Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Several years ago, at the funeral for University of Virginia Dean of Admissions Jack Blackburn, I ran into Bill Hartog, the long-time Dean of Admissions at Washington and Lee University.  We shared our fond memories of Jack and his legacy for our profession, and commiserated about becoming elder statesmen, or just older.

I shared my experience of attending a meeting of independent school college counselors, including several who had just moved across the desk from the college side.  At the end of the meeting, one of them looked at me and stated how inspiring it was to see the old-timers present.  Thinking he wanted affirmation, I started to reply, “It sure is,” when it hit me that the old-timer he was referring to was me.

Bill observed that he was now 25 years older than the next oldest member of his staff.  He sensed that people in the office were asking, “Who is that old guy, what does he do here, and why is he always so grumpy?”

No one would begrudge Bill for being grumpy this week.  I returned from Toronto on Sunday night to learn that the Washington Post had published an article about colleges that count incomplete applications when computing application totals and admit rate.  The focal point in the article was W&L.  A day later Washington and Lee President Kenneth Ruscio called for an internal review of the school’s procedures for reporting admissions data.   

The original article correctly points out that W&L’s practice is not out-of-line with the accepted guidelines for reporting data to the federal government or as established by the Common Data Set, but there is also an implication that what W&L is doing is comparable to the misrepresentation of admissions stats that occurred at places like Emory and Claremont McKenna and Bucknell.  Based on what I have read and what I know, that is not the case.

I read the article not as an indictment of Washington and Lee but as a criticism of the current state of college admission.  There is a disconnect between the accepted practice within our profession and public understanding of how the admissions process works.  The implicit criticism of W&L was due to counting as completed applications more than 1100 applications that were incomplete, an inclusion that lowered the acceptance rate from 24% to 19%.  That’s common practice, and I don’t consider it unethical, but many of us are guilty of massaging statistics to make us look better.

I also think we have deliberately kept a veil of mystery over how admission works, at least partly because we don’t want the public to know how subjective and imprecise holistic admission can be.  That veil of mystery is a double-edged sword.  It increases public fascination with college admission, but it also leads to skepticism and distrust about our practices and our motives.  As colleges move to a culture driven by marketing, we also send a message that we are motivated by self-interest rather than the public interest.  It is also the case that every instance of misrepresentation at one institution harms all of us.

The larger issue is that we have allowed admissions metrics to become a proxy for institutional quality.  Because educational outcomes are so difficult to measure, we have turned to things that are easy to measure (and easy to manipulate) and assigned them value that is in no way justified.  The unchallenged assumption is that the more popular the institution—application numbers, admit rate, yield—the better it must be.  There are plenty of culprits for that way of thinking—Presidents, Provosts, and Boards; Bond-rating agencies; and of course, U.S. News and World Report, the poster child for measuring educational quality without considering the educational experience.  The logical conclusion of the “Popularity=Quality” mindset is that the ultimate gourmand experience will be found at McDonald’s.

Either Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli said that there are three kinds of lies—lies, damned lies, and statistics.  Colleges and universities know better than to spread lies or damned lies, but I think we can expect more scrutiny over our use of statistics. I suspect we will be challenged both by Gen X parents and by the federal government to find new ways to show the value of a college education and the value added by particular institutions.  The Obama administration’s proposal to rank colleges and allocate federal aid based on access, affordability, and outcomes may be the first salvo.  We need to be proactive and not reactive.

Postcard from Toronto

Today happens to be the first anniversary of the blog.  It’s been a good year, and as I have told several people at NACAC in Toronto, one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done.  I am particularly grateful to all of you who read and comment both privately and publicly.

I celebrated by doing a session this morning with Lee Coffin from Tufts and Chuck Lovelace from the Morehead-Cain Foundation at UNC-Chapel Hill.  Our topic was one that readers of the blog will find familiar.  Are we measuring the right things in the college admissions process?  We addressed (not the same as answering) that question in three different areas: non-cognitive predictors of success; 21^st century skills; and measures of institutional quality.  It’s a discussion worth having, and Lee and Chuck have both done first-rate thinking in how to merge theory with practice.

Last week Eric Hoover at the Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to write a guest post for the Chronicle’s Head Count blog, and it appeared yesterday.  Here’s a link.

This was the first time in five years that I didn’t have official duties.  Several people asked me if I missed it, and I responded by asking if I looked like I had a sense of loss.  No one answered yes.  I enjoyed the opportunity to serve NACAC, and the experience has certainly benefitted me both personally and professionally, but I finished my term with a sense of satisfaction that I had done my best and that it was time to move on to other things.  Writing about the ethics of college admissions has helped make that transition easy.

