What the Harvard Admissions Case Means for Higher Education

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

I'm Michael Horn, and welcome to Future youe, joined by my co host, Jeff Selingo. And we're really excited for our guest today. We have Adam Harris, an education journalist at the Atlantic who's been a journalist not just in higher education, but covering a range of topics over the years. And from my perspective as a writer, I'm very jealous of your writing because I pick up your stories and I read them and they just flow beautifully and right through it. So if you haven't read his writing, please do, because it's. It's not only informative, but I think it's beautiful writing. So thrilled that you would join us on the podcast today.

Thanks so much for having me.

So we love to start off with our guests with a general question of just how did you get into this crazy world of covering higher education to begin with?

Well, it was kind of a roundabout path, but my path to journalism was also pretty roundabout. I went to Alabama AM and then went out to Texas Tech, where I met my wife. I had started a graduate program in philosophy and went on down to Austin with her. Didn't finish that program and worked a bunch of different jobs, kind of learning about a couple of different things, and decided I didn't want to do that whole range of things and wanted to do journalism specifically. So that was coaching, basketball, and digital marketing and substitute teaching and freelance writing all at the same time. So I went up to ProPublica and became the social editor. And while I was there, I worked on a lot of projects with Annie Waldman, who is just a fantastic higher education reporter. And kind of doing some of that made me think about education reporting and inequality in a different way. So as. As I was wanting to transition into more reporting, I started freelancing again for a little bit and then applied for the job at the Chronicle with. With kind of an eye towards covering historically black colleges. It was something that I knew all. All of my family members have gone to HBCUs, and I. I felt that there was kind of a gulf in coverage there. There wasn't as much coverage on HBCUs. So I get there and I start covering HBCUs, and that ultimately turns into covering the administration because, you know, early on in the Trump administration, they. They made this big play.

They said it was going to be a big part of their focus.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And the famous photo in the Oval Office. Exactly.

On the couch. Yeah. And so that ultimately turns into covering federal higher education policy as well. And I guess from there, it's kind of all history.

Now you're at the Atlantic, Adam, and the Atlantic has always covered, obviously, given its history, higher education. But every once in a while, they'd have these big cover stories in the magazine and once in a while, a piece online. But now it seems the Atlantic has really, in the last couple of years, focused much more on. On education in general, family issues and kind of the intersection between those and higher education. So what is, as you think about your coverage in the Atlantic, what are your kind of beats, your specialties? What makes an Atlantic higher education story, in your opinion?

So I think with the Atlantic generally, our whole thing is kind of covering and thinking about the American idea and thinking about how, as an education reporter, they're thinking about how education fits into that American idea and the attainability of education in that American idea. So covering higher education has a lot to do with inequality. It has a lot to do with cost. It has a lot to do with sort of some of these. These things that are ingrained in the system that. That we maybe take for granted. So I think one of the. I've said it was one of the most Atlantic stories that I ever wrote was about George Washington's idea of a national university, where you're thinking about how were the founders thinking about this idea, how. How did it progress through, what were the hiccups that it had along the way? What was the first Morrill act like, what was the second Morrill act like? And how did that create the system that we have today? So I think we, you know, we have this large project going on where we're covering college affordability. We've covered free college, We've covered what generally made college so expensive. We've been to Berea, that's gonna continue on, and kind of in this whole spectrum of K12 through higher ed, so I guess K through 16, what inequality looks like in higher education and how be remedied?

Well, I was going to say there's a twist off of that, which is that recently you were covering the affirmative action case about Harvard's admissions policies and where the students for Fair Admissions have alleged that Harvard is discriminating against Asian Americans. You got to be up in that courtroom covering that and writing a number of stories about that. I'd love for our listeners out there, can you give us a sense of what the mood of that trial was and how you see the big central issues at stake that came out in the course of the trial?

