
Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005) - haltingproblem
https://www.chronicle.com/article/top-colleges-should-select-randomly-from-a-pool-of-good-enough/
======
hardwaregeek
One interesting example is the UT system. Because affirmative action was
banned in Hopwood v. Texas, the UT system resorted to a program where they
accept the top 10% of each high school's class into all UT schools.

It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique
that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high
school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds
like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes
into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or
disperse them, but that's another topic.

What I like about this system is that it helps a population that even the most
altruistically inclined admissions office overlooks: the unprepared. I've met
my fair share of students who are brilliant, hard workers but just do not play
the game. Whether that's because of ignorance, fear of failure or some other
factor, I do not know. They exist at every level; I've seen them for college,
for tech jobs, probably for high school admissions. If someone could build a
system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile.

~~~
emddudley
> One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a
> mediocre high school.

Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You
go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford
private schools.

I would assume this is the case for 95% of Americans. You must have had a
different experience?

My family was not wealthy so I did not get a choice whether to "play the
game". Actually, I don't even know what game you are taking about.

~~~
flowerlad
> _You go to your local high school_

Parents are often willing to move to areas where there are good schools.

~~~
emddudley
Yes, but students don't make that choice. Parents do.

~~~
DiggyJohnson
You don't think parents make decisions based on what they believed to be in
their child's best interest?

~~~
extralegos
If they can’t afford to, they don’t. Welcome to America. Most working people
here simply don’t have this kind of flexibility.

~~~
throwaway123x2
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted... it's true. If you can't afford
to move, you don't.

------
abeppu
A bunch of commenters here have gotten fixated on two questions: (a)
"meritocracy" and what it means or should mean and (b) whether the value of
top colleges derives mainly from being exclusive.

I think an interesting / illustrative case is the AMA as the credentialing
authority for medical schools. An association of people in the profession, who
have a clear interest in the supply of doctors being low, has a clear lever by
which to restrain the future supply of doctors. Independent of which specific
people get in and how, for the country overall, most of us would probably be
better off if more people got into med school, if there were more med schools,
and there were just more doctors working a decade from now. The important
question isn't just who should get the seat, but which policy choice gives us
a better health care system.

I'm guessing the same is true for other areas, but it's just less clear.
Rather than asking "who gets to go to the best schools", more interesting is
"what policies at the best schools give us a country we want to live in a
generation from now?" or "what choice yields the greatest benefit, not just to
the student, but to society?"

And if schools don't want to make choices from that perspective, if they want
to operate like luxury brands whose goods are valued mostly because they're
rare ... then maybe they shouldn't get tax exemptions around their endowments,
or public funds, or the respect and esteem of a population that thinks they
serve some higher, refined purpose.

~~~
mikeyouse
The AMA doesn't restrict the number of people in medical school, you're
thinking of residency slots, and they don't restrict that either. They're in
favor of expanding the number of residencies available since everyone knows
there is a shortage of doctors. The restriction comes from funding since it's
all Federal dollars to pay for the training.

[https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-
bui...](https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-builds-
efforts-expand-funding-graduate-medical-education-0)

Congress, and more specifically right now, the Republican Senate is the only
thing holding up funding tens of thousands of more slots (the bills are
cosponsored by ~130 congresspeople, of which 100+ are Democrats and by 17
Senators, of which 15 are Democrats)

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-
bill/2267...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-
bill/2267/cosponsors?searchResultViewType=expanded)

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-
bill/130...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1301)

~~~
wonder_er
If the parent's comment is true, I wouldn't trust the AMA to market itself
honestly.

Ditto for legislative solutions. There's too much conflict of interest,
susceptibility to lobbying, non-representation of marginalized groups or those
who _would_ be doctors but are not because of troubling practices, etc.

From Mises.org[0]

    
    
      To accomplish the twin goals of artificially elevated incomes and worship by patients, AMA formulated a two-pronged strategy for the labor market for physicians. First, use the coercive power of the state to limit the practices of physician competitors such as homeopaths, pharmacists, midwives, nurses, and later, chiropractors. Second, significantly restrict entrance to the profession by restricting the number of approved medical schools in operation and thus the number of students admitted to those approved schools yearly.
    
      AMA created its Council on Medical Education in 1904 with the goal of shutting down more than half of all medical schools in existence. (This is the Council having its 100th anniversary celebrated in Chicago this weekend.) In six years the Council managed to close down 35 schools and its secretary N.P. Colwell engineered what came to be known as the Flexner Report of 1910. The Report was supposedly written by Abraham Flexner, the former owner of a bankrupt prep school who was neither a doctor nor a recognized authority on medical education. Years later Flexner admitted that he knew little about medicine or how to differentiate between different qualities of medical education. Regardless, state medical boards used the Report as a basis for closing 25 medical schools in three years and reducing the number of students by 50% at remaining schools.
    

