{"id":178,"date":"2017-01-03T09:25:18","date_gmt":"2017-01-03T09:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/?p=178"},"modified":"2017-01-03T17:34:40","modified_gmt":"2017-01-03T17:34:40","slug":"the-madness-of-american-college-admissions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/2017\/01\/the-madness-of-american-college-admissions\/","title":{"rendered":"The Madness of American College Admissions"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I finished high school, I wasn\u2019t a particularly interesting person. I didn\u2019t have many discernible hobbies or interests. I played chess, but not very enthusiastically; I wasn\u2019t even in the better half of chess players in my own club. I liked \u201creading\u201d, but my tastes were eclectic and protean. I played no instrument. I proudly detested sports. I didn\u2019t take part in any foreign exchange, and never visited foreign countries beyond family trips. I learned no foreign languages beyond English, and even that I dropped in favour of Latin. I took part in one summer school, only because my high school pushed me into it. I won a state Latin competition, but wasn\u2019t particularly invested in Latin. I did no meaningful amount of \u201cvolunteer\u201d or charitable work. I spent lots of time with my local church, where I helped organise events for children and teenagers. But that\u2019s just what our church did; it wasn\u2019t particularly glamorous.<\/p>\n

So when I finished high school, my list of provable life achievements was remarkably short. But luckily that didn\u2019t matter, because German universities do not care. I did well in school, and I could cobble together a not-terrible letter explaining why I liked philosophy. Most German universities simply select on the basis of GPA (Abiturnote<\/em>), and I got places at all the universities I wanted to go. (Indeed, I only applied to three.) Because the system is transparent and uncomplicated, I never much worried about my \u201cCV\u201d before university. I didn\u2019t have to; the system of applying to university wasn\u2019t mad.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Whenever I read about American college admissions, particularly at elite schools like Harvard and Yale, I have a feeling that there is no way in hell I would have made it to those universities. This article<\/a> in the New Republic<\/em> is particularly insightful. The selection criteria at Yale certainly sound like an elaborate put-down of my own achievements as a teenager. I wasn\u2019t a \u201cmusician in the highest category of promise\u201d, or really an \u201cX in the highest category of promise\u201d relative to any X other than academic achievement. I didn\u2019t have \u201cfive or six items on [my] list of extracurriculars\u201d which, we hear, already isn\u2019t enough. I am confident that I would have been judged to have \u201cno spark\u201d, and I am not sure I would qualify as \u201ca team-builder\u201d, whatever that is (perhaps it\u2019s just a synonym for being American). Furthermore, you have to be a \u201cwell-rounded\u201d or a \u201cpointy\u201d person to be considered as a potential Yale student (but if pointy, then really<\/em> pointy). But I certainly wasn\u2019t either. I was just a normal teenager: awkward, incomplete, unsure.<\/p>\n

Fair enough\u2014perhaps I\u2019m not Yale material. But if I\u2019m not, then I feel that I\u2019ve just been dismissed on the basis of strange, largely irrelevant features. Generally, I find the idea that \u201cpersonal qualities\u201d should play any role in university admissions, certainly that they should play a primary<\/em> role, troublesome. There are some obvious worries. First, most of the demanded \u201cpersonal qualities\u201d closely correlate with being from the middle-to-upper class. To become the kind of \u201cinteresting\u201d person Yale demands, you first and foremost need parents with the money and\/or time to provide you with the opportunities to become such a person. (Admittedly, I am from such a background, so maybe I was just lazy.) That\u2019s hardly a new point, but powerful nonetheless. In the article, William Deresiewicz suggests a number of ways of mitigating the impact of this imbalance (limit the amount of extracurriculars applicants can mention, discount other achievements such as foreign trips altogether, etc.)<\/p>\n

A second worry is that the type of \u201cpersonal qualities\u201d that Yale is looking for\u2014if Deresiewicz\u2019 piece is to be believed\u2014strike me as skewed and overly specific. They select a certain type of person: the hyper-motivated over-achiever who engages in a list of socially recognised activities (music, sports, volunteering). Or they\u2019re \u201cpointy\u201d characters, which I guess means nerds and other people obsessed over a specific issue. But many of the most interesting, most intelligent, most impressive people I\u2019ve met during my undergraduate didn\u2019t really fit any of these descriptions. That\u2019s because what made them interesting isn\u2019t easily measured in a list of \u201cextracurriculars\u201d.<\/p>\n

