Our College Admissions Madness Isn’t New
One of my favorite aspects of writing my book Surviving the College Admissions Madness was researching what previous educators and critiques decades and even centuries ago said about the college application process. Few families realize that the admissions madness isn’t a new phenomenon. Reading articles from fifty or a hundred years ago could be written today. The two things that have changed most in the past fifty years is the prevalence of social media and the sky high application numbers relative to the same number of scarce admissions spaces. In another video, I discuss the history of holistic review, but in this one, I want to point out how America has always had a uniquely bizarre admissions process.
The earliest mention of elite college admissions comes from a 1907 New York Times critique by Carnegie Mellon’s eventual second president, Thomas Stockham Baker. His headline may sound shockingly familiar: “‘Getting Into College’ Has Become a Very Serious Problem; The Vagaries of the Necessary Requirements for Admission to Leading Institutions Becoming More Pronounced Every Year—A Consideration of the Baneful Effect of Chaotic Conditions.”
An article written nearly six decades later in 1965 by Fred E. Crossland in the Phi Delta Kappan raises the same concerns I present in this book. “Because of our collective failures in both secondary and higher education, we have come close to making access to our colleges and universities a shambles (sic). For tens of thousands of our young people, we have made college admissions a traumatic experience. We may have seriously damaged the senior year in high school. We have created unnecessary tensions. We have been wasteful of our national human resources.”
In that same journal, another author wrote about “the college admissions rate race through the student’s eyes.” Other authors wondered which international students universities should admit or considerations about college access for African American and other marginalized populations.
Since the 1960s as part of the Civil Rights Movement, educators and policymakers have questioned the utility of the SAT. Educators and critics began questioning racial bias in the SAT and whether a single exam can accurately forecast a student’s future achievement. Former Director of New York’s Millbrook school writes in a letter to the New York Times editor on May 24, 1960, that “A 17- or 18-year-old is a complex organism, capable of growth or stagnation, of creative or unimaginative thinking…. The boy or girl with the highest test score does not always follow the predicted path in life.”
Around the same time, elite universities began having way more applications than their campuses could accommodate. The New York Times reported on April 24, 1963, that the eight Ivy League and Seven Sisters campuses received 58,625 applications for a total of 10,658 admitted seniors. “Heartbreak and frustration are inevitable when so many young people compete for so few spaces.” Then as now, educators and teachers emphasize that where you go is not who you will become. The article notes that spaces at state universities are becoming increasingly competitive, with fewer universities practicing open enrollment with admission available to anyone who has finished high school, driven in part by increasing numbers of out-of-state applicants.
The essential takeaway from this video is that the admissions madness dates back at least three generations. Neither your parents nor your grandparents generation created this system. It’s been around for so long that few students and educators take a step back and wonder how this insane application and admissions process came to be. Questioning the origins of the admissions madness will help you get in while staying sane.
