College
Admissions
and thePublicInterest
B. Alden Thresher
With a New Introduction and Reflections from the Field

College Admissions andthe Public Interest• •College Admissions andthe Public Interest• •B. Alden Thresher
With a New Introduction and Reflections from the Field

The College Board, New York 2017
Reprinted, with new Introduction, 2017.
Inquiries regarding this book should be addressed to
The College Board,
250 Vesey Street, New York, New York 10281.
Copyright © 1966, 1989, 2017 by The College Board. All rights reserved.
College Board and the acorn logo are registered trademarks of
The College Board.
Printed in the United States of America.

Introduction••
College Admissions and the Public Interest
The year 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the publicationof B. Alden Thresher’s book, College Admissions and the
Public Interest. Thresher’s brief volume — 118 pages inall — provides a lens into the history of college admission in
America, as he unerringly predicts the increasingly importantrole of admissions officers, financial aid professionals, andcollege counselors in serving the preeminent ideals of higher
education. Thresher’s words both celebrate and instruct,
showing us the progress we have made, but also the workthat remains to be done.
B. Alden Thresher’s 1976 obituary in The New York Times
tells us only a little of a life that produced a rare and lasting
impact. He was an MIT economics professor and served
as that institution’s director of admissions from 1936 to
1961. From those experiences, Thresher produced College
Admissions and the Public Interest, which has become oneof just a few seminal statements about the obligations of aprofession that has grown in size and importance in the five
decades since the book was first published.
v

College Admissions and the Public Interest continues to help
admissions professionals grapple with the central questions
facing them every day: Who should be admitted to college,
and why? His insight anticipated today’s higher education
admissions arena and the lengths to which American families
will go to ensure the lifelong success of their sons anddaughters. Yet Thresher’s words do not promote a particularissue or ideology. Instead, his reflections encourage insight,
honor nuance, and reinforce the reason why all of us entered
this profession in the first place: the students.
In 2015, Thresher’s book was the subject of a panel discussion
at the College Board National Forum in New York City.
The late afternoon session was packed. More astonishing
was the diversity of admissions professionals who attended
the session and their testimonials about the importance ofThresher’s words to their work. We coordinated that panel
discussion, and we were impressed (but not surprised) by
the single-note chorus of the attendees who insisted that
admissions professionals, in all of their roles — enrollment,
advising, financial aid — see their work as inextricably linked
to the public interest.
Anticipating professional matters of the heart, however,is perhaps Thresher’s greatest contribution. Every dean ofadmission must decide the fate of an applicant who is “onthe fence”; a student who may not be the most academicallyqualified but who has the potential for greatness. Seeing that
potential and admitting that student demands more thanprofessional judgment. It may even require a leap of faith.
But Thresher reminds us that if the universe is stranger thanwe can imagine, “the same is undoubtedly true of the depth
and variety of ability concealed in human personality.”vi

Who would not be cheered by that?
Thresher’s words instruct, too. Uncovering the individual
talents concealed in our personalities is of growing relevance
today, as colleges and universities seek metrics beyond
traditional markers of GPA and standardized test scores toassess the worthiness of applicants for undergraduate study.
Thresher acknowledges the difficulty of this endeavor, but
insists we are naive if we believe such talent could be uncovered
and cultivated simply by eliminating admissions requirements
or by offering more scholarships. Five decades ago, Thresher
mildly chided the modern admission officer by stressing that
there are “types of talent that we simply have not learned torecognize or to encourage” and that the evaluation of applicants“must be thought through in the broadest of contexts.”••
Why does College Admissions and the Public Interest continue
to resonate with us? Given our increasingly short attention
spans, what is the character of a book that stands the test of
time? How does that book stay refreshingly relevant despite
significant changes and advances in a field of study or inquiry?
Perhaps in Thresher’s case, it is because he did not writea “how to” book. You will find no advice about how to run
an admission office. You will learn nothing about strategic
enrollment management, discount rates, net price calculators,
or the latest advances in CRM. You will search in vain
for suggestions about what to do if you receive too many
applications, too few applications, or anything in between.
In fact, you will find only a few references to the commonplace
admission issues of today.
viiThresher remains relevant for a single reason. Like a.300 hitter, he keeps his eye on the ball. Despite the varietyof challenges facing higher education admissions — the risingcost of college, increased competition, fewer counselors perstudent, insufficient financial aid — Thresher keeps us focusedon the bigger picture: the public interest. He stresses that
all of our processes and policies mean little if the outcome ofour efforts do not address what every college and university
has articulated in its mission: to serve as a force for the
betterment of society. In the race for institutional prestige
and popularity, one of Thresher’s important reminders is that
we serve neither our profession nor our constituents well bycelebrating — even inadvertently — the number of applicants
we exclude from our classrooms.
Of course, the “public interest” is a broad constituency.
Certainly any politician, anxious to create orthodoxy andrecruit acolytes, can generate a platform to “reform” higher
education in the name of the public interest. The danger, ofcourse, is that such a platform may have no interest otherthan that of the public’s on Election Day. Higher education
advocates are also no strangers to construing the public
interest in ways that may be more self-serving than altruistic.
We are sometimes guilty of the appealing but fatuouscomplaint that since the fate of civilization rests on theunqualified excellence of the Academy, everyone should justleave us to our work.
Thresher’s notion of public interest is far more ecumenical.
His words do not invite consensus concerning the day’s
current controversies. The key for Thresher is theidentification of, and reliance on, fundamental principles:children before adults; liberty over tyranny; one person,viii

one vote; education over ignorance. In our cynical age, thisperspective might sound trifling or embarrassingly naive.
If so, Thresher’s book will not appeal to you.
Note too that Thresher’s title is College Admissions and the
Public Interest, not the Public’s interest. The distinction has
everything to do with the long view that Thresher maintains
throughout his book. What is universally popular — freetuition, say — may not be in the public interest, especially
if educational quality is compromised. Thresher invites us
to look beyond the ebb and flow of today’s political debate,encouraging us to stand by and contemplate — even embrace —the complexity and long-standing issues that influence college
admission policies and practices.

••
College Admissions and the Public Interest was firstpublished by the College Board in 1966 and could be easily
dismissed as a quaint testimonial for a simpler time in
American college admissions, with Mr. Thresher as an
American cousin of Mr. Chips. That assessment would bewrong. The 1960s was one of America’s most turbulent
decades and much of that turmoil was felt on college
campuses. American higher education became a domestic
battleground marked by violence and debate about the
war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and politicalunrest. Conflict was rampant beyond the college campus,
particularly in inner cities across the country.
Thus, Thresher’s times were hardly quaint. The headlines
he was reading in 1966 seem distressingly similar to what
we see today. Although Thresher makes no explicit mentionix

of the sociopolitical concerns of his day, his words are clearlyborn of a time and place not unlike our own. In fact, there are
only a few instances where his words betray his time.
Thresher’s prescience is even more notable when weremember the significant ways that higher education haschanged over the past 50 years. In the 1960s, there wereapproximately 13 million students worldwide enrolled
in higher education. In 2010, that figure had jumped to
178 million, and by 2025, it is predicted to be 262 million.
Globally, higher education is the key driver of economic
productivity and individual prosperity. As we embrace thisperspective, our profession is challenged to think more deeply
about issues of opportunity, talent, and success — all of which
Thresher grapples with in his book.

••
Authors of introductions have only one job: to compel thevaguely interested reader who holds this book in her hands
to take a chance on somebody else’s words. Fortunately,
Thresher’s book appeals to admissions professionals fromall segments of higher education, regardless of experienceand expertise. Thresher’s words will help you to think
more broadly about the role of the admissions professionalin today’s higher education arena. For veteran admission
leaders, Thresher’s words may not be new, yet his refreshingreminders of professional principles will speak to you as if
you were conversing with a cherished colleague. For those ofyou early in your careers — anxious to make your mark — you
may be tempted to dismiss Thresher because his common
sense notions lack some spark of originality. Resist that urge.
Thresher is neither a final authority nor an oracle. He is ourxfamiliar scribe, like the craftsman who stained the glass at
Chartres. He is our soft-spoken tutor who asks the questions
that need asking.
College Admissions and the Public Interest continues totouch and inform the work of admissions leaders around thecountry. To sample Thresher’s ongoing influence, we asked
a small group of admissions colleagues a simple question:“What do you take away from Thresher’s essay at this point
in your career?” Their eloquent answers — heartfelt, candid,
and thoughtful — can be found at the end of this volume.
Keep this copy of College Admissions and the Public Interest
close at hand. Dip into it when the provost is out of town orafter your fall registration deposits are safely deposited. It isduring those quiet — granted, rare — moments when Thresher
will offer up the insight you are seeking or provide the sparkof recognition that will console.
Stephen J. Handel
Associate Vice President —Undergraduate Admissions
Office of the President
University of California System

November 2016xi

James M. Montoya
Chief of Membership,
Governance & Global
Higher Education
Secretary of the Corporation
The College Board

Contents
Preface ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ xv
1� Admissions as a Social Process �������������������������������������������������� 1
A “Great Sorting” ������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1
The Supply of Talent �������������������������������������������������������������������� 8
The Demand for Talent ��������������������������������������������������������������� 18
Scarcity and Selection ���������������������������������������������������������������� 22
Levels of Analysis ����������������������������������������������������������������������� 31
2� The Student and His Future ���������������������������������������������������� 35
Focus of Decision ����������������������������������������������������������������������� 35
The Inarticulate Major Premise ��������������������������������������������������36
The Cultural Matrix �������������������������������������������������������������������38
The Useful and the Poetic �����������������������������������������������������������43
Kinds of Intervention �����������������������������������������������������������������46
Education as a Cultural Complex ������������������������������������������������ 53
Constriction at the Roots ������������������������������������������������������������ 56
3� Admissions within the Walls ��������������������������������������������������63
Faculty Viewpoint ����������������������������������������������������������������������63
Admissions Officers Emerge�������������������������������������������������������68
Registrar and Admissions ����������������������������������������������������������� 73
Selection Problems��������������������������������������������������������������������� 75
Organization of Admissions ������������������������������������������������������ 80
4� College Admissions as a System�����������������������������������������������89
The System Concept �������������������������������������������������������������������89
Abandoned Clienteles�����������������������������������������������������������������96
Ignorant Selection �������������������������������������������������������������������� 101
Value — and “Value Added” ������������������������������������������������������ 103
Models of Student Distribution ������������������������������������������������� 104
Optimum Distribution���������������������������������������������������������������113
Reflections from the Field ���������������������������������������������������������119xiii

Preface
This essay deals with some of the broader aspects of thecollege admissions process in the United States. It will nottell the reader how to get into college or how to run a college
admissions office. Having spent some years in charge of a
selective admissions operation, the author is keenly aware of
the pitfalls that lie in wait for anyone who presumes to selectfrom among large numbers of promising youngsters those
who will prove best qualified for any given life work, or evento identify those who will finish a four-year undergraduate
course.
The central thesis of these pages is threefold: first, one cannot
tell by looking at a toad how far he will jump; second, theprocess of admission to college is more sociologically thanintellectually determined; and third, to understand theprocess, one must look beyond the purview of the individualcollege and consider the interaction of all institutions withthe society that generates and sustains them.
Perhaps these comments may aid admissions and guidance
people by directing their attention beyond the normalboundaries of their daily concerns or help concerned citizens
who, having been through the college admissions processwith their children, may wish to look more broadly at theeducational enterprise in the light of the public interest.
B. Alden Thresher
Cambridge, Massachusettsxv

1. Admissions as a Social
Process••

A “Great Sorting”
Of the two million boys and girls who graduate fromhigh schools each year in the United States, more thanhalf distribute themselves among some 2,000 colleges,
universities, junior colleges, and technical institutes. This
“great sorting” is a social process of great complexity, notfully understood by the students themselves, by their parents
and advisers, or by the educators, including admissions
officers, who participate in it. The sorting process, taken in
its entirety, is a product of an immense number of individual
choices and decisions taken by millions of people, under the
influence in part of calculations and estimates projected ageneration into the future and in part of beliefs, opinions,whims, ancient loyalties, and areas of ignorance scarcely
amenable to rational estimate. It is important to notethat most of the decisions involved occur outside college
admissions offices, not in them. Access to higher education isessentially a social process deeply involved with the society’s
entire cultural pattern and system of values.

1Each student is considering whether to go to college, or
seeking a college that might meet his needs, evaluating
and appraising it as best he can, and narrowing down to achoice. Colleges, conversely, are on the lookout for recruits,
exercising a choice among them, sometimes stringently,
sometimes very mildly indeed. In the market for higher
education, just as in the job market or the marriage market,
the processes of search, appraisal, and selection go on
continuously, on both sides, and emphases shift according
to reciprocal needs and scarcities. In the past it has beenbroadly true that it was students who selected colleges; they
still do, but it is becoming apparent that now, to an increasing
degree, colleges are also selecting students.
The entire process of admission to college is conditioned byhistorical circumstances that have caused a sharp breaking
point to occur at the end of the secondary school years. We
now see this break, in one sense, as artificial and arbitrary.
Education in the current perspective is coming to be thoughtof as a seamless web, a continuous cradle-to-grave affair. Eventhe span of formal education — roughly from nursery school
through graduate or professional school — is but a part of thewhole. We have learned to appreciate both the determinative
importance of preschool experience for infants, and thecontinuity of growth and development made possible by adulteducation. So the location of the school-to-college breaking
point, with the major reshuffling among students andinstitutions that occurs at this stage, is essentially arbitrary.
So intricate are the arrangements needed to make workable
the business of getting into college that the practical tacticsof admission often divert attention from the educational
processes which are the heart of the whole matter. As in all
2

complex and poorly understood social situations, unfounded
beliefs, folklore, and old wives’ tales grow spontaneously.
Popular opinion about college admissions represents it as ascreening based on intellectual achievement and promise. So it
is, in part; but this is by no means the whole story. The sorting
process involves the interaction of sociological forces of manykinds. Some are so familiar and so subtle in their operation as
easily to escape notice; they come to be taken quite for granted,
on the principle that the last thing a fish would ever notice iswater. We probably exaggerate the part played by rational,
intellectual standards because these other forces are partly
hidden by the protective coloring of habit, use, and wont.
In admission to higher education there is a dual processof affiliation. On the one hand, the transactions involved
constitute a kind of symbiosis that unites the world of higher
education to the larger society that contains and interacts
with it. On the other hand, the same transactions serve toconnect the partially isolated society of a single nation withthe cosmopolitan structure of the world of learning. These aresocial processes of the utmost complexity. The ways in which
they work themselves out differ from nation to nation, but thebasic social forces remain much the same everywhere.
One can, to be sure, regard admissions as coterminous witha minor range of administrative procedures, supported byformal and not very significant curricular delimitations. This
viewpoint, all too prevalent in the past, misses the point.
The view appropriate to contemporary thought is quite thecontrary — that admissions must be looked at in the broadest
possible context. The roots of higher education lie deep within
the needs and aspirations of entire populations. The rangeof forces that determine the demand for education, regulate3access to it, and define the values that maintain it, reflects
some of the deepest values of the surrounding culture. In the“systems” view, admissions and its related phenomena areregarded in the light of these wider considerations.
We have gained a new insight, in the last 15 years, into thekey importance of the conditions that control access to higher
education. These conditions both determine and express therelationship between the educational system and the societythat has generated it and contains and interacts with it.
As secondary education improves, and as gross disparities
in articulation between its subject matter and that of higher
education become fewer, such academic devices as “entrance
requirements” play a diminishing role. Though the prim college
regulations about preparation and prerequisites that have been
evolving for three centuries were always intended as screening
devices, most of the real screening has all along been done by theaccidents of socioeconomic origins, early environment, and thevarious levels of aspiration habitually characterizing particulargroups and subcultures. Reflecting the pluralistic nature of oursociety, these forces have today become more complicated but
no less powerful. As entrance requirements in the older sense
have diminished in importance, efforts have increased to selectstudents on broad grounds of intellectual promise and aptitude,
to understand the dynamics of personality as it affects motives
and energy, and to trace the dimensions of human excellence
beyond such deceptively simple, unidimensional quantities asschool marks and test scores.
But there is much more to the problem than this; study of theindividual student in isolation gives only partial answers. The
deeper social forces uniting him to society remain dominant.
4The determining factors that control entry into higher
education are rooted in the home and school environment ofchildren from infancy on. What used to pass for “recruiting”
on the part of colleges and universities is seen in our present
perspective as a superficial effort to rearrange the educational
destinations of the limited fraction of the population that
had managed to reach the twelfth grade without having its
potential for further education damaged or destroyed. Formal
entrance requirements, through their long evolution, haveresulted for the most part from rearrangements of material
conventionally taught in secondary schools in each epoch. In
form they were set by the colleges, but in fact they could notstray far from what the schools were currently doing.
The question of who attains higher education, then, ismore than a matter of admissions requirements, or evenof finances. It is a question of who does or should aspireto education. This aspiration, in turn, is more than justa function of degrees of talent. It depends deeply on thesociety’s total concept of what education means and what
it can be expected to accomplish. The “level of aspiration”
of the adolescent depends in subtle ways upon his parental
and neighborhood environment. These determine his ability
to sense a connection between such spontaneous interests
as his environment and education have aroused in him,
and his expectations of a place in the world as he is able
to conceive it. From this interplay his educational goals,
if any, are generated. The climate of opinion in which hegrows up is probably the most important determinant of his
future, educational or otherwise. It is related to intellectual
values but is determined even more powerfully by deeper
and less rational influences at work in the society that
nurtures him.
5Social class, which we in the United States like to ignore, or
take note of only shamefacedly, plays a powerful part in accessto education. It is a paradox that in our society, relatively lessstratified than that of Europe, the phenomenon of social classhas been given more objective scientific study than there. In
older societies, class and caste concepts can easily come to betaken so for granted as to seem a part of the order of nature.
The western heritage of ideas about education is rooted in aclass structure out of the feudal era, only partly modified by the
mercantile age, the Industrial Revolution, and the growth ofurban communities. Traditional views about higher education,in their European versions, as well as in countries influenced
by European colonization, assume a social structure and a setof social views and expectations inappropriate to more fluidsocieties, including those of the developing countries.
Our generation has backed rather awkwardly intoa recognition of the scope and significance of the“access-to-education” concept. American colleges anduniversities entered the twentieth century inheriting a quite
restricted concept of the forces that did or should regulate
admission to college. It was not until the development of
the land-grant colleges and the state college and university
systems that the true genius of the American version ofhigher education began to manifest itself.
The older eastern universities and independent colleges ofliberal arts moved very deliberately. They initiated in the
1890s a process of standardizing the subjects of secondary
education deemed essential as prerequisites for admission.
The process involved was a dual one: on the one hand it
was a relatively minor rearrangement of the conventionallyaccepted secondary school subjects — for example, agreement
6

on what works of what classical authors should be read.
On the other hand it embodied the persistent liberalizing
tendency that brought in mathematics, modern languages,
English, and science. Much of this tendency was traceable to
the rise of the academies from 1800 on, and later to Eliot’s
broadening of electives at Harvard.
Despite the importance of these trends, they left largely
untouched the underlying social issues. Accepted as a part of
the natural order of things was the “pool of ability” concept,
the belief that higher education was the prerogative of asmall fraction of the annual crop of youngsters — a fraction
drawn mainly from the well-to-do mercantile, industrial,and professional class. It had little impact on the populace atlarge, most of whom were assumed to be incapable of higher
learning. The nineteenth-century heritage of a classicalcurriculum of limited relevance to contemporary life tightened
this limitation. The refreshing stream of classical learningthat had burst upon Europe with the Renaissance had shrunkin the nineteenth century to an attenuated and formalized
remnant, a pinched and pedantic version of classical culture.
The main impact of science was yet to come. In the society thatwas taking form after the Civil War, the central demand wasfor vigorous, practical men of action. Even the engineeringschools, which were then beginning to develop, got along witha minimum of science, as befitted an economy whose rate ofchange and innovation was slow despite its vigorous expansion.
The secondary schools served much the same limitedclientele as the colleges. It is true that the rise of theacademies had brought a needed influx of more practicalsubject matter and an atmosphere of relevance tocontemporary life. It is true also that the initial development
7

of public high schools toward the close of the century
envisioned them as “people’s colleges.” Despite theseliberalizing influences, it remained true well into thetwentieth century that for the most part only those seeking
to enter college completed secondary education, and thecurriculum was predominantly “college preparatory” in aquite traditional sense. The normal expectations of mostambitious and vigorous young men, ready to play theirpart in the life of their time, simply did not include college.
College was for ministers, lawyers, and a few scholars,
atypical and either underwritten or able to afford the luxuryof study.
The land-grant colleges and the state universities were theunique and characteristic contribution of America to thestream of higher education in the western world. These, fromthe start, represented a philosophy, social and educational, atwide variance with the colonial college tradition. Theirs wasmuch more nearly an “open-door” policy, tempered by common
sense provisions to exclude those clearly unsuited or unreadyfor higher education. That universities of great distinction
and the highest intellectual standards have sprung from thistradition is by itself enough to give pause to those who would
push selectivity in admissions to ever greater extremes.

The Supply of Talent
The simplest schematization of “the great sorting” would treat
it as a matter of the supply of and demand for students — aconvenient though greatly oversimplified concept.
On the one hand is the American society sending forward
its annual crop of young people. Facing these young people8stands a system of higher education more varied in its
origins, more diversified in its auspices and management,
more chaotic in its atomized separation, covering a wider
range of “standards,” and possessing, perhaps, more vitality
than any in the world. This is the “supply” side of theeducational process.1 The ways in which these youth are
drawn back after varying lengths of time into the social
complex of the economy constitute the “demand” side.
Considerations from the demand side, such as employability,
economic productivity, manpower distribution, and social
mobility constantly reflect back to the supply side of theequation. The interaction of these social complexes generates
powerful forces. The admissions process acts as a kindof hinge point through which many of these stresses aretransmitted. So the procedures connected with admissions,viewed in their full significance, are much more than aseries of rules and customs. Through them are conductedsocial stresses, the study of which can tell much about theprocesses of the society that contains them.
The educational establishment, embedded in the social process,interacts with it not only by the inflow and outflow of students.
It reflects the values and preoccupations of the society and
The convention of speaking of the “supply” of students coming out of thegeneral population and the “demand” for students by colleges is adopted
here arbitrarily. At the postgraduate stage, the “supply” is the annual crop
emerging from the undergraduate course, and the “demand” arises from
employers. The British “Robbins Report,” with equal propriety, adopts theconverse convention: it speaks throughout of the “demand” for education(on the part of students), and the “supply” of education (by the colleges).
As in any market situation, demand and supply are opposite aspects of thesame set of transactions. See Chapter 6 of Higher Education; Report of theCommittee Appointed by the Prime Minister under the Chairmanship ofLord Robbins. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1963, 335 pp.

