Admit Ivy League Students by Lottery

The time has come to say this aloud. Admission to the most selective colleges and universities in the United States simply is not an academic meritocracy. The current lawsuit against Harvard—accused of discriminating against Asian Americans—charges that admissions staff use not just grades and test scores, not just records of extracurricular activity, but also intangible factors of personality to decide who gets in and access to the treasury of Croesus. How those readings of applicants’ personalities shade over into culture and race seems to be the core of the case. The underlying logic is that applicants who are better students are being passed over because the portraits their portfolios paint are not sparkly enough.

            But for decades it has been the case that the nation’s most selective colleges make their admission decisions not solely on the basis of academic merit. When I was admitted to Princeton back in 1986, getting in was relatively easy—only 80% of applicants were rejected, compared to the 95% routinely rejected today. At some point in the distant past there was an academic cutoff—if your scores were good enough, you got in.* Now there are always fewer seats available than there are valedictorians, people with perfect test scores, and students with flawless GPAs bolstered by extra points for AP and honors classes in the applicant pool. In short, there are far more students who could clearly benefit from the rigorous academics of elite institutions than can be admitted. If you wanted an entering class that was nothing but wrestlers, you could surely build one from the qualified applicants.

            We also know that university admission is not an academic meritocracy because the faculty’s preferences are not the ones used to make most of the decisions. I am haunted by a scene in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel Admission, based on her experience on the decision-making staff at Princeton. Unable to make sense of an applicant’s essay about zombies, the protagonist sends it to a philosophy professor asking whether it is the real deal. The professor responds “Definitely. Absolutely. Yes, please.” A student like this is admitted as a rare “one for the faculty.” The balance of the applicant pool can certainly do the work required to earn an Ivy League degree, as testified by graduation rates, but it is their potential contributions to the rest of the university’s community life that tips the scales toward their admission: their prowess in fencing, their French horn, their entrepreneurial spirit, their proven leadership in student government.

There does exist an admissions meritocracy in American universities, one that culminates in the PhD. If you want to go to an academic (as opposed to professional) graduate school, you apply to a department and the faculty of that program decide whether to take you (assuming you meet the minimum criteria set by the university). Although faculty selection processes are surely far from perfect, they are skewed much more to the question of academic achievement than to a holistic view of an applicant’s potential community contributions. But imagine if you will what would happen if faculty got to select as the entering class at Harvard the students with the most potential for earning a PhD. They would pick the people most like themselves. You would get a yard full of nerdy gifted kids gleefully oriented to lab and library and a football team the size of the basketball squad. If Harvard wants to graduate a class that influences every corner of society, then it cannot leave admissions up to a faculty-based predilection for outstanding academic potential.

            So, what is an elite university to do? I suggest a more randomized approach to admissions. Use the admissions staff to identify everyone who is capable of thriving academically at Harvard and its peers. Then hold a lottery for admission among those applicants. Assuming the university doesn’t put its thumb on the scale—for the children of alumni, for “one for the faculty,” for tuba players, for underrepresented minorities, for first-generation college students—you would probably end up with a student body that looked pretty much like the applicant pool AND that would spread itself out into a broad range of post-graduation endeavors. The universities could even put their thumb on the scale for some percentage of the class that it needed politically or socially—or as an experiment to see how this idea works out—and leave the rest up to the lottery admissions. At a 5% admissions rate, it already feels like a lottery from the outside. Maybe it’s time to make it one on the inside as well.

*Unless, of course, you were a member of a group that was systematically excluded (women, African Americans) or capped (Jews). The history of the intersection of inclusive admission criteria and the cranking up of competition to get in is unclear to me. It is simple to say that with the widening of the applicant pools, standards went up and competition became more intense. But without inside information about actual admissions practices, it is hard to when the use of cutoffs shifted to evaluation of non-academic criteria.

Tara Westover’s EDUCATED: A MEMOIR

Tara Westover’s Educated is marketed as 2018’s Hillbilly Elegy. The surface level plot is about how your family—in Westover’s case, insular Mormon survivalists in Idaho—can mess you up, and how education can save you. Westover’s publisher won endorsements from J.D. Vance as well as Vance’s Yale Law School mentor Amy Chua. It is centrally about the redemptive power of education.

