College admission by lottery isn’t a bad idea — here’s how to make it work

In Vox on April 19, journalist and editor Bryan Walsh argues that elite college admissions should be conducted by a simple lottery system rather than by the inherently controversial assessment of merit.

Walsh contends that it would make sense to set an academic threshold — say, the 25th percentile of applicants accepted over the past five years as determined through test scores and/or high school GPAs — and then admit students that clear the threshold at random, as opposed to the ostensibly meritocratic, anxiety-inducing process that purports to make fine distinctions between elite schools’ ever-increasing numbers of highly qualified applicants. It’s already the case that these admissions are not strictly meritocratic, as every elite college receives applications from far more qualified students than it can admit. So, Walsh contends, let’s have a lottery, and drop all the politically charged pretense.

Many centrists and conservatives tend to see this kind of argument as yet another attempt to eliminate the notion of meritocracy and individual achievement from American culture altogether, by prioritizing equality of outcome over equality of opportunity. As a political centrist with mostly conservative ideas about education, I am sympathetic to this perspective. But, as someone who attended an Ivy League school myself and then spent over a decade teaching at both elite and non-elite universities, I know that meritocracy is so confounded in the college admissions process already that Walsh’s proposal actually does not go quite far enough.

The centrist case for radically reforming college admissions is simple, and consists of just one question: What do all those people effectively pushing the left over the brink by peddling the kinds of illogic that runs rampant in elite universities — whether it’s the outright bigotry of so-called “anti-racism” that insists people with certain skin colors can’t learn, the awesome misogyny of so-called “trans-inclusive” feminism that insists womanhood is a feeling rather than a fact, or the patent lies of so-called “restorative discipline” that victimize predominantly minority children in low-income schools by failing to guarantee a safe environment in which they can learn — have in common?

With very few exceptions, the people peddling these nonsensical, destructive ideas did quite well on the SAT.

Clearly, standardized tests do not effectively select for people with any particular quality of mind. They served their purpose, once upon a time, by creating a universal standard for college admissions such that academically talented Jewish, Black, and female students could gain admission to institutions built for and run by wealthy, white Protestant males. But the truth is that these tests put low-income, working-class and lower-middle-class students of every color at a real disadvantage.

The left is correct that to be born into a home with books around, a quiet space to study, and attention from adults is to have a leg up on the SAT before you’re out of diapers. To have parents and personal orientation obsessed with gaining entry to a top university is likely to raise those SAT scores even further. High SAT scores mostly tell us that a student has sufficient focus, time, attention and money to jump through certain hoops. We could instead base collegiate admissions — and not just elite ones — on a system much more useful, and far less falsely meritocratic, than that.

Here’s how:

First, colleges should require that all applicants sit for a 12th-grade proficiency exam, which is scored pass/fail rather than with a grade. Colleges should require students to submit their passage or failure on that test along with the name of their high school (which will reveal its overall passage rate, as well as its percentage of socioeconomically disadvantaged students), their transcripts, and their extra-curricular accomplishments.

Then, colleges should input all student data — GPA, extra-curricular activities, socioeconomic grade and proficiency test passage rate of high school, expected major, etc. — into an online system that filters the minimum GPA to gain admission and the numbers of students with the certain abilities that the school is looking to obtain in its freshman class. This could be tuba players, mathletes, baseball recruits, people from socioeconomically disadvantaged high schools, people who want to study Irish literature, and so on. Last, colleges just need to hit the “select ” key.

Applicants who are selected through this sophisticated but semi-blind system would be admitted. When some inevitably do not matriculate (because they also gained admission at another university they prefer, for instance), the school will then repeat the process. 

This system would serve to eliminate legitimate concerns about collegiate admissions on both the left and the right — and have benefits beyond college admissions as well.

First, it would facilitate more legitimate equality of opportunity by elevating students who pass the proficiency exam at schools where most students do not. In Philadelphia, for example, 37 percent of students are proficient in reading and 23 percent are proficient in math (and these numbers are inflated because of magnet high schools where the rates are far higher). If a given applicant to my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, is coming out of a Philadelphia public high school with low proficiency percentages but is proficient in both reading and math and has a GPA to match, his or her admission to Penn should be all but presumptive. A system that foregrounds the SAT might miss out on this applicant, just because they might not have scored quite so well given myriad disadvantages.

By accounting for the socioeconomic demographics and proficiency test passage rate in applicants’ high schools, this system would serve progressive goals of racially and socioeconomically diversifying college admissions without making race (which is in many places correlated with, but is an increasingly crude barometer of, socioeconomic disadvantage) the characteristic on which admission turns. 

Second, this system would create transparency around the abysmal rates of proficiency that currently plague many urban and rural high schools while also increasing geographic, ideological and cultural diversity on college campuses. Presumably, elite colleges like the ones Walsh is writing about will not admit any students that do not pass the proficiency exam. But other colleges might — especially in an era of declining demographics. To the extent that they do, it would reify how universities admit unprepared students and then either charge them money for degrees they never obtain or pass them through without measurably increasing their literacy or numeracy.

This would serve centrist and conservative goals by eradicating the ability of colleges to hide their own hypocrisy if and when they admit unprepared students. It would also prevent elite colleges from selecting only students with far-left ideologies that conform to those of today’s universities (no interviews or essays until after admission, when advising begins).

Ultimately, some colleges — the ones that can’t find enough proficient students to make up any sizable portion of their classes — will go under. In turn, some good-hearted higher education professionals may be struck by the alarming fact that so many American 12th graders do not have basic reading and math skills. And in creating a pipeline of people who are actually prepared for higher learning (not to mention a functional citizenry), we might even do something about that.

And then maybe, just maybe, American higher education could reinvent itself as something worthy of our children’s work and aspirations.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a freelance writer, an America’s Future Foundation Writing Fellowship alumna and a Young Voices contributor. She spent more than a decade in higher education, including at Saint Joseph’s University, Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Deseret News, Law and Liberty, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Philadelphia Inquirer.