The admissions policy to the CCNY school of engineering has one good property:  it is transparent. There are some requirements about years of mathematics, physics, chemistry taken at high school, percentage scores, and SAT score, and everyone who satisfies the requirements is admitted. The implementation of the requirements needs some guesswork by our admissions office and someone in our dean’s office, since the data is frequently not available as it should be, but that is a secondary issue.

There are, however, also some problems  with it.  First, we have almost no control on the number of students admitted this way, apart from closing admissions early. It is pure luck that our enrolment has been stable for several years (at the upper end of what we can reasonably handle). We are not at all selective, at least we would be if the applicants read the requirements before applying.

Second, we take the high school scores as if they were an objective measure, where it is obvious that different high schools have different standards. The only uniform measure that enters the admission decision is the SAT score, and that is well known to be not that good a predictor for what our students need to succeed. It would probably best if we had an open entrance exam organized by us; that would be a uniform measure that allows to be selective of students with the right qualification for engineering; only organizing such an exam for perhaps a thousand applicants would be very difficult, and of course it would discourage applicants that are not local. Perhaps we could split the system: admit everyone with highschool and SAT scores above a threshold, but also hold an open admissions exam, and admit the top ranked students from that.

Then there is the mystery of recommendation letters and the personal essay. Every applicant has to provide them, but actually they are never read. I always distrusted the system of recommendation letters; it is not transparent at all, but allows heavy bias by the judgement of some admissions officer, and the same for personal essays. We apparently ask for them because every college asks for them. We should just stop asking for them.

Peter Brass