Taking the pool of high school graduates as given, it is very hard to give African-Americans the comfort of being fully qualified for admission to a selective college as part of a large cohort of qualified African-American students. They can either be part of a small cohort or part of a large cohort that includes less-qualified students.
Suppose that you are an administrator at a selective college, and that if you admit students based on their apparent qualifications to succeed at your school, African-Americans will be under-represented. If you want to talk candidly to the qualified black applicants, which speech would you rather give?
(a) Most students who come here are nervous about whether they can make it here. So if you’re nervous, too, we understand that. But you should know that you are as qualified to be here as the typical student. You should not be at any disadvantage because of your skin color. If you see any unequal treatment be sure to let me know about it. I do have to tell you that on our campus the proportion of black students is smaller than that proportion in the general population. That is because we compete with other schools for qualified students, and other schools are willing to lower their standards for African-Americans while we are not. I hope that you will not feel uncomfortable about being one of the relatively few black students here. Again, I can assure you that you are qualified, and I expect all of our faculty and students to welcome you and respect you.
(b) Most students who come here are nervous about whether they can make it here. So if you’re nervous, too, we understand that. But you should know that you are as qualified to be here as the typical student. You should not be at any disadvantage because of your skin color. If you see any unequal treatment be sure to let me know about it. I do have to tell you that in order to meet our diversity goals we have admitted some other African-American students whose backgrounds are not as strong. As a result, faculty and other students may look at your skin color and presume that you are not as qualified as other students. I hope that you will not feel uncomfortable about having to fight this presumption. Again, I can assure you that you are qualified, and I expect all of our faculty and students to welcome you and respect you.
College administrators being what they are, they would never give either speech. But if it were me, I would much rather give speech (a). I think that (a) has a better chance of producing better race relations and maintaining the school’s pride in its intellectual standards.
My preferred policy is not going to be good at finding the “diamond in the rough,” meaning the apparently less qualified student who can be successful at my college. And the rest of society may not like the fact that I am not seeking out the diamond in the rough within the black community. But my view is that college is not the place to try to fix racial inequalities. The attempt to fix these inequalities has to take place much earlier in young people’s lives, so that more black students graduate high school with strong educational backgrounds.
Affirmative action in higher education is supposed to a free lunch. You can reduce social inequality and improve race relations without corrupting our standards. My guess is that you corrupt your standards without reducing social inequality, and you make race relations worse. If I am correct, then the unintended consequences of affirmative action have been severely adverse.
https://quillette.com/2021/02/10/unspeakable-truths-about-racial-inequality-in-america/
+1 thank you. Professor Loury is on fire with this one.
Fantastic speech & points made. Thanks for link!
Part of US racism today is a failure to define “racism”, yet being credibly accused of being a racist can get white people fired.
Have there been any Blacks fired by any college for racist words?
Maybe this? https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n116.full
In general, Whites can NOT say the same words that Blacks can say.
Racism – a policy or law which punishes people of one race for actions that another race can take without punishment.
Racist policies clearly violate the ideal of “rule of law”, treating all who commit crimes as criminals, no matter who they are. Same laws for all people.
The n-word is usually acceptable by Blacks, but no longer by Whites. This is both racist and violates the First Amendment. There is no similar word against Whites.
Similar to how “slut” is shameful, tho still pronounceable, to women. There is no similar negative word against men. The older “rake” meant promiscuous womanizer, but this was seen as more positively successful.
We need to reclaim that “racism” is wrong because of the violation of Rule of Law.
Re: “My preferred policy is not going to be good at finding the ‘diamond in the rough.’
Standardized tests (SAT/ACT) are good at finding diamonds in the rough. See:
Caroline Hoxby & Christopher Avery, “The missing ‘one-offs’: The hidden supply of high-achieving, low-income students” (2015):
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/missing-one-offs-hidden-supply-high-achieving-low-income-students
Caroline Hoxby, “The changing selectivity of American colleges” (2009):
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.23.4.95
I think that is true of some but not all individuals.
First I’ll give you the counter-example, perhaps apocryphal. Norman Borlaug (of the Green Revolution) claims he could barely get into the University of Minnesota because his test scores were too low. He said the same thing almost happened to his son. The way the Borlaug mind works, it just doesn’t take standardized tests so well. He achieved something, has a “World Food Prize” named in his honor–says he barely could get into Minnesota.
I read this in a book of his collected speeches–_Norman Borlaug on world hunger_ edited by Anwar Dil.
= – = –
Robert Sternberg discusses this issue in some of his work. He asserts that people in pre-literate cultures sort functionally, not by taxonomy. They group “gasoline” with “car” rather than with “diesel fuel,”
The other part of my point to be made later–so many opinions to share and so little time…
@charles w abbott,
Yes, standardized tests won’t find every diamond in the rough. But they are an efficient way to find many diamonds in the rough. BTW, I’m not saying that standardized tests should be the sole admissions criterion. For example, high-school grade point average also has some independent predictive value for academic performance in college.
For data about predictive value of various admissions criteria, see “Report of the UC Academic Council Standardized Testing Task Force,” Table A.3, at p. 21: https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/sttf/sttf-report.pdf
Dear John Alcorn,
I largely agree with you. Always I have been told that I score well on standardized tests–it started in 2d grade. Especially the verbal subcomponent. Like Roy Blount, Jr. put it in _Alphabet juice_, “I have always been hyperlexic.” It runs in the family, too.
