Before mailing out acceptance and rejection letters over the past week, thousands of colleges and graduate schools conducted their usual reviews of test scores, transcripts, and essays. But less publicly, admissions officers focused on something else: police databases, plagiarism checks, and reports by private-investigators.
There’s a new age of vigilance in academia. Spooked by incidents including guidance-counselor fraud in Los Angeles, blatant plagiarism at MIT and campus crime in North Carolina, colleges and graduate schools are shoring up their admissions process. In an era when applicants seek an edge with $500-an-hour "admissions consultants" and online essay-editing services, schools are using their own new methods to vet prospective students. Much like corporations that have been burned by CEO résumé scandals, universities are tapping into the burgeoning background-check industry to verify what’s written--or not--on applications.
The University of California system, which enrolls more than 30,000 college freshmen each year, now conducts random spot checks, asking about 10 percent of applicants to verify activities, grades, or facts from personal essays. Last year, five Division I athletic programs began using a law firm to conduct background checks on high school recruits. And this school year, Harvard’s undergraduate admissions staff added a former professional background checker. "We look at essays with a certain degree of skepticism," says Harvard College director of admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis. "We’re not shy about checking further."
Business schools have taken the lead in cracking down. After a couple of cases of B-school admissions fraud, corporate security firm Kroll started a Global Academic Verifications division in 2003. Kroll now does résumé checks on accepted students for about 20 business schools, including Wharton and Columbia. "Fake degrees, grade inflation, employment titles, or dates that aren’t true—we’ve seen it all," says Kroll’s Brian Lapidus, who oversees the division. Medical schools have also raised their guard. Last June, the Association of American Medical Colleges asked all of its members to include criminal background checks in their admissions processes.
Admissions officers say they have ways to identify heavy-handed parental editing, embellishments, and outright lies. Tainted applications can be easy to spot because they lack "internal validity"—a polished essay may raise eyebrows, for example, coming from a student with mediocre English grades. A simple Internet search can be used to spot-check athletic activities or scholastic honors. The latest innovation: downloadable SAT writing samples. Since the standardized test added a written component two years ago, colleges have been able to compare students’ writing proficiency on their SAT essays--more or less guaranteed to be their own work--with the prose that accompanies their applications.
The pressure to create a memorable application is growing as admissions brochures trumpet the importance of factors such as leadership, writing ability, and out-of-school activities. As a result, colleges have helped fan the perception that exotic pursuits and flawless essays are more important than ever. Lloyd Peterson, a former director of admissions at Yale and Vassar and current College Coach counselor, says the crush of applications "forces people to do things that they wouldn’t normally do."
