FERPA: A Window into the Admissions Processes of Selective Colleges

I was thinking about the lecture from class about crossing class boundaries and how different students from different backgrounds interacted at Amherst College in Elizabeth Aries's book, and remembered this article that I read earlier this year. The author of the article is a student at Yale, and was able to read her admissions files by using a quirk in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). She learned that although admission is need-blind (income is not considered in admissions decisions), a large amount of data was collected to determine her social background such as "[her] parents’ jobs and where they’d gone to college; a series of drop-down menus allowed admissions officers to note the percentage of students at [her] high school that were minorities and those that went on to a four-year college. There was a checkbox to note whether or not [she] lived in a low-income census tract." Yale makes a concerted effort to admit students from vastly different areas and backgrounds, especially those from inner-city and rural public schools. An admissions officer noted that the author would be a good admit from Minneapolis public schools, but she notes that she is nowhere near an accurate representation of her school district, "which is just 33% white, where 65% of students fall under federal poverty measures, and where almost a third of students are English-language learners."

The author says she herself is white and middle class, the daughter of parents who both went to Princeton, and that the other people she knows of from her school district at Yale are from the exact same demographic—white and middle class with parents who have graduated college—despite the fact that most people from that district do not fit that profile. Even though we discussed how higher education in elite institutions has become more open to those not of the old money elite, I think it's notable that this case, though possibly not representative of the whole, the admissions officers still have biases based on their own habituses (habiti?) regarding who should be excepted. Even though by the letter colleges are admitting more people from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds, I think it's important to try to make sure that personal biases aren't actually coming into play.