My periodic failures and setbacks tended to lead teachers to tell me I wasn’t living up to my potential, rather than writing me off as stupid and telling me to leave school and get a job because I was wasting space in the classroom.
There must be some inverse phenomenon–people who are high achievers despite average test scores. How to measure it? One clear metric can be financial. Tom Stanley in _Millionaire Mind_ discussed the people he focus-grouped who had each made at least $10 million dollars in business, despite being indifferent students. One told Stanley he had been “The smartest kid in the dumb row.”
= – = – = – =
I mostly believe in the validity of psychometrics for measuring IQ, and I believe it has some major predictive value. Oddly, I periodically find myself in conversation with smart people who tell me that they don’t believe in IQ, and they don’t believe it can be effectively tested for, nor do they believe that any such tests have predictive value.
I have a smart-enough friend who works in nursing. He didn’t study electrical engineering, but he tells me he thinks he could have gotten a degree in EE, and that almost anyone could do so. It’s amazing what people believe, or claim to believe. Amazing!
Why would smart people believe that? Call a sociologist, or a clinical psychologist! One guess: in the current zeitgeist, in some strata, individuals who are smart feel guilty about having won the smart genes in the genetic lottery of life. Some of them handle it by denying that any such lottery exists, much less that it was kind to them.
Charles Murray actually discusses this in his book _Real education_–he touches on it. He wants to see the bright people at the best universities told they are smart, just by God’s mysterious plan, and they also have to be wise, and be good. In addition it should be demonstrated that there are things they don’t know, and there are classes so hard they can’t pass them easily, or at all.
Thanks for reading. Prof. Kling has a great series of posts this week. Time for me to lapse back to lurking
This piece by Russell Nieli is still worth reading.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2015/03/29/25-years-on-the-affirmative-action-firing-line/
There is a substantial amount of material accessible to the motivated general reader–too long to list or even point to. I have also found some of the work by Peter Schuck to be of interest, including the chapter on affirmative action in his book _One nation undecided_. He develops some of his arguments in essays that are not paywalled and that anyone can find online.
Not canceled yet so we have been emboldened I see. I expect this post will also be OK too but perhaps I am being naive.
In my opinion, this is a very good post that makes a lot of important points. But there are several other relevant issues worth bringing into the discussion.
I think there was a much better argument for racially based affirmative action a couple generations ago when there was much more of a lack of racial role models for minority students. Today most racially based affirmative action admissions come from middle and upper class minority households. A class based, rather than race based, program would result in more genuine diversity of admissions, more genuine fairness, and less racial resentment. And it would still bring disproportionate benefit to the black community.
Let’s also remember that none of these elite colleges have the least bit of hesitation about eagerly lowering academic standards for an exceptional athlete of any race. Nor does anyone seem to be complaining about that. The same applies for students with extraordinary achievements in music or the arts. They also want the kind of diversity that keeps their various academic departments supplied with the numbers of students they are set up for rather than overloading some by only considering academic achievement. They would also prefer a more even distribution of men and women to a more lopsided one as well as greater geographic diversity.
And then there are legacy admissions. This is de facto affirmative action for mostly wealthy white kids whose grades don’t make the normal cut offs. You rarely see this criticized by the same people so horrified by reducing standards for racial minorities.
“Nor does anyone seem to be complaining about that.”
People complain about athletes and legacies constantly, including the legacies themselves that are pretty much uniformly in favor of race based affirmative action.
The people who dislike affirmative action of all kinds are Whites and Asians from non-elite backgrounds, because they are the ones discriminate against in the process.
The fact is that the scores of admitted whites vastly exceed the scores of admitted blacks, and so there is little reason to believe that any kind of merit based admission system would reduce white enrollment (even legacies tend to have much higher scores then blacks, and aren’t that far off from the average).
If affirmative action was done away with the white % would stay about the same, but blacks and hispanics would lose out and more asians would take their slots. The white bucket might adjust to include more whites from non-elite circles.
>—“People complain about athletes and legacies constantly..”
My point was that they aren’t people like you. The next time you complain about them will be the first I have seen despite the fact that you are the most prolific fountain of complaints on this site.
Yeah, as a son of a truck driver I’ve always fully supported unfair advantages for guys with “The 3rd” in their name. You’ve got me pegged greg.
I was commenting on the complaints you have actually repeatedly made, not the many resentments you haven’t even gotten to yet.
“not the many resentments you haven’t even gotten to yet.”
Please don’t encourage him. I’m sure he or his father will have some whacky adverse side effects to the vaccine. So, stay tuned for more long winded rants.
Well, we are talking about it now, so I’m talking about it.
Where is the Supreme Court case that is going to make legacies at Harvard illegal? How do I show my support for that case?
Is my local schools curriculum teaching my kids about how the children of the wealthy deserve special advantages because they have been oppressed? I’m not aware of that, but if so I will start opposing it.
Is there a constitutional amendment that makes discrimination based on legacy status illegal the same way discriminating by race is illegal? If you want to start a campaign for that, I will gladly add my signature.
