Researchers have long critiqued the idea that college admissions are purely meritocratic. But now, with the Operation Varsity Blues scandal and the COVID-19 pandemic making educational inequity even harder to ignore, many are advocating a strategy that would obliterate this notion entirely: college admissions by lottery.
In a lottery system, each school would set a basic threshold for applicants, such as a minimum grade point average. Prospective students with averages over the minimum could apply, and the entering class would be chosen from them at random. It’s as simple as that. Proponents of lotteries suggest that they could make the college process fairer by simplifying it and limiting the advantages conferred by wealth. However, a study published last week in Educational Researcher suggests that a lottery system would lead to less equitable results, at least when it comes to race, ethnicity, and gender.
Dr. Dominique J. Baker
The study, by Dr. Dominique J. Baker, an assistant professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University and Dr. Michael N. Bastedo, a professor of education and associate dean at the University of Michigan, used data from two U.S. Department of Education surveys to compare the demographics of selective school attendees to those who might attend using a lottery system. Baker and Bastedo tested several different ways of forming the lottery pool: including all students who scored above the 25th or 50th percentile of SAT scores at selective schools, including all students who scored above those percentiles in high school grade point average (weighted and unweighted), and by using a mixture of SAT scores and GPAs. Lotteries were then simulated one thousand times for each group.
The results were clear. In the vast majority of the simulations, the percentages of low-income students and students of color admitted to selective universities dropped severely, in some cases to below 2% of the entering class. In nearly every case, percentages of whites and Asians increased. The use of lottery pools based on GPA resulted in the proportion of men decreasing to as low as one-third. And when mixed SAT and GPA criteria were used, the mean percentages of Black and Latinx students were lower regardless of the cut-off point.
The lotteries simulated in the study reflected the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities of the lottery pools that the researchers assembled. “Our findings show that systematic inequalities in GPAs and standardized test scores will be baked into the results of lotteries,” said Bastedo.
Although, when considered collectively, the study’s simulated entering classes matched the levels of diversity of the lottery pools, the proportions of different categories of students varied widely from class to class.
“Institutions could not ensure that each year’s admitted class would have a significant amount of racial or ethnic diversity,” said Baker.
