Vassar Faculty and the Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid

Last year, in the midst of the Faculty Policy and Conference Committee’s (FPCC’s) herculean undertaking to improve Vassar governance, the FPCC proposed to place the Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid (CAFA) on the chopping block.  The FPCC had heard from several past CAFA members that CAFA was an ineffective body, annoying in the main, and that there were other ways faculty members might gain knowledge and exercise their input in admissions and financial aid policy.

I was one of those past CAFA members.    As co-chair of CAFA with Dean of Admissions David Borus from 2004-7, I had come to see CAFA as a committee with no teeth, even when members have a clear agenda, as I did.  My view was that the Admissions and Financial Aid officers saw CAFA as a way to educate faculty and student committee members about their work with the hopes of gaining informed, supportive voices in departments and programs across the campus.  Officers do find occasions when faculty and students on the committee offer useful input.  Yet I would argue that the admissions officers likely see CAFA primarily as a make-work body with little productive pay-off for the admissions and financial aid office.

There is a whole literature in political science about what happens when interest and issue arenas become “professionalized,” when expertise develops around a given domain or field once composed of interested non-experts.  I imagine that an eon ago, committees composed of faculty members and students on campuses like Vassar’s participated actively in selecting individual applicants for admission.  Today our campuses have officers and consultants with marketing and recruitment expertise, and quantitative skills that allow them to “shape a class” with remarkable precision.  This model has some clear advantages.  Political science literature would argue, however, that in the professionalization process, there is a tendency to become less transparent, more insular, less participatory, more bureaucratic.  I think it’s fair to say that in admissions – at Vassar and elsewhere – this has been the case.

Make no mistake – In no way do I favor a return to micro-managing the admissions process, and I have serious respect for our admissions and financial aid officers, who work very hard to bring so many remarkable students to Vassar.  I cannot imagine participating in assessing 8,000 applicants a year, making dozens of pitches a year on panels in high school auditoriums or at tables in high school cafeterias.  I would not wish to sit down with an anxious parent trying to figure out how to pay for her daughter’s college, particularly with Vassar’s unbelievable price tag.  And to be able to shoot for a certain number of acceptances and come within such a small margin of error each year constitutes a tremendous feat.  So as we explore how to fashion or re-fashion the faculty governance role or committee regarding admissions and financial aid – recognizing the central role of the admissions office — it is important to ask how we as faculty can work effectively and productively to support the professional staff so that we can all feel good about the make-up of our classrooms.

Right now, because of CAFA turnover, David must essentially begin again each year, providing the same statistics and overviews, presenting some of the challenges his office faces where faculty and student input might be useful, and, toward the end of the year, taking members through a mock admissions exercise, in which members assess three anonymous applicants and guess which one was accepted, which not.  Faculty and students on the committee walk into the meeting each month essentially having done no prior preparation, ready to converse and respond about whatever might be on the agenda that David and the co-chair may or may not have prepared together.

For faculty, as many know, CAFA is essentially a place to get educated about the college admissions process.  It is certainly rational for an individual faculty member who is also the parent of a student about to go through applying to college — which often includes applying to Vassar — to want to have an understanding of what is a tense, confusing process.  And in broader terms, faculty members who are parents of high school students are also probably more familiar with the challenges and failings as well as the strengths of K-12 today, and therefore may be well suited to offer input on the committee regarding high school recruitment.  So while I do not wish to deny there are faculty members who serve on CAFA because they are chiefly interested in the kinds of students they wish to find in their classrooms, I would venture that this is often not the primary reason faculty serve.

There is a good deal to learn.  For instance (though I learned this doing outside research in conjunction with serving on CAFA), the biggest single reason to support need blind admissions is because of the strong message it sends. It places Vassar on a bigger radar for high school guidance counselors in struggling communities, as well as for high achieving low-income high school students, thereby increasing the admissions pool.  Yet in reality, “blindness” is an exaggeration.  Professional admissions officers can tell a fair amount about a student’s income status from the first page of the common application.  Besides the fact that on the first page a student must check a box stating whether or not she is applying for financial aid, professional admissions officers can often make educated guesses about a family’s income level just from glancing at the combination of the applicant’s home zip code and the name of her high school.

