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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.
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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