Florida’s college admissions officers have to do a tough job — with class | Opinion

What’s Florida’s toughest job? The question arises at a time when many voters nationwide are curious about Florida and, coincidentally, when millions of Americans seemingly want to learn more about other people’s jobs — especially the toughest jobs.

The public’s job fascination is evident in the popularity of TV shows such as “Dirty Jobs,” which introduces viewers to jobs that typically involve hard physical labor performed under awful working conditions.

However, contenders for the title of Florida’s toughest job don’t fit into any of the dirty-job categories. Neither do they involve “running toward danger” as first responders do. Instead, they’re mostly white-collar jobs that, in Florida, may well involve a different kind of danger: abrupt termination.

Although some might argue that managing Ron DeSantis’ flailing presidential campaign could qualify as Florida’s toughest job, because it’s obviously very low in job security, that’s not it.

Others might contend that Florida’s school librarians have the toughest job. They’re supposed to evaluate books’ “age appropriateness” for students who mature at vastly different rates. One misstep could trigger a parent’s complaint and conceivably get the librarian fired. Even so, that’s arguably not Florida’s toughest job.

Many other Florida jobs — state attorney, college president — now carry an elevated risk of abrupt termination. But emerging as the top candidate for Florida’s toughest job is a position that, until recently, was little noticed within the burgeoning bureaucracy of higher education. It now faces new scrutiny and a host of challenges.

I nominate the administrators in charge of university admissions. They’re the gatekeepers to a college education, which, right or wrong nowadays, is often deemed the key to a good job and a happy life.

To say that these admissions officials are receiving mixed signals is an epic understatement. Consider their general goal of evaluating high school graduates’ applications and coming up with a freshmen class in accordance with criteria that, unfortunately for them, often clash.

Do you judge the students by their test scores? That may be one factor, but critics argue that tests are often culturally biased, and that anxiety causes some extremely capable students to perform poorly on high-stakes tests. Conclusion: Avoid an excessive reliance on test scores.

So, if not test scores, what about the applicants’ grade-point averages? A fair question, but one with the proverbial apples-and-oranges problem. Students given curve-adjusted A+ grades in an F-rated school may not be as deserving as B+ students who completed rigorous courses at an A-rated school. In academic lingo, it’s hard to obtain comparability of the data.

Of course, evaluating the applicants’ academic potential is only part of the job, albeit important in that admitting students who won’t be able to finish but, instead, will drop out disappointed and burdened by student-loan debt is a waste of time for the students and of university resources.

Beyond evaluating individual applicants’ qualifications, there’s now a need to examine each incoming crop of students collectively to ensure that it meets other worthwhile criteria.

For instance, will each freshman class include a fair representation of Florida’s very diverse group of high school graduates? And if that’s a goal, how do you achieve it when Florida’s governor had decreed that achieving diversity as construed in the usual sense — i.e. race, gender, ethnicity — must not be a goal for Florida’s public universities?

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education, in reacting to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June overturning the affirmative-action admissions practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, noted that the decision explicitly does not preclude policies aimed at achieving diversity in the student body.

Incidentally, that decision prompted several elite universities to review their admissions policies and take the commendable step of ending the practice of giving preferential treatment to “legacy applicants,” who often gained admission ahead of more-qualified applicants just because one or more of their parents were alumni and, no doubt, viewed as potential donors. In some schools, as many as 15% of the incoming freshmen were legacy students.

Granted, financial concerns can’t be ignored. If you’re in charge of admissions at a prestigious school where you have, say, 2,000 slots available and 20,000 applicants, accepting only 2,000 may well leave the 18,000 rejected applicants (and their parents) not only disappointed but also angry and looking for a way to sue you.

It’s different when you handle that job at a so-so school. If you have 2,000 slots and 20,000 applicants, you may want to accept all 20,000 in the knowledge that they also applied to at least a half dozen other universities where they were likely to be accepted. You hope at least 2,000 will show up because your university’s budget depends on their tuition and on taxpayer funding based on enrollment. Shrinking enrollment can lead to budget cuts.

Finally, just when you think you’ve done a decent job lining up a solid class that’ll benefit the students and the university, you learn that you neglected to check on the new students’ assorted talents.

You’re reminded of this when you get an irate call from the director of your university’s marching band. His complaint: Among the 2,000 incoming freshmen you admitted, there’s not one person who can play the damn tuba.

Tough job.