Educated’s effectiveness, though, lies in charting the path of education and its political significance. Hillbilly Elegy’s power is in J. D. Vance’s intimate descriptions of the chaos in his family, especially the ever-shifting cast of boyfriends in his mother’s life. Vance grew out of that experience into a moderate Republican, convinced of the power of the disciplined individual to move into a stable and gratifying personal life. Educated’s politics are more basic, not partisan, but about the polis. Westover’s political message lies in her unpacking of how education works. For her first sixteen years, Westover had no formal education. Although she was nominally homeschooled, her formal teaching was limited to reading and basic arithmetic. In its etymological Latin sense, to educate someone is to “lead them out.” Westover’s education leads her inexorably away from her natal family by teaching her how to see the world from multiple perspectives. While education permanently fractures her family, it also liberates her.

            Drawing on the tools from her doctoral studies in history, Westover’s primary sources for reconstructing her escape are her journals and emails and the memories of some of her siblings, as well as her own recollections. It takes some three quarters of the memoir for Westover to unfold the horror at the core of her family. Her father’s extremist stance against public education, the government, and the “Medical Establishment” animate the book from the start. But it is not his beliefs themselves that are the core problem for his daughter. What Westover ultimately cannot live with are the physical and emotional abuse from her brother, her father’s prioritization of his patriarchy and business over his children’s well-being, and her mother’s willful blindness.

Overlapping with her slow recognition of her willingness to rupture the family bond is Westover’s narrative how accessing a formal education allowed her to see the world entirely differently from the paternal indoctrination that shaped her childhood. In the second three quarters of Educated, we slowly watch the scales drift from Westover’s eyes. As she realizes that her new educated worldview will permanently sever her from her family, she falls into a temporary madness, wasting her a fellowship at Harvard binge-watching television instead of working on her scholarship. But by the end Westover has triumphantly earned a PhD with a dissertation that includes, inter alia, an analytical reading of the Mormon sacred texts that she grew up studying with religious eyes—a radical break.

            Westover never went to school until she was seventeen. After teaching herself enough mathematics to win a high-enough ACT score to be admitted to Brigham Young University, Westover begins to learn about events that her parents never bothered to let her know existed, starting with the Holocaust. More important than her ever-increasing knowledge, though, Westover shows herself moving through three essential epistemological problems. First, she has to learn how to distinguish what is true. The process starts in her dormitory, where she is astonished that the roommate with “Juicy” written on her backside goes to church. Initially, most of the other (similarly immodest) Mormon students at BYU seem to be what her family would have called “gentiles.” After several false starts, Westover learns that her roommates and new friends can teach her valuable things about how to get along in the world—including the importance of washing one’s hands after using the bathroom and that you have read the art history textbook, not just look at the images.

            Next, Westover reveals herself discovering the existence and value of perspectives other than the sole view cultivated by her family. That there is more than one way to see the world comes home to her most dramatically when her abusive older brother mocks her face blackened with dirt from summer work and spends months calling her the N-word. Westover narrates how she suddenly connected his taunts with the images of Civil Rights demonstrators she had learned about in a history class at BYU. Recognizing that her family “had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others,” Westover stops laughing along; “The word and the way Shawn said it hadn’t changed; only my ears were different.” (pp. 180-181).

            Finally, Westover explores whether one’s own memories can be trusted. In the book, she narrates several events whose exact sequence and details she remains unsure of, even when she was present as a witness to their aftermath—one brother’s burn, and another’s brain injury. Rather than just accept her own versions, historian that she became, Westover consults with the siblings who are still speaking to her to reconstruct what probably happened. She also flags those narratives as potentially unreliable and what the uncertainty over the exact details means for what kind of man her father actually is, softening his portrayal from a dictator to a fallible and flawed man. As further testimony to her intellectual honesty, Westover also marks passages where she has paraphrased emails instead of quoting them directly.

