Getting it right with college admissions

CHAPEL HILL -- She was a great, good-hearted student parked on the waiting list for admission to her first-choice school. When someone called to offer her the last space in the entering class, she dropped the telephone and started to scream. Then everyone in her crowded apartment -- parents, brothers and sisters, cousins twice removed -- screamed with her.

I was the person who called this student, 12 years ago, almost to the day. And I'll never forget the phone call -- partly because of the great joy I witnessed that afternoon, but also because of what came after.

Because four years later, this student, the last soul we admitted, was named the outstanding senior in her graduating class. In front of thousands of cheering witnesses, including many of the same people who'd screamed with her the day she'd gotten in, this last student became the first.

I think of her all the time, but especially in late spring, when we second- and third-guess the admissions decisions we've made at UNC-Chapel Hill over the course of a long year. After reading every application at least twice, and most of them three or more times, we know we've tried our best to get things right. But we also know that it's not easy to predict what a student might do and become, how she might change and grow, over the course of the next four years. We can't help wondering whom we've missed.

When we read applications, we remember that each one represents a real student, a young person with hopes and dreams and a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses. We try to understand the ways in which each candidate will contribute to the kind of campus that will help us fulfill our mission: to serve the people of North Carolina, and indeed the nation, as a community committed to scholarship, intellectual freedom, personal integrity and justice, and enlightened leadership.

The qualities that foster such a community -- intellect, talent, curiosity and creativity; leadership, kindness and courage; honesty, perseverance, perspective and diversity -- aren't particularly hard to name. But they're hard to gauge with precision, especially in 17-year-olds who are growing and changing day by day.

l l l

THIS WEEK I'VE BEEN ASKED REPEATEDLY about Wake Forest University's decision to make the SAT optional for its applicants. The dean of admissions there is a friend and colleague, and I wish her and Wake Forest well in making and managing this change.

Still, I'd argue that we need more tools, not fewer, as we try to plumb the mystery of talent and potential. Standardized testing gives us one sounding, however limited and imperfect, about how students will probably perform in our classrooms. It's not the only instrument, or even the most important one, that we should use. But it can help us see a little more clearly, and we need all the help we can get.

Last fall, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley published a study of how well various credentials predicted the academic performance of 60,000 students enrolled in the University of California system. They found that high school grade-point average (GPA) was the best single predictor, accounting for 20 percent of the total variance, or difference, in the GPAs earned by students in the study. In comparison, SAT reasoning scores, when used alone, accounted for 13 percent of the variance.

I'm not sure that this was news, since earlier studies had found that grades were a better predictor of college performance than standardized testing. But the researchers didn't stop with GPA and SAT. In their most complicated analysis, they measured the extent to which a variety of factors -- not only GPA and SAT reasoning, but also three SAT subject tests, parental education, family income and strength of high school -- accounted for the variance in college performance. Their answer: a total of 27 percent.

The true work of college admissions, I think, is to hunt for clues about the remaining 73 percent. If this search is messy and maddening, it is also human and humane. And it is the least we can do for our applicants, who honor us by applying for admission, and whose futures are far brighter than any of us can know.

(Steve Farmer is assistant provost and director of admissions of UNC-Chapel Hill.)