This morning I had the honor of addressing the 2009 Annual Meeting of
CAHSI – the Computing Alliance of Hispanic
Serving Institutions. CAHSI is a “consortium of universities that are
committed to increasing the number of Hispanics who earn baccalaureate and
advanced degrees in computing”. I was part of a panel called “Mentoring Lessons Shared”
which also featured speakers from IBM, Google, and MentorNet.
I arrived in time to hear the last part of a very interesting keynote address
by
Dr. Dan Atkins, Kellog Professor, Community Information, University of
Michigan (and past Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National
Science Foundation). Dan ended his talk with a Grand Challenge to the audience
to help find a way to college educate the extraordinary number of qualified students
worldwide for whom there are not enough university programs. He gave the number
100 million qualified students and said that it would take creating a major
university (U.C. Berkeley, Stanford…) every 15 minutes to meet their need under
the current educational structure.
Over lunch with Dan and other speakers, I recommended Neal Stephenson’s superb 1995
book Diamond Age or, A Young
Lady’s Illustrated Primer. This book addresses a piece of the problem
Dan challenged CAHSI to solve: it tells the story of what happens when an elite
educational tool is hijacked for a vastly broader audience of little girls.
In 2007, during her senior year in High School, my daughter Jessica experienced
firsthand the unmanageable glut of excellent university applicants. She is
very happy at the school she accepted: Carnegie Mellon
University (in Pittsburgh, PA). However, at the time, it was very stressful. Princeton’s 2007 rejection letter to Jessica said they had 18,900 applications for
an entering undergraduate class of 1,245 students. Looking at the current
Princeton Admissions Statistics, the situation has become even worse:
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Total Applicants: 21,370
Total Admits: 2,122
Total Enrolled: 1,243
Admit Rate: 9.9%
I still like the suggestion made by Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore in the article
“Why the best schools can’t pick the best kids – and vice versa”
(Los Angeles Times, Opinion, 18 March 2007):
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“The tragedy of all this selectivity and competition is that it is almost completely pointless. Students trying to get into the best college, and colleges trying to admit the best students, are both on a fool’s errand. They are assuming a level of precision of assessment that is unattainable. … There is a simple way to dramatically reduce the pressure and competition that our most talented students now experience. When selective institutions get the students’ applications, the schools can scrutinize them using the same high standards they currently use and decide which of the applicants is good enough to be admitted. Then the names of all the “good enough” students could be placed in a metaphorical hat, with the “winners” drawn at random for admission.”
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