Opinion – How is ‘merit’ defined in college admissions? You might be surprised.

Last spring, the University of Austin in Texas, declaring the college admissions system “biased,” “broken” and “unjust,” launched a “merit-first” admissions program. Students with high standardized test scores are automatically admitted, with “no essays, extracurriculars, or GPAs” considered.

This approach is the logical culmination of efforts by the Trump administration to reshape undergraduate admission policies. Intended as a blueprint for colleges and universities seeking priority access to federal funding, the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education requires reliance on “objective criteria,” lauding the use of standardized tests and disparaging “discriminatory admissions processes” that consider race or gender.

Similarly, the administration’s settlement agreements with Columbia University, Northwestern, and Brown require “merit-based” policies that do not use racial preferences or any “proxies for protected characteristics.” To monitor compliance, the universities must report admissions data “broken down by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.”

The administration has since decided to collect this information from all colleges and universities, to ensure admission decisions are “based on an objective assessment of merit and achievement.”

Difficult to define, merit is in the eye of the beholder. As with the Holy Grail, everyone wants to find it, but no two people can agree on what it looks like. Grades and test scores help assess a student’s academic preparation for college, but they are by no means the only criteria admissions officers should use.

Grading standards vary widely by school, teacher and subject, as does the rigor of the curriculum and the formulas used to weight grade point averages. With grade inflation rampant, it’s not surprising that, according to one recent study, “high school GPA does little to predict academic success in college,” at least at the most selective colleges and universities.

Test scores are better predictors of college GPAs and “correlate strongly with students’ post-college outcomes.” But test scores also correlate closely with socioeconomic status.

Students from wealthy families on average attend better schools, have more time to study, and receive more tutoring and test preparation than their less privileged peers. This leads some experts to conclude that “standardized tests are better proxies for how many opportunities a student has been afforded than they are predictors for studentsʼ potential.”

At the most selective institutions, a majority of applicants have near-perfect grades and test scores and have taken the most challenging courses available to them. More than half of the 35,000 applicants to Princeton, for example, are “so good that you could substitute one of them for an admitted student without any loss of quality to the entering class.”

Like most elite colleges and universities, Princeton “values many kinds of merit,” including “a commitment to service and citizenship; the discipline to excel at school while also holding down a job; the persistence to develop artistic or athletic talent; a capacity for teamwork or collaboration; the fortitude to overcome prejudice or hardship; the courage to do right; the honesty to admit fault; and the compassion needed to understand and help others.”

To assess those qualities, colleges and universities consider recommendations, extracurricular activities, work experience, family background and a host of other factors, as well as grades and test scores. As Brown University puts it, admissions officers want to see what students “have accomplished with the resources and opportunities available” to them and understand their “potential to thrive within the unique offerings” of the university.

Admission officers also understand that they do not select individuals in isolation; they are building a class. They seek quarterbacks and oboists, artists and engineers, writers and mathematicians, Model UN leaders and food bank volunteers. They want students who will excel at their academic work and contribute to the campus community and American society.

To make these decisions, admission officers engage in “holistic review,” assessing an applicant’s entire portfolio in the context of these goals. This process is, by necessity, partly subjective. And yes, it opens the door to considering aspects of a student’s identity that may correlate with race.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action, many elite colleges and universities are seeking to increase socioeconomic diversity. The Trump administration insists that using even facially neutral criteria as proxies for race is illegal, offering as examples “geographic targeting” (focusing recruitment in areas where minorities are overrepresented) and essay prompts asking about obstacles students have overcome.

But nothing in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, it is worth noting, forbids schools from redoubling their efforts to identify and recruit less affluent students. This is so even if the aim is to increase racial diversity, a goal the court deemed “commendable” so long as it is done through race-neutral means.

Wealthy families already have enormous advantages in the admission process and benefit from preferences for athletes, legacies and students from private schools. An exclusive focus on tests and grades is virtually certain to enhance that advantage.

Far better to retain the principal elements of current admissions protocols, which, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s observation about democracy, may be the worst system, except for all the others.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. David Wippman is emeritus president of Hamilton College.

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