New York Magazine has an interesting piece on the use of expensive consultants that can "package" college applications to improve applicants' chances of admission. Among the difficulties with such consultants is that they make an uneven playing field even more uneven: The same wealthy kids who have been given every opportunity to succeed are then helped even more by "help" in crafting the applications themselves. If you're a college admissions officer, I would imagine that this sort of thing is troubling. It makes it harder to assess real talent and hard work.

  I wonder if disclosure might help matters, at least a little bit. For example, I wonder what parents and applicants would do if the common application required applicants to disclose all of the help they received and all of the services and resources they used in the course of applying. You could make the disclosure a general one, or else make it very detailed. But I wonder if disclosure might help even out the playing field. First, it would discourage excessive packaging. Wealthy parents might want to give their kids a leg up by hiring a consultant to help Junior package himself for Dartmouth, but will they want to do it if Junior has to admit in his application that Ivywise was hired to help him out? Disclosure would help admissions officers, too, by giving them some useful context to evaluate applications.

  Of course, disclosure wouldn't work perfectly. For example, lots of applicants would probably misrepresent the help they received. And it's not easy to figure out what kind of information should be disclosed and what shouldn't. At the same time, disclosure might take us a tiny step forward in evening out the playing field for admission to competitive colleges.

  Thanks to Frank Pasquale for the link.