For the Admissions World, “Merit” Was the Word of the Year

One day after entering office in January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that banned what it called “discriminatory” diversity, equity and inclusion practices in the federal government, promising to “restor[e] merit-based opportunity.”

It was the administration’s first mention of merit, which would soon become a buzzword both in and out of the higher education context. In a joint address to Congress in March, Trump said that under his leadership, individuals would be “hired based on merit” rather than race or gender. As the administration reached agreements with universities accused of perpetuating antisemitism on campus, institutions like Columbia University agreed to “maintain merit-based admissions policies.”

In most cases, the administration has positioned merit in opposition to the use of racial preferences in college admissions, a practice that Trump has railed against and claimed continues—despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on affirmative action.

Higher education leaders have long argued about what merit actually entails in the admissions process. Some believe it should be quantified only by measurable academic metrics, such as grades and standardized test scores. But others argue that nonacademic achievements such as creative talent, leadership skills, commitment to service and even traits like kindness and empathy can both indicate academic excellence and improve the overall campus community.

What exactly the Trump administration means by merit remains unclear. In July, a Department of Justice memo regarding DEI practices referred to academic merit as a “universally applicable” criterion for deciding things like scholarship awardees. The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the agreement the federal government requested institutions sign in exchange for preferential treatment in funding, asked universities to agree to make admissions decisions “based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the University’s website and available to all prospective applicants and members of the public.” It also asked the universities to require applicants to submit standardized test scores.

No Simple Formula

Despite the lack of consensus on the meaning of merit, Americans overall seem confident it’s a worthy metric for admissions. Several Gallup polls in the 2000s and 2010s showed that about 70 percent of respondents think that merit should be the sole factor used in college admissions and that race shouldn’t be considered. (The polls didn’t delve deeper into how the respondents defined merit.)

“Advocating for merit is a political winner,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, the director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s American Identity Project and an advocate of class-based affirmative action. Trump’s speech to Congress celebrating what he characterized as a return to merit was a “good moment, politically, for Republicans, because most Americans believe in merit.”

College applicants and their families often view merit as the gold standard of admissions. Experts say it’s not unusual for students with the highest grades and test scores to assume they’ll easily get into top universities regardless of their nonacademic credentials.

“Many students and parents think that there’s a formula—they put in a certain number of variables, like great test scores, and then it just checks the box and there’s a line drawn and it’s as simple as that,” said Adam Nguyen, the founder of Ivy Link, an admissions advising firm for students aspiring to highly selective colleges. “In reality, it’s contextual, and it’s about institutional priorities.”

Factors other than academic performance have been included in college admissions for at least a century, according to Julie Posselt, who leads the Center for Enrollment Research Policy, and Practice at the University of Southern California. Initially, the goal of such policies—collectively known as holistic admissions—was to ensure that the campus community was a microcosm of society, rather than filled solely with students whose only focus was studying and achieving perfect grades.

Now, college leaders broadly say that building a diverse community where students can learn from one another’s strengths and life experiences is vital for creating a vibrant academic environment.

But the purpose of holistic admissions has also shifted, especially in an era when Ivy League institutions receive upwards of 50,000 applications each year. At those institutions, the majority of applicants have perfect or near perfect grade point averages and test scores and have taken the most rigorous courses at their institutions, requiring admissions officers to look at other factors to differentiate among them. In a 2023 blog post, Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber wrote that his institution rejects about 18,000 applications each year that are “so good that you could substitute one of them for an admitted student without any loss of quality to the entering class.”

When the vast majority of applicants qualify on academic merit, it renders the term virtually meaningless, Nguyen said.

“At the elite institutions, the Ivy league and Stanford, Duke, et cetera, those metrics usually function as a baseline,” he said.

Colleges also seek students that fill particular niches on campus; according to admissions lore, those who hope to get admitted to their dream college should learn to play an unusual instrument like the oboe, since institutions sometimes seek out students to fill slots in particular extracurriculars or majors. And while those talents fall under the umbrella of merit, they might lead a college to accept a student who is less academically qualified than other applicants in the pool, said Seth Allen, vice president of enrollment management and dean of admissions at Dickinson College.

