As promised last week, this Tuesday I am providing my proposals to comprehensively change the college admissions system in the United States through Congressional legislation, based on multiple precedents, to mandate a transparent, fair and equitable process that changes the admissions game currently dominated and effectively refereed by a coterie of elite universities, aided and abetted by the College Board, some corrupt elements of the admission tutoring and counselling industry, and the US News Annual College Rankings — each and all for the benefit of their own bottom lines, to the detriment of applicants and their families as well as the vast majority of tuition-dependent colleges.
This material is an excerpt from Chapter 8 of my new book, “Let’s Blow Up the Elite College Admissions Black Box: It’s Roiling Young Lives, Rigged for the Rich, and Wrong for America,” available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon. As in previous excerpts, details of the parenthetical citations in this material can be found in the “References” section of the published volume.
Reform as Reality: The Transparency, Equity, and Fairness in College Admissions Act of 2021 (“TEFCA”)
Mandatory Annual Public Disclosure of Specific Data on Formerly Secret Admissions Preferences and Their Impact on Overall Admissions Statistics
Because black box secrecy continues to provide the essential cover for corruption of the admissions process in favor of wealthy and well-connected applicants, comprehensive reform must start with mandatory and verified annual disclosure of critical statistical details specific to the historical hooks and ladders that elite colleges employ in preferencing those applicants above and apart from the general pool. These forms of reserved seating in elite college entering classes effectively discriminate against prospective students who were not born to wealth and or to parents who graduated from college.
TEFCA’s mandated disclosures will finally reveal not only to those students and families directly affected but also to the public generally the full extent that exclusionary admissions lanes not only discriminate directly against first-generation applicants but also often foreclose to all other applicants a substantial percentage of the nominally available admission slots at our most elite colleges. The special lanes can capture even a majority of admissions opportunities when combined with the early decision option that is itself is tethered to applicant wealth.
This mandated disclosure will apply first to the four major categories of preferential admissions consideration for the wealthy and well-connected at elite colleges: (1) legacies, (2) donors’ relatives; (3) coach-referred athletes (other than in revenue sports), and (4) children of their own faculty and staff or from colleges on a reciprocal basis.
Some have suggested (in the context of the Harvard Asian- American admissions discrimination case) that if affirmative action based on racial minority status is ever declared unconstitutional, preferences-based admission consideration for first generation and socioeconomically disadvantaged status should take its place, at least at all public colleges. (Gluckman October 22, 2018) Many colleges already have such categories for special consideration in place or plan to add them. Many colleges have already undertaken special recruiting activities focused on poor communities voluntarily, and it is important to capture and compare full data on the impact of those programs on admissions with those schools’ preferences for wealthy and well-connected applicants. Accordingly, data for college programs with special application review processes and standards for low-income applicants (5) will also be a required reporting category.
The new transparency defining the contours of special admission lanes will not preclude other limitations on these preferences included in other provisions of TEFCA. Moreover, the coercive early decision option, which can account for nearly majority of ultra-elite college admissions on its own, will be subject to an outright prohibition under another provision of TEFCA.
Because elite colleges have led the way in creating high affluence admissions lanes as core elements of their admissions models, TEFCA will feature distinct categories of colleges in terms of levels of disclosure detail: (I) all private and public non-profit colleges that receive the benefit of any federal funding (including aid to students and research grants) to support their mission); (II) a much smaller group of around 120 elite colleges, with endowments of at least $500 million and acceptance rates of 35 percent or less; and (III) about two dozen systemically important elite colleges with endowments of at least $1 billion and acceptance rates not greater than 20 percent.
The elite colleges are those where exclusionary black box admission lanes have the greatest impact on the general applicant pool. The most detailed admissions disclosures under TEFCA would apply to the systemically important elite schools because they essentially set the “rules of the road” other admission departments must follow to stay in the game. A similar category was created under federal disclosure rules for financial firms with the most impact on the overall health of the entire financial system.
The mandated data must be disclosed before the official start of each annual admissions cycle, and must include the following data:
For all colleges: the immediately prior three-year rolling average totals for first-year applications, admissions, and enrollment (including all academic terms), and the median and 25th and 75th percentile cut-off values for SAT, ACT or other standard admission tests, and whether they are required or optional, for both admitted candidates and enrolled students.
For elite colleges: in addition, the same data as above for each of the distinct categories of applicants (enumerated (1) through (5) above) given special consideration in their admission processes.
