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Opinion

Real Compassion in College Admissions

Credit...Mark Pernice

THE college admission process is always stressful, often unfair and may well reward the wrong values. But the recommendations released last month by a Harvard Graduate School of Education project called Making Caring Common will only make things worse.

In its report, “Turning the Tide,” the Harvard group suggested that kids take fewer Advanced Placement courses, that colleges should think about making the SAT and the ACT optional, and that all students should participate in what it calls “meaningful” community service activities.

Kids would then write college application essays about what they learned from these experiences. The report’s recommendations were triggered in part by a survey that found that only 22 percent of middle- and high-school students thought that caring for others was more important than personal happiness or individual achievement.

The report was endorsed by dozens of college and high school administrators, including many deans of admissions, who recognize that the current system has created a generation of sleep-deprived kids and debt-rattled parents and an arms race among the colleges. Yale has already announced plans to add a new application essay on a student’s “engagement” in the community.

However well meaning the Harvard team’s recommendations — who doesn’t want a kinder, gentler, fairer admissions process? — they will do little to level the playing field. Encouraging high school kids to make “more meaningful contributions to others” will just provide new ways to game the system.

Colleges set the agenda for what high schools offer and students take. Adding the proposed community service component to the 18 courses they already essentially require — particularly when kids also want to participate in sports and after-school clubs and perhaps need a part-time job — is a bit much. It has an almost quaint whiff of noblesse oblige.

Something has to give, and the Harvard team suggests that what should be de-emphasized are academics: Students shouldn’t “overload” on A.P. courses. But admissions officers candidly admit that they are looking to see evidence that applicants can do well in higher-level academic work. Do we really think that colleges won’t look more favorably on the applicant who gets four 5s on his or her A.P. tests than on the kid who gets two?

One reason the project recommended de-emphasizing A.P. courses is the presumption that it would give lower-income kids less of a disadvantage in the admissions race (because poorer school districts typically offer fewer A.P. options). That would level the playing field a bit, but in exactly the wrong way. Lowering standards won’t prepare kids for college-level work. Instead, colleges should say they’ll value community college courses just like A.P. courses in the admissions assessment. Even if their high schools offer few A.P.s, most lower-income kids have access to community colleges.

One of the greatest sources of high school anxiety is preparing for the SAT or the ACT. This is also where the system is probably most tilted in favor of wealthier families. Lower-income schools have only recently begun to recognize that they, too, have to play the test-prep game if they want to give their students a better shot.

Colleges may try to de-emphasize the SAT/ACT in their rhetoric about the holistic process they employ in making admissions decisions. But many schools still use informal SAT/ACT cutoffs. With more kids applying to more colleges than ever before, admissions officers have to use some sort of triage to make quick decisions. Even if more schools adopt a test-optional application policy, standardized test scores are hardly likely to disappear.

Perhaps the Harvard team didn’t realize that a test-optional approach helps colleges more than it does students. A few more kids who have high G.P.A.s but who test poorly may get admitted. The colleges however, benefit because the average SAT/ACT scores of admitted students typically go up because it is mainly the kids with lower scores who choose the option not to submit them. It also helps the colleges avoid scrutiny when admitting recruited athletes, legacies or underrepresented minorities.

Unfortunately, much of the perception of an uneven playing field is driven by a misunderstanding of whom kids are actually competing against for admission. Every year colleges try to put together the so-called well-rounded class, with top athletes, a few terrific musicians and performers, “development prospects” whose parents can pay for a building or two and a “critical mass” of underrepresented minorities, as well as a handful of double-legacies. The rest of the entering-class slots — and this is still the bulk of the student body — are chosen for their academic promise.

The Ivy League uses a formula for its recruited athletes that might be of use more generally. Potential athletes receive an Academic Index score based on their G.P.A. and SAT or ACT scores. Roughly speaking, recruited athletes are allowed to have an A.I. within one standard deviation of the overall admitted class.

The same approach could work to promote the community-focused objective the Harvard group is working toward. The best way for colleges to tell kids they truly value a concern about others and a real commitment to community service is to announce that they’ll give an admissions bump of one standard deviation to anyone who spends two years after high school doing full-time AmeriCorps-type community or military service.

That would do far more for both individual students and the nation than any high-sounding, touchy-feely essays — many of which will most likely be ghost written anyway.

The truth is that the best way to reduce the craziness of college admissions would be to bring down the cost of college itself. Despite what you may hear on the campaign trail, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Kids compete for slots at the highest-ranked colleges because rankings are a proxy, however flawed, for brand value. As long as it costs upward of $100,000 for four years at public universities and $200,000 for private colleges, the race for return-on-investment will continue.

The Harvard report has noble goals. It tries to promote community service, level the admissions playing field and make the process less stressful. But we can’t do all three at once.

Steve Cohen is a lawyer and a co-author of “Getting In: The Zinch Guide to College Admissions & Financial Aid in the Digital Age.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 4 of the National edition with the headline: Real Compassion in College Admissions. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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