> There is a simpler and more honest alternative: set a clear academic threshold for readiness and then admit students by lottery.
What minimum SAT score are you imagining here? There aren't that many students in the country who score 1550+ (though you could argue that would change as admissions criteria changed of course). I'm confident that fewer than 100k students would score a 1550+ on the SAT and a 5 on three AP exams, for example—and this is assuming they know those to be the only admissions criteria for eligibility in the lottery. I made some estimates here: https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/college-admissions-doesnt-need-to
In general, I don't understand the fascination with lottery systems, which prioritize a confused notion of fairness—unless the goal is merely to reduce the amount of effort and other resources students spend on the admissions contest, in which case you should make that explicit as the goal and try to quantify the costs and benefits that you're trading off.
> Once that bar is met, selection by lottery acknowledges an uncomfortable, but honest truth: beyond readiness, differences among applicants are often too small, too subjective, or too context-dependent to rank meaningfully ... Faced with thousands of academically capable applicants, institutions insist on ranking the unrankable
Your implied argument is that it's literally impossible to distinguish the top e.g. 10k students (out of a graduating class of 4 million) from the top 100k students. But you don't defend this assumption at all.
Reducing the amount of effort and other resources students spend on the admissions contest is a worthy goal in and of itself. Give our bright high schoolers their lives back.
Are you going to allow departments to do their own admissions? Outside of the most selective institutions, some departments require far more capable students than the general student admission bar - and institutions want those most capable students. I did my degrees in Physics and Engineering. I did my BS at an open admissions state university, but the Physics for Physicists class started with ~ 200 students the freshman year - and was down to about 5 by the end of the sophomore year. The math department similarly filtered the math students who chose to major in math. Such filtering is probably still universal in the STEM areas.
I suspect demonstrated interest should matter more. It’s harder for some students than others to visit or credibly express interest (a problem that could be worked on), but it’s a win-win for both students and colleges to have students who actually want to go there.
I agree with most of your particular points—most of the holistic admissions stuff is silly—but I’m not sure about the frame, which seems to be: colleges should be meritocracies where measures are objective, and all remaining noise, of which there is a great deal, will be handled purely by luck. I don’t think I’d want to operate, or apply to, a college run in that way. I’m not sure that this wouldn’t be doubling down on what is ossified and broken about college.
In the new lotteried equilibrium, there's a good chance that matters of interest would at least largely take care of themselves. Instead of needing to apply to very many colleges to hedge bets, where you were secretly much more interested in some than others but attempting to signal interest to all, you could know just statistically how many you needed to apply to, with your own stats, to have a great shot of getting into somewhere satisfactory. And presumably it would be much easier and quicker to run multiple rounds of admissions, not just early decision vs. regular. Willingness to commit earlier rather than later of course filters for interest. Perhaps colleges could tick up the objective bar as the admissions year wears on, even.
In my reading, part of the problem addressed by the post is that students are currently forced to spend their formative years jumping through many costly hoops in order to "signal their interest". The credible signals are the essays and extracurriculars and all the rest of the insane admission process--who would go through all that if they weren't interested?
Lotteries are a wildly underrated policy tool and not just public policy. It would also cut through the problems with things like Taylor Swift or Super Bowl tickets or whatever.
I think part of the problem is that this arises in areas of super high demand, which is to say things people really really badly want, and there's just some weird American psychology thing with leaving that up to chance and not letting people go to insane lengths to "buy" it.
But it's such a big and wide-ranging problem and lotteries are such a killer solution that even dipping the toe in (give enrollment to PART of the class via lottery, whatever) would bring a lot of benefit.
Why do you say only wealthy people can "take advantage" of test prep and retaking the SAT? College Board has a lot of free prep material, and it only costs $68 to take the SAT.
> There is a simpler and more honest alternative: set a clear academic threshold for readiness and then admit students by lottery.
What minimum SAT score are you imagining here? There aren't that many students in the country who score 1550+ (though you could argue that would change as admissions criteria changed of course). I'm confident that fewer than 100k students would score a 1550+ on the SAT and a 5 on three AP exams, for example—and this is assuming they know those to be the only admissions criteria for eligibility in the lottery. I made some estimates here: https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/college-admissions-doesnt-need-to
In general, I don't understand the fascination with lottery systems, which prioritize a confused notion of fairness—unless the goal is merely to reduce the amount of effort and other resources students spend on the admissions contest, in which case you should make that explicit as the goal and try to quantify the costs and benefits that you're trading off.
> Once that bar is met, selection by lottery acknowledges an uncomfortable, but honest truth: beyond readiness, differences among applicants are often too small, too subjective, or too context-dependent to rank meaningfully ... Faced with thousands of academically capable applicants, institutions insist on ranking the unrankable
Your implied argument is that it's literally impossible to distinguish the top e.g. 10k students (out of a graduating class of 4 million) from the top 100k students. But you don't defend this assumption at all.
Reducing the amount of effort and other resources students spend on the admissions contest is a worthy goal in and of itself. Give our bright high schoolers their lives back.
Are you going to allow departments to do their own admissions? Outside of the most selective institutions, some departments require far more capable students than the general student admission bar - and institutions want those most capable students. I did my degrees in Physics and Engineering. I did my BS at an open admissions state university, but the Physics for Physicists class started with ~ 200 students the freshman year - and was down to about 5 by the end of the sophomore year. The math department similarly filtered the math students who chose to major in math. Such filtering is probably still universal in the STEM areas.
I suspect demonstrated interest should matter more. It’s harder for some students than others to visit or credibly express interest (a problem that could be worked on), but it’s a win-win for both students and colleges to have students who actually want to go there.
I agree with most of your particular points—most of the holistic admissions stuff is silly—but I’m not sure about the frame, which seems to be: colleges should be meritocracies where measures are objective, and all remaining noise, of which there is a great deal, will be handled purely by luck. I don’t think I’d want to operate, or apply to, a college run in that way. I’m not sure that this wouldn’t be doubling down on what is ossified and broken about college.
I would co-sign this one and have said as much (very briefly) before myself: https://x.com/gtmom/status/1959408291022295179
In the new lotteried equilibrium, there's a good chance that matters of interest would at least largely take care of themselves. Instead of needing to apply to very many colleges to hedge bets, where you were secretly much more interested in some than others but attempting to signal interest to all, you could know just statistically how many you needed to apply to, with your own stats, to have a great shot of getting into somewhere satisfactory. And presumably it would be much easier and quicker to run multiple rounds of admissions, not just early decision vs. regular. Willingness to commit earlier rather than later of course filters for interest. Perhaps colleges could tick up the objective bar as the admissions year wears on, even.
A matching system could handle this?
In my reading, part of the problem addressed by the post is that students are currently forced to spend their formative years jumping through many costly hoops in order to "signal their interest". The credible signals are the essays and extracurriculars and all the rest of the insane admission process--who would go through all that if they weren't interested?
Lotteries are a wildly underrated policy tool and not just public policy. It would also cut through the problems with things like Taylor Swift or Super Bowl tickets or whatever.
I think part of the problem is that this arises in areas of super high demand, which is to say things people really really badly want, and there's just some weird American psychology thing with leaving that up to chance and not letting people go to insane lengths to "buy" it.
But it's such a big and wide-ranging problem and lotteries are such a killer solution that even dipping the toe in (give enrollment to PART of the class via lottery, whatever) would bring a lot of benefit.
Why do you say only wealthy people can "take advantage" of test prep and retaking the SAT? College Board has a lot of free prep material, and it only costs $68 to take the SAT.