All College Admissions is Rent-Seeking

To read this post, please tell me about a time in which you challenged yourself.

In a rational world, in light of the Supreme Court ending “race-conscious” admissions, California banning legacy admissions at private universities, and similar developments, the entire college admissions bureaucracy would be scrapped.

It won’t, of course. It will only grow, as admissions counselors and admissions officers find new and ever more prying ways to justify their existence—chiefly by reading application essays to ferret out students’ phenotypes without seeming to, like phrenologists wearing blindfolds and thick gloves.

The vast majority of college admissions outcomes are a plug-and-chug algorithm of test scores and GPAs. In the interstices of this system, and with greater concentration at the upper end of the higher ed ecosystem, is a quasi-religious set of rites and rituals designed to make the whole thing seem more meaningful and personal.

In a similar way, most American universities are similar to those of their type: The Ivies are all the same, the famous SLACs are all the same, the unheard-of SLACs are all the same (going broke, that is), R1 flagship state universities are all the same, regional state schools are all the same, and community colleges are all the same. The opportunities for meaningful distinction within these categories are real enough, but practically rare. (The uniqueness of a real outlier like Saint John’s College only shows how predictably similar the other SLACs are to each other. Ditto for traditional faith-based institutions.) Only the American flair for branding gives the appearance of vast variety and uniqueness within each category.

The American college admissions regime is worse than branding. It is a treacly, sentimental fantasy, like a perverted twist on Victorian missionary work: Admission to a university is grace given to those who have suffered but opened their hearts to the blessings of higher education. The smug presumptuousness of college admissions technocrats bears this out: Applicants must tell their life story—a story in which, ideally, the emergence of adult consciousness and the desire to go to college are the same narrative of Bildung—to a committee of high-minded strangers, and hope for the best. This revolting spectacle helps to soothe America’s ambivalence about meritocracy, for which the feudal hierarchies of educational attainment are both symptom and cure.

This regime keeps many people employed doing work which is sanctimonious and mystifying. There is the industry of recruitment or “outreach,” in which enthusiastic spokespeople go to high schools and build up students’ yearning for admission to their institution. It does not matter if those particular students actually come; driving up application numbers is how schools attain “selectivity” and, thus, prestige.

There are statistics wizards who crunch the quantifiable aspects of college admissions. And there are the committees of those who ponder the merits of individual applicants. They are the high clergy of college admissions, who, like Eastern Orthodox priests behind a screen, perform the mysterious sacraments of reading application essays and sifting through applicants’ entire profiles. At least Orthodox icons are more inspiring than college swag, and more conducive to humility.

“Rent-seeking” is a charitable term for the activity of this entire class of university professionals. However, a quick search shows that this term has only been used selectively: as a cudgel against legacy admissions, and in reference to middlemen recruiting applicants from Taiwan. One article from 35 years ago applies the term more broadly.

There is, of course, another way to do all this: The University of California/California State University systems’ pre-2000 “eligibility index,” which more or less automated the entire thing, sorting students according to academic performance and personal preference. There is no reason why a similar system could not be devised across the entire US higher education apparatus. There could even be carve-outs at the most selective institutions for a set number of low test-scorers and low GPAs, to catch the deserving geniuses who faced disadvantages in primary and secondary educational attainment. The entire system could be run out of a single office building.

Individual campus admissions offices could be closed, and office space reallocated. Admissions technocrats could be given jobs that are, for a change, useful to the university’s academic enterprise: cataloging library collections, proofreading faculty and graduate students’ research, setting up laboratories, and checking the university’s many webpages for dead links.

I’m sure they could be adequately trained for any of these jobs, provided they apply for them with an essay about how they’ve overcome adversity.