Some People Want Lottery-Based Admissions. That’s a Terrible Idea.

Chronicle illustration by Ellen Winkler

Thanks to the recent admissions-bribery scandal and the pending affirmative-action lawsuit at Harvard University, a long-talked about proposal — that a lottery should decide who gets into America’s elite colleges — is gaining momentum. Here’s how it would work: First, admissions committees at places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton would blindly rate students based on criteria like grades, SAT scores, and personal statements. Then, for students who make the cut, a lottery would determine who could attend.

A push for the proposal — whose champions include several academics at elite institutions — is even finding traction in Washington. Just last month, New America released a report addressed to four U.S. senators — including the Democratic presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris — calling for, among other suggestions, the enactment of “lottery-based admissions among highly selective colleges and universities that want to access federal research dollars.”

It’s easy to see the appeal. Elite colleges have more qualified applicants than they can accept. A lottery would obviate the problem of making fine-grained — and, some might say, arbitrary — distinctions among qualified prospective students. According to its advocates, a lottery could even help to ease the stress of the college-admissions mania by saving families time and resources in navigating what’s now an overly labyrinthine process. Yet despite good intentions, a lottery wouldn’t eliminate many flaws in the current admissions system — and could even make some parts worse. Here’s why.

First, prospective students are real individuals with real lives. Admissions officers often speak about what defines “the whole person.” Viewed collectively, criteria like grades, standardized tests, and family background provide instructive information about the motivations, skills, achievements, and experiences of students. This more comprehensive picture may get lost in a system that assesses specific factors in isolation to determine which students make the cutoff for the lottery pool. To understand what a student can bring to a campus, it’s crucial to consider how an individual’s entire application fits together.

Admission Through the ‘Side Door’

Dozens of people, including famous actors, college coaches, and a university administrator, have been charged by federal prosecutors for their alleged roles in an admissions-bribery scheme involving Yale, Stanford, and other elite institutions.

• One Year After College-Admissions Scandal, 3 Questions About What (if Anything) Has Changed
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A lottery could also rob students of a sense of ownership over their destiny. If getting into Stanford or Harvard is like winning the Powerball, students might come to see their fate as largely tied to uncontrollable forces. We shouldn’t teach aspirational 18-year-olds that success comes by waiting for the stars to align. Rather, we want to reinforce that hard work and persistence pay off. To be sure, luck — including the family into which one is born — often plays an outsize role in determining where Americans end up in the social hierarchy. Yet correcting for these advantages (and disadvantages) amid a discretionary system is better than leaving admissions to chance.

Another argument against lotteries is colleges’ need for symphony orchestras, football teams, student newspapers, and so on. A lottery-based system couldn’t ensure that those roles would be filled. Such activities (and the students who participate in them) enrich campus life. Although colleges are academic institutions first and foremost, an important part of preparing students for life beyond campus entails creating an environment in which they can explore their passions while gaining an appreciation for the many facets of civic and cultural life. Admissions officers at schools like Dartmouth and Columbia spend months crafting and fine-tuning their incoming classes in large part to advance that goal.

Then there’s the issue of diversity, which raises complications and for which no perfect solutions exist. A pure performance lottery would allay concerns about discrimination against certain students — particularly Asian-Americans. But it would also come at a cost. Low-income, black, and Latinx students apply to colleges, especially prestigious colleges, at lower rates than their wealthy white and Asian-American counterparts do. As a result, they would comprise a smaller share of the lottery pool — and hence the final admitted classes.

Take Brown University. In 2018 only 18 percent of its applicants came from families whose parents hadn’t attended college, while recent data show that children without college-educated parents constitute a much larger share of the population. In 2017, just 10.5 percent of Harvard’s applicants were black and 12.6 percent were Latinx — well below those groups’ share of the college-age population. In a lottery, colleges could correct for economic imbalances by assigning more points to poor students in the initial screening phase. According to the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case Gratz v. Bollinger, however, assigning a predetermined number of points based on an applicant’s race is unconstitutional.

Prestigious colleges have strong incentives not to adopt admissions lotteries. If institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton adopt lotteries, for example — but places like Duke, MIT, and Caltech don’t — then it’s the latter that will start being perceived as the most elite. Without some external impetus, elite colleges have little reason to relinquish their admissions cachet, since other institutions will invariably fill the void. The New America proposal could presumably address this concern by restricting access to federal funds for colleges that don’t implement lottery-based admissions. It’s hard, however, to see that sort of policy mustering sufficient political support in Washington.

One could argue, of course, that elite colleges’ admissions processes already function as de facto lotteries — and that a policy shift would simply formalize the randomness that now characterizes the process. For example, Tom Parker, a former admissions dean of Amherst College, has noted that when selecting among hypertalented applicants, “There are times, honestly, where I’m not sure why I put my hand up or failed to put my hand up. I’m kind of going with my gut here.”

The antidote to randomness in the college-admissions process isn’t more randomness. To educate the future leaders of our pluralistic society, colleges should admit students who reflect our tremendous range of identities, backgrounds, passions, talents, and experiences. That requires evaluating applicants intentionally.

One way to improve the current evaluation process is to do a better job of teaching admissions officers how to identify (and correct for) the unconscious biases that may creep into their assessments. We must also rethink the worth of certain variables — such as whether a student is a legacy or comes from a family that has donated large sums of money. It’s also worth emphasizing to accomplished applicants that many great universities exist beyond the Ivy League, and that Harvard isn’t the only ticket to life success.

The current system of admissions at elite colleges has serious defects — and we should strive to rectify them. Yet admissions needs to be more deliberate, not less. Depending on the result of the Harvard affirmative-action case, many elite institutions may be forced to rethink radically how they go about admitting the nation’s best and brightest students. A lottery-based admissions policy is an interesting idea, but one that should not make it past the wait list.

Leslie K. Finger is a lecturer in government and social studies at Harvard University. Thomas Gift is a lecturer in political science at University College London.