In short, Westover’s memor shows how far she has come from the certainties of the single worldview of her childhood. While there are things that are true, there is also more than one way to see the world, and a careful person acknowledges the limitations of her vision.

In these senses, Educated is a paean to the value of a liberal arts education. The education Westover received at conservative Brigham Young University, and then the venerable University of Cambridge and Harvard University, was not indoctrination in politically liberal values like tolerance, compassion, and the Democratic party—not the brainwashing of “liberal professors” (p. 134) that her father railed against. Instead, it was liberal in its fundamental (again etymological) sense: liberal as free. Westover’s education literally freed her from the bonds (=chains) of her family, whose patriarch systematically forced them to acknowledge only a single point of view—his. Westover shows us that education that is liberal—literally liberal—sets you free.

This praise for education is a vital political message for 2018, which perhaps explains why this book is resonating so deeply with American audiences.[1] If Hillbilly Elegy gives us insight into Trump voters, then Westover’s memoir reminds us how the skills embedded in liberal education—delivered with nuance, modesty, and skepticism—matter in securing American freedom and democracy.

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2018).

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[1] As of this writing, Educated is #44 on Amazon’s bestselling books list, with 906 customer reviews. There are a few negative reviews, including one that doubts Educated’s credibility and compares it to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

What I Witnessed at the Walkout

I. I witnessed hundreds of children—fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders—exit the building in complete silence at 10 in the morning.

2. I witnessed my own tall daughter, earlier enraged and drowning in tears, calmly lead off the speakers at the podium and loudly proclaim her right to safety and education.

3. I witnessed children, one two three at a time, realize that they had something to say and discover the courage to say it.

4. I witnessed a snowplow carefully placed at the entrance to the blacktop and city police stationed around the perimeter of the field.

5. I witnessed a child whose mother died of cancer demand safe schools.

6. I witnessed a child whose mother teaches math renounce all guns in schools, his face stretched in passion.

7. I witnessed the principal nervously checking his watch as the allotted twenty minutes ticked past and decide not to silence any child who wished to speak.

8. I witnessed scores of children recognize their need to speak, respectfully duck around their speaking classmates, and wait patiently in line for their turn.

9. I witnessed recording equipment for posterity but no microphones for the speakers.

10. I witnessed the crowd cheer every child who spoke, even the ones whose words I could not make out.

11. I witnessed a child in a T-shirt and no coat decide to watch everything without complaint, for an hour, in 30 degree cold.

12. I witnessed a child stop speaking, overcome by tears, and other children rush up to stand with her to help her finish.

13. I witnessed my own grief blossom into pride, love, and hope.

14. I witnessed a black girl and a white girl, hands clasped, declare themselves best friends and call for everyone’s safety.

15. I witnessed a few planned remarks and scores of impromptu speeches.

16. I witnessed the best thing I have ever seen in a school.

17. I witnessed more than one hundred children find their voices.

A Professor Responds to Parkland

Dear Students

I am going to exercise my privilege as instructor to take a few minutes at the start of our class time to respond to what happened in Floriday yesterday.

The world so often seems like an awful place. When we are whole enough to get beyond our own immediate feelings, I believe that there are three things we can do to address the terribleness of the world.

1. We can influence our government to address the causes and effects of problems. We can urge them to create new laws and programs that will help, and we can urge them to eliminate laws and programs that are dysfunctional.

2. We can respond to distress among our fellow humans with decency and compassion. This means we must take care of ourselves, our families, and our friends; and we should also seek to help those who are consumed by disordered cognitions and emotions, instead of turning away from them.

3. We can create and spread knowledge and ideas. I cannot articulate the depths of my feelings about this, but I know at the core of my being how much education matters.

Although I believe all of these things, I have committed my professional life to the third--the dissemination of knowledge. In that spirit, I refuse to let one murderous person derail what I am able to offer you in the privileged setting of this classroom. If you are too distressed to make good use of today's lesson, I understand that and encourage you to address your emotional needs and take care of yourself. You are welcome to return to class when you are ready. I will be here.

Sincerely

Amanda