On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration had offered nine schools a deal: manage your universities in a way that aligns with administration priorities and get “substantial and meaningful federal grants,” along with other benefits. Failure to accept the bargain would result in a withdrawal of federal programs that would likely cripple most universities. The offer, sent to a mixture of state and private universities, would see the government dictate everything from hiring and admissions standards to grading and has provisions that appear intended to make conservative ideas more welcome on campus.
The document was sent to the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia. However, independent reporting indicates that the administration will ultimately extend the deal to all colleges and universities.
Ars has obtained a copy of the proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which makes the scope of the bargain clear in its introduction. “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits,” it suggests, while mentioning that those benefits include access to fundamental needs, like student loans, federal contracts, research funding, tax benefits, and immigration visas for students and faculty.
It is difficult to imagine how it would be possible to run a major university without access to those programs, making this less a compact and more of an ultimatum.
Poorly thought through
The Compact itself would see universities agree to cede admissions standards to the federal government. The government, in this case, is demanding only the use of “objective” criteria such as GPA and standardized test scores as the basis of admissions decisions, and that schools publish those criteria on their websites. They would also have to publish anonymized data comparing how admitted and rejected students did relative to these criteria.
This was part a session talking about the research that was happening at MIT w.r.t. health. Professors presented their work on finding a new TB vaccine, on prosthetics, on health care funding, and on the detection of ovarian cancer. At the very end the moderator asked “What’s the one missing piece that would aid your research?” One said flexible funding to pursue strategy changes and another thought there should be more focus on therapeutics across a diverse community instead of research. Yet the last to speak, Prof Bryan Bryson, said:
That's what Trump is destroying.
SATs are mostly useless. The one place they work is as a threshold, not continuous function. That is, somewhere around a 500-550 you do get an achievement inflection point where students below that number do struggle relative to students above that number, but there's no benefit to being much above that number. That is, there's no correlation between success for 800s over 550s - they do the same. 500-550 is about where the College Board jumps off of the straightforward high school fundamentals and goes onto seeing how clever you are. The fundamentals matter, the rest doesn't.
GPAs are helpful, but more the unweighted over the weighted. Your honors and AP course grades after weighting undermine the model. The unweighted GPAs help it. That helps underrepresented students who attend poorly funded schools that can't afford to offer AP and honors courses. A push to a model like this will be received by a movement toward unweighted GPA which will undercut the entitlements of the upper middle class, mostly white communities. Unweighted GPA better reflects discipline, commitment, etc. You just have to work harder to get straight As than a mix of As and Bs that get weighted up.
AP scores can be helpful particularly in disciplines where they can get ahead of the curriculum, buying some breathing room which helps success, but who knows if they're allowed to be used here.
But the single most important metric in admissions for selective universites is none of this stuff. The most important metric is how predictably you will accept the admissions offer. Exclusive universes have a numbers problem. We had 130,000 applications for 5,000 seats. If you expect ⅓ of your offers to be taken, you have to make 15,000 offers. If you're wrong on that ⅓, and half take them, you're fucked - you have 2,500 students with no dorm rooms, not enough classrooms, instructors, not enough services, and so on. At a public university they also won't get their subsidy, so you're taking a ~$10,000 loss on each student. You've probably also wrecked your financial aid pool. If you go under that's less devastating, but still pretty bad because you have a lot of fixed costs that you need that tuition + subsidy at a public to cover. You can backfill from waitlist to some degree, but only so much. Universities care more about how reliably they can predict your likelihood to take the offer than they do about boosting the average GPA or whatever. When you're admitting 12% of the pool, there's really no difference between the top 1% and the top 5%, and the top 1% are the hardest to predict so you don't admit them. Yes, you turn down the highest achieving students because they're the hardest to get and you can't risk modeling them wrong.
Another byproduct of this kind of policy is male attendance is going to get hammered even harder. Why? Because male students (and this is true everywhere) for some reason overestimate their chances of getting in. If you look at the GPA/SAT distribution by gender, they're wildly different. Your distribution of women will look a lot more like your distribution of admits - with median GPAs and SATs a lot closer to where you will be making your selection. Your distribution of men will be miles from that mark. The bottom third of your pool is almost all guys that have no chance of getting in. What got these lower achieving men into the school in the past were athletics, legacy, etc. This removes one of your tools to try and balance the gender pool. Note, I'm not saying that men underachieve women, I'm saying that men overestimate where they are competitive. They tend to think they're competitive at a their of school that they really aren't, and they might even pick safety schools that they are a coin flip to get into. Women are better at estimated their competitiveness and tend to slightly underestimate where they are competitive. Our application gender mix was 50/50 but our mix when we offered admission was 70/30 in favor of women, and we were a state where considering race and gender was illegal. You can get around the race thing a big by substituting a geographic servicing mandate, which we had - we were a public, saying we would try and admit equally from across all taxpaying regions was valid so we did evaluation in the local context - you weren't competing against all other applicants in the state, only other applicants from your school or your district - and because communities segregate by race to some degree that kind of policy ensures that you are getting some degree of equal representation by race. But we don't segregate by gender. There aren't proxies to use apart from activity participation to do that. But a decent number of well achieving male students wind up at community college because they thought they were Berkeley material when they had no hope of getting in and got shut out of 20 schools they applied to. We soaked up as many of them through transfer admissions as we could, but many would just give up before we could get to them. I don't recall a single female student that wound up at a community college because they got shut out, they were all guys and there were a lot of them.
And we never figured out how to get students to better recognize where they were competitive. There are tools in the high schools that we provided data to that are personalized, and the boys would just straight up ignore them. I did studies showing that. Counselors were ineffective to correct that - students simply didn't believe them. The only thing that seemed to work was a one on one come to Jesus talk by admissions officers after reviewing their record, and we can't do that with 65,000 applicants. It's a serious problem and we need some cultural mechanisms to solve it, and we're doing the exact opposite. One thing that might work is what the California State Universities is trying now - they're sending admissions offers to students that never even applied. They get a students basic admissions record with grades and make an offer. That might get more discouraged male students to attend. We'll see. It's new, and it's a pilot, and I'm retired so I can't help my colleagues with that.
Anyway, this will be disastrous if it's implemented because like everything else it fails to understand why the system is in the state that it's in, it fails to understand the complexity of the problem, and it fails to anticipate unintended consequences. It's based like so much on some kind of utopian wishcasting, as if those of us in California haven't been working on this problem for the last 30 years out of 40 different universities and recognizing really clearly where the countervailing forces are regarding culture, rankings, economics, and so on. Privates are in a little better position to manage it because they lack the hard economic forcing function of how state subsidies are handled, but unless they have graduate programs actually carrying their institution (which the elites do) they're going to get hammered. And we have a private university closing in this country about once a month as it is. They are failing pretty steadily right now.
Admissions
Tuition
Hiring
Course content
Grading
Research
Seems reasonable. The university itself still gets to control what color to paint the offices and how often to cut the grass. So, it isn’t a takeover, no matter what the left (who are terrorists, by the way) say.