<p>Below are excerpts from an article that appeared in today's Chronicle of Higher Education by the first year preisent of Drew University, Robert Weisbuch.</p>
<p>Last year, my daughter applied to a number of colleges including my alma mater, Wesleyan University in Connecticut. When she was accepted and told me it was her top choice, I wept with pleasure.</p>
<p>This year, as I live through my first year as a university president and become more familiar with the intricacies of the admissions process, I weep for all of us. College is intended to sponsor an engagement with ideas and, just possibly, the development of character. Yet our recipe for achieving that is an anti-intellectual witches' brew of lousy values.</p>
<p>There are three aspects to our nasty creation. One concerns the testing boards. Another is the awarding of merit fellowships to those who don't really need them. And the third is the U.S. News & World Report rankings, a pun if there ever was one.</p>
<p>As I live through my first year at Drew University, in New Jersey, I find that our internal policies on admissions have everything to do with social values; and with each passing day I'm more convinced that, while short-term institutional interest and the social good may conflict, in the long term what is good for the nation is also profoundly good for Drew.</p>
<p>In recent weeks, the College Board has made a series of disclosures relating to the reporting of incorrect SAT scores. The mistakes, the board assures us, are being addressed. But the real problem is not the board's to fix because it lies in the way we think about the test and the weight it is afforded in college admissions.</p>
<p>When, as a college kid, I worked in commercial radio, we had a saying about the importance of radio ratings. "Arbitron lies, but Arbitron is God." It is an ugly saying, and it applies equally to the SAT's.</p>
<p>According to Human Capital Research, a college-admissions consulting firm, rated on an index from zero to one, SAT test scores predict a freshman's grade-point average at 0.03 to 0.14. "I might as well measure shoe size," the firm's president, Brian Zucker, was quoted as saying in "The Best Class Money Can Buy," one of a series of thoughtful articles on the admissions process that appeared in the November 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Zucker argues that the SATs have "made schools lazy and stupid at the same time." The opportunity costs involve "looking past literally millions of kids who would do a great job."</p>
<p>At Drew, we emphasize teaching to the individual, developing what is best and unique in each student. My colleagues and I wish to bring that same ethic to the admissions process. We are small enough not to have to reduce people to a single pair or trio of numbers.</p>
<p>But nationally, we educators have created a culture in which parents spend thousands on mind steroids to help their kids score 50 points higher. What messages are we parents sending to our children about their self-worth when we worship those exams? Thinking for yourself? Thinking as a good in itself? Forget it -- just think toward an 800.</p>
<p>The Atlantic article examines how enrollment managers "have changed financial aid -- from a tool to help low-income students into a strategic weapon to entice wealthy and high-scoring students." Oregon State's head of enrollment management is quoted as recommending that attitude in relation to competing institutions: "I'm going to go out there and try to eat their lunch. I'm going to try to kick their ass."</p>
<p>Not an elegant statement, perhaps, but an acceptable one if you believe that competition makes the world a better place. In this case, however, it makes the world all the more inequitable. "It's a brilliantly analytical process of screwing the poor kids," Gordon Winston, a Williams College economist, is quoted as saying. And when another admissions officer suggested that it was wrong to give money to people who don't need it if that means turning away students who do, he was criticized for proposing "unilateral disarmament." College admissions as Vietnam and Iraq; enrollment gurus as tin soldiers.</p>
<p>But isn't merit great? Depends on who and how you define it. Merit doesn't make me very happy when it means that students have a 1-in-2 chance of earning a B.A. by age 24 if their family makes $90,000 a year or more; a 1-in-4 chance if their family earns $61,000 to $90,000; and less than 6 percent if their family income is lower than $35,000.</p>
<p>What might be the best predictor of real potential is distance traveled. Where are you now in relation to where you began? But that is a question the fake meritocracy studiously avoids.</p>
<p>What are the motives for a behavior that seems designed to encourage social strife and to undermine any true notion of merit? The answers are at once pragmatic and short-sighted. Faculty members naturally want better-prepared students, though they are not quite willing to admit that that means fewer students from disadvantaged circumstances.</p>
<p>Then, too, in future years, alumni from wealthy families will provide more and larger gifts after graduation. SAT means and medians rise when you provide more money to kids who score better, who also are usually kids with less financial need -- and who, I would add, have traveled much less distance to get to their present level of achievement.</p>
<p>The SAT's matter so much because universities are in thrall to ranking systems, in particular the U.S. News system, which actually doesn't depend so greatly on SAT figures -- something that few enrollment managers and their deanly superiors understand.</p>
<p>At Drew, once I understood the trend toward increasing merit awards and its capacity to make education a means to enforce the status quo and to discourage brutally any upward mobility, it was pretty late in the season. We were able to increase our need-based aid, but that is hardly a brave or ultimate solution. And since no good deed goes unpunished, we will pay for it in the rankings.</p>
<p>Colin Diver, president of Reed College, one of the few institutions that has opted out of participating in the rankings, notes in that same Atlantic issue that institutional gaming runs rampant: from not reporting low SAT scores from foreign students, legacies, or whatever category one can conceive; to bloating the stats on instructional expenditures by including athletics and faculty research; to upping admissions yield by rejecting top candidates unlikely to attend.</p>
<p>I don't agree with all of Diver's views. </p>
<p>But I love the freedom Reed purchases by scorning the rankings -- no class-size manipulations created by employing adjuncts to lower the numbers, no doctoral requirement for faculty members where that degree might be irrelevant or even insensible. Reed is a better-known four-letter word than Drew, and we may not yet have the legs to walk away from U.S. News, but never will we spend a moment allowing its quantifications to shape any policy.</p>
<p>It is past time to banish the three hags of this demonic admissions trinity -- the SAT obsession, the antidemocratic "merit" scam, and the U.S. News obsession. Arbitron is not God, after all. The SAT's are not god, U.S. News is not god, and worshiping false deities is what we used to call idolatry.</p>