Why do colleges have to admit students?
Years ago, Walter Allen said something in our graduate seminar that has stuck with me since: Colleges don’t have to reject students. They do because that perceived exclusivity makes them a lot of money. You can think about it this way too: You have some of the smartest people in the world working there as professors. Why do they need to flush out anyone? Shouldn’t they be able to teach anyone? And wouldn’t it be more useful to our society if they taught the students who struggled, not the ones who have already proven that they are academically successful?
I am paraphrasing Dr. Allen. It has been over two decades since I was in his classroom. And before that time and since that time, he has published on access to education for African Americans. I also worked with him as a graduate student researcher for the College Access Project for African Americans at UCLA.
Educational sociologists like Prof. Allen set out to answer a pretty broad question: Do schools solve, create, or replicate inequities? If I put myself in that category of scholar, I will say that schools create and replicate, and with questions like what Prof. Allen posed for us, they could solve inequities.
So the short answer to the question I posed in the title is that they don’t have to admit students. And before you worry that the colleges can’t afford it, namely the top 40 most selective campuses, even if we ignore their massive endowments that they don’t want to touch, they’ve got tuition, donations, and research contracts that can keep them going for a very, very, long time. Those same university presidents have said that they could 10X their student populations tomorrow and wouldn’t have to hire another professor or build another building. And the tuition structure works in such a way that they could benefit right away from more students.
I phrased the title this way because this is how we all implicitly think about admissions, as a have to, not want to. When we phrase things as a have to and not a want to, we do a lot of damage to the college process: We treat education as a scarce resource. We justify the cost. We treat our high school relationships as transactional. We justify meritocracy and exceptionalism. It’s a mess.
One of the most important things that I did when I built the company was to find people who understood the above. I’ve encountered tutors and college counselors that make promises that uplift the have to. This looks like focusing on a score rather than fit. I’ve seen parents apply to colleges they know the student wouldn’t get funding for and therefore have tuition they can’t afford because they think admissions to that campus means they’ve earned something exceptional. It’s important; it’s not exceptional. So we built a platform that is based on the idea the most selective campuses are manufacturing exclusivity in a way that is predictive, and there are high-performing, low-brand ID colleges that focus on the work of educating, for whom admissions primarily works to find fit. For those of us who are not applying to college and do not know anyone who is, consider how educational sociologists frame the question—Do schools solve, create, or replicate inequities—and how your answer to that question may need to be tweaked.
