Two circumstances conspire to make
this an unusually long essay. First, it is D-Day, D being the Roman numeral for 500 and
this being the five hundredth weekly essay I have published on this site since
the appearance of “On Columns, Communists, and Camões” on June 13, 2009. Even if the chiefly remarkable feature of
this performance be its futility, obstinacy, or mere curiosity, racking up a
total word count slightly in excess of Gone
with the Wind, even if falling slightly short of War and Peace, demands a metaphorical pat on the back. Of course patting oneself on the back even
metaphorically is rather awkward, and could easily lead to a metaphorical
dislocated shoulder.
So I’ve
already blown a hundred words on that, and the more important cause of dilation
still lies ahead: the “college admissions” scandal that commanded so much news
during the last week. This is, in the
first place, a topic of almost universal appeal, and it offered a rarely
uncomplicated opportunity to exult in moral superiority and to hate on the
filthy rich with impunity. Furthermore,
I know a lot about the topic and have thought about it; so it offers me the
personal bonus of imagining that my ideas—some about to be shared with you—are
markedly superior to those I have been reading in the press.
The college admissions crisis
obviously begins long before college.
Here’s a story from yesterday’s paper.
The keen competition for entrance to the next freshman class in the
designated “elite” public high schools in New York City—the Yales and MITs of
the system, as it were--yielded a cohort of which only one in ten is black or
Hispanic. Stuyvesant, for example,
accepted 897, of whom seven are
black. (A quarter of the more than a
million students in the City’s public schools are black). Admission to the elite schools has long been
determined by a single difficult entrance exam, as nearly objective as such
things can be, in two subjects: English and math. The utility of any exam can be questioned,
but this one—in addition to being administered with absolute impartiality--is
impressively coherent. English
competency is fundamental to the skills of literacy (reading, writing, and
effective oral communication); math teaches numeracy and is the gateway skill
for the STEM fields. You thus could say
it is a basic test of capacity for high-level work in both the humanities and
the sciences. Appalled, as all of us
surely should be, by the reality revealed in the yearly results, Mayor DeBlasio
suggests as a remedy chucking the
entrance exam in favor of some method more effective in accommodating racial
preference.
I believe the Mayor is a man of
good will and sincerely egalitarian instinct; and I presume that it is pure
political duress that lies behind his dreadful muddle of means and ends. The college admissions fraud that has been in
the papers is a shameful fiasco, though one made psychologically safe for most
of us by the unaffordability of its turpitude.
It is a shock, a disgrace, an embarrassment. But in terms of actual scandal or crisis it
lags far behind the general crisis of American public education. Our high schools vary enormously in quality,
and people know it. That’s why New York
parents will do practically anything to get their kid into Stuyvesant. Meanwhile throughout the country, but
especially in our large cities, schools are failing to prepare young people by
the thousands with the skills and discipline to do anything that our economy
needs enough to pay for. Now that is a scandal. Mr. DeBlasio simply cannot, or dare not,
recommend that we chuck out several hundred ineffective school administrators. And, to be fair, that’s not the root of the
problem either.
Equality of opportunity and
equality of outcomes (aka “equity”) are quite different things, and “fairness”
will not be achieved by fudging the two.
There seems to be an implicit belief in some kind of
free-floating inherent “merit,” untouched by social influences, that will
manifest itself in the college admissions process. That is nonsense. All of us are the sum of our natural
capacities and the efforts that we ourselves and others have expended in
developing them.
I can tell you how to be a
compelling admissions candidate, but you may not want to listen. Start by being born intelligent, then cultivate
your intelligence with wide reading and other demanding intellectual
activities. Live in a household with two
loving parents, both of whom are seriously interested in your educational
progress and willing to devote serious time to its pursuit. Develop some wholesome, demanding and
absorbing interests—sports, playing the oboe, bird watching, that sort of thing—and
pursue them at a high level. Eat regular
family dinners at a set time, and include in your table talk some serious
conversation about serious things. Try
to speak Standard English in complete sentences, and do not shy away from words
of three syllables. And, oh yeah, like,
use “like” only as a preposition, conjunction, or a transitive verb.
This is not satire. I am aware of the decline of the American
family, but aware also of the dangerous popular fantasy that the public schools
can or should replace its unique educational function. I cannot go along with Bernie Sanders’s barmy
idea of “free college for all,” but I am absolutely in favor of a variety of
special, remedial, compensatory, and enrichment programs designed to repair
some of the damage inflicted on young people by the social pathologies of those
who have brought them into the world.
But, please, don’t call the absence of such pathology “unfair”.
