If I ruled the admissions universe

(Ward Sutton Illustration)

By Elinor Lipman March 24, 2008

I LOVE the humble fact that Mike Huckabee graduated from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark. In fact, I think I'll go teach there if they'll have me. I'd be making a statement that was neither pro-Republican nor pro-church, but something closer to woman bites dog, college-admissions style.

I don't mean to pick on OBU (ranked number two "Best Value" in the South, according to US News & World Report. Congrats!). My mission today is to celebrate the safety over the reach, to say to high school seniors, "You who are waiting anxiously for that fat envelope, please know that you'll enjoy the same success and happiness whether you end up at Bates, Bowdoin, or Ball State."

When I was 20 an older friend predicted, "Ten years from now, no one will care where you went to school. In fact, no one will ask." Ridiculous, I thought. She turned out to be right. Where you live between the ages of 18 and 22 won't define who you are. One day soon, the proud new college decal on your family car's rear window will start looking a little uncool.

I miss the good old days of relatively relaxed college strivings. During my own college outreach, my father drove me to Medford for a Jackson College (now Tufts) interview. On the ride home he said wryly, "I picture a letter that says, 'Dear Miss Lipman, due to a shortage of desks, we are sorry to inform you. . ." I laughed. I was rejected, but can't remember the sting. So different were those times that never once did he, a Harvard grad, suggest that I might want to found a club or play for a basketball team more prestigious than Lowell Hebrew Community Center's (chief rival, Pepperell Methodist) or work harder because I was a legacy.

In 1987, a friend's son wrote to admissions officers explaining that he had fallen in love and was therefore distracted, so could they please excuse the C in physics? They did. He went to Yale. If he hadn't? I daresay he would be the same hero he is today, getting the wrongly convicted out of prisons through the Innocence Project.

I'm thinking of a fix along these lines, a lottery: put the names of the top 1 percent in a hat. There are your future Phi Beta Kappas. Another hat for the A-minuses with charisma who will run the country and the board rooms; another for those who test high, but get Cs in physics who will write the songs and choreograph the Broadway shows; a smaller hat for the medium-smart who promise to study and keep up; then one for the slackers every campus needs, a la public school, who show the geniuses how to get along with regular people. A blindfolded admissions officer would then pick names from each hat.

Athletes? Maybe the coaches could pick them the way they do now. Orchestras? At Lowell High School in the 1960s, you joined the band and Mr. Notini taught you how to play, talent and experience not required, and you sounded fine.

It would be a brave new yet happier world. The question, "Where'd you get in?" on the day of the national college lottery would carry no suggestion of success or failure. It would be them and not you, the defanged luck of the draw.

If I ruled this new admissions universe, I would study the applications and sniff out the resume padders whose parents could afford the semester in the rain forests. I'd want good smart kids, including the ones who didn't shine as brightly as the alleged stars at this moment in their high school lives. After all, my favorite life lesson is that Biff, the high school bully and big man on campus in "Back to the Future," ends up working under the car of his old victim, Marty McFly.

I wouldn't care what you looked like or how many teams you captained. I might require at your interview, as they do in a bartending course's final exam, that you tell a joke. Maybe I would go with the lottery, or maybe just take the first 1,000 who applied. Studies would have shown that you are all excellent, and in the end, I couldn't go wrong.

Elinor Lipman, a guest columnist, will publish her ninth novel, "The Chaperones," in spring 2009.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.