Harrison Bergeron on the Charles

Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has been pushing an elite-college admissions lottery for years. Sandel: “Harvard and Stanford get something like 50,000 applicants for 2,000 places. Most of them are well-qualified. Cull out those who are not well-qualified, and among the rest, the 20,000 or 25,000, whatever the number is, admit by lottery.”

Frankly, this is a crazy idea. The whole reason why students want to attend an ultra-selective college is that it is ultra-selective! If top schools start randomly admitting kids from the top half of the applicant pool, they instantly shred the main reason to attend.

At first glance, Frederick M. Hess seems to be repeating Sandel’s proposal (“Country-Club Colleges,” August 28). But if you read closely, there is a crucial difference. Hess lets schools set their bars as high as they want.

In principle, this allows schools to make their admission standards so stringent that they need no lottery: If you have a hundred slots, admit the hundred best in the world. Given these constraints, top schools will very likely protect their status by adopting strict cutoffs. The upshot: While Sandel is explicitly trying to end what he calls “the tyranny of merit,” Hess is proposing more meritocracy than ever.

Is this a good idea? I say, “Do it.” Nobel prizes should go to the best scientists, Olympic medals to the best athletes, billions to the best entrepreneurs, and slots at elite colleges to the best students. Meritocracy is the fairest and the most socially functional ideal. While people should be free to be unfair and dysfunctional, Hess is right. If you want to reenact Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” government shouldn’t let you do it at taxpayer expense.

Bryan D. Caplan

George Mason University

Frederick M. Hess responds: I’m much obliged to Professor Caplan for his kind words. The point, as he astutely notes, is not to reject notions of merit or earned opportunity but to insist that taxpayer-subsidized educational institutions (which is pretty much all of them other than Hillsdale) admit students on the basis of transparent educational criteria — and not on the basis of fundraising convenience, the ideological stylings of campus officialdom, or a family’s acuity at gaming the admissions process. If such a shift happens to protect taxpayers, rein in campus ideologues, and combat the suspicion that elite higher education is a rigged game, so much the better.

Elite colleges claim they are national resources deserving of public investment in large part because they are identifying the most promising future leaders, thinkers, and scientists. It’s tough to square these claims with the evidence regarding what colleges do today. Professor Caplan is right to argue that publicly subsidized colleges should live up to their own ideals and forthrightly commit to admitting the most qualified, meritorious, and deserving.

While we must not abrogate the First Amendment protections that allow colleges to admit whom they wish, we have every right to insist that educational institutions that wish to collect taxpayer funds admit students in accordance with transparent measures of educational qualification.

Correction: In “The School-Choice Moment” (Nicole Stelle Garnett and Michael Q. McShane, August 28), an organization was referred to as “Parents Empowered.” It is in fact Families Empowered.