For most of its history, the American college sold something it could not quite describe. A student arrived at 18, read books he would never have chosen himself, encountered people unlike anyone he had known, and four years later emerged changed in ways that were difficult to measure. This was not considered a flaw. It was more or less the point.
That arrangement is becoming harder to sustain. Tuition and living expenses at some universities now exceeds $100,000 a year, while public confidence in higher education has fallen sharply. Families still want college, but they are asking an almost embarrassingly commercial question: What, exactly, are we buying?
I hear versions of this question regularly. Parents scrutinize majors, internships, career placement and starting salaries with an intensity that barely existed when I began working in this field. They want an education that will transform their child, but they would also like to see the transformation expressed in a spreadsheet.
Colleges have responded predictably. They talk more about outcomes, entrepreneurship, experiential learning and career readiness. As they have, institutions have encountered an awkward problem: The easier a benefit is to measure, the less distinctive it is.
A salary can be measured. So can employment six months after graduation. The effect of spending a semester reading Dostoevsky with an extraordinary professor cannot. Nor can the friendship that changes a student’s ambitions, the obscure seminar that redirects a career or the gradual discovery that something she believed at 18 looks different at 22.
Admissions makes this contradiction stark. Colleges say they value curiosity, intellectual exploration and unexpected combinations of interests, then ask applicants to convert those qualities into grades, activities, scores and essays. We have built an elaborate measurement system around qualities we insist cannot be reduced to measurements.
The response has been more data: rankings, outcomes, acceptance rates, return-on-investment calculations. Yet the information has made good judgment more valuable, because families must now distinguish between what can be counted and what actually matters.
This is the predicament facing colleges themselves. Under pressure to prove their value, they have every incentive to emphasize whatever can be demonstrated most convincingly. Over time, institutions redesign themselves around the parts that are easiest to defend.
The old bargain asked families to trust that four years would change a young person in ways nobody could predict beforehand. The new one asks colleges to prove it. Perhaps the most important things that happen there will remain stubbornly resistant to the exercise.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
