Hess Contra Harrison Bergeron
A longer version of my reaction piece from National Review
AEI’s Rick Hess recently wrote a piece advocating college admission by lottery. Though I’m deeply unsympathetic to this idea in general, Hess’ version of lottery admissions is, paradoxically, highly meritocratic. I explain why in this brief reaction essay for National Review - and Hess responds.
Here’s a slightly longer version of my reaction essay, reprinted with permission.
Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has been pushing an elite college admissions lottery for years. Sandel:
Harvard and Stanford get something like 50,000 applicants for 2,000 places. Most of them are well-qualified. Cull out those who are not well-qualified, and among the rest, the 20,000 or 25,000, whatever the number is, admit by lottery.
Frankly, this is a crazy idea. The whole reason why students want to attend ultra-selective colleges is that they are ultra-selective! If top schools start randomly admitting kids from the top half of the applicant pool, they instantly shred the main reason to attend.
At first glance, Rick Hess seems to be repeating Sandel’s crazy proposal. But if you read closely, there is a crucial difference. Hess lets schools set their bars as high as they want:
If colleges wish to be eligible for publicly funded grants, contracts, or aid, they should be required to establish transparent admissions qualifications and then randomly select from among those who qualify. For particular programs that require particular knowledge or skills (think engineering or dance), institutions should be free to set a higher bar, require auditions, or institute similarly open and competitive measures.
In principle, this allows schools to make their admission standards so stringent that they need no lottery: If you have a hundred slots, admit the hundred best in the world. Given these constraints, top schools will very likely protect their status by adopting strict cutoffs. The upshot: While Sandel is explicitly trying to end what he calls “the tyranny of merit,” Hess is proposing more meritocracy than ever.
Is this a good idea? I say “Do it.” Nobel prizes should go to the best scientists, Olympic medals to the best athletes, billions to the best entrepreneurs, and elite college slots to the best students. Meritocracy is the fairest and the most socially functional ideal. While people should be free to be unfair and dysfunctional, Hess is right: If you want to re-enact Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” government shouldn’t let you do it at taxpayer expense.
This piece actually surprised me. I thought your main point of your Case Against Education was that right now, most of the benefits of a degree was signaling, and a lottery seemed like a good way to limit the signaling. Obviously signaling you are competent is useful for the individual, but for larger society, do you think that college is best way of signaling competence? If we did a lottery, the prestige of college would lessen, and employers would look towards other signals, which would probably have less government subsization and interference. What am I missing?
You say that meritocracy is the fairest social ideal. I tend to agree. But the problem is how do you measure merit.
In a profit-maximizing business, people who are judged based on quantitative measures, like sales or or who makes the most widgets, have clear standards of merit. Arguably, the people with the most merit are the people who have the greatest ability to maximize those quantitative measures (subject to ethical and legal constraints and taking into account costs). Even in business, not everything is easily quantifiable. How do you choose the HR person with the most merit? Not so easy.
A university is a non-profit, so it has different considerations than a business. What is merit to a university? I suppose it depends on the goals of the university. Unlike a business with a focus on profit, a university could have many different goals beyond just education. Supposing a university was narrowly focused on education, then the most meritorious applicants (to undergraduate studies) might be those who graduate and are widely considered to be very smart and knowledgeable. In other words, the people who get good grades and test scores.
It turns out that having good grades and test scores tends to be correlated with a lot of other positive things in life. Probably will make more money than others, be healthy, etc. But while there is a correlation between having good grades/scores with life outcomes, that doesn't mean that they are the same thing as the merit that matters to a business. No doubt, many businesses will find these people to be highly meritorious. But being smart isn't the only thing that matters in business.