I’m as against legacies as anyone else, but what exactly do you want me to do about it?
I assume these schools admit a certain number of legacies because it provides opportunities and connections for their classmates that they would not otherwise have if they didn’t have powerful peers. It’s a lot easier to get a job or start a company when your roommate is the kid of a VC founder.
And because the scores and qualifications of the legacy pool aren’t actually that different from the general pool (its mostly about choosing specific qualified white/jewish people amongst a pool of qualified applicants, rather then flat out accepting the unqualified as with blacks).
Even Asians would like to know that if they get into Harvard it’s going to give them access to important social connections to help advance. That’s kind of the point of getting in.
The given reason to admit blacks, that it makes the whites better people because of diversity fairy dust, has much less empirical support than the idea that admitting legacies supports the power and influence of top schools.
Maybe you think such power centers should be broken up, and more power to you if that’s the direction you’re going in with this. But right now aggrieved groups like Asians are mostly looking to join the club, not tear it down. That’s why there isn’t a huge campaign to get rid of legacies, just some generalized resentment by those on the outside and a few affirmative action lovers who use it as a rationalization for supporting affirmative action.
As to the other given reason for AA (which the Supreme Court says is illegal), to right past wrongs, I don’t feel any guilt about my Irish ancestors that had nothing to do with slavery, were victimized by British Empire, and fought to free the slaves (generally being used as canon fodder to attrition the confederates down while the New England legacy set bought their way out of the war).
asdf,
>—“I don’t feel any guilt about my Irish ancestors…”
Did you really think I was saying you should feel guilt about your Irish ancestors? If so, were did I indicate that?
I don’t want you to feel guilty about your Irish ancestors. I want you to celebrate them. I want you to consider how lucky they were that someone like you wasn’t deciding if they should get into this country in the first place.
My mother’s side was entirely Irish. I was raised as an Irish Catholic. The Irish part stuck but the Catholic part didn’t. I couldn’t help noticing how your history lesson skipped the immigration part.
When Irish immigration was at its peak it sparked a huge and ugly nativist backlash in America and a new political movement inspired by fear of immigrants. The Irish were widely believed to be racially far less intelligent and of lower character than longer established citizens. This was considered to be self evidently obvious because they really did do worse in school and commit more crimes statistically than those not comprising the underclass at the time. It was considered self evident from the fact they hadn’t improved themselves more that they were genetically inferior and destined to overwhelm the existing relief and welfare programs. In addition they were considered to be unpatriotic Americans who were really loyal to the Pope. Of course, those Americans who believed themselves to be racially superior to the Irish longed for a time gone by before America had lost so much greatness. Methods were sought to make it harder for the Irish to vote. Ireland was considered to be a “shithole country” in today’s jargon.
No doubt the irony of all this is entirely lost on you.
If the Irish were inferior, they would not be as successful as they are today. Their success means they aren’t inferior. It’s empirical proof. If blacks start showing the same results, I will change my tune about them.
As it stands, the Irish didn’t need affirmative action to make it. All of these supposed impediments weren’t enough to stop them.
Many groups coming from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds came to America and thrived. And many who stayed behind became prosperous in their own native countries.
But not blacks. They fail here, and they fail back home. At any kind of scale anyway.
I don’t think it’s because blacks have had it extra special hard compared to others. When I look at someone who had to live under Jim Crow, and I look at what Asians were living under during the Century of Humiliation, massive wars, and Mao, its just really obvious blacks haven’t had it super duper worse then everyone else and that is why they have failed everywhere.
Whatever their relative position in America, they still lived in an immensely peaceful and prosperous land in which every single group but them as been able to make it. If others overcame their disadvantages, many worse than what blacks in America have faced, then blacks need to stop making excuses.
That blacks haven effectively given up on succeeding themselves and have instead embraced begging as their only means for advancement reflects I think their own implicit understanding that they lack the capacity to succeed on their own merits.
>—“I don’t think it’s because blacks have had it extra special hard compared to others.”
You I know. You are the real victim here as always.
You don’t have to go all 1619 Project to understand that slavery and Jim Crow were “extra special hard” especially when compared to your endless grievances.
Greg,
You dodged the question because you don’t have an answer. You make this about me because you know you’re wrong.
There are lots of groups that have succeeded more than blacks despite obviously worse circumstances. It’s extremely clear for instance that people in Asia had it worse than blacks, and yet they triumph. Tell me again how someone that lived through the Rape of Nanking, Great Famine, and Cultural Revolution had it worse than some black factory worker in Detroit with a standard of living 10x theirs along with peace and stability.
You people need the 1619 project because its such obvious bullshit to keep going to this well of black grievance. It was forgivable in 1960, it ain’t in 2020.
asdf,
“Yeah, as a son of a truck driver”
But, was he good truck driver or just a mediocre one? Better than the latinos, blacks and other whites out there? Why should I care?
At Princeton legacies have higher test scores and high school grades than the other students.
If rich people use their own money to buy membership into fancy country club schools, that’s not affirmative action, that’s just wealthy people using their wealth like normal.
Admission to school should be based on money not ability. Schools sell coaching + testing service and they should sell to any willing buyer. Schools don’t sell ability or achievement, that has to be earned. If schools want sell living accommodations, dining plans, and lifestyle experiences, that should also be sold to willing buyers based on money not ability.
