Who Gets In and Why

A Year Inside College Admissions

Jeffrey Selingo

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781982116316
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Amministrazione nella didattica

From award-winning higher education journalist and New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Selingo comes a revealing look from inside the admissions office—one that identifies surprising strategies that will aid in the college search. Getting into a top-ranked college has never seemed more impossible, with acceptance rates at some elite universities dipping into the single digits. In Who Gets In and Why, journalist and higher education expert Jeffrey Selingo dispels entrenched notions of how to compete and win at the admissions game, and reveals that teenagers and parents have much to gain by broadening their notion of what qualifies as a "good college." Hint: it's not all about the sticker on the car window.Selingo, who was embedded in three different admissions offices—a selective private university, a leading liberal arts college, and a flagship public campus—closely observed gatekeepers as they made their often agonizing and sometimes life-changing decisions. He also followed select students and their parents, and he traveled around the country meeting with high school counselors, marketers, behind-the-scenes consultants, and college rankers.While many have long believed that admissions is merit-based, rewarding the best students, Who Gets In and Why presents a more complicated truth, showing that "who gets in" is frequently more about the college's agenda than the applicant. In a world where thousands of equally qualified students vie for a fixed number of spots at elite institutions, admissions officers often make split-second decisions based on a variety of factors—like diversity, money, and, ultimately, whether a student will enroll if accepted.One of the most insightful books ever about "getting in" and what higher education has become, Who Gets In and Why not only provides an unusually intimate look at how admissions decisions get made, but guides prospective students on how to honestly assess their strengths and match with the schools that will best serve their interests.

PART ONE

FALL: Recruitment Season

1 Selling a College The Endless Pursuit of Students

The glossy college brochure. It’s become a rite of passage for American teenagers. So many over the years that they weigh down the mail carriers, fill boxes in bedrooms, cover kitchen tables.

Colleges would eventually have found their way into our mailboxes—and later into our email boxes—no matter what, but every innovation needs its Thomas Edison, the person who sees around the corner and speeds change up. For college marketing that man was Bill Royall.

The moment that changed everything took place on a spring day in 1988 at a conference having nothing to do with colleges. Bill Royall’s direct mail firm in Richmond, Virginia, didn’t have any higher education clients back then; he worked with politicians and with nonprofit organizations that needed to raise money. He had come to Washington, D.C., to talk with people who ran New England summer camps.

The camps wanted to expand their geographic reach, and they invited Royall to the meeting to talk about how direct mail might help in attracting new families. While political campaigns were Royall’s focus, he told the summer camp leaders that direct mail was increasingly an effective tool for selling all kinds of products. There was no difference between hawking a candidate for Congress and peddling a summer camp to parents. Better data and technology, he said, allowed mailing lists to be correlated with demographics and statistics from a variety of sources.

But Royall’s pitch that day fell flat. “They weren’t interested, at all,” he remembered.

After the speech, as Royall waited for the elevator at the Capital Hilton, a man approached him. He introduced himself as Robert Jones, the admissions director at Hampden-Sydney College, a private all-men’s college in Virginia. He had heard Royall’s speech and asked if he had ever managed mailings for colleges. “We didn’t have any clients in higher education,” Royall recalled telling him, “but there was no reason we couldn’t.”

A few months later, Hampden-Sydney hired Royall & Company. When Bill Royall started digging into the college’s marketing strategy, he was stunned not only by how the Virginia campus recruited students but also by what seemed to be common practices among many other schools, as well. Colleges purchased names of high schoolers much as they do today, but they were buying what Royall considered tiny quantities, limited to the names of juniors. Hampden-Sydney, for instance, bought only the names of students enrolled in private high schools. Most of all, Royall found that too many colleges waited for students to contact them instead of flooding the market with mailings to gin up interest.

