An interesting experiment

There is a well founded concern that universities, particularly elite universities, are admitting students who cannot perform academically. This is done under the guise of diversity but has real world negative consequences in uncompleted degrees, excessive student debt burdens, abandoning high demand degrees which would likely have been completed had they attended a state school.

There is a parallel concern that universities are imparting hard left ideologies but also failing to foster valuable life-skills.

This is only partially attributable to the professoriate. Much of the responsibility resides with the ever-ballooning administration portion of the university. I have seen no empirical review but from anecdote and isolated data sources, my impression that the employees in the administration of universities are more left, younger, less academically accomplished, more female, far less exposed to careers in the marketplace, etc.

In other words, the average university administrator looks nothing like the average successful American.


Elite universities used to make the explicit or implicit commitment that they were selecting the leaders of the future. People who would be productive and accomplished in leading the market, their communities, and the nation.

It appears to me that the commitment has shifted marginally but with grave consequences. They seem now to be selecting candidates based on posturing and ideological orientation. People who will be leaders of the movement.

The interesting experiment would be to establish in an academic year, two parallel admissions boards. One would be the usual administration admission board. Let's see who they would admit. Of course, we know what that matriculating candidate pool would look like because we can see it in the prior year's class.

The second part of the experiment would be to establish a parallel admissions board constituted of alumni with at least 20 years of full-time career experience. Perhaps you might want to add a requirement that they have some measured minimum level of achievement (income, title, awards, employees managed, etc.) You would want to add a randomization component.

This alumni admissions board would operate under the same guidelines and procedures as the administration board.

To what degree would the admissions candidate pools of the the respective boards be identical and to what degree might they differ?

My guess that there would be at least a 20% variance and perhaps as much as a 50% variance. I suspect that the alumni candidate pool would have far fewer poseurs, self-identified victims, panderers, virtue signalers, self-absorbed snowflakes, etc. They would be much more mission focused, ambitious, and more characterized as servant-leaders across multiple domains, not just within their career.

But that is just speculation until the experiment is run.