Oh, Grow Up!(BY THE BOOK) (college admissions)

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.

The late Joan Rivers' favorite catchphrase was "Oh, grow up!"--said in jest but meant in earnest--a shout-out reminder to "groaning" audiences that her comedic targets indeed were engaging in terrible acts ... and that we all know it; they were fooling no one.

It is in this spirit that I urge the nation to "Grow up!" following the nationwide incredulity at the lack of university admissions' meritocracy, pursuant to the "discovery" that television stars Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin, and other high-powered principals fraudulently conspired to gain their children entrance into elite colleges and universities.

The individual criminality of the perpetrators--applicants and school officials alike--may have been somewhat surprising, but the academy, despite its claims of devotion to Lady Justice blindness, has not been very meritocratic in its admissions practices.

The god-term in universities is "diversity," a goal articulated ostensibly to rectify past discrimination committed, in part, against groups, mostly minorities, who could not gain fair admission to higher education. However, the policies only selectively redress such unfair and unequal treatment: Jewish, Catholic, and other disfavored applicants for most of the history of higher education either were not admitted to major universities or were limited by a quota system. There are few compensatory initiatives at colleges and universities intended to redress that history.

Surely, though, in academia today, out and out racial discrimination against the best and brightest does not exist. Then again, Harvard University's race-conscious admissions policy--although the Crimson certainly are not solo actors in this practice--has gone on trial and, in the words of The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The case, brought by a nonprofit group called Students for Fair Admissions ... claims the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants by limiting the number of those students it admits."

Admission departments, often with little or no oversight within schools of higher education, arbitrarily establish priorities for small or large percentages of its admittees, including, in addition to varying weightings of grades and SAT and/or ACT scores and class rankings, such largely immeasurable factors as letters of recommendation, the reputation of the applicant's high school, writing ability in essays, outside interests, etc.

The College Board, on its website, states well the ultimate random...