Basing Admission to Harvard on Pure Luck Isn’t Such a Great Idea
Selecting the freshman class of elite schools by lottery would democratize higher education, but at a cost.
In February 2019 the progressive New America foundation said highly selective colleges and universities should admit students by lottery. Any school that refused to base admissions on luck “would lose all eligibility not only to Title IV aid but also to federal research dollars,” wrote New America staffers Amy Laitinen, Claire McCann, and Rachel Fishman in a report that went to a group of U.S. senators including Kamala Harris, the California Democrat who’s now vice president.
“This is, no doubt, a radical proposal,” but an important one for increasing social mobility, they wrote. “This would do away with admissions preferences that overwhelmingly favor white and wealthy applicants, including for athletes and legacies.”