The article is thoroughly footnoted. One might take exception with specifics,
but it seems hard to argue that the above is not approximately correct.

[0]: [https://mises.org/library/100-years-medical-
robbery](https://mises.org/library/100-years-medical-robbery)

Edit: I see the downvotes, but don't see the justification. I know Mises is an
often-unpopular resources, but the above article is well-researched. If there
are problems with the line of reasoning, I'd love to hear your perspective on
it.

~~~
MereInterest
Though I can believe there being a preference toward reducing competition,
their argument is weakened by including homeopaths as maligned groups.
Homeopaths are not competitors with physicians, as that would imply that
homeopaths provide medical treatment. At best, homeopaths provide a placebo.
At worst, they actively poison customers (e.g. belladonna teething tablets)
and prevent them from seeking out actual medical care.

~~~
nmca
Whether homeopathy works (it doesn't) doesn't have a huge amount of bearing on
whether homeopaths compete in the market with physicians (they do), because
their customers are seeking the same thing.

------
JumpCrisscross
We have lower-hanging fruit.

If a college accepts students taking government-subsidised loans, or otherwise
receives any federal funding, it should not be permitted to consider legacy
[1] or institutional advancement for admissions.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences)

~~~
murgindrag
I mean, the basic idea behind an elite school is you have:

* A community of rich folks who get to look smart-by-association

* A community of smart folks who get networked into the power networks

All the decision-makers would lose out on this. Why would this even fly?
George Bush Jr went to Yale and Harvard. He looked smart. And, a bunch of
people were friends with the President. Folks like him make the laws.

~~~
newen
The fact that GWB went to Yale made it possible for him to become President.

Elite schools make it easier for people who have money (but aren’t too
academically inclined) to get into positions of political power by building
credentials and connecting with a community of smart people.

~~~
murgindrag
Isn't that exactly what I wrote? The whole point of elite schools is to give
rich people appearance of intelligence by association.

If you take 2000 valedictorians and 500 rich douchebags, have the 500 rich
douchebags pay to educate the whole lot, and everyone comes out with a common
brand stamp, who benefits?

Answer: Everyone involved!

Taking away federal funding (as if that were politically possible) would slow
it down a little bit, but the rich douchebags are really, really rich. They'll
just pay a little bit more. I don't know how you're going to stop that without
a totalitarian state.

~~~
rjkennedy98
> Answer: Everyone involved!

What about the rest of us? Did we benefit that George Bush (who claimed never
to read a book at Yale) got the certification of an elite degree? What you are
saying is the equivalent of saying everyone in the mafia benefited by being
part of the mafia.

And btw before anyone talks about how Yale (or any other elite school) is
private and can make their own decisions - no - they receive MASSIVE amounts
of government funding. Princeton receives more per capita government funds
than Rutgers.

~~~
bilbo0s
The point he's making is that if the funding is removed, Princeton or Yale
would no longer need to put up the façade.

So the only thing that would matter is whether or not the Bush-type families
of the US benefit from the system that is in place. The commenter is positing
that the answer is "Yes". I agree with that assessment.

~~~
newen
The other side of the argument is that if the facade is not there, if they
only admit rich people, the university will lose its reputation and become
irrelevant overnight.

The thing that gives elite universities their reputation both their academic
reputation and the elites that attend them. If they lose the academic
reputation, the unis become irrelevant and might as well be a party house for
rich people; no one will care except tabloids. If they lose the elites, the
universities will still be prestigious universities.

So to spell it out, what I’m saying is that rich people attending elite
universities are not important for elite universities. It mainly benefits rich
people.

~~~
shajznnckfke
Most of the financial aid given out by these schools isn’t federal aid. They
even give full rides to international students who aren’t eligible for federal
at all, and middle-class kids whose families have too much income to be
eligible. This aid is funded by the endowment which is donations from rich
people.

I think when people say Princeton receives a lot of federal money, they are
talking about research grants, and possibly the effective subsidy that comes
from the tax deductible status of donations from rich people. Each of these
adds up to a lot more money than the Pell grants.

If you take away the rich people, the school won’t be able to afford to
operate this way.

------
_Nat_
This _ISN 'T_ a social-justice article.

Picking the top applicants backfires because people game it.

For example, consider Students A and B who're mostly identical except Student
A likes to binge on Wikipedia while Student B spends every night doing SAT
practice problems. Colleges that select only the top applicants get the B's of
the world, who optimize their observables, while the A's seem somewhat less
competitive on paper.

If you change the rules -- like you start focusing on clubs, volunteering, or
even just skipping the Top-1% -- the gamers'll adjust their strategies, out-
performing the non-gamers who develop actual talents. The top colleges end up
getting flooded by gamers who're focused on looking good.

The pragmatic solution proposed in this article is to randomly select "good
enough" applicants. This allows colleges to take in the top-performing non-
gamers who have a wealth of actual skills (rather than gaming hacks) while
also reducing the incentive for gamers to waste their time gaming the system.

