Since roughly the mid 1960s, college-admission selectivity has become a very big deal. It used to be the case that few people cared whether someone had graduated from Harvard or from a little-known school. But then, a few institutions figured out that they could boost themselves by looking very selective. Today, students and their families go through amazing contortions to look interesting to supposedly elite schools; there is a huge industry that does nothing except to maximize the chances for kids to get into one of them; and colleges have huge admissions operations to figure out which few of the vast number of applicants to admit.
Does this do any good?
In today’s Martin Center article, Rick Hess argues that it does not.
He writes: “It’s time for the Stanfords, Swarthmores, and state flagships to show that they’re actually effective at educating students and not just at vacuuming up high-achievers, parking them in lecture halls and TA-led sections for four years, and then handing them off to consulting firms and graduate schools—all while charging students massive sums for the privilege of being selected.”
But shouldn’t we want our “best and brightest” students attending the nation’s top colleges? Hess slays that notion. The “top” colleges are no better at educating students than are others, and in fact, they are often worse.
What would be better? Hess argues that admission by lottery would be preferable. He states that, “Consequently, the leaders of selective colleges should heed their own finger-wagging lectures about democratizing opportunity, take a page out of the K-12 charter-school playbook, and adopt lottery admissions. Such a move would help dissolve the relationship between where people went to school and how talented they’re presumed to be. This would shatter the ability of a few hundred selective institutions to sell taxpayer-subsidized fast-passes to good jobs and force employers to scrutinize candidates rather than alma maters.”
Hess makes a strong case.