What's Missing from College Rejection Letters

Recently the Wall Street Journal published an article on college rejection letters, citing some of the most praiseworthy (and infamous) among this year's crop. Even the kindest—and perhaps wisest—of these, from Harvard ("Past experience suggests that the particular college a student attends is far less important than what the student does to develop his or her strengths and talents over the next four years"), doesn't acknowledge the inherent subjectivity, randomness, and fallibility in college admissions.

The fact is, for every student admitted to any given college, many more are equally qualified and deserving but simply weren't lucky enough to get in. Although college admissions officials are typically highly dedicated professionals who work long and hard to make their task as objective as possible, the fine-level distinctions they ultimately make among highly qualified applicants simply aren't defensible from a scientific standpoint.

As I discussed in my previous post commenting on Barry Schwartz's Huffington Post piece titled "Why Selective Colleges—and Outstanding Students—Should Become Less Selective," his solution—that colleges should randomly admit students from their groups of "good enough" applicants—is not only sensible but more humane. Every year thousands of high school seniors are rejected from schools they had the grades, test scores, recommendations, essays, and extracurriculars to be admitted to.

These rejections are frequently traumatic and can have long-lasting effects, in part because colleges don't acknowledge the luck factor, which is far greater than most applicants or their parents suspect. Even rejection letters that pay lip service to unprecedented numbers of highly qualified applicants don't admit to the elements of chance, although doing so would be more honest and forestall much personal suffering on the parts of rejected students.

Some years ago in Admissions Confidential, a controversial book by a former admissions officer at Duke, Rachel Toor recounted her experiences in the field, revealing just how imperfect and random college admissions decisions can be. It's time for rejection letters to acknowledge this fact. Instead of claiming that only the "best" and "most qualified" applicants could be admitted (e.g., "The deans were obliged to select from among candidates who clearly could do sound work at Bates"), rejection letters should concede that the processes used to choose among highly qualified students are fallible and subjective, and that in the vast majority of cases, the determining factor was simply luck.