~~~
ffggvv
right but if you’re looking for people who will succeed in college (or the
corporate world)

wouldn’t you be looking for people who can achieve based on specified rules
and fun to within a system, instead of undisciplined people who can’t do that
but may naturally be intellectually curious?

the first makes a terrific employee, the second might not put in hard work for
stuffthey don’t find interesting or may leave altogether

~~~
_Nat_
Depends on the job.

If you've got a simple, mechanical job that a trained monkey could do if
monkeys were more intelligent, then, definitely, you'd want folks who'll
slavishly adhere to whatever task is assigned -- the folks who'll spend all
night doing SAT prep problems would be perfect hires.

But if you want to train innovators who'll actually advance their fields --
whether we're talking mathematicians, scientists, engineers, doctors, or
business leaders -- then you'll want the folks who'll pursue such things on
their own initiative along with the talents they've developed due to that
intrinsic motivation.

Elite non-innovators can have their place. In science/engineering/math, they
won't be leaders, but they can still be effective researchers with strong
publication records, reliably churning out decent-quality papers. In medicine,
they can be great practicing doctors. In business, they'd be reliable middle-
management types.

Still, it'd be weird for a top institution to only have middle-management
types.

------
ghaff
>randomly from a pool of good enough

It's probably closer to that today than most would care to publicly admit. Oh,
they don't roll a dice but they mostly have some sort of academic cutoff and
then decide on admissions from the remaining pool by lots of factors aiming
for a diverse student body across many somewhat arbitrary dimensions. A
handful may be slam-dunks above a certain floor (star athlete, parents donated
a building, did some amazing humanitarian project in high school). But for the
most part, there _is_ a lot of randomness among the admissions of solidly
good-enough students.

------
34679
Top colleges should stop treating admissions like a limited release beer -
driving up prices with intentional shortages - and build some damn classrooms.

~~~
murgindrag
The only difference between top colleges and not-so-top colleges is admissions
and endowment.

~~~
ausbah
and research output, the academic quality of the average student, class sizes,
and more

~~~
murgindrag
> and research output

(1) Which has no impact on student learning (what nominally is what the
undergrads are there for)

(2) And where there's a lot more academic malpractice at the elites. Most
people don't get to be an MIT professor without cheating at least a little bit
to get that extra edge.

Quality of faculty, which IS important, is identical until you get into really
lower tiers.

> the academic quality of the average student

Indeed. So the question is to you want to segregate or integrate? Would the
world be better off with all the smart kids and rich kids at one institution,
and everyone else at another, or with everyone together? Remember at
universities, kids can take different classes, so a freshman can take grad-
level courses if they're so inclined.

Elite schools give you elite brand stamps and elite networks coming out.
That's their key value-add. And it's totally worth it.

> class sizes

Ummm... No. Student:faculty ratios, usually. But a 4:1 faculty ratio with a
1:1 teaching load versus an 8:1 faculty ratio with a 2:2 teaching load leads
to the same class size.

For the most part, elite schools don't have the best teaching. The best
teaching happens at the more teaching-focused schools, unsurprisingly (which
isn't the same as "small liberal arts..." which are mostly horrible).

> and more

... and again, no.

------
duncan_bayne
Absolutely. Because we want our doctors and engineers to be just "good
enough", none of this elitism for us!

I'm sure they'll still cure cancer and get us to Mars, right?

And the truly elite who miss out by random chance ... that doesn't matter
because justice doesn't require us to recognise and appropriately reward
genius.

In fact, screw those priviliged geniuses, they're only first in line because
they won a genetic lottery right?

/s

~~~
pinkfoot
I upvoted you, but it is true that for most graduates, a degree is just a
ticket to the upper middle class where they will mostly do meetings, email,
and office documents.

Sadly, this is true for a lot of engineering jobs too.

Whether they learn anything is irrelevant.

~~~
duncan_bayne
That's true. But, bluntly, and speaking as a member, we don't matter anywhere
near as much as the absolute best.

The members of the "upper middle class ticket" group might as well be selected
by ballot from the intellectually qualified.

