Oddly, considering our diverse and well-read membership, when Malcom Gladwell's
New Yorker article on college admissions came out last fall, it got very little play here.
I think it is quite an interesting read - he extracts material from a variety of sources familiar to CC members, but compiles it into a lengthy and interesting essay. He concludes, in part,
Quote:
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The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let in—that those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.
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I think the key issues he raises are that elite admissions will always be driven by the whims (if that sounds too fanciful and arbitrary, then substitute "the needs and preferences") of the schools themselves, and also (once again) that just about all of the salary difference between elite grads and non-elite grads is explainable by the individual, not the school the individual attended.