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How, exactly, can a selective college like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc become less selective? By increasing the campus size tenfold? Staffing it with more, though less capable professors? As long as there is a size and quality limit, there always will be exclusivity.

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Maybe being the best does not necessarily mean to be selective?

I think that Internet slowly begins to remove the constrains you mention.

I'm all for widening the world and all, but let me think out loud.

Harvard lets really brilliant people meet each other in a place that offers exclusively brilliant people. (Brilliant by Harvard's standards, anyway: I'm aware that that's not a perfect standard.) It gives them some world-class teachers, and it gives them class sizes small enough that students can build relationships with those teachers.

How do you lessen selectivity without also lessening the experience of being in such an exclusive place?

I think that Internet slowly begins to remove the constrains you mention.

You have obviously never graded problem sets. ;) Have fun doing that for a class of 5,000 people.

By admitting students randomly rather than on perceived skill.

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