Getting admitted into the UW Madison is something of a crap shoot. The process is a secret as closely guarded as the nuclear codes. Let’s make it totally transparent.
It appears that right now there are only two ways to have 100% assurance that you’ll get into the UW. By state law you have to be accepted if you graduate within the top 5% of your Wisconsin high school class. You will also be guaranteed admission if your free throw percentage is high enough.
Here’s something that’s strange. Basketball coach Greg Gard is yet again rebuilding his roster after his players fled to the portal. He’s picked up two players now from Australia, each of which has played pro or semi-pro ball there. There’s no talk about whether they can be admitted based on their grades or test scores. And it gets weirder. Badger football’s Luke Fickell is crowing about locking down many of the state’s best high school players. Again, nothing was said about their academic performance. And Fickell pulled no less than 34 players from the portal for this season and in no case, apparently, will a single transfer be denied based on academics.
It’s just amazing that all of these players will be admitted to a university that accepts 44% of its applicants. Something tells me that inside that black box at the old admissions office sits a representative of the Athletic Department.
Now, on that front the thing to do is to dispense with the fiction of the “student-athlete.” In the age of NIL and the portal there’s simply no reason that players should have to be students. In fact, it’s a sham and it makes a mockery of the whole admissions process. Just be honest and acknowledge what is clearly true: most athletes, at least in football and men’s basketball, aren’t here to get an education. They’re here to play ball and that’s okay. I made that point in more detail in my Citizen Dave blog over in Isthmus this week.
But here’s my related point today: the athletic admissions scam should raise questions in everyone’s mind about the integrity of the admissions process from the get-go. What, besides test scores and transcripts, goes into the admissions decisions? Again, we don’t know.
In fact, we do know that the UW is once again putting off a decision to reinstate test scores as a necessary ingredient, though applicants can still take the tests and submit the results if they want. The need to submit SAT scores was suspended during COVID for good and obvious reasons. Getting a bunch of kids together in a lecture hall to take a test seemed like a bad idea.
But there’s no reason to extend that now for what has been five more years and counting. It’s clear enough that it’s being done because there was an argument that Black kids didn’t score well on those tests. But that’s a terrible reason not to use test scores, which predict success in college better than high school transcripts. If Black kids don’t score well on the tests, then that tells us we need to improve education for those kids downstream in elementary school and high school. By college it’s too late. If you’re not prepared, you’re not prepared.
But this decision hints at what else is probably going on in the admissions office. When the Supreme Court struck down the use of race for college admissions, admissions offices all over the country scrambled to find ways to do it anyway. Not requiring test scores is a way of trying to get at the same, now illegal, race-conscious goal.
So, here’s a better alternative, Keep the law that guarantees admission to Wisconsin kids who graduate in the top 5%. And, by the way, for schools with high percentages of Black kids, that’s going to guarantee their admission, but based on their academic performance and not on their race. Now, of course, if you’re that smart you’ll have other options, so I assume some substantial proportion of those kids end up at some other prestigious school. It’s one of the reasons that the Madison campus has failed so completely in increasing its number of Black students. That’s a problem, but not one that should be — or based on experience, has been — addressed by discounting merit.
Next reinstate the requirement to submit test scores. And admit kids based on a number which is the composite of high school grades and those scores. We can get more nuanced. Since test scores are better predictors of success, maybe they should be weighed higher. Maybe transcripts should be examined (I assume they are already) to determine how rigorous a kid’s high school career had been. Anything that’s measurable and based on merit is fair so long as the weighting mechanism is published and right there on the UW’s website. There should be nothing about this process that isn’t transparent.
And then simply admit kids based on the numbers until you fill the class. Take nothing else into account: not race, not athletic ability, not geography, not their (AI-inspired, if not written) personal statement and, most certainly, not who their parents are.
With the UW being recognized as the second best public university in the world, competition to get in will only get more intense. Getting to attend the university of your choice is one of the biggest steps in a person’s life. High school kids deserve to know why they were admitted or denied. And they should know that the process was fair and based on nothing but academic merit.
That’s it for this week, kids. Have a good weekend.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 