The Graduate School of Education’s recent report on new college admission guidelines, though well intentioned, could severely skew the admissions system and harm the low-income students for whom it purports to advocate. The report proposes an admission system that de-emphasizes standardized tests and long lists of extracurricular activities, while emphasizing service-based activities. This proposal limits students’ passions and provides incentives for students to engage in inauthentic service experiences, merely replacing long lists of extracurricular activities with long lists of service hours.
While the report rightly acknowledges the rampant résumé building that the current college application system encourages, it advocates for a system that will confine students’ interests and lead to a misrepresentation of their high school experience. A system that prioritizes “long ‘brag sheets‘” is problematic and must be reformed. Yet confining applicants by only allowing them to include two or three extracurricular activities as an incentive to focus on fewer activities may also limit their ability to explore other interests. As a liberal arts school, Harvard should be especially wary of this recommendation, considering that its purpose is to provide its students with a broad education over many subject areas.
A high school student should be allowed to be passionate about more than just three activities, and pressing students to provide an incomplete image of themselves contradicts the philosophy of a holistic application process. This recommendation places a higher value upon “pointy” rather than “well-rounded” students. While the recommendation is well-intentioned, it may ultimately be interpreted by the high-stress college admissions culture as a ban on exploring various interests in high school.
The proposed emphasis on service activities is more subtly problematic. As the report frames this recommendation, admissions committees should place value on “consistent and well-structured” service activities of at least a year in length. This will ostensibly create a more caring and service-oriented generation of college-educated leaders—a noble, but unrealistic, goal.
In practice, this weight on service will translate into a competition for the most community service hours starting from freshman year. While institutions may deny quantifying hours as a metric for students’ competence, applicants will still feel the pressure to rack up as many hours as possible. Where the report attempts to “relieve undue pressure associated with admission tests,” it will instead replace this stress with the pressure to complete hundreds of hours of community service. In order to fulfill the expectation of a long-term service activity, students will be expected to choose two or three community service organizations during their freshman year and stay with them until senior year, an unreasonable expectation for a 14 year old. This may lead to insincere service and a more intense form of resume building than currently exists.
Furthermore, an emphasis on service activities will harm the low-income students that the report professes to protect. A study from the Corporation for National and Community Service finds that students at low-income schools are “40 percent less likely … to report current or past participation in school-based service.” Low-income schools are also 7 percent less likely to even offer service-learning activities. The report appears to address this issue by providing an alternative to community service: family engagement. Nevertheless, quantifying and describing how one contributes to one’s family is much more difficult than simply cataloguing hours at a food pantry. Whereas it is much easier to prove a “consistent and well-structured” service activity, it is much harder to prove the same for family contribution.
The Graduate School of Education’s report is fundamentally flawed due to its lack of cynicism in the college admissions process. While its goals are lofty, there will still be significant advantage for privileged students. The pressure that is currently placed on standardized test scores will be replaced by pressure to compete for community service hours and commit to those activities as early as freshman year. If college students are supposed to be exploring different passions, high school students will instead be confined to their three allotted interests, rendering them unprepared for unstructured college life. The report is imperfect at best, and may shift, rather than alleviate, the stress of the college admissions process.