A few universities in Canada are currently considering introducing holistic admissions.  But what does that mean, exactly?  And is it a good idea? 

Making selections “holistically” is simply making decisions on things in addition to secondary school academic results.  In most of the world, this idea is pretty heretical.  Secondary school results (or matriculation exams such as China’s gaokao or the French baccalauréat) are the be-all and end-all where university admissions are concerned.  In these countries, there is a deep belief that test results alone are a valid basis for meritocracy, and it is anti-egalitarian to consider anything else.

Canadians do not typically believe this.  Here, most agree marks are a crude way of measuring talent and/or potential, and – when it comes to scholarships at least – we have a lot of great examples of scholarships that examine students on the basis of multiple measures: the Greville-Smith scholarships at McGill, Queen’s University’s National Scholarships, the Loran Scholarships and most recently the McCall MacBain Scholarships.  The exact “other than marks” criteria differ a little bit, as do the means for assessing and balancing the various components of merit they describe, but the underlying ideas are similar.

But with very few exceptions, Canadian universities reserve holistic selection for scholarships and eschew it for admissions.  The reason is simple: holistic assessment is very expensive in terms of time and resources.  If you let people in based on marks, it’s algorithms.  You got an 87%?  You’re in!  86%?  Sorry, pal.  Try the university down the street.  Marks-only admissions are cheap as chips.  And Canadians do love cheap.  We’re prepared to put in more effort where large-value scholarships are concerned, but that’s do-able because the number of files to be reviewed are a fraction of the whole.  But for everybody?  Forget it. 

(There are a couple of exceptions.  NOSM University gives applicants points for being from a Northern community because they think that will make them likelier to stay in the region the institution is meant to serve.  And UBC uses a form of holistic admissions through evaluation of personal essays to provide evidence of i) Leadership, ii) Sense of Self & Community, iii) Initiative & Achieving Goals, iv) Intellectual Readiness & Expression and v) Problem Solving and Resilience – click here for the 2016 Rubric, which as far as I know is still in force.  But that’s about it.)

The one place where holistic criteria are used regularly for admissions is the United States, where it is the norm in selective institutions, both public and private. In theory, the advantage of holistic admissions is that you can assess multiple measures of merit.  In theory, that’s great.  As with Canadian scholarships, it’s usually about trying to capture measures of leadership, character, and community involvement. In the US, other aspects like athletics, musical ability, and extra-curriculars also get brought into the mix (as, less salubriously, do things like keeping alumni happy via legacy admissions).   And, theoretically it’s a tool to deal with racial inequality.

Now one must be careful in distinguishing fact from fiction in how Americans use holistic admissions.  As Jerome Karabel showed in his majestic book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,  holistic admissions – the idea that universities should admit based on “overall character” as much as marks – originated in the years just before World War I as a way to exclude Jews from Ivy League universities (the WASP establishment thought they brought down the tone of the college experience).  It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that selective American universities realized they could use holistic admissions to admit underrepresented groups.  It’s true that some SCOTUS decisions, notably Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, pushed universities in this direction (to simplify considerably, the court told universities they could not directly reserve spaces based on race, but they could use race as one factor among many to support “diversity” – which gave a strong steer to institutions to make their holistic admissions systems as opaque and complex as possible). 

There’s another dimension to the American system.  As Jeff Selingo explained a few weeks ago when he appeared on our podcast, holistic admissions, as practiced in the US, is not really about equity, or equality, or trying to come up with an alternative, less academically-oriented definition of merit.  In fact, what selective American universities are trying to do is “craft a class”: that is, to create a student body which is diverse on multiple axes.  It’s about the balance of talents across an entire class, not the specific talents of any individual.  It’s an utterly unworkable idea, because you can craft as good a class as you want, but there’s no way to tell which students will accept your offers and which won’t.  But it’s how selective American universities roll.  And as Jeff told me in our interview, without the notion of “crafting a class”, holistic admissions in the US simply would not exist.

Now, here’s where the idea of importing American ideas of holistic admission gets strange.  In the US, each university only has one entering class, because down south you get admitted to a university, not a program.  In Canada, most mid-sized universities in effect have 30-60 entering classes because of the way our admissions systems are built around programs.  If you think it’s a lot of work crafting one class around multiple axes, imagine what it’s like doing it 30-60 times.  And remember, we Canadians love our cheap.

So ok, maybe we don’t need to craft a class/do holistic admissions for all programs.  Maybe just the 10-20% that are in highest demand?  Well, that might work.  Say a program had 500 applicants but only 50 spots.  Right now, based purely on marks, that would probably mean students would need a 95%+ to enter.  But why not, say, make the academic cut off at 85% or 90% and then judge students on a variety of factors that might partially favour students from disadvantaged backgrounds?  Sure – though frankly, if that’s the goal, why not save yourself the work and just go straight to a system of cutoff-plus-lottery?

Here’s the thing: if holisitic admissions are a means to an end, and that end is equity and diversity, you must acknowledge that in Canada, where we are not burdened by all that Bakke nonsense, there are much faster ways to achieve that end.  Dalhousie, for instance, reserves 40 spaces in its Nursing program for Black and Indigenous students.  The University of Toronto has separate Student Application Processes for Black and Indigenous students that don’t (quite) guarantee spaces but do provide a potential alternate route into the institution.  Engineering might benefit from adopting the Olin College strategy of simply saying that every starting class should be 50-50 male-female.

In other words, before anyone gets too carried away with the idea of holistic admissions, it’s worth being clear on purpose.  If it’s to improve ethnic or gender diversity, ask whether more direct and effective means aren’t possible.  If it is to create a broader definition of merit for the sake of producing more well-rounded students (and hence more well-rounded graduates) – which may or may not move the needle on diversity in the way direct entry streams do – then that’s fine too: just be aware of the scale of the workload required.