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Elizabeth A Seagull's avatar

I think this is a very interesting and reasonable idea. Is it being discussed at all in higher education admission circles? If not , maybe you could submit this as an op ed. Somewhere. NYT?

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Judith Andre's avatar

It's not being discussed, as far as I know. Thanks for the push!

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Jacqueline Stewart's avatar

This is intriguing. I wondered and worried how random selection would work for the Redistricting Commission. But the commissioners selected rose to the challenge, learned on the job, and produced a competent result. When I taught AP Stats I let anyone in the class who wanted to join and the self selection. worked - people don't deliberately puts themselves in impossible positions. Teachers/Professors might rise to the challenge too, of teaching a more diversely skilled group.

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Judith Andre's avatar

Your points are well taken, an encouraging for many situations. I was worried about the Redistricting Committee, too, and relieved at how well it all turned out.

But those fears aren't relevant to my proposal. I advocate a lottery only after a lot of initial winnowing has been done, at the point where in all honesty further winnowing is arbitrary. But it's hard to be honest about that, and so we convince ourselves that, in terms of my example, the Kazakh would add more than the Kenyan, high school X is slightly better than school y.

There have been natural experiment supporting the point. A medical school, for instance, suddenly had room for 30 more incoming students than expected. So the admissions committee reopened and admitted 30 more. Four years later the academic records of those "second-choice" students were indistinguishable from those of the 100 first chosen.

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cmason's avatar

Yes, this could lessen stigmatization as well as to counter balance the 'color-blind' racism of the Supreme Court decision. Interesting proposal!

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