Making Admissions to Elite Colleges Fair

In this essay, I’m going to offer a proposal on how to make admissions for incoming undergraduates to elite colleges and universities fair—certainly fairer than now. On the one hand, I want to avoid affirmative action and DEI, which attempt to enforce tendentious views of fairness at the expense of merit. On the other hand, I want to avoid what could only be called an arms race among students stockpiling ever-increasing numbers of accomplishments and accolades in a scramble to stand out to admissions committees. To get to my actual proposal, I will need to set the stage, much of which is autobiographical. But this context helps to make my case.

A Two-Percent Admission Rate

The California Institute of Technology, or Caltech as it is called, accepts the lowest percentage of undergraduate applicants of any school in US, being the first that I know of to break the 3 percent barrier. Ivy Central reports that the acceptance rate for the class of 2027 is 2.03 percent. All other US schools are at or above 3 percent, and that includes Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. Caltech’s low admission rate is helped by the school being so small, having less than 1,000 undergraduates (with graduate students, the school is still small—under 2,500 students total). One of Elon Musk’s sons attends Caltech, which may also contribute to the rising number of applicants and thus to the low admission rate.

As it is, one my sons attended Caltech, graduating in 2023. The difference-maker for him was Caltech’s baseball coach recommending his admission. Caltech is an NCAA Division III school, so it offers no athletic scholarships. But sports can make the difference in getting accepted. Caltech athletes need to prove that they can “do the work.” But proving that you can do the work won’t eliminate much of the applicant pool. That means getting in is still a crap shoot for most otherwise-qualified applicants.

I learned a lot about the current challenges facing undergraduate admissions into elite higher educational institutions from my son’s experience in applying to these schools and then in actually attending Caltech. Especially eye-opening for me was interacting with his fellow baseball players and their parents when my wife and I would fly out over weekends to see our son play baseball for Caltech. There were typically three games on a weekend, one on Friday, two on Saturday. It was fun to watch the games. And it was enlightening to talk with the parents and fellow players.

My Background with Elite Higher Ed

Before describing what I learned from my son’s experience, however, let me back up a bit to describe my own experience with elite higher ed. Throughout my high school days, I was driven to perform academically. I can’t credit this drivenness to pressure from my parents. They wanted me to do the work, but B’s were fine with them. I remember in fourth grade my mom paying me a dollar for each A, which did motivate me to get all A’s (there were ten subjects, so I remember getting ten bucks).

But it wasn’t until seventh grade that I started to apply myself. The turning point for me came early in the seventh grade, when my parents pulled me from a public middle school whose curriculum was in disarray. My parents went to an open house at the middle school. In the science classroom, the word “pseudopodia” was misspelled on a large sign stuck to the blackboard. When my dad inquired, he found that the science teacher had misspelled it (big mistake, given that my dad was a biology professor!).

In the math class, there was no textbook or clear course of study. When my dad asked what we were covering, the teacher waved his hands. For an A in that class, the teacher wanted us to compute 60 factorial by hand. This was in 1972 before calculators. Sixty factorial — or 60! as mathematicians write it — is 1 times 2 times 3 etc. all the way up to 60—an 82-digit number. This was sheer busy work. It was on returning from that open house that my parents pulled me from the Evanston public school system and sent me to a Catholic school in Chicago.

I loved the challenge and discipline of that Catholic school (we had to stand to attention at our desks when teachers or visitors entered our classroom). Early in eighth grade, the headmaster strongly pushed for me to go to an all-boys Catholic prep school out East that had school six days a week. My parents left the choice to me, but I decided to go for it. The prep school was rigorous. Among other things, you needed a foreign language and you needed Latin—at least two years of each. Having lived in Germany for over four years, I chose German, which enabled me to place out of the first year of that language.

In my freshman year at the school, I was second in my class, behind a brilliant boy who, sadly, could not continue beyond his freshman year because his divorced mother could no longer afford the tuition costs. (I say he was brilliant because he was able to get his good grades without much effort—I had to grind it out.) By the way, tuition, room, and board at the school in 1974 when I started was $4,000, which was affordable to my parents in that both my father and mother worked (it also helped that I was an only child). I just checked, and today the cost is fast approaching $80,000. That’s a 20-fold increase. The CPI (consumer price index), by contrast, shows only about a 7-fold increase between then and now.

The boy who got first place my freshman year did not have a higher raw grade point average than me. Instead, because of his more rigorous middle-school experience than mine, he was able to place out of first year Latin and first year algebra. On account of that, his courses were “weighted” more heavily than mine, so the deficit in his grade point average raw score was adjusted up to exceed mine. As we’ll see, this sort of adjusting of grades for harder courses has become increasingly prevalent and insidious throughout high schools in our day.

Driven as I was, I decided that in my sophomore year I would not lose out because I didn’t have sufficiently weighty courses. Therefore, in the summer of 1975, I did a full year of Latin, placing me into third-year Latin when I started as a sophomore. Also, I did a full year of classical Greek that summer so that I could place into second-year study in that language my sophomore year.

Greek was the most highly weighted of all the subjects at the school (there’s a reason for the expression “it’s Greek to me”). It’s not that I cared so much about Greek, but I did care about what it could get me in bumping up my weighted GPA. Later, as it turned out, I was grateful for this knowledge. After reading Plato and Homer, I found New Testament Greek by comparison easy, and to this day I’m grateful that I can go to the original Greek of the New Testament and read it with some comprehension.

Let me say in retrospect that I’m not proud of my drivenness to excel and “beat others out” academically. It wasn’t particularly healthy. That said, I wouldn’t want to say that it was entirely unhealthy either. Years later, as a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Chicago, I was roughly in the middle of my class. The experience of working with other students who were clearly stronger mathematicians than me helped me to become a better mathematician. The competition in that case was healthy. Iron sharpens iron.

In any event, my high school was a much smaller pond. So yes, I was first in my class my sophomore and junior years. My drivenness led me to leave high school in 1977 before my senior year without graduating in order to enter the University of Chicago (which I left after two terms, though I returned there some years later for graduate studies in mathematics). If my high school days were filled with success, my undergraduate days were turbulent and unsatisfying. In the end, it was for the good because I realized how much of an idol I had made out of academic success. In the process, I turned to Christianity and the true God.

Reversing Course with My Children

Fast forward to the high school days of my own children. Realizing how unhealthy academic striving could be, especially to get into elite schools, I didn’t want that for my kids, so I didn’t push them academically. Also, it had become clear to me just how ideologically antithetical to the Christian faith many of these elite schools had become, so I had misgivings about sending my children there regardless of such a school’s reputation and prestige.

As it is, my wife and I insisted that our kids apply themselves and do their schoolwork. And they had natural intellectual ability. The son who went to Caltech was reading at a 12th grade level in 5th grade. That said, he wasn’t a bookworm. He enjoyed socializing with his friends and playing baseball. He also worked during summers (working check-out at a grocery store, doing farm work, and building grain bins). If I pushed him at all during high school, it was to perform at a high level in baseball.