This morning the NACAC Assembly amended the Statement of Principles of Good Practice to address the use of international agents.  The Assembly adopted amended language to the motion put forth by the Board of Directors and Admission Practices Committee based on the report of the Commission on International Student Recruitment.  The amendment to the SPGP’s Mandatory Practices allows member institutions to use incentive-based agents when working with international students but requires that the institution ensure “accountability, transparency and integrity.”

I think it was important for the Assembly to validate the thoughtful deliberative process employed by the Commission, but "accountability," "transparency," and "integrity" all leave plenty of room for definition and further discussion. I think no one believes this will resolve the agent issue once and for all.

Justice and Mercy

I used to give my mother-in-law a hard time because the first part of the newspaper she looked at every morning was the obituaries.  I haven’t adopted that habit, but now that I have reached the stage in life where being referred to as middle-aged is a compliment, it doesn’t seem quite as amusing.

Recently I saw that the father of a former student had passed away.  A classical guitarist who had immigrated to the United States to receive a kidney transplant, he seemed to be on death’s doorstep 20 years ago, so I was surprised that he had lived this long. 

Seeing his obituary made me recall my proudest counseling moment. His son was bright, strong-willed, and rebellious, and his junior year could have inspired a soap opera or reality show.  He chafed under rules and expectations that were minimal, scored high enough on the PSAT to be a National Merit Semifinalist but didn’t have grades to match, shaved his head for shock effect, and in late January disappeared for a week.  It turned out he was visiting a girl at a college in the Midwest.

During the last month of school he was convicted of back-to-back honor offenses.  Both could be categorized as stupid rather than deceitful, but at St. Christopher’s the Honor System is the foundation underpinning everything that happens at the School, the line you don’t cross, and an upperclassman with multiple offenses is in deep trouble.  Both the faculty and his peers were at the end of their ropes, and the Honor Council recommended expulsion.

The Headmaster consulted me before acting on the recommendation.  We agreed that the boy wasn’t a bad kid, just immature and stuck in a bad home situation.  At the same time, it wasn’t in his or the community’s best interest to remain.  We finally arrived at a creative solution—either expel him or get him into college early.

And that’s what happened.  A good liberal-arts college (the same one he had visited for a week in January) was willing to offer him admission without a high-school diploma.  We didn’t expel him, he was accepted to college early, and four years later he graduated with honors, after which he wrote me the kind of thank-you note I’ve received only rarely in my career.  It meant even more because of the back story.

A guiding principle in ethics is “Treat like cases alike.”  The challenge, of course, is that rarely are two cases alike.  Every ethical dilemma brings with it a unique combination of circumstances and considerations and requires its own calculus.  That calculus must balance the interests of the individual with those of the community, as well as balancing justice with mercy.  Rarely is it possible to find a solution that accomplishes both, which is what made the previous case so satisfying.  

I have been thinking about the interplay between justice and mercy recently thanks to one of last year’s seniors.  He was an excellent student and school citizen who early last fall came down with a mysterious malady that ended up taking away most of his senior year.  He couldn’t sleep or hold down food and quickly fell way behind academically.  He went to numerous doctors and received numerous diagnoses and treatments, but none made him better.

By the end of September it was clear that the best case scenario was a significant drop in grades, and he decided to apply Early Decision to college so that senior year grades would not come into play.  I was okay with that approach, given that he was a strong candidate for a school he wanted to attend, but I cautioned him and his family that the college would need to be made aware of his situation eventually.

The challenge of the school year, and especially the senior year, is that you can’t call time out and stop the clock.  Christmas break offers one of the only concentrated periods of time when a student might catch up after falling behind.  When January arrived, the student’s health issues remained serious and undiagnosed, it was clear that he would only be able to complete two of his first semester classes, and we knew that we had to, in the words of my GPS, “Recalculate.”  The good news was that he was in college.

As a school we were trying to be sensitive and supportive of the boy and his family, but the situation raised some difficult practical and philosophical questions.  What should we do about the courses he wasn’t physically able to complete?  Is earning a high school diploma about earning a minimal number of credits or about a certain quality of experience?  What was our duty to the student, and what was our responsibility to the college he wanted to attend?  If Woody Allen is correct that 90% of life is showing up, what happens when you can’t even do that on a regular basis?