More generally, I find it strange that universities\u2014certainly public universities\u2014should play arbiter on what counts as an \u201cinteresting\u201d or \u201cwell-rounded\u201d personality. Even if Yale didn\u2019t have the exclusive, absurdly high-powered and skewed version of desirable \u201cpersonal qualities\u201d that it seems to have, it would feel awkward for me to apply to a university where I knew my personal qualities were judged at all.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been involved in Oxford admissions, and I\u2019ve trudged through applications by the type of accomplished teenager who applies to elite schools. And my impression was that most of them were precisely that\u2014teenagers. Teenagers who have experienced 2-3 years of semi-adulthood, who are still in the process of finding their own voice and interests, whose horizons are quite naturally limited and partial. I was quite glad that I didn\u2019t have to judge them on their \u201cpersonal qualities\u201d; I would have also found it difficult, and moreover, inappropriate<\/em> to do so.<\/p>\n

Just as an example: I know my own \u201cletter of motivation\u201d, and those of some select friends, and of the Oxford applicants I read. It is a terrifying thought that anyone\u2019s future should depend on engaging in this weirdest of all forms of literature; and luckily, in Germany and the UK it generally doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Another question is: when do we want the capitalist rat race to start? I spent much of my high school obsessing over Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kant (in this order; don\u2019t ask); I dallied away lots of time planning events for children at church; I programmed this-and-that computer program without ever really getting anywhere; in short, I grew up without the kinds of pressure which come from knowing that you\u2019ll be judged on your achievements (beyond the academic) and \u201cpersonal qualities\u201d once you finish high school.<\/p>\n

This is not to defend laziness, or the dallying that I indulged in as a teenager. British and German pupils on the whole, I suspect, are not less or more engaged in \u201cextracurriculars\u201d. But the form and nature of these activities changes significantly, I suspect, if they\u2019re not already part of a competition to get to the top.<\/p>\n

What underlies all of these objections is, of course, a deeper disagreement about the point of universities. I tend to think that, given the kind of good that universities dispense (liberal education), access to it should be guided by individuals\u2019 capacity to profit from, and excel in, that type of good. Given the kind of societies we live in, university education, certainly elite university education, also bestows other, unrelated benefits such as career success. This means that beside merit, access to (elite) universities should also be guided by other considerations, such as justice and equality. How to balance these two is a difficult question. There\u2019s also the practical question of how we estimate academic ability; \u201cpersonal qualities\u201d (though of a much broader, differently focussed kind) might correlate with academic ability.<\/p>\n

But ultimately, merit and distributional fairness are the guiding concerns on this picture; selection on the basis of \u201cpersonal qualities\u201d isn\u2019t. Sometimes I\u2019ve heard that diversity is important in university admissions. Insofar as socio-economic and ethnic diversity are concerned, I agree, insofar as these look like dimensions relevant to justice. But I find it hard to believe that beyond diversity of these kinds, diversity \u201cin character\u201d or \u201cpersonal qualities\u201d should somehow play a role in admissions. University isn\u2019t like a reality show where it matters that everyone has a distinctly interesting backstory.<\/p>\n

The German-British (continental?) system in which university places are distributed almost exclusively on the basis of tested (Germany) or perceived (UK) academic ability certainly has its own problems. Personal interviews in particular\u2014towards which Oxbridge admissions are heavily slanted\u2014are not the panacea they\u2019re sometimes made out to be, as they tend to reinforce the implicit biases of interviewers. Nor is \u201cGPA only\u201d the perfect solution\u2014in its extreme (say, Chinese) forms, it is certainly worse than the American system. But all things considered, I\u2019m glad that I never had to apply to American (elite) colleges. European universities often look enviously at the achievements of American elite universities, and try to copy them in many ways; but I would suggest that they ignore how those universities select their students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I finished high school, I wasn\u2019t a particularly interesting person. I didn\u2019t have many discernible hobbies or interests. I played chess, but not very enthusiastically; I wasn\u2019t even in the better half of chess players in my own club. I liked \u201creading\u201d, but my tastes were eclectic and protean. I played no instrument. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions\/185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}