The Lottery

In light of this Spring’s explosions of campus protests sparked by Israel’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7th attacks, it’s hardly surprising that just 17% of Americans express “a great deal” of confidence in higher education. More than one in five tell Gallup they have “very little” confidence. Both figures have worsened in the last eight years.

Some college Presidents, having had enough, made efforts to clear encampments and expel agitators. Others conceded to protesters, hoping to buy peace. But regardless of your views, the college ‘brand’ was already damaged by soaring tuition, illiberal diversity efforts, and ideological bias among professors. Exacerbating this distrust, our most exclusive schools – the ones that capture headlines when their students mistake terrorists for social workers – were revealed last fall to be preserves, by and large, for the rich.

Share of Individuals in Leadership Positions who Attended Ivy-Plus Colleges

But “Ivy Plus” students (those attending Duke, Chicago, Stanford, MIT or the eight colleges of the Ivy League) aren’t just atypically wealthy: The authors of this well-designed study note they are also quite likely to end up working at or heading our nation’s leading institutions. (see chart, left).

Yet we distrust these institutions. It’s perhaps unsurprising that just 17% of Republicans say our democracy works, but independents (27%) and Democrats (38%) aren’t much more satisfied. These numbers are all record lows. Just 13% of Americans think Congress is going a good job. Not a single senior appointed or elected official has the backing of the majority of Americans. The CIA, FBI, CDC, Fed? Not well regarded. The media? Big business, same story.

A lottery, limited to students with excellent scores, is the best way to get more middle-class kids with diverse views on track to lead our most influential governmental and private sector jobs. By itself, a more economically-representative student body won’t solve elite colleges’ problems. However their presence could boost these institutions’ credibility and moderate our politics.

Those accustomed to their progeny possessing these seats like a patrimony will insist it can’t be done. Those who see race as a more significant identity than class, will worry about a return to a segregated past. But these mostly wealthy beneficiaries of the status quo can take comfort in knowing that, like Tony Stark in Avengers: Endgame, their sacrifice may ensure the nation’s survival.

The above-cited study examined 2.4 million Ivy Plus applicants over 30 years. It reveals that more than half of Harvard students come from the wealthiest 10% of Americans; the median Harvard student’s family income is $169,000, around the 93rd percentile. At Yale, Princeton and Penn the story is the same. At Georgetown the median is $229,000; Vanderbilt, $204,500. Even when a middle-class kids had the same test scores, elite schools were 58% more likely to admit applicants from the 1% (families who earn more than $611,000 annually). At Harvard, the 1% are over-represented 15 times; at Yale it’s 19 times.

A Midwestern, middle-class Catholic who attended Princeton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, famously described the very rich as “different from you and me.” A century later Rob Henderson, who grew up in foster homes before landing at Yale on the GI Bill denounced the ‘luxury beliefs’ held by many elite college graduates. As, he writes

When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or anti-vaccination policies, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or uses the term “white privilege,” they are engaging in a status display.

Their wealth insulates them from the practical impact of these ideas, according to Henderson. But the impact of these ideas on middle- and lower-income citizens is both real and deleterious.

When MIT students silence a lecturer for challenging popular views on affirmative action or when a Berkeley professor claims Oct 7th was “not a terrorist attack and … not an antisemitic attack,” or when Yale students claim Halloween costumes cause harm, non-elites wonder if they’re living on the same planet.

The Ivy Plus, like many of their elite peers, are proud of the racial and gender diversity they’ve embraced in the last six decades. Even if grades were all that mattered, their admissions would be competitive. Only 25,000 students can be in the top one percent of test takers; our 28,000 high schools will have but one valedictorian (ok, sometimes two). But as the Ivy Plus search for future leaders, they rely not on grades alone but on subjectively irrational factors adduced from essays, recommendations and interviews that have a long, shameful history of abuse. Admitting students by random selection would be less biased and produce a class more representative of America, and most importantly, with more diverse views.

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How Did We Get Here?

For most of their existence universities were elite because few families could forego the income that their sons earned by working. My grandfather –a “first gen” student - dropped out of Penn when his father died in 1922. Even if they could afford it, the expense was significant: In 1929 Richard Nixon enrolled close to home; despite tuition scholarships from Yale and Harvard, his parents couldn’t afford room and board.

