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THE 8 THINGS I WISH EVERYONE KNEW ABOUT COLLEGE ADMISSION

By Jon Boeckenstedt

Congratulations to the 2020 Muir Award winner, Jon Boeckenstedt, who won for his

Admitting Things

blog, which is widely respected and seen as a clear, compassionate voice backed up by data. With his

nger on the pulse of college admission and enrollment management, his fearless writing insightfully supports our profession and the students we serve. We appreciate him contributing this column.

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When admission work—and admission in general—became something else I can't quite pinpoint. But when our national fascination with the quest for the best came to the forefront, friends and neighbors

started asking me a lot of questions, and it was kind of fun to talk about it. What was once just another job became a subject of interest and while I could never fully explain it, I felt it my duty to give it a

shot. Looking back, I'm guessing it would take three years of doing the job—the weeks on the road; the le review; the parent, student, and counselor interactions; the same question a thousand times—to

have the experience necessary to explain this profession to others.

So, it was interesting and puzzling to me at about that time, to see people who had never done our work start to write about it, opine about it, and make general pronouncements about it.

This has turned out to be considerably less fun than the job I've grown to love, because too often, I've found, they're wrong. They might have their facts straight but lack nuance. They might see a few

examples and make general pronouncements that don't hold up under scrutiny. They often make comparisons that seem disparaging or even mean between what we do and what other professions do. They

might be victims of their own privileged upbringing, which makes them think their little slice of reality is the only reality.

I'm under no illusions, of course, that a piece in a professional journal will disabuse people of the notions and prejudices they carry with them, but I have a bad habit of, in the words of the late great

newspaper columnist Molly Ivins (quoting a politician from Texas), "beating my head against a dead horse." As someone who almost didn't go to college at all, I think making a difference in the lives of

they don't always hire the applicant with the most years of experience, or the best GPA, or the one who graduated from the brand-name university, but it's still hard for them to grasp how admission works,

especially at the most selective institutions. In the words of Femi Ogundele at University of California—Berkeley, admission should be looking for "excellence, not perfection."

Of course we think about money. A colleague once told me, "Without margin, there is no mission." You can't run a university on good deeds and goodwill. The electric company wants cash each month;

the faculty expect their paychecks will hit their accounts on the last day of the pay period; and test tubes and superconducting nuclear magnetic spectrometers aren't free. Too many people think "not-for-

prot" means "charity." It doesn't and it shouldn't. What makes us different is where we draw the line: Prot is not our motivator.

Graduation rates are inputs, not outputs. Malcolm Gladwell claried selection effects and treatment effects in his terric article on college admission in

The New Yorker

. You don't become beautiful by

going to modeling school; you're selected because you're beautiful to start with. That's a selection effect. You don't get chosen to become a marine; what happens in basic training makes you one. That's a

treatment effect.

Similarly, if your selection process admits mostly children of wealthy, college-educated parents, who have known since third grade that they're expected to graduate from college, or if you can provide

extraordinary nancial assistance to that small group of students who don't fall into that category, your graduation rates are going to be high. It's another example of selection effect. Your graduation rate is

ofce may be at the heart of the problem of educational inequity, usually, at the behest of the powers in the university.

Standardized tests aren't academic qualications. Some parts of the SAT and ACT clearly measure what a student has learned. If that's all they measured, they'd maybe (big maybe) be useful tools in the

admission process. They also—to a greater or lesser degree—measure emotional control, speed processing, and formal preparation and practice, among other things, which may or may not be valuable in

college. Choosing the "right" answer from four given might be a skill you'd rather have than not, but good luck applying it in philosophy class.

We have no standardized American high school curriculum, so we're giving these tests to many students who have never had the opportunity to learn the content, through no fault of their own. The tests

don't measure "aptitude" or "native ability" and never have, despite the monikers once attached to them. And as barriers to the gated communities of academia, they serve merely as minor obstacles to the

wealthy, and impenetrable impediments to those without the social, nancial, and cultural capital to overcome them. In that sense, they are great tools to use in perpetuating inequality.

Virtually every lawsuit suggesting that admission processes are illegal is based on the premise that "I was more qualied because my test scores were higher." Pull that premise out from underneath and

watch the argument collapse on itself.

There is no such thing as need-blind admission. While it's true that at many colleges the admission ofcer can't see FAFSA data, that would be

FAFSA-blind

admission.

We don't always set the agenda, but we're expected to carry it out. People who blame the admission ofce might be right to a point. But the university mission and the strategy to accomplish it, as well

as the objectives the dean or director or vice president gets measured against, are set much higher up the food chain. A good admission or nancial aid function can and should serve as the nexus between

external markets and the internal workings of the academy, but it doesn't always work out that way. Boards of Trustees are often lled with businesspeople, some of whom don't understand—and don't

always like—the way colleges run.

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Admission isn't a crap shoot, but it ain't rocket science either. Very few colleges admit many, if any, unqualied students into their institutions. And while it's easy to predict how a class will perform, it's

Jon Boeckenstedt is vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University.

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