Last month thousands of our best and brightest high-school students found out whether they had been accepted by early decision to the colleges of their choice. Each had spent weeks poring over application forms, polishing essays, and agonizing over where to submit an application - a promise to matriculate at one institution, forsaking all others, in exchange for often considerably better odds of admission and a couple fewer months of worry about where they would spend their college years.
The applicants' anxiety was unwarranted - and it was also deceptive. Even before the applications were mailed, most of the decisions had been more or less preordained by social class.
I recently spent a year and a half in the admissions office of a highly selective Eastern college as an ethnographer, seeking to understand just how admissions officers make their decisions. I accompanied them on recruitment trips to high schools and college fairs, helped manage their offices' relentless current of visitors and mail, and observed them deliberate the fate of literally thousands of applicants.
What I found was consistent with the American ideal of educational meritocracy. I saw admissions officers who invariably made the quality of high-school transcripts the most prominent criterion of evaluation. They assessed standardized-test scores as only one part of an application, recognized outstanding records of leadership and community service, and were wise enough to distinguish genuinely strong applications from ones that were buffed and puffed by private consultants. Yes, I saw officers give special consideration to applications that were connected to promising donors - it was a private institution and, while hardly poor, it depended on philanthropy for its financial well-being - but nothing close to the shameless horse trading that occasionally makes selective admissions headline news.
Recruited athletes also enjoyed a systematic admissions advantage and often were admitted with weaker academic records. But then fully a third of the students who enrolled at the college in a typical year were varsity athletes who had invested heavily in their athletic skills throughout many years of childhood and were eager to hone those skills at competitive levels of play. In a sense, admissions preferences for top athletes are not really preferences but rather an extension of meritocratic standards to nonacademic skills.
Indeed, I realized that it was not big donations or athletic recruitment that most undermined the American dream of meritocratic admissions, but rather, and however paradoxically, the fact that our dream has come true. The days when old-school connections were enough to get through the doors of top colleges, and when dark skin or a Jewish surname were enough to be excluded, are over. Selective colleges now sort applications based on measurable accomplishment. But in general, only the more affluent among us can afford the infrastructure necessary to produce that accomplishment in our children: academically excellent high schools, rich with extracurricular programs; summer sports camps; private tutoring; "service" trips to Israel or Guatemala; and, of course, the time and money to invest in the elaborate competition for seats at selective institutions.
All that investment means that by the time upper-middle-class 17-year-olds sit down to write their applications, most of the race to top institutions has already been run, and they already enjoy comfortable leads. As William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University and president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and his colleagues demonstrate in Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (University of Virginia Press, 2005), the majority of students likely to meet the baseline criteria for admission to top institutions are from the top quarter of the national income distribution. For those kids, the big question is not whether they will be admitted to an elite institution, but which ones will offer them spots. Even while the fate of individual applicants at particular colleges remains uncertain until decision letters are mailed, the overall distribution of outcomes is heavily skewed in favor of affluent applicants. That is not the result of discrimination by admissions officers, but rather the consequence of privileged families deftly playing by the rules of the meritocratic game.
My research convinced me that the ever-more-frenzied activity surrounding selective admissions is essentially ceremonial - an elaborate national ritual of just desserts. The fact that the fates of particular applicants at particular colleges remain uncertain until the end enables us to believe that the winners earn their victories in a fair game. That is how the anxiety that attends the application season is deceptive: It encourages those who experience it to believe that the outcomes of the process are considerably more uncertain than they actually are.
More perniciously perhaps, the feverishness of each year's application season allows us to take comfort in modest reforms that mostly only tinker with that process. Some recent fixes at selective institutions - eliminating early decision, making the SAT an optional component of applications, or, a bit more radically, proposals to replace individualized selection with a lottery system for all those applicants who meet some general criteria - will do nothing to change the distribution of opportunity that delivers talented applicants to admissions officers in a markedly class-stratified way.
It would be far better if we turned our reformist energies toward improving educational opportunity earlier in life. Research in child development makes clear that young people's academic fates are decisively shaped by the amounts and kinds of resources available to them in their earliest years. A national preschool program, generously supported by the federal government, would take us a long way toward equity in selective college admissions. So too would national support for adequate college guidance at high schools in low-income areas and for the "extra" curriculars, like music, art, and varsity sports, that make meritocracy more varied and more fun for kids in wealthier school districts. Focusing our concern on larger, undoubtedly more difficult educational problems will be a tough change, especially when it means thinking about the needs of children other than our own. But the only way to have an educational meritocracy that is also genuinely just will be to make the entire system of college preparation more equitable.
Mitchell L. Stevens is associate professor of education and sociology at New York University. He is the author of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Harvard University Press, 2007).
Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008 (http://chronicle.com)