<p>Several years ago, Swarthmore psych professor Barry Schwartz ruffled some feathers in academia when he proposed (via a Chronicle of Higher Education article) a way to right some of the most egregious wrongs of the college-admissions process. Schwartz contended that the worst aspects of this process (especially the enormous unnecessary stress that it puts on our teenagers) could be alleviated if the hyper-competitive colleges replaced their current selection system with a lottery that would be open to all contenders who were "good enough" to make the cut. The "good enough" pile would include strong students who might have (God forbid!) a "B" in an English class or a 600 on an SAT. </p>
<p>I think that his attack on the "crap-shoot" nature of the admissions process is timely as so many talented seniors are receiving --or are about to receive--bad news from top-choice colleges while seemingly similar others are ripping open fat envelopes and dancing around the dining room.</p>
<p>This guy is mathematically inept, because that is a false statement. Stanford’s entering class is considerably more numerous than students with perfect SAT scores. </p>
<p>It’s an interesting essay, and I have bookmarked it on my browser as an example of commentary on the college admission process (with thanks to you, Sally, for posting the link here on CC). But he is going to need much tighter analysis and better command of the facts to convince me that his idea is an improvement over the current non-system.</p>
<p>I just read this in “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell. I think it’s a very intriguing system, and while currently it may seem a little out there, I think as students get more and more homogeneous in terms of exemplary academic accomplishments, a reform will be needed.</p>
<p>Haven’t read the article yet, but tokenadult’s comment reminds me of a statement made when we toured Duke–they said they could fill their freshman class three times over with nothing but Valedictorians, and were consequently reminding the kids that it takes more than grades and scores to make a well-rounded applicant. But man, don’t we all just want this to be OVER! These amazing kids are all being turned into basket cases by the stress–not to mention a few Moms! :)</p>
<p>Maybe by “perfect scores” he meant kids who have an 800 on at least one of the SAT or Subject test segments. There are probably lots of kids with one “perfect score.”</p>
<p>As for his general proposal of replacing the current high-end selections with a lottery, how is that going to reduce the “crapshoot” nature of the process? A lottery will make into a true crapshoot - totally random. Currently the process is more subjective than it is random - which makes it look random to outsiders, hence all the frustration. </p>
<p>There is a dose of good fortune in the current process - good fortune that you play the bassoon when the school needs a bassoonist, good fortune that the reader’s migraine cleared up before she got to your app. etc. But that’s not the same thing as randomness - where winners are selected for no reason at all. </p>
<p>A true lottery seems like nonsense to me. That would suggest above the basic qualification level students are all the same, that you cannot distinguish between them. I disagree.</p>
<p>I say this…eliminate the CLEARLY unqualified regardless of race or athletic prowess. All the others assign a number and pick them like lotto numbers out of a cage. When you have your class, that is it. Completely random and completely colorless and completely unbiased on any level for any factor, including legacy.</p>
<p>I am not kidding. </p>
<p>At least then kids know its a lottery and they either win or lose. But no SHENANIGANS.</p>
<p>^^Hey, if we are going to go for a true randomness by forcing schools to choose their kids with a lottery, you should also force kids to pick their schools randomly too. Why should schools have to live with randomness but kids still get to choose? No SHENANIGANS by kids either. Fair is fair. </p>
<p>This randomness should be a two-way street. You could assign kids into tiers based on their stats, and schools are already ranked into tiers by USNews. You would do the lotteries for one tier at a time. Out of one tumbling cage pops a tier 1 kid’s name and out of another cage pops a tier 1 school’s name; and off to college you go. No choice whatsoever. Totally random. Every school would have as many ping pong balls in the cage as they have slots in their freshman class, but every kid would have his name in there only once. Great idea, huh?</p>
<p>^ I once heard a very thoughtful and very wise admissions officer at Swarthmore say that in his opinion at least 80% of the kids who applied there were “well qualified” in the sense that their academic records indicated they were perfectly capable of doing the work and succeeding academically at that very challenging, very demanding college. He said when he first started doing the job he agonized over it because he knew he and his colleagues on the adcom were rejecting something like 5 out of every 6 well qualified candidates, mainly for highly subjective and, yes, random reasons; their job, he said, was not so much to decide which of the well qualified candidates were MOST qualified, but to assemble a diverse, balanced, and “interesting” class out of those who were well qualified. These days he consoles himself with the thought that, this being America, it’s pretty much a certainty that every one of those well qualified candidates will get into a very good college. Most won’t get into Swarthmore, but that’s OK because Swarthmore will get the class it wants, and the well qualified candidates will match up with other very good schools and, if they apply themselves, get excellent educations.</p>
<p>This is quite possibly the most honest and insightful thing I’ve ever heard from a college admissions officer. It suggests that in a way, we already have a pretty “random” process for college admissions at the most selective colleges, in which once candidates pass a certain bar of qualifications, they’re going to be selected more for the sake of variety of interests and backgrounds rather than on the basis of fine gradations of relative merit. Of course, that’s not pure randomness in the sense that adcoms aren’t making random decisions. But it is random in the sense that there’s a certain randomness to how any individual candidate’s interests and background stack up against the interests and background stack up against the subjective and largely non-merit criteria the adcom is looking for at the precise moment that particular candidate’s file comes up for consideration. </p>
