With colleges around the country being sued for exercising affirmative action and right-leaning activists attempting to demolish the practice completely, what's a college admissions board to do in order to maintain diversity while not facing lawsuits? Why, leave it all up to computers, of course!

Juan E Gilbert, an associate professor of computer science at Auburn, has created a software that he says satisfies the demands of both pro and anti-affirmative action parties.

The software works this way: A college decides how many applicants it will admit from that middle group. Then the college picks the criteria it will use to evaluate the applicants. These would generally include a range for acceptable SAT scores or high school grades, planned major in college, status such as first generation to go to college, intended major, race, gender and so forth. Then the software clusters all of these applicants into groups equal in total number to the number of projected admits. In doing so, the software groups applicants who share the same qualities together. Then the software selects one person from each group to be admitted, but this person is the applicant who is the least like others in his or her cluster. (Details are available on the company’s Web site.)

Gilbert said in an interview that this system offers key advantages. First, it removes bias from the equation, as an admissions officer can’t be accused of providing more or less emphasis to any criterion based on personal interests. Second, it assures that race and ethnicity are taken into account, but not given more weight than the Supreme Court would permit. “It does what we as human beings can’t do on a large scale,” he said.

Auburn will begin using the software for its admissions beginning next year. After that, the revolution of the machines. Bow to your MacBook!

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