But I'd never suggest that if it in any way imperiled the idenfitifcation and
support of the very best and brightest. Which, AFAICT, is exactly what this
proposal would do.

------
hliyan
Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair
meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to
accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear.
When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of
fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline.

"Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is
inevitable."

~~~
tchaffee
The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide
to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal
between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done.
Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah
both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has
done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back at Fred's talk history in detail
we learn that one of the conferences has a slight bias towards white men they
don't even know about, and another is a committee of mostly men who agree that
male speakers are just better.

By choosing Fred, you just amplified sexism. And possibly even the less
qualified person (assuming all of Sarah's prior talks were thanks to a fair
selection process). A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have
knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.

Now imagine how much this happens over a lifetime if you live in a racist and
/ or sexist society. This is why a healthy amount of randomness is at the very
least an interesting idea, and perhaps even has... merit.

~~~
Maximus9000
It's a good point. Does it go both ways?

What if Sarah spoke at a women's only conference. At this conference, it's not
just a "bias" towards women speakers, it's a downright rule.

How do we regard Sarah's experience here?

~~~
milesskorpen
Sure, goes both ways. But at scale would reflect systemic biases (which
broadly lean to white men in many fields).

~~~
lopmotr
Do they actually anymore? Aren't many male and white dominated organizations
actively trying to be biased the other way?

When I studied engineering, my university had a "women in engineering" club
which did a recruitment evening and I went along. When I talked to an
employer, they told me "this is really for women, you should go to the general
one instead". From what I understand, that kind of bias is widespread in
America too. Where is this male and white preference happening?

I know many fields are dominated by white men but that fact alone doesn't show
that it's because of systemic bias. Wasn't that stuff mostly stopped in the
1960's which is before anyone working today got started?

Just the other day there was a story on HN about an AI fighter pilot beating a
real pilot in a simulation. But the company that did it was given special
priority for government work because it was owned by a black person! A white
owned company doing the same thing might not have got that contract.

------
pontus
I think the points here are pretty interesting.

Related to this, I feel like there's a missed opportunity for the federal
government to create a national public online university.

There's a lot of talk about online education being the future of education on
the one hand and a lot of talk about "College For All" / cost of education /
inclusivity on the other hand, but it seems like the people who care about the
two things are disjoint.

I used to teach physics, and every semester it was the same thing: confusion
about the right-hand-rule, rotational motion, Gauss' law, ..., and every year
I explained things the same way (and so did all the other teachers in the
classrooms next door.) Why not record these lectures in some ridiculously
high-end way, blowing $10M on that one course, make it epic, and then just be
done with it? Imagine the amount of money that's spent every year teaching
stuff over and over again...

The federal government should allocate something like $1B-$5B toward building
out a virtual course catalog and open it up for free to the public. I feel
like it could fill the need of community colleges / public four-year
institutions quite well. In fact, I could see community colleges basically
transition into a set of distributed testing facilities where you go to take
your final exams or something.

~~~
doktorhladnjak
When I took physics in community college, we joked that we were getting a
Caltech education for $13 per credit hour because the instructor would just
show videos of some famous physicist lecturing there.

------
dr_dshiv
I like this random selection because it will be a natural lottery allowing for
a determination of the effects of the school on life outcomes.

------
kokooo
College should be a meritocracy, it's just that we want people to be able to
be able to afford it and not be shit out of luck if they can't go to it. This
would also reduce stress as you don't have to worry about not getting into a
college if you know your life is going to turn out fine either way.

Why has this goal been malformed and twisted around to the point where people
are coming up with any solution that doesn't involve tackling the cost and the
career issue?

~~~
ForHackernews
You're assuming that standardized testing procedures, high school grading, and
college admissions officers have the precision necessary to correctly
distinguish between the 99.9997% perfect candidate and the 99.9998% perfect
candidate.

All I can say is that's nuts. I got a perfect score on my ACT, and I know for
a fact that I guessed on some questions. Am I really a stronger applicant than
somebody else who made less-lucky guesses?

There's a garbage-in/garbage-out problem here where people who desperately
want "meritocracy" are deluding themselves into believing they can accurately
identify "merit" down to some extremely fine precision.

~~~
commandlinefan
> Am I really a stronger applicant than somebody else who made less-lucky
> guesses?

Well, what you seem to be saying is that the selection process is basically
randomized among the top candidates already, per the linked article... so, no
change needed?

~~~
samatman
It's actually an argument for making the SAT harder.

You can see on the Asian curve for the SAT, that cohort saturates the high
end. The SAT should be so difficult that _no one_ gets a perfect score without
being lucky.