Judgement of the best mathematicians/engineers/economists/historian/etc should be based on measures of ability or achievement not money or which school someone purchased coaching from.
Niko,
>—“Admission to school should be based on money not ability. Schools sell coaching + testing service and they should sell to any willing buyer.”
Most colleges and universities are non-profits that present themselves as seeking charitable contributions for their endowments and announce, as part of their mission, an intention to make their product available to those who couldn’t otherwise afford it.
Students who agree with you and feel that it is important that a college be a for profit corporation are free to apply to institutions like Trump University.
Elite universities including the many public elite universities like Berkely, U of Michigan, etc, don’t seriously intend to be available for the masses. They are intended for small curated groups that include a certain number of poor people. This model serves the interests of the universities and their incumbent members. It doesn’t serve broader society or the tax payers who pay the bills.
Society should make high quality education including social recognition and career tracks as widely available as possible. Ideally, to anyone with a laptop or smartphone for very low costs.
No, that’s not a realistic option. First, the government universities take a giant amount of money and political control of our society and that doesn’t work on an opt-in basis. Next, the government universities have a lock on meaningful credentials and therefore on the serious educational options.
“The attempt to fix these inequalities has to take place much earlier in young people’s lives, so that more black students graduate high school with strong educational backgrounds.”
This is a very dangerous and destructive sentiment that is likely to make the situation worse, not better.
What you are essentially saying is that K-12 is to blame, and that K-12 needs to fix it. I suppose you could blame several other factors in society outside college.
The truth is that a lot of effort and resources went into trying to fix racial inequity in K-12 (and before in pre-school) and it failed. You can read any number of sources on how Ed Reform failed to close the gap over the last few decades. Most every idea anyone has proposed has been tried, and none of them make much of a difference.
This failure is in part why Critical Race Theory is infiltrating our K-12 education. If extra funding, curriculum changes, etc can’t close the gap, and closing the gap is a moral imperative, then Critical Race Theory has to be tried to close the gap. After all, the only acceptable explanation for how all those brilliant ed reformers with all of those resources could fail to close the gap is that racism is holding blacks back (what else are we going to do, triple the education budget again and do even crazier curriculum changes).
All you are doing is trying to avoid the problem in higher education by foisting the problem on others. I think this was already tried in the 1990s-now with Ed Reform, and I don’t think raising an entire generation on critical race theory from kindergarten is going to make the affirmative action problem in higher ed easier.
Blaming society for the state of black high school graduates it passing the buck, it’s very selfish, unjust to those your blaming, and harmful.
Two complications:
1) For better or worse, tier-one colleges are residential. Customers (students) are also inputs. The chosen students, too, must choose among the selective colleges — and much of what they have in mind is a peer group. College education consists partly in interactions with Faculty, and partly in around-the-clock social interactions. The educational case for diversity rests on the role of social interactions at residential selective colleges.
The thorny difficulty here is that academic mismatch (substantially different admissions standards by group identity) thwarts healthy social interactions. Mismatched students adapt by self-sorting among academic disciplines by difficulty. Statistical diversity in general enrollments doesn’t translate into interaction or integration. There is deeper integration in a subset of athletics teams (e.g., football) than in classrooms and dining halls.
See the remarkable video conversations between Peter Arcidiacono & Glenn Loury: “Discrimination at Harvard?” (10 September 2020):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnar1utivgk
“Recalibrating affirmative action” (18 September 2020):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UniIenMfj6I
2) Selectivity is a ladder with several rungs. If diversity is achieved by academic mismatch at the top rung, then there is a ratchet effect producing mismatch at every rung. Thomas Sowell liked to say that a mismatched student, who adapts by Majoring in identity studies at the flagship UC-Berkeley, could excel in a STEM field at a regional UC campus.
Does proportional representation at the top rung, and among new entrants to the elites, have positive spillovers that outweigh the ratchet effects of academic mismatch throughout the selectivity gradient?
“Thomas Sowell liked to say that a mismatched student, who adapts by Majoring in identity studies at the flagship UC-Berkeley, could excel in a STEM field at a regional UC campus.”
Thomas Sowell likes to say a lot of crap that’s not true.
First, notice that it implicitly argues that an A doesn’t denote the same achievement at all universities. This is, of course, true. But everyone forgets that when they start yapping about the importance of grades in admissions. Grades are worthless.
Second, Sowell has no idea the discount that blacks are given. It’s *huge*. There are about 2000 blacks in the country who get scores that are pretty normal for any top 100 school. (Understand that a decent percentage (10-15%) of kids at top 100 schools get 1500 SAT scores.)
Given 200 blacks per elite school, that gets you to the top 20. So the top 20 schools get kids that aren’t on average any superior to white or Asian kids at the top 100.
Only 10% of blacks get over 600 on either section of the SAT.
By the time you get to regional campuses, you’re down in the 400-500 range, and they won’t be excelling much at STEM.
Here is the speech that matters:
Most students who come here are nervous about whether they can make it here. So if you’re nervous, too, we understand that. But you should know that it’s impossible for you to fail. Do put in your best work, that’s better for everyone, but know that one way or another you are going to graduate with a degree from top school. After that we will help you get a job at top company, who also won’t let you fail. You will go on to a career that is high status and well remunerated, and you will have a pleasant and happy life.
