You are a senior at a fancy private school in New York City, and tragedy has struck. It is December, and you have just been deferred—or perhaps even rejected—by the college to which you applied early decision. Now, while classmates are celebrating their admissions letters and starting their senior slides with rowdy parties and expensive vacations, you need to spend the next few weeks frantically preparing new applications while putting a brave face on things for your friends. But not to worry. A counselor from Command Education stands ready to assist you in the process, fine-tuning those new applications and doing everything possible to raise your chances of admission to a school that will prepare you, in due course, for a secure position in the American elite. The only catch: this counselor’s services, for just these few weeks, cost $250,000. This is not a typo.
Has something gone ridiculously wrong with admissions to elite universities? It is hard to read stories like this, from New York magazine, on Command Education, without answering yes to the question. The story does quote a Yale admissions officer insisting that consultant services will not help applicants, because it makes them look overly packaged, but it is hard to take the comment seriously. Whatever else can be said about the parents paying these obscene fees to get their children into elite colleges, they are not stupid. Clearly, the services produce the desired results. In an era when universities are cutting back on legacy admissions and making it harder to buy children a spot with million-dollar donations, the competition among wealthy families to get their offspring into top schools has reached Olympic-level intensity.
There are many reasons to be upset about this trend. Most obviously, it is so unfair. True, admission to elite schools has never been a level playing field. Up until the 1960’s, boys from leading prep schools and sons of alumni barely had to complete an application to win admittance. A man I know barely maintained a C average at Exeter and still sailed into the Yale class of 1962. Even today, children of alumni and wealthy donors get favorable treatment at many schools. So do top athletes, including those who play the “suburban sports” that inner city public high schools unaccountably fail to offer (crew, lacrosse, water polo, golf, sailing…). Until the Supreme Court ruling last year, members of underrepresented minorities also had advantages, and while there were powerful historical justifications for affirmative action, in practice it benefitted a lot of wealthy minority applicants from privileged backgrounds who arguably didn’t need the boost. But there have also been countervailing tendencies. Several leading colleges, including Johns Hopkins and Amherst, have eliminated legacy admissions. A series of scandals (notably “Varsity Blues”) have made admissions offices far warier about how they treat the children of big-ticket donors. The Supreme Court has ruled affirmative action policies unconstitutional.
The consultant boom has been driven by these recent trends, and by the decision by elite schools to de-emphasize standardized tests because of their supposedly discriminatory character. But by saving slots for applicants whose families can pay the fees, it hurts everyone else. Above all, perhaps, it hurts applicants from the broad middle classes: kids from ordinary high schools in ordinary towns and suburbs who may have genuinely extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and creativity, but who don’t have a $1500/hour consultant to package these qualities to the best possible effect. When I was at college in the 1980’s, kids like this made up a pretty big proportion of the Ivy League student body. Not today.
Another, more insidious reason the consultant boom is so harmful is because it reinforces the worst tendencies practiced by admissions offices today. What are these institutions looking for in applicants? It is not simply sheer brilliance. A century ago, Ivy League schools admitted principally on the basis of tests. Prep school students scored highly, but, increasingly, so did Jews from immigrant backgrounds. As Jerome Karabel showed in his classic study The Chosen, in the 1920’s, Harvard under President A. Lawrence Lowell took the lead in changing its admissions policies in order to reduce Jewish numbers. Now, it claimed, it would evaluate the whole person and place a heavy emphasis on “character”—something which young men of the Hebraic persuasion seemed lack in comparison with WASP Groton graduates. Other schools followed. And to evaluate the whole person, they introduced personal essays, letters of recommendation, attention to extracurricular activities, and the whole panoply of application elements that now make so much of senior year such a misery for so many American high schoolers. During the Cold War, a fear that this system did not put enough emphasis on space race-winning brilliance led the same schools to place significant weight on standardized tests as well. But since 2020, as noted, that trend has gone into reverse.
But, especially since the eclipse of the standardized tests, the system poses a real problem for admission offices. American high schools every year graduate many tens of thousands of students with near-perfect grades, a long list of extracurricular activities, and sterling recommendations—far too many for the elite schools to admit. How to choose? As the New York article says, Ivy League and equivalent colleges have increasingly chosen to pass on excellent, “well-rounded” applicants, and to aim for well-rounded classes full of “pointy” kids—i.e. kids who have one especially remarkable skill, passion, or interest. It could be prodigious musical talent, or the ability to throw a football farther than anyone else, or fluency in seven languages, or a fierce commitment to environmental justice. It is the extraordinary achievement that counts.
And this is something that the high-paid consultant services devote much of their attention to. Especially if families sign on early (and many are doing so as early as eighth grade), they look for an area in which kids excel and encourage them to focus on that area, quite possibly with the help of expensive coaches, tutors, or teachers. If kids have natural talents, so much the better. If, on the other hand, they are athletically challenged, tone deaf, and of only average intelligence, then it may be time to find a cause or interest. The consultant can help arrange appropriate trips, internships, volunteer activities. Whatever it takes to transform the adolescents in question into the “extraordinarily committed” young men and women whom elite colleges will perceive as “pointy,” and rush to admit.
This focus on the extraordinary itself has very unfair consequences. New York City teenagers who spend three hours or more a day on the subway commuting from their outer borough homes to their magnet public high schools (and there are a lot of them), do not have the same amount of time to develop an “extraordinary” talent or interest as their suburban and private school competitors. Kids who need to work after school, often to help their families, are in the same boat. Nor do most kids have access to the fancy internships and trips that the consultants can help to arrange.