I struggled to sort out my ethical obligations.  In any ethical dilemma, there are multiple duties involved.  The philosopher W.D. Ross argued that ethical duties arise from relationships, and that every relationship carries with it what he calls a prima facie (or first glance) duty.  In this case I had a duty to the student.  I also had a duty to my school, I had a duty to the college, I had a duty to the profession, and I had a duty to my core values as an individual.  Unfortunately Ross only tells you how to identify possible duties, not how to choose among them.

It wasn’t until March that doctors at the Mayo Clinic diagnosed the student as having postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS).  Having a diagnosis and knowing that it was treatable and not chronic was a relief for everyone, but finding the right combination and dosage levels of medications remained a challenge, and hopes for being able to come to school on a regular basis proved overly optimistic.   

As a school we were trying to do the right thing, balancing mercy and justice.  The family didn’t want to consider a repeat senior year.  The college said they would allow him to come if I/we certified that he was ready.  How could I do that, when he wasn’t healthy enough to come to school more than a period a day and would finish his senior year with 1.5 credits?  At the same time, he hadn’t chosen to get sick, and an important moral principle is that you can’t judge or punish someone for things they haven’t chosen.

He finished the school year one-half credit shy of the minimum number required to graduate.  We allowed him to walk at graduation, and gave him two options for earning a diploma.  He could take an on-line course during the summer to get the final credit or we would give him a diploma at the end of his first semester in college.  Of course the family didn’t like either option, and asked us to give him academic credit for therapy he did at the Mayo Clinic during the month of July.

The student started college a week ago.  He seems healthy and ready, but he has also essentially missed a year of school.  I don’t know that we achieved either mercy or justice, and I don’t know that we came up with the “right” answer.  Sometimes an okay answer has to be good enough.    

Desperation

Nearly a quarter century ago I took a three-year hiatus from my college counseling career to take a job as admissions director at an independent school.  I left college counseling reluctantly, because I loved the school and the kids I worked with, but I was commuting 160 miles round-trip daily and my wife told me I could consider any job I wanted as long as it was in Richmond.

I realized quickly that the school was struggling, far more than I had been told.  I attended a Board meeting before I started the job, and while casually reading the minutes of the previous meeting discovered that just a month before a motion had been made and defeated to fire the Headmaster, the person who had just hired me.  I began my first day on the job, a month before the opening of school, counting up all the returning and prospective students and discovered that the best possible scenario was 40 students shy of the minimum budget number.  The Headmaster had no clue.  Perhaps most telling was that when I went to the business office to get paper clips, they asked me how many I needed.  The school couldn’t afford to give me a whole box.

Less than two weeks before school started, I attended an emergency evening meeting with the Headmaster and the Executive Committee of the Board. They wanted me to make cold calls to try to recruit last minute enrollments.  I refused, telling them that if word got out on the street that we were desperate, the school would never recover.  The school might need that approach or that kind of admissions director, but I wasn’t willing to do that.  I stood there waiting to be fired, but one trustee spoke up and backed me, and the rest of the group backed down.

But what happens when you really are desperate? A recent New York Times article about falling college enrollments mentioned two institutions, Loyola University in New Orleans and St. Mary’s College of Maryland, that have fallen far short of their enrollment goals this spring, forcing them to cut their budgets by millions of dollars.

One paragraph in the article raised eyebrows among those of us in the profession.  Loyola was reported to have called students who had been accepted but not enrolled, including sweetening financial-aid offers.  The Times article stated that recipients of the calls included students who had already deposited elsewhere, a violation of the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice.

Loyola officials responded both to the NACAC Exchange and to InsideHigherEd (which did a follow-up piece) that they had been misunderstood, that the school had made the calls and financial aid offers only to accepted students who hadn’t informed Loyola that they were going elsewhere.  I appreciate the clarification from Loyola, but am also glad to know that the NACAC Admission Practices Committee will apparently investigate based on complaints made by NACAC members after the Times article appeared.

I am more intrigued by the larger questions raised by the articles. 

The most obvious has to do with May 1.  What are the ethical imperatives implied by the May 1 National Candidates Reply date?  Is May 1 the “end” of the admissions process, such that it is improper for institutions to recruit after that date? Should institutions like St. Mary’s and Loyola get a “pass,” given that financial stewardship, saving employees’ jobs, and staying in business are all in some sense ethical objectives? Are we about to see new attempts to erode the May 1 deadline?

