> You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function
If an institution doesn't want to simply accept the top N performers on one or more standardized tests, they could go one step further and perform an SAT/ACT-weighted lottery followed by a culling. This can be per-major or per-department, but many universities already enforce a set of near-universal required courses. Set a minimum performance requirement on those courses and bada bing bada boom, the institution is getting the cream of the crop for whatever quantitative definition of "cream" they want to set. People will be naturally disincentivized from applying to overly competitive programs in which they're likely to fail. There are probably many effective variations of this idea, too, like using a geographically distributed population-weighted lottery for applicants meeting some threshold score instead.
What are the failure modes of such quantitative approaches? Could the outcomes be worse than those of our current system? What are some better alternatives?
If an institution doesn't want to simply accept the top N performers on one or more standardized tests, they could go one step further and perform an SAT/ACT-weighted lottery followed by a culling. This can be per-major or per-department, but many universities already enforce a set of near-universal required courses. Set a minimum performance requirement on those courses and bada bing bada boom, the institution is getting the cream of the crop for whatever quantitative definition of "cream" they want to set. People will be naturally disincentivized from applying to overly competitive programs in which they're likely to fail. There are probably many effective variations of this idea, too, like using a geographically distributed population-weighted lottery for applicants meeting some threshold score instead.
What are the failure modes of such quantitative approaches? Could the outcomes be worse than those of our current system? What are some better alternatives?