I think this idea falls to realize that all “academically qualified” students are not created equal. It also doesn’t solve any of the advantages that people utilize to improve test scores or manage grades.
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If you run a lottery to take in students, the colleges won’t remain elite. It is the students that make a college elite.
And if the author cared about the issues he claims to care about, he should have turned down his admission to Princeton back when he was a student.
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This idiotic idea seems to get rediscovered on a regular basis by people who seem to have no idea that the admissions process is not random at all at the extremes.
Applicants to highly selective colleges are like candidates that apply to highly selective employers. Some don’t meet the basic minimum criteria and can be rejected right away. Their chance of acceptance was zero. At the other extreme are candidates so clearly strong that employers want them right away. Their chance of acceptance is near 100% if the employer thinks they will join. In between the extremes are candidates with various levels of strength, and they might get picked, or not, later in the decision process based upon subjective criteria, which is somewhat random.
Bringing this back to college admissions, a large percentage of applicants are neither in the absolute accept or absolute reject category. They are in the “qualified but not exceptional” category. A small fraction of them will be accepted, which is why many conclude the entire process is a lottery.
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Of course, for both colleges and employers, some applicants can be “hooked” and therefore more easily get admitted or hired compared to “unhooked” applicants.
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Why should the cutoff be the 25th percentile of accepted students? That would lead to dilution of academic standards at many universities since yield will still be much higher amongst students close to the minimum vs students at the top end of the range for those students with multiple acceptances.
If merit (which in this article is equated to test scores) is supposed to be the one deciding factor beyond randomness then why not pick the 50th percentile as the cutoff or the 75th percentile? Or simply choose three times as many candidates with the best scores as there are places and decide between them? Perhaps that could be done with an academic interview? Of course then you would have Oxford’s admission process…
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I will skip over the sheer stupidity of the udea, since I think that everybody here sees it immediately, and better than I in most cases.
Warning - rant ahead.
There are seriously disturbing levels of privilege, elitism, and how he absolutely dismisses the issues which plague any family which is not in the top 20%, or even 10% by income.
I mean:
Yes, maybe in the super wealthy community in which he grew up, and some of the students there (or maybe even most of the students).
However, the kids who are not in the top 10% or 20% by income are not even considering “elite” colleges. They’re worried about being able to pay for the in-state directional college that Mr Walsh doesn’t even know exists. They’re worried about even going to college, or have given up on the idea of college and are worried about being able to earn enough to pay for a place to live and food.
The crisis in higher education is that 80% of the students have a difficult time paying for any college education, not the the some of the kids from families of the top 10% by income cannot attend a college which their parents deem to be sufficiently “prestigious”.
As far as Mr Walsh seems to be concerned, there are wealthy kids who are going to attend college, and there are the Real Colleges, like his Alma Mater, Princeton, then the Lesser Ivies, like Brown or UPenn, then the lesser Colleges, Like U Chicago or Vanderbilt, which are for those Lesser Beings who are not as superior as he is.
PS. I wondered what Walsh believed the rest of the high school graduates do. What I came up with was this:
The unwashed masses of inferior kids all attend something called “pup-lick yoon-aversities”, where they spend their days watching football and drinking low-class beer. This main activity is punctuated by short periods of sitting in giant lecture halls, being lectured about stuff that superior kids (like Walsh) learned in kindergarten. The lectures are provided by “professors” (if they can be called that) who are there because they are unable to deal with the scintillating brilliance of superior being like Walsh who attend the Real Colleges.
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Advocacy for using lottery in “elite” college admissions isn’t new. There’ve been many articles, and even books, advocating such ideas. If college admissions have a set of criteria, any one of the criteria is an impediment to some groups of people somewhere. If the mission of achieving greater diversity is more important to a college than that of better education, then it naturally follows that the college should remove all such impediments (i.e. criteria) to admissions. Perhaps only a small minority of people are in favor of getting rid of all admission criteria at the present time, so colleges are just removing them one at a time. 
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I think the problem is that most applicants fall into the gray area - some version of your “average excellent” kid. Judging by the Harvard lawsuit data, relatively few applicants are academic outliers and those kids are getting accepted at much higher rates (of course, still not getting accepted as often as recruited athletes which is one of the few sure bets in Ivy admission). I have no proposed solution to this conundrum but I don’t think an actual lottery is it. So, I agree that admissions aren’t a lottery for a few subgroups of applicants, but because that pool is dwarfed by the others, it gives the impression that admission is a lottery for everyone.
