
Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery - harekaze
https://qz.com/1520155/harvard-needs-to-introduce-a-lottery-for-truly-fair-admissions/
======
crazygringo
So here's the thing: a student body is more than the sum of its parts, which a
lottery ignores.

To use just one example: a lottery could easily wind up admitting 40 violin
players and zero bassoon players, or 8 percussionists but not a single oboe
player. In which case a viable university orchestra becomes impossible, and
every potential orchestra player suffers. (These are not exaggerated either --
for an incoming class of 1,000 students, of which only ~100 have a sufficient
orchestra background with the requisite years of practice and want to play,
there isn't a lot of margin for error.)

Now repeat ad nauseum for every type of sports team, extracurricular,
distribution across majors, etc.

By ensuring there are approximately the right number of every "slots" for each
type of applicant, the institution ensures that students have the ability to
participate in the types of activities and courses they want to, and that
student life is rich both academically and extracurricularly.

There are legitimate problems with some of the "slotting" as practiced today
(particularly concerning legacies and in terms of whether a
racial/ethnic/national balance should match the nation, the applicant pool,
some other balance, or be ignored entirely), but a lottery would throw out the
baby with the bathwater, and be a disaster for ensuring the kind of vibrant
student life that is a major part of 4-year university experience.

(Obviously this is specific to smaller institutions, whether elite or not --
if your incoming class is 30,000 students then you'll always have enough of
everyone.)

~~~
siruncledrew
Harvard using a true lottery would be a self-inflicted wound. A lot of
Harvard's value is because it's Harvard. Harvard lowering their
perception/brand/prestige is a lose-lose for themselves and the
students/alumni (note: actual students, not prospective students).

Think about it this way: the nature of the game is like investing - it's about
Harvard picking winners. Harvard is like the well-known VC that can say they
funded <this many> unicorns, and being a part of Harvard means being
associated with success. Harvard may take some waivers on higher-risk/less-
fortunate students for diversifying investments, but it's only one piece of
the portfolio. Selectivity is a key ingredient to their ROI, endowment fund,
and social capital. Harvard is a private university and cares about their
private equity and capital in a way that is different from public
universities.

~~~
rland
This is the problem I have with higher education. It is not about the
effectiveness of the education, but the signal of effectiveness. "Social
Capital" is a zero sum game. If someone gains social capital, another must
lose. Actual education, on the other hand, is not.

It's really a shame.

------
dannykwells
This presupposes that colleges truly want their admission process to be fair,
which they absolutely don't. Then, how would they get to admit legacy students
with wealthy parents?

Also, admitting that getting admitted is based on luck directly contradicts
the narrative of meritocracy in college admissions, which would decrease the
perceived prestige of the school. So yeah, no way would Harvard go for this.

~~~
throwawaymath
I think that a lottery _without_ a qualification threshold would contradict
meritocracy. In contrast, I don't think a threshold-based lottery contradicts
meritocracy. Rather it can be interpreted as a claim that meritocracy cannot
be properly quantified beyond a certain precision (which in this case is the
threshold). Even if you disagree with that premise, it's substantially
different than the rejection of meritocracy altogether.

I also don't think it presupposes anything about what colleges want. What
colleges _want_ isn't relevant to a claim about what _would_ be more fair. The
paper this article is based on doesn't make an argument for how to force or
persuade colleges to espouse the system. It only argues that this system is
closer to a platonic ideal of admission fairness.

~~~
dannykwells
I think the point is too subtle to be broadly appreciated. Any crack in the
dam of meritocracy is likely to become a flood. The illusion must be
preserved.

wrt to point 2: I guess it's about perspective. It's fine to propose systems
that in theory would be nice but without an eye towards what could actually
work, what's the point?

~~~
sly010
A good example of the crack/flood analogy is the current H1B visa system. You
do have to be qualified to apply, but if enough people qualify a year, they
distribute the spots randomly. Eventually the general public started referring
to it as "H1B lottery" and assume it's all a matter of luck.

