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Ralph J Hodosh's avatar

Perhaps if we were forced to pull back from affirmative action, we would put the effort into improving K through 12 education of disadvantaged students. Improving K through 12 education would be a more difficult path, but I suspect that societal and individual rewards would be much greater than affirmative action.

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Dan Pinkel's avatar

I learned a lot from this article, and I agree with Mr. Gupta's conclusions. However I think there is another fundamental issue that needs addressing--the inordinate value put on degrees from the supposedly "elite" institutions. The student populations at these schools have not increased in proportion to the country's population, making this "resource" increasingly scarce, and requiring all sorts of unpalatable administrative contortions to manage admissions. Mr. Gupta was well served by a non-elite university, as would everyone. Such schools have excellent faculty and a quality student bodies.

We need a devaluation to the prestige associated with degrees from "elite" universities as indicating some intrinsic statement about the abilities of an individual. As one possible approach, why not make admission to some universities by lottery among the academically qualified? No implication of differential personal value is associated with admission-- the admitted were just lucky.

In practice admission now is a crap shoot, but a biased one as Mr. Gupta indicates. Why not just recognize it, and remove the bias? Whether a formal lottery would cause more to apply just to take a chance, or fewer because there were great alternative educational opportunities elsewhere would be interesting to determine.

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