Harvard's 20-20 Admissions

With the regular admission due date of Jan. 1 just around the corner, the admissions office is busy sorting through stacks of applications, looking for the best and the brightest—but is that all they’re looking for?

The Common Application starts out innocently enough, asking the applicant’s name, address and possible career plans before going on to test scores. Then, in an inconspicuous spot halfway down the application, sandwiched between test scores and academic honors, we find family questions. After a month of SAT analogies and SAT II sentence completions, surely the applicant notices that something seems a little out of place.

These family questions should have no place on the application. The family section asks questions about parents’ occupation, college, graduate school and degree. It even steps gingerly into the domain of siblings and asks the names of the colleges they attended and the degrees they attained. Why does the admissions office care which schools the applicant’s parents and siblings attended? Who is applying for admission to Harvard College: the family, or the applicant?

Admissions officers say they use the family educational data only to tell them one of two things: if the applicants are legacies or if they are the only members of their families to graduate from high school or attend college, and they get extra points. Supposedly, everyone else, most likely the majority of the applicants, might as well not even fill out this section, and yet, unlike the ethnicity section earlier in the application, this section is not optional. Why not tell the applicants to fill out this section if—and only if—they think they fall into one of the two categories? Why not make a legacy check a box on the Harvard Application Supplement and expand the first additional essay topic from “Unusual circumstances in your life” to “Unusual circumstances in your life, including academic adversity overcome,” obviating the need for a family section on the Common Application altogether while more accurately describing the adversity overcome?

But perhaps the admissions office is not as concerned with the family members’ education as they are with what their education tells them about the applicants’ financial situations. Although Harvard proudly tells prospective students, “Each admission decision is made without any regard for a candidate’s financial resources—a policy we call ‘need-blind admission,’” the admissions application suggests that they might not be after all.

When the applicants say what their parents do for a living, they give a somewhat reliable indication of their parents’ income. Graduate schools attended and degrees attained also help to provide information on the size of their parents’ wallets. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 1996 average earnings for high school graduates was $21,893 for women and $32,521 for men, while average earnings for individuals with a master’s degree was $44,471 for women and $70,859 for men. Furthermore, if they have siblings at Harvard, the admissions office can pull up their records to see if they are on financial aid and check their parents’ tax returns. Clearly, the Common Application provides Harvard’s admissions office with plenty of financial data and the admissions officers may consciously or unconsciously use it. Why put candy in front of hungry children if you do not want them to eat it? Why put information on candidates’ financial resources in front of admissions officers if you do not want them to consider the candidates’ financial resources? The temptation may be too great.

Harvard should explain in the instructions for the application the importance of the family questions, which should be optional. As it is, applicants often think the worst. If Harvard’s intentions are just, their actions should be transparent. And if Harvard assures the applicants that its admissions decisions are need-blind, no financial data, unless absolutely necessary, should end up in the hands of admissions officers.