What Gives you an Edge? Meritocracy's Last Stand

David Villarreal has conducted a six-year-long mating dance with Harvard.

What began as an elementary school crush--he began writing the admissions office after watching an episode of "Doogie Howser, M.D." where a Veritas shield was displayed prominently--suddenly turned serious. The College added Villarreal to its mailing list.

For the next six years, he did his best to impress. He was editor of his high school paper. He made the academic decathlon team. He became an activist in his community. He won nearly every award his high school had to offer.

And he continued to write.

"By my senior year in high school, I already had accumulated a stack of

Harvard information measuring more than six inches high or so," he says.

He returned the favor last year, sending along with his application "five recommendations...three essays, a list of books I've read, a portfolio of all my high school newspapers...every score from every standardized test I've taken."

It worked.

Villarreal was one of the 2,021 applicants accepted. A record 18,867 applied. The acceptance rate for the Class of 2004 was 10.7 percent.

Admissions officers acknowledge that even most of the unsuccessful applicants were scholastically competent.

Why Villarreal was accepted--and why more than 15,000 were not brings to the fore a series of perennial questions posed to Byerly Hall by prospective students, the media and educational experts alike.

What does merit mean in an age when everyone is qualified? How can schools measure it? How do descriptive factors like race and gender mix in?

"Yes, we are an academic institution," says William R. Fitzsimmons '67, dean of admissions and financial aid. "At some level, one does need to be talented academically, but we've got to look so far beyond that," he says.

"So far beyond" means, in the rhetoric of Fitzsimmons and other admissions officers, that academics mean much less than they once did.

Admissions decisions were once based mostly on grades and test scores, seen as relatively objective measures of achievement. They are now based mainly on intangibles. Individual achievement is context-bound. And almost anything that distinguishes one person from another can affect an applicant's chances for admission.

Harvard's conception of merit is subjective.

The irony of this situation cannot be missed. After all, Harvard invented meritocracy.

Journalist Nicholas B. Lemann '76, in his book The Big Test: The Secret History of American Meritocracy, credits University President James B. Conant '14 with founding the concept.

"Conant wanted a system for selecting an administrator class," Lemann says, "of picking out a few people with high IQs and training them to become leaders of society."

The result was that the College tended to accept high academic achievers whose test scores were a good predictor of their success at the university level. Other colleges followed suit and, by the mid-1960s, most selective academic institutions used the Conant model for their admissions.

But student activists and educational experts were beginning to realize the effects poverty had on achievement and on how socioeconomic status correlated with the credentials one brought to the table.

This correlation showed. The typical Harvard student was, even in that age of social foment, a white male who had been educated in a Northeastern prep or private school.

So though Harvard had always admitted more minority students than other Ivies, it began to reexamine its philosophy in the late '60s and early '70s.

In the early '70s, the school re-defined its educational mission. In contrast to Conant's model, which had promoted a cognitive elite, the new system promoted and privileged diversity. The goal of the College was to admit a diverse class--one in which students would educate each other. Taking account of a student's race and gender made sense.

The Supreme Court, in its famed Bakke v. California decision, cited Harvard's system as a model for private institutions to follow. Since the '70s, the number of minority admits has steadily risen. Tests have become secondary, in part because educational experts concluded that they were far less objective than once thought; they are often biased in favor of the wealthy.

Performance on standardized tests, for example, is tightly linked with the quality of a test-taker's previous schooling. And while SAT II subject tests are the best predictors of college grades, Fitzsimmons says they are even more dependent on the quality of schooling than the SAT I.

So admissions officers try to use other test scores to gauge academic accomplishment, such as Advanced Placement (AP) tests. But Fitzsimmons acknowledges that even AP tests and other tests are all correlated with a person's socioeconomic status. Poorer schools may not have the resources to offer AP classes.

As to whether legacies and minority applicants receive undue special consideration, Fitzsimmons says that being the child of a parent who went to the College is "only a feather on a scale"--a factor taken into consideration at the end of the process if all other things are equal.

"We can have people from the very richest to the poorest backgrounds, but we look for people who have been able to use their opportunities to create a sense of accomplishment," he says.