We understand you might feel mixed emotions about this. We could, for instance have rejected you. We send recruitment letters to every African American with a score of 1100 or more, and that’s obviously way below our average. But do you really want to attend some third or fourth tier school and graduate to get some mediocre job (or none at all). To be saddled with student debt to do so (BTW, we are going to give you a free ride because you’re black). That sounds like a shitty life. Way worse then being on the fast track to success.
Look, I already know what you’re going to say. All of our internal polling shows that you people support this arrangement. Lots of people get things they don’t deserve, and lots of people deserve things and don’t get it. You play the game and take what you can get when you can get it, right. Hate the game, not the player. We both know you aren’t going to turn down this offer, because so many people in your shoes before didn’t turn it down.
I promise never to bring this up again. After this conversation, you can decide to believe whatever you need or want to believe about why you’re here. Trust me, you’ll be fine.
That sounds about right.
While the student may prefer option one, that’s not the point. Affirmative action is politcal theater so that an entity can look like it is doing something about racial inequality without actually having to do the hard work that it would take to actually improve the lives of minority children.
What hard work?
What exactly do you think they can do to improve the lives of minority children that they aren’t doing? What’s the call to action?
Mentor, volunteer, be a role model. Help in sports leagues, tutor in schools, have fellowship with inner city churches. It might not be as sexy as “protesting racism” but it is real and you can make a difference in people’s lives. I feel that I have.
I don’t know if Affirmative Action serves as a substitute for these. Many people who support AA also do these things. And lots and lots of white leftists do lots of things in the ghetto (Teach For America, adoption, etc).
I think the fundamental issue is that while all those things are good to do, they aren’t likely to fix the thing AA proposes to fix. All the socioeconomic gaps are probably going to be very similar. That doesn’t make it not worth doing, but it does mean you are solving a different problem then AA purports to solve, or at least work towards solving.
I don’t see AA as an excuse for inaction so much as a mixture of naive optimism to solve an unsolvable problem combined with a cynical spoils based payoff to blacks in exchange for their splitting 90/10 to one side of the political/cultural conflict.
“Tis within ourselves that we are thus or thus”
– Shakespeare, Othello
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
-Blake
The most thorough and systematic treatment of the harm done by affirmative action is Mismatch by Sander & Taylor. Since anti-racism consists of pushing affirmative action to its logical extreme we will find out how much damage it can do. It may be a lot.
If blacks are harmed by mismatch, why don’t they just refuse affirmative action?
I mean if I have an 1100 SAT score and Harvard sends me an admissions letter, I don’t have to reply. There is nothing stopping me from going to my local community college were I’m going to be more average.
But nobody does. They all take the offer when given. Are they fools? Do they not know what is good for them?
Like, yeah they have to go into joke major and get fluff AA jobs, but if those fluff AA jobs pay a lot more then what you get coming out of community college why would you turn down that offer?
Isn’t the revealed preference of blacks that they want AA. They vote for it, they say they support it in polls, and they accept it when it’s offered. In what some commentators may think is a shocking statement from me, I don’t think that is because blacks are too dumb to know what’s good for them. They know what they get out of AA and what the alternative would look like.
But nobody does. They all take the offer when given. Are they fools? Do they not know what is good for them?
Not actually true. The fact that it isn’t true is what made it possible for Dale & Krueger to carry out their studies that showed that Ivy-admitted students who chose to attend less elite institutions did just as well in life as those who chose the Ivy.
It turns out that there’s really little or no value-add in choosing Harvard over, say, the honors college at your state flagship U (a result so apparently counterintuitive that it is well on the way to being forgotten). Not only is the instruction not superior at the Ivies, but the vaunted connections really aren’t more valuable than the ones you’d have made elsewhere. And keep in mind that an undergrad education is generally not the end of the line for high-earners.
Also, elite schools can be really tough if you make the mistake of picking the ‘wrong’ major, but graduating in other fields is not particularly difficult — none of those wealthy families who cheated to get their average kids into elite schools were really worried about them flunking out, but then Olivia Jade et al certainly weren’t planning to major in Physics either.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w17159
Stacy Dale & Alan B. Krueger
We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups.
***For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents’ education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics.***
—–
I mean I get that a large sample of SAT 1450 that attend a State U honors with average SAT 1450 or Harvard might have the same median income at age 40, but that’s not really the question here.
Not actually true. While those misinterpretations were eagerly reported and repeated (for unfortunately obvious reasons), they weren’t actually supported by the study results. Hanson covered up these “College Prestige Lies” 12 years ago: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/college-prestige-matters.html
“If blacks are harmed by mismatch, why don’t they just refuse affirmative action?”
The idea that many 18 year olds make poor decisions and end up in over their heads and worse off because of them isn’t difficult for me to believe.
Let’s say that for any individual, matriculating (A) leads to mismatch (B) which causes expected individual harm (C) so A->B->C.
People may be foolish or crazy, but in general, especially when being selected for something that tends to week out crazy fools, we can assume that people don’t tend to pursue things where they expect net personal harm,
So if choosing A, they believe A~>C.
