Hot Topic: Getting Into Harvard
This is the time of year when colleges and universities decide on the Class of 2010. It's also when students and parents are in full- throated gripe about the admissions lottery, the opaque system by which high school seniors are accepted or rejected.</br></br>We don't pretend to understand all of the mysteries of this ultimately arbitrary process. But for all of its imperfections -- witness the former Taliban spokesman who won a coveted slot at Yale, or the recent SAT scoring screwup -- on the whole the college- admissions process does a good job of matching students and schools in what continues to be the best system of higher education in the world. And it even lets us say something good for a change about Harvard -- and Yale too.</br></br>Cynics will note that the way to get into elite universities is to be a minority, the child of an alum, have a 4.0 GPA and perfect SAT scores, or be a star quarterback or piccolo player. It certainly doesn't hurt to come from a geographically "diverse" place such as Wyoming. And, oh, did we mention that it would help if junior spent last summer scaling Mount Everest or writing a novel?</br></br>Diversity is a much-maligned word these days -- and for good reason when it is used as justification for racial preferences -- but it is also one of the strengths of U.S. colleges. Unlike virtually everywhere else in the world, applicants to U.S. universities aren't usually selected by a set of fixed academic criteria. Most foreign universities couldn't care less about students' extracurricular activities or whether their parents wore the old school tie.</br></br>In Japan, entrance exams are everything. All the University of Tokyo cares about is how a kid scores on a test he has spent four years cramming for. European universities show somewhat more flexibility, but if you haven't followed an approved course of study in high school -- to which students are tracked at the age of 10 or 12 -- you can pretty much forget about college.