Six Fixes for the College Admissions Scandal
If you Google ‘College Admissions Scandal’, you’ll get 157 MILLION citations. That’s how it is dominating our conversations. It is absorbing stuff, the story of rich people getting yet another advantage in gaining access to the top shelf–but this time getting caught in the act. Some of the pieces I have read include thoughtful suggestions about how to make the admissions process more fair, but most are largely salacious details and hot air/outrage. I’d like to suggest SIX changes that could make the process a little bit more fair.
My bona fides: I recorded the process at four elite private institutions–Williams in 1986, Amherst in 2004, and Middlebury in 1990 for PBS and Dartmouth for NPR in the late 1970’s. In every instance, some applicants had been ‘flagged’ by athletic coaches or heads of the music and drama departments. Some applicants were flagged as ‘legacies,’ meaning a close relative had graduated from the college, and others were noted because their families had the capacity to make a major gift (or had already made one). That’s standard operating procedure at elite institutions; the central question is, of course, how low would an institution go to accepted a ‘flagged’ applicant? As a reporter, I could only ask that question. At the end of the day, it depended upon the integrity of the process and of the individual members of the admissions committee.
Producer Tim Smith and I were the first television journalists to get access to college admissions, at Williams in the spring of 1986. We spent three days videotaping everything that moved, and of course the Committee talked about ‘flagged’ applicants, including athletes, musicians, and children of alumni, but it never CONTINUE READING: Six Fixes for the College Admissions Scandal | The Merrow Report
