For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about reshaping the ethos of college admissions to emphasize character and virtue.
In 2016 Harvard’s Making Caring Common project published Turning the Tide, a report endorsed by 200 colleges that called for a refocusing of the college admissions process to reduce achievement pressure, promote equity and access for economically disadvantaged students, and send strong signals to young people about the importance of ethical engagement. “High school students have been hearing that what’s important is high numbers of AP courses, or being a good athlete,” says psychologist and Making Caring Common faculty director Richard Weissbourd. “They’re not hearing loudly that ethical character is important.” But while Turning the Tide and its 2019 follow-up report’s call for action provided a good first step towards change, Weissbourd and his colleagues realized that many colleges’ well-intentioned steps towards reframing the values of college admissions were still falling short. “Many schools could do a better job drawing on the science of character, defining what these traits are, and preparing reviewers to really assess those traits and virtues,” Weissbourd says.
Over the past three years, Weissbourd’s team has been developing a toolkit for colleges to evaluate applicant character in ways that are systematic, inclusive, and fair. The project, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation, included a year of research and surveys, pilot studies in a dozen high schools across the country, and further distillation into a report and set of resources for college admissions offices, scheduled to be released in summer 2020. Trisha Ross Anderson, Making Caring Common’s College Admissions Program Director, says that although the team began with the hope that they could come up with a single set of proven tools and practices that could be replicated across different colleges and universities, pilot studies in five partner colleges have convinced them that for character assessments to work in college admissions, a much more individualized approach is needed. “This is really much more about a process that colleges can walk through, asking themselves hard reflective questions about what’s important, how to define it, how to assess it,” Anderson says. “It’s a choose-your-own-adventure story, based in research and best practices.”