I expected that in college he would go to a Division I school to play baseball. He was first team all state his junior and senior years, cleaning up in pitching and hitting. Yet he didn’t like the pressure of the game. Also, he had injured his UCL (ulnar collateral ligament), so his pitching was never quite what it could have been. As his senior year in high school was approaching, he told me that he didn’t want to play baseball in college. Or, he said, if he did play in college, he would want to play for a mediocre program where there wasn’t any pressure (Caltech ended up fitting that bill perfectly).

At the time, he also indicated that he wanted to be an electrical engineer (he ended up doing a CS degree with a minor in data science). That was news to me since I never talked with him much about academics or what he might want to study in college. I assumed he would study business in college. My lack of connection with my son here may seem strange given my former drivenness in all things academic, but I was perhaps reacting against my own past. Also, as an intelligent design proponent, my own career as a professor had not been particularly happy because of the controversy surrounding my views. So it’s not as though I saw the academy as a promised land for my children.

Even with my son’s academic aspirations, I wasn’t pushing him toward an elite school. His older sister was attending a Christian school where she had a terrific experience, both academically and in the friends she made. Besides that school, there were other schools in Iowa (where we lived) and down the I35 corridor going south into Texas that seemed like they might be a good fit for my son. So we took a road trip in the spring of his junior year. None of the schools we visited stirred his enthusiasm.

The summer before his senior year, I told my son that we should take a road trip out east and visit some of the schools that I had worked at, whether as a grad student or postdoctoral fellow. I had done half a year of research in probability at Cornell as a grad student and had done postdocs at MIT (math) and Princeton (CS). So we did a circuit, visiting Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Yale, and Princeton in that order.

Getting into Caltech

Already at Cornell, on hearing the orientation by the school of engineering, my son knew that this was the sort of academic environment he would enjoy. Visiting MIT sealed the deal for him, which he described as a trade school for nerds. It became his first choice of schools he wanted to attend. In trying to help him get into these elite schools, I came to appreciate just how out of touch with the admissions process I had become since my high school days.

In the 1970s, Harvard admitted around 20 percent of applicants. For the other Ivies, the percentage was a bit higher. The prep school I attended had an inside track to all the Ivies. Each class had about 60 students, but the top 5 to 7 of the class could pretty much get in anywhere they wanted. I was first in my class, so I could have gone anywhere. As it is, I jumped ship early to attend the University of Chicago (which admitted students on merit who hadn’t finished high school). Had I stayed for my senior year, I suspect I would have attended one of the Ivies—or perhaps MIT or Caltech since both were also on my radar.

I just looked at my prep school’s 2023 college destinations (where its class of 2023 matriculated). Princeton was on the list, but not Harvard, Yale, or MIT. Indeed, this prep school no longer has the traction that it once had with these elite institutions. And that’s largely because the elite institutions have become so much more selective in their admissions. Harvard admitted roughly 20 percent of applicants in my day. In my son’s day this number was down to just over 3 percent.

These days, the summer before one’s senior year in high school is very late to start making plans to get into an elite school. If you’ve waited till then to decide you want to get into an elite school, it’s probably too late. As it is, because my son was ambivalent about even playing baseball in college, he didn’t go to any of the baseball camps where he could have been considered by baseball coaches at the elite schools. He also didn’t have a video showcasing his skills that could be circulated among coaches his junior year. We put one together last minute after that road trip out east.

As I learned from the Caltech parents on my son’s baseball team, getting into a school like Caltech took careful, indeed arduous, planning and preparation. If baseball was going to be your ticket to getting in, then you needed get your baseball resumé in front of the various coaches at the elite schools, and do so well before your senior year. And you needed to show up at their camps. My son had done none of these things.

Failure to get our ducks in a row by at least our son’s junior year of high school, and preferably sooner, effectively ruled out his possibility of admission to elite schools. Caltech proved to be the exception because of a historical quirk. Caltech had through much of its history devalued athletics. For instance, Caltech for many years manned their baseball team entirely with walk-ons. Thus, the coach would buttonhole students on campus who looked athletic and ask whether they wanted to play baseball.

As a result of this slipshod approach to recruiting their baseball players, Caltech’s baseball team was terrible. For almost a decade (from February 15, 2003, to February 2, 2013) the team did not have a single win. Their 228-game losing streak may be the longest in all of college baseball. Not to be outdone, the Caltech basketball team had a 310-game losing streak.

Caltech’s lackadaisical policy on athletics changed at the hands of Betsy Mitchell, a past Olympic gold medalist in swimming, who became the school’s athletic director. She rejected this slipshod method of recruiting, holding Caltech athletics to a higher standard. It was by coming in at just the right time to exploit this shift in athlete recruitment that allowed my son to get the attention of the Caltech baseball coach, who then recommended him for admission.

Was the Caltech Juice Worth the Squeeze?

Was it worth getting my son into Caltech? I would say it was, but mainly because he didn’t have to go through any soul-crushing contortions to do so. It’s not as though in his middle-school days he and his parents were carefully curating his activities so that he would have just the right distribution of courses, test scores, and extracurriculars for elite schools to view him favorably.

This is the danger: to put such a high value on getting into an elite school that your entire life revolves around making yourself look attractive to these schools. And what if the things you think will make you look attractive to the schools don’t make you attractive enough for them to admit you? And how hard are you going to take it if you don’t get into these schools?

One thing I liked about Caltech is that the school worked my son hard. Yes, he had time for baseball, and yes, he had time for socializing. But the problems sets that he had to turn in for his science, math, and CS courses were demanding. There was little grade inflation, which is one reason few pre-meds attend Caltech, pre-meds needing to keep up their GPAs to look attractive to medical schools. Also, all exams he took did not take place during class time. Midterms and finals for him were 4-to-5-hour exams, which he took by going to a quiet place on campus, such as a library table or cubicle. Students were on the honor system. On rare occasions when students cheated and were caught, it was a big deal.

At the end of the day, what made the Caltech experience invaluable for my son is the fellow students, with whom he formed friendships, who enriched him socially, and who stretched him intellectually well beyond where he was before. This, it seems to me, is the main appeal of attending an elite school—the students with which you get to rub shoulders. I found the Caltech students I met to be bright and alive, especially those on the Caltech baseball team.

Interestingly, my son didn’t attend many of the classes he took for credit. Covid hit at the end of his freshman year and disrupted his entire sophomore year, so he had to make due with online classes. Happily, he was able during some of that time to live with fellow students from his baseball team, and thus not entirely miss the collegiate experience even during Covid.

Probably his favorite course at Caltech was a literature course on Don Quixote, whose professor he especially enjoyed. He did attend this course. But for most courses, class notes and videos were readily available, and he studied these without attending class. What made Caltech a great learning experience for him, therefore, was not so much the teachers and their lectures. Instead, what made it great was collaborating with fellow students.