Like my grandfather, many immigrant children sought higher status jobs created by the growing economy. Like the prep school boys at St Paul’s or Groton they gained entry by succeeding on the “College Boards,” an exam of Latin, Greek, Geography and Math.

But too many immigrants - Jews and Catholics especially - passed the test. In response, as Jerome Karabel explained, Harvard President Abbott Lowell added recommendations, essays and a photograph to the application. Columbia’s contribution was the interview, waived if the applicant attended prep school. The admissions office could then assess applicants “holistically,” which sounds nicer than subjectively. Other elite colleges followed suit, and we’ve never looked back.

Lowell’s successor, James Conant, shared his predecessor’s antisemitism. But he felt Harvard should enroll more smart middle-class boys who didn’t attend Choate. He thought the Scholastic Aptitude Test could help identify them.

Because its creators embraced eugenics, some question the SAT’s validity. But as education scholar Don Hirsch explained15 years ago “These much maligned … tests are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available.” More recently, 2015 Harvard grad Emi Nietfeld, whose upbringing was not easy, wrote, “For many of us, standardized tests provided our one shot to prove our potential, despite the obstacles in our lives or the untidy pasts we had.” A recent study judged the SAT a better predictor of college success than high school GPA.

It’s a Meritocracy, right?

Test optional or (increasingly) not, elite colleges describe today’s admissions as a meritocracy, abusing a term sociologist Michael Young originated as satire. Advances in our understanding of biology suggest Young’s skepticism was right. Charles Murry and Richard Hernstein were widely condemned as racist when they first adduced environmental and genetic factors to explain elements of human intelligence and success. But three decades later, UT Austin professor Kathleen Paige Harden, a liberal, drew similar conclusions, and received far less opprobrium. She calls the results “the genetic lottery.”

Nonetheless, meritocracy’s power is broadly believed. After graduating from St Paul’s, an elite New England boarding school, Shamus Khan attended Haverford College – same income demographics as Harvard – and then pursued a PhD. As part of his work, he returned to his alma mater to teach and study the intersection of privilege and merit.

Boston brahmins and their Connecticut cousins no longer dominated St Paul’s, but most students were still from well-off families. (Khan acknowledges his own advantages as the son of a successful surgeon.) But, abetted by the faculty and administration, the students believed their extraordinary talent and hard work meant they merited a seat at St Paul’s. And eventually at an elite college.

Khan says his students were talented enough, but typical of kids with similar endowments of social capital. One of his advisees excitedly suggests a 9th grade classmate who was taking calculus could one day win the Fields Medal, another could play violin in the New York Philharmonic. Khan disabuses them of these fantasies. His students don’t work especially hard, or think very deeply. But they learn to use the correct fork at dinner.

Carla, (not her name) a Black scholarship student, challenged this ethos. Summing up her time at St Paul’s she tells Khan, “I didn’t get smarter. I learned how to say the same thing, only different. Not my way, yours.” She observes that many kids in her neighborhood could have learned these rules; she just got lucky.

So how should elite colleges regain the trust of the average American? Richard Kahlenberg (a Harvard and Harvard Law grad) calls for multiple changes, including eliminating preferences for legacy applicants and faculty children and ending early admissions. He says all three are effectively affirmative action for rich people.

It seems even less imaginable, but elite colleges could also strike athletic preferences. These drive parents to pursue sports like crew and fencing where the entry costs are high and the competition low, says David Deming, who worked on the study cited earlier. But, he writes:

If colleges stopped admitting recruited athletes but focused more on community service, rich people would find ways to game that too. … Reforms that shut down one form of preferential treatment in isolation will just increase focus on the others. It’s privilege whack-a-mole.

Deming says nixing these preferences would, in any case, only increase the enrollment of middle-income students at the Ivy Plus colleges by about 9%, or 145 students at the average Ivy Plus.

A Modest Proposal

In 2023 about 2.5 million of our 3.4 million high school seniors took either the SAT or the ACT. Students scoring in the 90th percentile or higher can succeed at an elite school; that how Harvard’s average recruited athlete performed. (In a soon-to-be published paper Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono estimates that Harvard has lower standards for legacies as well).

