Editorial: Schools shouldn’t implement a ‘lottery’ admissions system

Most people think getting into Harvard or Princeton requires exceptional intelligence. But what if Ivy League schools allowed chance to dictate who they accepted and rejected? Most people think getting into Harvard or Princeton requires exceptional intelligence. But what if Ivy League schools allowed chance to dictate who they accepted and rejected?

In a Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed this Sunday, Dalton Conley, the dean of social sciences at New York University, proposed a radical new approach to college admissions: Rather than evaluating applications holistically, administrators should establish a few prerequisites — a top-10-percent class ranking, for instance — that all prospective students must meet. Once they’ve eliminated the ineligible candidates, they can randomize their remaining decisions.

This “lottery” arrangement — which Conley believes would reduce students’ anxieties about, say, SAT scores — isn’t without its redeeming qualities. For one thing, it would prevent legacy students from gaining an upper hand. For another, it would immediately render preferential treatment based on race and sex a non-issue.

Nevertheless, we think implementing such a system would be disastrous. Far from diminishing the stress students might feel about their GPAs, test scores and other numeric measures of aptitude, a simplistic eligibility benchmark would eliminate the opportunity for them to distinguish themselves in other areas. If, for instance, Harvard made a 2300 SAT score its minimum entry requirement, everyone with Ivy League aspirations would devote their entire high school lives to achieving that score, to the exclusion of extracurriculars.

Furthermore, a lottery system would by no means level the socioeconomic playing field. Multiple studies have shown that rich students, who have a wider variety of academic resources at their disposal, are more likely to score higher on the SATs than their similarly intelligent, lower-income peers.

Last but not least, Conley is naive to assume that students don’t care which college they attend, so long as it affords them a certain future income. Many members of our community, for instance, selected Pitt over Penn State because they preferred an urban campus, despite the slight advantage the latter holds in alumni lifetime earnings, according to PayScale.com. If both institutions admitted people via a lottery, high schoolers might not have the opportunity to choose between one or the other based on important factors like location and size.

We’ll acknowledge that admissions criteria, especially for elite universities, are often arbitrary and inane. But a lottery system would create more problems than it would eliminate. Human judgment might be imperfect, but we’d much prefer to have trained administrators rather than a computer algorithm evaluating students’ applications. If you devote your entire high school career to improving your chances of attending an elite school, you deserve some personal attention.