~~~
dcole2929
I mean because at that point it is a matter of luck. You can pretend it's not
but when everyone is qualified there stops being a real difference between
candidates. I think a lottery for higher education works the same. At joe blow
public school that may not be true but at an institution like Harvard, they
receive so many qualified applicants they could probably choose and entire
class full of any one special interest group and still leave out qualified
candidates. The difference between student A and B don't really matter when
they are both exceptional

------
taylodl
_" The admissions lottery I envision—which would involve applicants who meet a
certain academic threshold—would help universities faced with large numbers of
qualified applicants, such as Harvard, admit students in a more equitable
way."_

The whole point to the modern university application process is they want more
axis than academic achievement with which to evaluate prospective students.
Did you play and do well in sports? Are you accomplished in any of the arts?
Are you a chess master? Did you build a great robot winning several
competitions? This is _true_ student diversity, it's not just race and class -
and it provides a differentiator between those who just studied and got a
perfect SAT score and those with other accomplishments who also happen to have
a near-perfect SAT score. The lottery system depicted here is unfair to those
students who've gone beyond and accomplished things. We need to recognize
accomplishments outside of the classroom are important.

~~~
Someone1234
> The lottery system depicted here is unfair to those students who've gone
> beyond and accomplished things.

Conversely it might take some of the pressure off.

As it stands there's never "enough." With a system that effectively caps you,
you get to your lottery tier and can then back off. And considering how much
the standards have increased over time to get into a school like this, that
may not be a bad thing for mental health.

~~~
agent008t
Would you really want a future Feynman to be playing an admission lottery?

~~~
trowawee
...kinda, yeah. Feynman's an interesting choice of example, actually; he
wanted to attend Columbia, couldn't get in because of anti-Semitism, and then
attended MIT before it was "MIT, Famous Engineering School", when it was still
basically seen as a vocational school for middle-class students. I think the
whole higher education system would benefit from having people like that
scattered throughout it, rather than concentrated at a handful of elite
universities.

~~~
subjectHarold
The problem isn't that we miss out on some specific genius. The real issue
with our system is that we have "Feynmans" working as waiters and driving
taxis (and some other countries don't have that system and are maximising
their talent).

It is interesting to critique this idea for introducing chance. Pitch this
idea to a poor person, pitch this idea to a rich person...that is your answer.
It is hard to understand if you grew up with opportunity but for poor people
this randomness represents a tremendous improvement. From a system that is
designed to crush them, to one in which everyone has the same chance.

~~~
trowawee
Absolutely agree. I don't know how much this particular proposal would help
them, though; I think catching those people would require a wholesale overhaul
of the educational system: universal free pre-school, standardizing school
funding nationwide (and specifically decoupling it from property tax revenue),
fully subsidized university education for anyone who wants it...and then
lotteries to get into elite schools.

Otherwise, I suspect this would primarily benefit middle class students who
can afford to pay for test prep and tutors, but not for a month-long
volunteering stint in Nepal, and primarily hurt the relatively-sub-par-but-
well-off legacy admits (which, who cares) and students with a lower SES that
currently get a boost from consideration for that status/the follow-up effects
of growing up and going to school in poor areas (which I do care deeply
about).

~~~
subjectHarold
Yep, I agree. The reason we have this problem at all is because, at least in
our part of the world, education isn't well-funded. I think we should still
have a lottery system but yes, other stuff will produce better results.

I also think that all the volunteering and whatever should be cut from
applications. Who gives a fuck if you played the oboe for ten years? Does that
really matter? The point of music is enjoyment, the point of volunteering is
to serve other people. I had a friend who was forced to play the saxaphone
until university and it was tragic: he wouldn't talk about it, he only played
to pass exams, he took no joy from it...like great but if you are being forced
to do this then who cares? It has become another way to discriminate...and it
isn't that much fun if you are a kid.