Let me answer the last question first.  I certainly hope the answer is no.  I consider May 1 the most important convention for preserving sanity and ethical practice in the college admissions world.  The May 1 date clearly provides protection for students to ensure they receive all decisions before making a final choice, but I would also argue that it provides protection for colleges, both as a benchmark for judging where enrollment stands and also as a guard against deterioration into a Wild West mentality.

It is also clear that the admissions cycle continues past May 1 for many institutions, including rolling admissions schools, those utilizing Wait Lists, and schools that have to deal with considerable summer melt.  There is nothing wrong with recruiting students after May 1, IF those students haven’t deposited at another institution.  It is appropriate to contact accepted students who have not deposited or informed you that they are going elsewhere, but conversations must stop once it is clear that a student has committed to another school, and financial exigency does not change that.

Are the shortfalls faced by Loyola and St. Mary’s anomalies, unique to those institutions, or canaries in the enrollment management coalmine? In the past week I have heard about two other institutions with freshman classes smaller than expected, although nowhere near the same degree as the two institutions named above.  At least one tried to cut back on its discount rate, only to find a corresponding drop in deposits. This spring I found that economic considerations seemed to drive college decisions for my students far more than I have ever seen before, choosing public over private and in-state over out-of-state.  I’m not sure if the decisions are driven by ability to pay or unwillingness to pay, but if it’s happening with my families, it has to be a wider phenomenon.  Will college admissions officers need to rethink fundamental assumptions? 

The ultimate question is whether college admissions can walk the fine line between being an industry and being a profession.  What distinguishes the two is the degree of commitment to the public interest as well as self-interest. Can we continue to agree on a set of principles that serve all of us well even when they might not always serve me well?  I hope so.  As Benjamin Franklin said about signing the Declaration of independence, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Summer Break

Ethical College Admissions is taking a break for the rest of the summer (let me be clear that I mean ECA the blog, not college admissions practices that are ethical).  I had planned to start the hiatus a month ago, but waited for the Supreme Court to announce its decision in Fisher v. Texas.

I’m not spending summer in the Hamptons or the south of France, so if some issue of monumental importance raises its head I’ll be prepared to comment on it.  But this seems like a good time to step back, recharge, and focus on some other writing projects.

I started this blog last September not knowing if I would find anything to write about, whether I could discipline myself to post on a regular basis, and whether anyone would find it worth reading.  What I discovered was that all kinds of issues I couldn’t have anticipated popped up, and after a week went by following a post I felt an urge to sit down and address a new topic.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to blogging.  One is that the blogger should write for himself or herself.  The other is that blogging is about a conversation with readers.  I accept both views.  I have found that writing has helped me clarify my own thinking about issues, but knowing that there are people reading the blog, including people whose opinions I value greatly, has proved fulfilling at a level I couldn’t have imagined.  One analytical tool tells me that close to 5000 people have viewed the blog, with readers from 49 states (the holdout is North Dakota) and 30 other countries.  I am particularly grateful to those readers who sent me e-mails or told me in person that they enjoyed the blog.  That means more than you can know.

I already have a queue of topics I’d like to address, but I’ll also be thinking about how to improve the blog.  My original intention was to include both some short posts as well as the 900-1100 word sermonettes, but it will surprise no one who knows me that lengthy somehow won out.  The older I get, the preachier I become.  I am thinking about doing a several-part series tracing the evolution of the affirmative action issue from Bakke to Fisher.  I’d welcome suggestions for how to make the blog better or topics/issues you’d like to see addressed.

We are officially on break.  Back in September.   

Fisher

On Monday the Supreme Court announced its much-awaited decision in the affirmative action case, Fisher v. University ofTexas.  The announcement wasn’t a surprise, given that this is the final week in the Court term and that Fisher was the earliest argued case still remaining on the Court’s docket.

What was surprising is that the decision was by a 7-1 majority (Justice Kagan recused herself).  That is the kind of majority many observers thought this Court was incapable of producing.  That strong majority, along with the long period of time between oral arguments and the decision, invites speculation that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion was narrowly tailored in order to cobble together that majority.

I read the opinion as soon as it came out on Monday morning, and had hoped to post a response later in the day, but I had a meeting out of town on Tuesday and Wednesday and didn’t want to rush just to get something out.

In Fisher the Supreme Court vacated a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision supporting Texas, remanding the case back to the Fifth Circuit to try it on its merits.  The Fifth Circuit had denied Fisher’s appeal on the basis that Grutter v. Michigan, the last big affirmative action case decided by the Supreme Court, had required courts to give deference to universities to determine whether a diverse student body is a compelling interest and how to achieve that.  Justice Kennedy’s opinion finds that deference to be mistaken.

