The pandemic may change college admissions forever – and that’s a good thing

A college degree has long been an easily recognizable signal to employers of potential and discipline, one that has usually grown stronger the more selective the school on the résumé. Over the past couple of generations, colleges and universities have become the gatekeepers to a prosperous life, a sorting function that begins even before college starts—with the admissions office. 

But as anyone who has been through the gauntlet of the college search knows, even at its best, the process is imprecise, ambiguous, and unfair. That raises questions for hiring managers everywhere—indeed for all of us—about why we continue to rely on higher education to frame everything else that follows after college graduation.

After spending much of the last two years embedded in the world of college admissions in the United States for a new book—including the selection process for an entire cycle at three top-ranked institutions—I found that it’s far from the “meritocracy” that we like to imagine. The selection system for the most elite colleges, where applications are abundant and seats are scarce, is broken because it has been built on a series of compromises and competing priorities.

The first thing to know is that admissions is not is about the applicant, but about the college and its agenda and needs. Goals for the admitted class are set by university leaders and then left to the admissions staff to carry out. In a given year, that might mean more full payers, humanities majors, and students from the Dakotas. Sometimes the goals are narrower: a pitcher for the baseball team, a goalie for the soccer team, or an oboist for the orchestra. Many colleges give special consideration to applicants with deep and lasting connections to the school, such as the children of alumni and employees.

The second thing to know is that there is no one measure of “merit,” whatever that means. Ask thirty students, parents, high school counselors, and college admissions officers for a definition of merit and you’ll get 30 different answers. Parents especially tend to conflate “merit” with “achievement.” I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard parents say how “hard” their child worked to score a 90 on an algebra test, finish an English literature paper, or win the 800-meter dash in track. Parents mistake achievement, often associated with one specific and fixed event in the past, with merit. That’s why colleges typically weigh the score on the four-hour SAT (achievement) less than the grades earned over four years of high school (merit).

The term “meritocracy” was never meant to promote a supposed academic purity. Indeed, when British sociologist Michael Young coined the idea in 1958 he intended it pejoratively. His belief was that when the objective veneer of standardized testing and grades is stripped away, the advantages of a centuries-old class-based system remain.

Young’s satirical term has been co-opted in the world of admissions by the very people he was mocking—students and parents who believe that grades and test scores alone should determine who is accepted amid rising application numbers and falling acceptance rates. When the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans in 2019 about eight admissions criteria colleges should consider, grades and test scores topped the list, by far, well above athletic ability, race, or first-generation and legacy status.

The reality is that by using only those two measures there are simply many more qualified applicants than there are spots at any selective school. Think about this: of the 26,000 domestic applicants for admission to a recent class at Harvard, 8,200 had perfect grade-point averages in high school, 3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, and 2,700 had perfect verbal scores. But Harvard had only about 1,700 spots to offer.

The pipeline into the workforce starts even before the college admissions office, of course, in high school. With more than 43,000 public and private high schools in the United States alone, it’s difficult to stand out in a pool of tens of thousands of applicants who arrive each year at top colleges, as I saw while observing the admissions process during parts of 2018 and 2019 at Emory University, Davidson College, and the University of Washington for my book.

While at Emory in early January 2019, for instance, the university already had 2,500 applications sitting in the admit pile. But admissions officers still had another 18,000 applications to review over the next two months. Of that group, more than 15,000 were going to be rejected.

Watching the evaluations unfold offered me a microcosmic view of the almost impossible decisions that admissions officers face at elite universities.

Some applications tugged at the heart strings. One was from an undocumented immigrant whose father left the violence of his Middle East home soon after 9/11 for the only job he could get in America—at a fast-food restaurant. The applicant wrote in his essay that he accompanied his father to work one day only to find him behind the deep fryer. At fourteen, the applicant was diagnosed with diabetes. But that didn’t slow him down. As the oldest of three, he spent more than 20 hours a week managing the household, all while he took seven AP courses, earned a 3.75 GPA, and scored a 1400 on the SAT. But four Bs during his sophomore and junior year derailed his application.

“He has taken a strong curriculum,” an Emory admissions officer wrote in his summary, “but would like to see stronger grades for consideration.”

He ended up in the growing pile of rejections.

Other teenagers drown in the sea of sameness that characterizes just about every top college’s applicant pool. One senior whose parents were lawyers worked a summer job as a pizza delivery driver. It’s something different. “You don’t see that anymore,” the admissions officer remarked. Even so, the reader found the student lacking “a fire for anything.” The applicant’s 1440 on the SAT, 3.3 GPA, and solid activities—but missing leadership positions that admissions officers like to see—were not good enough.

He ended up on the wait list.

