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The Times Higher Education Supplement:
French university admissions: the creme de la creme?

17 January 2019

One irony is that just as France has scrapped admissions lotteries, some in the UK and US are beginning to wonder whether they might be a good idea - albeit in a much more limited form than the pre- system. In a book published last year, Lee Elliot Major, chief executive of the UK social mobility thinktank the Sutton Trust, and Stephen Machin, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, argue that places at oversubscribed universities should be distributed randomly to students with grades above a certain threshold. The hyper-selectivity of "elite" universities favours the middle classes, who are better placed to help their offspring navigate the "baffling" selection processes, the book, Social Mobility and Its argues. A lottery could level the playing field.