Yeah, so I guess this. This kind of all has a start in the. In the run up to the trial where. Where there were. There were protests in the days before. Well, I guess they would call them rallies, but there were protests in the days before that were. Where you kind of saw the. The fissures in this. This issue kind of exacerbated. So at the. At the pro. I guess, pro. Anti affirmative action, but the. The Students for Fair Admission rally, there were actually two groups there. And a lot of this didn't really get two groups there. One that was like, they wanted to make it a little bit more political, saying, thanks, Trump, for making this, for bringing this to the fore and all of this different stuff. And then there was a group that was like, no, we don't want this to be political. We just want people to recognize that Asian Americans are being discriminated against. So as we move into the day of the trial and we get into the courtroom, all of that kind of. That fiercest. That it bubbled up, it kind of turned into like a general flow where it was like, oh, this is like a regular trial. And the judge gets up and there's a lot of decorum. And the judge actually, at the end of the trial praised all of the lawyers for, like, how respectful and, you know, legalese they were being. But I think there was kind of some of the central issues that came out was, you know, Adam or Tara, one of the first things he gets up and says is that the future of affirmative action is not really on trial here. And then. Then he kind of proceeds to make a litany of arguments that are essentially, you know, poking holes in the use of race and admissions, saying that if race is used as. As a plus factor for, you know, for black or Latino students, then is it also a negative for. For Asian American students or white students? And they've also said that this was kind of. This was doled out using this. This personal score, which I imagine we'll get into a little bit later. But, yeah, it seemed that it was. It was a tense environment, but it also. It seemed that Harvard was resting on the fact that there are four decades of Supreme Court precedent that it is wholly dependent basically, on students for fair admissions to prove that. That four decades of Supreme Court precedent is, I guess, discriminating against Asian American students.

Yeah. One of the interesting things about this trial is that it put a lot of documents out into the public sphere, of course, that Harvard did not want out there about how it conducted admissions and how it conducts admissions. You know, we started to see kind of a little bit behind the veil about what it does about the role. And, you know, even after covering this for all these decades, you know, what I was shocked about was the real role that legacy plays, which is really, I think exasperates inequality in much of elite higher education. The role athletics plays even at a place like Harvard, the role that, you know, donors play and everything else like that. As you think about that whole document trove that was in there, what was, you know, those, I think, generated the headlines, but there were a lot of other things in there. Anything come to mind as, wow, we never knew this about Harvard.

I think how, how early the. So one of, one of the most interesting things to me was, was how Harvard sent out recruiting materials. So how they sent out like the psat, you know, after you get your PSAT score back. It was like, you know, Asian American students and sparse country, they called it, would. Would get a mailer if they had like 1300 where, you know, white students in sparse country were getting it if they got an 1100.

And sports country, meaning those states that don't send a lot of kids to Harvard.

Exactly. So. So I think I thought that was probably one of the, and perhaps one of the most revealing things about where they're pulling their network from, of students that isn't, aren't, or that aren't legacy students or that aren't athletes and things of the sort. But I think one of the other things is just generally getting into Harvard's admissions practices and seeing just how we always knew that they're subjective, but seeing just how subjective all of this is. And almost the, you know, it kind of reinforces the fact that as an elite college and as a highly selective college where there are 1600 seats, nobody's going to be happy with any result, you know, unless they're just saying, oh, we're going to admit everybody, or we're going to admit like 30% or just up the amount of students that they enroll. Nobody's going to be happy because they could fill an entire Harvard class with people who have multiple times over.

Multiple times multiple.

With perfect sats and perfect GPAs. So just seeing how subjective all of this is kind of remarkable.

And so where does this go from here, Adam? Now, so the judge has the case. What. Whether, no matter how this turns out, where does this, where do you think this case goes?

It seems that everyone believes this case is going to the Supreme Court. I mean, when you look at that courtroom, you see all of the Supreme Court tested lawyers in there. I mean, Adam Wartaro, is one of the he actually may be the first person in history who has argued to amici briefs before the court and he's the lawyer for students for fair Admission. So there's, there's this kind of feel that because you have these high powered lawyers and because this case is so it is a case and they're making a unique legal argument that seems prime for the court that this is headed to the Supreme Court. Not within the next year, not within maybe the next two years, but at some point this probably heads to the court.

So we'll have you back on at that point. But the shift I'd love to make now is to maybe not a huge shift, but to politics and higher education. Because you've written a number of stories about that with the elections concluding a few weeks back. Back you've commented on sort of some visions about higher education and what it predicts in the American electorate, as well as how the implications for higher education given the election results. Just your thoughts about that as you've observed these patterns across the country?

