Let's Make College Admissions Merit-Based

Today's Supreme Court decision over-turning affirmative action in college admissions should be only the first step in making college admissions merit-based.

The following is an excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase for full price on Amazon.

Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:

Making Admissions Merit-Based

To promote progress, we need a radical reform of the college admissions process. The four-year degree has become the de facto admission ticket into the American professional class. This class dominates virtually all American institutions, and supplies virtually all of our leaders. We need to ensure that those who get into universities do so based on merit.

Universities benefit financially from being the de facto gatekeeper to the American professional class. Parents in that class will do almost anything to ensure that their children get into the right college. Many will pay almost any level of tuition to ensure the financial future of their children. This gives universities tremendous power to shape the behavior and beliefs of the future leaders of our nation.

Since virtually all of our leaders come from that professional class, society has a real stake in who is accepted into universities. And since state and federal governments pay for a very substantial portion of the higher education budget, they both have a significant amount of influence over the process.

Just as we need corporations to fully embrace skills-based merit, we need universities to fully embrace an admissions process that is solely based on academic merit. In this way, we can build a merit-based pathway into the professional class that is open to all. Unfortunately, discrimination is rampant in the college admissions process.

When most people think about discrimination in the college admissions process, they immediately think about the hot-button issue of affirmative action based on race. Unfortunately, racial discrimination has become a standard part of the college admissions process. Affirmative action started in the 1970s as a temporary step to expand the eligibility pool, but it has become institutionalized racial discrimination. It is a sad fact of life that universities have some of the highest levels of racial discrimination among all institutions in American society.

It is crucial to realize that affirmative action is far from being the only form of anti-academic-merit admissions criteria. Universities, particularly private universities, routinely accept students with far lower academic qualifications because of one or more of the following reasons:

• Their parent’s income (i.e. their ability to pay the tuition without financial aid)

• Their parents donated large amounts of money to the college

• Their parents previously attended the same college (leading to them being called legacy students)

• Their parents work for the college.

• Their parents have personal connections to college administrators (i.e. the Dean’s list)

• Athletic ability

• The students participate in a large number of extra-curricular activities or volunteer work

• Letters of recommendation from alumni, administrators, guidance counselors, or teachers

• Essays or projects in the entrance exam

• Candidate interviews

All of these non-academic criteria undermine the fairness of the admissions process and give an advantage to the children of White professional-class youths over other more talented youths.

A Legacy of Discrimination

Various combinations of the above admission criteria are currently in use by admissions departments in virtually all private and many public universities. To cover up the goals of the admissions process, universities label the process “holistic” and keep the results and process secret.

This complex and opaque admissions process started in the 1920s at Harvard University. Originally, Harvard and other Ivy League schools admitted applicants who passed fairly easy academic examinations. Because tuition was expensive and the pool of students was local, entrants to Harvard students overwhelmingly came from the Protestant upper-class in the Northeast.

Starting in the 1920s, the sons of Jewish immigrants in New York City began to apply to Harvard. As a result, the percentage of students of Jewish ethnicity began to rapidly increase. By 1925 the percentage of Jewish students at Harvard had jumped from near zero to 27% (SFA).

In an era when anti-semitism was widespread within the upper class, this was considered a scandalous problem that needed to be solved. Harvard President A. Lawrence Howell began a campaign to change the admissions process to get the desired result. This started a long tradition of doing the same in American admissions processes.

Private letters written at the time between President Howell, alumni, and the administrators make it clear that the original purpose of this system was to:

1. Limit the number of Jewish students to a level that was acceptable to its traditional upper-class Protestant students and alumni. Otherwise, those members of the preferred class would enroll in other elite colleges.

2. Create a system so complex and opaque that Harvard could plausibly deny that deliberate discrimination was taking place.

The “reform” worked. Within a year Jewish enrollment was cut in half, and it remained at that level for the next few decades. All of the new requirements – character, photos, essays, letters of recommendation, demographic information, interviews, legacy preferences, and ability to pay tuition – enabled universities to filter out undesirable Jews while claiming not to do so. By the 1960s, Harvard had added a complex docket system that exploited the geographical concentration of Jews to exclude them (SLA).

Thankfully, few universities today are trying to exclude Jews, but now Asians have replaced Jews in the role of “undesirable over-achievers”. In addition, universities want to increase the number of Black students to achieve non-merit-based goals of “diversity” and “inclusion.”