Race, gender and socioeconomic status are all variables in the equation.

Now, Harvard, Yale and some other elite colleges receive minority applications in proportions that often exceed those of minorities in the U.S.

Fitzsimmons admits that Harvard has become one of several elite universities to consider adopting a race-blind admissions procedure, something unthinkable just 10 years ago.

One reason is external. Courts and voters have expressed their disfavor with affirmative action. Another reason is that the applicant pool is very diverse and very qualified. The College might be able to disregard ethnicity since its pool is so diverse.

"We have certainly talked about and thought about this issue a great deal," Fitzsimmons says.

But Fitzsimmons says the adoption of a race-blind admissions procedure is unlikely.

"People are very much shaped by the complex set of factors in their environment and you'd be missing a part of a person if you didn't understand what that person may have had to deal with," Fitzsimmons says.

However, if Harvard ever does decide to change how it admits its classes, it faces a problem. Where merit can be measured relatively objectively--such as by the quality of a musical performance--race-blind admissions can be a useful tool to remedy implicit prejudice. But where overall merit depends on a confluence of individual factors, deleting the consideration of race may detract from the big picture.

Orchestral ensembles that were once predominantly male, for example, have achieved a more equal gender balance in recent years, but without affirmative action. Instead, they've used blind auditions since at least the 1970s, during which judges literally cannot see the person who is performing blind auditions.

"We have them perform the same set of excerpts from behind a scene, enter via a different entrance and enter the stage walking on a piece of carpet so you can't tell if they're wearing high heels or not," says Jill Woodward, a spokesperson for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

"[Blind auditions] are designed to try to wipe out all other factors than just sound," she says.

A study conducted by Professor of Economics Claudia D. Goldin and Princeton University's Cecilia Rouse found that using a screen during auditions increases the chance that women will pass preliminary rounds by 50 percent.

But Goldin and Rouse both point out that the goals of a university are different from those of an orchestra.

"The equivalent for an orchestra would be picking across instruments randomly," Rouse says.

Similarly, diversity for the Harvard admissions office means more than ethnicity.

Fitzsimmons says that the admissions office recognizes many more "types" of intelligence than Conant did. Referring to the work of Professor of Education Howard E. Gardner '65, Fitzsimmons says officers take into account intelligence in the form of artistic ability, musical skill, athletic prowess, moral reasoning and inter-personal skills when making admissions decisions.

In short, the applicant's potential contribution to the University and to society is weighed, Fitzsimmons says.

But what does this mean? Contribution to society is a subjective category of achievement, just as context-bound as test scores.

"Someone once said that of the 2,000 students that Harvard takes a year, 1,000 are no-brainer decisions because they're Natalie Portman '00 or Yo-Yo Ma '76," says Lemann.

"They've published a novel, recorded a record, played in a symphony or are the best athlete in the country; there are those kids every year and Harvard with great vigor goes after them. But the other half is those murderously difficult judgments out of which valedictorian to accept. It's really hard to talk about who deserves to get in with a straight face," he says.

Lemann, who was also a Crimson president, has taken a role in the process as an active alumni interviewer.

Fitzsimmons agrees that a subset of the applicants is so unusual and talented that "they almost admit themselves."

The remaining spots are allotted based on the results of debates and votes among the 30 admissions officers and additional Faculty involved.

"There's no way to calculate the hours [we spend deciding]," Fitzsimmons says. "It's an infinite number."

Sometime this spring, Villarreal's application was assessed at Byerly Hall. It probably took them awhile. His resume alone runs six pages long. In small type, it provides information on everything from his volunteer work--tutoring, the Red Cross--to his awards--many in journalism, several for civic participation.

At the same time, Villarreal is not Doogie Howser. He didn't score 1600 on his SATs and he isn't 12 years old. But something in his application resounded within Harvard's admissions rubric.

When the thick envelope arrived at his home in early April, Villarreal says his mother was crying.

"I don't know of what better news a mother could receive from her son," he recalls her saying. All his efforts had been worth it.

"It's Harvard," he says.