Max Cameron: Should university admissions be decided on the basis of a lottery among qualified applicants?

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Third, the growing polarization and rancour in our politics reflects a rift between elites and everyone else. The educated and well-to-do are pulling away, deepening resentment and anger among those left behind. Those who are not rising are told it is their fault, while those whose unearned privileges have grown are celebrated. What are we to make of a society that, in the darkest days of a pandemic, honours Mike Harris, a multi-millionaire CEO of a long-term care facility management corporation who, as premier of Ontario, introduced the deregulatory policies that made these facilities vulnerable to COVID-19?

A lottery for university admissions would not solve these intractable social problems, but it would send a signal to high school applicants that grades are not everything. It would remind university students that studying means learning to learn — and that takes trial and error, experimentation, and the cultivation of the joy of discovery, wonder, and imagination. And it would be a democratic check against the all-pervasiveness of the winner-take-all ethos of our market economy.

Nor would a lottery neutralize privilege. A lottery system would introduce an element of luck in the hope of stimulating a sense that doing well is not only a matter of hard work and talent but also of good fortune. To attenuate the deeper problem of privilege and inequality we must look to grants, scholarships, progressive tax incentives, support for racialized students and faculty, and other policies.

My own biggest reservation about Sandel’s proposal is that my students almost uniformly dismiss the idea. Mainly, I suspect, this is because they are deeply committed to the view that talent and effort should be reliably rewarded. Still, the idea has provided an opportunity to reflect on why meritocracy itself — and not just our failure to achieve it — is a problem. If this generates a thoughtful public debate that would surely be a good thing.

Max Cameron teaches political science at the University of B.C. His views are his own and he has no influence over admissions decisions at UBC.