America’s prestige colleges always say that they’re devoted to “inclusivity” and yet they reject more than 90 percent of the students who apply. What’s going on?
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Mark Bauerlein offers his thoughts.
He writes:
This is the strategy: the maintenance of prestige coincident with the elimination of injustice and exclusion. Elite schools want a filtering process that doesn’t look so elitist, so income-based, and so racially-biased. (The sexism accusation lost its bite years ago when female admissions beat male admissions—the undergrad proportion today is 58 to 42 percent.) Using criteria more personal and holistic than a test score, admissions officers can make decisions that don’t make rejected applicants feel that they never had a chance against the lucky few, who, in former times, got ahead through test-prep courses, private tutors, and white skin. Universities still want a big applicant pool and a relatively small entering class but with concrete evidence of non-traditional, historically-underrepresented identities on the day of matriculation, so that Woke bitterness dissipates.
And what if this sort of “inclusivity” with its obsession over race has unfortunate consequences such as admitting students who are unable to compete academically? Too bad for them.
Bauerlein recognizes that top colleges will always be selective; he argues that they ought to be selective in different ways:
Because the discriminations of college admission will go on, let’s shift the criteria away from justice and identity and toward these factors:
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“How many hours of leisure reading do you tally each week?”
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“What book has influenced you most in the last three years?”
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“What are the highest intellectual virtues?”
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“What are the habits you would like your college roommate to have?
I would suggest one more factor: evidence that the student is truly interested in pursuing some course of study.