One story for me, another for thee
As Ivy League undergraduate college offices release their regular admissions decisions for the class of 2029, we can expect yet another season of frantic student reaction videos, a dose of raucous enthusiasm and an atmosphere of hostile dismay. Just while students start poring over their options and coming to terms with a mix of excitement and disappointment, two social narratives emerge as putative blueprints for making sense of their complex emotions.
One is tailored toward those who receive rejection letters — who constitute the vast majority of the applicant pool at highly selective elite colleges. They are told that their achievements are in no way diminished, that they were spurned largely as a matter of statistics and that college is but a small facet of one’s identity and life’s long odyssey. In many ways, students have heard this story before. Admissions officers emphasize at each stage of the application process that their decisions are agonizing and that each cohort has become more competitive than the last, preparing them for the outcome that seems in retrospect to be a foregone conclusion.
The second is addressed toward those who are admitted. Even before stepping onto campus, they are told that they have been inducted into an exclusive fraternity where they will forge the most important friendships and memories of their lives. In a well-intentioned effort to combat imposter syndrome, admissions offices tell admittees they were selected not as a random consequence of statistical chance, but because of their individual merit. Once bashful Ivy League freshmen rapidly become comfortable with expressing their tribal pride and bearing their badges of honor, growing up to tell others the same story as confident and well-connected media practitioners and university administrators. We should therefore not be puzzled to find that students who did not make the cut — exposed to notions about the value of elite education from the cradle — quickly become disenchanted with the narrative meant to assuage the pain of being rejected.
And who can blame them? Whether one looks at the composition of corporate boardrooms, judicial appointments or elected offices, it is undeniable that college has a decisive effect on an individual’s trajectory, equipping them with powerful social networks and the vocabulary to navigate them. To claim otherwise is unhelpful at best and deceitful at worst. If it is also true that the difference in merit between accepted and rejected students is exceptionally narrow — as empirical evidence suggests — then higher education entrenches an arbitrary hierarchy at best, and at worst, is profoundly unfair.
Society cannot continue upholding the fantasy of just rewards for one group while simultaneously telling another group that their failure is illusory. One might suggest that many rejected students deserved to get in but were turned away due to a lack of spots; if that were the case, the logical conclusion would be for Ivy League institutions to drastically expand their enrollment. In doing so, they might lose some prestige, though this matters only if one believes that prestige is innately valuable, and that it derives from exuding exclusivity rather than embodying equality. If such a change is logistically impossible due to infrastructural limitations, then the Ivy League should not maintain the pretense that their admissions decisions reflect objective standards of quality when they come down to miniscule distinctions between equally capable candidates. Harvard professor Michael Sandel once proposed that Ivy League undergraduate classes should be picked by a random lottery among students who meet certain academic and extracurricular requirements. If we say that college admissions are a game of chance, then maybe they should be a game of chance, and provide true comfort to the unlucky while preventing false complacency from their fortunate counterparts.
We have two options. We could tell ourselves that Ivy League colleges are merit-based, elite institutions — at the risk of intensifying antagonism towards higher education and imperiling the ethos of intellectual humility that should be the foundation of the liberal arts. Or we could foster an egalitarian culture where the university one attends does not determine one’s opportunities: a challenge that would require going beyond platitudes, but a worthwhile mission nonetheless.
Caleb Loh is a first-year at Yale University. This article was originally published in the Yale Daily News and is posted here with permission for Caleb Loh.
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