1.

9

cannot easily rise above them. Yet it is the critic of thesevalues and preoccupations. In its rare and fortunate periods
education, despite its innate tendency to conservatism, may
play the part of stimulant and innovator. The institutionalized
and routinized aspects of education, as of any basic function
in society, are indispensable to practical continuity andeffectiveness. Yet it is the critical and innovative aspects thatgenerate growth and renewal, vision and change, in the happy
epochs when these forces can break through the encrustationsof tradition, organizational rigidities, and the vested interestsof those who are comfortably lodged in ledges and crevices ofthe existing structure.
In recent years there has been a radical shift in viewpointwith regard to the broad social problem of access to higher
education — that is, the supply side of the equation. This shift
in turn has led to a changed view of the admissions function.
Inspection of admissions credentials had been thought oftraditionally as belonging to the more routinized aspect ofeducation, and it therefore seemed natural in many colleges to
put admissions under the direction of the registrar, to be looked
after as a detail of academic accounting. Only in recent years
have the social as well as the educational complexities involvedin access to higher education come to be realized in anything
like their full significance. The academic records aspect, though
by no means negligible, has been dwarfed by comparison.2

2.
Out of 811 admissions officers, 18 percent were found to have the title ofregistrar and 8 percent a title combining registrar with admissions officer
in some form. Jane Zech Hauser and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, The Admissions
Officer in the American College: An Occupation under Change. A reportfor the College Entrance Examination Board. New York: College Entrance
Examination Board, 1963. Chapters separately paginated.

10Faint adumbrations of this newer attitude began as early as
the 1920s when a few universities appointed officers who were
to be specifically concerned with undergraduate admissions
problems. The practice spread during the depression years of
the 1930s, influenced more by the practical necessity to recruit
freshmen in an era when cash customers were scarce than by
any broader understanding of the social roots of education.
Admissions committees continued the administration ofacademic requirements, but this sedate activity was quite
overshadowed, particularly in the smaller, struggling colleges,
by the strenuous sales effort necessary to recruit a freshmanclass. Field representatives of various kinds, some paid oncommission, enabled colleges close to the margin of financial
survival to track down and sign up new freshmen.
The wave of postwar enrollments from 1945 to 1950
temporarily reduced the need for active recruiting. After thiswave subsided, the small colleges again had to struggle to fill
their classes, though the more sought-after colleges, including
those in the large, endowed universities, were able to exercise
an increasing degree of selectivity. Many state-supported
institutions, access to which had been easy, began to tighten
their requirements. Tests for admission came to be more
widely used in what had been virtually “open-door” colleges.
After 1950 a new set of ideas began to take hold. The question“Who should go to college?” began to be asked, and thepossible answers seriously investigated. In the early stages
this question carried overtones of discontent, on the part of
the academic world, with the motivation and attitudes ofmany college students. Stress was put on the number ofstudents in college who, it was thought, might better be
elsewhere. Swayed by the contemporary playboy ethos, even11

students capable of solid achievement sometimes wasted theirtime and that of the faculty. College faculties making thesecomplaints seldom paused to consider whether some partof the disaffection might be traceable to a curriculum that
seemed to the student remote from his concerns, to pedanticand dull teaching, or to an authoritarian atmosphere that
discouraged both innovation and inquiry.
Very soon the emphasis changed. Studies like that of Byron
S. Hollinshead3 began to show that a large proportion ofyouth of high ability simply were not continuing into higher
education. The waste involved far exceeded that of carrying
along into college some idlers who did not exert themselves.
From our present perspective the waste of talent is evenmore serious than had been thought, because these studies
looked primarily at “talent” identified as such and visibleat or near the end of the high school course. Because talentpinched off at earlier stages simply remained invisible toscrutiny directed at the twelfth-grade level, it became easy
to assume that only a small minority were capable of higher
education.
A little later, studies like those of Ralph F. Berdie4 cast doubt
upon another easy assumption: that the main obstacle to3.
Who Should Go to College. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952,
190 pp. This was a pioneering effort. See especially the chapter by Robert
J. Havighurst and Robert R. Rodgers on motivation for college attendance.
4.
After High School — What? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1954, 240 pp. See also R. Clyde White, These Will Go to College.
Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1952. This is a model ofworkmanlike investigation of a limited area in Ohio. It was followed bymany regional forecasts on similar lines.

12

further education was financial. The standard remedy had
been to offer scholarships. If takers did not immediately
appear, it was simple to conclude that those who were
unresponsive were not seriously interested in further
education, and so, clearly, not of “college caliber.” Berdie andthose who followed him established the basic fact that only
about half of this “lost” talent was deterred solely by lackof money. The other half, in the phrase of that era, lacked“motivation,” a convenient word that explains nothing.
What these studies disclosed was the range of social forcesthat caused many youngsters of high ability to shun higher
education. These would still not have gone to college even
if they had had the money. Nothing in their experience had
persuaded them that college would be a good idea, or indeed
would have any relevance to their life or needs.
In the 1950s the term “talent search” came to represent aslightly more advanced stage in public understanding about
education.5 It marked the passing of the primitive notion that
if one simply rang the bell and offered money for scholarships
to all comers, any student worth helping would automaticallyappear, and that those who did not grasp at this opportunity
were simply not worth wasting time on. It marked thefirst widespread departure from the notion that the only
youngsters able to cope with higher education are those whoknow enough about it to want it. Talent, it began to appear,
had to be searched out, helped, and encouraged. In large
measure, it had to be created, granted some minimum initialendowment of native intelligence.

5.
See, for example, The Search for Talent. College Admissions No. 7.
New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1960, 131 pp.

13

So the concept of the “search for talent,” useful as astep in the evolution of thought, has yielded to repeateddemonstrations that talent must be nurtured andencouraged at every stage if it is to survive and blossom —that talent, in fact, comes closer to being something
produced than something stumbled upon and uncovered.
This concept is broadly true, though here and there anugget of pure genius turns up against all the odds.
Access to education in Europe has always been organizedtraditionally along lines that implied a “pool of ability”
manpower theory. It is significant that the Robbins Reportin England explicitly disavowed this doctrine in 1963
and recognized the wide elasticity of the supply of able
students, given the necessary conditions.6 To be sure, not
all children are equally bright. There is a genetic factor
of great importance. But we simply do not know how toseparate the genetic from the environmental component.
We do know that intelligence, within far wider limits thananyone had suspected, can be increased by a favorable earlyenvironment, or stunted by a bad one. This is a conclusionof the first importance for a society like ours, alreadypressing hard against the limits of its educated manpowerand desperately in need of more. Major social factors suchas these we may call “conditions of opportunity.” They are
the most important determinants of who goes to college andwhere. A “condition” may be either a help or a constraint, abarrier or a highway.

6.
Cited in note 1. This report and the discussions of it provide a usefulcase study of the forces at work in these situations. For a penetrating
criticism of the report, see Martin Trow, “A Question of Size and Shape.”
Universities Quarterly (London), March 1964, p. 136.

14

For the first time, the overwhelming importance of anadolescent’s self-image and level of aspiration began to
be grasped. What had been obvious all along, but seldom
appreciated or acted upon, began to penetrate public
consciousness: that a major part of the preparation andpredisposition for higher education occurs at home andduring childhood, and that fairly specific habits, values, andattitudes are required. If these are lacking, few will surmountthe handicap. The majority will be permanently blighted fromrealizing their potentialities or contributing as they might
to society. All this began to undermine the assumption that“the really able will overcome all obstacles.” The assumption
had been based on no evidence except the observation that
there were, indeed, a few who did overcome all obstacles. The
evidence had become convincing that this lazy assumption
had been wrong, and that a serious waste of human potential
had resulted.
A major turning point was the Demonstration Guidance
Project in Junior High School 43 and George Washington
High School, both in New York.7 It showed, in brief, thatstarting even as late as the seventh grade, a combination ofenriched teaching, dedicated counseling and encouragement,
and a determined effort to interest and involve parents, could
produce remarkable results (at a moderate increase in per
pupil expenditure), even in children from culturally deprived
and poverty-stricken environments. Most of all, it showed

7.
Henry T. Hillson and Florence C. Myers, The Demonstration Guidance
Project, 1957-1962. New York: Board of Education, 1963. This outlines
the follow-up in senior high school of the original experimental groups inJunior High School No. 43

15that the operative force in this process was the change in thestudent’s image of himself — a rise in his level of aspiration.
This rise is the psychic power house; it provides the emotionalenergy and involvement without which the illumination oflearning has little effect. These were boys and girls who had,as a matter of course, assumed that they would be carrying
on a marginal, struggling existence; most of their windows
on the world would be closed and shuttered, and they would
be only dimly aware of the closing. They would join the greatarmy of the alienated, strangers, never at home in society.
Through this program some benefited only a little; theaverage showed a marked improvement, and a substantial
number came to see themselves as having powers andpotential. They began to see that doors they never dreamed
existed could be opened. A dramatic drop in juvenile
delinquency occurred in these so-called slum schools.
These teen-agers underwent a true revolution of identity —the acquisition of a self-concept that gave them status,
hope, and a respected place in a scheme of things they could
begin to understand. Little enough is known, still, about thenature of these powerful psychosocial forces. But it is clearlyin this area that we must look for the energies needed tobring about broad and fruitful access to higher education.
The machinery of selection, recruiting, tests, classification,and the like remains useful and significant. But the true
“nuclear” forces of the personality, which have begun to betapped in these efforts with deprived children, lie at theroot of the really basic problems of admission to college.
By contrast, the worries of the prosperous middle-class
youngster about getting into the “college of his choice” are ofminor significance.
16

A generation ago, college admissions conventionally dealt
with that small fraction of the twelfth-grade age group thatwas “college bound” and visible as such. That this should be atiny minority was too often thoughtlessly accepted as a fact ofnature. In current perspective this fact is seen, rather, to be
due to serious defects in the educational system and in social
attitudes. There will always be different levels of ability; notall students will be capable of high intellectual effort. Butsociety thus far has scarcely made a serious effort to develop
the talent it already demonstrably possesses. Nor has there
been more than a little progress in fathoming the dimensionsof human ability other than intellectual.
A certain broadening in the concepts that govern theadmissions process has indeed occurred. Efforts havebeen made to assess “nonintellectual” qualities, to study
biographical data, to experiment with “personality” tests, andto understand creativity. But the focus in all these efforts
has been upon the individual. The atomized concept of thecandidate as he stands, “on the hoof,” has been the dominant
one. Little attention, by contrast, has been paid to the social
forces that sway groups of individuals and entire subcultures.
We have been picking and choosing among the passive
victims of vast, complex, and largely blind social processes.
There has been only a little progress in understanding theseprocesses, and less still in controlling them.
A society that has learned to raise the kinds of turkeys, cattle,
or swine that it needs is largely released from the need forgathering roots and berries upon which to subsist. Yet for
its most basic asset, underlying all others, namely humanability, it relies very largely on the kind of chancy “searchand-pick-up” technique appropriate to a tribe of digger
17

Indians. It is true that “eugenics,” in Francis Galton’s senseof selective human breeding, has long been discredited; infact it is unnecessary. The pool of genes from which society
replenishes itself is almost infinitely varied and is perpetually
renewed. “Nature is never spent.” What we need is to make atleast a beginning to develop adequately the talent we alreadyhave, which now falls so far short of its potential.

The Demand for Talent
What forces resulting from society’s demand for talent
impinge on the problem of access to higher education?
Overwhelmingly of first importance is the changing nature of
the manpower problem and the demand of the employment
market. At the turn of the century the small fraction of theage group who continued into higher education was madeup primarily of those aiming at the traditional learned
professions; to these were added a gradually growing fraction
made up of scions of a prosperous business class affluent
enough to devote some surplus to introducing its sons (andmuch more gradually its daughters) to polite letters, andto the deeper currents of learning then stirring under the
influence of European university models. The rootlets were
there, though still tiny: in science, from the time of Silliman
at Yale; in graduate study on continental models, from thefounding of Johns Hopkins; and in a group of schools like
Rensselaer and M.I.T. that began to feed the rapid growth ofindustry and transport following the Civil War.
But all these beginnings were on a small scale. The vast
economic growth of the country from the Civil War to WorldWar I was managed with only a very small minority of college
graduates. Prevailing opinion was content with this situation.
18

Partly as cause, partly as a result, the college curriculum
only slowly evolved out of the limited and pedantic version ofclassical studies which had come to characterize nineteenthcentury America. The most powerful impulse for change
from the demand side was the deep popular feeling for the
pragmatic in education, which led first to the academies andlater to the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862. The landgrant colleges and the state institutions modeled after themwere, like the academies a century earlier, an expression of
the deep need for relevance in education — relevance to the
problems of a vigorous economy, an expanding frontier, a tideof immigration, an industrial revolution.
All this development is now history. The transformation of
the job market, almost overnight, could scarcely have been
foreseen a few years earlier. It seems hard to believe that aslate as 1951 fears could be expressed that there would be a glutof college graduates — an overeducated group of unemployables,a white-collar proletariat.8 World War II provided a turning
point. It became obvious for the first time that the kinds ofpeople turned out by the universities (and by the stronger
undergraduate colleges) were overwhelmingly needed. In theera of the new developing countries, the Peace Corps, foreignaid, and the sophisticated technical needs of the age of space
and automation, the university, on a worldwide basis, is seen
above all as a producer of needed people. Often, indeed, they
are so desperately needed as to distract attention from the very
real weaknesses and defects in the conduct of higher education.

8.
Seymour E. Harris, The Market for College Graduates and Related
Aspects of Education and Income. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1949, 207 pp. Pp. 64-75 summarize these fears.

19

There is a kind of continued tension between the two major
forces that keep the wheels of education turning. On the one
hand a large majority of college students would admit quite
frankly that the hope of a better job and a chance to rise in
the world are their chief motives in seeking higher education.
Confucius wrote, 2,500 years ago, that it is difficult to findanyone who will study for three years without thinking ofmoney. But it is not so simple. Education undertaken solely
with a remote, practical end in view can be insufferably dull.
It needs to be illuminated at every stage, if only fitfully by theinherent interest that characterizes the pursuit of knowledge.
Education is “autotelic” — a self-rewarding occupation. Thisquality is most clearly demonstrated in the education ofyoung children, but it is persistent in greater or less degree
throughout the lives of most people. There is a deep delightin learning that is a profoundly human characteristic. We areconstantly in danger of overestimating the purely economic
motive. Perhaps we can say that for many people, economic
motives lure them into college, and the unsuspected delights
of education keep them there.
We see constantly at work the interplay of both motives —the practical and immediate on the one hand, and on
the other the importance and fascination of completely
disinterested learning, uncontaminated by self-interest or
even by practical usefulness.
Curriculums in the so-called liberal arts colleges are heavily
infused with subjects having an occupational or professionalcast, while schools devoted to professional fields, whether
engineering, business, or journalism, find it important that
their graduates become immersed in the liberal arts at first
hand. It is a curious anomaly that we have been so long20

in recognizing that both of these elements are essential toeducation — we have persisted in treating them as mutually
exclusive. As Alfred North Whitehead put it: “The antithesis
between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. Therecan be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, andno liberal education which is not technical; that is no education
which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision.”9
The college, in exhibiting its wares, need not feel ashamedthat some programs, even at the undergraduate level,
tend toward some definable, useful niche in society. Suchan objective, even though it may turn out to be mistaken
in direction, imparts to the student an impulse anddirection and a certain sturdy self-respect which is hard to
reproduce in an atmosphere of completely neutral cognition.
So it is only natural that the great majority of college
undergraduates today should be in programs that have adefinable occupational objective, or at least an occupationaltendency. Thus the demand side of the talent equation feeds
back continually into the supply, shifting its direction andemphasis. This feedback sometimes follows too closely theephemeral fluctuations in the job markets. But basically, thejob market in its broad tendencies must be followed.
Another complicated set of social forces comes into play
here: social mobility and the desire for it, parental ambition,customary levels of aspiration, regional and ethnic groupings
with special objectives. Such influences impinge on theadmissions process, affecting the demand for education, thedirection it takes, and the way it affects individual colleges.
9.
The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: The Macmillan
Co., 1929, 247 pp. See p. 74.

21

These, then, are some of the social complexities withwhich the problem of college admissions is entangled. In
an earlier era, preoccupation with the academic hurdles
erected to control entrance led to almost complete neglectof the deeper, social forces which in reality determined
who entered college. Contemporary admissions problems
usually present themselves to the admissions committeeor the admissions officer in terms of the recruiting-cumselection complex. Detailed academic qualifications in termsof subject-matter definitions have receded in importance;
considerations of aptitude and achievement as measured
by marks and tests have come to the fore. But with thisevolution, there is still a general neglect of the deeper
cultural and social forces at work. To understand his job,
the admissions officer or the faculty member concerned withadmissions needs some understanding of the place of his
efforts in this social process.

Scarcity and Selection
The most conspicuous feature of higher education in theworld today is the universal and growing shortage of facilities
in relation to the demand for education.10 Every nation in
the world is seeking to multiply and enlarge its universities.
Some, especially among the developing countries, are doing
this in an atmosphere of total emergency and crash programs.
In many others cost, apathy, habit, and the vested interestsand inertia of an ancient establishment impose such a

10.
Frank Bowles, Access to Higher Education. New York: Unesco and The
International Association of Universities, 1963, 212 pp. This is a uniqueand classic study of the problem in a worldwide context.

22

lag that the gap between demand and supply, instead ofshrinking, widens from year to year. The unslaked thirst for
education is building up, in entire populations, pressures that
may well topple governments in the years ahead.
The people most in demand in modern society are the kinds
turned out by universities, even universities in their current
version, often unregenerate, unreconstructed, and complacent.
Such harmless foibles as medieval regalia are too often
accompanied by medieval habits of thought. So the emergency
can easily cause faculties and administrations to remain
smug. If one is so sought after, it is easy to conclude that
all one’s works are superlatively good. The valid concept of“high standards” gets shifted from an honest ideal of effective
teaching and scholarship to the unlimited, negative principleof exclusion. If Satan tempts the professor, it is in offering him
an opportunity to eliminate all but the ablest 10 percent — or
1 percent — of potential students. Then he can enjoy to thefull the luxury of being exemplar, guide, and mentor of thesurviving remnant of devoted and brilliant disciples, and yet
have a good conscience, since it is all done in the name of highstandards. He has a defense, although he may have added
immensely to the “human scrap piles.” This is not to say by
any means that all students are fitted for the more exacting
kinds of higher education. There will always be a difficult
problem of differentiation and classification. The point is thatscholars of the utmost integrity and the highest ideals can,by the very fact of their high standards, be diverted fromthe underlying social obligation to provide education by theassertion of a kind of divine right of exclusion.
The tidal wave of demand for university-educated people isdue not only to the advance in science and technology, but23more broadly to the need for specialists in every field, andthe protean growth of expert specialisms throughout society.
The intellectual component of the work of the world is rapidly
crowding out not only the muscular components but also thehabitual and unthinking components that could formerly,
without undue penalty, be ignorant as well. These are forcesthat generate a powerful demand for education. They are
reinforced, too, by needs even more profound than the needfor expert specialisms. The complexity and interdependenceof today’s close-knit and shrinking world demand that all
judgments and decisions be made in the light of a degree ofintelligence and maturity never to be found in an ignorant
populace. Along with multiplied needs for expertise of all
kinds goes the necessity for informed and balanced judgment
reaching across the boundaries of special disciplines. Thoughtliberated by education must be harnessed to meet imperative
human and social emergencies.
The lag that slows the higher educational establishment in
its expansion is due to another set of forces, also social in a
broad sense. These are partly fiscal; the costs of expansion
are enormous even though they are in reality investments
rather than expenditures. Part are due to the class structureof old societies, to traditional thought habits, sometimes topoorly organized secondary school systems. Part, too, are due
to vested interests and inertia within the older universities.
The unexamined dogma that “more means worse” has beenfor generations a refuge for vested interests in the statusquo. It is now in the process of being rapidly eroded, if notindeed contradicted. Whatever the causes, the lag exists andis traceable to many kinds of social disequilibrium. So we
return to the fundamental conclusion that, seen in worldwide
perspective, access to higher education, whatever its
24intellectual trappings, its nominal standards, is regulated ingreater or less measure by social forces having at most only alimited effectiveness in identifying and nurturing the ablest.
Meanwhile the result is an emphasis on selection that isacute and unavoidable. This imbalance is, in the longer view,a transitional situation; in its excessive form it is undesirable
and to be tolerated only as an emergency condition. Underany reasonable conditions of equilibrium between supply
and demand, selection could be less drastic. The underlying
obligation to provide education would override the privilegeof a selection that in some countries and some universities
is procrustean beyond reason. Most of the applicants refusedaccess to higher education under these acute conditions —much worse in some other countries than here — have theability to profit by and should be admitted to some variant
form of it.
In many nations the running disparity between the demandand supply of education has led to drastic, even heroic,
screening measures. These may consist of examinations
or other hurdles that are intellectual in form but do noteffectively identify the ablest. They may be based, forexample, on an obsolete syllabus; they may reward rotememory, or the reflection of received opinion, or persistence
in taking tests, rather than intellectual power. Such hurdles
reduce numbers without insuring that those showing thegreatest promise should be chosen for admission. Populations
have often showed remarkable patience with situations
involving unreasonable or misdirected selectivity, perhaps
because they have regarded universities with awe bornof ignorance. There are signs that this patience may berunning out.
25

