Change the Game and the Name of 'College Admissions'

Most high school seniors and their parents currently have college at the top of mind. Early application deadlines are approaching, and students are frantically writing their application essays.

But it’s not just families who are focused on getting in. Perhaps it even seems natural that everyone from college admissions officers to the media focuses on who gets in, too. But this focus on who gets to sit behind the wheel of a given car has caused everyone to neglect asking who gets to their destination safely and on time. While it should be the job of colleges to focus on outcomes, not just access, colleges have dropped the ball – and few have noticed.

How do we know that colleges prioritize access over outcomes? Long after the Covid lockdowns that kept students from taking standardized tests have ended, most colleges are still test-optional. Test-optional colleges choose to make their admissions decisions with less information about whether students are academically prepared to succeed at the college. According to the latest research, SAT and ACT scores are 290% more predictive of a student’s success at an Ivy or Ivy-Plus college than high school grades. Students whose test scores better match the rigor of that college get higher GPAs and are not only more likely to graduate but to do so in less time (which decreases the debt they graduate with). More specifically, if they are a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) major, they are also much more likely to actually graduate as a STEM major, instead of switching into an easier major. This ability to persist as a STEM major is not trivial: on average, students who graduate with a degree in STEM are more likely to be employed and have salaries about 50% higher than those who graduate without a degree in STEM. 

In the name of access and diversity, colleges are setting students up to fail. A 2013 study of the SAT scores of University of California (UC) students found that almost no students with low SAT scores were able to remain as STEM majors. Specifically, 0.6% of underrepresented minority students with SAT scores in the bottom 25th percentile who started as STEM majors at Berkeley graduated as STEM majors within four years. That’s not a typo. In other words, 99.4% did not do so. In contrast, those with high SAT scores did dramatically better: minority students in that same cohort who had top 25th percentile scores graduated at a nearly 4000% higher rate.

I believe diversity improves and enriches our lives. My wife is Brazilian, my business partner is from Ghana, and the bulk of my own undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago were on race and racism. In short, diversity is very important to me. But what we are witnessing in higher education is a focus on diversity to benefit the appearance of the university, at the expense of the diverse students it claims to care about. 

But colleges don’t care. They want their diversity numbers, and they want to be able to attract as many applicants as possible so that they can reject as many as possible to drive down their admit rate and drive up their perceived prestige. They are not even subtle about it.

College decision-makers openly admit to this kind of reasoning when pressed about why they remain test-optional.

According to the President of UVA, “There would be a competitive disadvantage that would be especially true of recruited student-athletes” if UVA went back to test-required admissions.

UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Governor Gene Davis more succinctly asked, “Do we want to put ourselves as a university system at a competitive disadvantage?” in defending their test-optional stance.

The University of Iowa Board of Regents’ David Barker admitted that he reluctantly voted for test-optional admissions in order to “stay competitive with other universities.”

For hard-working families taking on debt to try to put their kids in the best colleges, it is a gut punch that these colleges so openly look out for themselves first and their students second. The same President of UVA said, “It is absolutely the case that there is independent predictive value with standardized tests above and beyond GPA and other elements that we look to in applications.” These test-optional colleges know that test scores would help them admit students better matched to succeed at their schools. They just don’t need to prioritize outcomes, because no one is talking about outcomes. People only talk about admissions.

In addition to requiring SAT or ACT scores again, fixing the focus to outcomes requires that we rename – and thus reframe – what we call “college admissions.” The flawed name sets everyone up for failure. For instance, as my wife can attest, I tended to take the garbage out and not replace the bag. Yet this type of mistake is so common that it has a name: a completion error. Why is it so common? Because we call the task “taking out the garbage.” Mentally, once the garbage is taken out, we check it off as completed. Instead, if we call it “putting in a new garbage bag,” then we are dramatically more likely to take out the garbage and put in a new garbage bag because the task is named based on its ultimate, not intermediate, goal. (Thank me later – it works!)

When we refer to the application and acceptance process as “college admissions,” we set ourselves up to stop short of completing the task: ensuring students succeed. We should call it 'success matchmaking,’ ‘academic underwriting,’ or something else that describes the end goal rather than the first step. The point of college is not to get in. The point is to graduate and succeed. Students are set up for success at a college when they are vetted by the data to succeed there.