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Notes -
affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.
the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".
I've honestly never really understood the obsession with "merit" and college admissions. Like what exactly are you solving for if you think that you should just accept the most meritorious students? The discussion really seems to be wrapped up in some notion of rewarding hard work or talent. But why should we reward that as opposed to something else? Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?
As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect. I guess it could be the case that the kid with the highest high school GPA will get the largest treatment effect, but it's not really obvious to me that this is true. Maybe it's the legacy white kid who will be able to build out his connections; maybe it's the black kid who had to endure a shitty high school and by a gritty miracle ground out a 1300 SAT score; maybe the 1600 SAT score asian kid is going to do great no matter where he ends up.
People need to do a bit more work in connecting the dots here IMO.
Consider what harvard graduates do. They become doctors, surgeons, chemistry professors, CEOs, judges, politicians. Each of these (except perhaps the last) greatly contributes to the well-being and/or advancement of society. Better surgeons mean you're less likely to die on the operating table. Smarter chemistry professors mean that, via convoluted causal channels, in twenty years your computers will be faster and your consumer products will be cheaper. CEOs, again, more capable society and cheaper consumer products. All of these matter much more even by sum-hedonistic ethics than the individual effect of Harvard on a student. Take the best individual tutor in the world and he can probably raise a 105iq person's SAT score more than the top scorer (who has a perfect score), but that's a waste of society's resources. Who benefits more from college-level mathematics, a child young tao or a randomly-selected underrepresented minority?
The claim is that the most 'meritorious' people are smarter and more capable, and will be better able to create, understand, and improve society than the less intelligent. G, IQ, intelligence, whatever you want to call it, some people are clearly more capable, generally, than others. And much of the cause is genetic.
Consider, from the parable of the talents, Scott Alexander's brother, who
Of course it's framed, in the story, as an example of how different people have different talents, a personal berkson's paradox. But, absent a strong genetic effect and some shared cause of general capability, how plausible is it that Scott, a talented writer followed by some of the smartest people in the world, just happens to be the brother of a world-class musician? Clearly Scott's brother had something that made him generally capable, and whatever it was was shared somehow. I think the marginal treatment effect of piano classes was larger for Scott's brother than the average child. This is why merit matters! And why society-wide tracking of skill and targeting the most skilled for training is very useful.
Why should Harvard care about that? What they want is people who will donate generously to their alma mater and who are likely to bring additional prestige by doing something important and/or unique. They don't really want to admit Amanda Chang who will become a CFO of a Fortune 500 company, own three homes and a yacht and bequeath the rest of her fortune to her children.
Not sure I understand your point? The super-rich love making donations to their alma mater. Ken Griffin's $300M to Harvard made the news, but it's pretty common, it's where half the buildings get their names. This article names a variety of others of various occupations.
And professors / judges / politicians 'are likely to bring additional prestige by doing something important and/or unique'.
What I meant is that Harvard calibrates its admissions to increase the benefit to itself, not to the country at large. If Asian applicants have shown themselves to be generally unremarkable and tight-fisted as alumni, Harvard will deprioritize them. Wealthy Nigerian applicants might be equally intellectually unremarkable and tight-fisted as alumni, but they pay well for their education and legacy students like to study next to well-spoken Black people and not next to grade-obsessed Asians.
Sure, but that kind of partial incentive misalignment is legion. Capitalism cares about the personal wealth of capitalists, not social benefit. Individuals care more about status than doing valuable things. People will gamble or play video games or drink instead of working or 'pursuing meaning' or whatever. But capitalism, individual labor, and Harvard are all still useful to society.
The system still mostly works, and both in education and connection-making Harvard and other top unis provide valuable services to society! Not that they couldn't be provided better in other ways, but existing institutional knowledge and inertia isn't nothing
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Harvard in particular isn't focused on getting the best of the best (although getting much of that is a side effect of its actual goal). It's to serve as a reproduction ground for the elite, metaphorically but also very literally.
Access to Harvard and its sister institutions is about gaining entry to the elite. Which serves the elite well, as it enables bringing in the most meritorious members of the middle class, but only to an extent: a truly and fully meritocratic system would result in the current elite still being admitted very disproportionately but not enough for the reproduction of the current elite.