But If Not an Elite School …

As good an experience as Caltech was for my son, his life would hardly have been over if he hadn’t gotten into it or any of the other elite schools. On one of his summer internships, he was in Austin, Texas and roomed with several guys who attended UTAustin (one of them being a student who had started at Caltech with my son but then decided to go to UTAustin because of the disruption at Caltech caused by Covid).

As it turned out, these UTAustin students were very bright, were studying CS in an honors program there, and had some really desirable summer internships at places like Google and Facebook—in fact, better than the internships that many of my son’s Caltech friends were getting. Without banking on the name of their school, these UT students had to prove their mettle directly.

Training themselves on LeetCode to solve CS problems as might come up in job interviews, they had an edge over Caltech students tempted to bank more on the reputation of their school than on their actual skills. Following the example of these summer roommates, my son trained himself to solve computational problems at LeetCode, which helped him greatly when he went on the job market upon graduation. All told, I therefore think my son could have thrived at a good state school.

Other things being equal, however, the elite schools provide a better springboard to career opportunities, especially for those who want academic careers as professors. Take two math students, both of which get their math PhDs from UC Berkeley (a top math graduate program) but one of which attends Harvard as an undergrad, the other a small Christian college in the Midwest. Other things being equal, on getting their PhDs, the Harvard/UC Berkeley student will be more likely to get an academic job compared to the Christian college/UC Berkeley student. That disparity may seem unfair, but reality is often unfair. Still, it’s good to rein in unfairness where you can.

Unfair Advantages

The thing that troubles me most about admissions to elite schools is the degree to which these schools are closed to smart students who lack the backing from parents, paid consultants, and affluent high schools to make themselves look attractive to these schools. Over forty years ago, as an undergraduate psychology student, I took a course in data analysis. The instructor asked the class what single measure best correlated with success in college. It wasn’t GPA. It wasn’t standardized test scores, such as the SAT or ACT, whose validation depends on predicting college performance. No, it was MONEY.

My instructor was right and I suspect he is still right. His claim rang true with my son’s Caltech baseball team. Not that the parents of the players were all inordinately wealthy, though one player did come from a billionaire family. But in most cases, the parents were well enough off to spare no expense at helping their sons get into an elite school.

I found it especially interesting how rigorous the public-high-school education was of my son’s Caltech classmates. We hear so much about public-school education in the US being terrible, and there’s truth to that if one looks at average performance. But just about everything in life follows a normal distribution, and at the far right tail of the normal distribution for academic performance, American high schools—public and private—can be outstanding.

Taking five or so Advanced Placement tests in one’s junior or senior year didn’t seem unusual among my son’s Caltech classmates. My son’s small Christian high school offered precisely one Advanced Placement course, namely, for calculus. For other advanced work, students had to take online classes at the local community college. Elite schools look more favorably on Advanced Placement courses compared to community college courses because the exams for Advanced Placement courses are uniform across the country and thus maintain clear quality controls. By contrast, community college courses with the same name and subject area may vary quite a bit in terms of what is taught and learned. It was thus better for getting into Caltech to have scored well on lots of Advanced Placement tests than doing dual credit with local community colleges, where the rigor of courses might vary.

In this vein, here’s a revealing anecdote: I learned from my son about one student who did poorly on the calculus test that Caltech gave to incoming students for determining which math course they should be placed into as freshmen. It turns out the student had taken the Advanced Placement BC Calculus test (the more advanced of the two Advanced Placement tests in calculus, the less advanced being the AB test—the BC covers a full year of college calculus, the AB only half a year) because he had taken it as a sophomore in high school and thus had forgotten most of it by the time he was entering Caltech!

When Is the Cost Too Much?

So, what’s the problem with all this cultivating and curating of one’s academic profile to get admitted into an elite school? Let me answer this question by offering another anecdote, this one from one my son’s fellow Caltech baseball players. This young man described to me a student he knew in Georgia who made sure to get a high school physical education requirement out of the way the summer of his eighth grade while still officially in eighth grade. That way, the A that he got for the PE requirement would not factor into his high school GPA, where the lower weight of that PE credit could end up lowering his overall GPA, and thus could hinder him from being valedictorian and getting into an elite school.

For most people, a GPA of 4.0 sounds terrific. But the person described by my son’s baseball teammate was pushing for a 5.0 GPA where all his courses would be highly weighted and thus enable him to have the highest possible GPA. The mentality here makes the competitiveness I witnessed and engaged in at my prep school in the 1970s seem halcyon and benign. If my academic ambitions in high school was less than healthy, this level of competition and manipulation seems positively pathological.

Yet on reflection, it is not surprising. Getting into an elite school is a big deal for a lot of people. The Varsity Blues scandal, in which parents, coaches, and their enablers fabricated student profiles to gain admission to top schools, only to end up fined and imprisoned, takes this mentality to its logical extreme. But it is widely prevalent. And it is likely only to get worse as admission rates to these schools get lower and lower, leading to ever-increasing demand: the lower the admission rate, the more desirable the school, the greater the demand, and so the more prospective students will apply to get in.

Moreover, with applications being digital, pressing “send” to apply to one school, or a few, or even many, makes little difference. True, elite schools usually have “bespoke” elements to their application, asking questions specific to the school. But most applications have a lot of the same elements (such as transcripts, letters of recommendation, and standardized test scores). Also, text that answers questions specific to one elite institution can often be recycled for questions posed by other elite institutions.

What then, to ask again, is the problem with all this cultivating and curating of one’s academic profile to get admitted to an elite school? The problem is two-fold: (1) It leads to an unhealthy arms race in which students are increasingly competing for a small number of spots, going through contortions to make themselves attractive to elite schools. (2) It excludes bright students who lack the opportunities to make themselves stand out to admissions committees among students who have, usually with the help of parents and paid consultants, painstakingly constructed their academic persona.

Wanting Something Too Desperately

Let me address these points in turn, beginning with the first. I have a friend who for several years worked with Steven Ma at ThinkTank Learning, a private college admissions consulting company that gained public attention for its high-priced services and bold promises. Founded in the early 2000s, the company offered comprehensive packages aimed at securing students’ placements in elite universities. ThinkTank Learning’s appeal was especially to Chinese students wanting admission at elite US schools. Its heyday was in the 2010s.

ThinkTank Learning’s services included academic planning, test preparation, application assistance, as well as placements with prestigious labs and government offices (Would you like an internship with US Senator So-and-So?). In the above video, a package as high as $700,000 is mentioned. But, if memory serves, my friend who worked with Ma told me of packages over $1,000,000, the full amount being paid for getting students into top schools like Harvard, but with lower payouts for getting students into lesser but still elite schools. Admissions in some cases were guaranteed, but there were usually “restocking fees,” so that even if a large percentage of the original payment was returned, the balance was still enough to keep ThinkTank Learning profitable.