And lucky guesses on an entrance exam is a better filter than a lottery,
because it _feels_ like merit. For an MIT degree to mean "I'm reasonably smart
and very lucky" would be a disaster, for society and for MIT students both.
The illusion of agency simply must be maintained.

------
ineedasername
Quantifying "good enough" is not easy. I work in higher ed analytics. For even
a mildly selective school that accepts 40-60% of it's students, there's
certainly a group that are very likely "accepts", a group that are very likely
"rejects", but 15-20% in the middle require very close review and
interpretation of academic trends, non-cognitive attributes, how hard they
pushed themselves, and more.

The more selective a school gets, the more applicants meet sone easy to
quantify metrics, and the more that close review becomes necessary for making
all decisions.

It is a problem that such room for professional judgement introduces room for
bias and unfairness. But a random selection based on one-dimensional metrics
isn't really the solution: sound training and transparency into the decision-
making process would be good start in resolving these problems, though
probably just a start.

------
crazygringo
> _Should Select Randomly From a Pool of ‘Good Enough’_

But... they already _do_.

I can't find links right now, but deans of admissions from Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, etc. all talk about how they could admit 10x the students and
they'd all be equally good.

And that their selections aren't exactly "random" but are focused on
diversity: that there are enough players for each instrument in the orchestra,
athletes for each sport, varied extracurriculars in general, students for each
major, with a diversity of race, ethnicity, nationality, geography, and so on.
That early-decision candidates obviously have a bigger chance, etc.

But for a student who gets into Harvard and Princeton but not Yale or
Columbia, it _is_ essentially random -- e.g. Harvard and Princeton hadn't
allotted all their trumpet players already but Yale and Columbia did.

~~~
lozaning
Of all the kids in my IB class in high school, the kid that played the bassoon
got into more schools than any of the rest of us, even with moderately worse
grades.

------
fnord123
lol, why would they do that?

Then they will be found out since the differentiator between the top pool of
'good enough' undergraduate programs is merely being able to play king maker
to students who were going to go far in life anyway. And in return, the top
students help brand the university as being top.

~~~
nmeofthestate
> lol, why would they do that?

Basically, using academic aptitude as an entrance qualification
includes/excludes different races unevenly, (Asians and Whites do better) so
this is a way to get round that. Lowering the standards and using randomness
is a roundabout way to discriminate against Asians and Whites, but not
explicitly. Of course, another way of looking at it is that tests are racist
because of the variation in results.

~~~
BobbyJo
Would it actually discriminate against Whites and Asians though? The pool of
'good enough' is likely very White/Asian.

------
drojas
This seems relevant
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion)

The idea in the post looks very similar to an old Athenian system for
elections. I think it'd be a great tool for fighting corruption and could
produce good education opportunities with a lesser risk of institutional bias
and other forms of problems related to human-based (s)election.

------
nihakue
Or do something like
[https://www.npr.org/transcripts/793488868?t=1598260732452](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/793488868?t=1598260732452)
which allocates a pool of spots each for lottery, pay-to-win, volunteer-to-
win, and meritocracy-to-win. I think this way, everyone is happy.

------
ForHackernews
Yes. This is a fantastic idea that would reduce stress for thousands of
students, elegantly address questions of unfairness, and take wind out of the
sails of people who think their admission to $PoshUni proves them to be a
better calibre of person.

For all these reasons, I cannot possibly imagine the ruling class would allow
this to happen.

------
j7ake
There is discussion of these partial lotteries in academia as a way to improve
the procedure of getting grant money.

[https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000065)

~~~
pattusk
This is generally known as sortition and was common in the ancient world.

