Corrupted U.S. college admissions processes

Ability downgraded -- mainly to enable racial discrimination

On a beautiful fall day last week, I found myself on the main quadrangle of the University of Chicago, walking with the school's admissions director, Theodore O'Neill, when a freshman girl approached us. "How's it going?" Mr. O'Neill inquired of her orientation week. "This place is Mecca," she answered.

Mr. O'Neill decides who gets to go on this pilgrimage, and there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of high-school seniors who would kill for the opportunity I have today--to spend an uninterrupted hour talking with him. These eager boys and girls might try to enthrall Mr. O'Neill with their knowledge of the faculty's research, their love of community service, their expansive vocabulary, their passion for wind instruments or veterinary medicine or juggling. Anything that might make them stand out.

When Mr. O'Neill joined the admissions staff here in 1981, things were different: The acceptance rate for undergraduates was 70%. Today, it's about half that (even though the freshman class has doubled to 1,300). A quarter-century ago, the freshmen who ended up at the University of Chicago were mostly just smart kids who graduated from decent high schools, a sizable chunk in rural Midwestern towns.

Now it's a different ballgame. This fall, Mr. O'Neill will sort through several thousand applications, trying to find the perfect freshman class. What has made it so much harder for students to get into top colleges? And what is this cutthroat competition doing to kids?

To begin with, there was a baby boomlet around 1990, the year many of today's high-school seniors were born. Also, despite skyrocketing tuition, more parents can afford to send their kids to college, and higher education is more important for gaining secure employment.

Mr. O'Neill says that "students today have a better sense of what it takes to make themselves look like good candidates." They take as many AP classes as they can, prepare for the SATs, polish their essays, etc. And many parents pay tutors and coaches to help with this effort. But he tells me it is an "open question" whether the university's applicants are actually of a higher quality than those of 25 years ago. How many areas of American life are there today in which people work harder and spend more money only to see the same results they did decades before?

Well, that's not quite true, according to Mr. O'Neill, who proudly points to what he thinks is one of the biggest improvements to the University of Chicago in the past few decades--diversity. The school used to be about two-thirds male and overwhelmingly white. Now the gender ratio is about even, and 7% of the student body is black, 9% is Hispanic and 1% is Native American.

How has this happened? For one thing, Mr. O'Neill tells me, he has de-emphasized the SATs in the admissions process. They're used as "corroborating evidence" for what his staff learns from teacher recommendations, high-school records and essays. Ultimately, Mr. O'Neill believes that "there are some things that are more important than test scores."

A few months ago, black presidential hopeful Barack Obama, a former U of C lecturer, told George Stephanopoulos that he didn't think his daughters should be treated differently in the college admissions process from any other "advantaged" kids. But Mr. O'Neill disagrees. He would give the Obama girls "a break" anyway: "Those children, for all their privileges, will have interesting things to say about American society based on what I'm assuming their experiences are."

On Tuesday, Mr. O'Neill participated in a meeting of the Education Conservancy, which is "committed to improving college admission processes for students, colleges and high schools." Hosted by Yale University, the meeting consisted of 100 college administrators discussing how to get "beyond rankings." College "ranksters"--as Conservancy president Lloyd Thacker refers to U.S. News and similar surveyors--can be blamed, he argues, for much of the crazy atmosphere surrounding college admissions.

At a news conference after the meeting, some of the administrators complained that rankings didn't provide enough data or tried to quantify things that aren't quantifiable. What was needed were more "descriptive" measures of colleges. (Mr. O'Neill expressed the same sentiment when I spoke to him.) The group is trying to develop a system in which high-school students would be asked to evaluate their own "learning styles," and then a Web site would "match" them with colleges providing the right sort of learning environment.

Leave aside the silliness of asking a high-school student for this level of self-knowledge or the fact that most colleges sound the same when describing themselves. The real problem is that such a system would add another fuzzy element to the admissions process. As it is, colleges already discount so many of the concrete measures. In addition to ignoring test scores (when it's convenient), admissions officers have a hard time keeping track of which high schools are rigorous and which are not. The U of C has freshmen matriculating from 900 different high schools this year. What does an "A" mean at any of them? "We don't know," Mr. O'Neill replies. What about the essays? More and more kids pay coaches to compose them. The U of C has picked some odd topics to get around this--"Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard" or "Use the power of string to explain the biggest or the smallest phenomenon"--but coaches can get creative, too.

I suspect that what bothers kids most about the process is not the cutthroat competition they face, but the arbitrary nature of the whole thing. You struggle to give schools what they want. But ultimately folks like Mr. O'Neill may simply ignore your grades or your test scores, focusing instead on whether you've had the right "experiences" or have the right skin color to be admitted to the sacred city.

Source






Britain: Number of failing schools jumps 18 per cent in a year

The number of all schools judged to be failing rose by 18 per cent between the summer terms last year and this after changes to the inspection regime. Government figures show that 246 schools were in "special measures" by the end of last term, up from 208 at the end of the previous year. The rise was sharpest for primary schools, with 181 in special measures, up from 137 last year. The increase reflects the introduction of an inspection regime that has allowed many more schools to be inspected, to tougher new standards.Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, said that 2.7 per cent of the 6,100 schools inspected had been in special measures, compared with 2.2 per cent of the 8,300 schools inspected this year.

Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, said schools in special measures must improve within one year or face closure, but emphasised that fewer schools were failing now than ten years ago. Separate figures showed that hundreds of primary schools were unable to appoint permanent head teachers this year. A government analysis found 520 nursery and primary schools had filled head teacher posts on a temporary basis.

Meanwhile, plans for job-related diplomas to run alongside A levels suffered a setback yesterday when nearly half of the country's leading independent schools said that they would not introduce them. The new specialist diplomas, for 14 to 19-year-olds, have been heralded by the Government as the most important education reform in 40 years. Starting from next September, they will combine practical work experience with academic study.

Ministers and officials have emphasised that the diplomas' credibility rests heavily on their acceptance by employers, universities and parents. But a survey of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference group of independent schools yesterday revealed that only two members were considering them seriously.Private schools have been deterred by widespread concerns that the diplomas will not be ready in time and by flaws in their development.

Source