The good news is that the Fisher decision does not address the merits of affirmative action, although both Justices Scalia and Thomas made it clear that they would have voted to overturn Grutter if asked.  What it does is put the burden of proof on colleges and universities that take race into account in admission in order to achieve diversity.  Whereas the Fifth Circuit decision supported the idea that colleges should have discretion to decide what their institutional priorities are and how to achieve them, Justice Kennedy’s opinion puts the burden of proof on universities to demonstrate that achieving diversity is a compelling interest and that the admission policies put in place are narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.

So where does the Fisher decision leave the affirmative action debate?  It in no way resolves it, but it changes it by raising some fundamental philosophical questions that have been taken for granted in the past.     

The first question is, Is diversity a compelling educational interest for colleges and universities?  I think the answer is clearly yes, that a student’s education is broader and richer by being exposed to classrooms with a diverse array of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.  I also think that the higher education establishment has taken the value of diversity as an article of faith, asserting the value but not necessarily demonstrating the value. 

What factors contribute to educational diversity?  Given America’s history of racial discrimination, does being a student of color automatically bring diversity, or are there students of color who don’t contribute to diversity because of their socioeconomic backgrounds?  Are we as a society in a different place than we were during the Civil Rights Movement 50 years ago, or are our sensitivities to race just under the surface?  In oral arguments Texas argued for the importance of critical mass in order to relieve individual students of the burden of representing all students of a particular background, but didn’t have a great deal of research to show that classroom diversity would be lacking without the affirmative action program.  The amicus brief filed by the College Board and other educational organizations argues for self-determination, that colleges and universities should be trusted to determine their own policies, and it is clear that the court buys that argument only with limits.

If diversity is a compelling interest, is affirmative action necessary to achieve it?  Do colleges have alternatives?  In the Fisher case, the necessity argument was complicated by the fact that the defendant was the University of Texas. Several years ago the state of Texas instituted a law requiring that students ranking in the top ten percent of their high school classes be automatically admitted to public colleges and universities.  According to the UT-Austin website, 75% of the in-state spots in the freshman class are admitted through that program.  That law is certainly controversial and debatable on its own merits, but it has produced a diverse student body, if diversity is defined in terms of ethnic origin.  It was the program to admit the remaining 25% of students who were not in the top ten percent that was being challenged, and in oral arguments the attorney for Texas seemed to suggest that diversity required admitting underachieving middle- and upper-class students of color. It would have been easier to argue that affirmative action is necessary to produce a diverse student body had the defendant in Fisher not been located in Texas.

The ultimate question is whether the end justifies the means.  No one (at least no reputable voice) wants to return to the racial segregation of the 1940’s and 50’s, but does it make a difference how an institution achieves diversity?  In the first affirmative action case argued by the Supreme Court, the Bakke case, the medical school at the University of California at Davis set aside a certain number of slots for minority students and essentially conducted two different admission processes.  That approach was declared unconstitutional, but in succeeding cases institutions are less blatant but still figure out the result they want and reverse engineer the admission process to produce that result.  In Fisher the Supreme Court clearly answered that the means of achieving diversity is as important as the goal of achieving diversity.

In the wake of Fisher affirmative action lives, but colleges and universities will be challenged to demonstrate that their admission processes meet the burden of strict scrutiny if challenged in the courts.  That should stimulate a healthy discussion about how best to accomplish a worthy goal. I’m guessing that the Supreme Court will deal with this issue again in the near future.

Correction:  In the initial post I stated that the Bakke case involved the law school at the University of California-Davis.  It was the medical school, and I have corrected it above.  Thanks to Jon Reider for pointing out the error.  I could blame it on senility, but the truth is I was in a hurry to post and got careless.

Secret Agent

The National Security Agency wasn’t the only D.C. area entity dealing with fallout from leaks to the press last week.  While it didn’t receive the same publicity or have the same level of intrigue and serious implications for American society, NACAC was forced to release the report of its Commission on International Student Recruitment early after InsideHigherEd obtained a draft and published an article about the Commission’s findings.  It wasn’t exactly the Pentagon Papers, but NACAC had to speed-up its roll-out of the report to members and other stakeholders.

A Chronicle of Higher Education article on the report’s release characterized the report as weak and as attempting “to mollify everyone,” focusing on the Commission’s recommendation to change the language in the Statement of Principles of Good Practice prohibiting the payment of commissions to international recruiters from mandatory to a best practice.

