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Tangential to the suggestion of taxing endowments, I like Michael Sandel's idea of turning admissions into a lottery once a threshold is met. E.g. anyone with a GPA above x and a SAT score above y with a personal essay judged to meet quality level z (simplifying for illustration) is told that they have passed the acceptance threshold and are entered into the random lottery. The threshold should be set so that students who are prepared enough to succeed in the school are entered into the lottery and those who are not sufficiently prepared are not entered.

Then the freshman class is simply selected by choosing the number of available spots by random from those who have passed the threshold and entered the lottery.

It seems this would take a lot of pressure off high school students since meeting this threshold would be a well-defined goal. Once they've met it, they can start investing their time, energy, and resources into other pursuits like passion projects or time with friends, which would be a boon to mental health.

And the admissions process is essentially random anyway for the elite colleges, assuming you have sufficiently high scores. Making it explicitly random would take some (perhaps undeserved) prestige, status, and exclusivity away from the degrees from these schools -- not that the schools aren't good, or that it isn't hard to get in, but that there are many more who are just as well qualified that do not as there are who do; a fact that would be more well-recognized in society if the lottery approach were adopted. Of course, the elite schools don't want their status (and therefore degree value) tarnished so we're unlikely to see this happen of their own accord.

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The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity. There is no reason why a “Harvard” level class is restricted to just a room full of people. We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses and make education vastly cheaper but we choose not to for some reason. I think part of YC’s philosophy is basically this. Think making startups accessible rather than just some elite institution for wealth preservation.

> The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity.

This is assuming it's a problem that can be solved with simple tweaks or "startup disruption". It's an issue very much related to conspicuous consumption as education >in the Ivy League/cohort< is now a luxury good. Modeling a "prestige" factor helps account for the inequality [0].

Freakonomics[1] just did an episode on this, but I've come across similar data points else where. It's a stamp of not just a good education, but a social credential implying you have connections or money.

You can already get an equivalent education to one you might get at Harvard (or better in some majors) at many other public/private universities. The key here is the human connections you form, which go on to pay dividends later given the point above.

MOOCs were the golden child a decade ago, and they are working to some extent, but they're not breaking the elite walled garden of premier higher education.

[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29309

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-university-of-impossibl...

I’d imagine they work nicely for software engineering, but even then a lot of jobs out there are requiring degrees and might attribute too much ti the brand of college. Some sort of objective skill evaluation that is also officially recognized must be implemented in addition to actual knowledge acquisition. As I understand it if you are a doctor and capable in every way if you don’t have the degrees you can’t even be tested?

> but even then a lot of jobs out there are requiring degrees and ...

yes, and that's basically the crux of the problem. this is a social coordination problem, not a problem of education.

the trivial solution is to "outlaw" this by blinding the prestige credentials of the candidate (so only show a standardized thing like 3 year applied maths bsc) and only ask about previous experience (2 years working as data scientist) or whatever

"obviously" people will try to game this (though other universities can then copy what comes out of the fancy universities)

of course this could quickly lead to the rise of alternative prestige/reputation networks, but if the whole job application is standardized (so it becomes very hard to identify the candidate) then at least it gives a chance for folks to get in the door.

then only the usual biases remain, and the usual unfair questions (and typically the most disadvantaged candidates have the least chance to know about what kind of questions are discriminatory, and even if they know most of the time they don't have the time/energy to do anything about it)

Harvard is a good example of artificial scarcity. They have an extension school[1], where they advertise that you'll be given a Harvard education, by Harvard faculty, virtual or at the Harvard campus. It has somewhat open-enrollment, and thousands of people enroll every year. They're happy to take their money, but the students aren't allowed to say they're a Harvard graduate, they have to say they're "Harvard Extension School" graduates.

Harvard knows it's whole mystique is based on elitism and the artificial scarcity it creates by denying people admission.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Extension_School

I'm finishing my masters with Harvard Extension School and it's mostly as you say. It's good curriculum, pretty good professors (in comparison to my Stanford undergrad) but open-enrollment + Harvard's famous grade inflation does make it somewhat of a back door.

> We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses

If you're an undergraduate at Oxford[0] or Cambridge[1] you can expect to have multiple weekly sessions where two or three students get a session with a professor or postgraduate to go through material that's been presented in lectures.

Does this scale? Based on my experiences (six years in total, three on each side of the table as it were) I very much doubt it.

[0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/student-life/e... [1] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/how-will-i...

It can, very easily. Have students watch a lecture and read the accompanying text, then have them take a quiz, then have a review session where the most missed quiz questions are covered, along with popular questions submitted beforehand. Finally, set up study groups to let peers answer easy questions, and have virtual office hours/email for the few remaining difficult questions that peer groups can't answer.

The only thing that doesn't scale is on campus life, and that's meaningless to the degree that college is nominally about.

> Have students watch a lecture and read the accompanying text, then have them take a quiz, then have a review session where the most missed quiz questions are covered, along with popular questions submitted beforehand. Finally, set up study groups to let peers answer easy questions, and have virtual office hours/email for the few remaining difficult questions that peer groups can't answer

With respect, I don't believe that approach could work for the combination of the type of material covered and the type of (often open-ended) questions and discussions that resulted from it.

One of the questions I recall being asked to solve for a first-year Physics tutorial was "estimate the change in the length of the Earth's day if all the vehicles in the UK were to swap to driving on the right hand side of the road instead of on the left"

What you are describing doesn't really compare. I'm sure it would do a reasonable job, but focused individual attention is really hard to replace. Most of what you've described happens at Oxbridge in addition to tutorials/supervisions.

Having had small classes undergrad and larger classes where I went to grad school, scaling a class is not simple, the experience changes. With larger class size comes less in interactive lectures, more reliance on TAs (of varying quality) instead of professors, and different kinds of assignments. We don't have an easy way to scale these things yet.

The main reason is that the vast majority of the benefit of the Harvard is not the class but the name on the diploma. Signaling and status do not scale.

I completely agree with you. I think it would be best to expand class sizes in addition to this lottery.

Yea or do virtual classes or even video classes with distributed TAs that answer questions.

I think there are a lot of reasons why it can’t scale but none of them are related to the time spent in a Harvard class room.

The social connections and the culture are the key parts of elite colleges. I don’t think you can scale that with online classes.

One thing I have always found wierd is why is the "personal essay" (which is easier to game by folks who have the right connections/support groups/etc) a criteria for getting into a college? It almost feels like this is very hard to establish a transparent bar for, no? Cant colleges does exploit this aspect to get around randomness?

I'm sure the legacy students at Harvard (1/3 of each class) and their parents would love this.

no one, especially not some random contemporary, owns the idea of using a lottery once a threshold is met. that concept has been thrown around for millenia to pick lots of all sorts. i've even suggested it as a reasonable approach to hiring right here on hn, and didn't even need to crib the idea off anyone else to do so. it's a rational solution for a decision system under high, but not unbounded, uncertainty.

Not saying Michael Sandel owns the idea, I first heard it in his book Tyranny of Merit.

so reference the book, which is more useful, rather than some rando name.

It would also have the merit of distributing the best students to other colleges and eliminating (at least the perception) that those top college short list are a relevant filter when selecting CVs. The focus will be on the student, not the credentials, as it should be.

While I support lotteries in many different applications - I wonder if this may lead to people simply wasting years on trying to get in. Or alternatively, those qualified will keep applying until they get in.

This is done entirely to admit fewer Asians as a form of racial discrimination. See: Lowell High School.