College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy
Edited by Lloyd Thacker

BOOK REVIEW by Jennifer Dees

Lloyd Thacker is a man on a mission. He thinks the college admissions process has become over-commercialized, that this has threatened the educational goals of colleges, and that students have suffered because of it — and he's out to change all that.

A former guidance counselor, Thacker founded a non-profit organization, the Education Conservancy, to provide a counter-balance to the test-prep industry; the power of U.S. News & World Report's numerical college rankings; the early decision race; and other practices he considers harmful to higher education and the students involved in it. Instead of just slinging angry arrows at the Ivy League, like Loren Pope in Colleges That Change Lives, Thacker has enlisted the admissions deans and presidents of Ivy League universities, large public research universities, and small liberal arts colleges to work together to find ways to de-commercialize college admissions and make the process more fair for everyone.

In 2005, he collected and edited a book of essays by some of those college presidents and deans, College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy, published by Harvard University Press. Since then, he has become the go-to guy for ending that frenzy. Inside Higher Ed reported on his "Admissions Revolution" in 2006. Deborah Solomon interviewed him in a New York Times Magazine profile in 2007. The Chronicle of Higher Education got his take on the state of college admissions in 2010. In January 2011, Jacques Steinberg wrote about "folk hero" Lloyd Thacker on the New York Times blog about college admissions, "The Choice." And in October 2011, Thacker spoke at the College Board's 2011 conference on his favorite theme.

How is Thacker doing, then? Has the Education Conservancy accomplished its goals yet, or is there still a long way to go? Or is this Mission Impossible?

On his Web site and in the articles linked above, Thacker points to his success in getting 65 colleges so far to pledge not to return the surveys of U.S. News & World Report for its college rankings book. One of the earliest colleges to protest the policies of this guide based on numerical ratings was Reed College, in the Pacific Northwest. On the Education Conservancy Web site, one section is "Honorable Admissions — colleges improve their practices." There, Reed Dean of Admission Paul Marthers writes, "Since 1995 Reed College has refused to participate in the U.S. News and World Report 'best colleges' rankings. Reed does participate in several other well-established college guides that do not assign numerical rankings to institutions, including Barron's, the Fiske Guide to Colleges, Peterson's, Colleges that Change Lives, Newsweek's College Guide, and the College Board's College Handbook. Each of these guides attempts to describe more fully the experience, student culture, and academic environment at different schools. [...] Since 1995, the college has repeatedly asked U.S. News simply to drop it from the best-colleges issue, yet the magazine continues to include Reed and to harvest data from non-Reed sources."

Why such vehemence against U.S. News & World Report's Best Colleges guide? The guide's numerical rankings of the "best" colleges are blamed for making parents and students think that only the "top" 10 or the "top" 50 colleges listed in it are worth applying to; for driving the test-prep industry, since one of the ways colleges are ranked is on their SAT score range; and for driving colleges to compete with each other for the "best" students, through extensive commercial outreach, a practice many consider unbecoming to higher education.

There is still a lot of work to be done in other areas of college admissions as well to meet the Education Conservancy's goals. At the October 2011 College Board conference, Mr. Thacker and his co-presenter, Jerome A. Lucido, executive director of the University of Southern California Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice, listed areas that need improvement, proposing "...that each campus expand its freshman intake, growing its student population; that schools collectively reduce their merit aid awards by 10 percent and shift that financing into need-based aid; and that colleges across the country reduce their recruitment."

These recommended actions would address some of the many problem areas in college admissions today as outlined in the book Thacker compiled and edited, College Unranked: Ending the College Admission Frenzy. Some of those problem areas are:

• Boasting of rankings. When admissions directors decry the unfounded influence of U.S. News & World Report's numerical rankings, but their own colleges tout their rankings in their promotional literature, the rankings win. An "honorable practice," according to College Unranked and the Education Conservancy, would be for the colleges not to acknowledge or mention those rankings, knowing them to be problematic (the rankings can be easily influenced by colleges who manipulate the numbers they submit).
  
  
• Merit aid. According to detractors, the problem with merit aid is that colleges use it to attract plum candidates who often have no financial need. A cynical assessment is that those plum candidates will increase their rankings. Financial assistance, the opponents of merit aid say, should go only or at least mostly to students who are financially needy. More money spent on merit aid to top candidates means less available for pure financial assistance to the poor.
  
  
• Early decision. Students who apply to a college for early decision submit their applications as early as November 1 (rather than January 1 for normal applications). If they are accepted, they are bound to attend that college, and not apply to any others. This favors wealthier students who can pay the full tuition cost and not have to wait for other acceptances in the spring to compare financial aid packages. Some selective colleges now fill up to 40 percent of their classes through early decision acceptances.
  
  
• Admissions tests. Opponents argue that the weight given to the SAT (or ACT) in college admissions also unfairly advantages privileged students, who can pay for expensive test prep courses that poorer students cannot.

The book, College Unranked, explains these issues in greater detail as well as others impacting students, parents, and colleges caught in the "frenzy." Despite the urgency of that word, the essays in the book are measured and academic, as if written for journals on college admissions. Yet the message they collectively impart is urgent, suggesting that only if all of those parties individually take back the admissions process from commercial forces, will college admissions again serve the educational purposes assumed to be its mission. It will be tough to turn around the direction, since each individual student and parent wants only the "best" for that student, and colleges similarly have institutional needs for students who will enhance their college's environment. All are driven toward "the best," but commercial forces may interfere in finding the best "fit" for individual students, for both the student's and college's benefit.

Some powerful voices have contributed their wisdom to this book: the Deans of Admission at Vanderbilt, Harvard, Pomona, Grinnell, Reed, Dartmouth, University of Chicago, Smith, Clark, and the University of Washington. Several college presidents and high school counselors have also added their thoughts, and editor Lloyd Thacker has contributed essays as well. The result is not a how-to book on college admissions, or a college guide, but more of a reflection on what all this means to society and to individual colleges and individual students and their parents.

Yet there is much advice to glean in how to approach the process, some of it perhaps surprising. The Dean of Admissions at the University of Washington, Philip Ballinger, writes in his essay, "Saving Imagination," that "Both parents and students can take time to reflect and visualize. Time aside, time out, time within is not wasteful in the college selection process. It can be energizing. For parents, this time is a matter of imagining, visualizing, and making explicit in their own minds what they wish for their child. What do they hope for in the most foundational sense? Is hoping that Johnny or Mary gets into Harvard foundational, or is there something more primary behind this desire? Trying to separate their own needs and hopes from their child's needs and hopes in this process could prove helpful and practical."

There is much more such wisdom in this book that is well worth considering in your college admissions process.

January 8, 2012

Copyright 2012 Jennifer Dees