NEW YORK—Okay, the easiest solution to this whole college admissions controversy is to send all the applications to me and I’ll go through them and tell you which students should go to Harvard and which students should go to Texas A&M and which students should go to Agnes Scott College and which students should go to Virginia Military Institute and which students should go to the Empire Beauty School and which students should stay home and go to the University of Phoenix.
I have several special skills that are extremely rare among college officials.
Numero Uno: I can tell the difference between a score of 428 on the math section of the SAT test and a score of 598 on the same test. (Hint: The second one—the mean score of Asians—is higher.)
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Numero Two-o: I can go through an 800-word essay and grade it for grammar. I can also parse it for bullshit. Anybody who writes stuff like “It was my grandfather, a medicine man, who first taught me about the stars” is automatically eliminated. Likewise for “I am a daughter, a sister, a student, a friend, but I am more than the sum of my parts.” Should I go on? I don’t care about the Joshua Tree that you walked past every day on your way to gymnastics class. Tell me why you wanna go to this particular college and what you think you’re gonna do there. “I don’t know” can actually be a good answer.
Numero Three-o: I don’t care where you came from or where you grew up or who your daddy was, and I especially don’t care what color your skin is. Did you hit the books in high school? Are you gonna hit the books at some reasonable level next year?
But since America’s university and college systems probably can’t afford me, I propose that we do the next best thing:
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Blind applications.
Set up the application process so that nobody ever knows what your race is.
It’s actually easy to do. It’s already done with a lot of job applications. Just set up the rules so that there’s no picture, no reference to race, and any live interviews are done through Skype, with no video. We have the technology to do this, we can easily develop apps that make it possible, because the alternative is to go through this yearly ritual:
Stage one: Oh my God, the elite universities don’t have enough minority students!
Stage two: Lengthy debate, lots of meetings, lots of papers written, all showing that it’s because the elite universities discriminate against nontraditional students.
