By definition, there can never be enough selective schools to go around, or they would no longer be selective. They would all have a random sample of the total college population. Select schools are attractive because they are selective.
I disagree with your definition.
It isn't a definition, it is a matter of what is logically possible, just like it is impossible for a 6 foot tall man to be a player in a 5-feet and under basketball league. The league cannot exist independent of who is in it and how tall they are. The second the 6 foot man becomes a player, it is no longer a 5-feet and under league, and not only does the name of it change but most of its core features that made it substantively different from other non-selective leagues are gone along with the reasons why anyone would care to be in it rather than other leagues. The education a school offers is determined by and thus cannot exist independent of who attends it and the kind of knowledge, skill, and motivation they have which determine the kind of, level of, and method of instruction and expectations that optimize learning.
This is not a supply demand situation nor is it a survival situation. It is an equal rights situation.
Schools that want to select their students need to admit all students that meet their meet their academic criteria who want to attend that school. Rather than such as grades students can only be evaluated on whether they can do the things the school requires as measured by objective criteria. Students may not be excluded by comparative criteria. That is if Joe and Jill meet objective criteria, Jill cannot be taken over Joe just because she met criteria with a higher score. They both desire entry and they both qualify so they must both be admitted.
Great, so then you agree with me that AA admissions policies in the US are unacceptable because they violate equal rights and discriminate based on race. If race is considered in admissions, it necessarily means that different academic criteria are being used in admissions decisions for applicants of different races. It is logically impossible to change the relative representation of those admitted from what it would be without use of AA, unless different academic criteria are used.
It also means that all other forms of special consideration should be illegal, including legacy admissions, athlete exemptions, etc.. I completely agree. Only Foreign student applicants could be held to a higher standard, since as non-citizens they have no right to our education system, it is a privilege. But all other applicants should be put into a single decision pool, with no personal information (including names, etc) about them available that is not an empirically based indicator of their current academic preparation shown to predict some variable features of the learning context that are more and less optimal for learning by people at that level of preparation. Despite ideological assertion to the contrary, that is things like GPA, ACT, number of AP courses, etc.. A regression equation should be used to combine these variables into a metric that is used to determine the cutoff.
What is questionable is your bolded comment above. It seems to contradict your position that school can use criteria relevant to meeting their requirements. Those are "comparative criteria". Obviously, if the school sets the criteria at a level between Joe and Jill, then they can admit Joe and not Jill. I think you are saying that if they do not admit Jill, then they cannot admit anyone else at or below her standing on those objective criteria. I agree, and again it would make nearly all current AA admission practices illegal.
Do you agree that the cut-off value used should be allowed to change from year to year, based upon number of applicants, number of current students, fluctuations in instructors, budget changes, etc..? I hope so, because a fixed cut-off every year would created massive waste and burdens that impede the quality of education for all.
Its true that one can set objective criteria where only a very small percentage of citizens meet criteria. In that case the criteria must be changed so anyone wanting a college education can get in to that school if they meet minimum standards for accomplishing recognized demands of positions for which the college prepares the students.
The colleges must provide a menu of positions that spans the range of college educated capabilities. Harvard will no longer be the place where one goes to become president unless it is also the place where one goes to become Ilwaco Bolt cutter.
Damn. You were going good, but now you completely contradicted yourself. Before you said colleges can have admission standards but apply them equally. Now you are saying that colleges cannot have any criteria for who gets in because they must offer programs that prepare people for every possible type of career, spanning every level of ability. Your saying colleges can only use criteria to determine what program you are allowed to enter, but every single college must have a program for everyone.
There are many things extremely wrong with that. First, it is just as exclusionary as the current situation of different colleges having different criteria. From the standpoint of "rights", "exclusion", or other moral abstractions, it is no different. Overnight, all of the reasons why people would choose Harvard over UMass will just shift to apply solely to the specific programs at Harvard that are more selective. IOW, nothing is gained by it in terms of your own standards you laid out.
Worse than achieving nothing of value, it would lead to the utter decimation of the college system, increasing costs many many times over, costs that are completely wasted on things that do nothing to make people more educated and prepared for various jobs than now. Like many many other trades, bolt cutters don't need college. Its a waste of their time and someone's money. In addition, every different program in each school requires an physical and personnel infrastructure to exist, regardless of whether it teaches 1 or 1000 students. Your proposal that would prohibit schools from specializing in particular areas would increase the per-student costs many times over, plus lower to average quality of education in each department for forcing every school to offer programs they are not well equipt to offer.
In fact it should be the case that any school is a path to most any college education demanding position. If a society wants to be exclusive it should never have promised equality.
Society didn't promise the kind of fairy tale equality you are referring to where all people are equally capable to perform all tasks. And even if it did, society cannot deliver on it because a little thing called reality stands in the way.
Those who are employed need to adjust. If they want to be in front of only the very tops students they need toforget that want. Rather they should adopt goals like being the best teacher ever.
The quality of teaching will inherently go down, because it is only partly a function of things under the teachers control and is as much or more a function of the learning context, which includes the prior skill sets and internal motivations of the students, and the broader the range of these, the fewer the % of students for whom any instructional method or level of expectations is optimal.
If therr primary interest is conducting research and training those who desire to be nobel prize winners they need to become the best researchers they can be.
Again, different schools need to vary in whether they emphasize research, which means vary in what type of programs they offer. Research requires infrastructure. It needlessly and with no benefits, multiplies many times the operating costs of every institution.
Absurdly, you want to eliminate any specialization at the College level (eliminate types of colleges), but force total specialization at the level of professors, teach or research. Also, it makes perfect sense to have some institutions where the professors both do researchers and teach. Most of the courses in most disciplines are built upon understanding research and the knowledge it produces and the questions it leaves open. Actual researchers who conduct, publish, and review research have a far greater depth of expertise and more current knowledge of the field. For intro courses or undergrad degrees where the students are not going to become contributors to those academic fields, then non-researcher instructors can be as good or better. But, some upper-level undergrad instruction at some schools needs to be taught by active researchers. Yet another reasons why your proposal to make all colleges identical is destructive.
I consider anything that uses previous training as an entrance criteria a business which need be strongly regulated.
You can consider it a magical brownie, but you're objectively wrong. The prior training requirements some public schools use is not used by public colleges to make profit, because students are not employees and make zero profit for public colleges, they cost money. The prior training is used to determine the context (which in any pragmatic implementation means the specific college), the student will get the most benefit without harming benefits to other students. Thus, public colleges are not businesses, but non-profit organizations offering below cost public services who, like every single such organization has rules about how, where, and when those services are provided. It is no different than the DMV requiring different levels of prior training before you can even show up to take the test to get different kinds of licences. And contrary to your proposal, not all DMV offices offer every single type of service or licence that any person might want, because that is an absurd waste of resources that harms everyone.
Your prior post asserted that your position was that "education is a right" and that "it is simple". Yes, it is very simple to offer fluffy, meaningless, platitudes. But as your efforts to explicate how this would be manifested shows, it is extremely complex and efforts to implement feel good platitudes often leads to absurdly implausible, destructive, and internally contradictory proposals. Unlike things that can be reasonably established as a "right", like speech or thought, any kind of formal education is not a personal behavior entailing merely control over your own body. Instead it is inherently an interpersonal activity requiring others to perform various actions to benefit the person being educated, and direct impacts on all other being educated and those paying for the whole enterprise. IOW, it impact other people's actual rights over their person and property. That is why the notion of it being a right is largely vacuous, and at best only valid when specified in a very constrained and limited way.