The campus brochure, of course, existed long before Bill Royall signed up Hampton-Sydney as his first college customer. What Royall perfected was making the colorful college “viewbook,” as it’s known, as commonplace in the mailboxes of American teenage homes as an L.L.Bean catalog—and then ensuring the colleges he represented were on the top of the pile. Whether you call it junk mail, spam, or propaganda, generations of high school students and their parents have been inundated with images of perfectly manicured campuses and poetic promises of supportive professors because Royall and those who followed his lead persuaded impressionable seventeen-year-olds that a college actually wanted them.

But what the schools really desired were students to apply in order to boost application numbers and make the colleges look popular to other teenagers, alumni, and the rankings. Sure, some applicants would get accepted, but the more who applied and the fewer who got in, the better for the school’s reputation.

If you’re a high school student or a parent of one, don’t be easily enamored or swayed by all the mail colleges send to your home or your email box. As you’ll come to see, while there is a science to why you’re getting so much, some of the mail is purely random. What colleges are really doing with that mail is filling the top of their “recruitment funnel,” hoping that further down the pipeline they’ll receive enough applications to send enough admits to get enough Yeses from seniors to fill their dorm beds and classroom seats.

For you, the would-be applicant, the first brochure or email message you get is only the beginning of how a college’s agenda ultimately drives the admissions process.

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College admissions is a big business. Colleges and universities spend an estimated $10 billion annually on recruiting students—mostly with old-fashioned direct mail and email, using tactics not much different than those of credit card companies and clothing retailers. Yet at its core, college admissions remains defined by rituals developed in the middle of the last century for a far smaller undergraduate population and for students who tended to stay closer to home than their modern counterparts. If you’re a parent and marvel at how different your kid’s college search is from your own, consider that it’s based on a system designed primarily for their grandparents’ generation.

In the years around World War II, students typically applied to one school, and most colleges admitted anyone who graduated from high school. Colleges we refer to today as elite depended heavily on feeder high schools, usually boarding schools, where officials understood the academic standards and knew the student body. Until the 1950s, colleges didn’t have an admissions office to speak of. There were no admissions deans. No viewbooks the size of catalogs mailed unsolicited to would-be students. No official campus tours. Instead an administrator split his time between admissions and academic duties with the help of a clerical worker.

By the 1960s, the modern admissions infrastructure started to take shape, the result of more high school students knocking on the doors of colleges. The number of undergraduates more than doubled in the decade baby boomers arrived on campuses, to 8 million by 1969. In response, states expanded public campuses, turning former “normal schools” and “teachers’ colleges” into regional universities and building new college campuses to accommodate the growth. The University of California alone opened three new campuses in the 1960s.

With increased choices for students, public and private colleges began competing for them, shifting the admissions conversation from recruitment to selection. In 1959, the College Board published for the first time what had been previously a closely guarded secret: how many applications a school received and how many students it accepted. The term “selectivity” entered the lexicon of college admissions. “Once admissions statistics became public,” Elizabeth Duffy and Idana Goldberg wrote in Crafting a Class, a history of college admissions, “they came to signify a college’s quality.”

As high school students learned about acceptance rates, they began applying to multiple schools to play it safe. Such shopping worried admissions officers. They were concerned about the “growing hysteria over getting into college,” as the director of admissions at Ohio’s Hiram College put it in 1961—a laughable statement today since even the most elite colleges then weren’t as selective as they are now. But the truth is that colleges were concerned with their own sanity rather than that of the applicants. Multiple applications prompted unease within admissions offices, which until then had never developed models to predict which applicants would enroll because usually everyone accepted came.

But even as admissions officers complained about the rising application volume, they stoked the fire to keep fueling the numbers. They did so by going on more high school visits to woo counselors who they worried would start discouraging students from applying to colleges with declining acceptance rates.

Even so, one tactic remained largely unused by colleges until the 1970s: direct marketing.

To admissions officers, unsolicited mail and even advertising were dirty words, corporate approaches used to lure customers. Colleges were even reluctant to use the term “recruiting,” since that indicated they might be desperate for students. They preferred to call it “school visiting” instead. In general, colleges tended to wait for students to come to them.