“We want athletes to compete on our fields and on our courts. We want musicians to play in our orchestra, in our glee clubs, in our a capella groups. We want artists to inhabit our art studios to showcase the art to the campus community. We want budding poets to practice their craft on campus and delight faculty and fellow students,” he said. “That’s its own form of merit, as well.”

One institution has attempted to base its admissions solely on quantifiable factors: the University of Austin, the yet-unaccredited institution started in 2021 by a group of high-profile conservative figures. In a blog post announcing the system—which automatically admits anyone who scores over 1460 on the SAT, 33 on the ACT, or 105 on the Classical Learning Test, a conservative standardized test—the institution’s leaders wrote, “At the University of Austin, your merit earns you a place—and a full tuition scholarship.”

But not everyone who opposes affirmative action thinks that holistic admissions should be entirely abandoned. Shawna Bray, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a right-leaning think tank focused on eliminating racial preferences, said that she agrees that holistic admissions criteria can help students from disadvantaged backgrounds stand out; she herself came from a small town in Iowa where she didn’t have access to advanced coursework at her high school. But to improve socioeconomic diversity, she said, colleges must value extracurriculars that those students would have access to—like Future Farmers of America—the same way they consider expensive sports and hobbies like fencing, tennis or playing an instrument.

Kahlenberg, too, opposes race-based affirmative action; he testified for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC, the case that resulted in the Supreme Court’s ban. But he supports “economic” affirmative action that gives preference to low-income or first-generation students.

“If a student has a certain SAT score or set of grades and they came from a low-income family where the parents weren’t college-educated, where the neighborhood schools were pretty lousy, and they managed to do pretty well despite that—that’s something that most Americans favor,” he said. “They don’t see that as a deviation from merit; they see that as a measure of true merit.”

Imperfect Factors

Beyond the importance of holistic factors, measures like GPA and test scores can be flawed, admissions leaders say. Students from higher income brackets tend to do better on standardized tests, research has shown, likely in part because they can afford tutors and test preparation materials. Research at some institutions has also found that while test scores do correlate with college success, all students who score above a certain threshold are likely to do well, meaning small differences between scores are not useful.

Grades, too, are subjective, according to Joshua Eyler, the senior director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi and the author of Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It (Johns Hopkins University Press 2024).

“An individual instructor sets the learning outcomes, develops the assignments, activities, exams, et cetera, [and] creates the criteria by which those activities are assessed,” he said. “So, the grades, at most, are a reflection of student progress on one instructor’s learning goals for a particular course in a particular context. The grades given by a colleague for the same course given just down the hall reflect that person’s learning goals and assessment metrics.”

Admissions officers generally consider a student’s context, including their income bracket and where they went to high school, when evaluating factors like grades, test scores and the rigor of the courses they took in order to account for the imprecision of those metrics.

Still, Eyler noted that the notion that “merit can be neutral to opportunity gaps” encourages the mentality that under-resourced students should be able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps in such a way that they now meet our admissions requirements.”

Of course, the use of legacy preferences also looms large over the merit debate. Three-quarters of Americans say they do not approve of colleges considering a student’s legacy status in admissions, and many colleges have stopped doing so over the past decade. But a significant number of highly competitive institutions still employ the practice.

Despite the Trump administration’s focus on merit, though, they aren’t pushing to end legacy admissions.

“If you were truly committed to merit, one of the first things you would do would be to put pressure on universities to eliminate legacy preferences, which are essentially affirmative action for the rich … so one has to question the follow-through on that commitment,” said Kahlenberg.

It’s unclear how Trump’s focus on merit will continue into the new year, or whether his pleas for more meritocratic admissions will be heeded. In rejecting provisions of his compact, some institutions stressed that their admissions decisions are already meritocratic.

Angel Pérez, the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, told Inside Higher Ed that the Trump administration’s rhetoric around merit concerns him, especially as the Department of Education prepares to receive data about college applicants’ test scores and GPAs broken down by race.

“It does seem to me like anything that is related to students of color enrolling in college seems to be anti-merit to this administration,” he said. “I think we have to call a spade a spade here. It seems, at least in the behavior of this administration … that any time an institution has made any progress in enrolling students of color that they are going to be under attack.”

He also noted that the administration’s failure to define merit means they can “question or sue … if they don’t like what an institution is doing, if they don’t like their data. If you get extremely specific, it makes it much harder to attack institutions.”