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From the issue dated June 29, 2001
College Admissions: Why Selectivity Matters
By WILLIAM C. DOWLING
This spring, The Wall Street Journal caused quite a stir with an article about admissions at what used to be called safety schools--those colleges and universities that, while they weren't the hardest places in the world to get into, provided a reasonable amount of prestige to students and parents from middle-class families. The point of the article was that a lot of the safety schools are no longer sure things for students with high SAT scores and a solid record of extracurricular activities. Duke University, for instance, which used to be considered a classic safety school for students who didn't get into Ivy League institutions, now has an acceptance rate of 26 percent, in the same range as Ivies like Cornell and Penn.
Predictably, administrators at institutions that are still relatively easy to get into, according to the Journal's statistics, showed impatience with the idea of ranking colleges by selectivity of admissions. The whole notion, said David Smith, the vice president for enrollment management at Syracuse University (whose acceptance rate is 58 percent), smacks of "an elitist attitude" that reflects little more than an irrational "fascination with selectivity." His implication is that the quality of education at a college or university has nothing -- or very little -- to do with selective admissions.
In one sense, Mr. Smith is right. It's easy enough to imagine a case in which huge numbers of mediocre students apply to a mediocre institution, producing spectacularly selective admissions in spite of the institution's undistinguished faculty, dumbed-down curriculum, and general absence of intellectual seriousness in undergraduate life. Something like that actually happens at so-called lifestyle universities, where the attraction of the institution may have more to do with the opportunity to go surfing or get out on the ski slopes than to study Aristotle or read Shakespeare.
In a more important sense, however, Mr. Smith is dead wrong. The reason goes a long way toward explaining the general confusion about college admissions that reigns among applicants, their parents, and even many people inside higher education. The essential point is this: Those who complain about elitism are implicitly appealing to what could be called the Studio 54 model of college admissions. Studio 54, a fictionalized version of which was made notorious in Whit Stillman's film The Last Days of Disco, was a 1970's disco famous for letting people in only if they met wholly arbitrary standards of fashionableness.
The Studio 54 model has a long history in American life, and it is elitist in the bad sense: It uses criteria that have no intrinsic merit to admit or exclude people. An earlier version of the model was what might be called country-club selectivity, which involved the exclusion of people because they were Jewish or African-American, or spoke with the wrong accent.
The Studio 54 model, though, does not apply to college admissions today. At institutions that can choose which students to enroll, staff members in the admissions office don't make decisions based on frivolous or arbitrary grounds. On the contrary, admissions committees at selective colleges typically spend hours arguing about whether Candidate A, who has very high SAT's and who won a national violin competition, is a better choice than Candidate B, who has even higher SAT's but no more than a normal range of talents and activities.
Still, there is a far more important reason why the Studio 54 model -- and the cries of elitism that it provokes -- gives the wrong picture of college admissions. It is that the quality of your college education depends, to a real and important degree, on the quality of the other students you sit with in class.
If the Studio 54 model gives a false picture of selective admissions, what is the correct model? In more than 30 years of classroom teaching, I've found nothing that better captures the reality of college education than the model of the symphony orchestra, in which the performance of every musician depends in a complex and continuous way on the performance of everyone else. That is especially true from the perspective of the professor, who is, in effect, the conductor of the orchestra. Teaching a class of gifted and serious students is a bit like being Seiji Ozawa standing in front of the Boston Symphony Orchestra: They're going to make you look good no matter what you do. That is the reason why small, selective liberal-arts colleges, for instance, though they may have faculty members who are less intellectually distinguished than their counterparts at major research institutions, are legitimately able to claim that they provide excellent teaching.
