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

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/

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

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.

That's why I was focusing on accomplishments over activities. You played violin? Great! Were you first chair? Did you ever have a solo at a performance?

You played lacrosse? Awesome! How competitive was your team? How many starts did you have? What are your stats?

I'm not looking for people participating in activities, I'm looking for them succeeding. That should cut down a lot on people rushing around participating in a bunch of activities in order to pad a college resume. You want people who focused on results and had both the talent and tenacity to pursue them. Those are your predictors of future success.

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.