Lotteries for Education by Conall Boyle

Author:Conall Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Lotteries, education, schools, colleges, universities, ballot, admission procedure, sortition, public policy, choice, school-place lotteries, merit
ISBN: 9781845406547
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2016
Published: 2016-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

2 Sharp-eyed readers may have spotted the discrepancy between the 0.5 figure here and the 0.7 value quoted earlier. Those with a statistical training will realise that 0.7 squared is 0.5; one is the correlation coefficient, the other is the index of determination, so are essentially the same measure.

7. University Entrance by Lottery: Judging Merit

Don’t believe everything you read in newspapers! When the top headline in the Sunday Times was: Universities to pick students by lottery (Sep 6, 2003) this was just speculation or ‘kite-flying’ as it is called by political commentators. True, there was a major review of English higher education admissions procedures underway, under the chairmanship of Professor Stephen Schwartz. It had been looking at some of the lottery-based admissions systems in use, particularly the one used for medical school entry in the Netherlands. There will be much more about this marvel of Dutch pragmatism in the next chapter. But no, the Schwartz commission was not about to emulate, or rather anticipate the schools admissions code and recommend random selection. In their final Report (Schwartz, 2004a) Fair admissions to higher education they made no suggestions about using a lottery.

Admissions to universities and schools differ fundamentally from each other. Schools on the one hand are set up to cater for all the children in the population with a standard curriculum. Once schools have non-selective entry (like most in England and Wales), and when parental choice is added on, then admissions by lottery may seem a reasonable way to treat all applicants equally in a non-discriminatory manner. Colleges and especially universities on the other hand are academic establishments so some form of academic selection is inevitable. To throw higher education courses open to all-comers and then resolve the excess demand by a lottery would be unthinkable.

Lottery-admission exists nonetheless, and was even being considered as a means of picking winners for English university places. But is lottery-admission yet another example of well-intentioned moves towards equality of opportunity resulting in some strange deformations of higher education? Deciding who should be admitted to study on vital vocational courses like law and medicine by the luck of the draw seems to be the height of folly. Despite that, in this chapter and the next one I hope to show that in appropriate circumstances a lottery can be an excellent adjunct the process of admitting students onto courses.

In the old days, getting onto a university course always required some minimum qualification such as Matriculation. In some countries, most notably Italy, all qualified candidates were entitled to enrol on any course at any university. This led to huge numbers of students, sometimes in their thousands, crowding on to popular courses. Ability to pay fees and support one-self was another means of limiting numbers which applied in my own student days in Ireland in the 1960s. The ‘affordability’ hurdle was removed for many by the introduction of student grants and subsidised or free tuition. This in turn creates more demand for places. For courses such as medicine

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