Casey Tanner
Color and Money
November, 2011
Paper Three Paragraphs:
The admissions process is complicated and extraneous to all students. The difficult decision of choosing where to spend the next four invaluable years of school is based solely on the way people can display themselves. Criterions such as grades, standardized test scores, community service, etc all have an impact on the decision process of applications. However, many colleges and universities place a heavy amount of the decision based on the conditions many cannot control. Factors like financial status, alumni connection and racial background play a vital role in who is accepted and who is denied. As we have seen in our own simulation in class, it is often those with advantages in these backgrounds that are accepted over the real qualified students.
Trinity College should revise its application process to enhance the consistency of applicants who get accepted and those who do not. The qualifications of an applicant should be looked so that the sections of an application that can be determined by the students are weighted more than those areas that cannot be determined. Privileged individuals do have an advantage in the admissions process. However, there should be a system set in place to minimize the influence these privileges have in the final decision. Although it may seem impossible to make a perfect system to determine who is accepted and who isn’t, there should be revisions to the current process to provide more consistency.
To find a more efficient way to structure the admissions process, we will need additional information to help revise our current process. Factual evidence taken from our personal admissions process is a definitely necessity to see how our admissions staff makes decisions. The books we have read in class like Creating a Class and readings regarding admissions policies will also be critical to look at during this paper. With this information, we can design a stronger and more consistent way to accept students to Trinity College.
Casey, thanks for proposing a very interesting paper topic on ways to minimize the influence of privilege in the admissions process, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Please work with Chelsey or a librarian to search the Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times, or other news sources or journal articles on ways that other colleges are attempting to address your goal. Key words may be “need-blind financial aid” or “legacy students” or related concepts.