------
throwawaymath
The article is substantially predicated on a recently published paper[1] which
proposes a threshold lottery for university admissions. Among other things,
this paper directly kicks off discussion of several basic criticisms that
could be levied against lottery-based admission, such as (for example) the
definition of fairness.

In particular, note that the definition used in this context is an admission
lottery such that, for all applicants at or above an explicit baseline of
qualification, each applicant is _equi-probable_ of being admitted. It's also
worth noting the author explictly states the system is pragmatic for
distinguishing between qualified candidates of increasingly insignificant
meritocratic differences; however, it may not be compatible with "general
welfare."

1\.
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670663?seq=1#page_scan_...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670663?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

------
rconti
For those who aren't following closely:

Harvard, like many Universities with applications from far more candidates
than they can accept, filter applications based on perceived desirability. For
example, a student with the same academic background is more likely to get
admitted if they come from Wyoming or Maine than New York or California; in
the name of having a more diverse student body with more diverse interests and
upbringings, rather than just upper-middle-class students from coastal cities.

There is, of course, a racial component to this.

Today, qualified Asian-American applicants are overrepresented as a share of
the overall population, due to great academic qualifications.

Harvard has been found to be accepting them at a lower rate than you would
expect; if you look into it, there's some "desirability" factor that's
bringing them down. Obviously this is very controversial.

"Students for Fair Admissions" was created by Edward Blum, a Neo-Conservative
activist and AEI fellow who is well-known for his work against the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, for attempting to reduce the population-based power of
districts by only counting registered voters as persons, and generally
recruiting 'victims' of affirmative action to be subjects of test-case
lawsuits in order to advance his political beliefs.

~~~
jhwang5
I think there was some studies that showed the share of spots that would have
went to Asian Americans effectively transferred to white women. In that sense,
not sure if Asian Americans were the only "over-represented" demographic
segment.

------
abnry
The problem of college admissions seems similar to the problem of selling
tickets to a hot event. The free market solution to selling tickets to, say, a
Red Sox game is to charge as much as you possible can until people stop buying
tickets. But you get a problem. You make the less wealthy fans very unhappy
because they have no choice in being able to attend. This has long term
consequences. So the Red Sox, for instance, sell tickets for less than what
the market would allow. Then you get the mad rush for the first come, first
serve ticket sales.