For most colleges in the United States recruiting andselection go on concurrently, one or the other being moreemphasized as conditions change. It is a kind of paradox thatmany of the most selective colleges carry on the most vigorous
recruiting. The naive view that selection and recruiting arealternatives — that one recruits when he needs more students,and selects when he needs fewer — is so oversimplified as to bequite misleading. Every college, however low its standards,
will refuse some applicants, and conversely, even the mostsought-after college will bestir itself to attract candidates
whom it regards as exceptional.
But these are practical, surface phenomena. The selection
principle raises deeper social and educational issues about
which most people have strong views but little real knowledge.
Each college is busy selecting among applicants — some very
vigorously select a minority of applicants in, others rather
loosely select a minority out. In every case concepts areentertained of comparative merit, worth, or promise. We
don’t know how far these are valid or absolute, or how far
they reflect predispositions and prejudices built into us by
the culture in which we are imbedded or by the subculture inwhich we grew up. Least of all can we be sure whether thesevery unconscious and unrecognized predispositions may not
be shutting off, perversely and tragically, types of talent that
we simply have not learned to recognize or to encourage. One
has only to read at random in the field of biography to realizethat the history of education is strewn with unrecognizedtalent. All admissions officers and admissions committees
share in this general ignorance. The college justifies its
selectivity on two main grounds: first, it says, the intellectualissues and processes with which it deals are esoteric, erudite,
subtle. They can be dealt with adequately only by students
26

of more than average intellectual power and stature; wehave assembled a faculty of great distinction, whose efforts
would be wasted on the mediocre. This argument is especiallypersuasive in the natural sciences, where a student without
the necessary aptitude and preparation, particularly inmathematics, quickly sinks without a trace.
Second, argues the college, we are going to be judged, in thelast analysis, by the broad effectiveness of our graduates in
the context of society. We are entitled to pick the people thatseem most likely to contribute the most value and will havethe maximum impact on the life of their time.
These are defensible arguments, but they nevertheless often
serve as rationalizations for a kind of insensate avarice: wewant the best and only the best, we are never satisfied, we
regret that every class, no matter how able and promising,still has a bottom third. There are some professors who cannever quite reconcile themselves to the fact that some students
are better than others. If we could only chloroform all but the
top 1 percent, how ideal the world would be! Yet this is not
merely a form of human avarice. It is also deeply connectedwith the highest virtues of the academic man — the impulse
toward perfection. What looks like greed is the obverse ofidealism, and of a dedicated search for excellence. Under these
conditions it is easy for selection to become, to a degree, asubstitute for education. A student body so outstanding in its
talents that it shines under any kind of educational process
may have the effect of reducing the motivation for improvingthat process. Every professor wants disciples. If a good supplyof them, able and eager, is deposited annually at his door,
he need give little thought to improving the quality of theeducational process as he himself embodies it.
27Granted, for the sake of argument, that selective colleges knowwhat they are about, that they really succeed in picking theablest and most promising youth coming forward year by year,
what would happen if every college did the same? In a later
chapter in this book there is presented a theoretical model inwhich a hierarchy of colleges, ranked from the most sought
after to the least sought after, accepts and rejects in a manner
which results in the ablest students frequenting the strongest
colleges, and the least promising students sifting downward
into the weakest colleges. One must grant that some tendency
does exist toward the evolution of such a model. But it seems
certain that the forces tending to scatter talent widely andto bring it to fruition in the most odd and unexpected places
will continue to be dominant. It has not by any means been
demonstrated that the overall welfare of the nation or ofhumanity at large would best be served by concentrating all
the ablest students in a few of the strongest universities.11
The problems are not so simple as this model suggests. We don’t
really know which are the “best” students, or even whether the“best” colleges are doing nearly as good a job as they might. If
the White House is to be occupied in one year by a graduateof Harvard and in the next by a graduate of Southwest Texas
Teachers’ College (an institution which, however great its
merits, has less réclame, and less power to attract students
from a distance), then both colleges had better be good.
In the broad context of the general welfare, the overwhelming
obligation of higher education is the provision of education
11.
See A. W. Astin, “Productivity of Undergraduate Institutions.” Science,
April 13, 1962, pp. 129-135. See also “Undergraduate Institutions and theProduction of Scientists.” Science, July 26, 1963, pp. 334-338.

28

for all capable of realizing its benefits and feeding theseback in multiplied vigor into the general polity. Seen inthis wide context, the selection versus rejection problem isconverted into one of differentiation, classification, multiple
characterization. No doubt it will become more apparent
in the years to come how far it is necessary or desirable todifferentiate higher education into environments of widelydifferent kinds with reference to such characteristics asdegrees of intellectual sophistication, practical versus
theoretical bent, or social involvement versus detachment.
It may even be possible to find out how to “fit” each
student into a college with an atmosphere — social, moral,
intellectual — whose tone evokes from him the most active
response. All this remains at the borderline of humanknowledge, though enough experimentation has been carriedon to suggest that some progress can be made.
For the foreseeable future things will remain pretty chaotic.
It is realistic therefore to define the basic view of theadmissions process as the result of a series of social forces,
often blind, seldom fully understood, interacting in complex
ways. Reason enters into this process, but only fitfully andpartially. Devices such as school grades and marks, clumsy at
best, do serve a helpful purpose. Tests, after a half-century ofdevelopment, have proved to be useful adjuncts in the generalclassification process. But they are easily misused; andcritics who want to abolish tests forget that it is usually someobvious misuse of this valuable device, and not testing itself,that leads to trouble.
If the individual college sees its fundamental public obligation
for providing education chiefly in the guise of a right to selectever more rigorously, the result must be defensible on some29

grounds broader than a blind, avaricious impulse to reachout for more and better. Leaving aside the delicate question
whether College A deserves better students, or whether it
has done anything to earn them (except for high-pressure
recruiting), there remain many other unanswered questions.
Do the “best” colleges indeed attract the best (or most)
students? Are some colleges merely marshaling yards forswitching groups of students from particular secondary
schools with particular clienteles, reshuffling and sorting
them, and moving them on into various postgraduate
destinations? May this traffic-interchange function
overshadow the educational process itself, so that theinstitution becomes a kind of large-scale broker in talent,rather than a generator of education in its own right?
To ask questions of this kind is to present a series ofcaricatures, necessarily exaggerated, yet pointing totendencies that are to some extent present and operative inthe contemporary scene. The individual student is so intent
on gaining admission to some college he regards as suitablethat he takes the existing situation quite as it is. He hasneither time nor inclination for critical analysis. The system,with all its inherent chaos and unreason, is nevertheless abuilt-in part of his problem, and he has to cope with it as it is.
The extensive literature on “how to get into college,” much ofit very good and very useful, is pitched to this situation. It is
uncritical in the sense of accepting the educational world as itis, and helping the student get his bearings in it.
The individual college, as well, has a struggle and its own
set of problems to meet, financial and otherwise. It is intent
on getting more students, or better students (by its own
quite uncertain definition), or some combination of the30

two. Its standards of excellence in selecting students are
a complex mixture of values derived from the faculty, theadministration, the alumni, the community, the coaching
staff, and the surrounding culture. In this way, the college
is as intent on its own problem and as self-centered as is
the harassed student. Both are running a maze whose exits
and goals are partly hidden from them. Seldom indeed is aserious effort made to get a bird’s-eye view of the process withthe general welfare as the ultimate criterion. Yet to make aserious effort in this direction is a first duty of any admissions
officer or admissions committee seeking a broad perspective
on its task.

Levels of Analysis
The three chapters that follow are organized around theconcept of three standpoints from which the general problemof access to education can be viewed. They will be focused
mainly on conditions in the United States. The first viewpointis that of the individual student, or Level One; the second
that of the individual college, or Level Two. The third, orLevel Three, presents a conspectus of the system as a whole,including the competitive and cooperative relationship among
all colleges in the matter of the entrance and exit of students.
These are not merely three viewpoints chosen at random;they are organically related in a hierarchy of degrees ofcomplexity. They can properly be regarded not only as
three modes of discourse, but even more appropriately as
three levels of analysis at progressively higher degrees ofcomplexity. The process remains the same, but the purview
of the discussion broadens, and the intricacy of the analysis
increases, from level to level.
31Level One is clearly the simplest. Guidance counselors, parents,
teachers, and other advisers seeking to help the student fall
into this level of discussion, often quite unconsciously. The
extensive literature on how to choose a college, or how to get
into college, is carried on strictly at this level.12
Level Two concerns only the single college, but the problemsof a single college are manifold and difficult, with many
conflicts of principle and difficult choices. Level Two is ahigher plane of complexity. Most of the professional literature
on admissions is written, again quite unconsciously, on
this level. The existence of other colleges is ignored, except
as they may appear as competitors, or rarely, as models.
The inevitable article that the admissions officer writes atintervals for the alumni magazine is Level Two discourse,
pure and undefiled. The dominant criterion against which
everything is judged is the interest, or supposed interest,of the single college, its image and aggrandizement. The
unspoken assumption is that what is good for College X isgood for the United States.
The tacit presupposition is that the college seeks, and should
have, more students, or “better” students, or both. Suchquestions as whether the college deserves more or better
students, or whether some of its students might better, in
their own interest and in the public interest, go to college
elsewhere, lie outside the purview of this body of thought.

12.
See for example as two of the best: E. A. Wilson and C. A. Bucher,College Ahead! A Guide for High School Students and Their Parents.
New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1961, 180 pp. And Frank Bowles, How
to Get into College. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1960, 185 pp.

32

The typical admissions committee, like the faculty and theadministration it represents, is, in the candid phrase of one
such committee, “greedy” for talent.13 Colleges are generally
quite willing to tell the applicant, “You are not good enoughfor us.” Few ever say “We are not good enough for you.”
Level Three is the “systems” view of the entire process,and so is at a still higher degree of complexity. Discussion
at this level involves the interaction of all the colleges anduniversities with each other and with secondary schools,
as they appraise and deliver their annual crop of students
coming forward out of the society; it involves not only the“manpower” demands of the economy in a narrow sense,
but also the demands of the entire polity for an increasingly
literate society, an increasingly knowledgeable electorate,
and a citizenry with a depth of cultural awareness thatwould scarcely have been thought of a generation ago. At
Level Three it is permissible, at least, to query whether what
College X thinks is good for it is indeed good for the UnitedStates and in the public interest.
“The great sorting” between high school and college isreferred to here as a social process. In discussion or analysis
conducted at Level Three, this process is regarded as a whole,rather than from the single viewpoint of the student, or the
self-regarding stance of the college, with its own problems ofgrowth and survival. The forces involved in the system as awhole are the same as those involved in the sorting process,13.
See Admissions to Harvard College. A Report by the Special
Committee on College Admission Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University, 1960, 56 pp.

33

but many of them are not directly visible to the student. The
competition between colleges, the play of economic demand
for talent, the fluctuations of the manpower market, all forma part of the system as looked at on Level Three. Thus the“systems” view is the analytical view of the social process of
sorting, followed back to its roots in both the supply and thedemand for talent.
This essay, then, is directed especially to school guidance
people whose natural idiom of discourse is at Level One, andadmissions officers whose habits of thought are necessarily
focused on problems at Level Two, in the hope that by looking
more broadly at the system as a whole, that is by thinking
at Level Three, they may gain in perspective on their own
professional problems.

34

2. The Student andHis Future••

Focus of Decision
At Level One, that of the individual student, the “system”
with its constituent structure of schools and colleges is taken
for granted as it stands. Whatever its defects, injustices, or
illogicalities, it is there; the student has to deal with it if he is
to find and enter a college. To the extent that the high school
teacher or guidance counselor identifies himself with thestudent’s problem — and he typically does this — he functions
also at this level.
There is an extensive literature on the theme of “choosing
a college,” or “how to get into college.” This literature has
special importance for students in the United States who
have open to them a bewildering variety of educational
opportunities. Yet, in any broad sense, it has to be uncritical,
accepting the complexities and idiosyncrasies of higher
education in the United States as “given.” Matters of history,
evolution, change, or reform are beyond its scope, as arenormative views of what higher education “ought” to be. It
is “ad hoc,” and its end is served once the student gets into35

a college. He is then assumed to have solved his educational
problem, at least passably.
However complex the social forces that condition the problemof access to college, they must all come to a focus in themind and intention of the individual student. He, in the last
analysis, must decide whether he wants to go to college; andfor this decision, whether it is yes or no, he usually producessome colorable reason or rationalization. If the decision isyes, he then has to decide where he wants to go, make someestimate about where he probably can go, and make andimplement a series of subsidiary decisions. If, alas, a parent
or a counselor makes these decisions for him, the student
still has to live with the consequences. On him alone rests
the responsibility for making some kind of adjustment to thecollege environment; he alone can provide the continuing
drive and energy necessary to get an education. The world ofadmissions at Level One shows, in the student’s conception, no
tendency to change. It is part of his existential environment,
scarcely thought of as subject to growth, evolution, or reform.
It is “given.” His problem is merely to cope with it.

The Inarticulate Major Premise
What is the student’s equipment as he embarks on this task?
Most basic of all, and least noticed, is the cultural matrix
within which he has been nurtured, which has conditioned
his attitudes, beliefs, and expectations. His unconscious senseof what life is about and of the ends of existence goes back tothis deep level, but he generally cannot explain or understandit. Anthropologists studying a culture must depend heavily
upon “informants” from within the culture. They listen
carefully to what the informant says but do not make the easy
36

assumption that the informant knows why he does what hedoes, or even that he can accurately report what he does. It
is assumed, rather, that what people say about what they do
and why they do it is itself the product of a system of beliefs
provided by the culture and forming an integral part of it.
“The total configuration of belief and patterned behavior
characterizing a society is infinitely more complex than any
participant can understand, and perhaps even more complex
than the relatively detached and intellectually objective
observer can understand.”14 The individual nurtured in a
culture has its received opinions built into him, and they
become his own, a part of his personality structure; he wants
to act in ways that the cultural pattern of beliefs requiresthat he should act. He is characteristically unconscious of thesource of his attitudes. They have been absorbed to such an
extent that he is convinced either that they are self-evident
or that he has thought them up unaided. We are all to someextent brainwashed by our environment.
This basic principle of cultural anthropology should make us
exceedingly wary in interpreting any data derived by asking
people “why” they do anything. Questions directed to students
about why they want to go to college, or did or did not go tocollege, or chose a particular college, tell a great deal about
the patterns of belief that prevail in our culture but relatively
little about the inner motivations of the students themselves.
Much as the basic endowment of attitudes and beliefs differsfrom person to person depending on individual origins, there
14.
George D. Spindler, “The Character Structure of Anthropology,”in George D. Spindler (ed.), Education and Culture. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1963, 571 pp.

37

is a common core, least visible of all, because it is so nearly
all-pervasive. Like the “receptacle” in Plato’s thought, thisis the ground of being which conditions all particulars, the“foster mother of all becoming,” the background, sensed
rather than seen, against which all diversity and change areperceived.15 These form “the inarticulate major premise” ofour thinking, “the things we know but cannot tell.” At the
deepest level, the major premise derives from our common
humanity and forms the permanent base on which rest all
the less fundamental elements of culture that are relativeand changeable to such a great extent from one people toanother. This underlying common denominator includes theexistence of two sexes, the fact that all men are mortal, that
all need food and shelter, that all must communicate, and canhave no real personal existence except through relationships
with others, that all crave affection, and that many arequarrelsome.

The Cultural Matrix
In contemporary American society, we should find among theunanalyzed presuppositions of the attitudes and beliefs heldby the majority of students, vestiges of many concepts thathave come down through the centuries in the western world.
The Judeo-Christian monotheistic background is powerful,often felt rather than consciously attended to. The ideas ofJohn Locke and of the eighteenth-century enlightenment areclosely interwoven with our governmental theory and with

See Alfred North Whitehead’s discussion, Adventures of Ideas. New York:The New American Library, Inc., Mentor Books, 1955, 302 pp. Originallypublished by The Macmillan Company in 1933.

15.

38

popular ideas of it. There are important traces of uncriticalnineteenth-century optimism and its characteristic belief inprogress. There are veins and deposits of Calvinist innerdirectedness (in David Riesman’s phrase), all characteristic ofearlier stages of our development. Strong remnants persist ofthat restless, energetic individualism, that impatience withthe doctrinaire and theoretical, and that bent for the practical,
that grew up as a natural adaptation to the challenge of thefrontier and the westward expansion. The Horatio Alger spirit
is certainly far from dead in our national ethos.
Elements such as these are legacies from a past now rapidly
receding. The contemporary structure of beliefs shows manysigns of adaptation to an environment which, despite islandsof poverty, is the most opulent the world has ever known.
The basic principle of the welfare state has come to be widely
accepted within little more than a generation. The growing
governmental sector is still small compared with the area of
free enterprise. It is a society predominantly industrial andcommercial; agriculture has rapidly shrunk in percentage
terms and now occupies only a small minority of the working
population. The service industries are correspondingly
expanding. The society’s concentration into large urban areas
is an irrestible force with which we have not yet learned how
to deal. Widely prevalent too, among youth, are the kinds of
expectations and beliefs that accompany a relatively fluidsociety still characterized by high social mobility. Class
distinctions are conspicuous but have not acquired the castelike rigidity so typical of older cultures in which they oftencame to be regarded as unalterable facts of nature.
It is a society that is physically mobile as well. The movementof population among states generates a constant stirring
39

and mixing that weakens regionalism, whether of dress,
accent, or attitude. This homogenization is accentuatedby the mass media of communication which, despite theirprimary dedication to commerce via entertainment, perform
an important educational function. The average high school
youngster has a social awareness and sophistication far beyond
that of a generation ago, even though the sophistication ispartly superficial, and the awareness less than complete.
These are powerful counterforces to the built-in centrifugal
tendencies of a society as diverse and pluralistic as ours. Even
the tightest and most insulated subcultures find their ghettosof isolation more and more invaded and interconnected byunifying tendencies. These then, impressionistically sketched,
are some of the components in the climate of opinion andattitude in which the student is immersed.
In this matrix there are dark areas — disadvantaged
minorities of which the Negro population is the mostconspicuous. Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, Indians,
and a large group not identifiable by color or national origin
who are trapped in pockets of poverty, not only in Appalachia
but in many other places, share, in their own special ways,
the same general sorts of disabilities and handicaps. For ayoungster in one of these groups the controlling backgroundof attitude and motive is far different from that of the
majority. The structure of personality is different, and thewhole approach to education must therefore be different. As
noted previously, the extent to which these adverse influences
can be countered by timely educational intervention is one of
the key discoveries of this century.
The matrix of inherited basic attitude is constantly infiltrated
by the prevailing values of the surrounding culture. Young40

people are immersed in a world of advertising, bombarded
with claims that they soon learn are mostly exaggerated andmay therefore be automatically discounted. The inevitable
result of exposure to this barrage is a healthy skepticism
which may be counted as a positive, if unintended, resultof modern advertising. The phenomenon of “brand loyalty,”
often a product of this bombardment, is also a form of defense
against it. One is reminded of Alfred North Whitehead’s
remark that a creed, itself a product of speculation, is alsoa device for limiting speculation. The customer, having
gained from whatever source some impression of reputationand familiarity for a product, clings to the brand name forsecurity’s sake. It is not accidental that pecking orders of“prestige” among colleges should have grown up and received
a considerable recognition in a society conditioned to associatequality with reiterated brand names and slogans. Universities
of illustrious name and worldwide repute have existed since
the Middle Ages, but in the United States the special problem
exists of distinctions among immense numbers of institutions
in a situation in which the student has an extremely wide
range of choice and of substitution, and very inadequatemeans of making truly informed or realistic, comparative
judgments. David Riesman and others have advocated akind of “consumers’ research” effort to inform students aboutcolleges. It is uncertain whether this might offset the alreadyexaggerated effort to find the “best” college.16
Among the most important elements in the student’s
background of attitude and belief is the rapidly growing

16.
Margaret L. Habein (ed.), Spotlight on the College Student.
Washington, D. C.: American Council on Education, 1959, 89 pp.

41

belief in the importance of education. This extends
through all elements of society and is, indeed, a worldwide
phenomenon. Closely joined to the “revolution of rising
expectations” now universal in almost all nations is theconviction that education is the chief instrument by whichrising expectations can be fulfilled. The need of governments
for trained manpower exerts a strong upward pull to draw
youth into higher education — a pull reinforced even more
powerfully from below by the desire of young people to better
themselves. This conviction is at the root of the rapid andpersistent growth of the proportion of the age group seeking
to enter college in the United States. It is held not only by
those highly motivated toward higher education, but also by
those who, often regretfully, decide that it is not for them.
Conversely, the characteristic nineteenth-century distrust of
higher education as a “frill” is rapidly weakening even among
those who do not regard themselves as destined for it.17
Elements such as these, differing from person to person,
and from one subculture to another, make up thebackground cultural matrix of ideas lying deep in themind of the student as he gradually awakens to his social

17.
A characteristic expression of this earlier attitude appeared in G. H.
Lorimer’s Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son (Boston: Small,
Maynard & Co., 1903), a book that had considerable vogue at the turnof the century. For example: “… could prove that two and two makefour by trigonometry and geometry, but couldn’t learn to keep books;
was as thick as thieves with all the high-toned poets, but couldn’t write
a good snappy merchantable streetcar ad.” Philosophers of this stamp
granted approval to higher education only as a strictly practical aid inbusiness (in this case meat packing). The following passage, now a halfcentury old, is a kind of “museum piece” in the light of current demands

42

surroundings — the backdrop against which the drama
is played. But in the foreground, as active protagonists,
are two major forces that condition his entire educational
progress. These are on the one hand the spontaneous desire
to learn and on the other the practical need to get ahead,
to hold a job, to gain a marketable skill, to better oneself inthe world.

The Useful and the Poetic
This contrast is in part the contrast between the ideal andthe practical — or more precisely, between the poetic (in thewidest sense of the word) and the utilitarian. But even thisdoes not convey the full sense; for the desire to learn has
deep biological roots and carries survival value. This innate
pleasure in using the mind expresses a profound need of theorganism, and it becomes numbed and paralyzed only under
special conditions.
Education at the earliest levels is almost entirely
spontaneous — even unconscious, as when the child learns

from business for educated people at a much more profound level ofintellectual sophistication:“Does a college education pay? — Does it pay to take a steer that’s beenrunning loose on the range and living on cactus and petrified wood tillhe’s just a bunch of barbwire and sole leather, and feed him corn till he’s
just a solid hunk of porterhouse steak and oleo oil?
“You bet it pays. Anything that trains a boy to think and to thinkquick pays; anything that teaches a boy to get the answer before theother fellow gets through biting the pencil pays.
“College doesn’t make fools; it develops them. It doesn’t make brightmen; it develops them.”43

to talk and grasps some elementary rules of social behavior.
This same spontaneous joy in learning, in mastering someincreasingly intricate code or system of symbols and ideas
is utilized in the current movement to carry young children
much further than before into such fields as mathematics
and science. The key is to encourage situations in which
the child discovers principles for himself.18 By postponing
somewhat the authoritative imposition of rote learning, it ispossible also to postpone at least for a time the stage when
the child begins to be presented with “inert ideas” (in A. N.
Whitehead’s expressive phrase); his eye begins to glaze over,and he loses the first spontaneous enthusiasm.
The improvements that have taken place in educationin our generation have significantly extended the period
during which this spontaneous pleasure in learning can be
maintained and have increased the proportion of students
moved by this wellspring of interest. But at the higher levels,
prudential considerations inevitably take command.
Most higher education involves a tension between these twopolar opposites. There are, at one extreme, a few “natural
students” for whom the urge to know is overmastering, who
need no other incentive. At the other extreme is the muchlarger group impelled by practical considerations to “hirethemselves educated.” For these, a degree is the goal, andwhat pleasure and interest can be got along the way is only asmall extra. The great bulk lie between these extremes, the18.
See, for example, articles by various authors on elementary science
courses in the Quarterly Report of Educational Services, Inc., Watertown,
Massachusetts, Winter-Spring, 1964, pp. 61-82.

