Holistic Review is Bullshit

The biggest lie that admissions offices tell the public is that their holistic review process is consistent and fair. It isn’t.

Most applications are skimmed in less than ten minutes. Universities create elaborate scoring and review systems to evaluate candidates’ academics, leadership potential, creativity, adversity, and so on. They grade on one to five scales, offer a single score, assign plusses and minuses, soft or firm recommendations for admission.

Putting numbers on something doesn’t make it science.

It’s all bullshit. Holistic review is bullshit.

College admissions is essentially a human resources problem. How do you find the best fit among many qualified applicants for a few number of spaces?

Google, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey still haven’t perfected their hiring and human resources. And they have nearly infinite amounts of data and metrics to assess who succeeds in their organizations. Google has experimented with a number of strategies including brain teasers, conducting a battery of twenty-five interviews, or having prospective employees submit responses to three-hundred questions. If Google can’t figure out how to hire well, nobody can, including college admissions.

Reliably selecting for talent is impossible. NFL talent scouts routinely miss on undrafted free agents who eventually become stars, or their draft top picks never amount to anything.

Holistic review is inconsistent, imperfect, and prone to error and bias.

It isn’t a very effective tool for universities to “find the right fit.” Universities give the impression that their review process is “rigorous” and that they take “substantial time” to get to know their applicants. That’s misleading.

Two fundamental issues with holistic review everywhere are “calibration” and “consistency.”

When I scored applications for UT-Austin, all of us reviewers received office-wide training. We read sample files. Each counselor voted on what they thought the essay score was on a scale of 1 to 6. There was almost never a universal agreement. Some people scored the same essay as low as three with others awarding the highest score of six. The trainer had his own opinions that often disagreed with the audience. That means some reviewers tended to be strict and others more lenient. The review process can never be calibrated. You might get a strict reviewer and never know it.

Holistic review scoring is always inconsistent.

Not all reviewers are even admissions counselors. Universities hire outside readers and are paid $15-20 an hour. Most applications are read in eight to ten minutes. Reading 20 or 30 or more applications every day makes it difficult to maintain an even distribution of scores. Reviewers experience fatigue, especially since most applications look the same.

There is also bias and error. Reviewers tend to score more favorably the applicants who have similar interests or backgrounds to themselves. Your score might depend on the reviewer’s mood, how much sleep they’ve gotten, how strong the applications were just before yours, or whether they’ve been drinking a glass of wine. Even multiple rounds of review or review by committee doesn’t correct problems of consistency and calibration.

Towards the end of the review cycle, universities assess borderline applicants for admission, waitlist, deferral, or denial. This process to separate borderline applicants is called “shaping.”

Yale professor William Deresiewicz wrote the book Excellent Sheep. He observed Yale’s shaping process and says, “In six hours of committee work, we disposed of somewhere between 100 and 125 cases or about three or four minutes per applicant.”

Journalist Jeffrey Selingo who wrote Who Gets in and Why observed the same thing. There simply isn’t enough time in the day or staff to sift through record numbers of applications year after year. Since all applicants receive uniform acceptance and rejection letters, you never know how close or far you were from admission.

Holistic review privileges students who know how to play the admissions game. Some prepare for the college admissions arms race as early as pre-K or elementary school. Students who attend high schools with advanced courses know that they’re necessary as early as freshmen year. Clever students from wealthy families pad their resumes, attend expensive summer camps, and work internships at daddy’s real estate office.

Jeffrey Selingo shared an entertaining anecdote from Davidson University’s admissions review committee. A girl who was in the deny pile got pushed into the acceptance pile when the shaping committee applauded her volunteering as a “mahout,” which evidently is someone who cleans and trains elephants in Thailand.

Students feel pressure to find ever more obscure and niche activities to stand out in a crowded field. It’s madness!

Most people don’t reach their peak at age sixteen or seventeen. Students who are undecided on their major are also penalized. Universities miss out on late bloomers or students who take less traditional paths. Elite universities admit very few transfer students, especially from community college, so if you don’t play the game from your birth, you’re unlikely to gain admission.

Holistic review creates a perverse set of incentives that exclude middle class and poor students and it distorts the values of wealthy families. College admissions corrupts high school environments and their students and by pressuring them to pursue activities that don’t interest them, burn out by taking too many AP classes, and it takes away free time.

Admissions outcomes are more of a reflection of wealth and privilege than anything specific to the applicant. More students enroll in the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and other elite universities from the top 1% of society than the entire bottom half. 72% of students at elite colleges come from the top quarter economically and only 3% from the bottom quarter.

Oxford and Cambridge, traditional strongholds of British aristocracy, enroll more socioeconomically diverse student bodies than elite liberal American universities. These elite universities birthed identity politics and social justice yet they themselves lack diversity. They’re inaccessible for most students.

Despite advances in technology and Zoom university during the pandemic, Ivy League universities enroll the same number of freshmen each year as a century ago. Elite universities are partially responsible for increasing inequality in the United States, not inclusion and access like they claim. They are hypocrites.

Universities refuse to listen to messages like this because they’re convinced they’re helping society. But they refuse to see the role they play in squeezing out the middle class and keeping families in poverty.

I’m here to tell you that holistic review is bullshit. It’s madness.

Elite universities do not care about you.

Understanding this fact will help you see your applications and the admissions process more clearly.