~~~
briandear
So basically supply and demand?

~~~
abnry
The problem is that the usual way of solving the supply and demand problem in
the free market has consequences that many people dislike.It doesn't seem fair
for only rich people to attend baseball games. It doesn't seem fair for only a
select few of those qualified get to go to Harvard.

------
leroy_masochist
This would destroy their business model which is predicated on getting into
Harvard being an "expensive signal" of intelligence, industriousness, and
future potential, which is why they will never do it. But I agree with the
points in the article!

------
dcole2929
I agree with the premise of the article in that a lottery for those pass a
given threshold is the only truly fair wait to admit students to Harvard. The
problem I see though is that really doesn't help the image problem of any of
these institutions. Simply put if one of your goals is to ensure a diverse
student body, unless you start adding quotas and doing a lottery for specific
categories (which is largely problematic in and of itself) you are going to
end up with a pretty uniform student body. Certain groups of people will be
over represented in the pool you are selecting from and thus while any
singular student has an equally likely chance to get in, the overall diversity
numbers probably aren't going to be so great. Maybe that's fine if it's the
most fair way of selecting students but there's definitely an argument that
all you are doing is reinforcing the institutional disadvantages of the non
wealthy and minorities.

------
rheffern
The author's article is on a question that I considered before. I agree with
her that it may make the process more 'fair', however, she fails to consider
one consequence of a switch to a lotto based system. Namely:

How Much _Should_ a Harvard Lotto Ticket Cost?[0]

The author mentions that "This system would also alleviate the cost to
families associated with students applying to increasing numbers of colleges",
but I disagree. If you look at the system in terms of expected value, then
what _should_ you pay for that lotto ticket? (Note, I'm quoting a bit from my
article, please excuse the laziness)

Assume that you are actually applying to Harvard and they actually confess to
using randomness in their admissions. Say that they still require a fee to
submit your application. Today that fee is sitting at $75.00. Say that the
‘prestige’ of Harvard remains the same after this hypothetical confession to
the use of randomness and that today’s median salary for a Harvard grad stays
at ~$85,000.00/year.

The questions then is: Should you apply to Harvard and hope to be a random
applicant that gets in at the $75.00 price? Should you place a bet?

After you go through the math and stats for a bit, the conclusion is that the
price of a Harvard Lotto ticket _should_ be ~$89,823.00 . That's ~1200:1 on
your money. You should _absolutely_ apply to Harvard if they held a lotto, and
even if the number of applicants rose ~120,000%.

I go through each of the Ivies and there is an update at the bottom on the top
Universities and Liberal Arts schools in the US. Spoiler: CMU is not very
'worth it' (still a steal, all the same) and Carleton and Davidson are very
'worth it' for the admissions price.

In the end: Go to college kids. The ROI is insane.

[0] [http://heffern.net/rob/index.php/2018/05/18/hello-
world/](http://heffern.net/rob/index.php/2018/05/18/hello-world/)

------
motohagiography
From a statistical perspective, in a fair random lottery, would not the shape
of the probability distribution of attributes of winners necessarily match
that of the resulting qualified applicants?

If fairness is defined in this approach as a process that does not add
information to the system, and in this case actually removes both information
(bias) and noise (bias) equally, all it would serve to do is further obfuscate
the cause of being admitted.

For an admissions lottery to be considered "fair," you have to assume the
participant selection is fair, and that the functioning of the university
itself is indifferent to who it gets. Maybe they should A/B test it, where
some are admitted at random and their success compared against the traditional
admissions process. Arguably, that's even what "legacy," students provide, a
sample independent of the admissions process.

That we're having this discussion at all is a greater indicator of the waning
of the university system as meaningful process, and how undergraduate
education is subject to Goodhart's Law, where it has ceased to be a useful
measure of aptitude, competence, or much at all anymore really.

~~~
throwawaymath
I don't really follow your first two paragraphs. I don't know about the
ultimate utility of this system, but I don't think it exhibits the statistical
properties you're saying it does.

In a threshold-based admission lottery, everyone more than _k_ sigma from the
mean (for example) is collapsed into the same category, such that information
distinguishing them is lost. But the implicit premise to this system is that
you can't accurately measure the distinctions between those deviations anyway.

Given that premise, you're not adding noise to the system, though you are
removing information. I think the claim under question is that trying to
precisely measure people more than _k_ sigma from the mean is intrinsically
noisy and prone to spurious correlation with academic success. So then you'd
also be removing noise under this system.

So I think your point of contention should be with the premise if you disagree
with it, because I don't think we can really argue about statistical
properties of the lottery distribution until we first settle on the underlying
axioms.

~~~
motohagiography
The point I meant to raise was that the underlying axiom of the piece is that
the lottery is fair, when the mechanism for that fairness is simply removing
information. There are lots of reasons for it, but a lottery is a fig leaf.

The proportion of input students of a type will be the same as in the the
output of a fair lottery. Appeals to randomness just forfeit responsibility
and ownership of the decision.

------
agent008t
Who says that the threshold, as measured by e.g. SAT scores, is a good
threshold for a good measure?

~~~
jhwang5
There is a way to settle the fairness of process: re-run admissions process
where all data points that indicate demographics are scrubbed (name, ethnic
organization memberships, etc). See if the admission rates change.