44

useful and the poetic. Without some spark of response to theinherent interest of the subject, study becomes so intolerably
dull that few could continue it; some vestige of interest in
learning is always present in those who stick to a course. To
help them over the dull stretches, there is the shining hope ofa degree and a job.
Of these dual forces, it seems clear that at the stage ofadmission to college the prudential is the more powerful. In
our culture, it is a psychological necessity for most students tohave at least a tentative occupational goal of some kind by thetime they enter college. This need is apparent from the large
majority who enter four-year programs nominally directed
at such fields as business, journalism, nursing, engineering,or “premedical.” Even the minority who enter a nominallyundifferentiated “liberal arts” course include a substantial
group whose actual orientation is vocational, as expressed
for example by a chemistry or economics major. At the sametime, the proportion of genuine liberal arts studies includedin the nominally vocational courses is steadily rising. The
undifferentiated liberal arts programs tend to attract a larger
proportion of “natural students,” for whom eventual graduate
study is a natural sequel, and also a larger proportion of those
sufficiently well-to-do to be able to extend the exploratory period
preceding an occupational commitment. For this fortunate few,
the undergraduate years of “moratorium” can be a ripening
period of great value. These contrasting motives, seen against
the backdrop of innate cultural predisposition, are the key
factors in the decision to continue education past the secondary
level, and to a large extent also the key to the choice of a college.
These influences bear upon the student as he begins in a
conscious and purposeful way to think about whether to45continue his education after high school, and where. In thelast two high school years he begins to play a major part in“the great sorting.” Under the special conditions that obtainin the United States, a great deal of conscious choice has tobe exercised by individual students, but many extraneous
influences intervene to affect this choice, for better or worse.
The exuberant, even chaotic variety of colleges anduniversities in the United States is a potential asset ofincalculable value. Free enterprise and initiative function inparallel with state-operated education. The history of weak
denominational colleges throughout the nineteenth century
has led into a situation in which public higher education
increasingly shoulders the main burden but privatelysponsored institutions serve as a source of innovation,variety, and experiment. Many of the privately sponsoredcolleges of the earlier era have evolved into universities ofhigh standards of excellence. These are pacesetters; only
the strongest state universities equal them. The small,independent colleges of the nineteenth century carried adouble burden: sectarian narrowness and rivalry, whichalmost automatically eliminated itself within a generationor two; and a pedantic, narrow version of the classicalcurriculum, which had to give way before the broader
educational needs of the time. Natural selection eliminatedmany of these institutions; most of the survivors maintained
themselves by broadening their appeal.

Kinds of Intervention
The present situation has one serious disadvantage forthe student at Level One: he becomes so caught up in theprocesses of choice, selection, comparison, and competitive46

differences among colleges that he loses sight of the main
issue, the educational process itself. He is encouraged tothink of education as something favorable that will be done
to him, or in his behalf. Attainment of membership among
the happy few seems a final goal rather than a beginning. So
the task of guidance, from whatever source, is to emphasize
to the student the central importance of his own initiative.
He must learn to see the college as an incidental aid andsupplement to his own effort, not as the source from which
all enlightenment streams down. College, to change themetaphor, is a crutch, not a stretcher. Having grasped thisconcept, he is still faced with the necessity for choice and thetactical problem of implementing it.
In a wholly rational world, the student would look to thestated purpose of a college to determine whether it mightmeet his needs. Up to a certain point, catalog information
will serve him as a useful guide to its curricular orientation.
But to draw up a general statement of a college’s purpose isa task, deceptively simple in appearance, which has defeatedmost authors of catalog prose.19 Such statements are likely
to have little practical bearing on the processes involved
in “the great sorting.” Naive efforts to state in simple,
straightforward terms the objectives of a school or college
are seldom successful. Education is, above all, an openended process. A great many things, fortunately, happen to
students that neither they nor anyone else had planned orcontemplated. This fact lends a certain air of unreality to any
statement about the college’s purpose.
19.
See William C. Fels, “The College Describes Itself.” College Board
Review No. 38, Spring 1959, pp. 30-32. This masterpiece of gentle satire
should be read by anyone who expects to write admissions literature.

47

For the basic, hard core of simple factual information aboutcolleges, the various standard directories provide help.
Though they list more colleges than the student can possibly
take account of, they provide perspective on the entire field.
Second, and of greater import in the actual sorting process,are the spheres of influence, the clienteles of patronage
and association that to a greater or less degree cling toand encircle each institution. For denominational colleges,or those with a history of denominational support, these
spheres of interest are likely to lie largely within themembership of a church group. Beyond this circle, in allcolleges, lies the sedulously cultivated group of alumni andparents, with all the points of social radiation such a group
inevitably sets up. Such influences constitute a major andactive form of intervention in the sorting process, and theindividual student is frequently caught up in them and swept
into a particular college before he knows it.
Third, there is always a powerful geographical force thattends to make higher education predominantly a local
business; the sphere of influence of any school or college islikely to be strongest within a small geographical radius of
the institution itself. As demonstrated in the last section ofthis book, “College Admissions as a System,” propinquity
is probably the most powerful single influence on college
selection. Barriers erected against nonresidents by state
institutions, regrettable on educational grounds, haveincreased as admissions pressures have grown and havelessened geographical diversification. The full impact ofpropinquity on educational opportunity, however, may beseen in California which is dotted with more than 70 two-year
community colleges that have free tuition. Virtually every48

resident has one of these community colleges within driving
distance. Granted that in this context the student misses
certain values of the residential college, it may still be thatthe undiluted influence of the educational process itself
is seen here, shorn of the false glamour of the “collegiate”
tradition. It has taken the United States several centuries tomove into educational concepts broader than the European
tradition of students as a small, favored, and shelteredgroup, somewhat artificially segregated from the surrounding
culture and enjoying special privileges. The commuting
student and the adult student contribute other values andmay develop attitudes that can make more natural the
lifelong addiction to continued learning that the conditions of
the age require.
Fourth, intervention includes activities directed specificallyat recruiting, in the sense of a direct effort by the college
to interest and attract students for the ensuing year. Such
activities shade off gradually into long-range public relations
programs, with legitimate guidance of students as theirmain object, and mutual communication between college andsecondary school as their main instrument. Publications,bulletins, school visits, college conferences and the like,the importing of students and of school representatives forcampus visits — all, in greater or less degree, contributeto this overt attempt to inform and attract those who arethought to be peculiarly well qualified as potential students.
In all this activity, there is a mixture of propagandist effort
on behalf of individual colleges and guidance of a broader
sort that has to do with categories of institutions and therealms of value inherent in the world of higher education. The
student, though conscious that he is being wooed, cannot help
acquiring some sense of what the educational process is about.
49

Fifth, and most specific of the overt means of intervention, arethe direct financial aids offered to students. The categories ofstudent excellence that are thought to merit financial aid arewidely varying in different institutions. But it is essential todistinguish between aids awarded for the exercise of specifictalents (athletic, musical, or whatnot) and aids extended inrecognition of broad qualities of character and intellect suchas will come later to fruition. Financial aids of the former
kind tend in one way or another to exploit the student for the
benefit of the institution, or to further some end thought todeserve special support apart from the objective of educatinghim. In student aid of the latter type, an estimate of theultimate contribution of the student to society is the final
criterion, and a compelling case can be made for the view that
this is the only justifiable basis for financial aid. The reallydifficult problems in allocating such grants arise not out ofany disagreement on this point, but out of the difficulty ofpredicting in advance which qualities are in fact likely to be
most fruitful, and how “need” should enter the equation.
Sixth, the colleges intervene in the sorting process byinterposing a direct veto on a certain number of applicants.
This veto may range all the way from a minimum standardof academic achievement, which screens out a few clearly
unqualified candidates, to a competitive situation in which
only the strongest candidates are taken, and many who
are well qualified are turned away because of lack of space.
Taking the college world as a whole, this is a less important
kind of intervention than public opinion supposes it to be.
While to some extent colleges select students (and even theleast selective college does some selecting), to a much greater
extent, in this country, students select colleges. Even the highstandard college upholds its quality not so much by rejecting
50

applicants as by establishing a reputation that attracts many
able and ambitious students and, in the main, scares away
the weaker ones. In other words, preselection of the college
by the student, even in this era of selective admissions, ismore important than screening of students by the college. The
colleges probably intervene in the sorting process less thanthey suppose themselves to, and to the extent that they dointervene, it is often their reputations rather than their actions
that are the effective agencies of intervention. The college“telegraphs its punches” by making known its standards andpreferences. Potential applicants take these into account.
Guidance counselors in the high schools anticipate college
action by steering elsewhere those likely to be marginal.
Seventh, the colleges intervene by announcing formal“entrance requirements,” in terms of required years of studyof specific subjects. As already pointed out, the tendency inrecent years has been to reduce this kind of requirement toa bare minimum. The colleges are discovering that whenmost of their applicants are firmly grounded in secondary
education, they can devote their energies to selecting
students on broad grounds of character and intellect. How far
this effort is successful is problematical. In any case it is acomplete reversal of the earlier policy of insisting on specified
preparatory subjects in combinations that were often difficult
to defend except on grounds of tradition and precedent.
It is in the area of accumulative knowledge, particularly inmathematics and science, that the strongest case can be madefor specific subject-matter requirements.
These are some of the cross currents among which thestudent must navigate. Where, among this welter of
influences, does educational guidance belong? If the51

guidance counselor is to avoid authoritative direction
and indoctrination, he has to act as a kind of alter ego of
the student himself — more experienced, with a broader
perspective and more special knowledge, but dedicated above
all to the student’s best interests. This position imposes on
him the imperative, within the limits of his vision, to makeavailable to the student such wisdom as he can muster, toconvey to him some sense of the contingent and probabilistic
nature of the relevant information and of the difficulty ofarriving at clear-cut decisions free of any risk, ambiguity,or doubt. His task is to exert his influence on the student tokeep open as many doors as possible for as long as possible,
and to avoid relatively irreversible curricular decisions which
may effectively cut off the possibility of college. He cannotchange all the students’ systems of values, nor can he extend
a guarantee against mistakes, though he may cause them tobe fewer and less grave in their effects.
The range of quality open to a student is wide, the rangeof aims and intellectual climates even wider. The baffled
student, bewildered in a college that he is not really up to,and the bored student trapped in a college not really up tohim, both represent educational waste. Not only, then, isthere a formidable information problem, but it is social in
its origins. The student may not know what information heneeds, or how to get the information he wants, or how to use
the information he has.20 Intelligent educational guidance can20.
This elegant formulation of the nub of the student’s problem is takenfrom Martin Katz, Decisions and Values: A Rationale for Secondary
School Guidance. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1963,67 pp. See p. 25.

52

help, but many competing sources of information intervenein the crucial decisions. The communication network, taken
as a whole, constitutes a major dimension of the broadsocial problem of access to higher education. In so far as
communication lapses, the student has recourse to choice
on conventional grounds — propinquity, hearsay, “prestige,”fashion, parental association, or chance rumor and advice. All
these sources are more social than educational in origin.
That mismatching of student and college under these
conditions is not always as serious as it might be is traceable
to three reasons: first, the natural resilience and adaptabilityof youth is such that most boys and girls who fail to reachthe “college of their choice” nevertheless turn out to be quite
happy in some alternative environment; second, over fairly
wide limits, the important educational outcomes depend
less on where a student goes to college than on what hedoes when he gets there; and third, there is an importantelement of chance that determines what particular confreres
and teachers each individual happens to be thrown with.
The effects of these particular and randomly determinedencounters, for some students, may outweigh the moregeneral atmosphere and character of the college as a whole.

Education as a Cultural Complex
In guidance literature, the heavy emphasis on the psychologyof the individual student, whether in a clinical context orin the actuarial use of test and measurement as aids toguidance, has partially obscured what may be called thecultural anthropology of the guidance function. The counselor
should have a deep understanding of the various subcultures53

from which his students spring and a grasp of their value
systems. Too often he has himself represented a middleclass culture which is held out as the sole norm, to the great
disadvantage of talented students from minority or deprived
environments. He needs a sensitive comprehension of theethos of the various subcultures from which students comeand of the occupational goals and evaluations that moveparents and students. He needs a grasp of the world of workin relation both to education and to the forces of parental
ambition, misguided or well founded. Scores and marks ofany kind, useful as they may be, are measurements of slices
cut out of complex cultural configurations. Numbers gain
their full meaning only as they aid in describing the culturalcomplex in which the student is embedded.
It is customary to say that the world of learning is universal
and cosmopolitan in the sense that it transcends the limits oflocal and national cultures. Yet this is true only in a relative
degree. Not only does the word culture embody the integrated
total of the influences of its historical roots — Hebrew, Greek,
Arabic, medieval Christian, and scientific — it also becomes
identified with particular segments and subcultures indifferent environments. The youngster from a deprived
minority, seeking education, finds he is being asked to adopt a
new culture, a culture that he may associate with a particularsocial class or ethnic group which in his experience may seemalien or threatening. Is there a merely fortuitous resemblance
between the attitudes of a governing elite, a managerial class,or a religious leadership, and the attitudes of the scholarly
world? For example, the question has presented itself inacute form in the British universities where gifted students
from working-class backgrounds sometimes find themselves
painfully cut off from the culture of their homes and54

families through adoption of a body of mores and attitudes
characteristic of a university education long confined to theruling class, so that the apparatus of learning has long sincecome to reflect its attitudes and values, even its vocabulary.
A similar tension arises as traditional societies transformthemselves through Western scientific and technicallearning.21
The search for a “culture-free” test that would be fair toculturally deprived children has proved elusive. Even theearliest stages of preschool education begin to mold thechild into the configurations of cultural habit. The entire
educational enterprise is a complex of influences to mold
both behavior and personality. These influences keep
getting entangled and associated with other cultural forces
which are only partially educational in purpose and effect.
Education becomes associated with religion, with ethnic
and nationalistic aims, beliefs and strivings, and with ideasof social class. Snobbery is endemic in the human species.
Education has always been a favorite vehicle of snobbishness,
as have innumerable other things such as costume, accent,occupation, housing, and diet. As more and higher education
becomes virtually indispensable for a large fraction of
the population, it becomes important to disentangle theessence of education — its central meaning and value — fromthese adventitious contaminants. We literally do not know
how far this disentangling can go. Education is a partly
utilitarian, partly ideal venture. Because these two aspects
are never wholly separable, we shall probably continue to see
21.
Daniel Lerner in The Passing of Traditional Society documents thesetensions in realistic detail. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press of Glencoe (now adivision of The Macmillan Co., New York), 466 pp.

55

education in many curious combinations with other cultural
manifestations. Yet we still recognize some unity in the worldof higher education toward which the student seeking toenter college, though often stumbling and in a fog, is being
gradually led.
Despite these complications, the world of western learning
exhibits a certain universality in its tradition and outlook.
This is traceable to its roots in Greek speculative thought, inRoman law, in medieval monkish learning, and most of all
to the powerful influence of science and technology. To findexamples of education apart from this central stream, we
have to look either at primitive societies, or at such highly
developed examples as the ancient Chinese literary tradition,
the Talmudic tradition of learning, or the universities of
the Arabic culture. None of these has attained a similar
universality. The very inclination and readiness to undertake
higher education imply, however dimly, some acceptance ofthe values of this encompassing world of learning and aneagerness to participate in it. At least some adumbrations ofthese values must reach the student and move him, if he isto respond to the opportunities of higher education. He musthave a certain cultural attitude, a mental and emotional “set,”
absorbed unconsciously from the social environment.

Constriction at the Roots
The Western university tradition has, then, a certain
solidarity and uniformity at the top. The values of thescholarly world in all parts of the globe converge in a respect
for firsthand knowledge, whether of “sources” or of natural
phenomena, for intellectual integrity, for independence andlehrfreiheit, for the careful, persuasive methods of reason,
56

the conscientious weighing of evidence, and the obligation as
well as the freedom to publish results. Authority, no matter
how august, is rebuttable by new evidence duly presented.
Useful knowledge, too, has risen to a status formerly reserved
for traditional or ceremonial kinds of learning. Despite
international and intercultural differences, this cluster ofvalues is dominant throughout the modern world.
But when we look, by contrast, at the roots of the university
in the populations out of which they grow, wide local
variations appear in social attitudes. Access to university
education has been for the most part restricted to a small
fraction of the populace. Even where the apparatus ofcompetitive examination seemed to guarantee a career open
to talent, it frequently turned out that limitations of custom
as well as economic forces, often closely tied to ideas of social
class, sharply curtailed access to the secondary education
which was the only gateway to higher education.22
The “self-fulfilling prophecy” has been operative in every
country: the majority, systematically deprived of educational
stimulus, were considered to hold little promise of talent.
Being cut off for the most part from the influences that
nurture latent talent, they evidenced little of it; and this inturn was cited as the reason for diverting most children intoa low-grade “workers’” education. The American Negro, aminority, has shared with European working classes, a large

22.
See Frank Bowles, Access to Higher Education, cited in note 10.
This pioneering study analyzes in detailed variety the social forces thathave sometimes encouraged but usually hindered the movement of able
students into universities in many countries.

57

majority, the fate of being caught in this self-generating circleof non-opportunity and nondevelopment.
Simon Newcomb, the astronomer, has told in his recollections
how, as a poor farm boy in Nova Scotia in the 1850s, “I had
indeed gradually formed, from reading, a vague conception ofa different kind of world, a world of light, where dwelt people
who wrote books and people who knew the men who wrote
books — where lived boys who went to college and devoted
themselves to learning instead of driving oxen. I longed muchto get into this world, but no possibility of doing so presented
itself. I had no idea that it would be imbued with sympathy
for a boy outside who wanted to learn.”23
The contemporary version of this problem is more complex
but equally poignant. Even in the United States, where
nearly universal opportunity is open for secondary education,
there are backwaters and eddies in the educational stream.
Subcultures of considerable size exist in which education
makes no effective connection with the motivation of thestudent. There are talented youngsters who do not know
themselves to be so, or, if they do, have no idea how to develop
their talents. They are enveloped in a peer group swayedby other interests and values; for them life seems to holdquite different meanings, threats, and rewards. The “street
culture” of their environment is so noisy and powerful thatit completely jams the quieter signals that come in from theworld of education. If these signals do indeed reach them,
they still have a financial obstacle to overcome; only if by
23.
Simon Newcomb, The Reminiscences of an Astronomer. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1903.

58

some remote chance this problem is met can they then starteven with the prosperous middle-class youngster. Only at thisstage do they then encounter, as he does, the ensuing puzzleof choosing one out of many colleges and universities.
In a century the chief locus of the problem of access tohigher education has shifted from remote rural regions to
the heart of the great metropolitan areas. It has been well
said that today’s frontier lies in the cities. A Puerto Rican
girl in New York or a Negro boy in South Chicago can bein fact as isolated from educational opportunity as wasSimon Newcomb a century ago in remote Nova Scotia.24 His
counterparts of course still exist in rural areas today, but theimmense forces of urbanization have produced a far moredangerous and explosive social configuration, confined withina small space and ready to be touched off by the slightest
spark.25
These perilous forces are at the heart of the college
admissions problem in the United States. Compared withthem, the problem of the middle-class boy or girl trying
to decide where to go to college is relatively mild. Yet thisproblem, too, is worthy of attention, because so much of

24.
See especially James B. Conant, Slums and Suburbs: A Commentaryon Schools in Metropolitan Areas. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.,
1961, 147 pp.
25.
The literature on racial discrimination is immense. Especially
recommended are: Robert L. Sutherland, Color, Class, and Personality,
1942, 135 pp.; Allison Davis and John Dollard, Children of Bondage,
1940, 299 pp.; and W. L. Warner, B. H. Junker, and W. A. Adams,
Color and Human Nature, 1941, 301 pp. All three of these studies were
published by the American Council on Education.

59

the effectiveness of education depends on environmental
influences of a subtle, almost invisible kind. The student
tends to be thrown back on the somewhat nebulous conceptof “prestige” for lack of anything more tangible or more
specifically related to the quality of the educational process.
The fashionable current hypothesis is that the best known
and most prestigious colleges are in some not very clearly
defined way “better.” In its crassest form, this is simply
the widely held belief that a degree from such a college will
give preference in employment or social esteem. At one
remove from this is the hypothesis that in such institutions
the faculty is abler, the facilities superior, the student bodymore highly selected, and the quality of the educational
process to which the student is exposed consequently
better. Within certain limits, this may well be the case.
But this view overlooks the possibility, first, that applicant
pressure, in the current scarcity conditions, is not a safe
measure of a college’s real excellence, since none of these
institutions is nearly as good as it ought to be, could be,
and eventually will be; second, that many if not mostother colleges, now less sought after, could be radically
improved if the processes of educational innovation andexperiment were systematically pursued, followed up, andacted upon.26
There is a considerable recent literature of differentiation
among colleges with reference to their social, intellectual, and26.
Nevitt Sanford’s compendium, The American College, reflects in a
number of passages recurring doubts about the effectiveness of many
current educational practices. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1962,
1,084 pp. See note 27.

