Admissions and Admittance

This past week (and weekend), I have participated in several events organized by the university Admissions team. It’s a very extensive team because college admissions is big business and can feel like a circus. My part as a faculty member is to promote my institution by discussing the academic programs and answering questions from parents and students. During some parts, I feel like I am “on display” akin to a performer in a circus who comes in on cue. The video mash-ups put together by Admissions are very slick – I had forgotten how slick until I viewed several of them at the actual events. For a very amusing book on the circus from the parent point of view I highly recommend Crazy U by Andrew Ferguson. I read this a few years ago – it is both hilarious and incredulous!

What surprised me the most was how much I actually enjoyed participating in the event and talking up my university and my department. Talking up my department is easy – I’m very familiar with it and can answer very detailed questions. I think being a department chair has made me much more familiar with other parts of the college and the university as a whole, and means that I now do a better job connecting the academics to other parts of the college experience. (Yes, academics are important, but it’s only one factor among many that compete for the students’ attentions.) Plenty of students, and perhaps even more so their parents, are interested in the sciences. In break-out sessions I had lots of interested folks. Although parents generally asked more questions than students, I had a good proportion of the students speak up on their own behalf!

In the U.S., at a liberal arts college, you admit students in general if they have certain proficiencies or skills (or other reasons that I won’t go into – go read Crazy U). The philosophy of a liberal arts college is that you explore your passions, and match those with your abilities and your life goals – at least according to a high-level university official at one of the events (with slick video accompaniment). Students are encouraged to explore their passions, their inner selves, their many opportunities that the university will help facilitate, and so one thing emphasized is that you do not need to know what your major will be (when you first arrive). At most other tertiary institutions in the rest of the world, you apply into a university with a list of preferred majors. You may not get your first choice of major even if you get admitted. In some cases you apply to a university system and therefore may not get your first choice of specific university. (So you had better be realistic about your list or you might get nothing.)

There are many factors that go into the sorting system at these other universities, but it is done by the institutions – not by the students. (Things are changing though, and we are seeing U.S. style liberal arts education pop up around the globe.) The upshot of the liberal arts college philosophy, though, is that to some extent the college have control over what students are going to major in, at least to a first approximation. This makes allocation of resources potentially tricky. In recent years we have seen movement towards more students wanting to major in the sciences. (Tough economic times drives this, supposedly, or at least that’s what some pundits say.) Does one start gutting the less popular programs following the choices of the students? That seems like a bad way to go from a liberal arts point of view. If more resources aren’t going to the science programs to maintain the liberal arts balance, but we keep getting more students who want to “major” in our areas, do we start making our classes harder so we can weed out more students? That way we can just take the really, really good ones. This sort of weeding goes on in science departments all over the country. (I strongly disagree with the weeding philosophy, but I don’t deny its reality.)

Let’s go back to the admissions circus for a moment. If you’re not at the very, very top of the prestige pile, then you have to compete for the strongest students to attract them to your institution. If you do this, maybe, just maybe, it will help you move up the prestige ladder. All this might make one yearn for a “simpler” system such as those practiced by neighbors around the world. Then again, those systems also have their problems. There’s also a lot of pressure on parents and students to figure things out in the U.S. system where choice is an important feature in tertiary education. Of course the institutions also participate in their own choices on their end.

How does Hogwarts do it? Apparently if you have magical ability and you live in a certain geographic area, you automically get invited to enroll when the time comes. It doesn’t matter if you’ve heard of the school or not, or whether you even knew you had magical abilities. We see this in the case of Harry and Hermione. If you were part of the Wizarding World already (Ron Weasley for example), then this would be a familiar part of your life. You could turn down the invitation to enroll of course. It's not clear there is a law that requires you send your magical children to a school of witchcraft and wizardry. On the other hand, in some countries in the world it is mandatory that you send your children to “government-mandated” schools, and that home-schooling is either not an option or very difficult.

There are no Admissions events, School Open Days, nor competition for student places, at Hogwarts, at least not that we read about. There is one mention where Malfoy talks about his parents thinking of sending him to Durmstrang instead of Hogwarts, so there are alternative options. But perhaps the comparison of Hogwarts to the college system isn’t the right one, and instead it should be compared to the secondary school system. Certainly in the U.S., there is a hodgepodge of options. Many private schools function much in the same way as private liberal arts colleges where admissions is concerned. Education is indeed big business.

What have I learned from all this? I’m not sure. But it did make me pause to think about the system as a whole from a broader perspective. As an academic who can easily get engrossed in my own small slice of the college, it is a good reminder to see what is going on from a larger perspective and give some thought to the issues. After all, that’s what a liberal arts education prepared me to do.