Documentary after documentary underscores how the desire to get into an elite school can turn unhealthy, with applicants’ lives consumed in making themselves attractive to elite schools. Here’s a sampler of trailers for some of these documentaries (the full documentary for the first, The Test & the Art of Thinking, can be viewed at Tubi):

Now I don’t want to make it seem that it’s always an ordeal to gain admission to an elite US college or university. Some students are really so bright or have so much going for them that any school will eagerly admit them (such as winners of big prestigious science or math competitions). For some, athletics is their ticket into elite schools. And some may not take the whole exercise too seriously, listing elite schools among their reach schools, but happy to attend their target and even safety schools if they don’t get into the elite schools to which they applied.

Striving for admission to an elite school becomes a problem, however, when getting in becomes so important that students are ready to throw themselves off a building for not getting in. Also, it’s probably best to avoid the futility of striving to get into an elite school, with all the wear and tear that entails, only to fail to get in, which is always possible because getting into these schools is almost always a matter of probabilities. In most of life, wanting something too desperately is not a good thing. A certain level of detachment is necessary to manage our desires wisely lest they run amuck. Unfortunately, the pressure to get into elite schools can become overwhelming, making not getting in deeply disappointing.

When Opportunity Doesn’t Knock

This brings me to the second problem with cultivating and curating academic profiles to get admitted into elite schools, namely, most students and their families cannot afford to do all this cultivating and curating, and so these students will be at a disadvantage—and I would say at an unfair disadvantage—in getting into them. Increasingly, therefore, class (as in money and social standing) rather than race or sex distinguish between who can and can’t attend elite schools. In fact, we are seeing this now. Consequently, elite education exacerbates class divisions. Lots of high school students have to work jobs. They can’t run off to a summer science workshop or spend all of spring break on a traveling team for their sport.

Consider two students whose academic profiles are in some ways quite comparable: same GPAs, same standardized test scores, same interests. Yet one student spends summers working and attends a small rural high school. His responsibilities include tasks like building grain bins and vaccinating farm animals—hard, demanding work. The other student, meanwhile, spends summers conducting research in a science lab and even co-authors a peer-reviewed publication or two (with generous financial help from family and conveniently opened doors by college consultants such as Steven Ma). This student attends a large urban high school that offers a wide variety of courses, including Advanced Placement courses, and is able to take full advantage of such opportunities.

Anecdotal evidence with which I’m familiar (including a conversation with an MIT admissions officer) strongly suggests that the student with the lab experience is more likely to be admitted to elite institutions than the one with the farm background. In this story, my son is the one with the farm background—all elite schools other than Caltech rejected his application. Caltech accepted his application because of baseball, which the other schools ignored because he didn’t get his baseball resumé to them in time. With Caltech, therefore, my son had an opportunity denied to students working on farms and having little time for athletics.

But note, elite schools could just as well have rationalized letting my son in over the student with the greater academic opportunities: if the farm student was competitive with the other student despite having fewer academic opportunities, shouldn’t that count in favor of the farm student, as someone who is doing more with less? And what about the diversity it would bring to campus to enroll someone having extensive experience in running a pig farm (as my son did)? Given the current state of elite higher education, however, the student with greater opportunities seems to have the advantage in gaining admission to an elite school.

Yet there’s a caveat here: In trying to get into elite schools, students with greater opportunities (academic or otherwise) need to tread cautiously, not overstating or misrepresenting their accomplishments on account of these opportunities. Admissions committees at elite schools are no fools. They know that students and their advocates will try to game the system. They know that parents, if they can afford it, may be willing to pay exorbitant sums to make their children look impressive. And so, admissions committees are increasingly scrutinizing the accomplishments listed by applicants to make sure that they really are impressive. Thus, they may ask whether a student applicant started a non-profit because of a deeply held conviction to help people with certain needs or whether it was done just to stick another feather in the student’s cap.

Note that the fairness I’m talking about here has nothing to do with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). DEI has been much in the news lately, especially attacks against it by the current administration in Washington. Yes, I’m concerned with how to make admissions to elite colleges fair. But unlike DEI, or its earlier incarnation affirmative action, I’m not concerned with arbitrary notions of fairness that are designed simply to elevate some so-called victim group at the expense of some so-called oppressor group.

The issue of fairness for me is quite different: Once we have pool of student applicants who are demonstrably capable of excelling at an elite institution, how is it fair to admit some who have had all the breaks to construct a carefully cultivated and curated set of accomplishments while others, lacking those breaks, get shown the door? By the way, in posing this question, I’m pointing the finger at my own academic past. For instance, in my day, attending a prestigious New England prep school, as I did, provided just such advantages.

The Criteria for Admission to Elite Colleges

All the criteria used to evaluate and admit students to elite colleges are problematic. That’s not to say they are entirely bad or invalid, but they all have problems in identifying applicants most deserving of being admitted. Consider the following criteria, which cover pretty much everything an admissions committee will consider:

• ACT/SAT test scores. The problem for elite schools with this criterion is that many applicants will have perfect or near perfect ACT or SAT scores, so their test scores will not helpfully distinguish among students where the admission rate is less than 5 or so percent. The ACT and SAT have traditionally been billed as “aptitude” tests, measuring general ability to succeed in college, compared to “achievement” tests, which are supposed to measure actual knowledge in subject areas (see next bullet point).
• SAT subject tests. These used to be called achievement tests, and they were in a variety of subject areas. They were still in use when my son applied to Caltech, and he needed to take two in STEM subjects to be admitted (he chose math and biology). I had taken some of these achievement tests in the 1970s. But with Covid, in January 2021, the College Board, which had administered these tests, discontinued them. In their day, these tests provided an objective measure of academic achievement in given subject areas. But as with the ACT/SAT, the subject tests wouldn’t do much to distinguish among bright students applying to elite schools since they would all tend to score very high on them. Just as there were resources for scoring high on the ACT/SAT, so there were resources for scoring high on the SAT subject tests (here’s the guidebook that my son used to do well on the Math II subject test).
• Advanced Placement tests. Advanced Placement courses were originally supposed to be college level courses taught in high school to help students who took them place out these courses they would otherwise have to take in college. This could help them get through college more quickly, saving perhaps a year of college work. Or else, it could enable them to get to the courses that really interest them more quickly. Advanced Placement tests are scored from 1 to 5, 5 being best, and 3 being passing, though in my experience at least a 4 was needed for college credit. These tests increasingly became a badge of honor of high school students. And whereas taking them had usually occurred in one’s senior year, and thus too late to register the scores in applications to college, these courses kept being pushed to lower and lower grade levels so that now high school underclassmen are now increasingly taking Advanced Placement tests. So if you’re in a school that offers lots of Advanced Placement courses, you can call attention to taking such courses in your college application, as well as any Advanced Placement test scores from your freshman through junior years (the senior year scores won’t be available in college applications, coming well after admissions are decided). But if you are a bright student attending a school that offers few if any Advanced Placement courses, you’ll be out of luck (unless you simply want to learn the subject matter of an Advanced Placement course on your own, without high school credit, and then arrange to take the test by contacting the College Board—and how many students will do that?).
• Dual credit courses. Without Advanced Placement courses to take because your high school may offer few if any, the best you may be able to do to get credit for college-level work is to take courses with your local community college for dual credit (another option might include taking courses with a purely online college, private or public). In that case, you would get college credit for the courses you take there, but these courses would also be reflected on you high school transcript. Elite schools seem to treat such dual credit courses as non-ideal substitutes for Advanced Placement courses, but bright students without all the advantages have to make do with what they can.
• GPA (grade-point average). Grade inflation is a huge problem across primary, secondary, and higher education. Elite colleges tend to get their students from elite high schools that want to list their graduates as matriculating at those elite colleges. Because even one bad grade can derail an application to an elite college, high school students, teachers, and administrators face enormous pressures to keep high school GPAs high. But that means that high GPAs are not capable of adequately distinguishing among different calibers of high-caliber students. In my high school math classes, I always wanted to score 100 percent. Often I did. I remember one test in high school where I became particularly frustrated that I could not answer one of its questions. I expressed my frustration to the teacher, who wisely responded that there will always be problems outside my reach or the reach of anyone. The lesson was that tests, if they are really going to test someone’s ability, need also to reveal areas of inability. But such tests risk bringing about a less than perfect GPA.
• Letters of recommendation. To get into an elite college or university, high school students need super-positive letters of recommendation. A negative comment by even one letter-writer can derail an application to an elite school. A letter that is less than totally enthusiastic (such as “damning with faint praise”) can also derail an application. This puts enormous pressure on letter-writers to be less than forthright about the students they are recommending, accentuating the positive but sweeping any negatives under a rug. Granted, some student applicants may be super-impressive and thus deserve nothing but praise in letters of recommendation. But as is the pattern with this and the previous points, there is a tendency in all these evaluation criteria to bump heads on heaven’s ceiling—and there’s no going higher than heaven.
• College essay and questionnaire. Elite schools typically want a college essay from an applicant, and they may also ask some questions to which they want applicants to respond. In principle, what applicants write as a college essay and in response to a questionnaire could be quite helpful to an admissions committee as they try to determine whether an applicant will enrich and enliven the campus culture. But the problem, of course, is that the college essay and questionnaire need not be the applicant’s work. College counselors, for instance, could heavily shape and edit a college essay as well as offer advice on how best to answer a questionnaire to make oneself seem attractive. And now there is AI to help here as well. Moreover, if one comes from a background where excessive curating and cultivating of one’s academic and extracurricular persona is encouraged, one will be in an ideal position to sing one’s own praises (though one must be careful not to be too effusive lest one seem fake). In any case, the college essay and questionnaire are easily gamed. Regardless, bright students with less opportunity will be at a disadvantage with this criterion of evaluation.
• Extracurricular accomplishments. Some extracurricular accomplishments are so obvious and impressive that any elite school will admit someone sporting them. For instance, a student at my prep school in the same grade as me had solid grades, good standardized test scores, and was also one of the best middle-distance runners in the state for track and field. He was readily admitted to Harvard and, if memory serves, held the Harvard record for the 440 (yards). Certain science and math contests, especially those with a national or international reputation, can guarantee high performers (certainly outright winners) admission to an elite college or university. At the other extreme, however, are extracurricular accomplishments that are concocted merely to get into elite schools. Admissions committees can ferret out some of these, but certainly not all (as the Varsity Blues scandal illustrated, where, among other frauds, students were admitted to elite schools for their supposed athletic prowess in sports that they didn’t even play). In any case, lots of bright students may not be able to display impressive extracurricular accomplishments for lack of opportunity, which leads me to the last point.
• Work experience. Some high school students have to work one or more jobs while in high school. If you saw the film Stand and Deliver, about East LA high school math teacher Jaime Escalante, yes, he did get low income students to do great on the calculus Advanced Placement test; and yet, his students often had to work in a family restaurant or at some other job. The fact that these students did as well as they did in AP calculus testifies to Escalante’s determination to help them succeed. But it also testifies to the students’ grit to put in the time and effort needed to succeed in their studies despite the many obstacles in the way of their academic success. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any elite school that asks applicants to list tough blue-collar work they’ve done as something that will get them a second look from an admissions committee.

From Dossiers to Entrance Exams

These days, elite schools want what essentially are full dossiers on their applicants. Moreover, given digital technology, these dossiers can be multiplied and distributed with ease—just hit “send.” My son applied to 14 schools (elite and otherwise). When I applied to college in 1977, I applied to exactly one school, the University of Chicago (applying to just one school was unusual, but I knew that’s where I wanted to go and I was confident I would get in—most of my high school classmates in the 1970s applied to four or five schools, if memory serves). A friend of mine describes his college-graduate daughter as currently applying to 24 medical schools. Such escalation in number of applications by students in our day makes one wonder what applications to elite schools were like in an earlier age when they all had to be written out by hand and before, say, the SAT was widely administered (the SAT debuted in 1926, the ACT in 1959).

The answer is simple: ENTRANCE EXAMS. Elite schools used to give entrance exams to students seeking admission. Although there could be some additional considerations (religion, race, riches), a bespoke entrance exam specific to the school would typically be the deciding factor for admissions. Consider, for instance, the case of Derek Prince, a gifted Bible teacher I’ve enjoyed listening to and whose books I’ve enjoyed reading. He was born in 1915, went to Cambridge University for his college and university training, being a fellow of King’s College and getting a doctorate in philosophy there just near the start of WWII.

Before entering Cambridge, he attended Eton College, perhaps the most prestigious “public school,” as it’s called—in American terms, a five-year high school preparing students for college and university. Though preliminary to college and university education, Eton is as an elite a school as their is in England. What follows is a description from Stephen Mansfield’s biography of Derek Prince about how Prince got into Eton (see Derek Prince—A Biography, p. 29):

By the time he turned thirteen, Derek had absorbed everything Hawtrey’s [the school Prince attended before Eton] had to give, and Headmaster Cautley decided his gifted young scholar should attempt the entrance exams for Eton. Derek took the train to the legendary English school and found that his examination consisted of an essay on the proposition “if it is good, fight for it.” It was a typical theme of the age, a time when men were still reeling from the losses of the war [WWI] and wondering if any cause could be worth such horrible bloodshed. The masters at Eton clearly wanted to get a sense of Derek’s soul as well as his mind. His essay must have been stellar. Returning home the same day, he stepped off the train at Margate only to be met by Cautley, who was waving a telegram from Eton declaring that Derek had already been accepted. The decision to admit Derek to Eton was made in half a day. In July of 1929, Derek Prince entered Eton College and so joined the ranks of England’s emerging elite.

We see in Prince’s admission to Eton none of the dossier compiling and evaluation that prevails in contemporary admissions to US colleges, elite and otherwise. Take the entrance exam, do well on it, and be admitted. The entrance exam for Derek Prince was short and sweet—a single essay. Given the common curriculum of English primary and secondary education at the time (focused especially on classics), it could be assumed that to write an outstanding essay would be examination enough to be admitted to Eton.