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You are hitting on the three competing and unreconcilable goals of education: Democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility.
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We actually already have pretty good evidence which option works best here. Economic analysis shows that the productivity of high ability people goes up almost exponentially when in close proximity to other high ability people. This is an example of what is known as a “network effect” the flip side of which is when we put antisocial criminals together in a prison we accelerate their criminality. Like attracts and works best with like.
According to these principles diversity is a major obstacle to innovation and productivity. No one demanded that the Manhattan project be more diverse. Somehow a highly homogeneous team of male Hungarian Jewish geniuses pulled off major innovation, if DEI existed back then we would probably have never developed the bomb.
Anyway, hence we need high ability people together to get the most out of them. That’s if you actually care about society as a whole and not myopically focused on the welfare of a few antisocial criminal underclass cultural groups.
It is interesting response to “diversity is our strength.” That argument goes that there are biases so even if you don’t always hire the best person you have a better team.
A response is that diversity has benefits and costs so figuring out the direction and size of the direction is difficult.
Your point is that talent is exponential; not merely additive.
It’s a silly argument. Does anyone seriously think a diversity in work ethic makes for a better team? A diversity in intelligence? How about a diversity of medical conditions?
For there to be a true diversity to prevent biases you’d need viewpoint diversity. Somehow that one never makes the cut.
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Probability of successfully graduating and acquiring knowledge and skills defined by the curriculum
Establishing a social environment where one is among high-achieving peers which would support each other in achieving (1) and is able to establish networks that would help them post-graduation
Allow professors to teach on a level that is suitable for high-achieving students instead of being bogged down by the need to cater for the lowest common denominator - which will also allow access to higher level of teachers
Establish a basis for at least part of the graduates to become superstars, adding their prestige to the prestige of their alma mater
Establish a lifelong relationship with a large number of highly successful people, who would support the college financially, socially, organizationally and culturally.
If you accept a bunch of random people, some of which drops out and some barely graduate with a bunch of C-, none of this works well. For some colleges, the "gimme money, I give you the papers" model works, but Harvard obviously wants to be more than that.
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You could try to maximize social utility, but Harvard would stop being Harvard really quickly if it stopped admitting scions and legacies. That strata of society - the connected, the wealthy, the exceptionally bright and motivated, would immediately find some new signal for their status because they have the means and ability to do so. It’s the signal and network that are the value proposition here, not the education.
Okay fine, but I hope people with this view are ready to bite the bullet and support admitting a ton of legacies and athletes and CEO's kids.
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The theory for "merit" is that schools are intended to teach people useful things, and that "merit" is supposed to track the ability of individual students to learn from and engage with those useful things, such that they are more productive in later life and contribute additional impact to society. The extent this is realistic depends pretty heavily on the topic and school, since med or engineering students having certain skills is a lot more important than law fields, but it has supposed to be part of the spirit constantly.
I'm not sure I buy that -- for my criticisms of 'merit' as applied to Harvard, if it turns into a university pinata we might as well just seize the endowment and apply EA to that instead -- but even presuming it's true we actually still have both constitutional and federal law specifically prohibiting the government from making "largest treatment effect" analysis based on race without far more serious cause than present here.
((And I don't trust Harvard, or even the local YMCA, to apply a race-aware largest-treatment effect analysis in such a way that would recognize minorities they disfavour.))
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Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.
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But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard. The school itself does, in partnership with its prospective students and their potential future employers. They all follow their local incentives
If there were an Education Tsar (a real one) then maximizing social utility from the process might be a priority. As it is, we have an elaborate workaround to the fact that hiring based on IQ tests is illegal.
We're literally discussing SCOTUS, abstractly representing society, having a say in who gets to go to Harvard so it's worth thinking about what we as a society are aiming for.
