Having been through the process (from the parent’s end) twice, I question how college admissions works. My daughter has applied to a dozen colleges, as have many (most) of her friends. You know why? They know that getting in is a crap shoot and they don’t want to be left stranded. They’ve heard the stories of people with 4.2 GPAs from magnet STEM schools who won the Westinghouse Science Fair and agonize over applications. After months of worry, they get into Harvard, only to be rejected by Yale.

It must seem pretty much random, and that’s a heck of a lot of stress and self-doubt. So why not go full random. Elite schools haven’t really found a magic number that predicts how someone will do at college. Please, let’s dispense with the pretense of meritocracy.

Every kid gets to apply to a set number of colleges, like six. If they want to increase their odds, they can use their six spots for the same school. Every school goes through all the applicants and divides them into two groups – those that would be likely to succeed and those that wouldn’t. For some colleges, everyone who applies would be in the “succeed” group and that’s OK.

The freshman class is picked using a lottery from the pool of applicants likely to succeed. I am going to posit that schools won’t find their students any less worthy than the ones they pick now with a combination of academic hoops and some nepotism (and niche sports ability) thrown in for good measure. A longitudinal study comparing this class to other years(I love longitudinal studies!) would be awesome…

Truly random is a beautiful thing, not to mention the right thing. There are many gems out there that get tossed aside with the system we use now. That’s not great. What’s even worse is the systemic disadvantages of entire groups of people. With this approach, all sorts of traditionally disadvantaged people would be on truly equal footing with every other applicant.

High School seniors could spend their senior year learning instead of stressing so much to impress the admissions committee of their dream college. My daughter is “done” with school – so done that she apparently has no time or energy to run marathons or practice parallel parking so she can get her driver’s license. I think if she hadn’t been working all summer and all fall on college applications, she might still have some energy left.

Everyone could get their acceptances on exactly the same day. Kind of a national celebration. In fact, maybe give seniors and their parents the day off. To celebrate or mourn.

Of course there would need to be some tweaks. Ways to make sure that everyone who applied to college got in somewhere, for example. I am confident we’d figure out the details if we (society) put our minds to it. It’s kind of like how people graduating from med school get residencies… So, we could look at that model for a starter.