------
akhilcacharya
I've said this before and I've said it again - I'm genuinely not sure about
why we invest so much mental anguish about discussing $ELITE_SCHOOL's
admissions process _at all_. If we're talking about opportunity, shouldn't we
instead aim to provide opportunity for the 99.9% of people that either can't
(me), or didn't go to the same handful of elite universities?

~~~
trowawee
Well, the cynical answer is that the elite schools churn out the people who go
into the media, government, and various other halls of power, so a lot of the
chatter is actual graduates of these schools discussing their own alma maters,
and they've essentially worn down the rest of us into caring. But a slightly
less cynical take is that this stuff all trickles down through the rest of the
higher education system, because of the aforementioned dispersal of elite
university grads into positions of power, so fixing the culture at those elite
schools would probably result in positive changes in the institutions they
influence.

------
40acres
Harvard doesn't have an admissions problem, they have an image problem that
was brought to light by a controversial lawsuit. The institution known as
Harvard is basically a massive investment firm that just so happens to run a
school -- if Harvard's (and other elite, mega wealthy colleges) stated mission
was to promote general education they could open up additional campuses and
increase admissions without sacrificing much in the way of educational
quality. Even if Harvard was half the school it is today it would still be a
fantastic education.

Harvard is trying to have it's cake and eat it too with it's selection
process, there are a set amount of priorities they have with each class and
need to balance these priorities out, namely: Admit enough legacy / wealthy
students to placate the donor class, have a relatively diverse set of kids so
that they can claim diversity, grab some kids with "exceptional talent" (maybe
a great musician here and there) and pad out the rest with kids that have
perfect SAT scores.

I honestly don't think this is a problem that can be solved. Harvard
deliberately caps the amount of students they accept and their capacity to
accept these students to maintain it's elite reputation, combine that with the
fact that their student body needs to reflect the principles they tell the
world (diversity more so that absolute quality) and you will have situations
like this.

------
auntienomen
This is not a new idea. It has been generally suspected for years that Harvard
selects students by throwing their applications down a flight of stairs and
seeing who lands on the right step. As far as I can tell, it's working just
fine for them.

------
dontreact
I’ve heard that with the size of Harvard’s endowment, it would be trivial to
cover the costs of tuition for all students. Pitching random admissions as a
cost cutting measure seems unconvincing against this backdrop.

------
babyslothzoo
Would it be a problem to remove all identity categories
(name/legacy/gender/ethnicity/origin/etc) of applicants and simply admit the
most qualified students?

~~~
trowawee
"simply admit the most qualified students" is the "assume a spherical cow" of
the college admissions discussion.

~~~
babyslothzoo
Why?

Is this not supposed to be an elite university for elite students?

~~~
trowawee
Well, that's certainly what Harvard would argue, although a lot of people
might disagree, but even if we accept their/your framing, that doesn't solve
the issue. You're throwing around "most qualified" and "elite students" like
those are settled terms of art, rather than the heart of contention in an
argument that's more than a century old.

Imagine two hypothetical students. One student graduated with a 4.3 by taking
advanced courses at a high school where every student gets between a 3.5 and a
4.5 thanks to some combination of intelligence, good funding, grade inflation,
and a parent population who can pay for a new wing or two if it means junior
will graduate on time. The other student graduated with a 3.8 from an
underfunded high school on Chicago's South side, where the average class size
was 30+, the textbooks are 20 years old, and the average annual family income
is around $30k. Which one of those students is more elite? Which one is more
qualified?

Zion Williamson is currently a student and a basketball player at Duke
University. He's 6'8", weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 280 lbs., and a
few days ago he had a highlight where he started from under the hoop, sprinted
out towards the three point line some 22 feet away, leapt towards a player on
that line who was taking a shot, blocked the shot in mid-air, and landed
without touching the shooter. The number of people in the United States with
that combination of size, speed, and skill is in the single digits. The number
of people in the world might - might - be in the triple digits. Is he an elite
student? If so, is he more or less elite than the other students in the
previous paragraph?

There isn't a clean metric for most qualified or most elite, and there really
can't be, because the world doesn't neatly standardize like that. It's a
symptom of insufficient consideration of the problem to suggest that fixing a
massive and massively flawed system is super simple and just requires One Neat
Trick that the thousands of people who have been thinking about and working on
this for decades haven't considered.

~~~
babyslothzoo
> There isn't a clean metric for most qualified or most elite, and there
> really can't be

For an academic institution or an athletic endeavor, I completely disagree.
Performance in these environments is measurable. Elite performance is obvious,
observable, and measurable.

Should a theoretical elite university basketball team sign and start a 4'11
80lbs person who makes 1% of shots and has only played basketball maybe a half
dozen times before total but they happen to be the very best player from their
school? What if they're technically the best basketball player in their
schools history? Are they therefore an elite basketball player, and an elite
performer? I would say no, observably and measurably not.

------
lettergram
Harvard doesn’t have an admissions problem. It’s a highly successful
institution, that has lasted for hundreds of years and is not public.

Meaning - they clearly are doing something correct and are not beholden to
what we feel is “fair”. They aren’t doing anything illegal, so there is no
problem.

Perhaps it doesn’t jive with some sensibilities, but it’s not their
responsibility to cater to anyone’s sensibilities. The institutions purpose is
to grow and support its pupils. Then it’s pupils pay dividends back to the
institution. Anything counter to that, really doesn’t make sense.

~~~
criddell
> They aren’t doing anything illegal

Isn't there an active lawsuit claiming their use of race in the admissions
process crosses the line?

~~~
rconti
Yes, a conservative activist has recruited test-case students as plaintiffs in
lawsuits designed to strike down affirmative action.

~~~
honestinquiry
If the merits of the case are justified, what does it matter whether an
"activist" is involved or what his politics might be?

------
pickitupsnake
Or they could just admit more students..

------
azthecx
"Special status may also be given to increase opportunity for underrepresented
groups, in the interest of campus diversity." That's all fine and dandy as
long as people still enter by own merit and not to artificially inflate
diversity, which seems like an ongoing trend in American academia.

~~~
occamrazor
“Increasing opportunities” and “artificially inflating diversity” are
effectively two different definitions of the same thing. It may be a good or a
bad thing, but we can’t have one without the other.

------
diminoten
Fairer? Yes. Better? No.

The college application process screens for more than just measured ability,
and forcing colleges to take on people who aren't a good culture fit changes
the experience at that college for the worse.

~~~
nradov
It may change the culture at some schools. Whether that would be better or
worse remains an open question.

------
sfblah
When I was in high school there were exactly 4 people in the country with
perfect SAT scores. Now, according to the article, there are thousands. Maybe
they could start there.

And just to stave off the criticisms - yes, they made the test much easier.

~~~
karmajunkie
The article mentions perfect _math_ SAT scores. A perfect SAT score is much
more rare.

------
uasm
The true solution though, would be for people to wake up and realize that in
most cases, those so-called "ivy-league" colleges set you up for nothing you
couldn't have gotten elsewhere. That you're NOT in-fact better off at 22 with
a 150,000$ debt, which you could've avoided by attending a different
institute. That the quality of education in "less prestigeous" universities
doesn't necessarily "fall" from that of Harvard's.

Edit: Addressing the comments about how it's all about joining that Alumni
circle.

I've attended an ivy-league alumni dinner party recently (graduates from
multiple "high profile", internationally acknowledged institutes). Save for
several senior people with interesting stories, most others were working on
their "next Lyft"/"next Airbnb"/"Facebook for %s"/"%s but with AI!" startups.
Everybody had a suit and a nice lapel pin to show for it though. Some even
wore a bow-tie, no less!

At some point it stops being a club of outstanding members of society, and
instead, it becomes a "I took a huge loan to buy my way into this" club. Make
of it what you will.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
The education isn't anything special. For certain circles, though, the
_status_ of an ivy sheepskin is of utmost importance. State U isn't good
enough for the silver spoons. Harvard is also not indebting those lucky enough
to attend given it's generous scholarships.

~~~
babyslothzoo
The value in elite universities is the network