This episode of flagrant cheating
by wealthy parents suggests that many people have a very curious notion of the
actual nature of institutions of higher education, and of the actual process of
entry to them. There is much indignation
at the thought that an applicant admitted on the basis of a store-bought SAT
score has violated some rigorously enforced protocol that would have otherwise
guaranteed the success of an objectively “deserving” candidate. In fact there are already so many blind guesses,
fudges, finagles, and socially engineered adjustments involved as to knock that
idea in the head. The slightest experience
in trying to rank-order a list of even ten similar candidates will cure you of
spurious confidence in the objectivity of the exercise. To call the admissions process an inexact
science is to do violence both to science and the concept of exactitude. We can wax indignant about a Yale athletic
coach who feloniously got a house in Florida out of the slack in the system,
but he did not create the slack.
Much scorn has been cast upon
parents who hired SAT-preppers for their kids.
Really? For what other major life trials do we
consider a lack of preparation to be virtuous?
We have managed to create in the college application business an
experience that is an ordeal for most applicants and an actual trauma for many
of them. That is why there is a burgeoning private industry of educational
consultants, advisors, and consultants.
They offer clients strategic advice, sample SAT exams, mock interviews,
critiques of personal essays, and psychological hand-holding. Only some applicants can afford to make use
of these services. Is this unfair, that is to say, an offense
against justice? You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s
ear. Yet people who undertake strenuous
training before trying to climb Mount Everest or auditioning for first violin
in the symphony orchestra tend to have better outcomes than those who do
not. There is a certain contradiction in
the fact that everybody wants to get into an elite school while nobody wants to
be elite.
It’s hard to get into Stanford, but
so what? Few people have an accurate
idea of either the large number of American colleges nor of their extraordinary
variety. My dramatic education in these
matters derives from nearly a decade’s service as a commissioner of the Middle
States accrediting body, when I became aware of all of the colleges in several
populous states. Consciously picking a
low and conservative number, I will say that there are three hundred terrific colleges in this country, most of them
unknown even by name to most high school seniors. How could anyone shed a tear at failing to
gain admission to Duke?
On the one hand you have armies of
parents and counselors desperately trying to get their kids into certain
schools. On the other you have each year
another group of financially beleaguered institutions desperately trying to recruit
enough students to keep in business.
Hampshire College, which early in my career was a trendy, pace-setting,
wave-of-the-future kind of place, is in the process of going belly up. With an endowment of roughly fifty million,
Hampshire is not without resources. But perhaps
a private institution that doesn’t have a minimum of, say, a quarter of a million
per undergraduate might as well close
up shop.
One
emerging attitude that particularly takes me aback is that our private colleges and universities—still
the envy of the world—should adopt admissions policies that take no account of
their history, customs, or traditions.
But think about this for a second.
What sort of place is Harvard, founded 1636? Is it a public amenity like any other? Consider the toilet facilities at Interstate
Highway rest stops; consider the Emergency Room at any hospital. You want and expect such places to exist, and
that they be clean, safe, and available indifferently to absolutely anybody needing
to use them. Then there’s the little
restaurant where you always celebrate your anniversary. You have been on friendly terms with the
proprietors for years. Your children and
theirs were on the same high school athletic teams. Consider the parish church, civic club, political
party, or do-gooder organization to which, on account of your belief in its
ethical mission, you give generously of your money, your time, your leadership
talent, possibly as an elected officer, director, or trustee. These are all public venues. All colleges in theory share the same
mission: the preservation and transmission of knowledge. But the very essence of a college, as its
published propaganda will tell you ad nauseum, is community. Human community
is based in more or less intimate personal relationships, very often extended
over considerable periods of time. In
admitting a freshman class, an institution is grossly remiss if it does not
give serious thought to the nature of its community. That is far from “perpetuating the old boys’
club”—one of the more tedious canards I have heard around here for years. On the whole the Ivy League institutions were
remarkably lithe in evolving from small theological seminaries at the nation’s
founding to huge charities and engines for the redistribution of their wealth
in the form of social capital. The
racialized “affirmative action” of recent decades is but one aspect of the
extraordinary role they have played over the generations. Maintaining some sense of communal continuity
over decades of revolutionary change requires a balancing act. It requires, too, abandoning
pseudo-scientific pretensions about a process of admission along with the odd
neo-Bolshevik notion that the virtues we believe to be inherent in the
education we offer our current students become despicable in our alumni. So if old
Gotrocks Schnakenfuss of the class of ’24 thought so much of his education that
he gave you twenty-four million dollars for scholarship grants for penurious
undergraduates, that should not be a strike against his accomplished but far
from penurious great-granddaughter now a supplicant at your gates.