I've always felt it modern democratic politics would benefit greatly from such
a system. I'm not sure the same is true of academia, you want students good
enough that they do not risk failing at an elite institution, but when setting
the threshold for "good enough" it's easy to reproduce the same inequalities
you were trying to avoid in the first place.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)

~~~
slaymaker1907
I think the point is that the underlying metrics have a degree of randomness
which we need to recognize. Instead of just deciding what is good enough to
make it at Harvard and have that be the cutoff, you could certainly set the
cutoff higher but still have randomness after that point. Don’t introduce
arbitrary sorting when that is really not possible.

I TA’d a class where we used a grading metric sort of like this. It turns out
that it is a lot easier to grade assignments by grouping them into 5 buckets
than it is to give an extremely precise point value to everything.

------
bsder
Why does everybody think going to the Ivyies is such a good thing? I suspect
they are now a net loss for all but the uppermost tier.

If you want to do research as an _undergrad_ , the big name schools are a
detriment. They have plenty of good grad students. Pick a university outside
the top 20 but still top 50 (still quite a good university) and be an amazing
undergrad and you'll have professors fawning over you to do research for them.
You'll have multiple publications _and_ recommendations coming out the wazoo
as you head into grad school.

If you're a mediocre student at an Ivy, this isn't going to open that many
doors as most people are better or better connected than you. Dubya didn't get
where he was due to Yale; he got where he was because he was a Bush.

I don't get this obsession with the Ivies unless you're on very particular
tracks.

------
jakub_g
FWIW in France until last year, admission to most universities ( _except the
top ones_ ) was through a draw ('tirage au sort à l'université'). It's been
changed last year though not without controversies.

I don't know the historical context though about why and how it's been this
way.

------
sradman
This is a 2005 article by Barry Schwartz, author of _The Paradox of Choice_
[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice)

------
SrslyJosh
Let's take it further. Colleges should be government-funded, and their level
of discretionary funding should be based on how they are rated by their
students _and_ an independent assessment of their students' skills and general
knowledge (to be administered before and after attending).

~~~
hombre_fatal
While there's something to be salvaged from your idea (I was amazed when some
of my expensive courses were taught by a TA, and one we couldn't even
understand), unis aren't just vocational schools.

One of the most important classes I took during my engineering degree was a
philosophy 101 course I procrastinated until my last semester. 11 years later
I somehow still periodically get to talk about Callicles (from Gorgias) with a
stranger at a bar—it's happened twice—, and it's generally awakened me to
reading philosophy, something I assumed was dull and impenetrable.

I have no idea how any of that could be measured on a standardized test, and
it would be a shame if it was dropped from curriculum just because it can't
easily be measured.

Uni is more than a vocational school that prepares us for the work camp.

~~~
donw
That's great. You should be able to take those classes if you want to.

Near-as-makes-no-difference half of the classes I was required to take in
university -- my upper- and lower-division "general education" \-- were an
absolute waste of time for which I was forced to pay.

Even if I was forced to spend that money, I would have been better served by
pretty much any other experience that carried an equivalent cost -- like
spending a year backpacking in Europe and Asia.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Sure, and I have plenty of grievances myself. My expensive university calculus
and physics courses were so bad (a rushed professor and TAs we couldn't
understand) that we would meet up after the course to watch Youtube videos to
learn the subject and do the homework. We'd joke after class, "yeah, that was
definitely worth $X,XXX" with a tear in our eye.

Ended up taking a $120 summer course at a community college and mastered the
subjects.

I spent a lot of time in uni wishing I was spending that time backpacking
around Asia. But I also experienced the woes of standardized tests in high
school and I'm reluctant to see them as a solution to anything.

------
renewiltord
The whole point of going to top schools / universities is to be around other
kids who have the drive, ambition, wherewithal, and societal advantages that
you have. Then you get to benefit from the parochial altruism. Why would I go
to a random uni when I can aim at the rich person uni?

------
MarkMc
It's not mentioned in the article, but one benefit of this approach would be
as an A/B test to see which group was more successful in life - the successful
applicants or the rejects. This would allow the college to see exactly how
much value they are providing.

------
chii
education is not a scarce goods - why not accept _all_ candidates that are
good enough? The cost of educating one more student is marginal, and if
there's a large enough number, economies of scale can kick in as well.

~~~
Aerroon
> _education is not a scarce goods_

Education itself is not, but going to a top college is not the same as getting
an education. If Bryan Caplan's idea of college being mostly about
signaling[0] is true, then top colleges can't scale. They are an exclusive
club and a lot of the benefits of top colleges come from being exclusive.
Opening it up to more people reduces these benefits for the students.