Getting into Harvard in 1700

But entrance exams can be longer and more demanding. Take Harvard around 1700. The Law and Statutes for Students of Harvard College included, at the time, the following admission requirement (the following quotes from the Law and Statutes are taken from Gary Amos and Richard Gardiner, Never Before in History: America’s Inspired Birth, pp. 78–80):

Everyone competent to read Cicero or any other classic author of that kind extemporaneously, and also to speak and write Latin prose and verse with tolerable skill and without assistance, and of declining the Greek nouns and verbs, may expect to be admitted to the College: if deficient in any of these qualifications, he cannot under any circumstances be admitted.

Clearly, such competence would not be merely presumed but also tested, and such a test would constitute an entrance exam. Interestingly, from the vantage of Harvard’s super-low admission rate in our day, competence in Latin and Greek classics largely assured admission (“may expect to be admitted”) and thus would have allowed the admission rate to be very high (to the degree that competent persons applied).

I suspect that most classics majors at American Universities would not be able to meet Harvard’s entrance requirements back then, to say nothing of their graduation requirements. Harvard back in 1700 also had graduation requirements, which would be tested by graduation exams. Thus the Law and Statutes for Students of Harvard College also reads:

Every student who, on trial, shall be able to translate from the original Latin text, and logically to explain the Holy Scriptures, both of the Old and New Testament, and shall also be thoroughly acquainted with the principles of natural and moral philosophy, and shall be blameless in life and character, and approved at public examination by the President and the Fellows of the College, may receive the first degree. Otherwise, no one shall be admitted to the first degree in Arts, unless at the end of three years and ten months from the time of his admission.

Every scholar who has maintained a good standing, and exhibited a written synopsis of logic, natural and moral philosophy, arithmetic and astronomy, and shall be prepared to defend a proposition or thesis; shall also be versed in the original languages, as aforesaid: and who carries with him a reputation for upright character and diligence in study, and shall pass successfully a public examination, shall be admitted to the second, or Master’s degree.

The Harvard College Admissions Exam of July 1869

Harvard admissions exams from circa 1700 may well exist in the Harvard archives, but I don’t have access to them. David Robert Palmer, however, has reproduced the Harvard College admissions exam from July 1869. You can view this exam as a pdf, but I’ve reproduced it in full below as a set of images because I want readers of this essay to be sure to run their eyes over it.

Note the subjects covered, specifically classics (Latin and Greek), a general knowledge of the world (history and geography), and mathematics (basically high school math through precalculus). The exam is for its time comprehensive. By testing knowledge of Latin and Greek, it indirectly tests knowledge of English grammar and composition because, as a native English speaker, one can’t comfortably read and study Latin and Greek classics apart from competence in English.

The geography and history part of the exam, though relatively short, underscores the need for students to be widely read and informed—to have actual knowledge about the world and not just of the mechanics of learning, as is overemphasized these days in American elementary school education (a point Natalie Wexler ably addressed in her book The Knowledge Gap). And finally, the exam includes a solid assessment of the math that Harvard expected its entering class of 1869 to have under its belt.

Here is the actual exam. I’ll offer some additional commentary below, after it.

In this essay, focused as it is on trying to make admissions to elite schools (like Harvard) fair, perhaps the first thing readers will notice in looking at this exam is the admission rate to Harvard back then. As stated at the start of the test, of 210 students who took the test, 185 were admitted. The admission rate to Harvard back in 1869 was therefore 88 percent. Compare this to the roughly 20 percent admission rate to Harvard when I was applying to college in the 1970s and the roughly 3 percent admission rate to Harvard as it is currently.

One clear lesson here is that if schools give an entrance exam, their applicant pool is likely to diminish and their admission rate is likely to go up. Without the ease of simply hitting “send” over and over again to complete a digital application, as students today can do with the CommonApp, students who take bespoke entrance exams to get into a school need to be serious about attending the school. They will need to take time out of their busy schedules to take the entrance exam. They will also need to ask themselves if they are adequately prepared to do well on the entrance exam (presumably based on past exams with which they will be familiar).

A detailed entrance exam such as this one from Harvard in 1869 will also greatly simplify the admissions process. There would be no need for large administrative staffs to wade through endless applications, producing short lists, short short lists, and short short short lists in an effort whittle down to a final list of accepted students. True, there will be grading to be done. But in this 1869 exam, answers to the questions are objectively right or wrong, so there is no ambiguity in the grading.

The pool of applicants taking such an entrance exam would be much reduced compared to the current situation where students can apply to multiple schools often with little more difficulty than to a single school. Of course, by helping to significantly increase the admission rate, entrance exams would diminish the bragging rights of schools like the current Harvard, which is only too happy to tout just how competitive it is in admitting so few applicants.

If I Ran Admissions at an Elite School …

If by some quirk of fate I should have complete control over how admissions at an elite school get decided, what would I do? It’s the old hypothetical of if I were king or dictator or grand poobah. Hypotheticals like this often have no traction with reality. But bear with my proposal for running admissions at an elite school. Once the proposal is on the table, we can turn to its practicability—whether it stands any chance of actually being implemented.

My goal in changing admissions at elite schools is to make them fair. Right now they are unfair, privileging students who’ve had every opportunity to build their knowledge, skills, and accomplishments. The point of my proposal, then, is to level the playing field so that students who have not had those privileges, but are able to hold their own, are allowed on the playing field, which is to say, be admitted to the elite school in question. There’s no perfect solution to making admissions to elite schools fair—the privileged always have advantages, which is what makes them privileged. But there’s much that can be done to redress the present obvious unfairness. Entrance exams can play a pivotal role here, especially when combined with other evaluative measures.

Let’s be clear, though, that we don’t want to admit students that can’t do the work. This has been the problem with DEI and affirmative action, namely, that it admits students who cannot handle the demands placed on them in their course of study at an elite school. This always ends badly, and it ends in one of two bad ways. On the one hand, schools may maintain their high standards. In that case, students admitted who cannot do the work flounder. They then experience what is called relative deprivation, which is to say that even though they could do well at a less demanding school, they feel bad about themselves because they cannot keep up at the more demanding elite school.

On the other hand, schools may lower their high standards. Thus, to buttress DEI and affirmative action, they reward students for reasons of identity (ethnicity, race, class) rather than merit. These students, who would otherwise flounder, thus succeed (or more accurately, get by) because they get to take undemanding classes—and what exactly is the value of such success? Princeton has recently taken this route by no longer requiring classics majors to know Latin or Greek. Harvard is now teaching remedial math—high school math that Harvard students in the past would be expected to have mastered on entry. MIT, I’m told, has also lowered its standards. The mother of one of my son’s Caltech baseball teammates was an MIT grad. She described efforts by MIT alums like herself to restore the standards back to where they had been.

If, then, I were head of admissions at an elite school, what would I do? I would construct an admissions test that would be the primary tool for admitting students. I would make it a six-hour exam, three hours in the morning, three in the afternoon. It would need to be given in a secure location where students would have no chance of cheating by accessing external sources of information (via smart phones, crib notes, etc.). In fact, given the pervasiveness of AI these days, a crucial element of this exam would be to test how well students can think on their own feet, which is to say without any props, especially from AI. Indeed, students who have made a habit of letting AI do their work can expect to perform badly on this exam.