For systemically important elite colleges: in addition, the total number of admitted and enrolled (including grants of deferred enrollment) students in each of categories (1) to (5) whose applications would not have survived the college’s initial screening process but for membership in one or more of those categories.
The required disclosures must be timely posted for a year on the college’s admissions and applicant recruiting websites, and reported simultaneously to the Department of Education, which would also be required to publicly post such data immediately (subject to investigation of any reasonable suspicion of fraudulent submissions). The TEFCA disclosures will be additional to and not displace any existing disclosure requirements with respect to the College Scoreboard or any other reporting mandates of federal law or Department of Education regulations, or state law. Data disclosures on each college’s websites must be no more than two clicks away from the undergraduate admissions home page and signified by a prominently visible icon or link. A link to such data must also appear prominently in any online brochure sent to potential applicants by the college.
For all TEFCA purposes, donors’ relatives would be defined to include any applicant as to whom the admissions office was informed by any source to be of interest to the advancement or development office or higher university authority (such as the president’s office or a board member) in connection with an actual or potential donation to the college by spouse, parent or grandparent (including adoptive) or blood relative of that applicant to the level of aunt, uncle or first cousin.
The term coach-referred athletes would include any applicant as to whom the admissions office was informed by any source to be of interest to the athletic department, other than applicants under consideration for athletic scholarships for the school’s top three revenue-producing sports. To assure the integrity of the newdisclosures, the Department of Education would be empowered under TEFCA to impose further standard definitions of terms.
Ban Coercive Early Decision Admissions and Other Practices That Work to Favor Rich Applicants or Disadvantage Those from Middle- and Lower-Income Families
Another admissions practice that is not one of the four major direct wealth preferences but far outweighs each of those in terms of impact on overall admission access is the early decision option, which, as currently structured, is an inherently coercive, wealth- biased, but very effective yield and revenue management tool for admissions departments. Going forward under TEFCA, no college — systemically important or otherwise — would be permitted to require any student to accept an offer of admission in advance as a prerequisite to that application being considered at any stage. This new rule would bring a universal end to early decision admissions as we know them, but without precluding the far more applicant- friendly and far less wealth-biased early action option.
No federal rule imaginable could prevent an applicant who reaches an early and definitive top choice for enrollment from voluntarily promising to accept admission if offered, provided that the financial aid package, if relevant, proved to be acceptable. But under TEFCA, the colleges would no longer be able to create the conditions under which any such offer (solicited or unsolicited) would be enforceable, or limit any applicant to one choice of college only in order to be considered early.
No prohibitive federal legislative action under TEFCA would be required with respect to the current early action application procedures, because in that process the interests of applicants and admissions offices are more fairly balanced than under the early decision model. Some elite colleges admissions officials have expressed their support for the early action option, which usually has about the same submission deadline as early decision but allows the successful applicant until the regular cycle’s typical May 1 deadline to choose whether to accept or not. Some admissions officers at elite colleges have expressed their support for the early action option because it gives them more time to court high-quality applicants, knowing that there will be serious competition for them.
Systemically important elite colleges, however, would be required if they offer the early action option to make it available to all applicants, and add it to the list of distinctive admissions pathways subject to the new rolling three-year-average data disclosure requirements. These records would reveal over time whether early action applicants were being admitted with differentiated test score ranges, which, in a fair market, all potential applicants would have the right to know. If the data showed such a pattern of material advantage at systemically important schools, the Department of Education would be empowered to extend this disclosure requirement to all elite colleges. In the matter of assessing applicants’ demonstrated interest, TEFCA would bar any admissions department of an elite college from assigning special or extra weight to the fact that an applicant was able to visit its campus in person.
Additional TEFCA rules would bar any communications between any college’s financial aid offices and advancement or development departments with respect to FAFSA or other financial disclosures from applicants’ families that the college requires regardless of whether an applicant is applying for aid. This provision would prevent such private information from being used to reveal to fundraising departments the potential to seek donations from a particularly rich family in connection with an application.
Disclosure of Elite Colleges’ Initial Application Screening Algorithms and Related Weightings
Each elite college’s admissions department would also be required, before the beginning of each admissions cycle year, to disclose a material summary of its algorithmic or other standards for the initial screening of applications so that they will not be passed forward for any further consideration. This disclosure must show both the applicable classes of data considered in such first-stage assessment whether done by humans or machines. The categories covered could include, for example, weighted and unweighted GPAs, class rank, test score results, extracurricular participation, community service, recommendations, and interviews if referenced in front-end screening decisions. If applicable, the precise relative numerical weight assigned must be disclosed for each category, not merely a general sense of its relative importance.