Throughout reading season, admissions officers at Emory and elsewhere describe applicants as good kids, standard, steady, and kind. Maybe there is more to each of the students, but the authentic version is hidden beneath the curated portrait upper-middle- income students present to the admissions office, the one low-income students don’t know to present.

For the Emory admissions staff to labor through hundreds of files a day during the winter reading season, a chunk of applications needed to be moved quickly to the deny pile, in three or four minutes.

But easy denials were not always clear from simply looking at a summary of academic metrics. A boy with a 1500 on the SAT from a “busy school group”—meaning one that sends reams of applications—was moved within four minutes to the deny pile after looking at junior year grades (lots of Bs, B-pluses), a rather run-of-the-mill résumé, and what admissions officers characterize as an essay with “surface-level thinking” about discovering the world through Google while recovering from an injury.

A girl described as a “glue kid,” who brings people together in the background, was also sent to the deny pile with a 1480 SAT score, an upward trend in grades after some Cs in her sophomore year, four AP tests with either a 4 or 5 score, and activities that include the varsity tennis team and acting.

It wasn’t that any of those seniors were weak applicants; they just didn’t stand out or weren’t what the university was looking for at that precise moment. “Without seeing the whole pool,” Emory’s Butt told me, “anyone on the outside can’t see what stands out.”

Until the pandemic upended the college search for millions of students in the high school Classes of 2020 and ’21, admissions offices were bound to their traditions. Even as they competed with each other for students, they still moved in packs through the annual admissions cycle using a generic set of approaches—campus tours and direct mail, common deadlines, and strikingly similar rating scales for assessing applicants.

But COVID-19 is shaking up higher ed, and admissions in particular. Which parts of the process we hold on to and which parts we toss aside is a complicated stew that is tied largely to what institutions prize. That said, college admissions is not going to be the same, in the year ahead nor perhaps for generations to come.

In the near term, three big changes are upending the selection process this year, and they could stick around:

1. Testing. More than 400 colleges, including some of the most selective, are not requiring the SAT or ACT for admissions this year. Once their world doesn’t come crashing down and they still recruit a class, many of those colleges are not going to flock back to the test.
2. The virtual search. Students, unfortunately, put together their college list based on brand name and prestige. Prestige, however, is often a matter of perception. Spend some time in the pressure cooker of a prosperous suburban high school in the United States and you’ll see how that perception is shaped by students and parents who view college as another luxury good. In reporting for my book, I learned that the college search for those students included a list of 10 schools and that was it. They never looked up and out. Everyone was buying the same map. It’s like Waze on your phone when there’s an accident and everyone is directed by the app to drive on the same street. The college GPS (that is, the rankings, the high schools, etc.) directed kids to the same 10 schools  Now, it’s like we lost the GPS device that put us on that path in the first place. Kids and colleges are both flying blind. There are no college tours, no visits to high schools by college representatives, no college fairs. Now, we have a new atlas that could provide different opportunities for teenagers to find schools—and for colleges to find students. Many prospective students won’t be in high school hallways this fall hearing the cacophony of college brands from their classmates and counselors. Instead, they’ll have the chance to Zoom into dozens of college info sessions in the course of a few days and visit any campus virtually, not just those on the spring break college tour.
3. The application. In the old world, colleges just kept asking for more from applicants under the guise of holistic admission. We saw widespread application bloat – they just got bigger and fatter. Now, with many of the touchpoints of high school postponed, cancelled, or changed it’s going to be difficult for students to fill in 10 spaces for extra-curricular activities, flag down teachers for recommendations, or take six AP courses and exams. As they assess students in this coming cycle, admissions officers will need to focus on what matters—high-school courses students chose and the activities they engaged in over several years rather than just sign-up clubs for the college application.

In 1966, B. Alden Thresher, the longtime director of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued in a book, College Admissions and the Public Interest, that predicting which students will succeed in college is imprecise work. It’s an educated guessing game played with rules that are constantly shifting based on a college’s agenda. This is why teenagers and their families—whether they’re at the beginning, middle, or near the end of their college search—should constantly remind themselves that while they can steer the process, they can’t control the ultimate outcome. It’s also why hiring managers and companies shouldn’t put too much stock in the applicants that selective colleges choose during the admissions process.

An observation Thresher makes on his opening page stayed with me long after I finished my book: “One cannot tell by looking at a toad how far he will jump.”

It’s one of the most quoted lines in the book for a reason. There is no admissions officer—no matter how experienced, no matter how much information they possess, no matter how long they study any given application—who can predict who will succeed at a particular school and how far they will eventually travel in life.

This post has been adapted and excerpted from Jeffrey Selingo’s new book, “Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions,” on sale now from Scribner/Simon & Schuster. Two of his previous books were New York Times bestsellers. He is former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and now a special advisor to the president at Arizona State University.