Knowing that, her modest proposal for predicting whom is going to Harvard is either satire that is brilliant a astonishing rejection regarding the calculus she once championed.

After just one more springtime in which scores of United states children endured the anxiety of discovering whether their selected universities had accepted them, pundits are all over again lamenting the absurdity and social ills for the procedure. Why should a cabal of admissions officers hold therefore sway that is much high-school students’ self-esteem and use of the elite?

Permit me to provide a radical solution: Fire the functionaries and make use of random selection alternatively.

It will have an “eat the babies” feel to it, it is this simply Poe’s Law at its most useful?

I’m maybe maybe not the first ever to recommend this. The foundation that is progressive America has also made the concept — particularly, adopting lottery admissions at extremely selective universities — section of its want to attain greater variety in advanced schooling. There might be a poor idea of that is “qualified” — say, a higher college level and a minimal grade point average. Continue reading →