60

psychological atmospheres — the “press” of the environment
upon the student.27 This has great theoretical interest andeven some immediate utility in placing the student in anenvironment suited to his needs. It has by no means displaced
the purely intuitive differentiation based on hearsay andgossip, which is still the main reliance of many students andsome guidance counselors. The more theoretical approachraises as many questions as it answers. How far will thesetechniques “freeze” colleges in particular stereotypes? Is thebest education one in which all students tend to resemble
each other in values and viewpoint? Is the small “specialty”
college more comfortable but less truly educational than alarge institution in which contrasting subcultures coexist andinteract?
It seems certain that we have underestimated the extent towhich education is itself a phenomenon of acquiring customs,
values, systems of belief, and habits of thought in addition to
the nominal content of learning itself. The “cultural shock”
for a student from an alien environment (either a poverty
environment or a foreign culture) can defeat even a youngsterof outstanding intellectual gifts unless pains are taken to27.
This literature ranges from the impressionistic but useful sketchesof David Boroff, through the penetrating sociological comparisons ofdifferent colleges by Everett C. Hughes (for example: “How Colleges
Differ,” pp. 16-22 in Planning College Policy for the Critical Decade Ahead.
College Admissions No. 5. New York: College Entrance Examination
Board, 1958, 116 pp.), to the more rigorous psychological characterizations
by C. R. Pace (for example: “Five College Environments.” College Board
Review No. 41, Spring 1960, pp. 24-28). Among the classics in this generalarea are David Riesman’s Constraint and Variety in American Education.
(New York: Doubleday & Co., 1958, 174 pp.); and The American College,
edited by Nevitt Sanford (see note 26).

61

introduce him gradually to ways he does not know and“signals” he does not recognize or understand.
These are the kinds of problems that present themselvesto the student seeking higher education. The forces briefly
sketched above may be hidden from him or only partly visible
to him. He senses simply a confused world of educationthat he does not understand, in which he is usually forced
to exercise choices and make decisions for which he is illequipped. The guidance counselor needs to contribute whatenlightenment he can, and the admissions officer has an
obligation to look beyond the competitive advancement of theinterests of his own college and to serve a broader function astrustee of the student’s long-term interests and welfare.

623. Admissions within
the Walls••

Faculty Viewpoint
The ways in which a college or university organizes itself
internally to deal with admissions reflect its attitudes about
the meaning and purpose of the admissions function in
the life of the institution, the attitudes referred to here as
constituting the Level Two view. In these organizational
expedients there are not only responses to current opinion
and alignments but also many fossilized traces of conditions
long past. The admissions function, broadly conceived,
concerns the deep roots by means of which higher educationin general, and the individual college in particular, tap anddraw sustenance from the general population.
Few college people concerned with admissions realize how
deep these roots are. The invincibly “collegiocentric” postureso characteristic of most colleges largely inhibits attention
to the social roots of the educational enterprise. The college
thinks of itself as a little community carrying on certain
activities and striving toward certain objectives. Obviously
there must be an input of students. The faculty, keenly
63aware that there are numerous young people who are poorly
adapted to the routines and seemingly impervious to the
influences that the faculty conceives as constituting education,
early develops a bias in favor of those with whom they
feel most comfortable. Identify and exclude those “unable
to profit” from education — this is the simple and obvious
prescription. Thus the recruiting and selective processes cometo favor particular subcultures, particular temperaments andpersonality types and styles of behavior, with a bias toward
the student who exhibits eagerness tempered by a generous
admixture of docility. The teacher has a deep personal needto feel that he is handing on something both wanted andappreciated. So recruiting and selection, to the extent thatthey are under faculty influence, are generally slanted,
often quite unconsciously, in favor of those whose earlybackground and schooling have already carried them some
way toward education, who exhibit the cultural traits withwhich educators feel most at home. Conversely, those standing
in the greatest need of education, including some who havegreat native ability, are often excluded. One is reminded of themerchant who complained that the bank would let him have aloan only if he could prove that he did not really need a loan.
In the kind of admissions activity spontaneously developedby most colleges a heavy weighting exists in favor of adapting
the student body (by suitable recruiting and selection) to theprocesses of the college. Up to a point this kind of adapting
is necessary and proper; whether it is a principle thatshould operate to the exclusion of the converse — adapting
the processes of the college to the student body — is more
doubtful. The point is that most colleges take the former view
automatically and exclusively. Education, in this view, isdefined as what the college has long been doing. Those who64do not respond to these influences are thus, by definition,
ineducable.
The history of land transportation offers an instructive
analogy. For centuries it was taken for granted that the direct
and obvious way to attack the problem was to adapt the vehicle
to the terrain. The horse, the camel, the travois, the sledge, thecart, wagons with wide wheels and wagons with large wheels,were all tried. Even the automobile was sharply limited in its
early stages by the omnipresence of mud. It was only after
serious attention was paid to adapting the road to the vehicle,
first by the device of rails, then by improved highways, that
real progress was made. There are encouraging signs thathigher education may be beginning to adapt its processes tothe student, instead of choosing students to fit preexistingprocesses. But the internal organization of admissions, as wellas the curriculum itself, still reflects the traditional thinking.
In its reliance on concepts of “processing” — of subjecting many
individuals to what is essentially uniform treatment — higher
education, like education at lower levels, has disregarded or
suppressed its greatest asset: the inherent diversity of talentswith which nature has endowed individuals. Nature, as Emile
Duclaux remarked, loves diversity, but education aims at
repressing it.
Because the faculty thinks in terms of particular disciplines
and bodies of subject matter, its natural impulse is to lay down
rather minute specifications about prerequisites for admission.
To the degree that the teacher can be relieved of the burdenof working through an elementary introduction to his subject,
he can spend time on the more recondite aspects that interest
him most and can bring the student closer to the cutting edgeof new research and new knowledge where the excitement65

lies. It is easier and a great deal more fun to teach people
who are already three parts educated. Thus the hope recurs
in faculty discussion that the student will have at least a“decent” elementary grounding, or a “respectable” foundation.
Such words have the ring of modest reasonableness. They aresupposed to imply that one is willing to settle for the barest
minimum, but that nevertheless there are limits; one cannot
teach an ape or a complete barbarian. The definition of whatis “decent” or “reasonable” may, of course, include anything
one wishes — from spelling to an acquaintance with Hamlet;from arithmetic to the second law of thermodynamics. The
phrase “college preparation” embodies the quite unconscious
arrogance — indeed an innocent arrogance — of generations ofcollege teachers, immersed in this thinking.
There is a kind of reductio ad absurdum lurking behind allsuch reasoning which tends to admit to education those whoneed it least and to exclude those for whom the “value added”
by education would be greatest. It is obviously essential
to exclude those so unprepared that they cannot benefit
from instruction at the going level, yet this tendency if leftunchecked can focus the educational process on a small andindefinitely diminishing fraction of students.
Thus the impelling force behind the institution of facultycommittees on admissions has been the solicitude of faculties
for specific regulations about the subject matter that students
were expected to have mastered. A great deal of faculty
debate is concerned with the minutiae of these regulations.
The profound sociological implications of admission to higher
education and its attendant problems are quite generally
ignored. To require a year of calculus as a prerequisite foradmission may look like real progress to the mathematics
66

department, which sees the one student who comes in withthis added head start. It does not see the many candidates of
equal or greater ultimate promise who will be automatically
excluded by a provision of this kind.
An interesting sidelight on the evolution of admissions
methods and attitude is provided by Broome’s history ofadmissions requirements in the United States, published in
1903.28 This is a painstaking, thorough, and scholarly review,
beginning from the earliest colonial era. But so preoccupied
is Broome with internal organization, and with the detailed
rearrangements of traditional and conventional subject
matter, that all other values are simply ignored. It neveroccurred to anyone in that era to look more broadly at thesocial and economic forces which were the real determinantsof admission to college. Such pedantry was the culmination ofa long process by which the academic mind had managed todissociate itself from the living world around it.
The assignment of faculty committees to oversee specified
academic functions was rare in the early history of Americancolleges. Only in the last decade or two of the nineteenth
century did the use of such committees become prevalent,perhaps in imitation of German university practice; only inthis later stage was admissions included among the functions
so supervised. It is not entirely clear how far these groups
passed upon individual cases or whether, as seems moreprobable, they were mainly concerned with such aspects ofpolicy as could be expressed in subject-matter regulations.
28.
Edwin Cornelius Broome, A Historical and Critical Discussionof College Admission Requirements. 1903. Reprinted by the College
Entrance Examination Board, New York, 1963, 157 pp.

67

The history of the “Committee of Ten,”29 in the decade thatpreceded the formation of the College Entrance Examination
Board, lends support to the latter emphasis. The chaos thatthen existed was a man-made chaos of detailed specifications,which were essentially arbitrary in nature. The problem,
for the student, was real enough; but it was an artifact ofeducational rigidity, not a problem inherent in basic social or
educational causes. The steps taken by joint action to remedy
the situation (including the establishment of the College
Entrance Examination Board) were useful on the level atwhich the problem presented itself but did not touch the
deeper dilemmas of access to higher education.

Admissions Officers Emerge
The practice of designating an administrative officer to concern
himself with admissions came later. A scattering of larger
universities began appointing such officers in the 1920s, but
the practice became prevalent only in the 1930s. It was in thisperiod that the notion of selective admissions and a numerus
clausus for each entering class began to take hold. The earlier
practice of establishing admissions requirements, which definedcertain preparatory subject matter, set certain minimum
standards either of high school performance or examinations or
both; and from that point on, nature took its course. The size ofentering classes was a dependent variable — the net resultantof the total number of applicants minus whatever number wereautomatically disqualified by the operation of the requirements.
Large state institutions, operating of necessity by rule, haveadhered most nearly to the latter plan, partly because forthem it is important to set impersonal requirements. “Rolling”
29.

Ibid., p. 130 ff.
68

admissions follows essentially the same principle, with orwithout some degree of selectivity.
Independent colleges and universities were the first to
break this pattern; requirements were still published andmaintained, but they became, in effect, a candidate’s leastsignificant credential. If the total number of applications
exceeded a predetermined size, the right was reserved
to select among the qualified candidates in order to holdthe entering class down to the target figure. There were,of course, many complications and adjustments. Open or
rolling admissions could be limited by setting deadlines
and final dates. Minimum academic requirements could be
conveniently stretched by admitting candidates who held
one or more “conditions,” later to be removed by processes
that ranged all the way from “making up” a year’s work
(the “pound-of-flesh” approach) to the other extreme ofsimply wiping out the lapse on the ground that the student
had successfully finished the first year (the “forgiveness”
approach).
By a paradoxical coincidence, the beginnings of the selective
principle in admissions came during the 1930s at a time
when the Depression was drastically reducing the number
of applicants to all colleges. It remained an ideal scarcely
realized until after World War II. For most institutions,particularly the small, financially struggling liberal arts
colleges, many of them just emerging from a sectarian control
that severely limited their appeal, the decade 1930–1940 was
a time of desperate and anxious recruiting. The top priority
need was to find enough cash customers so that the college
could remain solvent. The appointment of admissions officers
became general in this era, and such people had to be,69

first of all, salesmen.30 The faculty committee on admissions
typically continued its nominal oversight of (more or lesselastic) “requirements,” but this was shadowboxing; the rootof the matter lay in the job of attracting students.
As time went on, and recruiting became less urgent, thefunctions of the admissions officer insensibly broadened. It
became evident that a kind of iron curtain had shut off thesecondary school system from the world of higher education.
Over a generation the pendulum had swung to an extreme inwhich the high schools of necessity had been led to give main
attention to noncollege students. As a result, problems of
guidance toward higher education, of curricular articulation,and of contact and information were next seen to be urgent andto need attention. Pari passu with the development of college
guidance as a quasi-professional activity in the high schools, theadmissions function began to develop in a similar manner, andto show at least the faint beginnings of a professional approach.
A kind of mutual improvement process got slowly underway.31 High school counselors found themselves trying to30.
The Association of College Admissions Counselors, now an influential
national organization, had its origins in this period, when an urgent needbecame apparent for a “code of ethics” to regulate intense competitive
recruiting efforts, particularly among midwestern colleges. The laterbroadening of the organization to include secondary schools, as well as its
geographical diversification, gave it increased standing as a Level Three
project.
31.
In the 1950s a vigorous movement for better communication and closer
relationships between colleges and secondary schools was initiated. One
important focus of this effort was the Secondary School-College Relations
Committee of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars andAdmissions Officers. See for example the 1955 aacrao booklet, Secondary
School — College Co-operation, an Obligation to Youth.

70advise students about attendance at colleges about which
the counselors knew next to nothing; a great informational
gap needed to be filled. Conversely, many people in college
were thrown into admissions work with no professional
training for it, and no real knowledge of secondary educationand its problems. The full range of educational guidance, itcame to be realized, was broad enough to comprehend boththese groups. With this realization the internal design ofcollege administrations began to change. Communication
between college faculty and schools, mutual visits, evenexchange of teachers, gradually increased.32 The rigid viewof admissions as the unyielding application of a series of “yesor no” rules began to yield to a broader understanding of
the educational, social, and human aspects of the guidance
function. Admissions values in this broad sense of educational
guidance began to permeate faculty thinking beyond thenarrow confines of admissions committees.
At its lowest and least imaginative level, exchange between
high school counselors and admissions people constitutes akind of brokerage operation. At this level, the job is one ofnegotiation: the high school counselor tries to make the best
possible bargain on behalf of his “client” for admission to astrong college. In an independent school, the student is quite
literally a client, and in the eyes of status-conscious parents,a school’s reputation may, to an embarrassing degree, dependon its success in getting its graduates into the particular32.
A classic account of the advantages and problems of school-college
teacher exchange is Edwin Fenton’s “Working with High Schools:
A Professor’s Testimony.” The School Review, Vol. 69, No. 2, Summer
1961, pp. 157-168.

71

colleges favored by its parent group, an objective often only
remotely related to the genuine educational worth of theprocesses carried on in these colleges, or their suitability forthe students concerned.
The counselor, if tempted to “oversell” a candidate, knowsthat he is always subject to the risk that another year thecollege will be more wary of his recommendations. The
admissions officer in turn has a recruiting problem — or thinks
he has. He is looking for the strongest students, or those
who in his scheme of values are deemed more “desirable.” Insuch an atmosphere of negotiation it is very easy to fall intoa predominantly bargaining habit of thought, losing sight of
the fact that both parties to the transaction are in a deeper
sense obligated to act as trustees for the student’s welfare,and to serve in a fiduciary capacity, giving him the benefit ofwhatever special skill and experience they can muster. What
the student or his parents want, or think they want, may not
represent the wisest educational solution. But they have aright to choose. Solutions cannot be imposed on them. It isa task of persuasion and diplomacy to carry them, perhaps,some distance but not all the way toward what seems thebest solution. There are no certainties; guidance, like politics,
remains the art of the possible.
The admissions officer and his colleagues representcharacteristic viewpoints about the aims of education andabout methods of attracting and selecting students. The
academic world is a subculture in itself. True, it has more
windows on the universe than the grocery or hardware
business. In its worldwide catholicity and universality, it
has dimensions centuries old, awe-inspiring and precious;

72

yet it too has its constraints and parochialisms. Not evenacademia, with its powerful tradition of detached rationality,
can ever get wholly outside the framework of its accustomed
thinking. Whoever comments upon this must in turn havehis own predilections and prejudices. Yet a conscious effort totranscend both the competitive interests of individual colleges
and the characteristic habits of thought of the scholarly world
can illuminate the forces affecting the inflow of students.
Higher education interacts in many ways with the societythat contains it. It is an interaction partly defined and shapedby the ways in which it reaches, attracts, and chooses its
students. An institution is to be judged by what it does. To
look at actual admissions practices, rather than at what an
institution professes these practices to be, is to see almamater en déshabillé and without her make-up.
We speak loosely of the college seeking the kind of candidate
for admission that it most values. But various elements in an
institution may have quite diverse notions of what constitutes
a desirable candidate. Even the faculty, whose views may
seem homogeneous if contrasted with those of the athletic
director or the treasurer, will produce as many opinions as
there are members on an admissions committee.

Registrar and Admissions
In about one quarter of American colleges,33 the vestigial
connection between the admissions function and that of the33.
See Jane Zech Hauser and Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s The Admissions
Officer …, cited in note 2.

73

registrar is retained by combining both in a single individualor placing one under the other. This organizational form isa kind of fossilized relic of the viewpoint that was dominantat the turn of the century and that grew out of faculty
solicitude for minute specifications; it became important torecord and keep track of the extent to which each student
met or fell short of the specifications. When a high school
principal wrote, “I recommend John Smith in algebra but not
in French,” the registrar’s habits of thought were such that hecould cope with the situation; the admissions officer could not,since John Smith was indivisible; someone had to say yes or
no to his application as a person entire.
The viewpoint of the earlier faculty committees was of apiece with the entire “credits” approach to educational
record keeping which has come to be characteristic of
American higher education. The registrar is of necessity acentral figure in this conception, so that to the extent thatit pervades admissions practice, the registrar seemed thelogical functionary to supervise admissions. The idea of small,interchangeable units of learning, redeemable at par, certified
much as were the coins stamped by medieval goldsmiths, hasbeen irresistibly practical and convenient, particularly in an
educational environment characterized by a wide variety ofcolleges and universities. Yet in using this procedure mosteducators have felt somewhat uneasily that it partakesof the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” The idea thatmeasured fragments of experience can be deemed to persist
and accumulate additively has a disquieting resemblance
to the manner in which some chemical substances persist
and accumulate in the human body, as for example in leadpoisoning. Or, alternatively, if “dated” credits are used, theprocess resembles ingestion into the system of radioactive74

substances which decay at a rate depending on their halflife — an even more disquieting parallel.

Selection Problems
In recent years, faculty admissions committees in manycolleges have assumed policy-making functions of a muchbroader scope, particularly in institutions which have become
highly selective. These committees often raise far-reachingquestions of general policy — questions so broad as to beunanswerable in any definitive sense because they involve
profound philosophical issues about the aims of education, its
functions in society, and the adaptability of various humantypes to versions of the educational process to which different
colleges are committed. Sometimes special ad hoc committees
have been set up to deal with these issues, and there is aconsiderable polemical literature in which individual faculty
members wrestle with questions of educational policy.34
This more recent current of thought represents an almost
complete reversal of the earlier emphasis in which
admissions committees laid down detailed specifications
about subjects of study. Two converging forces have brought
about this reversal. One of these forces is the spread of thecomprehensive high school, the general improvement of
secondary education, and the consequent greatly improved
articulation between secondary and higher education.

34.
An admirable example of determined faculty effort to wrestle withsome of the insoluble dilemmas is Admission to Harvard College, cited innote 13. See also pp. 52-73 of the “Annual Report of the Admission and
Scholarship Committee,” in Report of the President of Harvard College,
1959-60, for Dean Wilbur Bender’s discussion of some of these problems.

75

A student having possible college attendance in mind ismuch more likely to be guided into a reasonably appropriate
program and less likely to fall into one that is unacceptable
to colleges than was the case a generation ago. Specificsubject-matter requirements persist, but in diminishingdegree, and they are more rational in the sense of fitting
broad curricular objectives instead of reflecting arbitrary
selections of “units” made at the whim of individual colleges.
The second force is the view of the more selective collegesthat subject-matter requirements serve only as minimum
qualifications. Nearly all candidates meet these requirements,
so that the really difficult policy decisions involve selection
from a group already “qualified.” The grounds on which
decision is based may seem arbitrary and capricious to one
observer, while to another they may seem natural reflectionsof values deeply and sincerely held. In any case there
are few guidelines, and the scope for disputation is vast.
This is the area of “invisible” or “ambiguous” admissions
requirements.35 So it comes about that in selective collegescommittees frequently find themselves trapped in prolonged
sessions dealing with individual cases; relatively trivial
differences among candidates turn the scales. Such decisions
are basically ignorant decisions and may reflect whims andprejudices of individuals simply because no hard evidence
is at hand. Schools complain of the difficulty of predicting
admission decisions, and hence of advising students.36

35.
See particularly Henry S. Dyer, “Ambiguity in Selective Admissions.”
Journal of the Association of College Admissions Counselors, Fall 1963,
p. 15 ff.
36.
See Mary E. Chase, “The Admissions Counselor — Guide or Gambler?”
College Board Review No. 27, Fall 1955, pp. 25-28.

76

A great deal of soul searching goes on about the kind of
selection that should occur in these situations. Admissions
officers look for “interesting,” or “creative,” or “original”
candidates. They are, not unnaturally, drawn toward
youngsters who have shown intellectual curiosity, exceptionalenergy or initiative, those who have pushed some unusual
project to successful completion, or have demonstrated
marked qualities of leadership. It is quite probable that manyof these individuals will show exceptional achievement in
the next 30 years, at least in the qualities and activities that
our society values. But there are two defects in this kind of
selection.
First, the criteria in all this selection are based on limited
values and objectives. The college will gain through thesplendor of its reputation as a place from which leaders
come. But is this kind of gain good for the system as a whole?
Perhaps these human focuses of imagination and energy
would be more broadly effective and influential if scattered
more widely among more diverse student bodies. Perhaps,in the wider view, the obligation to provide an educationmust, at some point, begin to outweigh the privilege ofchoosing whom one will seek out to educate. Nobody everseems to question the usual Level Two approach, whichsimply assumes that this obligation does not exist, which
pictures the college ranging the jungle, seeking whom it may
devour, and richly entitled to whatever student material it
can pounce upon, regardless of the effect on other colleges.
Centers of excellence are, indeed, essential. But not if they
are artificially constructed by depriving others; not if tighter
selection is, in effect, made a substitute for education byassembling a group that will perform well under even themost dull and unimaginative tutelage. Excellence should be77

a product of the educational process and experience, not a
product of exclusion that may do more harm than good.
The second defect is that all the factors that enter into
“ambiguous” selection imply that we know a promising
student when we see one. But our decisions are ignorant.
Even if we set as a criterion merely the applicant’s ability
to shine in our existing academic environment, we miss themark in many cases.37 How much wider of the mark would
we be if our students had access to the full range of nurture,stimulus, and excitement that a truly imaginative university
environment would be capable of providing? As A. N.
Whitehead said, only certain kinds of excellence are possible
in particular historic epochs. It is entirely conceivable thatsome of the human types whom we reject as a matter ofcourse would, under a different concept of life and its purpose,turn out to be most needed. No admissions officer can everafford to forget the Ugly Duckling, Cinderella, or “the stonethat the builders rejected.”
The moral for admissions policy seems to be this: as apractical matter some floor has to be put under the level of
preparation and apparent intellectual aptitude, in order toavoid tragic misfits. Even if the educational process is all
wrong, we can’t change it overnight. But above this floor, agood argument can be made for something like a random
choice of applicants. Then each college will be more nearly
carrying its fair share of the load of providing education.
It will in time come to be judged by the “value added” to its
37.
See Joshua A. Fishman and Ann K. Pasanella, “College AdmissionSelection Studies.” Review of Educational Research, October 1960,
Vol. XXX, No. 4, pp. 298-310. See especially the bibliography.

