The aftermath of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) has put a spotlight on the capriciousness of admissions practices at selective colleges. In SFFA, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. After immense consternation about the impact of the ruling, dire warnings, and earnest discussion about how colleges should respond, the truth is that we have limited insight into what’s changed, how colleges are actually responding, or whether they’re even abiding by the law.
Here’s what we do know: At MIT, black and Latino first-year enrollment plunged, while the number of first-year Asian-American students spiked. At Wellesley, black student enrollment fell by nearly half and that of Latino students by almost a third. At Boston University, where the share of black freshmen fell by two-thirds, university president Melissa Gilliam termed the numbers “concerning and disappointing.” Meanwhile, Yale, Princeton, and Duke saw a drop in Asian-American enrollment and no change in black enrollment.
Selective college admissions is a big black box, an opaque system neatly hidden behind the cloak of “holistic admissions.”What’s going on? Are the admissions departments at MIT, Wellesley, and BU staffed by bigots who’d been covertly awaiting an excuse to turn away black and Latino applicants? Is Yale using “holistic admissions” to circumvent the law and micro-manage the racial makeup of the student body? Are some selective colleges using Chief Justice Roberts’s “essay loophole” (allowing the use of race-conscious application prompts) to sidestep the law?
The answer is that we just don’t know. As has long been the case, selective college admissions is a big black box, an opaque system neatly hidden behind the cloak of “holistic admissions.” As a result, applicants have no way of knowing how they’ll be judged or what criteria really matter. Meanwhile, policymakers and watchdogs are in the dark about whether colleges are complying with laws relating to race-based admissions or legacy preferences. Indeed, it’s only in extraordinary cases—as with the Harvard lawsuit or the 2019 “Varsity Blues” scandal—that legal discovery has illuminated corrupt conduct and illegal machinations.
The Problem with Black-Box Admissions
The presidents of selective colleges are fond of lecturing the nation about equity, even as they run a cartel of exclusive, lavishly endowed institutions. Their admissions regime favors students who can afford pricey application coaches or whose highly educated parents carefully “review” their personal essays.
There’s good reason to be concerned about the fairness and rigor of the application process. The 2019 Varsity Blues investigation and the SFFA case highlighted just how rife college can be with instances of corruption and self-dealing. Last year, over 60 percent of college students reported lying on their applications about such topics as their high-school activities, their personal experiences, and even their race. Heck, 30 percent of applicants said they’d faked their letters of recommendation.
Despite the accumulation of evidence regarding the extent of troubling conduct, colleges still refuse to reveal detailed admissions criteria. As a result, students have to turn to private sources like Transparency in Admissions, which uses snippets of available data to reverse-engineer a rough approximation of the admissions black box. Based on data squeezed out of Harvard only during litigation, Transparency in Admissions co-founder Michael Goldstein observed that applicants get a huge boost from being a wealthy donor’s kid or a recruited athlete. Meanwhile, whole categories of applicants can spend a fortune on test prep, consultants, and application fees but have a two-percent chance (or less!) of being admitted to many selective institutions. The black box is bad for youth well-being and parental pocketbooks, not to mention oversight and public trust.
Selective colleges use admissions policies to help pad their coffers, extend their influence, and curry favor among elites.Selective colleges have a track record of dubious conduct and show little inclination to change. Just like any exclusive country club, selective colleges use admissions policies to help pad their coffers, extend their influence, and curry favor among elites. And colleges have a First Amendment right to free association, giving them great discretion in determining whom they admit so long as they’re private actors—just like those country clubs. But the rules are different when public funds are at stake. Then the selling of access or corrupt conduct morphs from a private concern to a public one.
Time for Some Sunlight
When it comes to home loans or healthcare, the federal government insists on heightened transparency about the treatment of applicants or beneficiaries as a requirement for providers to collect public funds or participate in public programs. The same norm should apply to colleges, who collectively pocket a fortune each year in taxpayer-funded aid, subsidies, grants, and loans. In short, it’s time to shine some sunlight on the black box of selective admissions.
If colleges wish to be eligible for public funds (including federally funded student loans), they should be required to establish transparent admissions qualifications and annually report anonymized data, audited and confirmed by a third party, on all relevant characteristics of the applicant pool and of admitted students. Each institution should be required to report a specified array of summary data on its website, along with information on the percentage of applicants admitted broken out by demographic subgroups, legacy and first-generation status, and so forth. Whatever colleges say about their admissions process, this will allow observers to judge the end result for themselves.
Colleges should also be required to report the relevant data files to the Department of Education (or an alternate agency). Congress should mandate that this material be easily accessible to analysts, researchers, and watchdogs. Such reporting would be a powerful blow for transparency and public accountability. It might even help college leaders start to rebuild some of the public’s collapsing trust, at a time when 68 percent of the public thinks higher education is headed in the wrong direction.
This isn’t as stark a departure from current practice as it may seem. Eligibility for federal aid already requires colleges to accept a raft of conditions—including a number of rules regarding admissions—such as policies that prohibit paying recruiting bonuses to admissions staff. This can best be understood as an expansion of those safeguards.
Even putatively “private” colleges collect enormous sums of public dollars.To those who’d say, “Colleges know what they’re doing; this is a private affair,” the problem is that this is decidedly not a private affair. Even putatively “private” colleges collect enormous sums of public dollars. In 2021, selective private institutions including MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Duke each pocketed more than a billion dollars in public funds. In the five-year period between 2018 and 2022, the Ivy League alone collected $33 billion in federal grants and contracts, along with $12 billion in special tax treatment. Indeed, for every dollar that Ivy League institutions collect for research, they charge taxpayers an additional 64 cents in overhead. In short, these nominally “private” institutions are vacuuming up vast sums in taxpayer dollars. They should act the part.
Now, selective institutions will raise a number of objections to this proposal. They will complain that having to document their admissions process is unduly burdensome, that sharing this information will force them to divulge trade secrets, or that it’s difficult to reduce “holistic” admissions to measurable criteria. On the first, any alleged “burden” from transparency is a trade-off that should already be part and parcel of accessing taxpayer funds. On the second, it’s deeply problematic that applicants don’t know how students are selected and must pay consultants (typically former admissions insiders) a hefty premium just to understand the process. Transparency would therefore be profoundly democratizing. On the third, selective institutions already have systematic ways of organizing and comparing applicant data. This rule would simply require that they share an anonymized version of those materials and tabulations.
Selective institutions that reject transparency will have alternatives. They can throw open their doors to all applicants (like their open-access brethren). If that yields too many students, they can use a lottery to manage the numbers. They can also do what I’ve previously urged—identify qualified applicants on the basis of clear, public criteria and then randomly admit from the pool of qualifiers. And they can always decide to stop directly or indirectly pocketing public dollars via grants, aid, or loans.
If an institution chooses to selectively admit applicants while collecting public funds, however, some reasonable transparency is in order. Selective colleges have a right to employ an opaque admissions process and keep it hidden in the shadows, but they should do so on their own dime.
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.