I think that criticism is unfair, but I am hardly objective.  As a member of the NACAC Board, I was one of the driving forces for the Commission approach, arguing that a simple prohibition as originally proposed was an easy but wrong solution to an issue that is complex and in the words of the report, “dynamic.”  I think the Commission brought together a lot of good minds to study the morass of issues surrounding recruitment of international students, but the expectation that it would “solve” the problem is naïve.

What the Commission Report doesn’t attempt to do is address the ethical complexities that arise out of the use of agents compensated by commission to recruit international students.  That, of course, is exactly what I find most interesting.

Let’s try to sort through the issues.  First and foremost is that more American colleges and universities are recruiting students internationally.  Much of that is economically driven as colleges look for revenue, but it is also the case that bringing students to the United States from around the world is important educationally and also in the national interest.

Recruiting internationally is a challenge for many institutions.  Not only is it expensive to send staff members abroad, but getting a foothold in the international marketplace requires a network of contacts and knowledge of the culture.  A number of institutions have attempted to address these challenges by outsourcing recruitment to agents located overseas.

The use of agents is not in itself inherently wrong.  What is questionable from an ethical standpoint is that many agents are paid on a per-head commission basis, a practice that violates the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice and is also illegal in the United States.  Given that per-head compensation of agents has been long-standing practice in many countries, is the NACAC/U.S. position morally right or arrogant and culturally naive?

A complicating factor is that in most parts of the world there is not a school-based college counseling infrastructure, although there seems to be movement in that direction.  If NACAC were to prohibit colleges from using agents (per-head) without there being legitimate alternatives for students to get information about American colleges, then it harms member institutions trying to do the right thing and perhaps also harms students. Any ethical principle is worthless if it is also impractical.

(It is not the case that there are no alternatives.  EducationUSA, a branch of the State Department, operates advising centers in 140 countries dispensing information about American higher education.  EducationUSA does not represent particular institutions and also does not work with agents who charge commissions.)

The essential issue is whether there is something fundamentally wrong with an agent being paid on a per-head commission basis.  There is always a tension in college admissions between counseling and sales; does per-head compensation tip the scales?  If I am being paid by a college for every student who applies or enrolls, is my advice to a student based on what is best for the student or what is best for me? 

Clearly there are agents who are ethical despite being paid per head, but the world of agents is rife with questionable and corrupt practices, from double dipping (accepting payment from both students and institutions) to conflict of interest to misrepresentation to falsification of transcripts and writing essays for students.  Commission-based compensation may not be responsible for these abuses, but it creates the conditions for them to breed and spread and poison the good work that is out there.

I hope that NACAC will not abandon the principle that payment of commissions based on the number of students recruited or enrolled is wrong.  The principle that admission officers and recruiters should be professionals and not salespeople led to NACAC’s founding. The commitment to ethical professional practice, while under siege on a number of fronts, remains the bedrock of our profession.  The federal prohibition on per head compensation for students receiving federal financial aid is telling, and the experience with the predatory recruiting practices utilized by many for-profit institutions in the U.S.  after the Bush Administration eased restrictions for a number of “safe harbors” should reassure us that per head compensation is dangerous and problematic, no matter where it occurs.

There are certainly those who argue that the train has already left the station with regard to agents and per-head compensation, including the American International Recruitment Council (AIRC), which argues that training and certification of agents is the better path.  That may be an interim step, but I don’t buy the argument that it’s the best we can hope for.  The fact that something is an accepted practice doesn’t mean that it’s best practice.  The fact that people commit bank robbery doesn’t mean that outlawing bank robbery is futile.

Saying that NACAC shouldn’t abandon its principle doesn’t mean that simply outlawing use of agents in its current form is the solution.  As the Commission correctly recognized, the issue is complex and dynamic.  Real reform requires developing legitimate recruiting alternatives for colleges that want to do the right thing for international students.  NACAC is not going to solve this issue alone, and I hope the Commission report will begin a discussion with groups like the College Board, NAFSA, AACRAO, IECA, HECA, and AIRC on a new framework for international recruiting, a framework that puts ethical principles like institutional oversight, accountability, transparency, and integrity at the forefront.

My hope is that the work of the Commission is the beginning of a larger discussion about the landscape of international recruiting, and my dream is that NACAC will serve as landscape architect, bringing simplicity and even beauty to that landscape.