New Preferred Class in College Admissions

Level 4 - Highly Selective

Welcome back! 

Today we focus on preferential treatment in the admissions process. 

This is not some value judgment or a comment about the admissions process, but an acknowledgement that there is a significant amount of change in the admissions world taking place.

If you have not paid attention, there are some of those changes:

• End of Affirmative Action

• Rejection of Donor Advantage

• Rejection of Legacy Admissions

If all of these changes take place, you will go from an admissions process that rewarded a variety of individuals to no longer rewarding those same individuals. 

This is a fairly big shift in the academic process, and how big that shift is depends heavily on your views on admissions. 

But the bigger question is, who are the winners with this shift?

The easy answer is that the average applicant sees a benefit. After all, if everyone is losing “bonus points” in the admissions process, doesn’t that mean that the admissions process is becoming more equitable?

The short answer is, no, it does not. But that goes back to a fundamental misunderstanding of admissions. 

Most people believe that admissions is a zero-sum game based entirely on a few key details and that things like affirmative action remove opportunities from “qualified applicants.”

That is not how admissions works. That is not how admissions has ever worked.