Inside American Education (17 page)

As competition for new students grows tougher, college presidents are treating admissions directors like football coaches, firing those who can’t put the numbers on the board.
¹⁰

While this new pressure cost dozens of admissions directors their jobs in a single year,
¹¹
it also increased the demand for those with a record of success. Although the median salary of admissions directors in 1989-90 was approximately $42,000,
¹²
successful ones were being lured away at salaries as high as $100,000—“a figure unheard of just a year ago,”
¹³
according to
The Chronicle of Higher Education
. The economic stakes are high. When fewer students than expected enrolled at Bowdoin College in the fall of 1990, the college faced a loss of $500,000 in tuition.
¹⁴
Colleges also lose room charges when enrollment fails to fill the dormitories, whose costs of upkeep are not much reduced when there are empty rooms.

Given this picture—“the admissions director, faced with the prospect of empty beds and qualms about his job”
¹⁵
—it is possible to understand the pious but reckless huckstering that has become part of the college admissions process. For example, an article on preparing college brochures, appearing in the
Journal of College Admissions
, gave as its first axiom:

Perception is the ultimate reality.
¹⁶

In other words, the image of the college is what really matters, not what actually happens on campus. After quoting Marshall McLuhan’s dictum, “the medium is the message,” and recommending as a model “the folks with the golden arches,”
this marketing research consultant advised using less prose and more photographs, captions, and lists to capture the student’s attention. As he put it: “Keep body copy light”
¹⁷
and “pare your ideas down to their most simple form.”
¹⁸
Likewise, the head of a consulting firm specializing in college “marketing” said of college admissions brochures: “You want them to be mostly pictures. To be successful, a viewbook shouldn’t have too much content.”
¹⁹
Outside consultants not only advise on such things as preparing college brochures but also produce the brochures themselves and, in some cases, cause the college curriculum itself to be changed in ways designed to make it more marketable.
²⁰
In this huckstering atmosphere, accuracy counts for little. As one college guidebook notes: “At least fifty colleges proudly state that they are in the top twenty-five.”
²¹

Even the test scores so widely published, and so uncritically accepted, are often fudged. Most colleges’ reports of their SAT averages are not based on the scores of the students actually enrolled there, but on the scores of the students they accepted.
²²
Thus, if a young man with math and verbal scores of 700 each applies to six colleges, and is admitted to all, then 5 colleges he is
not
attending will also include his
SAT
s in their averages. Since higher-scoring students are more likely to be making multiple applications to more selective colleges, this inflates the
SAT
data, not only at those colleges but also at whatever “safety valve” schools were included among their applications.

Other gimmicks to boost
SAT
averages include omitting the scores of athletes, minorities, or others admitted under special provisions. An admissions director at a leading liberal arts college estimates that about one-fourth of the students in such institutions are likely to be special cases who are omitted in compiling SAT averages.
²³
The difference that this can make may be illustrated by the fact that the University of Rochester’s class of 1993 had a mean composite SAT score of 1149 with everyone counted, but 1218 with the various special students omitted.
²⁴

Lofty deception is as common in higher education as in elementary and secondary schools. Yet educators have somehow managed to convince others that academia should be teaching ethics to people in other professions and institutions.
But, as the late Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler put it, “the typical university catalog would never stop Diogenes in his search for an honest man.”
²⁵

THE HUMAN AND FINANCIAL COSTS
OF COLLEGE

One consequence of the hype surrounding college admissions—much of it originating in the colleges themselves and amplified by the media—is a whole body of myths and misinformation about the academic world in general, and about its prestige institutions in particular. It is difficult to exaggerate the frantic anxiety of students and their parents, as they focus their attention on a relative handful of big-name institutions. The Stanford University admissions office, for example, receives approximately 45,000 mail and telephone inquiries annually—including an “annual flood of telephone calls and unwelcome visits from irate students who were not accepted and their parents.”
²⁶
This desperate desire for admission to prestige institutions in no way reflects any greater likelihood of receiving a better undergraduate education there than at many highquality, less-known institutions.

College Quality

Perhaps the biggest and most damaging myth confronting students and parents who are choosing a college is that a “bigname” institution is a prerequisite or an assurance of a top quality education and/or a successful career afterwards. It is no doubt true that graduates of Harvard, Stanford, or M.I.T. earn higher incomes than the average graduate of unknown state colleges, but that is very misleading. Youngsters who have taken a voyage on the
Queen Elizabeth II
, or who have flown on the
Concorde
, probably also will have higher future incomes than those who have never travelled on anything more exotic than a bus. But that is hardly a reason to go deep into debt to book passage on the
QE 2
or to strain the family budget buying a ticket for the
Concorde
.

Top colleges turn out extraordinary graduates because they
take in extraordinary freshmen. That tells very little about what happened in the intervening four years, except that it did not ruin these individuals completely. It tells even less about what would have happened if these same extraordinary people had been educated elsewhere. Whether a given individual will do better, either educationally or financially, by going to a bigname college is very doubtful.

Hard statistics on the percentage of a college’s alumni who eventually become sufficiently prominent to be listed in
Who’s Who in America
, or who successfully complete a Ph.D., show many relatively obscure colleges whose alumni achieve either worldly success or academic success more frequently than the alumni of much better known institutions. The percentage of Davidson College alumni who end up in
Who’s Who
is nearly as high as the percentage of Stanford University alumni listed there—and is higher than the percentage at three Ivy League institutions (Brown, Penn, and Cornell), as well as higher than the percentage of such alumni of Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, or Duke. Little-known Cornell College in Iowa has a higher percentage of its alumni end up in
Who’s Who
than the alumni of Cornell University.
²⁷

It is very much the same story when it comes to the percentage of alumni who go on to receive Ph.D.s. Number one in the country in that regard is little Harvey Mudd College in southern California, an institution almost unheard of, east of the Mississippi. Over a period of years, more than 40 percent of all Harvey Mudd graduates went on to earn Ph.Ds—compared to 16 percent at Harvard.
²⁸
It is not that these two measures of alumni success are the be-all and end-all. But almost any other measure will also turn up big surprises for those who believe in big names. For example, the average medical school applicant from Franklin & Marshall College scored higher on the medical school test than the average applicant from Berkeley, Duke, Dartmouth, Penn, or Northwestern.
²⁹

All this is not to suggest that there are no differences in academic quality between institutions. There are in fact vast differences—but big names are not a reliable guide to those differences. Those big names are often a result of faculty research activity, whose effects on undergraduate teaching are at best questionable.

Even those who concede that educational quality bears little
correlation with institutional prestige often believe, nevertheless, that a big-name degree is a great help in gaining admission to top postgraduate institutions in medicine, law, or other fields. While it is undoubtedly true that officials at the nation’s leading postgraduate institutions have learned from experience which colleges send them the best-prepared students, and that this may well influence admissions decisions, it is also true that deans of the leading law schools ranked Davidson College graduates over the graduates of most Ivy League colleges, and deans of the leading graduate schools of engineering ranked the graduates of Rose-Hulman Institute and Harvey Mudd College among their best students—higher ranked than engineering students from such prestigious institutions as Duke, U.C.L.A., Penn, or the Universities of Texas or Wisconsin.

There are reasons for these anomalies. Academic prestige is usually research prestige, and it is often purchased by the neglect of undergraduate education. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that students from teaching institutions like Davidson or Franklin & Marshall are able to hold their own in competition with students from more prestigious institutions, or even in some cases to excel over students who entered college with better credentials. It may well be, as one academic writer put it, “a small school is often better equipped to deal with the tenuous beginnings of intellectual life.”
³⁰
However, precociously brilliant students may thrive elsewhere. Some of the most prestigious institutions, such as Harvard or M.I.T., may receive such an extraordinary student body that such students can learn a great deal on their own, despite the shortcomings of classroom teaching.

Conversely, at the other extreme, some small colleges may have such cozy student-faculty relationships that the student can remain immature, dependent, or even irresponsible, missing an opportunity to develop fully, either intellectually or as a responsible adult who can meet deadlines, respect rules, and maintain standards. None of these characteristics, which affect the quality of education, is something that can be quantified in a formula or calibrated in a simple ranking.

Because the national media are concentrated in the northeast, colleges in this region get far more attention than comparable (or better) institutions elsewhere. West coast institutions
like Pomona and Harvey Mudd are quite comparable academically to the best institutions on the east coast, and yet they remain relatively obscure nationally. Whitman College, in the Pacific northwest, may be superior academically to Bennington by virtually all the usual indices, and yet Bennington remains far better known. One director of a college placement bureau offers as a geographical “law” of academic visibility: “Any distance west from Washington is twice the same distance north or south.”
³¹

With colleges and universities, even the prices charged are not nearly as indicative of quality as the prices charged for most other goods and services. According to a Carnegie Foundation study, “substantial differences in cost do not necessarily connote significant differences in outcomes.”
³²
Partly this is because tuition is only part of a college’s income, with varying other amounts coming from endowment income, federal or state money, and alumni donations. Some very mediocre institutions charge high tuitions and some top-rated institutions charge much less.

Various other economic factors prevent price and quality from being as closely related as they are outside the academic world. Obviously state financing is one. Another is the widespread availability of financial aid, especially at the most expensive colleges and universities. This means that the net prices actually paid vary much more than the “list prices” shown in college catalogues. That is, the tuition actually paid varies widely from student to student in the same college, as well as among institutions.

In addition to myths, there is also misinformation. Perhaps the most dangerous misinformation are the many rankings of colleges and universities by “quality,” “selectivity,” or other such labels. The most elaborate—and most misleading—of these rankings are published annually by
U.S. News & World Report
magazine and then republished in book form in
America’s Best Colleges
. The fundamental flaw in all these rankings is that no college can possibly be “best” for everyone. Even brothers or sisters may thrive in very different kinds of institutions. It is hard even to imagine what kind of person would be equally at home at Bennington College or at West Point, Reed College or Brigham Young University, Georgia Tech or the Juilliard School of Music.

The atmosphere and personality of colleges vary enormously, quite aside from variations in academic standards and methods. The real problem is to
match
individuals with institutions, not to
rank
institutions. It may be meaningful to say that M.I.T. outranks the Florida Institute of Technology as an engineering school, but many an individual may be able to learn engineering at F.I.T. and unable to learn the same subjects at M.I.T., where these subjects may be taught at a faster pace or in a more abstract and theoretical manner, requiring far greater mastery of advanced mathematics to follow what is being said.