The admissions office would be free to note that they retain the right to waive these requirements in any case (but TEFCA will also require specific disclosure and sign-off procedures for exceptions possibly linked to outside and wealth-related influences, as described below). Publication of the heretofore secret initial cut benchmarks could discourage applications that have no chance of surviving that cut, but which even the most elite colleges seem to encourage only to pad their selectivity rankings.
Further Controls on Formerly Secret and Undocumented Admission “Tips” for Legacies, Donors’ Children and Special Sports Athletes at Elite Colleges
A full and direct prohibition against admitting any applicants from the four historical wealth- and connection-related preference lanes would be rightly unenforceable. Elite colleges will of course continue to be able to admit applicants who happen to be legacies, donor’s children, faculty children and aristocratic sports athletes to their entering classes, subject to the new disclosure requirement and also to the following limitations on the process of selection.
Beginning with third academic admissions cycle after the enactment of TEFCA, there could be no more generalized extra weight assigned to an applicant’s status in one of those four categories that an elite college otherwise provides in favor of first- generation or lower-income categories of applicants. And if the colleges offer no such special admissions break for those in economically disadvantaged groups, then there will no permissible “tips” in the process for any of the wealth-connected categories. Moreover, as a check on compliance, all elite colleges will still have to disclose all TEFCA-required data relating to admissions and enrollment in terms of each category TEFCA has singled out.
In order to support the objective of fair play rather than pay to play, moreover, admissions departments of elite colleges would be required to separately track and disclose any admissions involving legacy, donor-related, or coach-referred applicants that do not meet the specific minimum admission screening standards that also must be disclosed under TEFCA, and provide evidence of high-level sign-offs on such extraordinary admissions with advance written explanations and approvals by the admissions dean and the school official to whom the dean (and, in the case of athletes, the athletic director) reports. This provision of TEFCA recognizes that any such admission, where the favored applicant has test scores below the school’s average or median for otherwise-accepted applicants, automatically raises the bar for those with no such preferences in order for the admissions office to meet the test score data it wants to present to the public, and especially to the US News selectivity rankings. A similar proposal has been under consideration in the California legislature to apply to all “admissions by exception” to that state’s public colleges and private schools that get state tuition support funds for their students
In terms of federal jurisdiction applicable to these unprecedented disclosures and limitations on admissions preferences, bills have previously introduced in Congress to require colleges to disclose their firearms policies and security event records in any admissions brochures they publish. For-profit colleges have been required in the past to limit their tuition receipts from federal grants to not more than 85 percent of their total tuition revenue. None of TEFCA’s mandatory disclosures or rules regarding admissions preferences would amount to any federal constraint on final admissions decisions, or impose any governmental admissions criteria or quotas. TEFCA would simply level the playing field for all applicants while bringing what has been kept secret by most elite colleges into the open.
Require Admissions Officials to Certify the Truthfulness of Their Published Marketing Materials
TEFCA would direct the Department of Education to require deans of admission to certify that all the required disclosures, as well as their brochures and other applicant recruiting materials and application websites, are accurate and complete as required and contain no misstatements or omissions of material facts. Penalties for false certification would start with warnings and then proceed to suspension without pay from their duties for a period of time, with repeated violations of a serious nature warranting loss of their position (as sometimes is the case as punishment for NCAA rule violations in intercollege sports recruiting offices).
Prohibit Federal Tax Deductions for Donations Made “in Contemplation of” Specific Individual Admissions Decisions and Other Admission-Related Tax Reforms
There is one special preferential admissions consideration, however, that merits immediate and direct federal intervention on the tax policy side: namely, donor-related admissions. Without parsing the fine distinctions between a true quid pro quo and a carefully choreographed pas de deux (as the New York Times called it) TEFCA will establish a rebuttable presumption that any donation, pledge, or committed bequest by a related party (to be defined to include a range of family members and any donor- directed charitable or other trust funds they control) within a two- year window before and after an admissions decision with respect to a related party as being made in contemplation of an affirmative admissions outcome and therefore not eligible for a tax deduction as a charitable contribution.
This presumption would be rebuttable, for example, in the case of the unanticipated death of a related party triggering a bequest made before the window period. Under TEFCA’s rule, there would no doubt still be circumstances in which the advancement office would notify admissions of an admissions case in which a significant potential disposition toward giving may be involved. Hence, TEFCA’s disclosure requirements tracking donor-related admissions would continue to be in effect for all elite colleges.
