<p>I've been a big fan of Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz ever since I heard him interviewed a few years ago about there being too many choices in modern life (The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less). The Atlantic magazine has picked up his idea that colleges should turn to a lottery system to even the playing field amongst qualified applicants to highly competitive colleges.</p>
<p>Maybe if Swarthmore and a few other elite schools were to go this route, the others would follow? Think of all the warm fuzzies that would result if you knew your kid was good enough to enter the pool even if he or she lost the lottery! :-)</p>
No one deserves to get in. The do deserve to be considered for admission. That presumably the way it works now, except it’s not a lottery to be selected but based on an admission board’s decision. With some colleges being <10% admission rate it probably seems like a lottery anyway.</p>
<p>I think he’s arguing that, all things being equal, this young woman was as qualified (or “deserving”) as any of the kids who gained admission. Let’s not forget he’s a Swarthmore professor; I’m assuming he’s a pretty good judge of the overall quality of the student body – at least as good a judge as the AdCom members!</p>
<p>He fleshes out the idea in more detail here:</p>
<p>Isn’t the point of holistic admissions that the adcoms can create a diverse class? A lottery system could easily produce 18 tuba players yet only one flautist. How about a small department like Classics? What happens when that department dries up because the chosen lottery students have interests elsewhere? A small school doesn’t have the number of available seats to leave things up to a lottery. Isn’t that what big State Schools are for?</p>
<p>I’d like to see the pool seriously limited to kids who “deserve” to apply, whatever limits particular colleges would set. Sort of a take on the system in many European countries. Forget the idea so many kids have that all they have to do is pay the fee and list all the colleges they want. It just burdens the process to have to slog through kids who don’t have the goods.</p>
<p>The problem with a lottery is that colleges want more than x number of admits- they need to create the right balance, in and out of classrooms, various sorts of diversity, enough science majors to make use of that new lab, maybe not too many kids in a dept that’s got a few profs on leaves of absence. Some kids who’ll pursue certain activities, etc. But, since you have to have the academic strengths to thrive at a particular school, why open the wide end of the funnel to just anybody?</p>
<p>Not all profs, btw know all the institutional needs. Plus, they may be expert on the sort of kid their dept favors- and not know what makes a good student in another specialty.</p>
<p>It would be hard, not easy, for a lottery system to produce a class with 18 tuba players. (I bet Swarthmore doesn’t get 18 tuba applicants most years.) But it would be easy to overcome that point – the school could just create as many mini-lotteries as it wanted among the qualified pool. For string players, woodwinds, brass, legacies, actors, National Merit Scholars, Hmong. Whatever. Recruited athletes would doubtless be outside the lottery pool, too (as they are now). Or some could be outside the pool, and others in a special Football Blocking Dummies lottery.</p>
<p>The problem with Barry’s suggestion is that it’s not clear how it differs from the current system. He acknowledges – and I think admissions people also acknowledge – that the results of the current system are not really distinguishable from a lottery. What he really wants is for elite colleges to send a message to high school students that they don’t have to be perfect, that they can take risks and still get admitted to Harvard (or wherever). But, guess what? The colleges DO send that message, all the time. And no one believes it. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, high school students keep insisting that “stats” matter. And they do matter, at some colleges, just not so much the ones Barry is looking at.</p>
<p>High school student angst over whether they will get into Harvard or Stanford or have to “settle” for WashU is one of those obnoxious “first world problems” (also known as WPP) that really don’t cry out for a solution. I think we have been operating under Barry’s regime for at least a decade, maybe a little more, and the effect has generally been what he would hope, just not quite as wonderfully as he would like.</p>
<p>JHS, of course I was exaggerating about the 18 tuba players. Can you explain how the mini lottery thing would work? How does an applicant decide which catagory they are in? If they apply as a choral student, are they bound to join and participate in choral activities, and for how many years? Same for a sport or an academic discipline. I am open to idea’s, but I just don’t see how a computer is going to choose a well rounded class in a smaller size school than the adcoms can.</p>
<p>If you weighted the SAT heavily, it might be difficult for a 98%ile student (like the young lady in the article) to even make the “good enough” pile for Swarthmore under this scheme. THere were 32,000 kids in that bucket last year, more probably if you count superscoring and ACT equivalents. For kids looking to LACs Swarthmore is going to be very popular. Adding some sort of grade and EC threshold might winnow it a bit, but there are just too many highly accomplished kids applying these days.</p>
<p>So you’re just going to have the same sort of competition and gaming to get into the draw. They will likely come up with holistic quick picks.</p>
<p>Hm. It’s obviously a metaphor, as JHS suggests, to provide a model of how elite admissions does work. Once an applicant has the chops to be considered, random factors do come into play, like how aggressive the regional rep is, just to give one example.</p>
