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What the Admissions Office Is REALLY Saying — and How You Can Tell

From Selectivity to Rejectivity

If you love higher education, then perhaps you ought to be appalled by the national collegiate rankings proffered by famous news magazines. Because of the prominence of those annual rankings, and because of the way those rankings are devised, terrible things happen in admissions offices all across the country.

Such rankings normally include selectivity ratings because selectivity (rather than educational quality) looms so large in the minds of parents, students and counselors. These selectivity ratings, however, are gauged by what percentage of applicants a college rejects. And so admissions offices troll aggressively for ever greater numbers of applicants, even though those colleges know the applications obtained in this manner have little or no chance of acceptance. Nor were they meant to have it. Those applications were heavily solicited precisely for the purpose of rejection because rejection equals selectivity, and selectivity means more prestige and more money.

While few college admissions offices admit to the practice, nearly all say that their competition is doing it.¹ That means that the admissions office must be lying half the time — either about themselves or about others. Which half of the time that is, you decide.

Put differently, you can probably count on colleges to work harder at looking selective rather than at being truly excellent. Admissions offices, and the administrations that employ them, are often more concerned with appearing to offer rising quality than with the difficult and expensive task of actually providing that rising quality itself. Admissions offices could pressure the administration and the faculty to raise the level of education so they can recruit more and better students. However, because of the pervasive and perverse influence of famous national rankings, admissions offices are forced to appear increasingly selective and to provide statistics to support that appearance.

They Sell What You Buy

But if you are wise and savvy, you know that education, not prestige — and certainly not appearance — is the real issue. Selective standards for graduation, not for admission, are the hallmark of a great college. If it's harder to get into than it is to get out of, you aren't looking at a great college, no matter what some national ranking says — a national ranking far more likely to sell magazines than to improve higher education.

To change colleges for the better, prospective students and their parents must find ways to detect and measure great education. What's being taught, how it's being taught, and by whom it's being taught, are far better indicators of quality education than who gets in now and who gets hired later.

The salespersons who so often fill admissions posts will give you what they think you want. That's what they were hired to do. Most of them are quite good at it. At the moment, they have precious little reason to think you want an outstanding education and are researching carefully to find out if their particular college actually provides one. Only occasionally do they see prospective students and their parents scouring and comparing the course catalogs and course descriptions from many colleges all at once in order to determine true academic superiority.

Those heady concerns aren't what admissions counselors most often hear from parents and students, and they aren't the bases upon which most prospective students select a college. Consequently, that's not what admissions offices will normally try to sell you. So many of the things admissions offices sell to prospective students have precious little to do with higher education, things like palatial athletic facilities, an active party culture, and country club-style co-ed dorms with at least one Starbucks.

If you want to know how good and how insightful an admissions office really is, and if you want to know what the college in question really values and provides, see how well and how often the admissions staff trumpets the glories and benefits of a college education and the rigorous efforts required to get one. If the admissions staff do not or cannot sell such things well and effectively, they are in the wrong vocation. And if you are going to college in order simply to get a job, then you need to remember that the purpose of a college is not to help you make a living, but to make a life.

Tyranny of the Three P's: Price, Prestige and Placement

Price, prestige and placement are the three things academic outsiders tend to concern themselves with the most: "How much will it cost?" "Who gets in?" and "Who gets a job after it's all over?" Those are the questions the media, parents and prospective students ask most often. They should be asking — in addition to the questions they do — "What happens once I get in?" "What does this college think of as higher education?" and "Does this college actually provide it?" In other words, they should be asking questions of quality, not simply of price, prestige and placement.

If you are wise, you understand that the admissions process is actually part of the process of being educated, and not a preliminary to it, not simply a marketplace purchase. Just as life begins at conception, not at birth, higher education begins with the admissions process, not after its completion. A college that does not understand that obvious fact and act wisely upon it is a college you need to avoid.

You need an admissions office dedicated to educating prospective students and their parents about the real nature of higher education and the profound and important ways it differs from job training and job placement. You want an admissions office that can help you see how most of the things other colleges use to lure students into applying have nothing at all to do with better teaching and learning. If an admissions office is interested in actually beginning the process of higher education with you, it has nothing to hide. If it is not, it's hiding something already.

But because prospective students and their parents seek primarily for price, prestige and placement, (along with partying, if three Ps just aren't enough for them) admissions offices sell those things and not others. As long as admissions offices think of themselves as in "P" sales, and not in education, nothing changes.

Admissions offices will abandon the sales and marketing paradigm only when you convince them that for you everything hinges upon non-marketing considerations. They will stop selling only when they are convinced you are not buying — you are investing. You must convince them you're not purchasing a bit of prestige and a hand in finding a job. No; you're looking for the highest and most profound educational payback possible — not ease, not comfort, not fun and not job placement. Just as you don't turn to amusement parks, hotels and marketplace head hunters for a college education, you don’t turn to colleges for entertainment and job placement.

In other words, you must let colleges and their admissions offices know that you understand that selectivity and job placement are not the best means of assessing the viability of an institution of higher education. Political, theological, moral, educational, communal and aesthetic considerations are at least as important. Let them know you're determined to assess this college and its offerings on those grounds, not on others.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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Here's the good news: Because college admissions representatives are trying to get you to attend their school, they will change their ways if you change yours. Whatever you do, whichever path you choose, they will follow. They must; they're market driven, not principle driven. Because they're in sales, not higher education, they themselves are for sale. It's a useful irony, one you can exploit to great effect. If they insist on assessing their college's policies in light of the ledger book, then you know what must be done and how to get them to do it. But if you give in to the hegemony of market thinking, they will give you nothing else.

You are in charge.

Act like it.