INEQUITIES IN ELEITE COLLGE ADMISSIONS
HOW TO FIX COLLEGE ADMISSIONS, PART IV - IF ALL ELSE FAILS, BREAK GLASS....
Turning Admissions Risk Upside Down: An Alternative Path to Transparent and Fair Outcomes for Applicants and Colleges Alike
If the reforms proposed in TEFCA (See my previous Substack post) are not adopted, or if it were to fall short in terms assuring comprehensively to replace and reform the current college admissions transparent, fair, and equitable access to higher education to all capable applicants at a reasonable cost — in terms of money, time, and anxiety — even more radical measures must be considered that, while preserving the most useful and potentially beneficial aspects of the current system, would decisively alter the balance of market power in admissions that currently favors the richest applicants and the richest colleges.
Adapt and repurpose the Common Application into a national application database where all prospective students would submit their grades, test scores, extracurricular activities, and standard essays, which would be immediately accessible to all colleges.
Allow students to submit a list of up to ten colleges where they want to pursue admission, along with (a) completed standard FAFSA forms based on the latest available parental tax data and (b) any additional essay-type material or test scores required by those colleges, which in each case would be made available to the colleges listed.
Authorize each college, within a set period of time in early spring, to extend (a) a “bid” (defined below) for any of the students who listed it and provided the materials required, and/or (b) a full bid based solely on the Common Application of any student, or (c) a conditional bid to any student submitting a Common Application whom the college itself wishes to pursue, subject to receiving further material. This means some applicants could get bids from schools they had not focused on themselves.
Each bid would include the proposed tuition, room, and board costs net of related financial aid or work-study packages that the college commits to extend to the student. There would then be a thirty-day window for negotiations between the prospective students and colleges relating to those terms.
After a first round of such bidding, negotiation, and decisions, there would be a second round available for both colleges and applicants to match up under the same process if not satisfied with the results of the first round.
All the new mandatory disclosure rules under TEFCA outlined in chapter 8 would apply to this new admissions process, so we would be able to see if any discriminatory preferences were evident in admissions results. The new system would essentially turn the current admissions process (and seller-buyer market power relationship) upside down: colleges would be strongly incentivized to put their best bids forward to get the students they want most.
The current, highly problematic bookends of the admissions calendar — early decision and the dreaded wait list — would become unnecessary and irrelevant. Moreover, the students from the wealthiest families would forgo the relative exclusivity they enjoy in pursuing early decision admissions: all applicants, once admissions bids come out, would have the same opportunity to know right away the aid package on the table and share the same time frame for comparing and negotiating final terms.
This new admissions matching and bidding system, based on the existing Common Application processes, would relieve the undue risks and burdens of the admissions processes now borne by high school students. It would also incentivize colleges, which would under this new system carry more of those risks and, to mitigate their own stresses by more, not less, transparency and real, academically-sound selectivity.
The current elite college rankings-driven selectivity game we know and loathe would effectively be a thing of the past. Applicants would have much better up-front data on their real chances for admission to a particular college. There is even the prospect that the bidding process would at last begin to bend the college cost curve down, as well as the trillion-dollar student debt burden overhanging the economy. That result could be the best college admissions outcome of all.