Yeah. So one of the biggest things that we've seen since probably the 2016 election, even a little bit before that, is this growing divide among Republican voters, white Republican voters specifically, on party identification. So there's this partisan education gap. And we really wanted to look into what was driving that gap and what that meant for higher education going forward. Because if you have the Democrats being the party of white voters with college degrees and the Republicans being the party of largely voters without college degrees, that creates a problem for higher education when one of the major parties is part of perhaps a little bit skeptical of higher ed. And you've seen what that looks like in states like Wisconsin or you see what it looks like even in kind of the Prosper Act. And this was a point which was

the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Yeah, this is a point that Terry Hartle from ACE was making that this is a bill that was largely unpopular for higher education, that a partisan party of Congress was able to push through committee. So I think going forward you could see more instances of kind of partisan bills that higher education is not a fan of being pushed through by a party that is a little bit skeptical of the enterprise.

Adam, recently Michael Bloomberg gave a large amount of money, large amount, well over a billion dollars to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to make it was essentially for financial aid, which he hadn't given to before he gave to Johns Hopkins, but not on financial aid. They now say they'll have need blind admissions in Perpetuity, which also makes you think, even with all their money before, why they couldn't have done that? But anyway, that's probably a question. For another matter, you know, there was a lot of criticism on Twitter when that gift came out about, well, he could have just spread this money out to more institutions and had a bigger impact. This is similar to other gifts to elite, selective, very wealthy institutions in the past. And people think, well, will it just encourage more rich people to give to the institutions that don't really need it, or will it encourage giving across the way? What have we seen in the past when these mega gifts have come out? Does it just encourage the rich to get richer or does it actually encourage giving in a broader way? And what's going to happen now? I mean, do you think that Michael Bloomberg could actually have an impact maybe not on giving large sums of money, but maybe giving money to where it's most needed? And it's not buildings and diseases, which he's given before, which we should say is probably needed. But we know that. But a big piece of what's happening now in higher ed is both access and completion, and financial aid is critical to both of those things.

Yeah. Well, I think I go back to this Walter Kimbrough essay in Inside higher ed in 2015, where he was talking about Harvard's. Harvard had just received a $400 million donation, and at the time it was the largest single donation to any university in the country. And it's almost like this is an embarrassment of riches. It is a university that has received a large sum of money when they already have a large sum of money that they're sitting on that they could potentially be using for other things. And yes, that did encourage it sets a threshold that other rich people might be like, oh, yeah, maybe I upped that. But as you've seen, it's been upped, but at Johns Hopkins University and not at other potential institutions that need more help. So I saw a tweet from Ron Lieber that was like, why not give this to UMBC or a little bit to UC Merced or something like that where they have more low income and minority students. And these are the students that are being most underserved by elite higher education. So I don't know that this sets a pattern. It'll probably help a good amount of low income students and minority students at Johns Hopkins, but that's kind of a drop in the bucket.

Well, that'll be a pretty small end because It'll probably be 20 people maybe.

Exactly.

So cynical so cynical. Adam, thanks a bunch for being on Future youe with us and we'll look forward to having you back on the show at some point.

Most definitely. Thanks so much for having me.

And we'll be back on Future youe.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

And we're back on Future youe. Michael Horne here, joined by Jeff Salingo, coming off a great conversation with Adam Harris. We seem to be on a good streak of these conversations that could go on very long and we have to cut them off at about 15 minutes. But Adam has been covering a lot of interesting stories in the Atlantic, none more so than the national story that got a lot of attention in the pages, the Wall Street Journal and so forth of the Harvard trial with the Students for Fair Admissions. And Jeff, you're writing a book on admissions. So I'm curious, from your perspective, how much is this story coming up in the stories that you're documenting at colleges and of students thinking about this admissions process and trying to. And what do you think the impact of all this is going to be?

