Elizabeth Cornell

A lottery based college admissions system could greatly impact many aspects of the application process, such as stress, diversity, and more.

When students open their college decision letters, some are very disappointed and often find themselves thinking, “Why didn’t I get in but they did?” But for some, opening a college decision letter makes them ecstatic. They may even feel like they have won the lottery. But what if that really was the case?

Ten years ago, 30,000 students applied to Harvard University, and 9% were accepted. In 2024, Harvard boasted just over 40,000 applicants and admitted just 3% of them. Rising application rates and declining acceptance rates are a common trend among higher education institutions in the United States. College admissions today are associated with extreme stress, intense competition, corrupt systems, and students competing for admission at the same few schools. The college admissions process in the U.S. today is clearly broken. College counselor Amy Larson agrees: “I just think that the bubbles got [to] burst. Something has to change.”

College admissions simply cannot go on as they are. No changes to the current system will most likely mean fewer and fewer students will be able to receive a college education. Some sort of lottery system may be the only equitable method to determine college admission. Instead of submitting a traditional application, students would submit their name and some sort of criteria (test scores, GPA, etc.) to the university they wish to attend. That university would then randomly select however many students they would like to admit from a pool of applicants.

Many students today feel that applying to college is simply too stressful. A lottery system will decrease some of this stress by allowing students to enjoy high school and simply leave their college decisions to chance. It may also increase access to college for many students who face many obstacles when applying to college today, increasing the diversity of many universities. “I think it would definitely diversify the field of education and allow many more students to attend college,” freshman Luke Machalek said.

To many students today, getting into a prestigious college is everything. However, does prestige really matter at all? Many successful individuals either didn’t attend college, attended community college or state school, or dropped out before graduating. Success is still very possible without attending a “prestigious” university. A lottery system might help combat this problem. The impressiveness of being accepted into a college with a low acceptance rate is, in many cases, becoming more attractive to students than actually attending that college. If a student’s chance of acceptance is left to chance, this ulterior motive for applying to college would vanish.

Today, high school is often more about “preparing for college” than embracing high school education itself. Students feel pressured to take the most AP classes possible, maintain a perfect 4.0 grade point average, and overall, create a flawless high school transcript that no college can resist. “I didn’t really want to continue world language classes, but I still took an extra semester of it, just because I knew colleges would want that on the transcript,” senior Caitrin White said.

A substantial problem that this mindset creates is that many students do not have access to this information until it is too late. “The highly selectives, I think automatically, cut out a lot of kids who…didn’t take courses in ninth and tenth grade that they would have needed to [to get accepted],” Larson said.

Some argue that a lottery system would prevent students with lower test scores or grade reports from applying to selective universities. However, studies have recently found that 93.7% of Harvard applicants have a GPA of 3.75 or higher, and over 70% have a perfect 4.0 GPA under the current system. Criteria required to enter a lottery system would only exclude roughly 10% of applicants, which wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Although it may help with these problems in college admissions, a lottery system would certainly have its downsides. For one thing, it would be very difficult for colleges to get to know their applicants’ personalities and true nature. Although this problem already exists, it would likely be magnified if a lottery system was implemented. “When colleges see a more rigorous schedule, they see that, ‘She’s working harder.’ But that’s not necessarily true. Some people who are in normal classes are working just as hard, if not harder, than people in AP classes, but they don’t get the same credit,” White said.

In 1970, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign did implement a lottery system. However, instead of having some criteria required to apply to the university, admissions were completely random. This caused outrage among many angry applicants who felt that they were better qualified to attend the university than many who were accepted to it.

A similar system has been implemented by the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia, a specialized charter school. The intention of this plan was to increase racial diversity at the school. However, the amount of white students at Thomas Jefferson is instead expected to grow by 18 percent under the new system.

The college admissions process contains all kinds of problems. No solution is perfect, but a lottery system would be the most realistic and reasonable solution. While it would have some downsides, it would most likely reduce stress over college applications in students, increase diversity and access to colleges, optimize high school education, and eliminate the concept of prestige. Who knows, in a few years, those disappointed students crying over a rejection letter may soon turn into elated students beaming at their winning lottery ticket.