There’s a story at the Chronicle of Higher Education (which may slip behind a paywall in a day or two; blame them, not me) about a Justice Department investigation of colleges who share lists of early-decision students to make sure they’re not double-dipping. This clearly sounds a little shady, but you could also argue that it’s not nearly the top legal issue facing higher education these days, and the Justice Department really ought to have better things to do.

In the interest of provocation, though, I might throw out a different idea: I’ve wondered for a while whether college admissions, particularly in the elite private school sector, is an area where allowing a bit of collusion between institutions might actually be a good thing. Specifically, I think you might be able to reduce the ambient angst level a bit if institutions were allowed to share admissions information at a level that they’re currently not permitted to do.

I should note up front that while I work at an elite private college, I can not claim any special knowledge of the admissions process. My involvement in admissions activities is limited to participating in open house panels and lunches, and talking with and giving tours to students who express an interest in physics while visiting campus. I have never read application folders, nor participated in discussions of who gets in and who doesn’t.

Given that, a lot of this is guesswork, but I like to think it’s a reasonably educated guess. My impression from reading innumerable accounts of the process is that a huge fraction of the angst about college admissions, and a big driver of the arms race that “Dean Dad” describes comes from a particular set of good-but-not-outstanding students. These are kids who have the basic credentials needed to get into good colleges, but aren’t terribly distinctive.

Any given college gets many more applications from students in this group than they can possibly accept, which means that something has to be done to pick out which students get in and which ones don’t. This is where all the tricky decisions get made– the kids with perfect test scores and published research articles all get in everywhere, the great athletes, artists, and musicians get in everywhere, but the kids who have solid grades but undistinguished sports and music careers all end up in a big mush in the middle of the process. And that’s where you have the “holistic” arguments about how this student’s essay is marginally better than that one’s, or this one would check some geographic or demographic box, etc. That’s also where the test-prep and admissions counseling businesses make their money– polishing up the applications of good-but-not-outstanding students.

The result of this process is a little bit of a lottery sort of scenario– kids above a minimum threshold of ready-for-college but below some I-know-it-when-I-see-it line that marks “outstanding” have a decent chance of getting in somewhere, but whether they do is almost random. Except I suspect it’s not completely random– all of these colleges are mostly looking for the same kind of things, so I suspect acceptances get clustered. Whatever subliminal factors put one student over the “admit” line for one college is likely to put them over the line with most comparable schools. And, similarly, you’ll get some students who get denied everywhere through no particular fault of their own. You’ll get more students in each of those groups than you would expect from a truly random process. That’s great for the students who get the ego boost of lots of acceptances, but pretty awful for the kids who end up denied everywhere.

Why would collusion help with this? Because each accepted-everywhere student can, in the end, only attend one of the N schools that accept them, so N-1 of those schools would’ve been better off accepting one of the denied-everywhere kids instead. But, of course, they don’t have any way of knowing that, because colleges aren’t allowed to share that kind of information, so they’re all guessing blindly. Which is part of how you end up with accepted-everywhere and denied-everywhere students in the first place.

So, in a weird way, it might be to the benefit of both students and colleges if there were some collusion allowed– that is, if schools could share lists of good-but-not-outstanding students who applied to the same ten colleges, those colleges could agree to spread their admit decisions around a little more evenly. Maybe some of the accepted-everywhere students get admitted to eight of ten colleges instead, while some of the denied-everywhere students get accepted at two of ten instead. That kind of system would reduce the angst for everyone (including the admissions staff who have to make high-stakes hair-splitting decisions about students who are not significantly different from one another). And that angst is a big driver of a lot of the Bad Things about our current system– students and parents who are desperate to avoid falling into the denied-everywhere pool expending lots of resources to try to distinguish themselves, and forcing everyone else to keep up.

Of course, the logistics of this kind of thing would be really hard to work out, given that students don’t conveniently sort themselves into readily identifiable cohorts who all applied to the same set of schools. There’s also something about the concept that seems a little icky, from an equity standpoint, and if you listen closely you can hear the “drip…drip… drip…” of salivating lawyers. But then, medical schools do something similar for one of the apprenticeship stages of newly minted MD’s, so I suspect that there could be some way to make it all work.

Of course, from a strict equity standpoint, the best option might be to make things genuinely random– to set some “automatic admit” threshold and some “automatic reject” threshold, and then throw all the names that fall between those into a random number generator that picks some to admit and some to reject. Given the nature of probability, that would still get you a group of accepted-everywhere students and one of denied-everywhere students, but at least statistics would let you make the probability of landing in either of those really small.

Neither of these systems have a prayer of being implemented, though, for a whole host of reasons, so we’re probably stuck with something resembling the current hot mess. Which totally sucks in many respects, so if you’re a student or parent going through this process, you have my sympathy.