how to fix college admissions

College admissions should be more random. This would both be more just as well as easier on kids.

the problems with college admissions as they stand

• SAT and GPA have some predictive value in relation to student success, but also correlate with student background and reproduce intergenerational advantages
• other factors that colleges can select on, such as extracurriculars and essays (much less obviously insane things like legacy status) likely correlate even MORE with class status and other demographic variables, except it's harder for outsiders to notice and criticize
• the pressure to get into the best college feasible places incredible pressure on kids, whether that pressure is applied to academics or extracurriculars or both, with little observable advantage to their flourishing

There is a way to select people that produces no incentives and no intergenerational privilege: randomly! This should consequently be used more.

the solution

I don't propose that college admissions be completely at random. I think there are some legitimate reasons for colleges to care about GPA/SAT, and about diversity and equity (though probably the biggest gains for equity would come from reducing the premium for going to college, reducing the cost of college, and other things that have little to do with who goes where.) Further, there's such a thing as good fit - some people are likely to thrive in a small college and others in a big one, or urban vs. rural, and so on.

Here's the proposal:

• colleges can state GPA/SAT minima on the grounds of "you have to be this prepared to succeed at the classes we teach"
• colleges can set quotas on given demographic variables - sex, race, parental educational attainment - to shift them towards total population baselines, if desired
• within each quota tranche, selection is random amongst every applying student who meets GPA/SAT minima

There's selection by fit here but that part is entirely driven by students. If you want to join the fencing club, join it because you actually enjoy fencing.

advanced proposal: funding

The above proposal has incentives that seem to work entirely to incentivize colleges to set high GPA/SAT minima (since that selects for students who are most likely to make money and donate, make the college look impressive, and graduate.) These are also the students who need the least help. Moreover, you increase your signalling value if you are more selective in this way.

This could be fixed by simply giving more funding per student to colleges that set lower minima - which would have the added benefit of funnelling educational resources to students who need more assistance anyway. They'd only get the funding for students who actually graduate, however!

advanced advanced proposal: full educational communism

All of these are fragile attempts to compensate for the actual way to handle higher ed:

• anybody can go to any college
• there's no such thing as graduation; you learn whatever you learn for the sake of learning it (though there might be, seperate from the process of learning it, certificates for particular skills)
• anybody can take some number of years (ideally infinity, presumably less in practice, but at any rate as much as is feasible for the economy as a whole) off from external obligations to devote themselves to self-improvement and education

Of course, even my watered-down proposal runs into a number of difficulties - courts in the US dislike quotas and so does the voting public, and more fundamentally colleges WANT to get the most privileged kids (as long as it can be done in a sufficiently invisible way) so they can get more alumni dollars, &c.