It's admissions season, and across the country, thousands of admissions officers sit in front of screens, reading files full of transcripts, test scores, extracurricular profiles, letters of recommendation, and, of course, essays. I was once one of these officers, spending emotionally exhausting 12-hour days reviewing thousands of applications from Ivy League hopefuls over a span of five months. When I was a new admissions officer, the importance of each application component was drilled into my head. Other factors, like legacy status or whether the student was a person of color, mattered, but those first five elements were key. At first, they seemed reasonable-enough measures of potential to succeed at an elite university. But after I saw how consistently our process created disadvantages for students who are low-income and people of color, my trust in the system faltered.
I soon found myself reading Jerome Karabel's The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The book offers a thorough examination of how our current system of selective college admissions came to be, and it persuaded me to question all the parts of a college application that we take for granted today. I learned that the aspects of college applications that are commonly thought of as most important in promoting inclusion—like the consideration of personal qualities in addition to supposedly objective measures of academic potential—actually first became part of the application as a way to identify and exclude Jewish applicants. That realization seemed to upend the field's expectation that those same metrics could be used to increase diversity, and helped explain my disappointment when they instead reproduced the status quo.
In fact, I grew so disappointed that I did something inappropriate: I went on Facebookand vented about an essay from an applicant. (The student in question had used the essay to remind us that they were a legacy and had even had a religious rite performed on campus as an infant.) But I recognize now that the real target of my frustration was, and is, a system where unearned privileges like familial ties have any bearing on one's likelihood of admission to an institution of higher education.
[For more on this story by NADIRAH FARAH FOLEY, go to https://psmag.com/education/a-...n-college-admissions]
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