Resume De-Padding

Last Wednesday, the Making Caring Common Project at the Graduate School of Education published a report analyzing the flaws of the current college admission process. The report, a product of extensive research and innumerable conversations, pinpoints three discrete issues with the current system that must be improved, each followed by several recommendations for action.

The report correctly identifies a serious problem with the college admission process: It sends “young people messages that emphasize personal success rather than concern for others and the common good.”

As it stands, many applicants believe that they should push themselves to take as many rigorous classes as possible, score highly on standardized tests, and travel the world doing service in order to be serious applicants. In this system, affluent students are often at an unfair advantage; meanwhile, all students of all socioeconomic backgrounds suffer undue amounts of stress.

For these reasons, the college admission process should be reoriented—as the report suggests and we have previously acknowledged—towards seeking out students who are as conscionable and conscientious as they are intelligent and driven. Despite its good intentions, however, this move to fix the admission process is ambitious at best. The underlying problems with the process run much deeper than this report could hope to address.

The report's recommendations have the potential to affect serious change in the American college admission process, and they include several actionable ideas for rethinking the definition of success so that it benefits thoughtful, genuine people rather than competitive, dishonest, and often wealthy robots. These recommendations, which all argue for quantity over quality in everything from community service endeavors to coursework, certainly need to be communicated to students.

That said, admission committees should ensure that these recommendations do not shortchange those exceptional students who are happiest taking a heavy course load or participating in multiple student organizations. It is, after all, that type of student Harvard hopes to educate.

In this vein, admission committees and high school guidance counselors should particularly emphasize the report’s fifth recommendation under its third area of consideration: “expanding students’ thinking about ‘Good’ colleges.” Perhaps the biggest stressor for students applying to college is that they believe they must go to an elite institution. Harvard and its peers should make clear that applicants should not force themselves to be people they are not solely to gain admission to a university with a low acceptance rate.

There is also much work to be done in reconciling the findings of this report with Harvard's practice of taking legacy into account in the admission process. If an overhaul of the admission process is to productively make room for low-income students at Harvard, it must not only discourage resume padding in its students but also abolish its own systemic flaws. This report has contributed to exposing some of those issues, but further factors deserve similar attention.