...[N]ationally, we educators have created a culture in which parents spend thousands on mind steroids to help their kids score 50 points higher.

…[An] Atlantic article [about college admissions] examines how enrollment managers "have changed financial aid -- from a tool to help low-income students into a strategic weapon to entice wealthy and high-scoring students." Oregon State's head of enrollment management is quoted as recommending that attitude in relation to competing institutions: "I'm going to go out there and try to eat their lunch. I'm going to try to kick their ass."

Not an elegant statement, perhaps, but an acceptable one if you believe that competition makes the world a better place. In this case, however, it makes the world all the more inequitable. "It's a brilliantly analytical process of screwing the poor kids," Gordon Winston, a Williams College economist, is quoted as saying. And when another admissions officer suggested that it was wrong to give money to people who don't need it if that means turning away students who do, he was criticized for proposing "unilateral disarmament." College admissions as Vietnam and Iraq; enrollment gurus as tin soldiers.

In that same issue, Ross Douthat writes that in a single decade, the 1990s, private colleges increased aid to the wealthy (top quartile) from $1,920 to $3,510, whereas poor kids (lowest quartile) improved only from $2,890 to $3,460. College faculty members who rail against Reaganomics but who urge buying well-prepared students with merit fellowships might find a strange reflection in their mirrors.

… I love the freedom Reed [College] purchases by scorning the rankings [Reed doesn‘t cooperate with US News and World Report] -- no class-size manipulations created by employing adjuncts to lower the numbers, no doctoral requirement for faculty members where that degree might be irrelevant or even insensible. Reed is a better-known four-letter word than Drew, and we may not yet have the legs to walk away from U.S. News, but never will we spend a moment allowing its quantifications to shape any policy.

It is past time to banish the three hags of this demonic admissions trinity -- the SAT obsession, the antidemocratic "merit" scam, and the U.S. News obsession…