked colleges and universities now turn down far more than half the valedictorians that apply. Some groups of students routinely file more than 10 applications and some students are now submitting over 20. These kinds of numbers are especially true for students applying to highly selective schools.

All of these changes have resulted in a huge increase in applications to highly selective schools. Since the Ivies and the other top schools’ applications have doubled over the last decade, the acceptance rate, as a result, has plummeted. The schools have not increased the numbers of incoming students by much. The top of the top schools used to hover around a 20% acceptance rate. Today that number is now in the single digits with several dropping close to 5%. And for those schools that can’t keep up with the pace of application increases and demonstrated progress in testing and rank, it means big problems. Just recently, there has been a lot of stir around Dartmouth and for those who work there this is not good news. Dartmouth’s drop in applications means the school, and more specifically the admission office is under a great deal of pressure and scrutiny: Here’s a snippet from the Dartmouth blog:

I decided to check with a colleague I’ll call Adam, a college counselor at a prestigious private high school. He had a less benevolent explanation for Dartmouth’s recruiting drive. Last year, Dartmouth was the only Ivy to have a higher acceptance rate in 2013 over the previous year; it took about 10 percent of its 22,416 applicants, compared to 9.43 percent in 2012. In short, Dartmouth was the lone Ivy to be ever-so-slightly less selective last year than the year before, having received fewer applications. “Once I saw that, I guaranteed that Dartmouth would triple its marketing and recruiting budget,” Adam said.

Why does that tiny shift in selectivity matter so much, particularly given the flood of applications elite colleges like Dartmouth receive — roughly double the number of applications it took in just 10 years ago? As with most of the nonsense that drives college admissions, it all goes back to the U.S. News and World Report rankings. “Colleges are looking for applicants because it helps their U.S. News numbers,” Marilee Jones, the former Dean of Admissions at MIT, told me. A college’s overall rank is determined by 16 measures, and three of them are closely linked to admissions: SAT/ACT scores of admitted students; their standing in high school — ideally in the top 10 percent of their grade — and the college’s acceptance rate. Colleges want those kids with the highest standardized test scores and lowest class rank to enroll, but they need lots of applicants to get their acceptance rate down. A low acceptance rate, which equates with selectivity, means many more kids applied than were accepted. “Every college is working that U.S. News algorithm, to use that algorithm it its advantage,” Jones said. [Emphasis added]

SAT Scores
	Reading		Math		Writing
	25%	75%	25%	75%	25%	75%
Brown	660	760	650	770	670	780
Columbia	700	780	700	790	700	790
Cornell	640	740	670	780	-	-
Dartmouth	670	780	680	780	680	790
Harvard	700	800	710	790	710	800
Princeton	700	790	710	800	710	800
U Penn	660	760	690	780	680	770
Yale	700	790	700	800	710	790

It’s clear numbers matter. It’s clear they matter a lot. Some would argue they matter way too much. The number of applications, the average SAT Scores, the percentage of students ranking in top 10% in class now all translate into moving up or down the rankings and that effects the job security of the people who work in admission.

No doubt about it, admission, these days, is big business. Schools don’t like to say this but there is a lot of evidence would I think convince virtually any jury. Of course admission offices still have the primary directive to do social good, to bring in great students, and to find great matches for students. But the numbers, to a much greater degree than they used to be, are still what drive many decisions being made today in admission.

Why this long foray into the history of admission? Because it helps to give context to the response and actions of those on the other side of the big business of admission—the parents and students. Given the dramatic increase in selectivity, it should come as no surprise then that parents and students have also increased their efforts at finding ways to stand out among an increasingly large and deep pool. My next entry on this topic will attempt to prove why those who turn to the private side for help are not bad people, and why those who work on the private side are some of the best resources for parents and students, not just with essay help, but for building skills that will help students thrive in college and beyond. 

                       Most of the acceptance rates to these schools have continued to drop