This article misses the simple fact that the type of fellow students you have will impact how well you do as a student. Humans are social creatures and will influence each other's behavior. That's not even getting into negative pressure from things like bullying.
edit: Also their point on the curriculum being similar misses the fact that the standard for doing well differs. Barely learning some material is different from understanding it well. I've had the experience of taking various college math classes from a variety of institutions. There is a very large difference in the effort I had to put in to do well at a top school versus a middling school. This is of course related to my first point on the quality of students mattering as you simply cannot have the same bar given such different student populations.
Isn't this what is suggested below the second picture?
> Really, it’s harder than this picture suggests, because many experiences are based on other students. If I want you as my project partner but you want to forget I exist, then something has to give.
Doesn't that enhance the effect of the gate rather than detract from it? If, ceteris paribus, being around the shiniest of gold stars helps you shimmer a little brighter, that seems likely to make the gating-function effect more pronounced, not less.
My criticism of the article is that there's no alternative solution given. You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function . . .
> You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function
If an institution doesn't want to simply accept the top N performers on one or more standardized tests, they could go one step further and perform an SAT/ACT-weighted lottery followed by a culling. This can be per-major or per-department, but many universities already enforce a set of near-universal required courses. Set a minimum performance requirement on those courses and bada bing bada boom, the institution is getting the cream of the crop for whatever quantitative definition of "cream" they want to set. People will be naturally disincentivized from applying to overly competitive programs in which they're likely to fail. There are probably many effective variations of this idea, too, like using a geographically distributed population-weighted lottery for applicants meeting some threshold score instead.
What are the failure modes of such quantitative approaches? Could the outcomes be worse than those of our current system? What are some better alternatives?
One of the points of the article seemed to be to do gating latter rather than earlier. I'm saying that this is detrimental as being around the dullest stars will make you a dull star more often than not.
Perhaps I missed it but I didn't see the author put forward a mechanism for how the "gate later" approach was supposed to work. Did I miss it?
To your point though, absent an implementation of "gate later", it's not clear to me that what the author would want would put you near the "dullest stars". There's no way Harvard (or any other Ivy+) would accept a "gate later" implementation that would give them the dullest of stars. The differentiators between folks with any non-zero chance of acceptance are already pretty small, and I don't think "allow everyone in" would be feasible as they would not have room to put all of the people who want to be there.
Stratification is inevitable but efforts to disintermediate lifetime quality of life from status (Ivy) is warranted (depending upon your viewpoint on merit).
edit: Also their point on the curriculum being similar misses the fact that the standard for doing well differs. Barely learning some material is different from understanding it well. I've had the experience of taking various college math classes from a variety of institutions. There is a very large difference in the effort I had to put in to do well at a top school versus a middling school. This is of course related to my first point on the quality of students mattering as you simply cannot have the same bar given such different student populations.