Daniel Pink explores a reader's idea: colleges admit students randomly from those who clear a minimum GPA and test score. It could boost fairness and diversity, but would lose exceptional outliers like top athletes. Pink challenges elite schools to try it secretly for five years.
Hey, this is Daniel Pink. I write the Why Not column for The Washington Post, where we propose big ideas for remaking our country, our organizations, and our lives. We've gotten thousands of ideas from readers all over America. Here's one from a reader in Northampton, Massachusetts, who says, why not have colleges and universities admit applicants at random, solving the problems of obtaining diversity, of being fair to everyone, and of preserving constitutionality? It's an interesting idea. What you could do is you could establish a minimum cutoff of grades and scores, and then everybody above that level gets thrown essentially into a lottery, and whoever emerges in the lottery is that incoming class. It seems fair superficially. The downside is that you lose out on the outliers— the greatest shortstop in the country, the greatest violinist in the country, and so forth. What I'd like to see is elite colleges do this, not tell us, and then reveal it 5 years later and show, hey, it worked out just fine. But tell us what you think in the comments.