<p>DS was sent a likely letter from Wesleyan and then a rejection and then a phone call accepting him off the wait-list the day after the rejection letter came, before he even sent back his acceptance for his first choice college. It made absolutely no sense, but I figure it was a p****** match for regional reps.</p>
<p>The idea is truly borne out when applicants are rejected from three Ivies and accepted to Harvard. If there were really a “merit template” that wouldn’t happen.</p>
<p>A lottery randomizes choice in one way; the real world in another. If the heating is broken (or air conditioning depending on climate) on the day the committee is considering an application that might lessen the chances of the acceptance. Or if another candidate from the same high school has just that day been put on the accept pile an hour before they look at the second dossier.</p>
<p>Having said that, I think both my kids acceptances were right in line with the schools that were best for them. They were each rejected at schools that were not as selective as some of their acceptances, but truly, those schools were not as good fits.</p>
<p>So half lottery, half well-considered set of deliberations.</p>
<p>For me, this sentence destroyed the author’s credibility. Failed? Come on. He doesn’t tell us where the extremely accomplished young lady example ended up, but I am confident it was somewhere good.</p>
<p>Each school, even among the Ivies, has different strengths and different needs. Doesn’t surprise me a kid could get rejected at 3 Ivies and accepted to H. Or any similar pattern. Maybe the whole thing should be like the football draft, what little I know of that. </p>
<p>Mythmom, I hope it wasn’t one of those likely letters that suggests the kid can now consider withdrawing apps to other schools.</p>
<p>What a lottery would not account for is the truly exceptional students–not those who are “good enough,” but those that are considered so exceptional that they get offers of admission from every school they apply to. One of my kids fell into that category (received likely letters, personal notes, and ultimately was accepted to every school, which were mostly ivies). Clearly her accomplishments made her desirable to any school. We’ve known a few other kids like this who had unique talents that made them a catch for any school. And what about athletes? How would these schools fill their rosters if students are selected by lottery?</p>
<p>I think applications would greatly increase at any of the already selective schools if it is announced that they would pick 1-5, or whatever number of students from the rejected stack just for the pure serendipity of it.</p>
I think the idea is that a committee is already considering the interests and activities of each applicant and whether they might participate in X, Y or Z. So the committee would decide which category to put them in. If Suzy has been playing the tuba for 10 years, they can reasonably assume she might continue to do so. If there are 18 tuba-playing applicants and they only want to accept 2, they could put all 18 names in the mini-lottery. Of course, it gets complicated if 3 of them also think they want to major in French and the French Department is clamoring for more admits!</p>
<p>While I agree that they might as well make it a true lottery for the “average” BWRKs and let the admissions fall as they will for the tippy top schools, I also agree that there are some superstar students who would be unfairly treated if a lottery was put into place. At my son’s high school, the few admits to the highest ranked schools were so clearly superstar material that it surpised nobody where they were accepted (and they were accepted everywhere, their stats really were amazingly stellar). Not so much my son, a typical BWRK who is thrilled to be going to a school he loved, we can afford, and knew he would get into.<br>
Of course, we all know a lottery is never going to happen…and if it did the fight would be over who was qualified to be admitted to the dance and who was not.</p>
<p>The mini-lottery idea: I can’t imagine that it would be too hard to set this up. Presumably, when the Admissions Committee is sculpting their wonderful class – and I don’t know how much any college with a yield too far below Harvard’s really does this; I suspect not much at all – they pay attention to certain categories, like tuba players. (As for prospective French majors, I bet they don’t pay attention to that at all. My guess is that the demographic that applies to highly selective colleges yields a pretty predictable level of French majors without anyone doing anything special, so they don’t.) So if they need a tuba player, they could pull all the tuba-player apps out of the pool and pick two or three to accept and three more to waitlist (in case none of the first choices commits), and then reject the others or return them to the general pool. (And tick off any other special category any of the lucky tubaists fills.)</p>
<p>As for recruited athletes, they aren’t ever going to be part of the lottery system, and maybe recruited superstar scholars don’t have to be, either. But that gets into dangerous territory. Inherent in the lottery plan is the notion that really good application-writers like catalina’s daughter don’t really need to get accepted everywhere. And to have the benefits Schwartz wants, people have to really believe that there’s no advantage in trying to look better than good enough.</p>
<p>Schwartz’s plan has two big problems I can think of. One is that there’s no longer any incentive not to apply everywhere. If you don’t believe that your particular match with a school is going to give you a better chance of acceptance there, then you improve your expected outcome with every application you file. So why not apply, at the very least, to the top 40 colleges/LACs? Then, since there’s no incentive to winnow out colleges before you apply, you will have kids making decisions in a frenzy in April. Kind of like now, but probably worse, because their acceptances will have been truly random. (Also, ED would probably have to go to make the system work.)</p>