There has been a spate of stories this spring about the low acceptance rates

at the elite universities. Here is one about a

young fellow with a perfect ACT score who was turned down by all his top

choices.

The story rehashes the usual explanation that there are more students than

ever, more of them have good grades and test scores, and so on. Still, that

doesn’t explain why an extraordinary student would get so many rejections.

Attention should be focused on the admissions process. The top schools want

to have a “diverse” and “interesting” student body. In his superb book

Inside American Education, Thomas Sowell quotes Harvard’s dean of

admissions: “We want to serve the best students from all backgrounds and

we’re trying to choose people who will be leaders later on . . . . If we’re

driven exclusively by academic qualities, we would have a much less rich and

interesting student body than we currently have.”

To that, Sowell comments, “What will look ‘rich and interesting’ to

superficial people can of course differ greatly from what scholars who are

masters of their respective intellectual disciplines will find to be

students able to plumb the depths of what they have to offer. Dull-looking

nerds can revolutionize the intellectual landscape and produce marvels of

science, even if their life stories would never make a good movie or

television mini-series.” (p.125)

The idea behind this approach to admissions is that the student body is

improved by screening out some kids who look like “just” good students in

favor of some who aren’t so academically capable, but have other qualities

that are supposedly important. You couldn’t have a “rich and interesting”

mix of students without the careful planning of the admissions people. And

here’s the problem with that notion. People are so remarkably varied along

so many dimensions that you’d wind up with every bit as much diversity if

you just took the top scoring applicants as with a process that contrives to

engineer diversity by fixating on certain characteristics that appeal to the

admissions officers.