The right match?

• Author: Klugman, Joshua
• Position: LETTERS - Letter to the editor

With regard to Kevin Carey's piece about the future of college admissions ["The End of College Admissions As We Know It," September/October 2011], eliminating "undermatching" and getting all students admitted to colleges appropriate to their intellectual abilities will not do much good in terms of really equalizing access to selective colleges.

The problem is a lot more insidious: as selective colleges give more weight to standardized tests, kids from affluent families have been able to meet the ever-higher threshold necessary to gain admittance to selective colleges. We need to tackle the arbitrarily high standards of merit used by college admissions officers, which have been increasing over the past few decades. Upper-middle-class kids have been able to keep up with this; disadvantaged kids less so.

Even granting that something like ConnectEDU will eliminate undermatching, I doubt we will see a greater representation of disadvantaged students in selective colleges.

Joshua Klugman

Philadelphia, Pa.

I see two problems with the solution Carey proposes: the advantage will be to the tech-savvy...