But just as importantly, why the emphasis on the “extraordinary,” on the “pointiness,” in the first place? Why expect seventeen and eighteen-year-olds to have discovered a guiding passion, a lifelong cause, or a talent to which they are ready to devote every waking hour? Most kids at this age are still, quite rightly, undecided about many, many things, and not ready to make decisions that may determine a great deal about their future life course. Why force them to develop that one special thing, when they might naturally want to explore, and try out many different things? Why discriminate against kids who do not look “pointy,” but who are extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, caring, and ambitious? Very few people are fully developed adults at age 17 or 18. The college admissions system is pressuring applicants to become them too early. This places additional pressure on adolescents whom the college admissions process has already put under tremendous stress. It might well be adding to the mental health crisis that many universities are currently experiencing with their students.
At present, universities do not have an easy way of identifying terrific but “non-pointy” applicants—which is one reason why, as noted, they have developed their current preferences. But there is a simple enough way of doing so. Bring back serious testing. Imagine if the top universities in the country got together and developed a single comprehensive admissions test covering key subjects in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Ideally, these tests would not be multiple-choice, as the SAT and a large portion of the AP exams are. They would require written answers. Writing and grading them would be a large-scale production, although still much smaller than the current AP tests, since they would be limited to applicants to elite institutions. However, the faculty of these schools might reasonably be asked to contribute to the process (the faculty of Oxford and Cambridge have long taken part in admissions). Grading could also provide some welcome additional income to graduate students and recent Ph.D.’s.
Would students at places like Exeter, Horace Mann, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science have the best scores on this new test? Of course they would. For one thing, these sorts of high schools, both private and public magnets, already have their own, hyper-competitive admissions procedures, so they have already pre-selected excellent students. For another, they provide superb educations, far above the abysmal American standard. But I’m not suggesting for a moment that the new tests should be the sole criterion of admission, or that admissions officers should treat scores on them as absolute, objective measures of ability. Just as they have long done with the SAT, they should recognize that a good score from a student from a disadvantaged background, attending a poor high school, can be far more impressive than an excellent score from a student from a privileged background, attending a prep school.
Would wealthy families now use their wealth to hire tutors promising to give their offspring a leg up on the new tests? Would new sorts of consultant services spring into being? Again, of course. But the tutoring would matter much less, because the most important preparation for the new tests would take place where it belongs: in actual high school classes. The whole point of the new tests would be to evaluate what students learn in high school, as AP tests do today, although in a far more haphazard and badly focused way.
And I’m not suggesting that elite colleges ignore extra-curricular activities, or evidence of genuinely extraordinary achievement in fields the students are genuinely passionate about. (On the other hand, they would do well to eliminate the personal essay, which in the days of consultants and hyper-competition has become an entirely absurd exercise). But they should remember two basic points. First, college admissions should not be a reward for exceptional achievement—or the simulacrum thereof—at age 18. It should be a recognition of promise in the broadest sense, and centered, necessarily, on intellectual promise. And college itself should not be principally an exercise in bringing supposedly extraordinary adolescents together to learn from each other, as current admissions offices sometimes seem to think. It should be, above all, about students learning serious things in a serious environment, from the faculty. In a desperately unequal society, elite college admissions will never be a level playing field. But if the process forced applicants to focus on actually learning important things, it might at least have a degree of social utility, unlike the increasingly absurd process at work today.
A final, personal note. Because I’m lucky enough to teach at Princeton, I see the undergraduates who have come out on top in the current admissions system. And, in many ways, they are terrific: intelligent (often fearsomely so), hard-working (again, often fearsomely so), creative and committed. But, on average, they come into my history classes with far less basic historical and cultural knowledge, and less mastery of basic writing ability than should be the case. Plus, on average, they are far more stressed out than their counterparts were thirty years ago. There are many, many reasons for the stress, to be sure. But I can’t help thinking that the massive pressure on them in high school, not just to excel, but to stand out in one particular area—to be “pointy”—is a not-unimportant factor as well.
Ill point out as well that this would all matter much less if we followed a very reasonable policy proposition put forth by, of all people, Bernie Sanders in his 2016 campaign --- make all federal finanical aid available only to pubic institutions that received a certain standard of state funding and met federal accreditation standards (eg certain standards for breadth of general education and for the proportion of faculty hired on a full-time rather than contingent basis). Yes, it would return us to a scenario in which elite schools were entirely playgrounds of the rich and in which the curriculum would be an expression of the ideology of its private funders. At the same time, but it would also make that point clear to students, families and high school guidance counselors -- and to employers. Given the option between a quality education at a much more heavily subsidized rate at a public school, would people not already in the elite care as to whether they got admitted to a wildly expensive institutions not eligible for federal financial aid or federal accreditation.
David:
Your very smart piece raises fundamental questions about the American system of higher education for the elite. The admission process is unjust and corrupt. But the solution you propose is neither practical nor scalable. When I was chair of my department I couldn't get the faculty to "waste" a day on showing up for an important meeting and you're suggesting that they'll actually agree to read some regurgitated handwritten essays of highschoolers to select who should be admitted to the college. Like they care. Most professors at elite universities consider teaching a burden that gets in the way of their "research." You were a dean at JHU. You know very well how impossible it is to get the faculty to do ANYTHING. My solution is cheaper and simpler: lottery. It really doesn't matter who gets in because once a student is in s/he is part of the club. Anyway, everyone gets an A in nearly every course, and students get this grade not because someone actually evaluates the work carefully, but rather because giving an A is the easiest way to get the grading over and get back to "research." Everyone is happy. The students think they're brilliant and they don't bother the professor. Even better, they give the professors glowing reviews in course evaluations and Rate My Professor, which allows the latter to believe that they are actually good educators.
Elite universities have been exposed as overpriced hot-beds of stupidity and antisemitism. Reforming the fairness of the admission process is the least of its problems.
doron