As colleges look for new affirmative action workarounds, what’s to keep applicants from just lying

Affirmative action in admissions is over and as I pointed out here, the progressive left is basically freaking out about what will happen next. What we’ve seen in California, which outlawed affirmative action in 1996, is that the percentage of black and Hispanic students are likely to drop until schools adopt legal ways to make up for the advantage affirmative action was giving these students. The Washington Post has a story up today looking at how schools might do that. [emphasis added]

“Expect a shock,” said Michael V. Drake, president of the University of California, who is in position to know. A 1996 state law has barred UC from using affirmative action in admissions for the past quarter-century. After the initial thunderbolt, he said, came the hard work of making up lost ground. “We had to adapt. We’re still chasing, but we’ve made progress.”…

Some steps are straightforward, experts say. Colleges will push harder to obtain diverse applicants from high schools and regions previously overlooked. They will scour an applicant’s essays, recommendations and life experience, often gleaning relevant information about racial and ethnic background.

Later on the article informs us that admissions people from colleges around the country have been strategizing what they could legally do if the court were to overturn affirmative action. And the general idea seems to be to get students to focus more on writing sob story essays.

Before the ruling, admission leaders and lawyers around the country strategized for months over what would be permissible. Shannon R. Gundy, assistant vice president for enrollment management at the University of Maryland, which until now has considered race as a factor, told higher education leaders in April that universities should advise counselors on strategies for writing letters of recommendation and students about writing admission essays.

“Right now, students write about their soccer practice, they write about their grandmother dying,” Gundy said. “They write about the things that are personal to them. They don’t write about their trials and tribulations, they don’t write about the challenges that they’ve had to experience, and they don’t know how to and they don’t want to. We’re going to have to educate students in how to do that.”

Two points about this. First, I find it hard to believe that students aren’t already writing about their trials and tribulations. An associate professor wrote a piece for the NY Times this week saying that affirmative action had turned nearly every student into one who was doing his best to either highlight or hide his racial identity.

The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.

Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification.

He went on to predict that the end of affirmative action would only make things worse: “Writing college essays will descend further into a perverse, racialized version of the Keynesian beauty contest.” He also admitted that a lot of this was already happening.

I continue to believe, as I said here, the situation can’t get worse from the students side because they are already fully aware what schools are looking for. However, it could get worse from the school’s side. As schools abandon test scores and even grades in order to give a more “holistic” application process that gives a chance to more minority students, they will focus more on the essays, scanning them for clues about a student’s racial background.

And this is where it occurs to me that this is probably creating an even greater incentive for students to just lie.

Of course, this is probably already a problem. Some students are probably already lying or exaggerating in order to create a compelling essay. But in the past, students still had to submit their SAT scores and grades and those scores mattered a lot. Only the students with top grades and scores had a chance at Harvard regarless of what story they had to tell. Maybe a great essay could give them an advantage but it wasn’t enough on its own to get them in.

But if test scores are increasingly abandoned and the importance of grades are discounted in an effort to include more minority students, what’s left as the core of the application is a bunch of essays written (perhaps?) by students who know their best chance at acceptance is a story about their struggles with racism or some other ism.

Of course there are students who may genuinely have struggled with racism. I’m not denying or discounting that. I’m just pointing out that, with the importance of the essay being elevated, we create a major incentive for some people to just…make something up.

The advantage of grades and test scores is that they are pretty difficult to fake. You can take some test prep classes and maybe add 100-200 points to your overall SAT score but it’s still you filling in the little circles on the form. But how are admissions offices supposed to check the veracity of student essays about their experiences? How do they know the essays were created by an AI program?

Granted, parents and relatives might know if a story is true but they are also highly motivated to see their child get into Harvard. And who is going to ask them anyway?

Bottom line, affirmative action racially gamified the system. Now in order to maintain “equity” without affirmative action we’re going to move further away from quantitate evidence of academic merit toward qualitative evidence of personal merit (essays, recommendations) that could be invented out of whole cloth or based on the whims of teachers with their own agendas. Maybe admissions officers should think about this a bit.