New tax rules in TEFCA would also require faculty and staff members of a college with annual compensation over $150,000 from the school to report 25 percent of the value of any tuition and other discounts received in respect to enrollment of their children as income for federal income tax purposes, unless their children qualified for such discounts on a basis other than simply being offspring of a faculty or staff member as certified in writing by the dean of admissions and director of financial aid.
Facilitate Test-Optional Policies
In relation to the fraught subject of test score considerations in the admissions process, all colleges would be encouraged by TEFLA financial incentives to adopt at least a modified form of the test- optional policy, whereby applicants could submit (at their own risk) in lieu of SAT or ACT results a test or other evidence of their readiness to undertake college-level work. All colleges would be required to disclose whether they have adopted any such policies when they publish any standardized test score data regarding their entering classes pursuant to TEFCA requirements or otherwise.
Considering that the most the College Board is able to assert unequivocally about the relevance of its SAT to admissions decisions is that it is a better predictor of first-year college performance than GPAs, elite colleges should be taking the lead in experimentation with alternatives to the current standard tests in any event, and TEFCA would make supporting funding available to any colleges that wish to try various forms of test-optional policies as well as alternative testing regimes.
Crack Down on Admissions Cheating, Support Registration of Consulting Services and Proper Guidance Counseling in Public Schools, and Ban Other Questionable Admission Practices
Applicants have been known to cheat not just in their high school classes, but also in taking standardized tests. In a survey of 40,000 high school students, 80 percent said they had copied another’s homework, and 59 percent said they had cheated on a test during the prior year. As part of their application process, students would be required under TEFCA to affirm that they have not violated any rules regarding test taking, and that they have not falsely claimed any disability or other condition that has allowed them to take the test under special arrangements. They will also be required to certify that the essays they submit on the Common App or required by any particular college’s admissions processes are substantially their own work. Any false declaration in these matters would justify withdrawal of an admissions offer. Under TEFCA, fair dealing between colleges and applicants must be a two-way street.
States would be provided federal funding to support development of registration, basic disclosure requirement and codes of conduct for private admission consulting firms and individuals above a certain revenue level of in-state revenue, and to support reducing the ratio of public high school admissions counselors to students to levels consistent with being able to properly serve and write well informed recommendation letters for their caseloads in their particular schools.
TEFCA will also ban application fees at systemically important colleges — which are frequently waived in any event to encourage more applications as the admissions calendar draws to a close. TEFCA would also prohibit the practice of sending “likely letters” to applicants to entice them to give advance commitments to accept an offer in order to secure the pending bid. Under TEFCA, this or any other form of “early decision light” will go the way of the currently prevailing early decision process.
Require Annual Compliance Audits of Standardized Test Administration, Data Privacy Safeguards, and Effective Opt- Outs for Test-Takers’ Regarding Their Personal Data
Meanwhile, the new rules established under TEFCA would also require providers of any standardized test used for college admissions decisions to engage in an annual audit (to be filed with the Department of Education) by a competent professional organization as to security, anti-cheating measures, and test monitoring. They would also have to publicly disclose any material weaknesses revealed in such audits and how they are addressing them.
The providers of the PSAT, SAT and ACT and other standardized admissions tests would also be forbidden to sell to a college or any other entity the personal contact details (including mail and email addresses, text, phone, or other contact details) or other information they obtain with respect to persons who have taken any of their tests, based on the statistical level of their test performance or otherwise, without an advance “opt-in” executed by the test taker at the time the test is taken or at the time the test taker receives the results. This requirement also would be subject to the audit mandates relating to test security and monitoring procedures. In a time when personal privacy is becoming a luxury good, it is important to use an “opt-in” rather than “opt-out” test for what applicants and their families want.
Some applicants may well find it advantageous to agree to such sales of their data in order to receive more information on college options from a wider set of resources than they are familiar with, but that should be a deliberate choice made with clear disclosure. It is also possible that preventing unwanted disclosure of personal information that will trigger an incessant marketing deluge will help reduce the application packing that colleges engage in to manipulate the denominator of their admissions-to-applications ratios and their related selectivity rankings.
Rather than limiting high school student choices in terms of APs, TEFCA would require all elite colleges to disclose whether and which AP grades will be given extra weight when they recalculate transcripts and which AP courses and levels of performance will assure waivers of related common core or prerequisite courses.
The College Board’s Common App should also be voluntarily reformed to limit more tightly the number of non-academic extracurricular activities other than sports that can be submitted. It has been allowing up to ten, which can pressure students to fill in all ten, sometimes with marginal or even fabricated entries.
Annual Reports to High Schools on Admissions Outcomes, and Public Disclosure of Any Material Violation of the TEFCA Admission Practices and Disclosure Rules
The number of applications any college receives from each high school annually, as well as the numbers accepted and attending, would have to be disclosed to the high school before the start of the next admissions year cycle. This will be particularly helpful to overloaded public high school college admissions counselors in terms of advising their seniors on their admissions chances at particular schools.
The legislation would also require the Department of Education to publish annual reports, accessible online, that summarize significant patterns in admissions outcomes emerging from the new disclosures mandated by TEFCA, and identify any colleges that have violated any of those requirements or other mandated admissions practice changes, and reveal any sanctions imposed with respect to such violations, including potential denial of federal aid eligibility for those colleges that consistently fail to meet their obligations under TEFCA.
Help Colleges Support and Graduate Economically Disadvantaged Students
Companion legislation to TEFCA will provide federal appropriations to restore cuts and increase support for several programs designed to support middle- and low-income and first-generation college applicants, including students who have been in the foster care system and thus suffer a college attendance profile in the single digits. Federal assistance would include strengthened funding for the Federal Work-Study and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant programs, as well as doubling funding for Pell grants, making them available year-round including for summer study by students who must work their way through college as quickly as possible. (See Douglas-Gabriel 2016)
Companion legislation to TEFCA would also expand the annual federal 1.4 percent tax on college endowment earnings to apply to all nonprofit private colleges with net investment assets of $250,000 or more per student, and require that receipts from this tax be applied in part to expand Pell grant capacity. TEFCA will also create a dollar-for-dollar exemption from the endowment tax for colleges that increase their financial support for low-income students.
TEFCA will provide special funding for disadvantaged students to take AP and International Baccalaureate classes and tests, as well as subsidies to enable them to take standardized admission tests early and often to take better advantage (which wealthier students already do) of super-scoring by elite admissions offices that evaluate them using only their best scores on each major test segment and overall. (Chinoy 2018)
TEFCA will also be accompanied by financial incentives for all colleges — allocated with reference to their relative financial resources — to place more emphasis on achieving economic diversity within their entering classes and to sustain that diversity with programs to ensure that relative newcomers to their college environments develop a real sense of belonging, and have their basic human needs accounted for, like enough food and access to wellness care, during their time in college.
Respond to the COVID-19 Impact on Colleges with a National Plan to Radically Expand College and Broadband Access
The severe impact of COVID-19 on college resources, budgets, operations, and students has also presented an opportunity to greatly extend admission opportunities with state-of-the-art forms of online learning that colleges have been forced to adopt. Collegiate “telelearning” could well become as commonplace as telecommuting and telemedicine. Including suggestions already put forward by Paul N. Friga of the University of North Carolina and Angel B. Perez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (See Friga April 22, 2020 and Perez 2020), TEFCA would fund a five-year, multi-billion federal “College Access Assurance Plan” including:
(A) A research surge to design and implement a revised “common app” with a new online template where applicants can demonstrate their portfolios of subject matter mastery and the personal development needed for college studies.
(B) A comprehensive examination of higher education business models to identify and facilitate potential administrative efficiencies; operational process improvements; more educationally productive year-round usage of campus facilities; improved transparency of student activity fees and dining hall charges to prevent overcharging in relation to value delivered; academic term structures and delivery options not tied to 19th century agrarian calendars; and novel approaches to tuition charges and payment options — all in order to “bend the college cost curve” downward by 20 percent within five years.
(C) A crash program to help every non-profit college develop best practice online educational options and choices appropriate to its mission, including support for acquiring the requisite hardware, software and connectivity; hiring instructional design talent; development and training of online instructors; and orientation of online students to a level of comfort and satisfaction so that no tuition discounts versus in-person courses would be objectively justified.
(D) A national infrastructure proje deliver affordable state-of-the- art high-speed broadband and connective hardware and software to every American household within five years.
Citizens and their leaders alike will hopefully recognize that assuring access to college through a transparent, equitable, fair, and affordable admissions process that works for qualified students of all economic, racial and ethnic backgrounds — using 21st century technology rather than enshrining 19th century class distinctions — would restore the historic promise of economic and social mobility in America. The financial commitments part and parcel of TEFCA recognize that comprehensive reform of college admissions must be accompanied by an equivalent expansion of federal resources necessary to make that American promise a reality.