Well, it's definitely of concern to selective colleges like Harvard. At the same time, very few people, even at the selective institutions use the same process from institution to institution. But at the bottom line, for those institutions that do use have very selective admissions, it's the ability to shape a class. Right. And so every institution, most of those selective colleges, you select holistic admissions, which means they read every application, they have various ratings on students like Harvard does, and their ability is to say, we want this student but not that student. Because as Adam said, you know, Harvard has the ability, given the selection that they have, the selection of students that they have, they could fill it with everybody who scored a perfect score on the ACT or the SAT and has a 4.0 plus GPA. Right. And they could fill that over 10 times. Right. But what these colleges want is a diversity of people from backgrounds from the sports they played from the activities they participated in and from the backgrounds that they come from, whether it's race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, geographic. They want a mix of students and that ability. To me, what's on trial here is the ability of colleges and universities to say, this is what we value and this is important. And I always tell students who talk about the admissions process as not being fair. I say it's not about you. Admissions has never been about students students. It's always been about institutional priorities. Every institution has priorities for what it wants out of its classes, and that's how it designs its classes. And if the, if the Court and the Supreme Court eventually takes that away just in terms of the narrow aspect of using race and admissions, you're really kind of taking away the use of any sort of subjective matter in terms of admissions. And that's what admissions is. Admissions most of the time is, is subjective because those objective measures of scores and grades is. There's, you know, at some of these institutions, hundreds, thousands of students have the same scores. So you have to have some subjective measure in terms of admissions.

Yeah, we always joked at Harvard Business School, especially since I got to see a few different classes staying on there for a few extra years to write some books with Clay Christensen, I got to see subsequent classes. And we, I always joked that you could always see that the Harvard Business School admissions office basically had micro targeted the exact 900 people, you know, down to the individual that they wanted for each class. And I was the non traditional, non business background person who'd come in and you'd get the, you know, person with exactly this many years of McKinsey experience, et cetera, et cetera, and they could literally micro target. But the other thing that occurred to me, both listening to Adam, but also in terms of reading the coverage of the story, was how little this impacts, from a numbers perspective, most of the people that go to higher education in the sense that most of the institutions of higher education in this country are not these uber selective institutions. They're, they're enrolling a sliver of the higher education population. And then if you add on to that all the people that don't go to college, it's really, it's, it, it doesn't feel as consequential in that regard as in some ways we're making it out to be. Although of course, in the admissions industry, it seems very intense. Is that, is that a fair perception?

Well, first of all, yeah. The average acceptance rate of American colleges, universities, and according to the latest NACAC survey, which Came out a couple weeks ago, 65%. So 65% is the average acceptance rate. Right. Where at Harvard it's well under 10. I think it might have been 6% last year. So yes, Harvard and those most selective institutions are definitely outliers. They probably Enroll Less than 10% of students, but they probably get 90% of press coverage. And largely that's because, I mean, there's a lot of criticism of press coverage of elite universities. I think many newsrooms are filled with people who went to these universities. They're readers. And I think most of it is that whenever those criticisms come up on social media, I always say they're just appealing to their readers.

Right.

It's many of their readers went to those places and there's advertisers care about those readers. And so they're just appealing to their readers and their listeners and their watchers.

Same reason the New York Times publishes certain wedding announcements and not others.

I mean, it is just, you're playing to the audience. But I think the bigger issue here is from a point of public policy which gets us into the other stuff that we talked about with Adam and that is around the election result. Right. And so we're starting to see a big divide here in the electorate which has come across the last couple of elections and particularly going back to 2016, where non college educated people are going Republican and college educated are going Democrat. Now, obviously there's a lot of ifs, ands and buts there, but in general, that's the way we're seeing. And the thing that Adam brought up is the, this has implications in policy making. We saw this at the state level many years ago with Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, who was just ousted in this latest election, who did not have a degree, who did not. Right. And talked about college as getting jobs and really changed a lot of things around. Higher education policy in Wisconsin got rid of tenure, changed a lot of the, you know, the program management at, at colleges, universities, at the public colleges, universities,

in terms of the programs, just to be clear. Right. In terms of the programs that they could offer.

They could offer and things like that. Again, to make it much more around job preparation. So Michael, what, what, what are the long term aspects of this in terms of Republicans having much more control of kind of this non college going population?

