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.