This is so misleading as to be inaccurate. SCOTUS isn't determining what Harvard's admissions standards ought to be; they're determining (determined) what sorts of discrimination is and isn't allowed when organizations like Harvard choose their admissions standards. In that context, the question of "what we as a society are aiming for" has to do with, "Do we want organizations, even private ones, to be able to discriminate their admissions against individuals on the basis of that individual's race?" Whether Harvard wants to prioritize students who would have the largest "Harvard marginal treatment effect" or whatever is up to Harvard; all SCOTUS (society by proxy) is telling them is that one thing they're not allowed to prioritize is the students' race. If Harvard wants to scrap the meritrocratic approach and look for students with the largest "Harvard marginal treatment effect," they're free to do so in a race-neutral way.
They're restricting the space of inputs that Harvard is allowed to use when making admissions decisions. I don't see how it's misleading at all to characterize that as SCOTUS having a say in who goes to Harvard.
There's one line of argument that's saying, AA is bad because race-based discrimination is bad. I guess I agree with that but I'm kind of a libertarian at heart so my prior is that Harvard should be able to do what it wants. But anyway, I'm not interested in that part of the discussion.
There's another line of argument, which I'm asking about, which is saying that AA is bad because it's not meritocratic, and I'm trying to understand why we should really care about that per se.
It's misleading, because SCOTUS is ruling on the first paragraph up there, about whether "race-based discrimination is bad," not on the 2nd paragraph, about whether "AA is bad because it's not meritrocratic," though the original statement was about the topic of the 2nd paragraph. SCOTUS - society by proxy - has nothing to say on whether or not Harvard choosing (pseudo-) meritrocracy for its admission standards is bad. Your claim was: "As a society the people we should be sending to Harvard are those who will get the largest Harvard marginal treatment effect." You responded to the claim that society doesn't have much of a say in this by saying that SCOTUS (representing society) just handed down a ruling which implies that they do have a say. But that's misleading, because the part society has a say in is only about the racial discrimination aspect of it, not on the overall standard of Harvard choosing meritrocracy or not. It's a shift in topic from "society getting to dictate what standards Harvard uses in admissions" to "society getting to dictate that Harvard and similar organizations can't racially discriminate in admissions." Just because they're both placing limitations on admissions standards don't make them the same thing.
Again, society has no say on whether or not a private institution like Harvard decides to pursue a meritrocratic approach in admissions. What we do have a say on is if they get to be racially discriminatory during it.
This feels like semantics so I'm going to drop it after this, but I'm responding to someone saying "But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard" by pointing out that if society is restricting the ruleset by which Harvard can choose who gets into Harvard, then clearly, plainly, obviously, society is on its face having a say in who gets to go to Harvard. I'm not sure what's complicated about this tbh.
Correct, it's semantics, and it seems like you're playing semantic games by responding to the person's point with an unrelated but technically semantically correct point that doesn't address the person's point in any meaningful way.
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Our elite colleges claim to admit people based on merit. They ought to either actually do that or stop claiming they do; I wouldn't have cared either way as long as they were consistent. In reality we should have clearer distinctions between different types of schools with distinct admissions policies (Ivy League-type incubators for future elites, Caltech-type schools that admit solely based on test scores, trade schools, etc.).
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I don’t particularly care about Harvard admissions- I’m not getting in whether they have affirmative action, no affirmative action, bias towards southern whites, etc- and I think the actual effect of affirmative action tends to be overstated(white and Asian men who go to a podunk state that has rejected exactly one applicant in the past five years mostly do fine), but I do think establishing the precedent that it’s legal to discriminate against me, and only me, is a bad thing.
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Because it is a prize. This is an objective, undeniable fact. It confers a great deal of status on the person who receives it. Basing admissions on academic achievement rather than the subjective whims of the admissions officers is at least an attempt at making it "fair".
Unless you just think that upward social mobility itself is not something that society should be optimizing for. But then that's a separate discussion entirely.
Right, so how do we decide who gets this status? Is it the person who benefits the most, or is it the person who got a 1600 on their SAT? It's not clear that these are the same people. They might be, I don't think I've ever seen an anti-AA person clearly connecting the dots.
Most anti-AA people also take a libertarian-ish view of economics and they think that wealth should be distributed based on merit. The person who works the hardest gets paid the most. The person who works the hardest should be given the most status. Not the person who "needs" it the most. I don't see what dots they're not connecting; they're being internally consistent, at any rate.
