What’s Kanye wearing? What’s El*n driving? What’s Besos buying?
If you believe the answers to these questions are relevant to your life than the New York Times might be the best paper for you to learn about the college process. If you pattern your life choices after what a billionaire or celebrity does, if you think that brand is all that matters in college admission, the NYT is for you. If not, then you should probably never bother to read it about college admission or at least read it with a careful and critical eye. This is because I’ve been forced to conclude that the NYT doesn’t write about college, it writes about a few highly rejective colleges. Yes, I said that intentionally . . . a few.
But let me rant less and demonstrate more.
Let’s start in 2018, when I did a little searching in the NYT archive and tweeted about it.
My search in their archives found that they wrote very very very few stories that weren’t about Harvard. In 2022, I tried to quantify this a bit more carefully and made this chart that looked at the headlines in the paper by their primary (they have several) education reporter.
As you can see, the reporting in the NYT has a particular focus, which might be fine if they were transparent about that focus. But they aren’t. They suggest they are talking about college rather than “a few colleges.”
So, why is this a problem?
One, because this isn’t where most students go to college. It doesn’t represent college. This tiny subset of colleges shouldn’t be presented as the default aspiration of anyone seeking to go to school after 12th grade. It doesn’t benefit the public. I could go on and on, but let’s instead ask who does this benefit and, perhaps more importantly, what is the harm? More and more I come back to the harm-benefit question. I coined “highly rejective” in part because of that. Yes, this college selects 4% of its applilcants (benefit) and might be called “highly selective”, but that ignores that it rejects 96% (harm?) of them and thus is perhaps more accurately called “highly rejective.” To brag about one but ignore the other is creating a falsely rosey picture.
Two, this feeds the drama and stress around college admissions. I expect the “paper of record” to be better than Town and Country magazine. At least T&C is honest about who its writing for and its lack of interest in the public. It has a clearly defined audience , but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell them apart. Here are a few headlines published in the last few years, can you tell which are from the NYT, T&C, or NYPost:
- This Year’s College Admissions Horror Show
- 2024 Was the Year That Broke College Admissions
- Early Decision Results Are in For College Applicants—Was It a Bloodbath Again?
- The College-Admissions Process Is Completely Broken
- Have College Admissions Returned to a Normal Level of Crazy?
- Why Parents Can’t Quit the Elite College Arms Race
- The Misguided War on the SAT
If you’re not immediatly sure which is which that says a lot about the state of journalism at the NYT. Despite its national profile, the NYT has always leaned heavily in on being the paper for the wealthy kinda-liberal New Yorkers, I think it has gotten worse.
The ways in which reporting influences our preception goes beyond headlines. The use of adjectives is another subtle and pernicious way in which writers (at every paper) influence our perception and the conversation. Elite colleges. Top students. Happy meals. Best schools. Objective tests. All of those adjectives are ascribe qualities to a thing that isn’t an objective description, it’s an opinion. Robert Mcguire recently posted this on LinkedIn:
Again the NYT shows its bias. The use of these adjectivies implicitly describes these schools as better without telling us how or better at what. Based on available data, we know they enroll more rich kids, have more in their endowment, and tend to feed to consulting firms and investment banks more than other colleges do but is that what you would consider elite? Should that be the measure of a good college? Is that because of the college or because of the nepobaby status?
Why is this?
Perhaps what we should be asking is why. Why does the NYT have this bias? Where is journalistic objectivity? Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab, which perhaps ironically is a journalism lab funded by Harvard, explored who works at the NYT and you might not be surprised to see his findings:
How does this happen?
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not a media conspiracy theorist, but the more I learn the more jaded I become. This blog post was motivated by this article in Inside Higher Ed, in which the writer tells the tale of how NYT wrote asked them to write and oped, but had a very particular narrative that they wanted to oped to push. It wasn’t looking for objective journalism, it wanted to frame a narrative. It seemed the editor wanted to reinforce certain beliefs. According to the author, the NYT said they wanted “a piece about selective admissions with the framing that this year an already-crazy system went truly bonkers.” When the author pushed back, offering to reframe the conversation about the more broadly applicable FAFSA crisis they balked and “got someone else to make exactly the argument they wanted.”
The story is behind a paywall, but Jon/John/Joe Boeckenstedt on Xwitter does a good job breaking it down here (its a thread which you can only read in full if you have a twitter account).
As you read articles, espeically ones that feature for-profit business like college consultants, remember that many of them are pitched by the consultant to the newspaper and end-up creating the narrative.
So what’s the real deal?
With regards to “college,” we should remember that college means lots of different things. It covers everything from community college to medical school depending on who you are talking to. But if we use college to mean a place to get a bachelor’s degree, than most students aren’t considering (maybe you should), applying to (maybe you should), or enrolling in highly rejective colleges. Here is a great chart from James Murphy (the chart is great, the man is mid*) at Ed Reform Now that let’s you see where most students go to college.
Any story that doesn’t at least acknowledge which sector they are reporting on is doing the public a disservice. For another way to look at the data, I pulled from the government’s IPEDS database the admission rates of colleges that award bachelor’s degrees (some 2 year colleges give bachelor’s degrees). Here is what I found from 2022 admissions data:
| Percent admitted | Number of institutions | Percent of institutions |
| 0 – 10 | 33 | 1.5% |
| 11 – 25 | 58 | 2.6% |
| 25 – 50 | 154 | 6.8% |
| 50 – 75 | 498 | 22.0% |
| 75 – 100 | 948 | 41.9% |
| Total colleges | 2265 | 100.0% |
| Total reporting admit rate | 1691 | 74.7% |
Most kids go to It’s unfortunate that the paper of record continues to create a false impression of higher education and warp the conversation about admission rather than to support the public good or at least encourage a full and fair discourse that benefits the public at large. I wrote about this differently a few years ago but I think this post still useful.
Anyway, I say all this to say, buyer beware . . . when you read the NYT about “college” make sure you’re asking “what college” and “how many colleges” otherwise you might confuse the practices of Xaviers School for Gifted Youngsters and the Massachuchets Academy (great schools for mutants but probably not relevant to the rest of us) with the practices of all or most colleges.
Do better, NY Times, do better.
*You guys know I kid about James Murphy being mid right? He’s a good friend who I was in Real World: Korea with and I just want to see if he’ll read this or if I have to go full SW on him.
The answer to the article headlines:
- This Year’s College Admissions Horror Show (T&C)
- 2024 Was the Year That Broke College Admissions (NYT)
- Early Decision Results Are in For College Applicants—Was It a Bloodbath Again? (T&C)
- The College-Admissions Process Is Completely Broken (NYT)
- Have College Admissions Returned to a Normal Level of Crazy? (T&C)
- Why Parents Can’t Quit the Elite College Arms Race (NYT)
- The Misguided War on the SAT (NYT)
Bellowings 