<p>If you look at it that way, it becomes apparent that a lot of the stress associated with college admissions is self-induced, predicated upon a false assumption on the part of students and their parents that college admissions is a purely merit-based game, and therefore every acceptance or rejection should be construed as an indication of where the candidate falls in a rank order of merit. 'Tain’t so. Lighten up, people. If you don’t get into the college of your dreams, don’t take it personally. They may not be saying that in their judgment you aren’t qualified. They may simply be saying that even though you were well qualified, you were the third world-class bassoonist from suburban Chicago they considered this year, and having already accepted two they decided to pass on the third. But if you are a well qualified candidate—and if you applied broadly enough—you will get into a very good college and have an opportunity to get an excellent college education.</p>
token, stop toting this information around as if you have some magical insight. We all know how many kids get what SAT score. How does that help anyone when the information is public knowledge.</p>
<p>Why couldn’t we follow a different path to reform from that proposed by the Swarthmore psychology professor and have all applicants to some “top” group of colleges submit a rank-ordered list of their preferred colleges to a central matching organization, to which colleges would also submit a rank-ordered list of applicants? That is already done for medical residency programs in the United States after graduation from medical school,</p>
<p>and it is provable mathematically that the match algorithm offers the optimal trade-off among the different preferences of applicants and programs.</p>
<p>I think bright high school students on their way to top colleges could figure out their preferences well enough to deal with such a system, and the colleges ought to be able to deal with it too.</p>
<p>Students may increasingly move toward homogeneity in level of achievement, but they will never succeed in becoming homogeneous for fit. Fit is where the rubber meets the road, and no lottery can do such choosing. Yes, many students are self-selective when it comes to fit, but a surprising number are not: for them (or for their parents) it’s just random listings based on meaningless rankings – not far more important things like campus culture, size, choice of majors, opportunities in probable major, academic policies, available e.c.'s, housing options, financial options, location, and more.</p>
<p>Yes, the vast majority of applicants to selective U’s are “good enough” to do the work, but the vast majority do not necessarily belong there.</p>
<p>If that is what he meant, but he wasn’t clear on that point, it is certainly correct that students who gain a score of 800 on ONE section of the SAT number in the thousands. </p>
<p>I find it interesting how much most people here on CC and out in the general public, such as the Swarthmore professor, overestimate the number of students with “perfect” scores (that would be scores of 2400) on the new three-section SAT. My interest in this issue developed on College Confidential threads where some student would say, for example, “I only have a 2250, can I get into [name of some very respectable college]?” The wild-guess answers usually grossly overestimate the frequency of such scores and thus correspondingly underestimate the student’s chances (insofar as test scores are one element of a successful college application). Seeing students worry about this issue is what prompted me to post my FAQ thread, </p>
<p>from which any reader who is able to read a cumulative frequency table can discover that ALL colleges in the United States MUST admit students who didn’t perfect the SAT. (Only Caltech has a small enough entering class to enroll solely perfect scorers, but Caltech’s yield is a good bit less than 50 percent among the students it admits, and not all perfect scorers even apply to Caltech.) I wanted to disagree with the professor’s mistaken statement vigorously in order to reassure students who are worried about what are in fact very good three-section SAT scores, a worry I frequently see expressed here on CC. </p>
<p>For students who feel entitled to get into their favorite college by getting scores in the rare highest echelons of scoring, I once posted a different thread </p>
<p>reminding the few people who don’t know this about the correct point the Swarthmore professor makes, which is that test scores alone are not the only desired attribute of applicants for any college.</p>
<p>A good friend of mine who ran a medical residency program for many years suggested this to me eons ago. But I told him back then that, unlike with medical residency placements, the admissions process has a huge financial aid component, which could be a very sticky wicket.</p>
<p>The medical residency system might work out among a relatively small (and well endowed) group of colleges (e.g, the Ivies), if each college promised to appropriately aid all the students who ended up on their short list, but when you add other, less flush, colleges to the mix, I think that finaid would be the dealbreaker that keeps such a system from being feasible.</p>
<p>The lottery idea is silly, and I think the deans are absolutely right to slam it. Colleges aren’t actually picking students at random. They’re assembling a class that meets their needs based on a variety of factors.</p>
<p>The real issue is that people need to learn that admissions is complicated and that the job of adcoms is to promote their school’s interests, not to give you a cookie for doing well in high school.</p>
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<p>The students and parents do it to themselves, and I say that as someone only a few years removed from the process myself, and watched my sister go through it last year. I didn’t find it particularly stressful, and neither did she. Colleges shouldn’t be catering to people’s lack of perspective.</p>
<p>I know of countries (in Asia) with “capitalist” (I prefer the term “free-market”) economies and a college admission system that is essentially a national match system. But perhaps you are disagreeing with the author of the submitted article. Yes, I think it would be a hard sell here in the United States to go over to a system of lottery admission to the top colleges.</p>
<p>Well there wouldn’t be any truly “top colleges” with this system right? Selectivity is largely what gives a top college its status in the first place (granted there are other factors involved). The college admissions system as it is at present is simply a reflection of American values, which inherently favor stratification at all levels of society.</p>
<p>Not sure what to think of this thread as S2 is headed to Swarthmore this fall. I hope he was more than a crap shoot or a lottery choice, but who knows? All I do know is that I am really happy he is headed there. My son will be a Swattie and that is all that matters!</p>