78

alumni, and it will have the satisfaction of knowing that its
achievement is inherent and earned, not adventitiously andartificially gained through shunting a super-select group into
its gates.
In other words, we need to entertain the possibility that oursociety is not infallible in its characteristic judgments andvalues. Should our criteria for access to higher education turnout, in a longer perspective, to be limited and provincial, one
way to mitigate their harmful impact would be by increasing
the randomization of the selective process.
It is a basic principle of evolution, as well as of human affairs,that diversity is a chief source of progress.38 Because wecannot begin to imagine all the kinds of diversity that might
help us, we need to imitate nature by permitting random
processes to play their unpredictable part. It has been well
said that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine —stranger than we can imagine. The same is undoubtedly
true of the depth and variety of ability concealed in humanpersonality. The worst way to get at the truth is to start withthe assumption that you have it already. For generations theuniversities of the old world have assumed that they knew
how to select students. They tested their assumptions bypointing to the leaders the system produced. This argument
had two fatal flaws: first, there was virtually no other sourceof leaders against which to measure the success of the system,and second, the real test of selection is the quality of therejects. As the saying goes, the doctor can bury his mistakes.
38.
I am indebted to Henry B. Phillips for his original thought along theselines. See his paper, “On the Nature of Progress.” American Scientist,
Autumn 1945, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 253-259.

79

The university system has been able to render its mistakes
invisible by condemning them to noneducation and hence, forthe most part, to nonperformance — a perfect example of theself-fulfilling prophecy. We say to a candidate, or to a socialgroup, “You are not able enough to benefit by education.” Weaccordingly deprive him of education, he accomplishes little,
and we can then point to the wisdom of our decision. Not only
have American Negroes, a minority, been the victims of thisreasoning. The European working classes as a group havebeen under the same disability for centuries, as have ourworking classes, too, to a smaller extent.39
The faculty admissions committee, then, started as a policy
group, and in the beginning policy took the form of relatively
minute subject-matter prescriptions. The evolution from thispoint has taken two main directions: some committees pay agreat deal of attention to passing on individual cases, so muchso that little time is left for thoughtful consideration of major
policy questions. In other cases most individual decisions areleft to an admissions staff, but the committee may devote agreat deal of time to broad policy matters and the study of thelong-range effects of alternative selection methods.

Organization of Admissions
In The Admissions Officer, Jane Zech Hauser and Paul F.
Lazarsfeld report on a comprehensive statistical survey,
made in 1963 by the Bureau of Applied Social Research of

39.
See Frank Bowles, 1963, cited in note 10. This study assembles
striking evidence of the severe restriction of educational opportunity inmany countries.

80Columbia University.40 It is a survey of great utility becauseof its broad coverage of the admissions function in manycolleges. The report tabulates questionnaire responses from811 colleges, broadly representative, by type, of a universeof 1,299 colleges. A study of such breadth must of necessity
confine itself largely to formal relationships and externals,
and cannot penetrate deeply into the substance of admissions
policy. Nevertheless this study contributes important
evidence about the internal organization of the admissions
function in colleges.
Eighty-seven percent of the respondents reported theexistence of an admissions committee, but the functions ofthese committees are shown to vary widely. In some colleges
the committee is purely advisory, in some it passes uponborderline cases, in others upon all. About 50 percent of
the admissions officers responding were chairmen of theircommittees. According to the authors, “this can be taken
as an indicator of influence.” Many would dispute thisconclusion. There are clear advantages in having a chairman
chosen from the faculty, and in having the professional
director use the committee as a maker of policy, as a sounding
board, as a source of support, and as a generator of ideas.
Particularly, in a working committee, the assignmentof tasks by a chairman from the faculty who is not an
administrative officer is likely to be accepted more willingly.
The all-important goal of involving the faculty is promoted.
The sagacious admissions director maintains close relations
with the faculty, both in and out of the committee. He keeps
the faculty fully informed of admissions problems and40.

Cited in note 2.
81admissions policy and involves them as much as possible inactivities related to admissions. Colleges in which hostilefaculty groups set out to investigate and alter admissions
policy and procedure are likely to be those in which
the faculty has not been kept informed, has no sense ofparticipation, and in consequence often has quite erroneous
ideas about the nature of admissions problems. A faculty thathas been kept consistently informed, that has been consulted,
that shares a sense of participation in admissions activities
and an honest puzzlement at admissions dilemmas is not
the kind of faculty in which “lynching parties” spontaneously
form to attack the admissions office.
If an admissions officer jealously reserves to himself allactivities and decisions regarding admissions he wholly
misconceives the nature of his job. To be truly effective hemust learn to work through many other people, and in thisway greatly to multiply his efforts and effectiveness. He must
work more by influence and persuasion than by authority.
If he discovers a rebel in the faculty, he contrives to get
him appointed chairman of a committee to grapple with the
problem in all its complexity. A faculty deeply involved in thesocial and educational ramifications of the admissions process
can contribute much to the making of a wise admissions
policy. Furthermore, attention to the broad sociologicalaspects of admissions is an effective antidote for the minor
pedantries to which even the most dedicated teachers are
sometimes prone.
The admissions function should ramify not only through thefaculty but also through all the activities of the institutionthat concern student personnel. Student counseling can bemade more effective if information collected in connection with82

admissions is made fully available both to faculty advisers andto professional counselors.41 It goes without saying that theconfidentiality of this material must at all times be respected.
Some admissions data may prove to be simply irrelevant
to counseling needs. But in many admissions folders areconcealed hints and suggestions of the dynamic and usually
turbulent processes of change to which the late adolescent is
exposed. He is in a stage in which his emotions outweigh his
intellect, and his glands outvote his cortex. He is learning toestablish his identity, to cut loose from emotional dependenceon his parents, and, as the phrase goes, to discover who he is.42
He is seeking to understand and clarify his relations withthe other sex; he is groping toward religious concepts
which may be quite at variance with those in which he wasbrought up. And very often he is struggling to free himself
from the presuppositions of the particular subculture inwhich he was nurtured, having for the first time cometo realize that the environment of his childhood, with its
attendant system of values, is not the whole world. All theseadjustments carry the possibility of very great stress andturmoil. The admissions folder may contain hints of family
situations which contribute to the student’s current dilemma.

41.
See B. A. Thresher, “Using Admissions Information in College
Counseling,” pp. 53-63 in Counseling in School and College. College
Admissions No. 8. New York: College Entrance Examination Board,
1961, 71 pp.
42.
See especially J. Roswell Gallagher, “The Role of the Emotions in
Academic Success,” pp. 106-109 in College Admissions No. 1. New York:
College Entrance Examination Board, 1954, 156 pp. and Dana L.
Farnsworth, “Some Non-Academic Causes of Success and Failure inCollege Students,” pp. 72-78 in College Admissions No. 2. New York:
College Entrance Examination Board, 1955, 98 pp.

83

The counselor cannot afford to be ignorant of this backgroundmaterial, even though the live student before him mustremain the chief source of information.
It goes without saying that the administration of student
financial aid, as grants, loans, or part-time jobs, must be
closely coordinated with admissions. The two functions are
increasingly coming to be administered under a single head.
Coordination with the college medical office is also essential.
The procedures for securing health information before andafter candidates’ admission, particularly in the sensitive areaof mental health, must be carefully worked out in cooperation
with the medical director. Of particular importance isthe maintenance of the professional confidentiality of
medical records. The college physician should deal with theapplicant’s physician. The admissions officer may arrange
matters but should serve in this area only as a lay recipientof advice.
The matter of coordination with the athletic department issuch a sensitive and well-advertised topic that one is tempted
simply to ignore it. It raises complicated issues beyond thescope of this discussion, yet it illustrates more perfectly thanany other aspect of the admissions process the basic truth
stated above that the way in which a college organizes itself
internally to deal with admissions reflects its attitude about
the meaning and purpose of the admissions function in thelife of the institution. The area of sports provides the mostextreme examples of collegiocentric, or Level Two, thinking.
So essential are sports to the health and welfare of mostyoung persons that it is easy to hide many abuses under thepretense that whatever concerns sports is good.
84

There is a place even for spectator sports, sedentary as they
are, but it is questionable how far the colleges ought to exploit
students to provide them. College administrations are usually
so much under the spell of alumni thinking on this issue thatthey are well behind representative student thought. The typeof alumnus who remains a perpetual sophomore is, however,coming to be less common than the student of a new generation
who has a realistic view of what he wants from education.
Whatever compromise a given college makes between theadmissions and the athletic interest, it is above all importantthat the relationship be known and clearly defined. The
less the admissions process is distorted and corrupted by
the concept of spectator sports as a concomitant of higher
education, the better the odds that a sane policy of truly
amateur sport with wide participation, and with genuine
excitement, will come into being.
Cooperation by alumni can be an important and legitimate
asset in the admissions process, yet in the past generationor two, there have been glaring abuses in this area. The key
to wise utilization of alumni lies in the conviction that thecentral purpose of alumni participation should be educational
guidance, with a subsidiary yet sometimes useful aim ofaiding the process of selection. A mature graduate of any
college or university should be able to convey to a high school
student some conception of the values inherent in higher
education in general, and also some notion of what goes onin his own alma mater, including its prevailing customs,
attitudes, and beliefs. Discussion with such a person can bea valuable experience for the youngster groping toward adefinition of his interests and confronted also by the practicalnecessity of deciding what college to aim at. Though there are85exceptions, effective communication with teenagers is usuallyeasier for younger than for older alumni. Younger alumni
are also more likely to know the college as it is today and areless likely than their older confreres to be under the spell ofancient and outmoded educational ideas.
In point of fact, alumni recruiting usually has been the focus of
peculiarly virulent Level Two, collegiocentric, thinking. Not allintercollege competition is bad; the danger lies in the sort ofignorant decisions to which all college recruiters are prone.
Recruiting implies that one knows a good candidate when one
sees him. The judgments involved in this process are heavily
loaded with personal and class predilections, prejudices, andassumptions, all held with such conviction that they seem, tothe holder, to be self-evident truths or laws of nature. So we
see the enthusiastic alumnus, aflame with competitive fervor,
exerting all his persuasive arts to steer toward his own college
particular students who satisfy his image of how the ideal
alumnus-in-the-making should look. Undoubtedly some of these
attractive youngsters will turn out extremely well. But withthe eye of long experience one easily imagines all those others,
whose promise, at this stage well concealed, will eventually begreater, who somehow do not get picked up in this process, so
uncomfortably reminiscent of fraternity rushing.
Yet carefully chosen alumni, painstakingly briefed in
the essential values of the situation, can provide mosthelpful guidance. This is particularly true if they maintaincommunication with local high schools. The school willknow quickly enough how to distinguish the high-powered“recruiters” from those willing to align their efforts withthe school’s own low pressure, long-range objectives ofsound educational guidance. One good way of judging and86

comparing the true educational merit of the admissions
policies of various colleges is to talk to the high school
guidance counselors in the high schools. Their objectives
are basically educational, their stance toward the world ofintercollege competition is neutral, and they have a basic
identification with the student himself and his interests.
The alumnus must realize that he is not an “agent” of thecollege in the sense of being authorized to make commitmentson admissions or financial aid. He must be prepared to see ayoung favorite of his, with whose interests he has identified
himself, refused in the general selection process, perhaps
in favor of some other competitor in a distant city; andhe must be prepared for occasions when his verdict for oragainst a candidate will be overruled by a preponderanceof other evidence. His firsthand impression, based on briefacquaintance, is a valid and useful contribution, but theschool, which has watched the student perform for threeor four years, may have more convincing and contradictoryevidence. Above all he needs to be restrained from his loyal
impulse to compete first and think afterwards.
Finally, no admissions operation is completely developed
unless it maintains some effective cooperation with student
government and student thinking. In one sense, college
undergraduates can offer the best educational guidance ofall, because from them prospective students can get the true
“low-down” on the college, untainted by catalog rhetoric orofficial pretense. Their enthusiasm, if it exists, is contagious
and genuine, their strictures realistic. Such functions as
campus hospitality and the guiding of visitors are peculiarly
appropriate as student activities. Perhaps most effective of
all is the informal relationship of the student with his own
87high school, usually unorganized and unorganizable. Some
communication with student government or with student
committees that evince an interest is evidence that theadmissions office is alert to student opinion and prepared toconsult and cooperate with student groups. It is one more
small contribution to preventing student alienation from the
purposes of the institution.
The foregoing discussion shows at once how vital theintelligent administration of admissions can be to theeducational welfare of a college, and how little it depends onthe formal exercise of authority by the admissions officer. His
task is in the broadest sense an educational one of bringing
his colleagues in the faculty and administration into constantand repeated contact with the problems and dilemmas ofadmissions and involving them in admissions and guidance
activities. His task and that of his staff is one of influence,
persuasion, organization; it is to create an atmospherein which his associates gain a deeper appreciation of thesociology of higher education, and its roots in the society
around it, especially in the secondary schools. College
teachers can be counted on to recognize cases in which thewrong applicant has been admitted; they need to learn toworry even more about cases in which the wrong applicant
was rejected or, what is worse, discouraged from applying.
Admissions is one of the main tap roots connecting an
institution to the society that sustains and judges it.

88

4. College Admissions
as a System••

The System Concept
The movement of students through the elementary andsecondary school systems, their redistribution among many
phases of higher education, and the forces and motives
that cause them to persist or drop out, all constitute a vastsocial process. This is a system in the classic sense of awhole with interrelated parts — an organism rather than amechanism. Everyone is aware of this interrelationship, yetin the actual procedures and motivations connected with theentry of students into colleges it is usually ignored because
the interests of individual students and individual colleges
are the dominant forces. Only recently have we begun tocompile statistics that are comprehensive enough to make itpossible to study the system as a whole, or to begin to makea judgment of how far the uncoordinated self-regarding
action of a multiplicity of individual institutions does infact contribute to the overall public welfare. We have too
easily assumed that the public interest is served by turning
everyone loose in a competitive scramble.

89

The result is that little thought or discussion is directed to
Level Three, which may be roughly defined as “admissions
and the public interest,” or, more broadly, “admissions asa system.” Yet this is a topic of increasing relevance. The
focusing of Congressional attention upon higher educationand the channeling of federal funds in the same direction
will raise insistent questions about quality differentials,
because in their “system” behavior, our many institutions,taken together, constitute a great, interacting complex.
An increasing literature about new, developing countries
puts education at the center of the forces that make for
economic and cultural growth. The nature of these problems,
both in the United States and abroad, enforces a systems
viewpoint both upon the government operations that seek
to further educational development and upon the studies
by social scientists that seek to appraise and measure thisdevelopment. This viewpoint has, however, been slower inappearing in the United States, which is older (in a certain
sense), much bigger, and less self-consciously “developing.”
There is in the United States, it is true, a good deal ofintercollege activity devoted to joint action of narrowly
specific kinds. Regional pacts for cooperation among colleges
and universities are one example. The formation of theCollege Entrance Examination Board in 1900, for the specificpurpose of standardizing admissions requirements andproviding tests, was an earlier case in point.43 The more
recent work of the College Scholarship Service in organizing

43.
See Claude M. Fuess, The College Board, Its First Fifty Years.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1950, 222 pp. See especially
Chapters I-III.

90

the evaluation of student financial need also filled a lackthat all the colleges felt. Though a vast amount of discussion
has gone into the organization and conduct of services suchas these, little of it has included the Level Three point ofview. These organizations and the areas of discussion thatenvelop them have a Level Two bias. Large groups of colleges
have been able, in the pursuit of their own individual ends,
to agree on these measures only because the measures aredesigned to run parallel to the interests of each, and so are toa large extent noncontroversial. Cooperative agencies amongcolleges tend to include activities in which the interests ofthe members run parallel. The really difficult problems at
Level Three concern differential interests among colleges,
the areas of conflict and competition in which the ostensible
or supposed interest of the college runs counter to the public
interest, or to that of individual students, or to that of othercolleges. Such conflicts form a natural and inevitable aspectof the ecology of higher education. It is significant that little
progress has been made in joint admissions procedures,clearing systems, timing control, and the like, or in control of
the “raiding” of faculties, because these measures touch thesensitive areas of competitive recruiting. These relationships
resemble the interaction, sometimes hostile, sometimes
cooperative and symbiotic, among living species. The
relationships between competing species, or between predator
and prey, though involving sharp conflicts of individualinterest, contribute to the balance of nature.
It is something of an historical accident as mentioned abovethat a major “switching point” in education should occur atthe end of the twelfth grade. Any division of the educational
process into periods is in part arbitrary, as is illustrated by
the long, inconclusive controversy about the usefulness of the91

junior high school. That controversy itself is merely a special
case of the more general problem of subdividing the 12-year
sequence. Though this segmentation is arbitrary, it exists andwill not quickly be done away with. Custom and habit as wellas vested interests in particular administrative arrangements
are strong forces tending to perpetuate the status quo.
As pointed out earlier, the decisions that determine thesorting among colleges are guided by a certain substratumof factual knowledge about higher education, supplemented
by a vast, amorphous, and confused body of beliefs, rumors,folklore, and gossip. This situation is true both of students
in choosing colleges and of colleges in choosing students.
Although the criteria of choice have intellectual and academic
dimensions, they lie predominantly in the field of cultural
anthropology and sociology.44
A generation or two ago the fact that only a small fractionof students “went on” to college made the conclusion of highschool a natural breaking point. Now, though we are entering
an era in which a substantial majority of all high school
graduates continue their formal education, the custom ofa general redistribution at this stage, once established, isreinforced by the momentum of long habit, by the complex
variety and differentiation of colleges, and by the fact thatthe four-year undergraduate college is the only stage inthe educational process that imposes heavy financial cost

44.
See for example Byron S. Hollinshead’s 1952 study, cited in note 3,
and Ralph F. Berdie’s After High School — What?, cited in note 4. These
were pioneer efforts to open up the sociological aspects of access tohigher education.

92

on the student. Free education through the secondary levelis generally available to all, while at the postgraduate
university level a variety of financial aids, now greatly
augmented by government funds, facilitates the progressof qualified students. There is much taking of thought,
exploration, soul-searching, and “shopping around” as thegrade 12 switching point approaches, for it leads students
directly into a four-year period that is expensive for almost
all of them and indispensable for an increasing proportionof them.
The diversity that exists among American colleges anduniversities has given rise to an extensive literature. A whole
school of sociology has arisen out of efforts to study anddifferentiate the relative “climates” of different colleges. Waysof “fitting” the student to the college have become prominent
topics in current discussions. This work is admirable andingenious and needs to be pressed further. But in these“typologies” there is little that is normative. The student isencouraged to look for an environment that in some sense“fits” him. There is nothing wrong with this attitude, but
perhaps the same amount of thought devoted to the moregeneral problem of how one goes about getting an education(with such help as one can find in a college — any college)
would be more rewarding. The question also arises whether“consumers’ research” publicizing these differences may tend
to sharpen them, perhaps reducing the encounter of differing
human types and views that is of the essence of education.
The exuberant variety of colleges and universities in
the United States is an asset of incalculable value.
Free enterprise and initiative function in parallel withstate-operated education to produce the world’s most diverse,93

as well as the world’s most chaotic, educational system. It
may prove also to be the world’s most vigorous and effective,
but it poses special problems for the student, functioning as
he does at Level One.
In particular, the legacy of the English university colleges
has exerted a curious effect on our system. In this tradition
the student is not merely affiliated with the college (which
is of course residential); he is enveloped and engulfed in it.
The college is responsible for his entire formation, not only
intellectual but social, moral, and physical. This situation isin sharp contrast to the more casual and shifting connectionof students with universities in the European continental
tradition. So close an envelopment generates powerful,
lifelong loyalties. The American phenomenon of alumni
loyalty to an undergraduate college is in large measure
traceable to the English tradition.
Much that is valuable has come from this tradition, but
it has had one unfortunate effect. The student’s system ofvalues gives a central position to the objective of getting into
“the college of his choice.” Once this vantage point is gained,
he is tempted to relax and think of education as something
beneficial that will be done to him, not something he getsfor himself. This is the almost inevitable result of the unduestress put upon affiliation with the “right” college. The
Pierian draught must come from the proper jug with theproper label, or it has no magic. The obvious convenience of
this tradition to stimulate alumni financial support has beenin one sense a boon to education, while at the same timeit has furthered an irrational particularism that distracts
attention from the main issue, that is, the educational processitself. The American student thinks of himself as wedded for94

life to his college, a view the college is delighted to encourage.
There is little of the movement from one university toanother that for generations exerted a civilizing effect on
European students.
It may well be that in the large urban universities that havea tradition opposite to that of close nurture in a fostering
environment, other values will emerge. The shifting clientele
of these institutions, less distracted by particularistic
institutional loyalties, driving fiercely toward the heartof the educational process itself, may recover some of themedieval flavor of the university as the product of student
initiative.
The conventional discussion of college admissions, pitchedas it is at Level Two, is based on selection of students.45 In
the era now coming upon us, in which perhaps three-fourthsof all high school graduates will be going on to some kind of
higher education, selection becomes an inappropriate methodof sorting. For if selection is to have social utility, there must
be a large, undifferentiated group of rejects whom one candismiss from consideration, because they are taken care of inother ways. The system is not designed or expected to takeaccount of them. Under the conditions now approaching, theprimitive device of application-and-reply becomes unbearably
clumsy and inappropriate unless heavily supplemented byother expedients. The problem becomes one of guidance,

45.
But see Louis T. Benezet, “College Admissions: The Hours before
the Dawn.” A.C.A.C. Journal, Winter 1963, Vol. 8, No. 3, p. 19. This
thoughtful discussion stresses the large fraction of colleges in which theadmissions officer, under pretense of selection, is in effect “selling space”
in the college.

95

often of redirection, to bring about a gradual regrouping andclassification of students, looking toward the movementsof groups with differing talents and interests into various
appropriate categories of further education.
The forces that lead a given student to apply to a specificcollege constitute, in the aggregate, a more far-reaching andeffective sorting device than the small amount of selectivity
the college is able to exercise among the relatively few
students who have gone so far as to seek it out and fill out
applications for it. In other words, preselection by the student
and by his advisers is a more pervasive and powerful force for
sorting than is selection by colleges. The heavy investmentof most colleges in recruitment of students, and in public
relations directed toward this end, is a tacit admission of theimportance of preselection.
Insofar as selection by the college itself is effective, it ismainly a process exerted at second hand. The student, and inparticular those who guide him, tend to anticipate shrewdly
the action of the college. Admissions committees “telegraphtheir punches.” Applicants avoid colleges they believe arelikely to refuse them and concentrate on those more likely to
accept them. So the “system” view of admissions discloses a
network of probabilities continuously in process of weighing,revision, and correction, with alert guidance officers serving
to mediate the forces of supply and demand.