To understand the genuine importance of selectivity, all you have to do is imagine that you are a bright high-school senior applying to college. If you get into Harvard or Yale, it's reasonable to expect that the classmates you sit next to in "Modern European History" or "Philosophy 301" will be the intellectual equivalent of the musicians who play in the New York Philharmonic or the Cleveland Orchestra. If you get into one of the places that The Wall Street Journal lists as "first-tier backup schools," like Colgate University, you can look forward to the equivalent of playing in a good regional orchestra. Your fellow musicians may not be the best in the world, but they're well trained and competent, and in their company you will be able to play real music.
At an institution with open admissions, on the other hand, your experience will be like that of a violinist or a clarinetist sentenced to play with a group of people who have walked in off the street and been handed an instrument. They may be tone-deaf, they may not read music, they may not know how to get a sound out of the oboes someone has just put into their hands -- but the selection process has made them fully accredited members of the orchestra. The problem is obvious: No matter how gifted you are or how many thousands of hours you've devoted to mastering your own instrument, you are not going to be able to make music in their company.
The symphony-orchestra model explains an otherwise mysterious aspect of college experience. We are used to saying that a hugely important part of college is the education that takes place outside the classroom, in the company of other students. Everyone who remembers college as a period of intellectual growth is also likely to remember dorm-room arguments that lasted long into the night about Wittgenstein or medieval theology or the meaning of a Nabokov novel. Some will claim that they learned more in those discussions than in their courses. But the enriched intellectual atmosphere in which those midnight discussions take place exists only at institutions with a selective admissions policy, for only such a policy can bring bright students together to educate one another.
Today, with the widespread increase in remedial-level instruction, critics frequently complain that institutions with open admissions have become glorified high schools rather than real universities. Whether or not the complaint is entirely justified, it is certainly true that such institutions offer only an oxygen-starved intellectual atmosphere to bright and highly motivated students.
The symphony-orchestra model also explains why, even at selective institutions, educational quality may be extremely precarious. In The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton University Press, 2001), James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen show that universities like Princeton and colleges like Williams have been seriously diluting the quality of their student bodies by admitting less-qualified applicants to play on their sports teams, normally through set-asides designated by varsity coaches. The symphony-orchestra model permits us to see why such institutions have been able to get away with the practice for so long, and why, as the reaction to Shulman and Bowen's book among Ivy League administrators demonstrates, it is nonetheless a matter of serious concern. Every orchestra at the level of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic can carry a certain percentage of less-talented performers. But there is a limit. When the level of the entire orchestra begins to go down, the really gifted musicians will, inevitably, begin to think about going elsewhere.
Yet the most important thing about the symphony-orchestra model is that it shows why Mr. Smith's complaints about elitism are misplaced in relation to selective colleges and universities. Once you have seen that college is a place where the intellectual performance of every student necessarily depends in a real and continuous way on the performance of every other, the "fascination with selectivity" that Mr. Smith talks about so impatiently makes perfect sense. The attraction of the New York Philharmonic for really gifted musicians is the opportunity to play in the company of others as talented as themselves.
We gain an essential perspective on the debate about selective college admissions when we ask why nobody in the United States ever uses the word "elitism" about self-evidently selective pursuits like music or sports. Everyone seems to understand intuitively why the Boston Symphony or the Chicago Bulls try to get the best players they possibly can, and why the most gifted musicians and athletes work so hard to be chosen by them.
Any discussion of selective colleges taps into a deep American uneasiness about social class or status. But that uneasiness has no more legitimate a role in discussions of college admissions than it does in discussions of how the Cleveland Orchestra selects its members.
A national discussion of college admissions ought to focus on how to provide the highest quality of education to the greatest number of intellectually motivated students. That is especially true in public education, where our obligation to bright students from less-than-wealthy backgrounds is strongest. Yet it is precisely in public education, where the political pressure toward open admissions is most relentless, that charges of elitism are most likely to be thrown around recklessly. That is when it is salutary to realize that the irresponsible use of the term is a sign that we are not really talking about college admissions but about something else.
William C. Dowling is a professor of English at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. His most recent book is Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson (University of South Carolina Press, 1999).
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