There was an interesting collision of articles about college admissions in my RSS feeds the other day. Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily had a post about a proposal to make college admissions random. The idea is that we could reduce stress on students and parents by having colleges identify those students who meet their academic standards, and then select randomly from among them, rather than trying to find perfect matches.
At around the same time, Inside Higher Ed had an article about Davidson College’s decision to eliminate student loans from their financial aid packages. Students who qualify for financial aid will receive a package of grants that will eliminate the need to borrow money from the college. They say that this isn’t actually a major policy shift– they were already strictly limiting the amount of loans in their aid packages– but they made the announcement in order to encourage students from low-income backgrounds to apply.
The intersection of these two ideas is pretty amusing. Let’s randomly select students to receive free tuition! Whee!
Of course, then Davidson pledge is not without its fine print– they pledge to meet the “need” of eligible students with grants rather than loans. “Need” in a financial aid context is the end result of a complicated calculation about how much a student’s family can afford to pay for their education. This depends not only on the financial assets of a given family, but also on how cleverly they managed their money to make themselves look needy. Two families with very similar incomes can have very different levels of “need” depending on how they have their money invested, and there’s a thriving business in investment counselling for people planning to send their kids to expensive elite colleges (one of my father’s cousins does this for a living).
So it’s not like the students and families affected by this policy will escape entirely without debt. Many of them will be expected to pay something, and given the high cost of college these days, that may well require some loans. Still, having been lucky enough to receive a scholarship that covered my calculated need with grants rather than loans, I can attest that leaving college without tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt makes a huge difference. And typical tuition has almost doubled since I graduated…
The random admissions thing is also an interesting idea. There’s certainly a huge amount of effort sunk into trying to select exactly the right students to admit to colleges, and it’s not entirely clear that it really makes that much difference. And if you talk to students about how they decided where to go to college, it sometimes seems like there’s a random selection taking place already, on the student end.
A great deal of the college experience is determined by the “fit” between a student and an institution, and a lot of that is fairly random. Students choose between comparable colleges based on whether they had a good time on their campus visits, or whether the tour guides were cute, or whether they liked the food, or any of hundreds of factors that are completely beyond the control of the admissions department, or any member of the faculty. They’re attempting to find a place where they “fit” well, or at least where they think they’ll fit well.
And sometimes, that’s completely deceptive. I chose Williams in part because I really enjoyed my campus visit, but the guys I stayed with when I visited were not people I ended up hanging out with when I was there. When I actually got to campus, I wound up in a completely different social circle– I actually wound up hanging out with the loud drunk guys upstairs from the guys I stayed with when I visited…
To a large extent, the “fit” between a student an an institution is self-determined. On the student end, it’s a combination of finding the place where you fit on campus, and becoming the sort of person who fits in the place where you happen to be. It’s important to remember that college students are still fairly malleable, personality-wise, and will leave as very different people than they were when they came in.
On the college or university side, a lot of effort is expended in trying to find students who “fit” in a slightly different sense. There’s a bit more of an academic emphasis, but at the same time, there’s an attempt to ensure some social and economic diversity in the student body, in part to ensure that all students will be able to find a place where they “fit.”
It’s not entirely clear to me, though, that this is the best place to be putting the effort, given that college students grow and change a lot in four years. I left Williams a very different person than I was when I arrived, and I almost certainly wasn’t exactly who the admissions office thought they were getting when they accepted me (particularly not during my sophomore year…).
So, while I’m sure the idea of choosing students to admit on a random basis probably horrifies admissions officers (at least when they’re not in the middle of the admissions process– in mid-February, they’d probably be willing to go for it), I’m not sure it wouldn’t work just as well as the current process. In terms of getting the sort of college and community we want, it might almost be better to stop trying to pick out students who look like exactly what we’re after, and instead choose students at random, and work on changing the campus culture so as to shape those students into the people we want them to be.
(This, by the way, may come off as totally hilarious to those of my colleagues who read this, given the job that I’ve agreed to do for the next three years… No, I’m not going to explain that.)
Anyway (and really, I’m mostly just thinking out loud, here), on a sort of theoretical level, I find the idea of random admissions kind of intriguing. On a practical level, though, I share Dave’s concerns that this wouldn’t actually do much to reduce the stress on students and parents applying for college, and would just shift the existing stress around. Particularly if some schools went to random admissions and others did not– that could easily turn into a total nightmare.
It’s an interesting suggestion, though.