I’m imagining students would show up at a secure test-taking facility where they would work on dedicated laptops (stripped down machines without internet access). If they need calculators, note pads, or other materials to help with taking the test, these would be provided. Test takers would need to be thoroughly checked over, even more thoroughly than by the TSA at an airport, for any evidence of surreptitious information sources, such as earpieces or smart glasses. These, as well as more obvious sources of information, such as smart phones, would need to be absent from the test-taking environment. Those who would slip them in surreptitiously would, for attempting to cheat, be excluded from taking the test.

Administering the test could pose logistical challenges, especially if there is only one day of the year when it is given. But technology makes it doable. Also, it’s unlikely that people will take the test indiscriminately. Students who set aside six hours on some given Saturday to take an admissions exam for a particular elite school are serious about trying to get in; conversely, those who are not serious won’t even bother trying to take the exam. Still, I would set a minimal threshold for taking the test, such as a GPA of at least 3.5 and an ACT score of at least 30. I might even go with a GPA as high as 3.8 and an ACT as high as 32. But I don’t think I’d go higher.

I would want to look at unweighted GPAs rather than weighted GPAs as a way to limit grade inflation. I would also want to set a GPA of 3.5 or 3.8 as a floor only for the junior and senior years of high school. Such GPAs are way lower than the cut-off for most elite schools, but the point of this “low bar” would be not to overvalue grades. Also, it would discourage obsessive concern about grades among students applying to elite schools—there’s more to life than holding a super high GPA.

Some very bright students only get their acts together as juniors and seniors in high school. I would want to see a positive trendline with grades in the junior and senior years, not putting undue weight on grades during freshman and sophomore years. I would also want to see some diligence on the part of applicants so that it’s clear that they were at least trying in high school (if they blow off high school, they’ll probably blow off college, which as head of admissions I wouldn’t want to encourage). That said, I know of brilliant people who don’t do well in high school because they are so bored with the material (one such person is my friend Chris Langan, who in the late 1990s scored the highest of any American on IQ tests).

I also would not want to admit only those students with super high ACTs or SATs. In my view, someone who can take the ACT and score a 32 with minimal preparation for this test is comparable to someone who scores a 35 by going through an intensive test-prep course. Note that a score of 36 with the ACT is highest, and scores ranging between 33 and 35 are typical for elite schools. In any case, I would have GPA and ACT provide minimal quality assurance, but then put the main burden for admissions on the admissions test.

The Proposed Admissions Test

The admissions test I’m proposing would break into two three-hour portions. The first three hours would be standardized in the sense that each test-taker would attempt the same set of questions. The second three hours would be interactive, in which test-takers would be asked probing questions and then be able to demonstrate deeper levels of knowledge depending on their answers. For instance, a question might ask, “Do you know anything about ordinary differential equations (ODEs)?” If the answer is yes, further questions would be posed to see just how deep this knowledge of ODEs goes. If the answer is no, no further questions on this topic would be asked.

The precise details of what would be on such a test would need to be worked out in consultation with faculty, who will be teaching the students taking the test and will want the test to identify students best able to excel in their classes. The actual test would be refined over time as high test results come increasingly to correlate with student thriving at the elite school in question. Certainly, the test should avoid asking students questions that shift the focus from academic abilities to autobiographical descriptions that, depending on cultural predilections, will put some students in a more favorable light than others. In other words, the test should give no comfort to DEI, CRT, affirmative action, etc.

Although I can see such a bespoke admissions test for an elite school taking a number of forms and asking different types of questions, if it were up to me, I’d be sure to require one or more writing samples, created on the fly by test-takers on topics of general interest. E.g., “Should college be free?” “How do talent and perseverance relate to success?” “By what guidelines should social media companies moderate content?” All the writing samples currently in a typical college applications packet are suspect because they can be written and edited by people other than the actual applicant. The only exception was the SAT Essay, but the College Board discontinued it in 2021. The writing sample(s) in the admissions test I’m proposing would therefore provide a real test of writing ability.

Other things on this admissions test that I would like to see there would include the following:

• The test would include a deep dive into vocabulary, grammar, and style to determine just how extensive (or not) a student’s knowledge of the English language is. Free Rice, which gives rice to poor nations based on online users taking and scoring correct answers on various tests, offers a vocabulary test similar to the one I have in mind (go here). Grammar and style could be tested by putting the test-taker in the role of an editor and requiring passages with substandard English to be improved.
• The test would include sequence completions, analogies, logical reasoning, and puzzles. The point is to see how well students can draw connections based on common knowledge. The world’s so-called shortest IQ test is in this vein. The Miller Analogies Test was also in this vein, administered back in the day to prospective graduate students. But like so many tests used for admissions, this test was also discontinued around the time of Covid (in 2023). Yet in discontinuing this and other similar tests, elite schools weaken their ability to admit students fairly, looking instead to factors that students, especially privileged students, can all too readily manipulate.
• The admissions test should gauge knowledge in a variety of areas that are important to both academic and practical life. It should test knowledge of basic facts about Western Civilization—hat tip here to E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s shared foundation of factual knowledge, which he calls “cultural literacy” (compare Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap). Successful test-takers would need to demonstrate a solid knowledge of American civics. As for practical knowledge to be tested, this could include money management, etiquette, gun safety, self-defense, everyday law, etc. etc.—the possibilities are wide and varied. Applicants with such practical knowledge should, in my view, be rewarded for that knowledge.

The first three hours of the test would be standard, with everyone answering the same questions. In its grading, one test score would always be comparable with another, the higher being better. Based only on this half of the test, the highest scoring students would be admitted, and so there would be a cutoff below which students with certain scores would be refused admission. This half of the test would be designed to make fine-grained distinctions among already high-performing students, a distinction that gets flattened with the ACT and SAT tests. That’s because these standardized tests can’t meaningfully distinguish among students once their scores place them in the 98th or 99th percentile.

The second three hours of the test would, by contrast, be designed to interact with students, probing their knowledge. A student could be asked about ability in foreign languages. “Do you know Mandarin?” “Yes.” “Okay, then what does the Mandarin word “谢谢” (xièxie) mean in English?” (It means “thank you.”) The 1869 Harvard admissions exam probed knowledge of Latin and Greek, but with digital technology it is possible to determine proficiency in languages much more quickly and efficiently (cf. the five levels of proficiency as measured by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, or ACTFL).

The interactive portion of the test is meant to mirror human interactions with experts. Direct human interactions can very quickly determine knowledge and competency. Unlike several-day batteries of tests as needed to pass the legal bar or the medical boards, oral exams allow for very quick and reliable determinations of knowledge. When as a math grad student I had to pass two foreign language exams, I chose French and German. With the French exam, I was required to translate a passage from a French mathematics text. I passed but it took time to complete the translation because my reading knowledge of French wasn’t great. With the German exam, I showed up to the German examiner (mathematician Israel Herstein) and mentioned that I had lived in Germany. He said, “Okay, start speaking in German.” I uttered a few sentences in German. He said, “Okay, you pass.” AI can now substitute for such oral examiners. That’s how I would use it on the second half of the admissions test.

