"… There has been a crescendo lately in talk about how to conduct college admissions in a manner that brings greater socioeconomic diversity to campuses, making them richer places to learn and better engines of social mobility.: …
Opinion
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/opinion/sunday/hidden-gold-in-college-applications.html?_r=1
I’d love to hear Mr. Bruni’s plan to help the University of Michigan explore the extenuating circumstances of 50,000 applicants. That’s one obvious challenge.
A less obvious, but equally important, consideration: how do schools below the top 50 or top 100 take Mr. Bruni’s advice into account? A lot of them have too few resources, or too many applicants, to do this sort of sleuthing.
Every spring, countless op-eds debate the best way to correct 18 years’ worth of disadvantages through 18 minutes of work by the admissions office. The importance of such measures is, in my view, greatly overstated; the importance of improving K-12 schools can’t be overemphasized.
Mr. Bruni has good intentions, but he is a restaurant critic who’s never run a restaurant, a parenting critic who has no children, and an admissions critic who has never read a college application.