reflections on the credibility of the "enrollment management" process

Parents Corner
1

<p>The sad saga of Ms. Jones' lies about her own credentials seems to be only the latest incident in a disturbing larger pattern among college officials in admissions and financial aid.</p>

<p>Of necessity, the work of admissions and financial aid officers must be done largely in a secret, behind-closed doors process. </p>

<p>Students and parents are asked to entrust admissions and financial aid officers with honest but deeply private and personal information: educational, financial, and disciplinary records. Transcripts and tax returns, recommendations, essays about mistakes made and lessons learned from failure, all of it is fodder for the "enrollment management" process.</p>

<p>And yet, it seems that all too many "professionals" have shown themselves to be unworthy of this trust, because they have not been honest themselves.</p>

<p>To name a few disturbing items: the growing scandal of conflict of interest issues among financial aid professionals at a large number of colleges; the episode a few years ago in which Princeton officials cavalierly used applicant data to break into Yale's computer database to check on common admits, the lack of transparency from some admissions officers about the extent to which preference is given to early decision or legacy or development case applicants, the books written by former admissions officers that sometimes portray a different picture of actual admissions policy, somewhat more cynical than the officially stated policies; strategic misreporting of SAT data that omits certain categories of applicants from data reported to US News
<a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Echance/course/topics/cheat.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/cheat.html&lt;/a>, the athletic recruiting scandals that have resulted in admissions of athletes with no reasonable prospect of doing college-level work ....it all adds up to a disturbing pattern.</p>

<p>I truly believe that there are many honest, idealistic, and dedicated people working in admissions. Moreover, in many schools, there are dedicated and committed students and faculty who participate in the process as volunteers out of genuine love of their institution. </p>

<p>But the pressures are very great for many admissions professionals. </p>

<p>MIT is hardly a typical college; most are in far more precarious straits: under significant pressure to deliver an entering class with adequate financial and educational statistics. At the typical college, the vice president of "enrollment management" is under heavy pressure to deliver a satisfactory number of well-credentialed students who will yield sufficient revenue to keep the organization afloat and bring sufficiently high statistics to keep the US News ratings from going into a tailspin.</p>

<p>Given the pressures and the secretive behind-closed-doors nature of the "holistic" admissions process used by most private colleges, the temptation and opportunity to behave more like a used-car salesman than like a saint must surely be great at times.</p>

2

<p>Wisteria, you have lumped together a large number and variety of sins. I don't fault the admissions department for admitting athletes or legacies or development candidates that are not fully qualified academically. That is business as usual, and acceptable business in my book. </p>

<p>However, it is not acceptable for an admissions employee to accept stock, gifts, or cash from lenders so that they can be put on the school' s preferred lender list, or gain special access to students that are taking out student loans. </p>

<p>It is also unacceptable and unforgivable for anyone to claim degrees from a college or university when that person has not actually earned those degrees. That crime is compounded and steeped in irony when the person who lies on an application has the job of reviewing applications.</p>

3

<p>
[quote]
I don't fault the admissions department for admitting athletes or legacies or development candidates that are not fully qualified academically.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>NJres, I was not faulting admissions officials for the practice of giving preferences to such students, but rather for dishonestly dissembling about the extent to which such preferences are given, in some cases.</p>

<p>So the overall pattern to which I was alluding was a widespread pattern of many episodes of dishonesty and lack of trustworthiness in an industry which purports to be about "truth."</p>

<p>If a college wants to hold itself out honestly and forthrightly as a school that caters to athletes who read and do arithmetic at the middle school level, that's their prerogative, though such honesty would probably preclude them from playing in NCAA intercollegiate games.</p>

<p>I think that all the "sins" I lumped together fall under the general heading of dishonesty.</p>

4

<p>So far as I can tell the self-reported admissions and SAT/ACT scores, GPAs, and class ranks the schools are giving in the Common Data Set and which USNWR is using in its rankings are as unaudited today as they were in 1995.</p>

<p>Did you ever esk yourself what constitutes an application? When reporting admissions numbers and percentages do you count withdrawn applications? Incomplete applications? What about kids you enroll in the Summer to get them "prepared" for the Fall or students you enroll in the Spring semester, an increasingly common practice for academically "challenged" atheletes? </p>

<p>Lot of gray areas out there huh? I really liked the school that did not count the kids off the wait list and I know for a fact that a large number of the alleged applications these schools talk about were in fact incomplete - especially true for the free online applications a lot of schools have become enamored of.</p>

<p>Figures don't lie but liars can figure.</p>