There are only two logical possibilities here.
Either they don’t believe mismatch applies to their case, so while B->C may be true for others, they believe ~B, so A~>C.
Or they accept mismatch applies to their case, but they don’t believe they’ll be harmed by it, so B~>C, ~B->~C, and again, A~>C.
What are the cures for either error.
The first would be to convince the person of mismatch, “You aren’t cut out for this.” But if the selection process pretends that an admission means they *are* cut out for it, why should they believe you over the admissions office?”
Correcting the second error amounts to the same thing, “the admissions office is setting you up for failure by putting a thumb on the scale, but that’s the end of the thumbs, and everyone else is going to apply meritocratic standards rigorously.” – “Why in the world would the thumbs suddenly stop helping me out there, when everyone at every level after the admissions office uses exactly the same language and faces exactly the same incentives as the admissions office does?”
They are right; mismatch doesn’t matter.
I think we are talking about a heterogeneous university experience, especially regarding the hazard of flunking out or dropping out.
It ‘s my sense that it’s hard to flunk out of Stanford or the Ivy League Schools. There are many selective universities that are easy to stay in once you get in and matriculate. I would guess that it’s harder to get a degree in engineering at Michigan State or Texas A&M than it is to get a degree in Sociology at Stanford. Consider that a hypothesis, not a statement of fact.
It was easy to fail out of the SUNY Buffalo (UB) engineering curriculum in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A lot of the people I know at UB had started as aspiring engineers and then changed their major a few times by the time they were juniors. But my sample population of friends and acquaintances didn’t include those who had dropped out or failed out, only those who had “survived” and were still enrolled.
Perhaps the risk averse strategy for the mediocre “more or less college-ready” student with moderately good intelligence, motivation, study skills, sitzfleisch, and resilience is an easy major at a highly selective school that admits you and pushes you through with a degree, rather than a hard major at a big state degree mill with a challenging curriculum in engineering or bench science, and a high “burn rate” from “weed-out classes.”
This is an empirical question. We need good longitudinal studies with a lot of data.
If I’m right, it’s possibly rational to accept mismatching at a top school as an AA admit. I think we need more data on student attributes, university attributes, and the “hazard functions” of different majors.
Lent 2021…
Somewhat off topic, but we’ve officially disconnected from the following companies as of today:
* Amazon (including Whole Foods)
* Nike
* ESPN
* Facebook
* Google
Doing our best to work around companies that don’t support our values.
For the time being, we are struggling with how to disconnect from:
* Twitter (please come back Parler)
* YouTube
* Apple
Starting with the easiest, highest dollar value spending for first for our family and then working south from there.
Support woke or find something different.
RIP Rush Limbaugh. Say what you will, but he had the bravery to actively oppose woke day after day over decades long before it was known as woke.
You’ve been officially disconnected from Amazon (including Whole Foods), Nike, ESPN, Facebook, and Google? Is this for personal use? For your family? For your business? Or for politicians that you like?
For an alternative to YouTube, you can use Rumble for many things. I don’t think there’s a good alternative to Android/iOS for smartphones or tablets.
Sorry if I wasn’t clearer. As a consumer family, these companies are gone from our list of approved vendors as of today. See ya later! I should have noted that the ban also includes the NBA, but we disconnected many months ago.
You are absolutely correct that we aren’t going to be able to disconnect from iOS/Android without paying a very steep cost. Phase II or III perhaps. Stay tuned, but not optimistic.
For now, we are focused on the low hanging fruit – have a look at where we spend the most money and then find alternate vendors that aren’t completely woke or anti-free speech.
And, I’m not suggesting that this will accomplish anything other than to make us feel slightly better as a family. But…with a Reddit campaign or something similar, we might be able to accomplish something collectively. However, for now, I’m not really worried about that. This is just our family’s Lent for 2021.
What do you have against the NBA? It’s full of black people, but those athletes are legitimately excellent at what they do. Its selection criteria seem tolerably fair.
We are unable to watch the game with all of the BLM/systematic racism branding everywhere. Adios NBA!
Am I the only one who isn’t offended by any of these various “lives matter” slogans? I think everyone who is offended by any of them is being a snowflake.
It’s a small percentage of the people saying “black lives matter” who are pushing critical race theory (or even know what it is) and it’s a small percentage of “blue lives matter” people who think that police brutality is OK.
As for Twitter and Facebook, I’ve stayed off both because both bring out the worst in everyone on all sides as far as I can see.
Greg,
You gotta do what you gotta do and so will we. I have zero tolerance for supporting the myths (and yes they are) surrounding Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, etc. that the NBA/WNBA actively marketed endlessly over the summer. You can call us snowflakes if you’d like for this stance, but it’s not going to change our minds.
FWIW – I’ve never met a blue lives matter supporter that was in favor of police brutality. Please find a new straw man.
>—” I’ve never met a blue lives matter supporter that was in favor of police brutality.”
Which is entirely consistent with me saying it is quite rare.
I’ve never met an Ibram X Kendi style supporter of legally mandated equality of outcomes racial “equity” “anti-racism ” either.
“It’s a small percentage of the people saying “black lives matter” who are pushing critical race theory”
Off the top of my head…Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the University of California, the Democratic Party, etc. They are absolutely pushing equity, which is one of the most cherished logical outcomes of CRT.