Admissions will be a slam dunk for only some 10% all the time. By construction. Because the colleges have made so. They have made the criteria fuzzy enough to make it a non slam dunk for everyone else. It doesn’t have to be that way. The 85th percentile kid is excellent by most metrics. Harvard just won’t admit it because it limits their choices. Their desire for diversity of a particular kind is so large that they weight it very very heavily making the 85th percentile kid’s admission probabilistic. Indeed this is the symptom of their behavior. Not the primary driver for us to make admissions more chaotic and unmoored to underlying fundamentals.
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At holistic schools, the criteria are not fuzzy at the college level though. Their app reading process, internal rubrics, and institutional priorities are clear to the admissions staff. The problem seems to be that because it is fuzzy to outsiders, it bothers some who want more transparency.
I am not sure why people have a strong desire for more transparency…maybe so they can direct their kids to try and fit an institutional priority (but that wouldn’t work because institutional priorities change often), or so they can armchair quarterback the admission process, or so they can be (misguided) arbiters of ‘fairness’ (again impossible because people don’t agree on what is fair)?
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There is no fairness in elite college admissions. Schools have institutional priorities that outsiders are unaware of and these change from year to year. As the parent of a child who is considering a couple of T20 I have set the expectations bar very, very low. S24 is wonderful, and exceedingly bright, but not special to anyone but his family. We have not spent his teen years curating a list of activities to appeal to colleges - a waste of time in my view. He’ll go to college somewhere, after all, and if it isn’t one of his reaches that isn’t some kind of tragedy.
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I don’t disagree, and everyone’s definition of fair is different as I said above.
I can’t think of any group that thinks admissions are ‘fair’, including those of any race, some religions, those from some geographies, some with high stats, certainly not the oft maligned athletic recruits, for which 1,000s are competing for each and every slot…and believe it or not, many of those coach decisions are indeed made holistically.
To be fair though, since 1990 (using Harvard as an example), 53,000 people have graduated from Harvard College.
That’s still a lot of people. Not that I’m saying this is a good idea but even if 200 seats a year were given up to a lottery-type system, I don’t think it would stop Harvard from being elite.
It is weird to think that there are over 50,000 Harvad College graduates alive today. At last count, I read it was 120,000 Harvard College graduates living.
They could in theory keep some of those seats reserved for poorer people and Harvard would still remain elite. Not that they should or would - just playing devils’ advocate to that particular point.
Currently, 55% of Harvard undergrads qualify for need based aid (H has a generous FA formula), and 19% are Pell Grant eligible. I believe it’s approaching nearly 50% of US HS grads are Pell/partial pell grant eligible, but of course many of those students don’t go to college.
It would be interesting to hear more details on what “fair” would look like in college admissions. Would it be different for public and private schools? Should academics matter? Should ECs matter? Should we be surprised to find that students from financially stable families have better chances for strong academics and ECs
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I would argue that increasing diversity results in a better education for all the students. All learning during this formative time does not take place solely in classrooms. With income inequality growing, and the increasing segregation of classes, there are few opportunities for people of varying backgrounds, classes, and experiences to mix. Thus making it even more valuable that this can happen in college.
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Wouldn’t admissions by lottery result in the greatest diversity?
Isn’t that misleading though?
Harvard is very generous with financial aid to the point where if your parents make the median American household income, you pay nothing.
Being on aid != being poor.
I know someone who is on aid and their household makes more than $125k a year.
The median household income at Harvard (according to The New York Times) was $167,000. That’s not that much granted but it’s still 3x as much as what the typical American household makes (and this was years ago so that’s not a current figure)
Even the median college-educated household in the US only makes $105,000 a year and that’s a 2021 figure.
Now, I’m not saying Harvard should accept more poor people. And there are reasons why poor people are underrepresented that I don’t need to go into.
But Harvard says they care about diversity. But it doesn’t appear socioeconomically diverse at all.
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Depends who gets to be in the lottery.
Right now, there are fewer URMs and fewer pell grant eligible students in the college going pool to start with. (i know those examples are not the only type of diversity)
So, who gets to be in the lottery? All HS grads, regardless of their GPA? Those who only meet certain GPA and/or rigor hurdles (no way to make that equitable)?
If you make artificial cuttoffs to enter the lottery, academic or income or whatever, then the pool of what you probably have left is not equitable by many peoples’ measures. And on and on…
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I agree and would also point out that in some comments here and for sure in the great wide open there is this very strange notion that somehow the diversity is changing the overall academic excellence in some meaningful way.
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