How to De-emphasize Wealth in Stanford Undergraduate Admissions

An Open Letter to the Planning and Policy Board

Bravo to the Planning and Policy Board for seeking to de-emphasize wealth in Stanford undergraduate admissions.  The outreach and admissions efforts Stanford has made in the last decade have greatly improved the access of first-gen low-income students, who help make our student body a highly diverse and promising community of future leaders.

I count myself among the larger Stanford community eager to hear more about how the Planning and Policy Board will approach these changes, especially any new requirement that asks applicants to list who has helped them and in what capacity. From the description in The Stanford Report article of January 29, 2021, however, I worry such a requirement will fail to produce greater equity, and instead might exact a number of unintended consequences that could stifle diversity and fairness in admissions. Allow me to elaborate based on my experience as an admissions reader at several elite American universities and as a private college counselor, whose clientele includes mostly pro-bono low-income students.

First, nearly 70% of students use some form of college admissions counseling, and while private college admissions counseling has become a booming and greatly controversial business, this percentage offers no clear correlation to wealth. The 2019 college admissions bribery scandal that led to Operation Varsity Blues provided only a partial glimpse into the bad behavior of the ultra-wealthy and their unqualified children. Clearly, not everyone is a monied abuser. Just as not every private college counselor is a high-end corporation that engages in dodgy tactics to boost the uncompetitive elite. In fact, many private counselors are small-business women, and an increasing number of FLI students and alumni are engaging in outreach to their own communities to help future college applicants navigate their paths to college.

The National Association for College Admission Counseling publishes no statistics on the racial or ethnic identity of clientele who use private counselors, but my experience in California and around the country is that a significant number of these students are Asian Americans who are not necessarily wealthy, but rather have families who devote a great proportion of their hard earned resources to make their children competitive. The current, highly chaotic and often unjust admissions climate has given these families good reason to fear their children will be side-lined because of their race or ethnicity. Consider, for starters, that Stanford’s IDEAL race and ethnicity categories lump Asians of all backgrounds in with people of European descent, so they have no status as people of color, nor are their widely differing family stories registered.

Asian American families who dread being excluded because of their race often over-hire their admissions counselors to help their children beat the odds against them. Sadly, sometimes the effect is detrimental. Of the 10 Bay Area Asian American students I counseled this 2020 cycle, ones who could afford counselors hired a corporation in addition to their school counselor and me, which meant they had at least three different sources of professional—and often contradictory— advice. Reading the commentary of these other counselors provides an often painful education in identity marketing. It seems the most common advice of counselors is to “show leadership and empathy” by writing about some less fortunate, less mentally or physically able student than themselves whom they helped, which thus makes them worthy of admission to an elite university. One student wrote her common application statement about a friend who just wasn’t as brave as she at public speaking. Another student tried to cheer up a depressed friend during COVID. Yet another intervened in a friend’s eating disorder. Whatever merit these stories of supposed “leadership and empathy” had, these students were counseled to avoid telling their own stories. Some of my own students inspired by traditional South Asian dance, or a father who had been a Tiananmen Square dissident and escaped to America, or a Vietnamese refugee single mother who raised the student to be a multilingual humanist were redirected to “leadership and empathy” narratives devoid of Asian content.

Perhaps, if Stanford requires applicants to report they had private admissions counselors, admissions will free applicants from such adult meddling in their narratives. In any case, admissions readers can recognize such intervention from a mile away. Why make students confess? The process will be messy and could undermine the very community of low-income students admissions hopes to identify. Under such a rule, the 130+ pro bono low-income students I helped from California would have to report they had a “private college counselor,” or they simply wouldn’t mention it. Such a policy may change nothing except the willingness of applicants to tell the truth.

There is a much more straightforward path to reduce the impact of wealth on admission to Stanford. How about requiring a FASFA-style tax return form from all applicants, whether or not they are applying for financial aid? As a single, low-income mother—Stanford lecturers outside of Engineering earn less than $100K a year, but that’s a whole other story—I’ve filled out FASFA forms for every year my kids have attended college. A FASFA form will tell admissions right away who is low income--and who is rich--without wading into the murky territory of who is helping the student write their statement. Stanford Admissions would learn a lot if it required family tax returns from all applicants, and the process of screening for low-income students would be less cumbersome and ethically entangled. It is possible to limit the percentage of wealthy students and make more room for middle and low-income applicants while still maintaining enough full tuition payers to subsidize low income students. Collecting FASFA information does not require asking for whole tax returns and would help Stanford decide those numbers and be more just and effective in “leveling” admissions than penalizing those applicants who seek out essay assistance.