College admissions shouldn’t be treated like a race

With the Supreme Court set to rule on affirmative action, college admission is again in focus. But that narrow lens — can we consider race, yes or no? — distorts how, at residential, selective schools, the admissions process aims to build a community that can effectively seek truth as it educates responsible, unique individuals.

If you’re a driven high school senior, getting into college might feel like a competition where schools measure all applicants against the same standard. Justice Samuel Alito adopts this perspective when he compares the process to a 100-yard dash. In a fair race, the fastest get in. Give one a head start, you disadvantage the others.

But this race analogy is distracting. It encourages applicants to measure themselves against some phantom “fastest” person. As a result, many amazing young people agonize over how they fall short instead of celebrating what they’re good at. Others may come to resent a process that fails to recognize their clearly superior speed.

College admission isn’t like a head-to-head race. It’s not about who’s fastest, because each applicant is proposing to follow a different route. Among the students in my last class (at Davidson College) were a physics major defensive lineman who will be an engineer, a musical theater actor headed to law school and maybe politics, and an amateur triathlete studying economics and computer science before going into business.

No single standard — no race — could do justice to the achievements and potential of these three individuals. The admissions committee likely considered different accomplishments when evaluating each of them. They likely also asked whether the path each student wanted to take was possible at Davidson and how each student would contribute to a learning community committed to cultivating “humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of leadership and service” (Davidson’s primary purpose).

A learning community is a distinctive thing. It isn’t a team — members don’t all share the same goal. It isn’t an orchestra, because students won’t play from a single score. Students will chart a path through a range of curated educational opportunities. Each will bring a distinctive perspective, shaped by experiences, and set of questions to these shared activities. The more heterogeneous the questions, the surer the insights. A community of students with a wide range of backgrounds, aspirations and experiences is best equipped to facilitate one another’s intellectual and personal growth and more generally to seek truth together. Building such a community requires seeing applicants as individuals, each on their own terms.

Because criteria can vary with each applicant’s aspirations, and because many more talented people want in than there is room, mistrust comes very easily. The college admissions process can be maddeningly opaque. It’s demonstrably vulnerable to corruption and can perpetuate inherited privilege. Going forward, institutions can offer more detailed, less jargony explanations for how an entering class is selected. We can describe the distinctive community we each strive to build and make clearer how our educational programs and campus cultures differ, so applicants can make informed choices. We can be open to criticism and even radical change.

The process of college admissions is not like running a race. And while it’s on us in higher education to earn the public’s trust, it’s also important to acknowledge the value that our heterogenous truth-seeking communities provide to students and to the country.

Carol Quillen is professor of history and president emerita of Davidson College, and a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute.