Although the article’s entitled, “Elite-College Admissions Are Broken,” the rest of the article discusses the Harvard lawsuit as a mere symptom of much larger cultural and socio-economical forces that cause greater demand than the available supply: “The lawsuit, it seems, is a byproduct of the fact that too many students are applying for too few spots at too few colleges.” “‘There’s a disease in that so many people are focused on 10 to 20 highly selective colleges that aren’t any better than 100 other colleges,’ says Richard Weissbourd, a developmental psychologist and Harvard lecturer… ‘If we don’t break the back of that [disease],’ Weissbourd says, ‘we can’t get rid of achievement pressure.’ The Harvard lawsuit is merely a symptom of this disease that will likely continue to metastasize.”
In fact, instead of offering any analysis of how the elite-college admissions are “broken,” the author devotes quite a space in extolling what good these elite-colleges are actually doing while pointing out various culprits (correctly) in everything else from Common App, USNWR rankings, to what the millennials and Gen-Xers’ want for themselves today and prestige as a top priority in incoming freshmen etc.
The article, from its content, should have been more aptly entitled, “Are Elite Colleges Victims of Their Own Popularity?”