Giving Compass' Take:

· Highly selective colleges are facing scrutiny for their admission decisions. According to The Atlantic, a number of elite schools are being questioned by the Department of Justice in regards to their admission decisions, believing that some processes may be violating federal law.

· The processes these schools use for deciding admissions are kept in secret. What factors could go into these admission processes? Why have highly selective colleges kept their processes from the public?

· Read more about college admissions and how we could help the process.

Getting into America’s top colleges is extremely hard, but making sense of how it’s decided who gets in is arguably even harder. By and large, colleges—especially the most selective ones—are allowed to keep their methods to themselves.

Terry Hartle, of the American Council on Education, the leading group representing colleges and universities, calls admission to an elite college “very desirable, exceptionally competitive, and inherently subjective.” Hartle’s first two descriptors are reason enough to examine how institutions choose who to let in, but—given how lucrative it is to hold a degree from such institutions—it’s the third that most invites scrutiny.

Recently, it has been the Department of Justice that has taken up the invitation. Over the past year and a half, the department has started a handful of inquiries into the practices of a number of elite institutions in order to see if their admissions processes violate federal law.

Late last week, several highly selective colleges received letters from the department regarding “a potential agreement between colleges relating to their early decision practices.” The news was first reported by the trade publication Inside Higher Ed. The “agreement”—under which colleges are thought to pass information to each other about which students have gotten in where— may constitute an antitrust violation in the eyes of the Justice Department. Wesleyan University, Wellesley College, and Middlebury College are among the institutions that received the letters.

Read the full article about selective colleges by Adam Harris at The Atlantic.