Sorry, off topic. Arnold, I think you’d enjoy this blog post related to builders vs bureaucracy. It’s by the CEO of Wave, on working within Google after selling: https://paygo.media/p/25171
Tyler Cowen wrote the following on this topic specifically regarding Harvard, but this applies more generally to all selective and prestigious American universities:
Most of that has nothing to do with academic skill and training but rather with this ultra-political caste of social elite maintaining their country club cliques of power and authority and privilege.
I’d like to see more of what Cowen might call Warehouse Education. Offer plain academic training + certification to normal people who want normal jobs.
Community colleges offer a very limited form of this; with an open admissions system, anyone can get the first two years of a serious university undergrad program. I’d note that basically anyone living in the US can enroll in a difficult class in calculus/physics/chemistry, and that’s not a problem. Students self-select for courses they want and think they are ready for. It’s very unpleasant to be enrolled in a course that is way over one’s head. Most Americans aren’t ready to take a serious class in college calculus, and they know it, and will overwhelmingly choose to not enroll in such a class. Similarly with more advanced classes like Real Analysis or Topology or Lie Groups, students self-select. Outside of academia, look at classes in adult fitness: people self-select for classes that fit their skill level and interests.
There is a more subtle problem with Affirmative Action selection that has to do with falling trust in institutions, and, once again, tends to rebut Levin’s thesis to the extent it was about anything but the need for the GOP to purge out the bad Trump-like people.
Except for extreme superstars and born losers, most people go through a sequence of selection events, trials, and tournaments, and sometimes they win or ‘advance’, and sometimes they ‘lose’ and usually off-ramp at that level or league. A few of those experiences are bound to be at the marginal level: one barely got in or one narrowly missed.
Now, what happens with all those events is that one gets a chance to observe up close the qualities of those who shared the same fate. In a fair, meritocratic process, one will advance to discover a lot of people with high levels of talent, work ethic, productivity, and drive. A marginal case will feel outclassed, but perhaps even more than others will know that the process is very good at picking excellent people and the cream of the crop, very few ‘imposters’ or people who aren’t cut out for that level.
When someone loses, they can also look around and see that most of the people that lost were not the best. If they are a marginal case, they will know that they are a rare elite among the losers, most of whom are far below their own level. They will also observe that the process is very good at not unjustly discriminating against talented people, and not leaving people with high potential behind.
A series of these kinds of experiences tends to build confidence and trust in ‘the system’. You can trust the institution because you trust in the merit of its people – that is, the process that you are confident gave it all the best people. If you work in one, you can trust that a culture of excellence and rigor can hardly be suppressed, because it is often (not always) the natural cultural equilibrium of uniformly talented people trying to impress other talented people with a high bar for being impressed. Everything tends to do solid work and pulls their weight.
Now, what happens when you begin to bend that process? When you move up, you’ll notice that there are a lot of mediocrities around. They do not do solid work, you are asked to do their work for them, or correct it (but you are officially their peer or subordinate, not their supervisor). If an important but difficult mission were given to this group, you seriously doubt they could handle it well, as the few genuinely talented individuals are already overloaded and all out of bandwidth. You stop having faith that this institution can do its purported or assigned job well.
Meanwhile, when you do not get selected, you look around and see a lot of talented and driven people who were passed over and who are operating well below their potential, in a kind of anti-Peter Principle.
It’s obvious that this state of affairs creates a lot of bitterness and resentment. Even in the winners’ circles, there is plenty of tension about the elephant in the room, and a common kind of nasty acrimony that is the natural psychological reaction and projection of insecurities related to being an imposter out of one’s league.
In this state of affairs, no one trusts the process that picks the people, so one doesn’t trust the people that compose the institutions, so one doesn’t trust the institutions. When those institutions then prove the point by failing repeatedly, it only seems to strengthen the case.
That is, throughout society – despite the contrary messages of the socially dominant ideological narrative or political formula – there is a kind of commonly lived experience that repeatedly invalidates and deligitimizes ‘the system’ and erodes trust, faith, and confidence in institutions in general. Notice also that in those “confidence in institutions” polls, the ones that tend to retain any trust at all are those which are perceived to enforce rigor and high standards for their people (e.g., military, professional sports)
When institutions then are obligated to turn around and defend themselves by making statements that are contrary to these lived experiences, it once again only reinforces the distrust, erodes confidence, and corrodes legitimacy and ‘good will’.
All of this is why many institutions feel it necessary to engage in explicit messaging dissonance where Affirmative Action is both essential and unnecessary at the same time, because everyone who needs and gets help still has no deficiency of merit. Freddie DeBoer has complained about this very phenomenon repeatedly.
That’s why Orwell is a prophet, because doublethink requires one to simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, and indeed, we are required to do so in this case.
All of the Academic corruptions are to undermine the “meritocracy” narrative. Reality has never been too kind to it (“it’s WHO you know, not what…”), yet having merit and correct answers as an ideal worth striving towards has been hugely good.
It’s possible that it can come back before a major disaster, but until it does, the likelihood of disasters increases. Like Texas frozen gas pipeline machinery which has never been weatherized for cold winters.