This implies that around 250,000 students could thrive at an Ivy Plus school. Ivy Plus colleges enroll slightly more than 91,000 undergraduates, of whom about 23,000 are freshman. Thus, there are 11 qualified applicants for every seat. Admissions is a game of chance, but unlike the Powerball, the selection process relies on criteria prone to interpretive bias, like ‘leadership potential.’ The students are not chosen at random. They should be. Since SAT scores are correlated with income, the threshold would have to be adjusted – Kahlenberg suggests using the applicants home zip code – to fully realize the economic diversity that will make elite colleges credible.

A lottery will de-escalate class tension, introduce viewpoint diversity into institutions which desperately need it, and save a good portion of the $2.9 billion we spend on private admissions coaches each year. Colleges, whose tuition has been rising rapidly, will also save money from a vastly simplified admissions process. And high schools will gain back valuable instruction time currently misspent on student essays and teacher recommendations. (This account of Sidwell Friends, the Washington DC private school, suggests that stressed out prep school students and their parents might turn out to be the biggest beneficiaries of such a move.)

Eliminating special access for legacies, faculty children, athletes and donors’ children would be a bitter pill for elite colleges to swallow. But 12 schools with a total endowment of $239 billion, (32% of all US college endowments), will manage to survive economically. (And despite claims to the contrary, well-resourced schools dedicate a small fraction of their endowment to financial aid.)

And even if the Supreme Court has decided it must be done, asking those invested in identarian beliefs to relinquish affirmative action is also hard. Despite racial progress in the last six decades, we can’t ‘unsee’ skin color and it can still bias our actions in some cases. That said, there are plenty of minority middle-class applicants who would benefit from a lottery. And wealthy minority students like Claudine Gay -- Phillips Exeter ’98, Stamford ’92, Harvard ’98 -- will make their mark in the world, regardless of where they attend college.

As with arms limitations, the system would only work if everyone signs up and there is a transparent inspection mechanism. The good news, as a recently settled lawsuit indicates, is that the Ivy-plus colleges have experience coordinating their actions. If the lottery proved successful, elite liberal arts colleges like Williams and Amherst could feel pressure to adopt it.

To further increase efficiency, schools could adopt a matching mechanism like the one used for medical residencies. Applicants above the SAT threshold would rank colleges and be matched to one. Saving time and money on college tours and admitted students’ days. (Hard as it may be to believe, this is more or less how UK schools like Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrew’s do it.)

Apart from our elite institutions, the lottery would also benefit the 95% of applicants that will not be accepted by an elite school. For it will not be their essay, or too little test prep, or not serving as editor of the student newspaper, or not possessing a 98 mile-an-hour fastball that explains their rejection. In time, they will appreciate that their strengths and their efforts are far more important than the name of the college on their diploma. As Chief Justice John Roberts, told his son’s graduating class:

I wish you bad luck, from time to time, so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved, and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either.

Convinced that their prestige is fully merited, that they wield their sorting hat power wisely, Ivy-Plus colleges will find this proposal appalling. They will insist that lowering their standards is unimaginable, forgetting that these same ‘standards’ were how, for decades, they excluded Blacks women, Jews, Asians and Latinos. Just last month former Harvard President Derek Bok, now 94, published a spirited, defense of colleges like his.

Among Bok’s claims are that elite schools uniquely create valuable knowledge. In fact, this is a function of graduate students, who can be recruited from among many promising undergraduates. One example is Harvard economist David Deming, who helped guide the study that has been central to this essay’s claims: A (presumably) proud Buckeye, where just 25% of students come from families with incomes in the top 10%.

But it’s a rare person or institution that willingly concedes power. Relinquishing control to an algorithm would be far different than how the Ivy Plus have managed undergrad admissions for the last century. One way they might gain comfort with this change would be to back test the lottery on the millions of applicants in data sets complied for the research I’ve cited in this essay. A lottery might mean that Harvard loses out to Yale or Dartmouth on a future superstar like Sheryl Sandberg. It might also mean Ted Kaczynski goes to Penn. Regardless, it would have been luck of the draw.

Researchers know Jesus’ saying that the rich get richer as the Matthew Effect. The Apostle Luke tells a different parable that the Presidents of the Ivy Plus colleges might consider: “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more." Like it or not, the Ivy Plus receive, and to a large degree merit, disproportionate attention. A lottery with a meritocratic floor of the 90th percentile has the potential to be fairer, more efficient, and ultimately more beneficial to the well-being and continued thriving of the nation which these universities care about so deeply.

No Man is Above the Law