you weren’t listening…. This is about sorting at age 11. But I do agree with Eli on this.

Good heavens, no! I wouldn’t want to torture some poor students with my teaching. I’m best one-on-one as a tutor if I’m going that route. But I think the arguments are roughly similar. If you can’t really tell the difference between smart people in college, it is almost certainly more difficult to sort them out at the more elite professorial level. Why bother trying? Why not just have a lottery and assign professors to a school that way? That way you aren’t unfairly discriminating against people who don’t interview well.

Thanks, too, Nikolai; I was aware of the Boyle (but haveen’t read it) and will look up both papers next week (I assume JSTOR or something will have the Edgeworth).

Sebastian—have you been on the academic job market? Are you thinking of buying into the lottery?

Until you can quantitatively address the issue of the value of predictors you are just blathering.

WRT professors, I defy anyone to find a real difference between the best 10 or more applicants for a position. You can toss out maybe 2/3 of the applicants on rational grounds (not in the area we are interested in, weak preparation, Russian , etc.) but after that it all hinges on subjective issues.

The situation is different for earlier levels. I still think there might be some place for access-limited (based on merit) magnet schools. But it would be inappropriate for these to affect the quality of education offered in the rest of the system, and I’m not sure if that is possible. Here I agree that random selection is a better way to go than, as you point out, other methods designed to discriminate against lower class families.

Thanks for the citations.

The Edgeworth reference (for a graduated lottery based on marks) is obscure. 1890. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 53:661. There’s also a less obscure paper by Conall Boyle (which you’re probably aware of, but just in case) that’s created a lot of interest in the question of lotteries. 1998. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series D 47:291.

Why not simply raise the entry standards—and the tuition!—until the number of qualified applicants matches the number of available slots?

I wrote about this in a pamphlet called “Educational Equality and the New Selective Schooling” published by the PESGB, which got a lot of press attention in early 2000, and, more briefly, in another pamphlet I wrote for the Social Market Foundation in 2002, which also got a lot of attention for a brief period. I think I advocated the idea in a piece in the Fabian Review, too, which will be hard to get hold of. I think some of the discussants would do wel to distinguish compulsory from higher education; this is a proposal that applies at age 11 (or 12), and is an alternative to methods of selection that are not arbitrary, but are designed (like those cited by slocum)to benefit children of middle class parents. My model was not charters etc, but vouchers—the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which uses lotteries for oversubscribed schools.

Could you get me a reference to Edgeworth? (or would googling do it?)

mpowell is right—most of the real work is done by relatviely few people. Is your worry that giving those people decent educational opportunities when they are children would result in no work being done at all?

I also think part of what enables top schools to offer the quality of education they do is the quality of the students at the school. It allows the school to give the students more flexibility in choosing their own pathway and elevates the level of discussion in the classroom.

As someone who thinks that most of the real work is done by a small minority of people, I find the extent to which people are willing to go to ‘level the playing field’ disturbing.