The overall goal of “holistic” admissions is still to obscure the fact that the process is not based on merit, while enabling administrators to claim that it is. Now, the main goal is to ensure that universities, particularly private ones:

• Don’t admit too many Asian students, to make the university look diverse and inclusive.

• Admit a reasonable number of Black students, also to make the university look diverse and inclusive.

• Admit a sizable number of students with lower academic qualifications whose parents are wealthy enough to pay the exorbitant tuition.

• Create a system so complex and opaque that the university can plausibly deny that deliberate discrimination is taking place.

Racial/ethnic discrimination is still at the core of the admissions process. Now we have also added a layer of financial discrimination. Universities systematically set targets for the racial percentage of new students and then rejig the criteria to get the desired result. Any deviations from the targets are made up in the next year. Then they deny that they are doing it (SFA).

Ironically, a system designed to make the university look diverse and inclusive also discriminates in favor of the White professional class. Apart from racial affirmative action, all of the criteria in the holistic admissions process tend to favor students whose parents have four-year college degrees, higher incomes, and connections with the school.

While the actual results of the admissions process are typically kept secret, the recent lawsuit by the Students For Fair Admissions against Harvard University has provided unprecedented insights. Students admitted into Harvard who are recruited as athletes, legacy students, those on the Dean’s list and children of faculty and staff (known as ALDCs) have much lower academic standards than other students admitted into Harvard. According to one study, three-quarters of White ALDC students would have been rejected if admissions had been strictly based on academic merit (Arcidiacono).

Recruited athletes had a 14-times higher rate of admission than non-athletes with comparable academic accomplishments, and they made up 10% of the admitted class. Legacy students had a 5.7-times higher rate of admission, and they made up 14% of the class. Children of faculty and staff have similar rates. All three of these groups were over 68% White, and they had far higher incomes than the average applicant (Arcidiacono).

When the focus shifts to a less prestigious private university, the discrimination shifts more to the ability to pay tuition. With the exception of elite schools, private universities routinely accept below-average students from high-income families (Tough).

In order to make room for those more profitable students, universities must turn away more talented students from lower-income families. High tuition prices have forced most private universities to prioritize the ability to pay over academic merit. Moreover, the Best Colleges algorithms reward colleges for spending lots of money (Tough).

The dirty little secret of private schools is that they give a substantial percentage of financial aid to students from wealthy families. They do so, not because the students need the assistance, but because their research shows that the practice increases the chances that students whose parents can afford to pay their exorbitant tuition fees will choose their school. Unfortunately, this leaves far fewer resources for students who actually need financial aid (Tough).

While each of these admissions criteria has some logic to them, when applied together they lead to a deeply corrupt admissions process. Universities can pretend that they searching for the best young academic minds and only making exceptions for the talented poor, when in fact the entire system achieves the opposite.

Just as Jews were the victim of the admissions process from the 1920s to the 1960s, Asians have been the primary victim since the 1970s. For Asians to get accepted into a university, they must have far higher grades and test scores than other races. By combining the elimination of all the criteria in the holistic admissions process with the elimination of racial discrimination, we can strike a far greater blow against “white privilege” than anything affirmative action can possibly achieve (SFA).

Racial Preferences Cannot Be Made to Work

Racial preferences are based upon many flawed assumptions. One problem is that universities do not admit “a group” into the university. Universities must make a decision for each individual, not for each group. The chosen individual does not represent their racial group, as each individual has unique characteristics.

In addition, all of these preferences appear to be based upon the assumption that Americans come from basically two groups: affluent Whites and poor Blacks. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When a university admits a Black person to satisfy a racial preference, that person is highly unlikely to be poor. The children of poor people are not applying for university in the first place. Racial preferences merely replace a student whose parents are White members of the professional class with a student whose parents are Black members of the professional class. This is only promoting diversity within a system of class privilege.

Nor are there only two races in the United States. Perhaps this biracial system made sense in the 1960s, but it is a gross distortion of America in the 2020s. Depending upon your definitions, the United States currently has five racial groups: Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans. More to the point, none of these racial groups are monolithic.

The category “Asian” consists of dozens of different cultures. The number approaches the hundreds if we include ethnic minorities within Asian nations. Many of these people share virtually nothing in common, except for the continent where their ancestors once lived.

The category “Hispanic” includes descendants from at least 26 different nations, not to mention religious and ethnic minorities within each nation. Hispanics themselves are largely an amalgamation of Spanish, Portuguese, Black, and a wide range of Native American tribes.