Classic Curb episode on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgqUQ17sYm0
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and blog about affirmative action or gender or anything, and I wouldn’t get canceled, OK?” Arnold remarked at a economics talk at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. “It’s, like, incredible.”
I’m commenting from North Texas under a foot of snow and with zero (literally zero) running water. Please cancel me. Begging you please. I’ve been a very naughty boy against all things woke.
Lastly, and I’m hoping that this isn’t asking to much, but you please provide a link for your quotes.
I’m certain you are correct: AA for less qualified folk corrupts standards AND is worse for race relations.
It *IS* better for most of the individual Blacks who are over promoted, in that they get a higher prestige credential and, thru business, higher paying jobs.
One hugely under-discussed issue is the Black “brain drain” OUT of the Black majority communities. Not too many Harvard grads in Harlem, nor Stanford grads in Compton. To help the Black Community, the individuals who are being helped have to be part of that community, rather than get up and leave it.
Sort of like JD Vance, white hillbilly, going to Yale and leaving his roots, doesn’t help the “hilbillies” too much. It does help him.
But no amount of gov’t help will equalize average group results for groups that differ widely on promiscuity and especially having kids outside of wedlock.
Similarly, groups that differ widely on crime won’t have equal results.
Absent father kids, and choosing to commit crimes so often you get caught and go to jail – these choices are not “racist” based. Poor whites are usually poor for one or both of these reasons, too. But the proportion of such “bad behavior” individuals is higher among Blacks.
My current idea is to order all the school districts by the % of kids growing up with both, married parents. Half points for married to step-parent for 4 years or more. Special “marriage benefits”, subsidies by the gov’t, should go to those who are married and living in those areas with 30% least married parents.
Extra gov’t rewards for “good behavior”, more than they’d get just by the market – which itself is usually more than those with bad behavior.
There is a third option, which was typical until 50-ish years ago: a few schools have large, well-qualified cohorts of African-American schools. (And other schools have none.)
Diversity between institutions is far more valuable to society than diversity within institutions.
https://www.bestcolleges.com/features/top-historically-black-colleges/
It’s still an option.
Note that AA sucks most of the cream of top SAT Blacks away from such colleges like Howard or Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (hadn’t known about this one).
Maybe if Barack Obama had gone to Howard he would have been first in his class, tho much less likely to get the connections that allowed his rapid, maybe too rapid, rise into the Presidency.
I’d guess that most years, most of the Blacks that choose Harvard would have been in top 3 at Howard, but won’t be in the top 10 at Harvard. Nor will they achieve as much, tho they’ll get paid more.
I claim there is something good for top people’s self-confidence and achievement orientation by being the smartest person in the room. Top Blacks at Howard get that more than Blacks who are seldom the top at Harvard.
Even if admissions are race neutral, the test scores admitted black students will be worse on average than those of white students if blacks’ average test scores are lower than whites’ and both distributions of scores are normally distributed. Suppose a school admits only based on SAT scores and admits anyone with a score of 1400 or more out of 1600. Since blacks have lower scores than whites on average, the average score of black students with scores of 1400 or higher is still lower than the average score of white students with 1400+.
Here is an analogy. Women who are at least 6 feet tall are on average shorter than men who are at least 6 feet tall, because men are taller than women on average.
Bottom line: even under race-neutral admissions, black students will be worse on average. Racial preferences increase the gap.
The real problem is that affirmative action has been around for roughly half a century now. For a long time, the schools and elite could have the opinion that it takes time for AA to work properly. But the bare fact of it is that time hasn’t done much to narrow the black white gap. In contrast Asians have continued to do well and even improve somewhat relative to whites despite the wide variety of ethnicities that qualify as Asian, and the fact that easier immigration should have lowered the bar for who gets in. Short answer, unless they change the goalposts to equal outcomes, not equal opportunity AA has proven to be the sham critics said it was long ago. Since the Left now controls the Democrats, the media, and the academic elites, the only way out of this is just to live through the various nostrums ad absurdum that will become foist upon us and hope that a core of academia remains uncorrupt and able to reemerge when this fever of equalitarianism burns out. Or not.
Arnold’s 3 Academic Corruption posts are excellent:
1) Gov’t Money
2) Emasculated Culture
3) Racial Affirmative Action
It’s missing (0) Discrimination against Republicans (esp Christian pro-life & anti-promiscuity, and small-gov’t conservatives).
Just as AA has helped many individual Blacks, but has been overall worse for many (most?) Black communities, feminist promiscuity has been OK for many women, but overall worse for many families – especially Black families.
The rotten, secret yet arguably legal (or illegal) discrimination by college hiring bureaucrats validates Pournelle’s Iron Law, as the discrimination against any dissent helps the purity of the college, to the detriment of education of the students.
It also occurs to me that “sexism” is the “third-rail” in politics, as is “racism”. Much like Libertarians are the “third party”, as is the Green Party; and in 1992 it was HR Perot’s Reform Party. I recently read that the fusion of Reform Party and Tea Party is the future of the Republican Party – and I believe it. Against the GOPe / RINO / elite-Rep Party of “good losers” with big donor bucks. And the Reps will include more women and more Blacks, both numbers and percentages, than the Libbers. Yet most of both will remain Dems.