The Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite (review)
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Access to college continues to be a popular subject among researchers, administrators, and public policy decision makers and is often the catalyst for generating massive publications and impassioned speeches. The Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite by Christopher Avery, Andrew Fairbanks, and Richard Zeckhauser is a contribution to the literature on college access. The authors focus on the peril of elite universities and high-performing, majority-race students finding each other in the higher education universe.
The book chronicles political developments among elite institutions as they selected early admission (EA) and early decision (ED) policies at their respective colleges. Access to and actions by Harvard appear to be the standard and the catalyst for the actions of other elite institutions such as Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. The motivation for institutions is to have an entering class of the best and brightest students before they choose to go elsewhere with their education dollars.
The book not only focuses on the pressure of elite institutions to acquire the "cream of the crop" for each entering class but also addresses students' struggle in gaining access to these institutions. The authors address the strain that EA/ED places on students, given that they might have to commit to an institution that is not their first choice. EA programs allow students to submit multiple applications to various institutions, and acceptance to EA institutions is not binding for the students. ED programs require applicants to apply to one institution, and admitted students must attend that institution. Institutional strategies for enforcing the requirements of ED programs are unclear. It is not clear how the commitment to the institutions is policed or what the consequences are for students who agree to attend an institution to which they are admitted but then change their minds.
The authors report that college choice should not be taken lightly since there is evidence that "graduates from the more selective institutions (those with the highest average SAT scores for entering freshmen) had significantly higher average incomes than graduates from the less selective institutions" (p. 4) and that "those who attend the most selective colleges will have the most successful classmates" (p. 5). This argument is a rationale for expending the fiscal and human capital required [End Page 411] to complete the comprehensive and complex research that served as the book's foundation. The authors employed a mixed-methods design using both quantitative and qualitative data collection strategies, over a five-year period at 14 colleges. This rationale notwithstanding, the authors excluded minorities, alumni children, and recruited athletes whenever they were identified, reasoning that people in these groups were "given advantages in the admission decisions" (p. 138), thus making it difficult to make fair comparisons.
The positioning of minorities in the same category as children of elite institution's alumni is an interesting juxtaposition. Certainly it is imaginable that minorities could be part of each group (minority, alumni descendant, and athlete). However, it is difficult to imagine or believe that all minorities should be excluded from inclusion since they would be admitted to these institutions based only on noncognitive criteria. Admittedly, high-performing minorities are micro populations, but they do exist and are capable of being admitted to elite universities based on their intellectual and academic abilities. Minority students who are academically talented are not mythical characters. If they were, scholars such as Kassie Freeman, Patricia McDonough, Walter Allen, and others would have an altered research agenda.
It is ironic that a book on promoting elitist behavior was published at a time of reflection on the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a landmark case for educational inclusiveness. For those who worry that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and other selective institutions will not have their fair share of the brightest nonminority students, this is a good read. However, readers who are interested in either high-performing minority students' access to these institutions or in the access, retention, and...
