On Readmitting Previous Students

I know that this is supposed to be a Chinese New Year update, but I thought we would take a bit of a serious detour instead today.

As some of you may know, I received my first rejection notice yesterday and, unfortunately, it was also from my first choice of school. At first I was absolutely inconsolable over the matter. How could my credentials not be sufficient to gain admission to this philosophy program? Certainly they have a large pool of talented applicants every year, but let us look at my qualifications and needs:

1) I have a 1400 GRE score which fits reasonably within the average.
2) I have already completed one thesis with a second one nearing completion.
3) I have presented a paper at a conference and given another presentation in-department in Hong Kong.
4) I have spent two years studying in Hong Kong at one of Asia's top universities (sure, that does not say much but they have accepted applicants from less-prestigious universities).
5) I have at least middling proficiency in three additional languages (Spanish, Latin, and both simplified and traditional Chinese).
6) I have actually held a job for more than two months (which counts for more than you might think).
7) I had two internal recommendations and two external recommendations, all from academics in the top of their specific areas.
8) I am married (not a qualification per se but I like to think it's a respectable trait).
9) I have actually done original research and designed a potential project for a doctoral dissertation.
10) My project uniquely fits a certain niche of interdisciplinary work that only a very limited number of schools can support with any real depth.

Now, with all of these things in mind, how could anyone think of me as a weak candidate? What did some other applicant do, save the rain forest with one arm tied behind his or her back?

Relax, man, and take a chill pill. A number of people have informed me that it is common practice for universities to reject re-entry attempts by applicants who were previous undergraduates...no matter what the situation of the applicant may be. Ah, okay, now we might be getting somewhere. It turns out that this may well have been (re: was) the case with my application. It never had a chance. The reason being? I already had a diploma from their institution.

I want to clarify that I do not feel discriminated against here, nor do I feel cheated or as if I was treated unfairly. I am very much aware that almost all colleges hold this policy and that almost any student would have been given the same treatment I was if he or she was in my situation. It is also not an unreasonable philosophy to hold: you want students to gain a cornucopia of experiences academic and otherwise; diversity makes the beast stronger. If I sat in the same place thinking the same thoughts day after day I would be both very unproductive and, more frighteningly, very boring. The horror. So the fact that this has remained a long-standing policy in American higher education should shock no one and, in fact, is rather comforting to those of us who worry it may have been a lack of credentials that resulted in our rejection. The message? "You're not stupid, we just don't want you back, er, think you should get experience elsewhere." Okay, thanks Ma and Pa, I'm sure it's not about avoiding the appearance of nepotism as well or anything. Okay, maybe there's a little snark here.

I am not done yet, though, because I want to critically examine this academic policy. Without any malice or spitefulness I can say that there are some significant drawbacks to rigidly holding to this admissions principle, the first of which is that it does limit the prospects of students who have very particular interests that may only overlap with a few select departments. If a student becomes enamored with a specific project that is only being pursued at one or a handful of universities, one or the only one of which happens to be his or her alma mater, then what is that student to do? Take it further: the best postgraduate option for that student is the alma mater. Now what? Switch interests or fields? Give up? That seems a bit unreasonable. Why should a student's options suffer, both in quality and quantity, simply because they were a previous admit? Granted, this will only happen in niche cases like mine, but it can and does happen and, frankly, it is probably something worth considering.

To be truthful, I am surprised this kind of thing does not happen more often. Due to the way we rush students through schools in the US, at the undergraduate level many of us only scratch the surface of the fields in which we end up pursuing further study. This brings me to my second point: since students seldom ingrain themselves in specific departments during their time as undergraduates (or, if they do, it is more an ingraining of acquaintance rather than depth; they rarely do any real work with faculty as opposed to under faculty) it may be overblown to characterize the pursuit of further study at the same institution as allowing such students to remain narrowly in a particular comfort zone. The argument seems even more inaccurate for students like myself who have been abroad and working elsewhere for at least two years. Clearly we have been out of our comfort zones for a while and are quite broad, it probably would not hurt to return to a university where we have very few, if any, deep connections with the faculty at large. Even assuming we did the relationship dynamic would be altered significantly by maturation of ideas and divergent experiences, that's simple psychology. Again, I definitely see the merit of the comfort zone concern, but it might be over-emphasized.

Let us take an example from one of the western world's favorite philosophers: Immanuel Kant. Kant has been lauded as a genius, a broad thinker whose ideas were significant in early modern philosophy and remain major points of discussion in  contemporary ethics and politics. Frankly, I think he should also make a fascinating case study for psychology. If the stories about his personal life are to be believed, then Kant, like so many other great minds, was a sad, strange little man. Supposedly he was extremely obsessive-compulsive and clung strongly to his habits. He would, I have been told, walk the same path at the same time in the same city every day. To the best of our knowledge he never really left Konigsberg, yet he somehow managed to produce works that continue to ground many philosophical arguments. Now, tell me something: if a man who never left the town he was born in could do all of that, then why should we assume the current human mind has declined so?

On a final note, I want to return to a matter I raised in point one, that a prospective student's best option might be where he or she completed an undergraduate degree. Now, when I say "best option" I don't just mean "best fit for the project". That's clearly a concern, but it's not the only thing to be thinking about. You also want to be thinking about your future career. If you plan to stay in academia, then you need to get into the most prestigious programs that you can that also support your work. Why? If you do not, then when you go job-hunting you may find your prospects of finding a new home to be, well...nil. That PhD you worked so long to obtain? Yeah, no, that doesn't matter because you got it from Backwoods U, even though your BA was from the University of Awesome.

This leads to a major conflict for people who just want to get the most they can out of academia: How do I plan my college career? That's right, you have to ask someone, at the age of around eighteen, how they want to spend the next four to twelve years. Do you know how many unknown and unsolvable variables there are in four to twelve years? I'll give you a hint: infinitely more than the known ones. Had I known what I would want to do six years ago, would I have made the same choices I did? Maybe (probably, as I try to live without regrets). The problem is that we're now juggling matters that cannot be known, and that's simply unreasonable. Compounding the dilemma is the issue of prestige: if you have already been to the best-rated, best-fit university as an undergraduate and you want to pursue a line of work that you discovered there, only to find out your options are extremely limited and all of the other options are career-killers, then what happens? Alternatively, maybe you think: well, perhaps it would be easier to just start at a decent but not great university and work my way up? Bzzt! Wrong answer, as only 1% of postgraduate admits in elite universities will be from non-elite schools. Bit of a catch-22, isn't it? So what do you do? I keep hearing things like "Change fields" or "Consider other job prospects." I acknowledge that I have to take these options seriously, but that also seems absurd. If someone is really dedicated to a particular line of study and is more than competent enough to flourish in that area, do we not value the idea of aiding this person in realizing his or her goals and, in doing so, benefiting the academic pursuit as a whole? Why would you not want the best people to have the best opportunities? You just end up stifling yourself in the process.

In conclusion, I want to restate that the thesis here is not to completely dismiss the "no readmissions" policy but, rather, to evaluate what I think of as some compelling counter-considerations that universities might want to reflect upon before adopting the policy rigidly. My motives, I hope it is clear, are self-serving only  in the sense that I am an academic, and I want academia to be able to flourish as a whole.