Harvard and UCLA

Harvard announced the elimination of early admissions, while UCLA announced a more "holistic" approach in evaluating prospective students. Both are noteworthy and may spur changes in other institutions of higher learning.

However, as readers of this blog know, I am a proponent for the elimination of Legacy Admissions (check here and here for recent posts on this subject). For institutions like Harvard and the U.C.'s, it will take a lot of courage for this to happen. Not all topnotch schools have Legacy Admissions: Caltech doesn't. It's probably why they have so many Nobel Prize winners among their alumni!

As I pointed out in a previous post, the top Asian schools don't have Legacy Admissions either. In order to maintain our leadership position in this globalized world, we need our best and brightest to go to our best schools. Not, as Warren Buffet would put it, winners of the ovarian lottery.