In Response to Schwartz’s (As crafted for English 114)
Posted in Life, School on January 28th, 2010 by Sebastian – Be the first to commentSo I’ll be required to blog for a few class blogs this semester on a variety of subjects. I’ve decided to replicate said posts in this blog so I can have a general idea of what I’m writing about and when. This is the first of the series and in this particular case in response to Barry Schwartz modest proposal to make college admissions random.
So just a sidenote. The view expressed in this blog post series does not necessarily reflect my own. At times, I will take the devil’s advocate point of view to enhance my own thought process (something I’ve done many times in debate).
Also, I tend to be pretty introspective, which may explain why writing out my thoughts can actually change my beliefs on the topic manner.
So without further to do, this is my blog post titled:
Good Enough? Not Quite.
Oh the good ol’ modest proposal…
In explaining his essay as a “modest proposal,” Barry Schwartz pays tribute to Jonathan Swift as he compares Swift’s proposal to eat babies to how colleges admit students.
To be fair, there are a lot of similarities between college admissions and the consumption of babies. For one, they’re both messy affairs that upset parents. Two, they’re both solutions to their respective “overpopulation” problems; Switching to a random lottery would supposedly solve the “overpopulation” of overly competitive students gaming the system and eating babies would solve population problems in general.
However, I believe there is a fundamental problem with the premise of the lottery itself. First, there is Schwartz’s insinuation that intense competition should be accepted as inherently bad (citing a slippery slope decrease in academic vitality and what not). However, as seen by the thriving cultures on universities such as Yale (a university that has experienced decreases in admissions and increased competition for the better part of two decades), this so-called “intense competition” manifests itself as a proactive student body driven to succeed at their craft. Competitive ambition and blood-seeking competition are often confused. In a sense, being driven is itself a minimum standard for a person needs to succeed in college and in life. So is it not that the fact that people subjected themselves to such competition makes them that much more suitable to thrive in college (or at the very least prevent the degradation of academia).
Second, his solution doesn’t solve any problem. Although the main benefit of a lottery would be to stop gaming, the “gaming of the system” will always exist. Any set of rules has a metagame, a game beyond the rule set, that can and will be accessed for individuals who seek to maximize their efforts. By switching to a lottery, you’d replace overachieving metagamers with “minimum effort for maximum results” metagamers. Not exactly a pleasant change at all. This is a fundamental part of how people work and as a result, should not be considered as a valid reason to implement a lottery.
Lastly, simply taking a lottery would work if we could quantitatively assess individuals for their intelligence, motivation, and potential. Such a measure does not exist in the least, which is why the universities currently employ staffs of admission officers to discern these traits. A lottery assuming individuals at a certain will be “good enough” without a perfect assessment is to disregard the holistic view of an individual and his or her ability to contribute to the university.
-Sebastian Park
-Sebastian Park
PS. Oh yeah, Freshman Screw was fun. I have a draft of what my thoughts were before and after screw on file on this blog, but who knows when I’ll get around to actually cleaning that up.