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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

A lottery is such an obvious solution that we can only conclude that the people who developed the Harvard admission process are irredeemable racists.

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A lottery among the academically qualified students would produce a class with many fewer African American, Native American and Latino students which would be politically untenable. Those cohorts score much worse than caucasians and asians on standardized tests.

The data is pretty shocking and closely guarded by the testing people who believe they'd be asked to shut down altogether if it got out.

This would only happen if you set the threshold too high. If Harvard wants to be an institution with lots of AA, NA and LA students then just set the threshold at a level where these groups can enter the lottery.

A lottery at any threshold will create a student body biased away from blacks/natives/latinos, since the entire bell curve of their SAT results is to the left of whites/south Asians/east Asians. (Unless the top students stop applying, which is an unacceptable outcome for any elite school.)

[1] https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

A lottery appears to be a reasonable solution but it has a problem. The admissions system has two objectives - selecting students according to criteria that Harvard deems important and second, giving the public perception of selecting quality students. If it was publicly known that getting was a lottery, then the perception of quality takes a hit.

I mean, if we really have this many "perfect on paper and equivalent" students applying, toss out everyone who was less than perfect and then run the lottery on the cream of the crop.

Imagine if the lottery produced only White and Asian males being accepted. The meltdown and tears that a even a less than 0.01% event would cause prevents the lottery concept. I personally agree that a lottery is a valid suggestion but I don't think it would ever happen, at least completely random without "supervision"

How could a lottery produce such an outcome with tens of thousand of people in the pool and thousands being chosen? Set a threshold to get into the lottery (say a SAT score of 1200) and then choose at random.

Such an approach will likely encourage diversity as people who think they don't have a chance under the current system will apply.

I'm not disagreeing with you. But someone in Admissions (who is heavily incentivized to not use a lottery) is going to vehemently argue the opposite

In Harvard wanted to stay a top school, they wouldn’t set the lottery threshold to 1200, they’d set it to 1500, with minimum 4.0 GPA. They’d still have a huge pool of applicants, but it would likely end up with a class around half Asian, which is what they are explicitly trying to avoid.

If Harvard can be a top school despite accepting people with scores of 1200 (which it currently does) then why can't it come down to this level for everyone and run a lottery?

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