The category of “Black” includes descendants from slaves in the United States, American freemen as well as recent immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. With increased immigration from those nations, the percentage of Blacks who are actually descended from slaves declines every year.

The category of “Native Americans” includes 574 federally recognized tribes, each of which has its own unique cultural traditions. These five racial categories obscure the substantial cultural diversity within them. And even this cultural diversity does not capture the enormous individual diversity within those groups. Universities must admit individuals, not groups.

More to the point, intermarriage across races, religions, and ethnicity is extremely widespread and getting more common with each generation. In total, 10.2% of all married-couple households are interracial and the number is increasing. In 2015, 17% of all newlyweds were married to someone of a different race (Pew, US Census).

The interracial marriage rate for newlyweds is 27% for Hispanics, 29% for Asians, and 18% for Blacks. For native-born Hispanics and Asians, the rate is around 50%. Only a constant stream of new immigrants keeps the original categories from washing away completely. For Native Americans, racial intermarriage rates are even higher (Pew, US Census).

Within each racial category, there are also American citizens and non-citizens in various forms. Our racial categories treat new immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa as if they were in the same category as American citizens whose ancestors come from the same continent.

This is particularly awkward for Blacks, many of whom have ancestors who lived on North American soil for 400 years. A very sizable proportion of Blacks in selective universities are actually recent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. To say that a recent immigrant from Africa or the Caribbean somehow represents Black Americans descended from slavery is utterly ridiculous, no matter how you look at it.

Racial preferences play racial minorities off against each other. The primary victim of racial preferences in selective universities is not Whites, but Asians. Asians know they are not competing against other races; they are competing against each other for a deliberately constrained number of slots. The same goes for other racial minorities.

Why Should We Care?

Some may claim that universities, particularly private universities, are independent institutions that should be allowed to set admissions criteria in any way they choose. I am sympathetic to this argument for a few isolated examples, but when the same admissions philosophy pervades the entire university system, it has deeply negative consequences.

A Progress-based reform agenda should require that universities that accept taxpayer money have a simple, transparent, merit-based admissions process. Because acquiring a four-year college degree is a de facto admission requirement for leadership positions in American institutions, society has a vested interest in the admissions process. The more the process is based upon merit, the more contributions our leaders can make to progress.

I also believe that our admissions process has played an important role in the decline of academic rigor. In our current system, with a large percentage of students entering with sub-par academic qualifications, professors are under constant pressure to make grades easier and require less reading and writing from students.

This particularly becomes a problem when identifiable groups, such as racial minorities or athletes know they cannot compete academically, so they put pressure on the university to lower standards for everyone. They effectively create interest groups that support low standards.

Having a student body with a fairly narrow range in academic ability will also make it easier for professors to make their courses more challenging. As a former professor, I have seen first-hand how students who should not have been accepted into a college in the first place force professors to lower their standards.

When all students are fairly homogenous in academic ability, professors can realistically cut grade inflation, and increase the length of paper and reading assignments knowing that they will not leave one-third of the class behind. Declining standards have become so institutionalized that I am not hopeful this change will actually happen, but at least some committed universities and professors could take a stand.

Finally, our public university system is largely based upon taxpayer funding, giving all of society an interest in who gets in and why. Even private schools accept a substantial amount of direct federal research funding and indirect financial aid for students. So our university system has not been truly independent for quite some time.

Merit-Based Admissions

Public universities and private universities that accept government funding should be required by legislation to admit students based purely on clear academic achievement. They should only be allowed to use the following criteria for admission:

1. High-school or post-secondary grade point average.

2. Test scores, such as SAT, SAT Subject, ACT, CLT, AP, TOEFL, or GED.

3. Other academic metrics that are clearly correlated with subsequent college GPA and college graduation rates.

4. These metrics may only be applied if they increase the accuracy of predictions of college success above the first two criteria listed above.

Universities must also require that all their on-site students are American citizens, legal residents, or have valid student visas. Online learners could be exempted from this requirement.

Public universities and private universities who accept government funding should be required by legislation to not use any of the following criteria in the admissions process: race, religion, gender, ethnicity, age, donations from students, donations from parents, attendance or employment in the same school by parents or other family members, opinion’s of university deans or administrators, athletic achievements or ability, extra-curricular activities, essays or ability to pay.

The terms of the legislation should make it clear that accepting government funding includes direct government funding as well as indirect funding via financial aid for students. As long as the government is supporting these institutions financially, they should be able to influence the admissions process.