So do they think inheritance should be taxed at 100% so as to prevent lazy heirs from benefiting?
Otherwise, what is the metric for wealth distribution? Is it who works the hardest? Is roofing in the summer as a redhead especially lucrative?
All of which is to say hard work is not the only or even the main determinator of who makes the most money. So why shouldn’t the spoils go to people with the he most need? Or of a specific race?
What should determine the distribution of wealth?
How useful you are to the people with the money to pay you. Which generally implies being willing to take on extra work, or having done a bunch of work yourself for free to build expertise, so that you're useful later. The children of the wealthy are generally considered extreme outliers, who tend to lose the money within a couple generations, and don't really have much of a long-term effect.
Suffering doesn't buy the boss anything. Working hard may require suffering, but the suffering itself does not have any value, unless the boss is a (literal) sadist, in which case it may provide quite a bit of value. The value is generally in the work, and if you can find a way to do the work without suffering (example: the redhead wearing a wide-brim hat to protect their neck), basically nobody would say you should charge less.
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To a Libertarian wealth should not be distributed at all, based not on merit or anything else, but rather sit with the person who generated it until they decide to do whatever they want with it. I think a Libertarian would argue that wealth belongs morally to the person who created it because its an extension of bodily autonomy, personal freedom, and the fact that all civilization rests on freely agreed to contracts.
And if "whatever they want" includes giving it to their heirs to squander, the state should have no opinion on the matter. Inheritance taxes are an infringement on the dying man's right to his property being disposed of in the way he wishes (in his will).
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Even on utilitarianism, meritocracy is useful. The erosion of meritocratic norms and increasing resentment may cause more harm in the long run than it benefits a few black Harvard students.
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Why do these libertarians take the view that their abstract notion of merit entitles them to a Harvard education? Why suddenly hate the laisses-faire outcome of Harvard deciding how to allocate Harvard's resources?
This is Culture War, the integrity of the debate crumbled long ago. As is often said here: My rules applied fairly> your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly.
If all universities receiving federal funds were allowed to discriminate on the basis of race and could discriminate against any race, I think libertarians would have a more tempered view. But when its only against Whites and Asians, the one-sidedness of the argument becomes apparent and we enter the matrix above.
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Our rules >> your rules applied fairly >>>> your rules applied unfairly.
We might prefer laissez-faire to anti-discrimination law, but anti-discrimination law only applied when the discrimination is against certain races is worse than either.
I agree with this, but it's a different argument than the meritocracy argument.
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Everyone seeks status, and the more unequal, more diverse and more fractured a society is, the more important status is. In Denmark, status is relatively less important than it is in America, where it is in turn less important than it is in India (which is not to say that there are not surely many social-climbing Danes, but their struggle is less desperate).
Status is security, it’s freedom, it’s opportunity, above all it’s protection. At the floor, an undergraduate degree from Harvard in a major with decent employment prospects is the surest guarantee of a comfortable life in America’s upper middle class. At the ceiling, it’s a pathway into the true ruling class (return for a JD, clerk for a SCOTUS judge, get set, go).
The Harvard degree acts as a proxy for status in the U.S. It is not perfect, and it is far from the only indicator, but it is widely accepted by everyone from employers to your fiancé’s parents to dinner party companions and clients. It is not necessarily Harvard’s “fault” that this is how it is, but when a single institution becomes a core bestower of status in a country, scrutiny is always justified.
Right, what I'm asking is why it's so obvious that the decision rule we use to decide who gets that status should be based on who got a 1600 on their SAT in high school, or some similar measure of pre-college merit. Why shouldn't it be based on our best estimate of who will benefit most from that status? Maybe these things overlap, but it's not obvious that they do.
Are the people who 'need' more status the ones best equipped to reap it from higher ed? There's some data that suggests shoehorning such candidates into positions that are beyond their level of merit or capabilities only ill serves them and increases the rate of drop-outs and failures. Maybe 'Harvard flunkee' has more status than a community grad, but ehh.
