A lottery system with high acceptance requirements has always made more sense to me than obsessing over “objective” metrics to draw a line between students rank

A lottery system with high acceptance requirements has always made more sense to me than obsessing over “objective” metrics to draw a line between students ranked 82nd and 83rd. Put in other words, make a list of all students who you would be happy to have on campus and draw randomly if you have more students than freshman dorm space. If there is a large oversupply of students who passed the threshold to enter the lottery, then it may be time to consider increasing the requirements. If you don’t need to lottery at all, then there are probably difficult institutional questions to ask. I will admit that this shouldn’t be the only system for admission at any school, as it leaves no room for the various specialty admission channels. My gut feeling says that at least ⅔ of the student body should enter through the general admission lottery with the remaining third reserved for athletics, academic scholarship winners, full-price foreign scholars, affirmative action, townies, etc…