The Students' Union
I had an interesting idea this morning while I ran down Harlem Avenue to White Hen for coffee: What if high-achieving high school seniors formed a sort of cooperative (I hate to call it a union) to force colleges to moderate their behavior in certain important ways? Colleges compete for the best students, so if the best students got together and agreed to act in concert, interesting things might happen.
For example, let's call such a hypothetical organization SAT1500, and its membership is limited to college-bound seniors with SAT numbers over 750 on both sides. With enough of our best seniors in its ranks, SAT1500 could tell offending colleges, "Kill campus speech codes, or we'll go to schools that do." Would this work?
I think it might work, for all except maybe the top four or five schools in the Ivy League. Everybody wants to go to Harvard, even though its liberal arts schools don't teach much of anything anymore, so Harvard and Yale might not even notice.
But maybe they will. And when you get down to the low-end Ivies and everybody else, well, the impact could be enormous. A mature SAT1500 organization could end the chaos and rank discrimination of the scholarship dance and ask the colleges: What do you bid for our top 1,000 students? What do you bid for our next 10,000 students? If SAT1500 grew powerful enough, it might be able to force schools to admit students without knowing their sex, race, or ethnicity, information virtually always illegally abused.
Anyway, just a thought. As the Boomer Echo works its way through our universities and moves on, schools will suddenly realize that the gravy train has left the station, and competition for students will become intense, not only at the top but at almost all levels. SAT1500 could find itself with the power to reshape our higher education system in ways we might call impossible today.