☆ Time for Silicon Valley colleges to revamp (read: simplify) their admissions processes? (5/5)
Most higher ed institutions require a hefty applicant package: essays, recommendations, grades, interviews, etc. But University of Austin prof and statistician David Puelz thinks biased local colleges might want to rethink that—he lays out some compelling data, below, including what one metric is likely the most valuable for admissions. An Opp Now exclusive.
Opportunity Now: Elizabeth, you’ve advocated for looser admissions standards for public college applicants, paired with a rigorous first year of coursework (and beyond) to weed out unqualified students.
And, David, your university recently changed their admissions process—pretty drastically. What can local colleges take away from the University of Austin’s shift?
David Puelz: I’ll first offer a quick counterpoint to the “big tent” idea. While that may be beneficial for public universities, our perspective is to screen out underqualified students from the get-go—recruiting only the cream of the crop, so our learning environment is as rigorous as possible. That’s why it’s really important to us to admit students based on merit.
Which leads me to UATX’s new admissions policy. In studying previous policy, we found that the strongest predictor of performance in college is actually the standardized test (SAT, ACT, and/or CLT); and that’s controlling for all the other things you might want to measure on a student's application.
So we originally had this well-thought-out admissions process where the committee was calculating a leadership score, creativity score, and writing score. But, considered next to the standardized test score, these other variables are just statistical noise—not adding any information or helping us predict a student’s collegiate performance.
That’s why we now only consider the standardized test score (automatic admissions if SAT ≥ 1460, ACT ≥ 33, or CLT ≥ 105). Crazy concept, right? And, to some critics, presumably racist or classist.
ON: How might UATX respond to that critique—a common one, by the way, for local merit-based educational standards?
DP: Well, we published our admissions algorithm (which is funny even to call an algorithm because it’s three lines total) for full transparency. To show there’s no funny business going on—complete objectivity.
Also, if a potential applicant is below those test score thresholds, we ask them to describe their three greatest (verifiable) achievements in a single sentence each. This helps us identify and bring in bright, creative, hardworking students.
And I will acknowledge another rejoinder: that the standardized test is correlated with income. It’s true. Typically, higher income students get higher scores. But here’s the kicker: the traditional admissions process used by Harvard, MIT, etc.—standardized test score + black box holistic approach—is even more correlated with income.
ON: A surprising finding. How might you explain it?
DP: Because you have to engineer all these extracurriculars, and you have to start a nonprofit to reduce poverty in Africa, and you have to be captain of the swim team. You get the point. All these activities and projects are, in general, more available to students of higher socioeconomic status.
The interesting thing, too, is we’re finding that our new admissions policy—along with our institutional culture in general—is causing strong self-selection for students. We get students who care about merit. We saw this in our previous cycle: we have a student transferring from Carnegie Mellon because he heard about our merit-first admissions policy. He’s already completed one year and wants to start over. We flipped a student from Stanford. We flipped a student from UChicago.
Turns out, this whole idea of designing an institution with a clear value system, and signaling that effectively to the world, is pretty important.
ON: Indeed, whether you’re a college in the Lone Star State—or the heart of Silicon Valley.
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