After the U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions practices, the world of higher education has scrambled to find ways to maintain racial and ethnic diversity on campuses. One of the most commonly suggested methods is for colleges to put a greater focus on character, that bundle of mental and moral traits like determination, unselfishness, and curiosity that shapes outcomes inside and outside of the classroom.
Dr. Robert Massa, co-founder of the Character Collaborative
The Character Collaborative was recently acquired by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC), which will make its work the centerpiece of its Character Focus Initiative, announced last Thursday in the strongest sign yet of character’s newfound prominence. The Character Collaborative is offering a series of online courses to help admissions staffs incorporate character into their processes, with two focusing specifically on evaluating recommendation letters and college essays. The courses make it clear that colleges looking to successfully consider character may have to make a big adjustment.
The courses present research from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common Project showing that, when colleges have attempted to use character in the past, the capacities that they focused on were often chosen with no clear rationale, based on little evidence, and poorly defined. Often, application readers didn’t use formal rubrics or get sufficient training in character assessment. And performance character traits like diligence, grit, and initiative were often conflated with ethical character traits like compassion, honesty, and caring, leading to ethical traits getting short shrift.
The Harvard researchers recommended that colleges and universities consider these capacities separately, with performance and intellectual character traits being considered as part of an academic potential index, alongside traditional measures like grades, and ethical character being considered in its own domain with a separate weight. Colleges will have to create prompts to elicit this information from students and figure out how they are going to assess contextual factors, like whether a student has to work at a job that might affect his or her grades.
The courses also show that incorporating a character focus into admissions will be a long process. A school first has to settle on the character traits that best fit its institutional mission and establish common definitions of the traits through training of the admissions team. A college will have to determine which parts of the application provide the best evidence of those traits and determine what scale or combination of scales will be used to evaluate the applicants. An institution will have to create teams of readers who have gone through a norming process together and who read through the parts of the application in the same order. And finally, a school will have to be willing to follow up with external sources when more information is needed.
Dr. Don Hossler, a senior scholar at the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California
