SPONTANEOUS ORDER. Lengthy Kitchen Cabinet post on the usefulness of hardship admissions to universities, with cross references. There's more about the David Brooks article referenced here, and a relatively minor point in Brooks gets the attention it deserves. Namely: the quality of education a student gets at a top university depends to a great extent on the quality of other students. There's not that much difference among the faculties, but a bull session that gets into the finer points of Republic or Wealth of Nations is likely to yield different results from a bull session that determines who are the hotties in the class.