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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

> The way admissions works in the US now it has basically become a lottery for qualified students.

That's not the way I would phrase it. A lottery would mean the outcome is random. There is nothing random about it. They consider essays, extracurriculars, and income, and look for evidence of hardship, diversity, athletic ability, and leadership. 100% subjective, sure, but not random.

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For any student who meets the qualifications, it is essentially random. There is a process that seeks to find the best students but it is flawed in the same way the job interview process is. Plenty of exceptional applicants get rejected and more than a few accepted students don’t succeed at the level one would expect.

But that doesn't make it a "lottery" as claimed in the post I responded to. Every application gets a score and then the ones with the highest scores get offered admission.

If it was a lottery, they'd do a binary classification of "qualified" and "not qualified", and then they'd randomly choose who gets in. IMO that would be an improvement on the current system. Powerball and other big lotteries don't pay out on subjective criteria, each ticket gives you the same chance of winning, with no other information being used.

The randomness is whether the committee reading your essays read them before or after lunch, or if something you wrote reminded them of their first romance, etc. etc. etc. The scores may not be "random" in the truest sense of the word, but the latent state that determine them is unknowable a priori and therefore the scoring ends up being highly stochastic.

They consider all those factors and then aim for a mix. No admissions board wants a class of 100% track stars or 100% economic hard-luck cases or 100% rich kids, etc. But they are faced with a bunch of kids who meet the GPA etc. criteria and also fit into each of these buckets.

Result is it's effectively random for each qualified kid.

That's all true, but you haven't described a lottery, you've described subjective criteria.

They do all that and then have 10x - 100x the students left in the pool. They can’t make offers to them all, so it ends up being mostly random in that final selection.

That’s why the person you are replying to said “qualified.”

But at institutions with sub 10% admit rates, it is random. It's not a uniform distribution because you can do things to help your odds, but unless your family has a building on campus or you're an olympian or something... admission isn't guaranteed.

People are getting hung up on the word "random." It's not random in the literal sense but it is at least somewhat arbitrary unless you're below some academic cutoff or you're well above it and have some other at least relatively notable achievements.

Random doesn't mean unlikely to happen, so I actually think it is random in the literal sense for almost all applicants. Much of life is.

You can do things to tip the balance in your favor, but the most important things can come down to chance.

I don't really disagree. I probably prefer other terms in those circumstances. But a lot of the ultimate decisions depend on how particular people felt about an essay or some other aspect of a submittal.

And how that particular person felt on that particular day was in part a function of how well they slept, whether they read your application before or after lunch (c.f. Hungry judge effect), and any uncountable other things. Random.

Some people's world views aren't robust enough to handle the idea that some of what they got they didn't deserve. It's unfair in the best way. It's luck. It's grace. Every person with access to this website has been granted things well beyond what is "fair".

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