At Inside Higher Ed, Chad Aldeman explains that academic institutions just don’t have the resources to identify the most worthy student applications from within the colossal piles that they receive.
“The myth of a meritocracy, on which the selective admissions system is built,” Aldeman confesses “is substantially a lie.”
So how about a lottery? Here’s how it might work,
Institutions would set a threshold based on high school grades and SAT score and then open the lottery to anyone meeting those levels. A public university might have one lottery for state residents, after determining how many slots they should receive, and fill remaining spots with another lottery for out-of-state students. Everyone would have an equal chance of gaining admission, and the process wouldn’t be subject to influences from money, alumni, or human error. Students who submit scores would be eligible for admission to institutions without going through the tedious and expensive process of writing essays, asking for recommendations, and paying separate application fees to each institution. They’d pay one fee to be a part of the lottery. Institutions would save on the cost of operating admissions offices that would be better invested in scholarships or teaching.
If you believe that savings from the admissions office would really be reinvested in teaching, chum, then let me tell you about this amazing bridge in Brooklyn that I’m going to sell you.
Also, I submit that some of this tedious essay-writing and recommendation-requesting, along with research to find the right school, actually has bona fide pedagogical value, requiring the strategic thinking that will help make high school seniors into college students. Sure the application process has been reduced to something of an empty ritual, but that would be a peculiar complaint coming from educators who have in many cases taught the same survey courses for decades.
Finally, the logic here is just faulty. It would be one thing if the proposal was to abandon meritocracy as a matter of principle. But that’s not Aldeman’s position. Instead, he both laments the injuries being done to the ethic of meritocracy and also suggests that we ought to murder it. What kind of an argument is that? Hey: meritocracy hasn’t been working so great at Wall Street firms, either, so why not introduce hiring lotteries there?
If that sounds preposterous it’s because life isn’t a game, and neither is higher education. Too many students treat it that way already, and the lottery idea would only signal to them that there is little need to apply themselves seriously where it matters most – in the classroom.