You say more work needs to be done to connect the dots and explain why merit-based ascent is the way to go. While I'll admit this model is fuzzy and imperfect, I am having trouble imagining the alternatives and what their decision-making matrix even looks like, or how it would be any less abstract or illegible than the status quo.
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I disagree. There's room for organizations like that, but I wouldn't want Harvard to fill that role, and I doubt Harvard itself wants that either. Elite institutions like Harvard are places where I want - and I believe the institutions themselves want too - people to get educations that allow them to contribute the most to society. And I'd want the people we send to Harvard to be people who are most able to take advantage of the education to get to a state where they can make such contributions. I'd rather send A+ students to Harvard in a way that turns them into people who contribute amazing world-changing things, than sending C- students to Harvard in a way that turns them into upper-middle class middle management, even if the latter would mean larger Harvard marginal treatment effect.
Of course, some of this hinges on what one means by the "effect" in "marginal treatment effect." If the "effect" here is referring to something like "ability to meaningfully contribute to society," then it seems clear to me that the people who do enjoy the largest marginal treatment effect will overwhelmingly be people who have already demonstrated a combination of hard work and talent. Pushing people who are at the top of those things even further will almost definitely create greater, more significant contributions to society than pushing people who are at the middle or at the bottom up to the top or middle.
Really what I'm asking for is some evidence for the assertion that sending A+ students to Harvard is the way to maximize the number of people who contribute amazing world-changing things, and that the C- student who got affirmative actioned into Harvard isn't doing that.
I doubt that any specific evidence of that sort exists. I think it's a pretty good guess, though, based on how we know things like intelligence and drive interact with academic performance and overall life achievement. Given the limited number of seats at elite institutions and the observation that achieving amazing world-changing things tends to be easier if one is highly intelligent and driven, it seems to me that filling those seats with people who have a track record that indicates high intelligence and drive is likely to result in more amazing world-changing results than filling those seats with people whose track record indicates mediocre levels in either or both.
If there were somehow evidence that pointed in the direction that taking a bunch of mediocre people and uplifting them to become slightly above average is more conducive to great innovation and prosperity in society than taking a bunch of extremely capable people and uplifting them to be elite even by those standards, then changing the attempted-meritrocratic system seems reasonable. I don't think that is the case, though. I think it's the same reason why MLB teams tend to draft people who already have a track record of good baseball performance - someone who already has that good track record is likely to be a better player than someone whose track record is mediocre, even after subjecting both of them to the same sort of training from the team and farm system.
I sort of have the view that Harvard/Stanford/Whatever is good at churning out elite but not exciting folks like programmers and doctors and bankers and lawyers, but for truly world-changing things to the extent that there's any correlation there it's all selection rather than treatment. If Harvard is good at doing the former and not the latter, I think it kind of makes sense to "uplift" a bunch of people into those positions that don't require true genius to do well, and not really worry whether the next Einstein goes to Harvard or Ohio State for undergrad. Anyway, as you said, it would be hard to identify this in the data anyway, but I just don't think it's the open and shut case that a lot of people here make it out to be.
Who are the lots of people making it out to be an open and shut case?
That's a huge "if," though.
And there's the big issue that there's no particular reason why Ohio State couldn't just as well as Harvard "uplift" a bunch of people into those same positions that don't require true genius to do well. And Ohio State (representing any generic state school) has a lot more seats and lower tuition. Why would we want an elite institution like Harvard to do that work when cheaper, more plentiful tools exist? Unless you mean Harvard and other elite colleges just shouldn't be elite and all colleges should have the same status? That seems untenable given the natural status-chasing inclination of people who run organizations. And given how network effects work, it seems valuable to me to have colleges that are specialized for bringing the best of the best at certain things together, potentially far more valuable than having those people dispersed.
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For my part, it's simply that the equal protection clause exists. If that's no good anymore, then okay, let's amend the constitution according to the process it lays out. But laws for thee and not for me is not an acceptable equilibrium.
I still think extending the 14th Amendment to apply to private universities on the basis that they accept federal funds is a massive overreach, but it's one that's done in plenty of other venues, so it is what it is.
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