Note that I don’t foresee grading such tests as difficult. Many of the questions, certainly on the first half, could be fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice, which are easy to grade. On the second half, I could see AI/LLMs doing the probing and the grading, though there would need to be quality assurance to prevent AI “hallucinations,” as they’ve come to be called. Some human graders would be needed, such as for the writing samples. But it should be possible to automate most of the grading of the admissions test I am proposing.

Using This Test in Admissions

Deciding admissions to an elite school in light of the test I’ve just outlined would not be like using a cookie cutter. Students taking the test would need to do well enough on the first half of it to ensure that they can “do the work,” being able to take the required courses and do well on them without excessive struggle or hardship. But once this portion of the admissions test has narrowed the field to qualified applicants, the admissions committee will still need to do some winnowing. True, students willing to take a six-hour bespoke admissions test to get into an elite school will be far fewer than students who apply only to schools where it’s enough simply to send digital application packets from the students’ hard drives. So, even if there is winnowing, it’s likely to be far less than the winnowing that most admissions committees at elite schools have to do now.

The second half of the exam will facilitate this winnowing, helping qualified students to be admitted who exhibit a true diversity of interests and abilities. Presumably, it would enrich a campus to have students who have mastered different languages besides English. Their mastery of these foreign languages could be tested and rewarded with admissions. Likewise for students adept at so-called “dead languages,” such as Latin and ancient Greek. Deep knowledge of various STEM fields could likewise be tested and rewarded. An extensive knowledge of literary classics (as gauged by knowledge of characters, plot lines, and the ability to associate quotes with their authors) could also be tested and rewarded.

Things important to the campus culture could also be factored into the second half of admissions test. Caltech, for instance, has a pranking tradition, as I learned when my son applied to the school and showed me a question on the application where he was asked to describe notable pranks in which he had taken part. Caltech is famous for its clever and elaborate pranks. The Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961 stands out, which even has its own Wikipedia entry. During the 1961 Rose Bowl game between the University of Washington and the University of Minnesota, Caltech students hacked into the stadium’s flip-card section that displayed choreographed images held up by Washington fans. Caltech pranksters reprogrammed the cards to spell out “CALTECH” in huge letters:

Nothing about the admissions test I’ve outlined would prevent elite schools from admitting students with special skills that they want to see represented on campus. If a school needs a student to play a bagpipe, then it needs to admit a bagpiper. But such a student would need to be a competent bagpiper and also have done sufficiently well on the admissions test to prove capable of the coursework. Sports also fall under such special skills. If the elite school in question needs to field a sports team, then it needs to admit competent athletes in the sport, but as always with the proviso that these student athletes can “do the work.”

In the admissions process, I find it helpful to distinguish between special skills and special accomplishments. Those with special skills perform at a high level at challenging tasks and win plaudits for doing so. Special accomplishments, by contrast, are accomplishments that are meant to look impressive and confer bragging rights. “I did an internship at Senator So-and-So’s office last summer.” “I worked in Nobel laureate So-and-So’s lab.” “I co-authored a peer-reviewed paper that was published when I was a high-school junior.” Such accomplishments often look impressive, but they can become far less impressive when the hidden costs to bring about these accomplishments are factored in (such as investments of large sums by parents to college consultants like Steven Ma).

When it comes to special accomplishments, I would want these to make a difference in admissions only if it’s clear that they truly are a big deal—that they are hard won, gained without pampering or coddling, and satisfy objective criteria for excellence. Included here would be winning a big science prize, scoring high on an international math competition, being part of a nationally recognized dance team, belonging to a debate team that won a state or national championship, etc.

I don’t want to exclude here students who in high school publish peer-reviewed papers or start non-profits to benefit groups in need. But with such special accomplishments, it’s crucial to make sure that the admissions committee is not being gamed. Such students need to make crystal clear that their accomplishments stem from deep conviction and are hard won. Conversely, it needs to be crystal clear that their accomplishments are not merely expedients for getting into an elite school.

The Prospects of Success?

Will this approach of using entrance exams as the main determiner of admissions to elite colleges and universities succeed? Obviously, to succeed it needs to be tried. By success, I mean making admissions to elite schools significantly fairer than they are now. Under success I would also include side benefits, such as curtailing the crazy arms race where students increasingly put extreme pressures on themselves to get into these elite schools.

I would expect the use of bespoke entrance exams in admissions to elite schools to lead to many more low- and middle-income students being admitted to them, especially if these schools continue, as they do now, to provide generous financial assistance to students and families from lower income demographics. Additionally, as just noted, this use of entrance exams would deincentivize the striving and self-immolation that now seem so much a part of getting into elite schools (the arms race).

That said, I know of no elite school that on reading this proposal would smack themselves on the forehead and say “Of course, this is the approach we should be using in college admissions.” Perhaps the biggest obstacle for getting elite schools to make entrance exams the centerpiece of their admissions process is that schools revel in their low admissions. Low admissions confers bragging rights. “Harvard admits just over three percent of applicants.” “That’s nothing: Caltech admits just over two percent.”

It’s a badge of honor among elite schools to be so desirable that applicants flock to them—the more the merrier. These schools can then, with seeming heavy hearts, inform the vast majority of applicants that, regretfully, they could only admit a very limited number of applicants because there were simply too many that applied. This is a sham. It perpetuates the unfairness of admissions to elite schools by excluding applicants who can do the work, but didn’t have all the breaks to make themselves look good on paper.

Even though elite schools have till now had little incentive to implement the entrance exam approach to admissions that I’m advocating in this essay, given the wild ride that higher education seems to be on now with the current administration in Washington, this entrance exam approach may not be entirely off the table. I could see, for instance, the current administration in the White House making federal grants to elite (and other) schools contingent on fair admissions, which could be defined as any students clearly capable of thriving at the school needing to have a fair shot at gaining admission.

Taking this definition of fairness to its logical conclusion could mean randomizing admissions—essentially making it a lottery for students to gain admission once they demonstrate a certain threshold of ability and merit. I could even see an executive order enforcing such a lottery. In general, people rebel against lotteries where they want to win something that they think should not be subject to chance—such as gaining admission to an elite school. An entrance exam approach to gaining admission might then seem less arbitrary than a lottery while at the same time keeping applicants enthusiastically engaged with the school for which they are making the time to take a bespoke entrance exam.

In sum, bespoke entrance exams for gaining admission to elite schools promise three benefits:

• They would improve fairness of admissions by leveling the playing field between privileged and less privileged students while also ensuring that only competent students are admitted.
• They would reduce, and ideally eliminate, the arms race among students vying to get into such elite schools.
• And finally, they would increase the likelihood that students gaining admission are there because they really want to attend the school and are willing to make the time to take such entrance exams.