[Asian Americans have a thorny relationship with affirmative action.]

As Natasha Warikoo, an associate professor of education at Harvard and the author of The Diversity Bargain, a book about the role of race at elite universities, recently told me, “There’s no such thing as a perfect admissions system that leads to ‘a meritocracy.’” In other words, no matter what, any admissions process is inherently going to privilege one group over another. And when the criteria are so fuzzy, there’s no way to definitively identify, let alone root out, discrimination.

But what if Harvard created a fixed set of criteria that it deems desirable—say, an SAT score of 1470 or above, a 3.5 or higher GPA, a demonstrable interest and aptitude in particular non-academic activities, a record of overcoming obstacles, and so on? To continue to promote diversity, the school could give extra weight to certain applicants depending on, say, their zip code, the kind of high school they attended, their income, and their race. Then admissions officers could use those criteria to whittle down their batch of 40,000 applicants to a much smaller pool of qualified contenders and from there select the final 2,000 or so through a lottery (not everyone who’s admitted attends). Proponents, including Warikoo, suggest that this approach could help Harvard (and other universities) avoid accusations of racial discrimination while still helping it achieve its goal of building a diverse class.

In this system, “instead of being the ‘best,’ [students] would only have to be ‘good enough’—and lucky,” wrote Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore College, in a 2015 opinion piece for The New York Times. And while it may feel unjust to the students who aren’t lucky enough to get their name drawn out of a hat, experts have long argued that such a strategy is in fact the most fair. As the philosopher Peter Stone wrote in the journal Comparative Education Review, “Fairness … requires random selection under the right circumstances.”

The idea of a lottery system as a fix for elite-college admissions isn’t new. Lani Guinier, a professor emerita of law at Harvard, for example, broached the idea in a 1997 Times op-ed on affirmative action: Schools, she wrote, could establish a minimum test score; students “who offer qualities that are considered valuable would then have their names entered more than once … to increase their chances of being selected.”

And the benefits of such a system would, proponents argue, extend beyond creating transparency in colleges’ racial-diversity efforts. In a 2005 op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Schwartz described the elite-college admissions process as “a fool’s errand”—one that disadvantages both students and schools.

For example, Schwartz contended, lotteries would encourage a certain degree of risk-taking among high-school students. In recognizing that their admission is random, perhaps highly qualified high-schoolers would embrace their passions and explore their intrinsic interests rather than pad their resumes with accomplishments and activities they think—and have been told—those elite colleges prioritize. Under the current model, “everything they do is calculated to produce better credentials—high grades, great SAT scores, impressive extracurricular activities,” Schwartz wrote. “They choose classes that play to their strengths, rather than those that might correct their weaknesses or nurture new interests.” The result, he argued, is a “distorted adolescence” for many of the country’s most talented youth.