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Jon's avatar

There is also a problem in that the right tail of the academic distribution has been truncated by high school grade inflation and the recentering of the SAT. There is a wide range of ability within the top 1.0% and it makes a difference. Harvard's basketball coaches are not impressed by high school players in the top 1.0% (roughly top 5,000 nationally, plus many non-U.S. players). Their recruiting efforts are directed at the top 0.1%. It is now much more difficult now for admissions committees to tell the difference between those applicants who are strong academically and those who are exceptional.

40 years ago Robert Klitgaard wrote a thoughtful and rigorous book called Choosing Elites. At the time Klitgaard was a professor and Admissions Chairman at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and also Special Assistant to Harvard's President, Derek Bok. Based on a careful analysis, he reached a conclusion similar to Prof. Deming's: "We have some confidence that those who do better academically will also do better in later life. But beyond this, current nonacademic information cannot be shown to help much in selecting among applicants at the right tail those through whom a top university will create the greatest social value." He also wrote ""Intuitively, some readers may think they can learn a lot about candidates from essays , but studies do not support the predictive power of such measures, and again one worries about dissimulation."

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Arnold Kling's avatar

Abolish admissions offices and replace them with a lottery.

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