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question because that's sort of the argument that Adam's making advancing is that, that it's, it's the, in some ways that's the bigger predictor now of which party you will vote is your college education. And so if the Republicans that have historically been suspect, it's not just been Scott Walker. Right. I mean that suspicion of higher education has long been felt, I think in Republicans. And the folks that are very upset about a lot of the free speech issues come from the conservative side as well. So I think it's an interesting question to see at the state level, maybe a little less so than the federal level. At the state level, will this result in less funds for higher education than you might otherwise see? Will it result in more micromanagement of the programs themselves? We also saw in North Carolina recently that Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, was brought in as chancellor of the UNC system and then she was ousted because. Well, excuse me, she stepped down, right? But there was a lot of perception,

but she basically stepped down.

She basically stepped down because she couldn't handle a very political board. Right. And so

that became even more Republican.

Right.

Or. And more to the right than, than she was comfortable.

She was comfortable with. And they thought the perception is that bringing her in that she was going to tow that party line and she took a much more traditional chancellorship view of higher education, I think it's fair to say. I think in keeping with her track record, to be honest. But it. That raises interesting questions. How are you going to manage these public institutions that are fundamentally political in the same way that K12 districts are political and so forth. I think it's an interesting question how this will continue to evolve across the

country with that and Republican, Democrats and then of course we'll throw the independents in there. And Michael Bloomberg, who has political ambitions.

Rumored for President.

Rumored for president but gave a huge gift to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, which has caused some controversy because it's already an institution that has multi billions of dollars in its endowment and already in the focus of the gift was on financial aid for low income students and the ability of them to probably go from 14% Pell eligible to maybe 20% Pell eligible, which as Adam brought up is a very small number at the end of the day. Thoughts on whether this will spur others to give more broadly to higher ed. I have a thought on why he did this or what he should have done probably instead.

Yeah, well, I'd love your thought. I'll say I'm a little bit more sympathetic often to lead institutions because I do so much fundraising for my alma mater of Yale and I see all the restrictions on the endowment and so forth and it's not so easy just to say we ought to do this because donors have put all sorts of restrictions on these gifts that, that make it hard to frankly manage in accordance with what you want. And so on one hand I'm really excited that he gave not just to build another building like he did at Harvard Business School and put it toward financial aid and making them need blind. I think that's a great model for the country and I far prefer it personally to merit based scholarships. And so I think that's a good push from a storytelling perspective. I'm not sure it's going to have a huge impact though if I'm speaking frankly about giving to higher education across the country. What's your take?

I mean, my take was that I was kind of surprised given Bloomberg Philanthropies has been a big advocate for access in higher education, particularly among low income students, that for example, they've been a big supporter of the American Talent initiative which has 100 plus colleges signed on and really surprised that since his philanthropists who are working with him know about what the issues are in higher education, that there are these access institutions that need the help that serve a lot more low income students than a place like for example, Johns Hopkins that he wouldn't have given to efforts like that instead of his alma mater. At the same time. You know, I defended him on Twitter recently when I said, you know, he gave to his alma mater. You know, people give to something they know well. And he did that. And so I don't think, you know, I don't think we should ding him for that reason. Yeah.

And I think it also presents a realistic picture of higher education which is what makes it so unique, which is that alums care about their schools. And that's a good thing, I think, and it's a good thing for the perpetuity of higher American higher education as well. But I do agree, given his philanthropies, deep knowledge and expertise in the broader access and equity and completion agenda. I was a little surprised by that. What I would love to have seen is Johns Hopkins say we're going need blind and we're doubling the size of the class. That would, that, that would have been neat. But I guess for infrastructure reasons that wasn't going to happen.

Maybe he'll give more money to do that infrastructure. And then the final thing on Adam is I was glad he was able to talk about what the Atlantic is, is thinking about in terms of its higher education coverage. This idea of the American ideal of higher education. I think that we need more voices covering higher education, especially as more regional and local papers kind of pull back on their higher education coverage. And we know this is critical to the future of the country. And so it's always good to have more voices in this realm.

And narrative shapes the future of higher education. And so it was important to have that voice and that perspective in the pages of the Atlantic. So for all of you joining us, thank you so much. Wonderful to have Adam on the show. And stay tuned for future episodes of Future you. And wherever you are listening, please rate us, subscribe to us, tell your friends to listen, follow us on social media. And until next time, I'm Michael Horn signing off for Jeff Salingo. We'll see you soon.