The Impossibility of Getting Into An Ivy League College and School Choice

In some ways, last week's excitement about the increasing difficulty of getting into Ivy Leagues reflects a popular criticism of school choice. (Harvard's admit rate has plummeted to 9.0%! From 9.3%!) The admit rates of Ivy League colleges (and other colleges of similar quality) captured the headlines because candidates of (seemingly) high caliber were being rejected. The NYTimes article linked begins with:

Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages.

This is the result of the demand for these ‘best’ universities far surpassing the supply of places at these institutions.

In a similar vein, some critics argue that school choice doesn't get to the crux of the key education problem dominating the current US education landscape: the insufficient number of good schools. Giving students (and their parents) the option to choose their schools, regardless of race, class, or income, merely tinkers with the distribution of students across the small subset of existing good schools in the entire population of schools, rather than actually improving schools. To use the metaphor of college admissions: instead of splitting hairs trying to differentiate between excellent and outstanding candidates, shouldn’t we be working toward increasing the number of places in the ‘best’ colleges by increasing the number of good universities?

This line of criticism essentially stems from a failure to understand school choice's theory of change: by tying educational funding to students and allowing students (or their parents) to pick their own schools, school choice would result in the survival of a school being dependent on how well it caters to the people who matter most: its students. Schools that do well will be ‘rewarded’ with a long waiting list of students and can then consider scaling up. Schools that chronically under-perform will eventually be ‘punished’ with an exodus of students and hence be forced to buck up or close. Through this mechanism of incentives that encourages the proliferation of good schools and hastens the demises of bad schools, school choice will increase the quality of schools across the board.

It’s precisely because school choice is dependent on students (or their parents) being able to exercise their option to exit that judging the efficacy of school choice based on the success of charter schools in raising the achievement levels of other public schools in their district is disingenuous (Hess & McGuinn, 2002, makes a similar argument about the efficacy of Cleveland's voucher experiment). Firstly, charter schools do not really provide (serious) competition since their numbers are arbitrarily restricted to a tiny fraction of public schools in a district. Thus, despite long waiting lists for most charter schools indicating high demand for them, most existing systems do not allow enough new charter schools to spring up and meet this demand. Consequently, students cannot exercise their option to exit since they have no alternative to exit to (unless their parents are Catholic or are willing to cough out a ridiculous amount of money for private schools, or take a huge pay cut and home-school their children). In this way, 'school choice' via charter schools is robbed of its key mechanism through which to drive improvement in currently under-performing schools. Most public schools know that their students don't have many other tenable options and, like all monopolists, tend to become fat cats without the pressure of competition to keep them lean.

Furthermore, critics of charter schools who claim they do not work because on average, their students' grades on standardized tests aren't much higher than public school students in the same district, are falling prey to a weakness that allegedly market-based reformers are especially prone to: the tendency to judge schools according to their student's test scores. Research has indicated that parents often prefer charter schools because of a host of other issues, like school safety. Not focusing solely on test scores is congruent with the philosophy underlying school choice. When proponents of school choice claim it gives parents the chance to choose the best school for their students, they aren’t necessarily referring only to 'the best school for raising their students' test scores' (one can be test scores-satisficing without being test scores-maximizing). Parents could prefer a school that focuses more on a student's holistic development or a student's particular passion (e.g. music, arts, theater, technology) instead of merely emphasizing how their students perform on multiple-choice questions. Thus, school choice doesn't force an ideal of 'student achievement' on the entire population of students. A voucher system would allow students to choose schools that best fit their diverse and unique individual talents, interests, and learning needs. Such a diversity of schools will better cater to the development of students than an arbitrary one-size-fits-all model that attempts to fit the 'average' student but ends up chafing most students.


School choice has lots of problems (what happens if parents' don't exercise their right to choose? how can we get past the seemingly insurmountable problems of getting rich parents to subsidize poorer students in order to implement the progressive voucher system necessary for achieving true equality of opportunity?), but putting up straw man arguments does nothing to help the case of anti-school choice opponents.