When Jack Maguire started as Boston College’s admissions dean in the fall of 1971, he sat with his secretary to watch what she did when a prospective student called requesting information about the school. “She took out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope, dictated the name and address on it from the phone, stuffed the envelope and put it in the out-basket,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, aren’t you going to keep a record of that name?’ and she said, ‘No, if they’re interested, they’ll apply and then we’ll have a record.’ ”

That same year, the College Board offered a new service to campuses that would, over the subsequent decades, revolutionize how millions of high schoolers searched for colleges. It was called the Student Search Service, and it sold the names and addresses of test takers—in other words, prospective students—to admissions offices. The service got off to a slow start. Colleges didn’t think they needed to market to students. But as the 1980s began, attitudes shifted. “Ten years ago schools that were actively marketing were seen as hucksters,” Lee Stetson, the dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania told the New York Times in 1984. “Now everyone has to do it.”

The last wave of the baby boom generation was leaving higher education. Demographics are destiny for colleges, and analysts projected that the number of U.S. students graduating from high school would shrink for much of the next decade and beyond. Schools needed to fill the classrooms and dorms they had built for the baby boomers, and marketing consultants such as Bill Royall were ready to help them do it.

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When Bill Royall got to work at Hampden-Sydney College, he took a page from the playbook he was already using to raise money for politicians and nonprofits.

The first approach he suggested was to add a P.S. to the letter to prospective students. Hampden-Sydney’s admissions director resisted the idea, worried it would look as if he hadn’t thought through what he’d written. Royall finally persuaded him to try it out with an A/B test. The P.S. letter performed better; more students who received that letter ended up applying.

Other new ideas followed, each one validated with a randomized experiment. One-page letters instead of two. Sending to juniors in high school as well as seniors. Window envelopes to speed up the mailing process so envelopes didn’t have to be matched with letters. An “offer” of free admissions tips if students returned the reply card.

“Everyone was resistant to the offer,” Royall told me. “It sounded cheesy, they said. It wouldn’t generate good inquiries from students. We told them more inquiries could get them better inquiries.”

Later, Royall convinced his clients to allow teenagers to mail those cards to a centralized facility run by his company to speed up the process even further and to better track responses. This was after Royall discovered some colleges stored inquiries from high school sophomores in a closet for up to a year before entering them in their databases because they couldn’t keep up with the responses. Most colleges were accustomed to using small consulting firms headed by former academics to run their marketing campaigns, and some colleges even mailed their own materials. Speed often wasn’t a priority until Royall came along.

Royall was first intrigued by direct marketing as an advertising tactic when he was a college student in the late 1960s and volunteered for statewide political campaigns in Virginia. By 1976, he was running the statewide election effort for President Gerald Ford in Virginia, the only southern state Ford won. The following year Royall helped elect the state’s new Republican governor by pioneering a segmentation analysis that sent materials to voters based on the issues that most appealed to them. Such data-driven segmentation was beginning to permeate every facet of marketing consumer products. By the end of the 1970s, Royall left the governor’s office, where he was working as a senior aide, to head up a direct mail company in Richmond.

By July 1992, Royall had about a half dozen higher education customers. Politics was still his passion, however. On July 16, 1992, he sat in a hotel suite in New York City, watching Bill Clinton on television accept the Democratic nomination for president. On a table in front of Royall was a letter he’d written hours earlier with excerpts from the speech that the Arkansas governor had signed. The following morning, that letter with a New York City return address was mailed to millions of Clinton supporters around the country. It would become one of the most successful political fundraising appeals of its time.

If he had wanted, Royall could have cornered the political fund-raising market. But in the early 1990s, colleges were facing even deeper enrollment troubles than during the previous decade, the result of a decline in American births in the 1970s. Schools needed outside help to run their admissions marketing operations, and increasingly they were turning to consultants. In 1995, Royall decided the future of his business wasn’t in politics, but higher education.

