College admissions are broken — and everyone knows it.
Working at a number of colleges over my career has taught me the ideal students are independent thinkers craving challenge and willing to be bold.
But the admissions process rewards privilege and punishes authenticity. Courage is punished. Originality is flattened out.
Admissions essays, above all, have become an exercise in disingenuous posturing.
Students agonize over “personal statements” because they feel pressure to lie or at least stretch the truth. Readers, meanwhile, cannot help but ask: “Did this student really write this essay?”
ChatGPT is ubiquitous.
But the more likely source is another person. Paid consultants, overzealous parents and high-priced counselors have turned the “personal statement” into a team project — one that’s as much about resources as it is about character.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The personal statement has always been vulnerable to manipulation.
Even if, with the Trump administration’s help, race finally does recede as a factor in undergraduate admissions, this problem will not be solved.
Admissions officers could use personal statements as, for example, a litmus test for political allegiance. “Is this student on our side?” By their very nature, so-called “holistic” admissions inevitably allow bad actors to place their proverbial thumbs on the scale.
Take New Yorker Zach Yadegari, whose artificial-intelligence startup generated $30 million in revenue. Despite his 4.0 GPA and 34 ACT score, 15 elite universities rejected him.
His personal statement candidly questioned college’s value — a fatal honesty in a system that rewards conformity over independence.
Or Kaitlyn Younger from Texas, with her 1550 SAT, 3.95 GPA and 11 AP classes, who received rejected from nine elite schools in 2022.
Her guidance counselor was baffled: “I don’t know what else she could have done.”
Her apparent flaw: being a middle-class white female from a public high school interested in business.
Why not lie a little? Play the game? Tell the story most universities seem to want to hear?
But what does it say about our society if the price of admission to the upper crust, or even the upper-middle class, is dishonesty?
In the words of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Students forced to think in terms of oppressor and oppressed will inevitably start to internalize that reductive vision of what it means to be human.
Playing along with far-left ideology is not an idle game.
The rest of the world hears about the campus protests and wonders what happened.
Legislators, trustees, donors and parents watch in horror as students agitate for radical causes such as defunding the police or boycotting Israel.
The students themselves, meanwhile, seem not to grasp what they’re saying.
This kind of brainwashing is to be expected from a system that begins by asking applicants to demonstrate they’re willing and able to internalize progressive propaganda.
The sad reality is that academic excellence is very far from many elite institutions’ foremost concern — perhaps nowhere more so than in admissions.
In the early 1900s, university admission depended on performing well on a standardized exam. But in 1926, Harvard’s president switched over to holistic review, largely (in his own words) to “reduce the number of Jews.”
The practice is unusual; to this day, most countries organize admissions to their national universities based on standardized exams.
Where they have introduced more holistic processes, modeled on what has become the American norm, the results have been corruption scandals, as well as more general misgivings about transparency and the reproduction of inequality.
University of Austin applicants tend to be fed up with identity politics and looking for an alternative.
Their personal statements are mercifully free from victim narratives and savior complexes.
But we still face the same nagging question every other university does. “Did this student write this essay?”
A recent foundry10 study suggests about 30% of college applicants use AI to help them with their personal statements.
Nor is ChatGPT the only cause for concern. Nationwide, many students still outsource their admissions essays the old-fashioned way: by seeking help or even outright ghostwriting from a parent, a guidance counselor or a paid professional admissions consultant.
The result is a wildly uneven playing field.
The same problem, unfortunately, tends to be true of letters of recommendation and participation in extracurriculars.
Statistically speaking, these components of a standard holistic application tend to reveal not so much students’ individual drive and character as their access to opportunities — i.e., the relative wealth and emotional stability of their parents.
But what if we don’t care about that? When we assess applications at the University of Austin, what we want to know is not an applicant’s social class but his or her ability to handle our demanding curriculum.
“If only we had some way to divine the suitability of a student for an elite education,” Steven Pinker wrote. As it turns out, we do have what Pinker calls “this magic measuring stick”: “it’s called standardized testing.”
The military has the ASVAB. We have the SAT, ACT and CLT.
These tests are not perfect: Better versions would make the upper regions of intelligence more test-legible.
But they are better predictors than nebulous essays or even GPA. And they are widely available.
Lead author Raj Chetty and his colleagues in a recent study conclude “there are a substantial number of low- and middle-income students with strong chances of success — in particular, students with high SAT/ACT scores — who apply but are not currently admitted to Ivy-Plus colleges.”
These are the students whom holistic review, almost as if by design, excludes.
And these are students we want.
Standardized tests may reveal disparities among groups. But a commitment to excellence requires judging individuals as individuals, not as representatives of any racial or identity group.
Without a clear benchmark, colleges are left guessing who is prepared for college and, as a result, often default to students from wealthy schools with polished applications and access to consultants and tutors.
The University of Austin is a startup. And one benefit of being a startup is we can pivot rapidly.
So in the interests of efficiency and fairness, we are launching an experiment: a new and more streamlined admissions process.
Students with an SAT ≥ 1460, ACT ≥ 33 or CLT ≥ 105 will be automatically admitted, pending an “integrity check.”
Students with scores below this threshold will be ranked by their scores and invited to submit up to three sentences listing three achievements.
In either case, we do not accept submissions of personal essays, extracurriculars or GPA.
“What about character?” Our new model is less like arranging a marriage and more like selection for the Special Forces. Anyone who meets the bar should be able to have a go.
We do not inflate grades. We expect more than usual attrition.
Those who stick with the program, however, will be given the structure necessary to become effective leaders and to make the most of extraordinary opportunities.
“What about fit?” This question might be appropriate for a specialized graduate degree. But for a BA?
The more we dig into the college-admissions game, the more it seems to us that when most colleges talk about “fit,” what they mean is “conformity.”
“Can you sit still? Do you follow orders? Do you support the Current Thing?”
At the University of Austin, we don’t want “excellent sheep.”
We are not training students to be the next “organization man.”
We want self-starters with an appetite for risk.
These kinds of students are allergic to bureaucracy and not always willing to spend their high-school years carefully crafting a CV.
They like the idea that what really matters is their general intelligence (“g”) and their willingness to do serious work.
So we expect they will find our new no-nonsense approach to admissions attractive.
Patrick Gray is the dean of Arts and Letters at the University of Austin. The opinions expressed here are his own and should not be construed as an official university statement.