Abandoned Clienteles
In the past generation or two there has existed on a wholesale
scale a process by which colleges “run away” from theirnatural clienteles. What defines the natural clientele of a96

college? Basically the geographic determinant is the mostpowerful.46 The natural clientele is made up predominantlyof local or nearby students and is commonly limited to aparticular segment or stratum of these. For denominational
colleges, the natural clientele is the denomination. Beyond
these, there are socioeconomic determinants leading to theselection of high- or low-cost institutions, and there are ethnic
groups and subcultures prone to seek particular kinds ofeducation. Programs that have a professional or vocationalslant have long had a special appeal for socially mobile,
upward-striving youngsters, particularly those of immigrantbackground seeking a firmer place and improved status in an
inhospitable culture.
Insofar as a college serves its natural clientele, it is adhering
to its basic obligation to provide education to those needing
it. A college “runs away” from its natural clientele when
it replaces this clientele with other groups, though thismay be done for what it regards as cogent reasons. A
conspicuous trend of this kind has involved the now highly

46.
It is important to judge the student’s motives more by what he does
than what he says. The fact that about 80 percent of students attend
colleges within their own state is in sharp contrast to a study that shows
52.9 percent of college males explaining their choice of a college because
it was a “good college,” while 18.0 percent explained their choice as“close to home.” See John L. Holland, “Student Explanations of College
Choice and Their Relation to College Popularity, College Productivity,
and Sex Differences.” College and University, Spring 1958, Vol. 33, No. 3,
pp. 313-320. There is ample evidence that for most students few colleges
other than those nearby come into consideration. See for example David
Riesman, “College Subcultures and College Outcomes,” pp. 1-14 in
Selection and Educational Differentiation. Berkeley, Calif.: Center for the
Study of Higher Education, 1959, 187 pp.

97

selective colleges that served mainly local clienteles ageneration or two ago. The rapid growth of the demandfor education enabled them to “raise their standards”
and attract on a nationwide scale applicants thought tobe especially well qualified. This effort was reinforced byfinancial aid deliberately planned to encourage geographicaldiversification. There are genuine educational values insuch diversification, and the colleges quote distinguishedauthorities from George Washington down in support of it. So
it is that many of these colleges have come to serve a national
clientele, leaving a much larger stratum of less prestigious
and commonly newer institutions to meet the needs of the
preponderant group who must go to school near home. The
new clientele, more diverse in geographical origin, typically
grows more homogeneous in its preponderance of students
from high-income families of the managerial and professionalclasses.
For the selective college, this has been a matter of selfcongratulation because of “higher standards.” Looked atfrom the obverse, it is rather a matter of abandoning one
clientele and replacing it with another. Higher standards ofstudent selection have not inevitably led to higher standardsof teaching. In some cases the opposite is true: colleges
have brought in students so able that they may succeed inwringing an education out of quite outmoded and uninspired
teaching; but not always. Boredom on the part of brightfreshmen in courses attuned to the freshmen of yesteryear
has pointed up situations in which student quality has
outrun teaching quality. College faculties that a generation
ago had been complaining about “poor preparation”
shifted smoothly and imperceptibly into complaints about“student apathy.” Though there has been a gain in regional98

diversity, it has been offset by a reduction in the diversity ofsocioeconomic origins.
How far the abandonment of a clientele is justifiable
depends, among other things, on how adequately theabandoned clientele can be taken care of in other ways.
Assuming that they are adequately accommodated by a shift
into nearby colleges, there still remains the question of how
far it is educationally desirable and in the public interest
to concentrate the ablest students in a few institutions. Up
to a certain point this concentration is undoubtedly usefuland stimulating. “Centers of excellence” are not wholly
mythical. But the arguments are not all on one side, and it isentirely possible that in the end more would be accomplishedby having more high ability spread more widely as a
stimulating influence. The argument is in part academic
because nature takes good care that first-rate ability keeps
turning up in the unlikeliest places. So no small group ofcolleges, however prestigious, is likely to corner the market
for high ability.
It is probably true that for many colleges that have becomemuch more selective in recent years, “higher standards”
represent a student group that is intellectually somewhat
abler. Whether this change has been accompanied by aconcurrent improvement in the educational process isquite another and more dubious question. The pressure ofapplications has often made for fatuous complacency amongcollege faculties who reason that if what they have to offer
is so sought after, it must be very good. The non sequiturin this reasoning rarely comes to light because of the ardor
and energy of students sufficiently determined to extract an
education for themselves even from uninspired offerings.
99

Another conspicuous example of abandoning a clientele isfound in the history of many denominational colleges. These
colleges were founded, typically, to hold young people in thefold — to meet the need for education but to supply one purgedof secular and worldly influences. Too many faculties strongin piety were less impressive in learning and intellectual
stature. The demand for higher intellectual standards ran
counter to the ideal of doctrinal purity. The need for cash
customers often made it desirable to accept students outside
the fold, and their presence intensified the demand for an
education more broadly based. The denominational clientele
were thus often largely unprovided for, except as they werewilling to accept an education quite different from what
the founders had envisaged.47 The early twentieth century
accordingly witnessed a wholesale shift from denominational
to nonsectarian control.
Something of the same flight from an established clientele
may be occurring in the hitherto predominantly Negro
colleges. The stronger ones reach toward a national clientele,
while the beginnings of integration reduce the numberof places that might earlier have gone to nearby Negro
students badly in need of education at low cost. All theseshifts in clientele tend to be thought of, by the individualcolleges concerned, as gains and improvements; actually they
may or may not be. What is certain is that they represent
departure from earlier objectives and shifts in the direction of
institutional purpose.

47.
This theme, made explicit by Robert Merton, has been elaborated byDavid Riesman. See for example Constraint and Variety in American
Education (cited in note 27), pp. 25-26.

100Ignorant Selection
It is not strange that the “systems” view of college
admissions has been neglected. Students, like otherconsumers, are unorganized. In the typical case, the choiceof a college, like the choice of a mate, is a once-in-a-lifetime
problem; the individual copes with it as best he can andmoves on. There is little incentive to gain practice andexperience in the art of shopping for an education. Colleges
are invincibly atomistic. Not only do independent institutions
pursue their own supposed interests undeviatingly, often
at the expense of the student’s long-range interest; eventhe several local constituent units of a single state system,
all under the same control, eye each other jealously andcompete intensely in recruiting. Some of this may redound
to the student’s benefit, but much of it simply ignores theeffect a student’s choice of college may have on him. It is not
permissible to suggest that one’s own institution should notbe, if all the facts were truly evaluated, the very best bargain
for nearly every one.
Each college strenuously seeks the “best” students. To theextent that marks and tests come to take the central position
as means of evaluation, this imposes a unidimensional scaleby which to value human talent. The scale, it is true, stresses
a set of verbal and quantitative capabilities, and a knackfor dealing with abstractions that are of central importancein a wide range of human affairs, especially the intellectual
disciplines. But it tends to enforce a one-sided and narrow
view of the full range of human talent. It conceals the depthof our ignorance about the dynamics of human personality
and about the rich diversity of ways in which human ability
manifests itself.
101

The highly selective colleges, faced with a superfluityof candidates “qualified” by conventional criteria, findthemselves falling back increasingly on subjective appraisals.
These lead to ignorant decisions based on hunches or upon
unconscious predispositions about personality types. Thereis, indeed, serious question whether, above a certain “floor”
of ability, the college and the public would not be better
served by random selection of candidates than by the kind ofignorant purposefulness many admissions committees delightto exercise.
David Riesman, echoing A. N. Whitehead’s thought alreadycited, says “I believe that only certain ideas will be generated
and catch on under any given socioeconomic conditions.”
The accustomed and largely unconscious scheme of values
that characterizes our culture must, like all others, have its
blind spots. The evaluations that we intuitively regard as
least disputable may, in fact, be the very ones that conceal
these blind spots. As Irving Lorge has pointed out, it is only
the imperfections of our selective processes that make themtolerable. This is only another way of saying that a healthy
degree of randomization has sneaked in through the backdoor. Our earnest but ignorant purposefulness undoubtedly
excludes some variants, some types of excellence which weare not capable of recognizing or even of imagining. So it isreasonable to suggest that intense selectivity, beyond somepoint or other, brings diminishing returns. There is more
to gain by improving the entire educational process acrossthe board, than by segregating for education in particularenvironments either the few who are so able that they candevelop in almost any environment, or a group homogeneousin the sense that it corresponds to our blundering andignorant notions of excellence.
102

Value — and “Value Added”
Colleges love to “point with pride” to the achievements of
their alumni. The achievements are real enough, but they
are often due not so much to the educational processes of thecollege as to the forces that have concentrated in that college,
people with particular interests and abilities. The college, inother words, serves less as an educational influence than asa traffic interchange — a switching and concentrating force
to bring together for four years people likely in any caseto proceed to certain educational and occupational goals.
Thus A. W. Astin has shown that much of the apparent high“productivity” of certain colleges in turning out PhDs inscience is traceable to their attraction for students alreadystrongly conditioned by inclination and ability to proceed inthis direction.48 The attraction exerted by these colleges is ofcourse not at all the same thing as the selectivity they may
exercise among their applicants for admission. The workof A. W. Astin, John L. Holland, and D. L. Thistlethwaite
using National Merit Scholarship Corporation data is an
important contribution to the study of access to education ona “systems” basis, and an antidote to exaggerated claims forthe differential effectiveness of particular colleges.
What we need to measure, if measurement is to be resorted toat all, is something akin to the “value added by manufacture”
as this term is used by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The“value added” by four years in a particular college may inindividual cases be large, but more often it is only moderate,
and the social effectiveness of graduates is traceable in great48.

See A. W. Astin’s articles, cited in note 11.
103measure to the antecedent quality of the entering students.
Nor can this be regarded necessarily as an argument forhigh selectivity, since so much of the effect is traceable tothe preselection on the part of the student and his advisers,
which must first occur before he is brought within the ambitof the college’s selective process.

Models of Student Distribution
To represent the “system” behavior of the entire college
admission process, one can distinguish a number ofoversimplified models, each an extreme case of how such asystem might operate. Granted that what actually happens is a
mixture of all these, such caricatures help to clarify the problem
by sorting out the kinds of forces that seem to be operating.
Some of the more obvious models would be the following.
Since in this country 80 percent of college students attend
colleges within their state of residence, it is probably safe toconclude that geographic propinquity is the strongest single
force leading to choice of a college. Though the strongest,
it is by no means the only force, because, depending on the
populousness of a state, and the complexity of its educational
system, much scope remains for the exercise of other forces
as well. State boundaries are of course arbitrary. In a large
and populous state that has a wide variety of colleges,
students can stay near home and still find wide opportunity
to follow educational preferences based on reasons other than
propinquity. In other states the range of opportunity may
be restricted to a handful of institutions of limited variety
in type or quality. Though here the incentive to go farther
afield is greater, to do so is expensive, so that many will findthemselves in colleges less well adapted to their needs and104

preferences. The recent marked tendency of state institutions
to discriminate against out-of-state applicants, as places
become scarcer, is increasing the validity of this model andincreasing the provinciality of the education offered by each of
the 50 states.
Because of the arbitrariness of state boundaries, some of the“cuckoo states” have depended unduly on nearby institutions
across state borders for the educational nourishment of
their youth. To the extent that this has occurred, even the
20 percent of students who attend college outside their own
states are moved in large measure by the basic force of
propinquity. This is a phenomenon that has characterized
several populous eastern states in which an old educational
tradition of private colleges and universities long inhibited
adequate development of publicly supported education.
Logically next on the list of models, but numerically muchless important, is the opposite kind of situation, in which
students seek out the most distant opportunities in orderto maximize the benefits of geographical diversification.
This tendency, pressed to its utmost, brings an increase
in interregional and international study, with all the
educational benefits of intercultural experience. Suchcosmopolitan exposure, despite its undisputed value, canaffect only a small minority of students. In terms of numbersof students involved, it represents a far weaker force forcollege selection than does propinquity.
Quite different in principle is a model in which thestrongest institutions attract the ablest students. This
concept is simplistic in that it leaves unanswered a tangleof questions about which are the strongest institutions
105

and which the ablest students. In complex universities
different undergraduate schools may properly have widelydiffering “standards,” and it is in any case an oversimplified
abstraction to measure the varieties of effective human talent
on a single, unidimensional scale. There may be, too, somedivergence between true excellence in a college and the sort ofprestigious reputation that can attract applicants. One mustallow for the inevitable human tendency to want what others
seem to be running after; fads and fashions come to play apart. Yet despite such limitations, objective support for thismodel can be found. A. W. Astin and John L. Holland haveshown that there is a strong tendency for “high-endowment”
private institutions to attract abler students than “lowendowment” private institutions, and a somewhat lesspronounced tendency for “high-budget” public institutions to
attract abler students than “low-budget” institutions.49
The basic rationale of this model, from the standpoint of the
public interest, resembles that of free, competitive enterprisein the economic world. Insofar as a college succeeds
legitimately in meeting the needs of its clientele, there is acertain presumption that it is promoting the public welfare byfollowing its own institutional self-interest. In Adam Smith’sclassic phrase, the businessman attending industriously
and selfishly to his own affairs “is led by an invisible handto promote an end which is no part of his intention” — thatis, the general welfare. Hence his view that a man is “neverso harmlessly employed as when making money.” Thecongeniality of this concept to the characteristic American

49.
“The Distribution of ‘Wealth’ in Higher Education.” College andUniversity, Vol. 37, No. 2, Winter 1962, pp. 113-125.

106

ethos of independent individual initiative was bound to
produce an educational system that looks chaotic in contrast
to the hierarchical European universities, designed by and foran old and stratified culture.
Serious imperfections and counterforces exist to mar theperfection of this model, both in the world of commerce andthe world of education. For example, many of the strongest
institutions are also the most expensive. Though they areable to extend much financial aid to students who have“demonstrated need,” this need is defined in relation tohigh and rapidly rising educational costs, so that even the“needy” student may come from a relatively well-to-do family.
The student body as a whole, since it represents uppersocioeconomic strata, may include a good many who lack theferocity of all-out effort typical of the hard-up youngster who
has only himself to depend on. Students may be sought for
purposes thought to benefit the institution rather than thestudent, on the reasoning that the ultimate purpose of theinstitution is to benefit students, and that this end justifies awide variety of means. Such reasoning may become farfetchedand tenuous if used to fill up a weak department, or to
supply teams for spectator sports. So it is not always safe to
say that a college is never so harmlessly employed as whenrecruiting students.
The fourth model is one in which students distributethemselves into categories separated by clearly definededucational and vocational objectives. This is a model ofcommanding significance. Between 20 and 25 percent ofundergraduate degrees in the United States go to students
preparing for teaching below the college level. About
16 percent are in business administration, 10 percent in107

engineering, 6 percent in fine arts, 3 percent in agriculture,and 3 percent in home economics. These six fields accountfor more than 60 percent.50 The remaining 40 percent
might be thought of as “liberal arts” students and hence
nonvocational; yet in fact vocational objectives are likely to beconcealed in many majors in the so-called liberal arts colleges,
particularly in natural sciences, social sciences, mathematics,
and languages. It is only with the help of these concealed
vocational objectives that many small liberal arts colleges
manage to compete with the larger and better-financed
state institutions many of which have curriculums that are
overtly and unashamedly vocational. Public institutions are
freer from the kind of inhibitions that caused the economics
department of one leading women’s college to be dissuaded
from offering a course in accounting because this would be a“useful” subject.
The model that implies a basically vocational motivationreflects the widespread habit of looking on education
as a means, not an end. It reflects the motives of the
upward striving youth, seeking to better himself, willingto “hire himself educated,” and uncritical of the means foraccomplishing this. He may be limited in the breadth of his
horizons, not necessarily interested in “ideas,” but drivingwith intense energy toward a degree as a key to professional
advancement. It is to be expected that a society in the
midst of a vast expansion of higher education will place ahigh value on such considerations. In such a society, many
youngsters will not have attained the degree of intellectual

50.
John D. Millett, The Academic Community. New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Co., Inc., 1962, 265 pp. See p. 125.

108

sophistication of the “academic” student, who can regard
education as an open-ended process, potentially leading
toward any one of a number of unforeseen destinations.
The latter is able to contemplate changes in direction as heproceeds with the exploration he properly regards as the very
essence of education. Between these extremes lies a complete
spectrum of human types and of concepts of education. The
model represents a central mode in our current mores. It isalso convenient for purposes of analyses, in that it can betied to definite, objectively determined categories and can be
adjusted in a satisfying way to statistics of manpower needsin the economy.
A fifth model that can be conceived is one in which the“atmosphere” of a college plays a large part in determining
the student’s choice. Traditionally, information about thesocial, intellectual, and psychological climate of various
colleges has been spread in covert, informal, and unorganized
ways, by hearsay, rumor, and personal report. Only in thelast few years has the college as a study in social psychology
become a popular field of research. Behavioral scientists
more recently have sought to define the “press,” the loose
congeries of impressions and pressures that constitute thestudent’s environment in a college. To treat the college itself
as a field of sociological and anthropological study has been
a novel idea, somewhat frightening to both administratorsand members of the more traditional disciplines. As Nevitt
Sanford has pointed out, the reaction of college faculties has
been defensive. They have felt threatened by this intrusion
into an area in which a certain mystique had come to prevail.
It was one thing to live in an accustomed climate where
doctrinal disputes, though frequent and vehement, werecomfortably inconclusive. It was quite another to be the109subject of cold-eyed, dispassionate investigation marshaling
objective evidence.
One could devote a volume to comparison of the many
typologies of colleges and of college students that have emerged
from these studies, which are of great interest educationallyand sociologically. For the present purpose, it is enough to saythat the studies are important because they help to trace whatkinds of students tend to go to so what kinds of colleges. Thiseffort is plagued by a kind of concealed circularity in reasoning,which is difficult to get rid of for the reason that its extent ishard to measure. One can, of course, categorize colleges byquite arbitrary and conventional descriptions such as “public
colleges,” or “Catholic colleges,” or “nonsectarian liberal arts
colleges,” or by such variables as size, cost, selectivity, and thelike. Such descriptions do not go very deep.
In the effort to go deeper, a number of investigators haveworked out categories based on the psychological “press” ofinstitutions, using questionnaires to students to search out
student attitudes, backgrounds, values, tastes, habits, andbeliefs. This is a reasonsable procedure, since it is clear thatan important, if not the chief, determinant of the press upon
the individual is the kind of student who populates the college.
The chief influence on students, in other words, is exerted
by or mediated through their peer groups. These generate
and apply most of the “press.” But then, having categorizedcolleges, the researcher goes on to ask what kinds of students
go to each college. He finds himself undertaking thisinvestigation by asking another sample of students (typicallyhigh school graduates about to enter college) much the samekinds of questions already asked college students in theeffort to categorize colleges. The net upshot of the operation110

is the conclusion that on the whole the kinds of students (asdetermined by questionnaires) that go to a particular college
resemble the kinds of students that already attend the college(as determined by another set of questionnaires). Although
this is of course an oversimplification of the situation, it still
seems clear that an element of circularity must creep into
investigations of this sort.
A. W. Astin, in his study, Who Goes Where to College?51 seeks to
get outside the circle, at least in part, by tying his categorizationof students to broad occupational goals and accepting the notunreasonable assumption that “a person’s choice of a vocation
depends to some extent on his abilities, values, goals, attitudes,
and other personal traits.” He accepts uncritically John L.
Holland’s proposal that there are six groups of occupations
corresponding to six basic personality types: realistic, scientific(or intellectual), social, conventional, enterprising, and artistic.
This is a thoughtful and ingenious classification, and so great
are the difficulties of any such classification process that it
would be rash to assert a priori that a better one could be
developed. Yet any such categorization obviously depends onso many arbitrary and peremptory decisions about the humantypes needed for or prevalent in specific occupations that it
must raise serious doubts about results that depend on them.
Such efforts to relate student types to types of colleges raise,
however, a broader range of issues, which would still bepresent even if the methodologies were unexceptionable.
One possible use of such material is to try to fit students
into the particular environments they will find congenial or

51.

Chicago: Science Research Associates, Inc., 1965, 125 pp.
111

stimulating, or adapted to their needs, or calculated to serve
their purposes. This effort would accord with the proposals
of David Riesman and others that some kind of “consumers’
report” be available for different colleges so that theprospective student can know in advance what he is buying.
To the extent that such a device prevents the student fromgetting into a college he is not up to (an unlikely contingency)
or from getting into a college not up to him (which is much
more probable), it could be useful. One wonders whether the
net result might be an intensification of “typing,” so that thestudent seeking a college looks for a student environmentthat most nearly fits his own subculture, origins, values,
and attitudes. Any such tendency would reduce the varietyof the social “mix” that is an indispensable ingredient in all
education. The invincible propensity of most human beings
to associate with others as nearly like themselves as possible
is a contra-educational force of great power. It is only partly
offset by the innate adventurousness of a minority who
are stimulated by people different from themselves. Only
the more intrepid succeed in overcoming this pull toward
security, which represents the basic need for roots, stability,
and an environment that is comprehensible and predictable.
There are long-range forces at work that may reduce the needand the significance of “typing,” or of fitting the student to thecollege environment. Despite the persuasive advantages ofthe small college environment when functioning at its best,
the long-term competitive forces appear to favor the larger
institution. It can offer to the student a range of choice, andto the faculty a professional opportunity, and both of them adegree of stimulation and variety hard to equal in any small
environment, particularly if it is isolated. By imaginative
expedients of organization, large student bodies can be112subdivided in ways that offset the student’s feeling of facelessanonymity. Student disturbances are a sign that we have
not yet seriously grappled with these problems, not a proof
that the problems are insoluble. To the extent that student
groups can be so organized, the large university unit has thegreat advantage that it can accommodate within itself many
subcultures, and shifting “congenial minorities,” which stillneed not be isolated. These stimulate each other, are open
to interchange, and may work to offset the kind of ingrown
patterning that so often characterizes isolated small colleges.