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If you’re a high school student deluged with mail from colleges on a daily basis, it’s because the College Board has your name. Most people know the College Board as the owner of the SAT. Founded in 1900, the organization counts some six thousand colleges, high schools, and nonprofit groups among its members. While legally a nonprofit, it often feels and acts like a giant corporation. It collected one billion dollars in revenue in 2017, according to its federal tax forms, mostly in fees for the SAT and AP tests.

The idea of selling the names and addresses of test takers started with a noble intent—to increase access to college by putting information in the hands of students who historically didn’t go. But as campuses competed aggressively for new undergraduates in the 1980s, peddling names turned into a moneymaker. By then, the College Board was selling 30 million names a year, at 14 cents a name and grossing $4 million.

In the 1990s, marketing consultants urged colleges to cast wider nets to find would-be applicants, upping the number of names purchased yet again. Then in the last decade, as email marketing and year-round outreach was introduced earlier in students’ high school careers, the College Board expanded further, selling names as many times as it could. “There might be 100 of us all paying for the same name,” said Michael Sexton, the former dean of admissions at Oregon’s Lewis & Clark College.

In 2006, the College Board sold 60 million names. By 2010, 80 million names were licensed, even though only 5.2 million students took the SAT and PSAT that year. Exactly how much name-selling has grown since is unclear. The College Board refuses to disclose how many names it now sells through “search,” as the practice is commonly called in the world of admissions.

Here’s what the College Board would tell me: search is bigger than ever. It sells names to nearly 2,000 colleges and scholarship organizations, up from 1,600 a decade ago. A student’s name is sold, on average, 18 times over her high school career, and some names have been purchased more than 70 times—all at a cost now of 45 cents a name, each time it’s requested among those test takers who opt in (students have the choice to participate). While the College Board was the first to sell names, they are far from the only one doing so these days. One survey of admissions officers found that they buy prospects from over a dozen sources, although the lists from the College Board remain the most popular, with the PSAT typically supplying freshman, sophomore, and junior names, and the SAT senior names.

In the pre-Internet days, the College Board released names twice a year; now it offers new names fifteen times during the year, turning the pursuit of students into a year-round effort. Years ago, the fall of junior year was early enough for most colleges to start their outreach. But for competitive reasons, schools now want to scope out students even sooner. As a result, schools have stepped up recruitment of high school sophomores. Today, 9 out of every 10 colleges purchase names of sophomores.

When colleges buy names, they can filter the purchase by a variety of factors. An admissions office, for example, might order the names of men with PSAT test scores above 1200 who live in Pennsylvania and want to major in the humanities. This again is where a college’s agenda—and not the talent or accomplishments of students—drives the search buy. A college isn’t looking to send mail only to straight-A students who scored a 1500 or higher on the SAT. Campuses have certain needs—more men, more minority students, more English majors, more students from five states away—priorities they attempt to fulfill by buying names fitting those criteria. The information used to compile the search order is gleaned from questionnaires students complete when they register for a test.

The search business has allowed the College Board to add millions to its bottom line each year without doing much more than pressing a button to send names to colleges and their marketing consultants. While the College Board governs the use of the names under licensing agreements with colleges, the group hasn’t curtailed the endless stream of marketing to students—marketing that ultimately whips teenagers into a frenzy every year and warps the eventual value of the college search.

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In the late 1990s, Royall & Company had plenty of competitors. Twice a year, all the firms would all ramp up staff and wait for FedEx boxes to arrive from the College Board with nine-inch reel tapes embedded with names of test takers.

For Bill Royall, even FedEx wasn’t fast enough anymore.

One summer afternoon in 1997, he sent a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron to New Jersey to intercept the tape delivery from a FedEx processing center near Newark airport. What was in those boxes was gold for the colleges that were Royall’s clients. Every minute mattered. The sooner he pulled those tapes out of the boxes and got those personalized letters in the mail the sooner those students would know that these colleges wanted them to apply.

In New Jersey, two men—one the Beechcraft’s pilot and the other a Royall executive—loaded 150 boxes into the back of their aircraft, the seats rem...