Happy Bastille Day (Elites)

[Periwinkle]

<p>Barry Schwartz: [Lotteries</a> for College Admissions - Barry Schwartz - The Atlantic](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/lotteries-for-college-admissions/9026/]Lotteries”>Lotteries for College Admissions - The Atlantic)</p>

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The solution to this problem is a lottery: every applicant who is good enough gets his or her name put in a hat, and then “winners” are chosen at random. If selective schools use a lottery, the pressure balloon that is engulfing high-school kids will be punctured. Instead of having to be better than anyone else, they will just have to be good enough—and lucky. Anyone who is good enough gets her name thrown into the hat, and has the same chance of admission as anyone else with a name in the hat.</p>

<p>A lottery like this won’t correct the injustice that is inherent in a pyramidal system in which not everyone can rise to the top. But it will reveal the injustice by highlighting the role of contingency and luck. And acknowledging the role of chance may encourage the institutions themselves to care a bit less about where they place in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, and a bit more about where they rate when it comes to nurturing good citizens.

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