Optimum Distribution
These then are some of the forces at work in effecting “thegreat sorting” of students among colleges. The sorting occurs
among a rapidly evolving and changing set of institutions.
Two major questions arise in studying it. The first questionthat pioneer studies like those of C. R. Pace, John L.
Holland, A. W. Astin seek to answer is, essentially, “Whatis happening?” The objective is description and analysis. At
least a start has been made toward answering this question.
But if the ultimate object is to study not merely college
admissions as a system, but “college admissions and the
public interest,” there is the much more difficult problem oftrying to decide what the sorting ought to be. This normative
purpose has been little thought about, beyond repeating theideal prescription that each student ought to have as mucheducation as he can digest and use.
We shall have to begin to clarify ideas beyond this stage.
For example, given the present assortment of 2,000 colleges,
universities, and junior colleges, what is the optimum way of
distributing students among them, taking the long-run public
113interest as the criterion? Does the present scheme of things,
representing an intricate mix of all the models sketchedabove, approximate the ideal of the classical assumptions
about free enterprise? Would it be better, for example, tochange the structure of the institutions by encouraging
them to merge or to subdivide, than to try to change the
distribution of students? One way to relieve the undue
pressure on older, prestigious universities is to establish newones intended, of set purpose, to surpass the old in quality.
The new British universities, such as Sussex, or the new
Santa Cruz campus of the University of California represent
imaginative efforts in this direction.
The need for innovation and experiment to strengthen the
educational process everywhere, and to increase its vitality
is overwhelmingly great. If competitive recruiting can be ameans to this end, let us by all means have it. What we seemto lack now, and what gives rise to doubts about competitive
recruiting, is evidence of a direct coupling between advancesin educational quality and recruiting appeal. The student
himself, to say nothing of his parents and advisers, scarcely
realizes the extent to which his real need is not just tolearn but to acquire the habit and technique of learningand the appetite to go on with it indefinitely. In the public
consciousness, education associates itself still, to a large
extent, with the concept of a fixed corpus of knowledge thatmust be mastered, and the further concept of this mastering
as instrumental — as the key to prescribed preferment andlifetime competency. A degree or a certificate is somethingnegotiable and tangible to wave at a potential employer.
It would be unrealistic to hope for neat or definitive answers
to large questions of this kind. Higher education in the114

United States is too complex and vast to lend itself to morethan a modicum of central, purposeful control. Thoughmutual emulation tends toward some degree of uniformity,
and governmental policy can exert salutary influence insome general directions, there is, in a certain large sense,
nobody “in charge.” Even governmental policies, weighted
with the power of financial resources, constitute only one ofmany forces acting. Many aspects of change, of amelioration,must remain in the hands of the thousands of individuals
whose decisions, decentralized and seemingly unrelated,
will collectively determine the ponderous movements of thenational rudder.
It is for this reason that educators collectively, though
primarily concerned with their local decisions, need thehabit of looking at the system as a whole. An infusion of
thinking at Level Three in the training and the habitual
practice of all concerned with college admissions can domuch to broaden their perspective. A step forward formany of these people would be the mere realization thatsuch a concept as Level Three exists and its criteria aredifferent from those to which they are accustomed. This
realization could influence their day-to-day task as theygrope, according to their lights, toward the fulfillment of
their annual quotas of students.
The study of college admissions as a system will inevitably
merge, as time goes on, into the broader study of higher
education in its totality as a system. A decade ago we werestartled by the high proportion of able high school students
who failed to continue their education. This proportionis decreasing rapidly, partly through increased financial
aid, partly through a heightened public consciousness of115

the importance of education. In one respect our concept ofhigher education remains primitive. We speak of “goingon to college,” a simple idea, inherited from nineteenthcentury practice. But just over the horizon we can sense two
important changes in this oversimplified view.
As the first of these changes we shall see important new
departures in the teaching and learning process at theundergraduate level. Undoubtedly more will be learned
faster, but more important, what is learned will haveincreased relevance to the process of lifelong education, tocultivating the habit of learning and the appetite for it. For
the first time, we shall educate for coping with a changing
environment. College faculties will be relieved of much of the
expository labor of education so that they may devote moretime to their unique and indispensable function of interactingwith students — needling, stimulating, questioning,browbeating, and encouraging. This interchange, which isthe essence of education, can be greatly strengthened if thestudent has full and convenient recourse to film, television,
records, tape, and similar aids to exposition. These will
free the teacher’s time for more important and personal
interaction and will bring the student to a higher level of
preparation to take his part in this dialogue.
The leading objective of public policy will be rapidly shiftingfrom getting people into college to the more difficult andsubtle one of making college a truly educational experiencein the contemporary meaning of the term. We need a general
aggiornamento of higher education. Beyond this, we needmeans of coupling the forces of innovation and experiment
to the forces that influence the distribution of students
among institutions.
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The second, and concurrent, development will be theevolution of a much richer variety of institutions andorganizational forms. The four-year college course, a legacyof the nineteenth century, even with all its recent revisions,retains a rigidity of concept, content, and method. Even its
calendar is rigid. The pressure of increasing numbers hascreated such a massive problem that it diverts energy andattention from innovation and reform. Indeed, the temptation
has been to accept the pressure for admission to college as
evidence that the product is already so appealing to thecustomers that it stands in little need of improvement. The
public habit of brand loyalty, and the mindless relianceon degrees as status symbols, have retarded the needed
development of flexible forms of post-high school education.
The possibilities of interfusing liberal studies with programsof vocational utility have been incompletely explored.
The large number of college students who need a changeof pace and an interruption of study are poorly served byour existing procedures. Many able youngsters are “actionoriented.” For them a period of purely intellectual study
becomes frustrating. A year or two in a job, or in exploring
several jobs, can give many of them a completely new view oflife and send them back to college refreshed, with an appetite
for study. Our habit of regarding a four-year course as a norm
and ideal do great harm to such youngsters. They are likely
to be tagged as “dropouts,” or “failures,” with permanent
injury to the self-confidence they need and should retain.
A major aspect of educational reform will have to include
flexibility of timing.
All these things will come to pass, some of them sooner
than we now dare hope. In the meantime the year-to-year117

work of recruiting, selection, and guidance will go on. To
bring these processes into the central stream of education
by increasing the student’s awareness of the options open
to him with all their values and implications will become amajor preoccupation of those concerned with admissions andwill inevitably involve faculties to a much greater extent
than now. The concept of education in the light of the public
interest must include the guidance process as an integral
part of education. College teachers, it is to be hoped, willaspire to reach whatever students come before them and beless insistent that unless they can teach the most promising
they would rather not teach at all. When this day comes,
admissions committees, at the same time, may admit thatthey cannot always spot the winners, that the race is notalways to the swift, and that the eager student sometimes
outpaces the bright one. They may even grow more willingthan now to accept with humility the duty of doing as muchas they can for whatever students present themselves, inthe assurance that among those who look least impressive to
begin with, through the inscrutable operations of a statistical
Providence, unsuspected talent will come to light.

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Reflections from the Field••
The Continuing Influence ofThresher's College Admissions andthe Public Interest
Over the past 30 years, I have learned a great deal regarding
college admission and the public interest. Alden Thresher’s
essay, which I encountered early in my career and haverevisited often, has served as a catalyst for me as I madechoices about how best to serve all students for “the Public
Interest.” What does this mean? At every available opportunity,
we must work to create access and opportunity for all students,
and this is especially vital for those students who have not beenafforded the college prep and academic capital of some of theirpeers. “For the public interest” is essential for the continued
strength of the United States and affects students’ families andour collective national future for generations to come.
This concept is critically important, both as philosophy
and practice. As Thresher said at the end of his essay,“ … admissions committees … may admit that they cannot
always spot the winners, that the race is not always to theswift, and that the eager student sometimes outpaces thebright one. They may even grow more willing than now to
accept with humility the duty of doing as much as they canfor whatever students present themselves, in the assurance
that among those who look least impressive to begin with,119

through the inscrutable operations of statistical Providence,unsuspected talent will come to light.”
Every student deserves the opportunity and choice ofattending college. Outreach within schools and communities
and the work of the College Board are built upon thispremise. Thresher’s seminal essay remains relevant today.
Fifty years ago, he posited that we need to be thinking
about access and opportunity, blind to income or status or
station, but instead built upon the merits of the individual
student in the context from which they came. These ideals
and imperatives continue to inform our work today —Thresher’s essay should be required reading for admissions
professionals, public policy professionals, institutional
leadership, presidents, boards of trustees, and enrollment
management professionals as we strive to achieve access andopportunity for all students.
Douglas L. Christiansen, Ph.D.
Vice Provost for University Enrollment Affairs
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid
Associate Professor of Public Policy and Higher Education
Vanderbilt University
Chair, Board of Trustees, The College Board••
Many of the prominent themes in Thresher’s essay are astrue today as they were when he wrote them in the 60s. As
someone who has spent nearly three decades in enrollment
management, I am struck by how thoughtfully and seriously
he takes the role of admissions in our society.

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Thresher begins by outlining the challenges of recruiting
students and helping them to understand the value of acollege education. He juxtaposes this against the pressures oncolleges and universities to have the revenue to provide theworld class education that students expect.
While these “opposing forces” keep people like me up at night,
Thresher reminds us that we must challenge our profession
and ourselves to look beyond meeting our targets and aim forthe more noble ways that we help advance our society.
Since this book was written in 1966, just a year after theHigher Education Act and two years after the Civil Rights
Act were signed into law, we have seen steadily increasing
percentages of women and minorities attaining college
degrees. I’m inspired by most of Thresher’s musings andsee evidence today that a college degree improves a person’s
chances of a better median income and a higher level of civic
engagement during one’s lifetime.
I cannot think of a better time to reflect on these values.
This essay leaves me with hope and optimism about the rolehigher education will continue to play in our society, andreminds me that there is more work to do, as evidenced by
the current political environment in our country.
MJ Knoll-FinnVice President for Enrollment Management
New York University
2015 College Board Forum panelist celebrating Thresher’s essay••121In an age of dramatic demographic shifts, rising costs ofcollege, and schools struggling to meet enrollment targets,
Thresher’s book is significant now more than ever. He
reminds us that guidance counselors and college admission
officers indeed serve the public good. We are vessels thatconnect society to higher education. We create the pipeline tohigher education and help guide students into their futures.
Regardless of what demographic and institutional challenges
face us, we continue to have a tremendous responsibility tolook beyond our own institutional self-interests and consider
the impact of our work on society. Those who we counsel andsubsequently admit to higher education become the globe’s
future workforce and educated citizenry. We should not takefor granted this tremendous responsibility. The decisions wemake today will have repercussions for decades to come. In
fact, we should continuously evaluate how our own systems,
biases, and evaluation criterion keep many students fromever entering the pipeline. Thresher challenges us to think
about how those of us charged with admission and counseling,might actually be engaging in processes that contradict ourgoals of serving students well.
Everyone engaged in the field of college access and higher
education should read Thresher’s book every few years. It’sa timeless affirmation of why we all began this career path.
Thresher’s work is a passionate meditation and call to action.
He reminds us of our own privilege in doing this work, whilechallenging us to always keep the interest of the public first.
While so many things change, the foundation of our work
stays the same. Helping students and families find, afford,
and attend higher education is a public good. Local, national,
and global communities benefit, and Thresher always
reminds us what an honor it is to be a part of it.
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Angel B. Pérez
Vice President, Enrollment and Student Success
Trinity College2015 College Board Forum panelist celebrating Thresher’s essay••
Thresher eloquently established college admissions as asocial process woven into the fabric of our society with
inherent responsibilities broader than our local institutional
objectives. Having served 19 years in college admissions,
I believe our profession must deepen its commitment toembrace this notion — to exist for the public interest and toserve students.
Reflecting on Thresher’s essay, so much has changed andyet much has not changed since 1966. Today, the very soulof higher education is in question. Still, our administrations’blind ambition, focused on the chasing of prestige, keeps
us from engaging in the grand challenge or even entering
the great debate. We disguise our ambitions in the cloak ofserving students by selecting those who “fit” — the ablest
students who have the appropriate metrics that we believe
deem them deserving of the opportunity to be on our campus
and an investment of our resources.
To make inroads, we should embrace Thresher’s sentiment —convince faculty and administrations that we should caremore about whom we exclude than whom we include. We
should challenge administrations to abandon the chase forprestige and rankings and focus on the biggest challenge ofour day — educating all students, especially those talented,
low-income, first-generation students who often have no123

advocacy. We should build selection processes anchoredin research that identifies characteristics correlating withcollege success — beyond our narrow mysterious notions of“fit.” Lastly, we admissions professionals should lead our
campuses in educating faculty to embrace the challenges
in the educational pipeline and dispel the notion that there
are better students out there, the ones we have become
accustomed to serving at our universities. Thirty years
from now, we as educators will be judged harshly. As thedemographics and readiness of the educational pipelinechange expeditiously, history will ask us what we did asparticipants in this educational system.
Jose A. Aviles
Associate Vice Provost and Director of Admissions
University at Buffalo, State University of New York••When I first began my admissions career, I was not aware of
Alden Thresher. Like many in this profession, I was drawn
to admissions out of a desire to help others. As a firstgeneration college graduate, I was a strong believer in thetransformative power of education, and I was excited to share
the gospel of higher education. Early on, my idealism waschallenged as the job became more about designing strategies
and initiatives to meet institutional goals of quantity, quality,and diversity than counseling students about the wondersof learning. At times, the pressures of ever-increasing
institutional emphases on questionable metrics have led
me to question my choice of career. At those times, I find
comfort in the timeless words written by Alden Thresher. He
foresaw with amazing clarity my struggles. Reading his essay
124renews me and continues to inspire me to be “a trustee of thestudent’s welfare” to the best of my ability.
John Barnhill
Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Management
Florida State University••
Thresher’s essay highlights challenges in education that are
as current today as they were 50 years ago. One hopes that
50 years from now, these issues will have become historicalchallenges long resolved. Until then, this essay provides ahumbling reminder that our “new” problems are not new
and demonstrates how easily we labor under a false sense ofsurety when we are blind to the social constructs guiding ouractions. Without this awareness, our well-intentioned talent
search, commitment to holistic review, and predictive models
predict nothing more than our ability to replicate exclusion.
Thresher recognized that replication was not the way forward
for American higher education and challenges admissions
professionals to question the traditional tools used in the“great sorting.” Defining success — scorekeeping — using thecrudest numerical methods risks converting our nuanced,
diverse, and even chaotic educational ecosystem into an
educational econ-system where the balance between poetic
and utilitarian functions in education tips toward thetransactional business of enrolling students. Like the highschool student who “becomes so caught up in the process ofchoice … he loses sight of the main issue, the educational
process itself.” Thresher’s essay is a cautionary tale forthe admissions professionals who become caught up in the125business of higher education and lose sight of the social
constructs that define their work.
In this profession, being satisfied may in fact signal lack ofawareness of the very real issues explored in this seminal
text. Even those who work at well-known universities —including Thresher, with a career at one of the mostprestigious and, indeed, selective universities in our nation —should not be self-satisfied. Thresher’s essay reveals both
his dissatisfaction with and optimism for higher education.
Education is both “pragmatic and idealistic” and, indeed, so
is the work of admission. In this world of duality, successful
admission professionals should have not only tactical skills
but also humanity and humility, an openness to complexity,
to duality, to nuance, and, above all, a core understandingthat that talent, in all of its forms, exists within us all.
Thresher reminds us that seeking this talent is in our own
best interests; his work challenges us to look closely atourselves and our own core beliefs and to carefully analyze
our own beliefs and behaviors.
Stephanie Dupaul
Vice President for Enrollment Management
University of Richmond••Rereading Thresher’s essay in this, my 43rd and last year
in higher education, first stuns with his eloquence andalso invokes my own reflection on how our institutions andchallenges have both evolved in many ways and yet in others
remained the same. He was prescient in identifying thevagaries and effects of both supply and demand and the use
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of merit aid on admissions practices and in describing thecomplexity of human characteristics and potential that canbe used effectively in holistic and comprehensive review.
However, he could not have predicted the power of a rankingsarms race, the effect of online applications, social media,
and recruitment on volume and stress in the process, andthe high-aid/high-price model that allows a few wealthy
institutions to fulfill their mission and keeps many others
just afloat. Probably, most important, he could not havepredicted the divestment of the states in higher educationand the profound changes in U.S. demographics, along withinternational demand for undergraduate education here.
He also could not have predicted how the careers in the
global knowledge economy of today and tomorrow demand
postsecondary education for almost all.
Thresher reminds me that we have come far in many
ways, but our work remains unfinished. There remains
a seat in higher education for everyone in America, eventhe geographically isolated. Access is not our challenge.
Aspiration is high. The vast majority of middle school
students want to go to college. But access without
adequate preparation and planning — academic, social, andfinancial — is a false promise. Efforts in just the past few
years of renowned highly selective colleges to increase their
numbers of Pell-eligible and first-generation students are
admirable and make a difference in the lives of individuals,
but those few institutions cannot move the needle very far.
Our great land-grant and public flagship universities haveeducated thousands of such students since their inception.
But completion rates at the majority of higher education
institutions that enroll the majority of American students
remain stubbornly low, and borrowing without completion127

is the true crisis in student debt. For higher education torealize its promise to students, our fascination with selective
admission needs to broaden to include high expectations forall secondary-level students and effective student successprograms for those in college. We know what works; we needto have the courage to act. And we will be most successful
if, as Thresher advises, we act collectively and cooperatively
across sectors and levels in education and as effective
partners across society.
Pamela T. Horne
Vice Provost for Enrollment Management
Purdue University••
Never has a piece of work in the field of college and university
admission more embodied multiple generations of relevancethan B. Alden Thresher’s, College Admissions and the
Public Interest. Fifty years later, Thresher’s work reflects
the tremendous change and vision that has encompassed ahalf century of evolution in the higher education landscapeand still charts a future path for the areas in which weturn slowly in the tide. In our times, it is increasingly
apparent that our responsibility to embrace his concepts ofaccess to higher education, in light of the varied values andpreoccupations of our society, remains necessary.
It still holds true that we “cannot tell by looking at a toad how
far he will jump … and … [that we] must look beyond thepurview of the individual college and consider the interactionof all institutions with the society that generates andsustains them (1966).” Therefore, it remains our fundamental
128responsibility not merely to sort for ourselves but rather
to bring to bear within the system of our institutions andpartners the rich diversity of individual, educational, social,and ideological experiences that foster the development of
talent in all students and that will then benefit the larger
public interest.
A required professional reading, College Admissions andthe Public Interest, will remain at the forefront as a guiding
and principled treatise educating and reminding countless
numbers of admissions professionals of the responsibility
and consequences of their duty. In 2066, in looking back,there will still be much to gain from this timeless piece, andit can only be hoped that steady progress on the vision that
Thresher provided will have continued on.
Kedra Ishop
Vice Provost for Enrollment Management
University of Michigan••
This is an important (and still) extremely relevant bookfor all educational leaders, particularly for enrollment
managers and admissions directors. In this age of multiple
and often competing enrollment priorities, Thresher frames
the complexities of essential admissions issues concisely. His
analysis will assist enrollment managers to think critically
about the impact of various admissions models as well
as about educational trends. Through historical analysis,
Thresher debunks several myths and biases regarding therole of admission including supply and demand, the rise of
selective admissions, the role of standardized testing, and the129exclusion of certain ethnic and economically disadvantaged
populations to name a few.
Even with the continuously changing educational landscape,Thresher argues effectively for the greater good for all
students. He challenges us to improve our admissions
processes and models to be more inclusive and not just for
those who have the ability to pay our full tuition.
Whether you work at a private or public institution of higher
education (and I have worked at both), this is a must read.
Thresher reminds us of why first-generation, economicallydisadvantaged students like myself entered the field of higher
education: to be a voice and champion for those students
who often have little to no voice in the admissions selection
process.
Rodney Morrison
Associate Provost for Enrollment and Retention Management
Stony Brook University••
In the 50 years since College Admissions and the Public
Interest, Thresher’s words still seem as freshly prescient andprescriptive as the day he first struck them into print. Our
headlines are riddled with stories about job rates among
graduates. Many pit the fields of STEM, vocational study,
and liberal arts against each other like gladiators competingfor the privilege of shaping students’ minds and economic
futures. Thresher undermines that conception. As he noted,“We are constantly in danger of overestimating the purely
economic motive” of education. What a student needs beyond
130occupational potential, he wrote, is “the habit of learning andthe appetite for it.”Within our current, diverse cultural matrix, and given an
economy increasingly based on service and intelligence,
Thresher’s predictive ideas about education’s role ring truer
than ever. His argument for “The Useful and the Poetic”
reads like policy made literary. Rather than painting liberalarts and vocational study in oil and water, he argues thatthe two are coterminous. Taken together, he says, thetwo concepts cultivate the “appetite” for learning, provide
economic incentive and opportunity, and make good on the“obligation” of higher education to provide “for all capableof realizing its benefits and feeding these back in multipliedvigor into the general polity.”At the University of Chicago, students embrace both the Lifeof the Mind and preparation for postgraduate success. Our
core curriculum is strongly founded in the liberal arts, andour majors exist distinct from — yet within — a multitude ofcareer paths. A University of Chicago education is strongly
redolent of Thresher’s ideals, even if in his time “thepossibilities of interfusing liberal studies with programs of
vocational utility [had] been incompletely explored.” Thereremains much to explore in regard to Thresher’s ideas still,
but time, if anything, has only proven favorable to that legacy.
James G. Nondorf
Vice President for Enrollment and Student Advancement
Dean of College Admissions and Financial Aid
University of Chicago••131I keep a well-thumbed hardbound copy of College Admissions
and the Public Interest in my office. B. Alden Thresher
was MIT’s first director of admissions; he developed MIT’s
selective admissions process and I know each of his successors
has felt the responsibility to continue his legacy.
I revisit the essay every summer, and it always reminds me of
the idea that captivated me when I began in this profession:that we could have a profound effect on our students, andthrough them, our society. Indeed, Thresher recognizes
that this influence can be for good or ill, cautioning that“the practical tactics of admission often divert attention
from the educational processes, which are the heart of thewhole matter.” Every year we must remember this: to pushback against those forces that divert attention from theeducational process and to shape our policies in the public
interest to serve students’ education.
Thresher questions the assumptions of his day, which look
remarkably like the assumptions of our day. That an essay
written a half-century ago can feel so fresh and current mustmean that it contains something timeless and essential. It
recalls the idealistic motivation that is the true power ofour profession. The essay concludes with the exhortationthat continues to motivate so many of us in the admissions
field that “unsuspected talent will come to light.” Indeed, it
is what we are here for, to help every student reach theirpotential, and to especially help those whose potential lies
“unsuspected.”
Stu Schmill
Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
132