Stanford Report, June 6, 2001
BY JOHN SANFORD
For roughly two decades, the month of December has rekindled an annual crisis for Robin Mamlet, Stanford's dean of admissions.
It's about this time that Mamlet, a longtime college admissions officer, starts to wonder why she has been vested with the authority to decide which students get to attend the school she works for.
"Isn't that sort of audacious? You know, what on earth makes one person qualified, or gives them the right to pass that kind of judgment?" Mamlet said Friday, during the second to the last installment of the 2000-01 Ethics at Noon series.
The weekly forum, sponsored by the Ethics in Society Program, invites faculty, staff and students to present a topic dealing with ethics. The floor is then opened for questions and discussion. The title of Mamlet's presentation was "Ethics and the Selective College Admissions Process: Not an Oxymoron."
Not surprisingly, Mamlet's vocation offers plenty of relevant material for a discussion about ethics. "I sat down yesterday to sort of start thinking about exactly what topics I wanted to cover here," Mamlet said. "My husband joked with me, 'Well, what are you going to do on the third day?'"
Her husband, Charles Brown, is director of medical development at the School of Medicine, and he "is fond of saying that you can see a person's values in their checkbook," Mamlet said.
As an admissions officer, however, Mamlet said she considers the spaces available for an incoming class of students like a checking account.
"And how an institution chooses to spend those spaces speaks volumes about who that institution is and what that institution in fact values," she said. But making those "spending" decisions -- especially when choosing between "right and right" -- is very hard, she said.
About three years ago, while working at Swarthmore College, Mamlet was having her annual crisis. "The dean of the college walked into my office and I sort of said, 'Oh, you know, Bob, why am I doing this? This is just craziness,'" she recalled. "And he said, 'I see. You're wondering who made you God.' And I said, 'Yes, I'm wondering who made me God.' He said, 'The president did. Now shut up and go back to work.'"
She said it was a good lesson in perspective -- the kind of perspective an admissions officer needs to get the job done.
The criteria
The job itself entails considering many different aspects of the university and characteristics of the prospective student.
"It's about equity. It's about fairness. It's about shaping or designing or even engineering a community," she said. "It's about extending privilege, judging circumstances, assessing opportunity, recognizing and weighing special talents -- the issues are broad-spread."
There are several areas where ethical concerns intersect with the admissions process at highly selective and expensive colleges. One such area involves what Stanford needs to build its class -- the "institutional need" -- versus what's fair to an applicant. These two concerns sometimes create a tension. For example, if Stanford needs an oboist, and an otherwise qualified student does not play the oboe, what is the fair thing to do?
The notion of a "level playing field" also can be a complex factor to consider in the admissions process, Mamlet said. "My question always is, At what point does that level playing field start?" she added. High school? Junior high? Elementary school? Pre-school?
And what is the university's responsibility to the future of America? What if a student in an impoverished school system is the best the school has ever produced, but still does not have the abilities to hit the ground running at Stanford?
These are just a few of the areas where admissions officials must tackle ethical questions.
A case study
During her talk, Mamlet laid out three examples of ethical dilemmas with which she had dealt over the previous three weeks. In one case, an international student had applied to Stanford without requesting financial aid. He was accepted. For students who are permanent residents of the United States or U.S. citizens, the university has a "need blind" application process -- that is, whether a student can afford to attend the university does not influence the admission decision. But the opposite is true for international students.
"This, I'm happy to say, is probably changing, but not for this year," Mamlet added.
Those who aren't in need of financial aid must fill out paperwork showing that they can afford the university for four years and, once admitted, may not apply for aid later.
In the case at hand, the international student later confessed that he actually needed financial aid after Stanford accepted him. He was accepted at Yale, where he had applied for financial aid, but he wanted to come to the Farm. And he told admissions officials that he had believed he could raise funds needed to make it happen. Indeed, he had come fairly close to raising enough money to cover the costs for the first year, and Stanford happened to have some money left in its budget for needy international students. Should Stanford give it to him?
Debra Satz, an associate professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics in Society Program, said the student honestly may have believed he could raise the money.
"I would have cut him some slack," she said.
A student in the audience said she thought it was not fair that other international students had applied according to the rules, fully aware that their chances of acceptance were slimmer.
Another student said she thought that, given the cutthroat competition for admission into Stanford, "it seems like working the system may be justified."
However, had this international student applied for financial aid, he probably would not have been accepted, Mamlet said. And she said that other, more qualified international students had applied for financial aid and been denied admission.
In
the end, the admissions officers decided against giving the student
the financial aid. They allowed him more time to raise the money on
his own, but he couldn't.
Robin Mamlet
