College Admission: Now and Then Again
Stephen Handel · College and university · 2015
I left college admissions at the University of California (uc) a decade ago. Today, I am back at uc, two doors down from my former office. Although some things remain unaltered (the University still has nine undergraduate campuses and annually receives more applications-600,000-than the populations of most medium-sized cities in the Midwest), the world of college admissions has changed significantly. My current disorientation has left me rubbing my eyes. Channeling a higher education version of Rip Van Winkle, I offer the following ten observations:* The electronic application has come of age. In 2004, online applications were starting to be utilized, accompanied with cheerful guarantees of more accurate responses and easier reporting. Today, nearly every college in America has an online application. As of this writing, uc's online application is running flawlessly (although no one here is smug given recent troubles at the Common Application). Granted, some of the enthusiastic predictions about the efficiency of electronic applications have been met: Applicants do make fewer errors. Yet prospective students procrastinate far more than in years past: For the uc system, half of all applications arrived within two days of the deadline.* Comprehensive review goes public. According to the annual State of College report by the National Association of College Admission Counseling (2014), grades in college-prep courses, rigor of the curriculum, and admissions tests scores remain the most important measures of merit for freshman admission-as true today as a decade ago. The difference now is that many selective, public institutions are developing admissions processes that place additional emphasis on other information in an applicant's file-something that elite, private institutions have been doing for years. This process, commonly referred to as comprehensive review, is time consuming. Still, from my newish vantage point, it is a worthy commitment of time and resources, demonstrating the value we place on applicants as something more than the sum of their grades and standardized test scores.* It's hip to go to community college. Although community colleges have existed for more than a hundred years, their success in preparing students for transfer has earned greater regard from four-year institutions, whose pipeline of high school graduates has begun to run dry. The fall-out from the latest recession has also made middle- and upper-class families keenly aware of college costs, with the result that their children have begun to enroll at community colleges as lower-cost alternatives to four-year institutions. Of course, that is precisely the mission for which these remarkable institutions were created in the first place.* Politics are still local. According to the Institute for International Education, the number of international applicants to U.S. colleges and universities has increased by a third since 2004, fueled partly by rising economies abroad and a sustained awareness of the reputation of u.S. higher education institutions. The increasing international diversity of our undergraduates is a wonderful addition to our campuses, yet I am mindful that public institutions like uc ignore at their peril the needs of local constituents.* The Supreme Court goes to college. Who could have predicted the high court's relentless interest in college admissions over the past decade? In 2003, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the consideration of applicants' race and ethnicity by the University of Michigan's Law School. In Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor famously opined that such practices should be unneeded in 23 years. A mere six years later, however, the Court heard oral arguments in Fischer v. University of Texas, which, while not overturning the earlier decision, nevertheless tightened the conditions under which a college or university may use affirmative action in admissions. …