I think that a few reasonable exclusions should be allowed. Universities might want to limit their pool of students either partially or entirely to their own city, metro area, state, or region. This would enable some schools to offer a unique educational experience based on their local geography and history. Universities should not, however, be allowed to establish a complex docket system that sets limits for many different regions across the United States. This system is too open to cheating.

To ensure a fully transparent system, public universities and private universities that accept government funding should be required to display the cut-offs used for GPAs and test scores for each year on the internet. The website should include a simple calculator that enables anyone to enter a combination of GPA and test scores to see what the results should be. That will ensure that everyone knows the rules, and can see that the rules are being applied fairly to everyone.

Public universities and private universities that accept government funding should be required to make all admission applications completely anonymous before any college employees view their record. This will ensure that admissions make their admission decisions exclusively based on legal characteristics.

Public universities and private universities that accept government funding should be required to publish anonymous online databases listing all students who applied, their GPA, test scores, and demographic characteristics along with their admission results. Then anyone who is treated unfairly has the data to back their discrimination claim.

Because private schools rely on students with below-average academic qualifications from wealthy families to pay tuition fees, they will be faced with a choice. They can either maintain their current admissions process and drop government funding or overhaul their admissions process.

Any private school that wants to continue receiving government funding directly or indirectly via student financial aid or loans may be forced to radically cut the cost of their tuition fees. Without being able to cherry-pick students whose parents can pay the tuition, nor being able to pass the bill on to the government, they may have no other choice.

The Ivy League and other most prestigious private schools have large enough endowments that they might be able to do as they choose. These large endowments will enable them to maintain current practices without government subsidies. My guess, however, is that, if the rest of the university system changes to a more merit-based system, the Ivy League schools will have a difficult time justifying their current practices to students and alumni.

I believe that certain types of educational institutions should be exempted from some of these requirements. Historically black colleges may require that some or all of their students are black. Historically religious colleges may require that some or all of their students are members of a certain religious faith. Historically women’s colleges may require that some or all of their students are women. As long as the practices are not too widespread, I see no problem with allowing such practices to continue.

College Sports

College sports are a uniquely American institution. To the best of my knowledge, no other nation or culture has anything quite like it. Universities in other nations have few highly-competitive sports teams that function as feeders to professional leagues.

In some ways, college sports are the most merit-oriented of all university activities. All athletes must relentlessly compete and the results on the field or court are obvious to all.

Unfortunately, that merit is based on athletic ability, not academic ability. Those two abilities are so far apart from each other that it will be impossible to mesh them together.

I know that my Progress-based reform agenda will face serious resistance if it leads to the abolition of college sports. And I must confess that I am a huge college football fan. Since college sports are such a major part of American culture and the campus lifestyle, certain athletic exemptions should be put in place for major college sports.

If we combine an exemption with an acknowledgment that college athletes are athletes first and students second, this seems justified. In particular, we should acknowledge that big-time college sports are highly profitable industries that exploit young unpaid labor. Just as the Olympics finally gave up on the charade that amateurism is a necessary ideal, so should college sports.

Realistically this means football and basketball. These are the only college sports that are revenue-making. All other sports programs, with very few exceptions, lose revenue.

As a special exemption, college football and basketball athletes could be accepted into college based exclusively on their athletic ability in that sport. In exchange, universities should pay their athletes. During the season of that sport, the student would be considered a full-time athlete who is paid at least minimum wage and not required to attend classes. Outside the sports season, the student would be considered to be a full-time student who takes classes full-time.

Athletes in all other sports would have to meet the same academic requirements as all other students, and their academic ability would not be allowed to play a role in their admission. Since the vast majority of those athletes come from the White professional class, this in no way undermines concerns about diversity or racial equity (Tough).

If a university does not wish to pay its football and basketball athletes or the programs do not earn enough revenue to pay their salaries, then the athletes should be admitted by the same criteria as non-athletes.

Focus on Results

Key metrics for measuring the success of policies to make college admissions merit-based should be percent of universities that:

• Allow only GPA and test scores as part of their admission process.

• Publish their admission cut-offs online each year.

• Make all applications anonymous before any employees view their record.

• Publish anonymous databases of students who applied and their characteristic (as described earlier).

Conclusion

Because the four-year college degree has become the de facto admission ticket into the American professional class, and a portion of that class will provide the future leaders of our society, American society has a strong interest in ensuring that college admissions are entirely merit-based.

Stay tuned for more excerpts!

The above was an excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase for full price on Amazon.

Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series: