6 ms·

Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

48 points by harekaze 8y ago

throwawaymath 8y ago
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_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670663?seq=1#page_scan_...
diminoten 8y ago
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 8y ago
  It may change the culture at some schools. Whether that would be better or worse remains an open question.
- albntomat0 8y ago
  Many of the Ivies admit that they have multiple freshmen classes worth of qualified applicants every year. The lottery doesn't mean everyone who applies gets the exact same chance. It could choose among the qualified, perhaps using some sort of weighted system.
dannykwells 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - jihadjihad 8y ago
    But how is that threshold itself determined? Seems like it's completely arbitrary and at the discretion of the institution.
    - trowawee 8y ago
      It would also probably dramatically worsen the grade inflation that's already rampant at a lot of the elite feeder high schools that pump people into the Ivies (and rampant at Harvard itself[1], fwiw). 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/20/why-grade-inflation-even-at-harvard-is-a-big-problem/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
lettergram 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    Yes, a conservative activist has recruited test-case students as plaintiffs in lawsuits designed to strike down affirmative action.
    - honestinquiry 8y ago
      If the merits of the case are justified, what does it matter whether an "activist" is involved or what his politics might be?
  - stronglikedan 8y ago
    I personally don't know if such a lawsuit exists. However, if it hasn't been settled in favor of the plaintiff, and no other such lawsuits have been settled in favor of the plaintiff, then they aren't doing anything illegal.
    - wolfgang42 8y ago
      > if it hasn't been settled in favor of the plaintiff...then they aren't doing anything illegal. Wouldn't that mean that they haven't yet been determined to be doing anything illegal? If you do things against the law they're still illegal even if you haven't been caught.
taylodl 8y ago
"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.
- karmajunkie 8y ago
  All of those criteria are quantifiable and can be part of a threshold calculation.
  - trowawee 8y ago
    Not really. Is it more impressive to climb the seven summits, or write an original work and have it performed by the New York Philharmonic? These aren't cleanly comparable things (which was always the point, of course; the focus on "more well-rounded students" appeared when elite institutions were worried that academically successful Jewish students were becoming too big a proportion of the student body.[1]) 1: http://250.browndailyherald.com/how-1920s-anti-semitism-inspired-the-modern-day-admission-system/ http://250.browndailyherald.com/how-1920s-anti-semitism-insp...
    - karmajunkie 8y ago
      You don't have to decide which is more impressive. What you have to decide is how much you want either impression to count for in your threshold score. Does high achievement count for 30%? 50%? 80%? Does it outweigh an utter lack of academic achievement (i.e. could a high achiever in the "soft" achievements hack it in the "hard" subjects, or vice versa?) Once you've decided the proportions of things like that, this article proposes that it should be purely up to chance via lottery (an assertion I personally agree with.)
leroy_masochist 8y ago
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!
agent008t 8y ago
Who says that the threshold, as measured by e.g. SAT scores, is a good threshold for a good measure?
- jhwang5 8y ago
  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.
sfblah 8y ago
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 8y ago
  The article mentions perfect math SAT scores. A perfect SAT score is much more rare.
- criddell 8y ago
  > Maybe they could start there. A lot of kids take those tests. The fact that there are thousands of perfect scores isn't necessarily a problem as long as the score distribution looks reasonable, right?
abnry 8y ago
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 8y ago
  So basically supply and demand?
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    The best approach would be to stamp the name and date of birth on the tickets. Check ID and DOB at the door. No ticket scalpers.
  - abnry 8y ago
    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.
- chillacy 8y ago
  It might not matter as much to the Red Sox but if your event happens to also depend on the participation of the fans then you want to make sure your event isn’t 100% rich people too.
uasm 8y ago
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.
- kevinventullo 8y ago
  I agree with you that the quality of education is maybe not worth the price compared to a UC say, but at the highest tiers (say top 10), the network and the name alone will get you pretty far. Also, if you're close to prodigy level in your field, then it's probably worth it to go to the best schools. The people who are really screwed are those who paid $50k a year for a low-demand major at some private school no one's heard of.
- Mitchhhs 8y ago
  This is a misconception that kind of bugs me. At the top schools they give a tremendous amount of need-based grants (i.e. money that never needs to be paid back). Elite institution grads are not the ones who have debt they can't pay back. Its people at middle of the road private institutions and many other scenarios that have this issue. You are confusing the sticker price with what the bulk of non-rich students actually pay which is far lower. This narrative bugs me because it is just incorrect and focuses on the wrong places as sources of a very real issue.
- trowawee 8y ago
  People who go to HYS et al. aren't paying for the quality of education; they're paying for the signaling device and the network opportunities.
azthecx 8y ago
"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 8y ago
  “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.
pickitupsnake 8y ago
Or they could just admit more students..
rconti 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
dontreact 8y ago
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.
crazygringo 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
40acres 8y ago
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.
babyslothzoo 8y ago
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 8y ago
  "simply admit the most qualified students" is the "assume a spherical cow" of the college admissions discussion.
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    For the record, this is also an assumption that the "coding interviews are bogus" crowd makes too.
  - babyslothzoo 8y ago
    Why? Is this not supposed to be an elite university for elite students?
    - trowawee 8y ago
      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.
motohagiography 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
akhilcacharya 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
rheffern 8y ago
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/
auntienomen 8y ago
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.
dcole2929 8y ago
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.

48 points by harekaze 8y ago

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_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670663?seq=1#page_scan_...

diminoten 8y ago

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 8y ago
It may change the culture at some schools. Whether that would be better or worse remains an open question.
albntomat0 8y ago
Many of the Ivies admit that they have multiple freshmen classes worth of qualified applicants every year. The lottery doesn't mean everyone who applies gets the exact same chance. It could choose among the qualified, perhaps using some sort of weighted system.

dannykwells 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- jihadjihad 8y ago
  But how is that threshold itself determined? Seems like it's completely arbitrary and at the discretion of the institution.
  - trowawee 8y ago
    It would also probably dramatically worsen the grade inflation that's already rampant at a lot of the elite feeder high schools that pump people into the Ivies (and rampant at Harvard itself[1], fwiw). 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/20/why-grade-inflation-even-at-harvard-is-a-big-problem/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...
  - throwawaymath 8y ago

lettergram 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  Yes, a conservative activist has recruited test-case students as plaintiffs in lawsuits designed to strike down affirmative action.
  - honestinquiry 8y ago
    If the merits of the case are justified, what does it matter whether an "activist" is involved or what his politics might be?
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  I personally don't know if such a lawsuit exists. However, if it hasn't been settled in favor of the plaintiff, and no other such lawsuits have been settled in favor of the plaintiff, then they aren't doing anything illegal.
  - wolfgang42 8y ago
    > if it hasn't been settled in favor of the plaintiff...then they aren't doing anything illegal. Wouldn't that mean that they haven't yet been determined to be doing anything illegal? If you do things against the law they're still illegal even if you haven't been caught.

taylodl 8y ago

"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.

karmajunkie 8y ago
All of those criteria are quantifiable and can be part of a threshold calculation.
- trowawee 8y ago
  Not really. Is it more impressive to climb the seven summits, or write an original work and have it performed by the New York Philharmonic? These aren't cleanly comparable things (which was always the point, of course; the focus on "more well-rounded students" appeared when elite institutions were worried that academically successful Jewish students were becoming too big a proportion of the student body.[1]) 1: http://250.browndailyherald.com/how-1920s-anti-semitism-inspired-the-modern-day-admission-system/ http://250.browndailyherald.com/how-1920s-anti-semitism-insp...
  - karmajunkie 8y ago
    You don't have to decide which is more impressive. What you have to decide is how much you want either impression to count for in your threshold score. Does high achievement count for 30%? 50%? 80%? Does it outweigh an utter lack of academic achievement (i.e. could a high achiever in the "soft" achievements hack it in the "hard" subjects, or vice versa?) Once you've decided the proportions of things like that, this article proposes that it should be purely up to chance via lottery (an assertion I personally agree with.)

leroy_masochist 8y ago

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!

agent008t 8y ago

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

jhwang5 8y ago
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.

sfblah 8y ago

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 8y ago
The article mentions perfect math SAT scores. A perfect SAT score is much more rare.
criddell 8y ago
> Maybe they could start there. A lot of kids take those tests. The fact that there are thousands of perfect scores isn't necessarily a problem as long as the score distribution looks reasonable, right?

abnry 8y ago

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 8y ago
So basically supply and demand?
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  The best approach would be to stamp the name and date of birth on the tickets. Check ID and DOB at the door. No ticket scalpers.
- abnry 8y ago
  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.
chillacy 8y ago
It might not matter as much to the Red Sox but if your event happens to also depend on the participation of the fans then you want to make sure your event isn’t 100% rich people too.

uasm 8y ago

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.

kevinventullo 8y ago
I agree with you that the quality of education is maybe not worth the price compared to a UC say, but at the highest tiers (say top 10), the network and the name alone will get you pretty far. Also, if you're close to prodigy level in your field, then it's probably worth it to go to the best schools. The people who are really screwed are those who paid $50k a year for a low-demand major at some private school no one's heard of.
Mitchhhs 8y ago
This is a misconception that kind of bugs me. At the top schools they give a tremendous amount of need-based grants (i.e. money that never needs to be paid back). Elite institution grads are not the ones who have debt they can't pay back. Its people at middle of the road private institutions and many other scenarios that have this issue. You are confusing the sticker price with what the bulk of non-rich students actually pay which is far lower. This narrative bugs me because it is just incorrect and focuses on the wrong places as sources of a very real issue.
trowawee 8y ago
People who go to HYS et al. aren't paying for the quality of education; they're paying for the signaling device and the network opportunities.

azthecx 8y ago

"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 8y ago
“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.

pickitupsnake 8y ago

Or they could just admit more students..

rconti 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

dontreact 8y ago

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.

crazygringo 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

40acres 8y ago

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.

babyslothzoo 8y ago

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 8y ago
"simply admit the most qualified students" is the "assume a spherical cow" of the college admissions discussion.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  For the record, this is also an assumption that the "coding interviews are bogus" crowd makes too.
- babyslothzoo 8y ago
  Why? Is this not supposed to be an elite university for elite students?
  - trowawee 8y ago
    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.

motohagiography 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.

akhilcacharya 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

rheffern 8y ago

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/

auntienomen 8y ago

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.

dcole2929 8y ago

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.