[0] [https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-
education...](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education-
credentials-20180211-story.html)

~~~
chii
> a lot of the benefits of top colleges come from being exclusive

which is something i feel is a bad outcome for society in general, even if
this is good for those individuals.

------
JoshuaDavid
One point about this that I think is overlooked is that if you don't include
some sort of randomness, you'll end up over-optimizing for whatever you're
measuring, and under-optimizing for the thing you actually care about. More
concretely, if we say that there are some underlying factors which correlate
to both student "quality" and to admissions scores, and some random factors,
we'll find that score and quality are correlated, but the highest quality
students and the ones with the highest scores aren't the same ones. This is
easier to explain using a graph: if we assume that "score" and "quality" are
two gaussian variables, we get a graph that looks like

    
    
        16 ^ Quality
        15 |                 #####BBBB  
        14 |              ########BBBBA 
        13 |           ###########BBBBAA
        12 |         #############BBBBAA
        11 |       ###############CCCCAA
        10 |     #################CCCCAA
         9 |    ##################CCCCA 
         8 |   ###################CCCC  
         7 |  ####################CCC   
         6 | #####################CC    
         5 | #####################      
         4 | ###################        
         3 | #################          
         2 |  #############             
         1 |   #########                
           +----+----+----+----+----+----+>
           0    5    10   15   20   25   30
                        Score
    
    

If you do the naive thing, and grab the very highest-scoring students, we set
the cutoff at 27, and get all 10 of the students labeled by A in the above
diagram, thus have a quality distribution of 10 - 14, with the bulk being
around 10 - 13, and the average score being 11.5. If we instead set the cutoff
at 23, we get 47 students (labelled B for students above the average of the
originally selected ones, and C for the ones below that average) -- if we then
pick among them randomly, we'll get a flatter distribution ranging from a low
score of 6 to a high score of 15, with an average of 10.98. The distribution
of scores looks like

    
    
        Score | Strict | Cutoff/
              | Cutoff | Random
        ------+--------+--------
           15 |  0.00% |  8.51%
           14 | 10.00% | 10.64%
           13 | 20.00% | 12.77%
           12 | 20.00% | 12.77%
           11 | 20.00% | 12.77%
           10 | 20.00% | 12.77%
            9 | 10.00% | 10.64%
            8 |  0.00% |  8.51%
            7 |  0.00% |  6.38%
            6 |  0.00% |  4.26%
    

So if you care a lot about simply not getting bad students, and not very much
about getting the very best ones, you should do a strict cutoff, since that
will give you the highest possible average. If you care more about getting the
very best students, and are ok if you let in a few relative duds, you'll do
better to lower your cutoff and select randomly from everyone who passed your
cutoff.

Elite colleges get their reputation from having students who go on to do great
things, so I'd argue that at least for them, the "cutoff plus random
selection" makes sense.

------
Melting_Harps
I recently heard a podcast with Andrew Yang and Scott Galloway (professor at
NYU) [1] and the summary was pretty much that he attended UCLA at a time that
it was not only affordable, but also when they were willing to take on local
students with less than stellar or 'good enough' backgrounds, in order to
remain apt to the articles title, as the lower acceptance rate wasn't
something that added to the institutions supposed prestige.

I think this underscores what happens when a supposed Social Good (which is
funded as such at both a State and Federal Level) is used to primarily serve
as a state-subsidized monetization scheme on it's Brand which will bend
backwards to maximize its profits with International Students. I sincerely
believe this is what inevitably comes when Education is centralized and is
reduced to serve as an expensive commodity in the form of virtue signalling
rather than serve as an actual institution of Higher Education for it's
populace. And this needs to be understood before any reform to accommodate
people who really shouldn't be there, which is quite honestly a large
percentage of students with University degrees, before anything is undertaken.

I personally wanted to walk away when I realized what a farce University had
become and I had to be talked into going back to class after I got Honors in
Philosophy and told I'd get all expenses paid to debate moral ethics, all
while I was a Biology major struggling to get classes to advance to Junior
status and transfer to a CSU campus with more STEM based offerings only to get
hit with budget and strikes when I transferred that resulted in even less
course availability due to the financial crises.

Personally, I'm really enjoying seeing how quickly the disruption has occurred
to Higher Education in the US, and the UK as you can now get some degrees for
pre-2000s prices on Coursera. College of London offers an Online Bsc CS degree
for $17k, and CU Boulder offers an MSc EE for ~$20k. I paid 65k for BSc at a
CSU and graduated in 2009. And while I'd love to see a further race to the
bottom in terms of pricing, I take solace in that they know that its
inevitable.

CU Boulder recently allowed students to move in last week, and in that time 13
people have tested positive for COVID on campus, and one has died in the
county in that time [2]. But it must be said, if you're really thinking going
for the 'Campus Life' during this pandemic than I'm afraid to say no
prestigious degree is going to save you from the Real World when it comes
crashing down and you have no real understanding of cost-risk-benefit
analysis. It must also be noted that the only classes offered on campus right
now are for things like Latin according to an interviewed student.

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gESwwG9sa2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gESwwG9sa2Y)

2: [https://www.timescall.com/2020/08/21/cu-boulder-now-up-
to-13...](https://www.timescall.com/2020/08/21/cu-boulder-now-up-
to-13-positive-coronavirus-cases-for-move-in-week/)

------
eagsalazar2
_ALL_ schools should pick randomly from all applicants. I mean, honestly, I
don't feel as passionately about this for colleges, but private preschools or
kindergartens that select kids based on _anything_ is super f-ed up and kind
of enrages me. The gradual defunding of public education in the US as more and
more people move to elite districts or private school (white flight) is bad
enough. Then excluding any kids who are slower learners, more hyperactive, who
have less advantages at home (the kids who actually need great school the
most) even if they have the $$ is borderline Nazi-party-bad it is so vile.

Generally my take on this is: (1) all schools should select kids at random
from applicants and (2) private schools should charge selected kids based on
what those families can afford, up to their full tuition which in the Bay Area
_averages_ over $30K/year, (3) funding for every school should come from
national or at least state level so travesties like Piedmont can't exist
explicitly for the purpose of robbing poorer kids, 2 blocks away, from having
decent schools (and parks, that's another subject).

Anything else is hyper regressive toward _children_. F-that!

(sorry to hijack the topic, but this is a subject I deal with a lot and
royally pisses me off)

------
known
30% Law makers are selected via Lottery in Belgium
[https://archive.is/vMt1d](https://archive.is/vMt1d)

