opinion | Let’s destroy the college admissions process

Within days or weeks, the Supreme Court will make a decision on the future of affirmative action in higher education. If things go as expected, conservatives will cheer when these policies are dropped — and progressives will wail.

But perhaps we can all use this moment to reimagine the college admissions process itself, which has turned into one of the truly destructive institutions in American society.

The modern era of college admissions was launched more than half a century ago with the best of intentions: to transform the graduating schools for the Protestant establishment into talent factories for all. But in the end, the elite universities merely exchanged one privileged elite for another. These days, you don’t need bloodlines dating back to the Mayflower to stand a decent chance at an elite school, but you do need to be born into a family with the resources to lavishly invest in your early education.

In 2017 research led by Raj Chetty students thought from families in the top 1 percent of earners were 77 times more likely to be accepted into the Ivy League than students from families earning less than $30,000 a year. That same year, there were 16 times more students from the top income quintile at the University of North Carolina, a public school, than students from the bottom quintile.

We now have entire industries that view attending an elite school as a marker as to whether they should hire you or not. So the hierarchies built by the admissions committees are repeated throughout society. America has become a nation where the educated elite marry few, send their children to the same exclusive schools, move to the same affluent neighborhoods, and pass disproportionate economic and cultural power from generation to generation—the meritocratic Brahmin class.

And, like Michael Sandel from Harvard has arguedthe meritocratic culture gives the “winners” the illusion that this sorting mechanism is just and unavoidable and that they have earned everything they have.

And then we sit and wonder why Trumpian populists are revolting.

Even worse, this system is built on a definition of “merit” that is completely insane. In what sane world do we sort people—often for life—based on their ability to please teachers from ages 15 to 18?

In 2018, organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote a powerful essay for The Times pointing out that “academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Research across all industries shows that the correlation between grades and job performance in the first year after college is modest and trivial within a handful of years.”

We could have chosen to sort people by creativity, generosity or resilience. We could have chosen to promote students who are passionate about one subject but lag behind in the others (that’s how success works in real life). But instead, we’ve created this academic pressure cooker that further disadvantages people from the wrong kind of families and leaves even the real winners stressed, depressed, and burnt out.

For the past several decades, Richard D. Kahlenberg, the author of “The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action,” has argued that we need to replace the race-based system of affirmative action with a class-based system.

His proposal, to give preference to applicants from economically disadvantaged families, would address a fundamental inequality in society. Like Kahlenberg wrote in The Economist in 2018, social science research finds “that being economically disadvantaged in America today is a seven-fold obstacle to high student achievement as a race.”

In addition, he continues, if you structure programs well, you can elevate the poor and middle class while redressing the injustices historically inflicted on African Americans. Writing in Dissent this yearKahlenberg, an expert witness for the plaintiffs the case of undoing affirmative action, describes an exercise he did with the Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono. Using data from Harvard and the University of North Carolina, they built an admissions model that would eliminate racial preferences and preferences for the children of faculty members and alumni, but boost applicants from poor families and underprivileged neighborhoods.

At Harvard, under this model, the proportion of African American, Hispanic, and other underrepresented minority students would rise, and the proportion of first-generation students would more than triple.

The arguments for Kahlenberg’s proposal get stronger every year. If the Supreme Court does away with racial preferences, it will be overwhelming.

Perhaps this could be a time when we finally step back and acknowledge that elite meritocracy has spiraled out of control. It’s ridiculous that we’ve built a culture where people make fine status distinctions between Princeton, Northwestern, and Penn State as if they were 18th-century courtiers arguing over which aristocratic family had the greatest name.

It’s ridiculous that we built a system that overvalues ​​the kind of technocratic skills these universities cultivate and underestimates the social and moral skills that any healthy society should value more.

It’s sad that we spent decades trying to build a more representative leadership class, but we ended up with an educated elite who don’t know much about the rest of America and don’t seem much more competent than the elites that preceded it.

If SCOTUS tears off the fixing bandage, we may be able to address the underlying wounds.