Giving Compass' Take:

• In this story from AEI, author Frederick M. Hess argues that elite colleges should switch their admissions processes to a lottery, just like K-12 charter schools.

• The author's central argument is that we cannot "trust [elite colleges] to make subtle distinctions when it comes to sensitive issues like race and merit." If this is true, are admissions lotteries the only and/or the best way to restore accountability? Would removing competition from college admissions limit the incentives for high school students to excel academically?

• To learn more about how poor students survive once they arrive on elite college campuses, click here.

Last week’s college admissions scandal occasioned endless commentary, with most it of seemingly focused on all the problems with America that it illuminated. I had a somewhat different take. As I argued over at Forbes:

This isn’t an indictment of America but of the elite college cartel and the pathologies that it has enabled and exploited. It’s an indictment of the way elite colleges sell fast-passes to lucrative jobs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, of the manufactured scarcity that they have cultivated, and of the way they have avidly marketed that scarcity. When colleges sell access, or are so inept that they make it easy for the rich to buy access, this . . . is an indictment of elite colleges.

 

If admissions offices cannot detect even rudimentary corruption and institutions can’t stop themselves from selling access, it raises the question of whether we can trust them to make subtle distinctions when it comes to sensitive issues like race and merit.

Given that, I offered a modest proposal:

Maybe elite colleges should put their money where their mouth is when they pontificate about the need to democratize opportunity, take a page out of the K-12 charter school book, and switch to lottery admissions.

 

Lottery admissions would help dissolve the relationship between where people went to school, how talented they’re presumed to be, and where they would ultimately work. Students, of course, would still be free to apply to the campuses that they find the most attractive and most convenient. Faculty at elite colleges would still do their research, teaching, and mentoring, just with a less curated (and self-impressed) student body. Obviously, all this would only affect a sliver of American higher education, in any event, since most colleges aren’t selective.

Read the full article about elite college admissions lotteries by Frederick M. Hess at the American Enterprise Institute