~~~
samatman
From the article, this is a proposal, not an extant policy.

------
starpilot
Don

------
chancemehmu
They already pretty much do

------
kepler1
I know the person's intentions are good in putting forth such an idea, but the
problem with intentions is that they're always good. But they often ignore the
bad side effects of the idea when it comes to putting it _into practice_.

First, let's not mince words here -- this suggested policy is about lowering
the bar for admission to top universities so that some previously unqualified
tier of applicants has a better shot at getting in. These lower tier students
get a better chance in a lottery, at the expense of people who through better
work/aptitude/achievement/(and no small amount of luck, finance, or legacy
also) would otherwise usually get in with high likelihood. (Note, those last
exceptional categories are a small portion -- something like 10%.)

So what's one of the side effects here? Or let's call it incentives produced
by such a system?

Well, perhaps it's that students, who throughout school are taught to study
hard, do well, apply themselves, at the end face a selection that tosses that
out the window and says, well, everyone is equally good and we're going to do
a lottery. We're lowering the bar so that everyone who got above a B average
has an equal chance of getting into Harvard.

Is that teaching them the right lesson? Is that incentivizing people to excel
and be really good at something? How would you respond at work if at the end
of the year, everyone doing a minimum amount of work were given the same
salary?

I don't think you'd actually like that (most people reading these forums, at
least). Now, I don't dispute that there's a lot of unnecessary pressure on
students today. And part of it is a bigger problem that the population has
grown while top spots have stayed relatively constant. So people are trying to
fix this.

But I disagree with attempts to create artificial equality at the last step.
We wouldn't accept this for anything else that matters -- you wouldn't prefer
to be treated by a doctor who was just "good enough", or be flown by a pilot
who barely passed the flight exam. In the name of lowering their level of
stress, or making the doctor / pilot population look a certain way. And by the
way, to make a difference in college admissions (according to the function I
can imagine the author desires), you really have to lower the bar a lot.

I don't want these kinds of distortions for a system that my kids will be
subject to. That's not the lesson I want them to learn. Students in other
countries have a far harder and more competitive time than ours. I don't want
them to wake up to that reality only when it comes time to apply for their
first job and find themselves falling flat.

~~~
compsciphd
people say that Ivy's get such a large number of applicants and accept such a
small percentage that they could take their applicant pool, accept one cohort,
put it aside, accept another cohort and the 2nd cohort would be just as
successful as the first cohort.

If that is true, its not about lowering the bar, as both cohort pass the same
bar, its just about increasing fairness.

if its not true, then yes, you are correct, it lowers the bar.

~~~
csa
Imho, this is not true.

If you take the bottom 1/3 of any ivy class and replace it with the next folks
in line, then I would probably agree in a hand-wavy kind of way.

Some points:

1\. The folks who barely missed getting into (somewhat randomly) Columbia will
most likely get into a place like Cornell. Is there really a loss there?

2\. The folks who barely miss getting into Cornell will most likely get into a
place like NYU. For most of these folks, is there really a loss there? My
guess is that, at most, they lose some cocktail party swagger.

3\. The top (15-30%?)of the classes at the Ivies really makes those schools
_academically_. That said, there are a lot of other folks at the school that
have significant social and intellectual capital to the schools. Athletes are
one group, folks who demonstrably know how to get stuff done on a
regional/national/international level are another group. Using these criteria
to assess merit will produce a class not dissimilar to what we see now.

------
Yc4win
Colleges are in for an extremely rude awakening. No more int'l student tuition
coupled with the fact that most people don't need college anymore when you can
learn better than some two-bit "professor" could teach you with just a set of
instructional videos. Add in a take home exam and now you are running your own
ivy league education for free.

