[School Story] College Admissions Should Be Like Harvard’s

The most natural college admissions system is one in which each university selects students who are likely to contribute to the development of that particular school. Some students may enhance the school’s prestige through academic excellence, while others may do so through political talent. The way a university chooses people it needs for its own development will also vary from school to school. One university may select freshmen based on CSAT scores, while another may choose them based on the high school they attended.

That is how companies hire new employees. Academic records may be taken into account, but above all they determine whether a person is likely to contribute to the company’s development. A handsome person may benefit the company, or someone who speaks well may be the right fit. What criteria to apply is at the discretion of the hiring side.

Consider how Harvard University selects incoming students. There too, the results of an academic aptitude test similar to Korea’s CSAT, the SAT, are important, but many other factors also affect admission decisions: the tradition of the applicant’s high school, achievement in individual subjects, whether the student comes from a remote area, and whether the parents are Harvard alumni or professors, among many others.

What we should pay attention to is the fact that the ultimate selection criterion is whether the student will contribute to the development of Harvard University. For example, the university confidently explains that children of alumni or Harvard professors generally receive extra consideration because they tend to have strong loyalty to the institution. It also says that students from certain prestigious high schools are favored because that is beneficial to Harvard’s development.

If given freedom, universities in Korea would also try to select as freshmen students who would contribute to the development of their institutions. And that would be done through a wide variety of criteria and subjective judgments. Because universities would apply diverse standards, high school students who want to attend a particular university would each prepare in their own way to get into the school they want. High schools and parents would also educate accordingly. In other words, we would move away from the uniform entrance-exam preparation of today.

Just as students should be free to choose among various universities, each university should also be left to decide at its own discretion which freshmen to admit and how to select them. Only then will Korea’s high school students begin making diverse, non-uniform preparations for university admission.

Original title: [학교이야기] 대학입시는 하버드 대학처럼

Author: Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

Date: 2008-06-30

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=18&idx=10714