The suggestion of some of Harvard’s trustees to stop charging tuition is great. Right now, over 70% of undergraduate students at the school come from extremely wealthy families. And it’s been demonstrated time and again that students do not benefit from being surrounded by people who are exactly like them all of the time. Besides, it’s not like Harvard or Yale need the tuition money.
The only problem I’m seeing is that it will be very hard to select among the applicants. Everybody who applies has the perfect GPA and a bunch of super impressive extracurriculars. It would suck if applicants are pushed towards (even more) gimmicky application letters to stand out.
Clarissa's Blog 
How about just setting an entrance examination and taking the top whatever percentile of applicants based on their results in this exam?
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There is the SAT exam but everybody has the perfect score in it when they apply. It’s hard to do something other than the SAT because the students are all over the world. There needs to be a globalized system in place to reach them.
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If there’s one scenario online exams were made for, it’s this one.
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I’m a bit puzzled that Harvard don’t interview all candidates. That should sort out at least some of the prospective students with falsified results etc. and would allow exceptional students from non-typical backgrounds to show their brilliance.
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Interviews are hard because you can’t do in-person ones, Skype will be inaccessible to some people, there might be claims of discrimination if you make it a requirement, and then what’s the point anyway if you can’t really verify the speaker’s identity?
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