During my tenure as CAFA co-chair, my focus was almost singly on the admissions office’s approach to recruiting at Poughkeepsie, Kingston, Beacon, and Newburgh public high schools, on targeting struggling local city schools where we have the unique advantage of proximity.  At that time, when we asked why Vassar was not more representative of the US college-age demographic as a whole, and was even doing a poor job in comparison to her closest peer institutions, the argument was always that Vassar was going after the same pool of brilliant low-income students and students of color and losing to other elite colleges and universities. So then why not focus on recruitment close to home?  Why not offer competitive, even enticing financial aid, and perhaps help shore up the local high schools at the same time?

CAFA made serious demands on the admissions office to gather data, to lay out its approach, to explain why Vassar admissions was not more aggressively recruiting at Poughkeepsie High School (PHS), for example, or why top PHS students were not even applying to Vassar as a back-up school.  We often questioned and challenged David, and it could be tense and unpleasant.  During that period, I talked to many faculty members and Vassar officers who had previously served on the CAFA, and they tended to shake their heads and say that pushing for a serious change in admissions approach through CAFA was a waste of time.

The successful push to strengthen Vassar’s admission approach to PHS, particularly, would subsequently come not through CAFA but rather through a proposal from the Committee on Inclusion and Excellence (CIE), a 22-member body of faculty (including myself at the time), officers (including David Borus, who helped draft the language), staff, and students with a line directly to the college president and deans – in my view, a committee with teeth. The CIE also successfully proposed that Vassar admissions treat the applications of undocumented students equal to all other student applicants and to state this publicly in the Vassar admissions materials.  It certainly helped that these proposals landed on the desk of a new college president whose principles and expertise are in consonance with increased access and equity.  Since Cappy’s arrival, as we know, Vassar has further developed a range of approaches for increasing the high-achieving low income pool, including returning to need blind admissions, instituting loan forgiveness for families with incomes of under $60,000, and joining Questbridge, which matches high achieving students from underserved communities around the country with the colleges of their choices.

This past year, because of the FPCC’s “threat” to eliminate the CAFA, which I initially supported, I learned that in fact, CAFA does have some teeth.  CAFA can make admissions and financial aid policy proposals to the faculty.  CAFA can stand on the floor of the faculty and argue for a policy change.  I confess that I was unaware of this at the time, as in my several years at the college I had never heard of CAFA doing this.  It seemed to me that the only time I had heard from CAFA at a faculty meeting was when CAFA co-chairs offered a report at the close of their tenures, often at the end of a faculty meeting.  And I can understand this, as I continue to find the idea of speaking on the floor of the faculty nerve-wracking, intimidating, uninviting.

In February 2010, the CIE presented its report on the floor of the faculty (which, by the way, included our announcing and seeking faculty interest and participation in a newly formed sub-committee to explore recruiting high-achieving Veterans).  To our surprise and disappointment, we got no questions, no discussion.  Admittedly, presenting a 10-12-minute report may not be the most effective way to invite a discussion. Yet committees like the CIE and CAFA hope that faculty members as a whole will listen to their reports and engage with issues like admissions and financial aid.

We need to find ways to have important conversations about Vassar’s relationship to the world beyond its walls.  What influence can Vassar have?  What responsibility do we have to use this influence?  I would welcome, for example, a serious conversation on the faculty floor about Vassar’s role in a country where K-12 education is in serious crisis, where many sharp, talented, high-achieving students are underserved by high schools that do not have the resources to offer writing-heavy courses or advanced and AP courses across the sciences, for example.  Or where equally sharp, high-achieving students coming from elite high schools have strong formal writing skills but produce essays that are empty in terms of content or creativity, and they have no idea such is the case.  Can we have a conversation about the effects of the US education crisis for all of us, with our own rich and disparate talents, perspectives and skill sets?