Steep income hierarchies create unfair admissions scrambles

The recent bribery scandal over admissions to some very selective US universities seems particularly American. But university admission is a high-stakes game in many Western countries.

Access to higher education in general is not a big problem for high school graduates in countries such as the US, Australia, Canada or the UK, where the number of undergraduate places is in reasonable equilibrium with the number of people seeking them. And for most school-leavers in these countries, the methods that universities use to assess their application is not nearly as influential on the decision made as applicants’ performance in their final year of school.

But selection methods become more important for the minority of school-leavers who seek admission to a highly selective programme or institution. For these, admission criteria and processes come under a pressure that most are not well designed to bear.

School performance is reasonably strongly related to socio-economic background, so basing admission to highly selective programmes on performance in year 12 is criticised for being inequitable. Yet compensating equity applicants for their disadvantage is contentious in most countries – not the least in the US, where applicants whose parents are alumni or large donors are routinely favoured.

Some critics of relying heavily on entry scores argue for whole-person criteria, such as applicant portfolios, interviews and volunteering history. However, these are even more heavily correlated with social capital than school performance. They are also gamed easily.

There is much that highly selective universities could do to improve the equity of their entry methods. But no amount of improvements will solve the underlying problem, which is their sheer level of oversubscription. That, in turn, reflects the level of inequality in the wider societies in which students seek advancement.

While universities instil valuable knowledge and skills, they also attest to graduates’ positional value, which University of Warwick economist Fred Hirsch described as their position in a reputational hierarchy. The steeper the hierarchy, the more intense the competition. A large part of elite universities’ value is their scarcity, and places in elite US universities are more scarce than places in elite Australian, Canadian and UK universities.

I say that on the basis of two measures of status. One is membership of a country’s club of elite universities: the Group of Eight in Australia, Canada’s U15, the UK’s Russell Group and the Association of American Universities in the US. Canada has the least steeply hierarchical university system on this measure. Some 47 per cent of Canadian bachelor’s students study at an “elite” university. In the UK, it is 27 per cent, in Australia 20 per cent and in the US only 12 per cent.

Examination of the global top 500 universities tells a similar story. About 55 per cent of Canadian and Australian undergraduates are enrolled in a top-500 university. For the UK, the figure is 37 per cent and for the US it is only 25 per cent.

These measures of hierarchy are reflected in measures of wider social inequality. Australia’s Gini index – a measure of inequality in the distribution of family income – is 30.3, which is close to the median for the European Union. Canada’s Gini index is 31.5, at the median for countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The UK is rather more unequal at 32.4, but the US has a Gini index of 40.8, which is very unequal for a wealthy country.

This is a problem for universities in two ways. It makes it harder for them to select on merit (as they see it), as opposed to simply replicating the inequalities of the school system and society generally. And it increases the incentive for applicants to game the system – even through illegal means – to obtain the positional advantage of gaining admission to a prestigious university.

The pressure on elite universities’ selection methods can only be reduced by making them less selective. This could be achieved by increasing those universities’ size or number – or both. However, any move to attenuate their positional value would be resisted by those who benefit most from the status quo.

Gavin Moodie is adjunct professor of education at RMIT University, Melbourne, and the University of Toronto.