When I was a reporter in China in the 1970s, I found that retired people sunning themselves in the park were among my best sources. There wasn't much anyone could do to them if they offended the authorities, and they had some interesting stories to tell.

Candor often comes later in life also for Americans who once held important positions that required them to keep their more provocative thoughts to themselves. My latest favorite example is a paper sent to me recently by Cliff Sjogren, 75, entitled "A Radical Plan for a Simplification of the College Admission Process."

Sjogren has intimate knowledge of the trauma and frustration that American families suffer during the college admissions process, since he once helped cause some of it. From 1973 to 1988 he was director of admission at the University of Michigan and from 1989 to 1993 he was dean of admission and financial aid at the University of Southern California. The past 10 years he has worked as a consultant out of his home in what he calls the backwoods of Cadillac, Mich. He has also been very active in helping the International Baccalaureate Organization bring college level courses to more high schools in the United States.

Most of our debates over college admissions process these days are pretty marginal. Should we encourage more schools to have less binding early application programs? Should we add a writing sample to the SAT? Should we trim our waiting lists? Those are all interesting discussions, at least to those of us obsessed with this stuff, but they carry none of the power of Sjogren's paper. He wants us to dynamite the whole system and try something new.

"In a well-intended albeit futile attempt to be all things to all people, colleges and universities have seriously complicated application procedures for the student, overly burdened high school counselors, and substantially increased the colleges' costs for enrolling freshman classes," Sjogren says. "A growing number of institutions have created intimidating and overly bureaucratic processes that consist of a 20-plus page application, one or more essays designed to elicit politically correct responses, several letters of recommendation, external tests to be evaluated all too often by unqualified readers, anchored by a dizzying array of early decision/early action schemes ('get commitments before students are prepared to make them!') while raising tuition and fees to pay for bulging institutional administrative costs."

Sjogren says we need to save students, high school counselors and college admissions officers from all this time-wasting drudgery. Here are his recommendations:

1. Put the emphasis where is should be -- how did the student do in his or her high school courses? That means grades, which can be hard to interpret, but Sjogren has a solution. He recommends a national student-centered admission program in which high schools submit, along with the student's transcript, the following information: percentages of As, Bs, Cs and so on in all of their academic courses, percentage and number of students in accelerated courses, grade distribution on those accelerated courses, test score distribution in Advanced Placement or IB courses, percent of AP or IB students who take the final exams, percent of seniors to go to four-year colleges, percent of teachers with advanced degrees and the median or average SAT or ACT scores of all juniors. That should establish the relative worth of each student's grade point average. A clever computer expert might even come up with a way to rate each high school's degree of grading difficulty, just like diving judges do at the Olympics.

2. Replace early action, early decision, early application and every other gimmick of the age of selective college angst with a rolling admissions system like that used by many state universities. "Rolling admission places the student's interest as paramount as the college commits early and the student has until May 1 to make a choice," he says. I can hear admissions officers predicting over- or under-enrollment chaos, but Sjogren says this system worked fine when he was at Michigan handling 20,000 freshman applications a year. Depending on when they applied, students got one of three answers -- admit, reject or give us more time -- as early as October. "This process can be accomplished rather easily with well-conceived computer-managed enrollment projection mechanisms," he says. "Some colleges are doing it. Why don't more (or all) do it?"

3. Eliminate the essay. Sjogren has noticed the rise of college essay polishing services, as described here recently, and he is appalled. "The range of rates for the service seems to be from $10 a page up to $800 for the 'complete works,' " he says. "Is it fair? Of course not!" He says the essay favors applicants from high-income families and has outlived its usefulness. Instead, he says, colleges should simply include a blank page on the application for students who want to say something extra about themselves, but no obligation.

4. Eliminate or greatly reduce required recommendations. Sjogren is pained by the time counselors spend on these fawning appreciations of each student that usually have little impact and put students at ordinary public schools at a disadvantage because their overburdened counselors don't have much time to write them. "Rather than preparing long, cliché-ridden, template paragraphs extolling the virtues of their applicants, counselors' time would be better used in counseling students about preparation for college, and life," he says. A sensible substitute for the recommendation, he says, would be a mark on a chart to indicate the probability, from high to low, of an applicant being ready for that particular college.

5. Modify the role of the SAT and the ACT tests. Require students to take the exams but only consider the scores if they are average or above average. "High standardized test scores are unambiguous and may reveal skills not apparent elsewhere," he says, "while low scores are ambiguous and may result from a multitude of influences," such as weak language instruction, anxiety, lack of test prep, non-verbal upbringing and other things.

6. De-emphasize extracurricular activities, or at least look more carefully at what the student is doing unconnected to the school. Sjogren says that when he was reading applications he was bothered that so many students felt they had to apologize for not joining clubs because they were working to support their families or tending to a sick relative. He says they should get some credit for whatever they are doing that "clearly distinguishes them from the ordinary or demonstrates a strength of character."

7. Eliminate legacy, alumni and faculty preferences for in-state students at public institutions. He says he is willing to give some preference to out-of-state applicants from alumni families as long as the admission standard for them remains at or above that for in-state applicants.

8. Eliminate all no-need financial aid. "Merit awards sap funds from those who need help," he says. "Replace with book awards, certificates of merit, notices to hometown papers, etc. to recognize high-performing students." Some colleges could be exempt from the rule if they showed they could not fill their classes with qualified students without merit scholarships.

9. No credits, just advanced standing, for college level work done in high school. Getting through college quicker is not a worthy goal, Sjogren says. It is fine for a student to place into a more challenging course because of an AP credit, but they should be encouraged to use this to enrich their college years, not shorten them.

10. Preserve special consideration for applicants with personal qualities, creative talents or ethnic backgrounds that are in short supply. Affirmative action has its place, Sjogren says, but it should not focus on just race. Applicants who are the first in their families to go to college, or who are from homes that do not speak English, are worth a second look. And in every case, he says, they must be academically qualified and only get what he calls the "nudge factor" if they are just below the point where they would be competitive in the fight for space at that selective school.

I have qualms about some of Sjogren's ideas, but he makes a strong overall case. For most selective colleges, the admissions process has become not much more rational than the crap tables at Atlantic City. Admissions officers admit privately they could pick applications blindfolded, like deciding who gets the door prizes at the office party, and produce a freshman class just as talented and successful as the one they will have to spend months selecting.

"Few colleges have validated by research the effectiveness of such commonly used selection criteria as recommendations, essays, the interview, extracurricular activities, and even entrance examinations," Sjogren says. "We know very little about the reliability of those criteria as college success indicators. Why, then, do we subject applicants to such lengthy, stressful, and costly procedures as we select freshman classes?"

Sjogren says he has been thinking about this for a long time, but had to wait for the freedom of senior citizenry before he could dare put such heresies on paper. He admits that he does not know how such change can ever come about and expects to be ignored.

But maybe not. At the very least he stimulates our thinking about this. Why not tell me your long-suppressed plans for revolutionizing the college admissions process? When I mentioned Sjogren's paper to my wife she offered her own radical solution -- let computers do the matching of college and applicant, just as medical students are assigned to hospital residencies. I suspect many of you have even wilder ideas.

No half measures, please. Let's look for ways to make the whole bizarre forced march of kids, parents and educators a more humane endeavor. I promise to publish the most intriguing ideas, no matter how loony they might seem.

Selecting a Professor

Simplifying the College Application Process

Plan for Process Simplification