I think merit-only would be a bad idea. A kid who has managed to achieve above-average in a poor home where the TV is never off, parents offer no help, constant racket and stress, may have in college the first opportunity to take off and grow.
I will never forget going to the home of one of my partner's Vietnamese friends, Saturday night …
I think merit-only would be a bad idea. A kid who has managed to achieve above-average in a poor home where the TV is never off, parents offer no help, constant racket and stress, may have in college the first opportunity to take off and grow.
I will never forget going to the home of one of my partner's Vietnamese friends, Saturday night and the kids are all at the dining table studying. Dad is just there letting them work, encouraging by presence alone.
I will also never forget the kid who came in 2nd in his whole school of over a thousand on the aptitudes, expecting congratulations. Instead the parents turned away. "why were you not 1st?"
"I think merit-only would be a bad idea. A kid who has managed to achieve above-average in a poor home where the TV is never off, parents offer no help, constant racket and stress, may have in college the first opportunity to take off and grow."
Yeah, I do agree. Like I said, what bothers me is that this first opportunity is pretty late in the day for that kid. I can't believe there aren't good ways to offer that support earlier in life.
My youngest (adopted) daughter arrived in America with no English and a different alphabet. One thing that Arizona does right is Enough immersion.
At school she was in total language isolation. Her incentive to learn English was high. 1st year, I did her homework with her helping. 2nd year, she did it with me helping. 3rd year, I inspected.
The Spanish speaking kids took much longer because there are so many Spanish speakers here. No social isolation.
Then there is parental help in other ways. One of my daughters was having difficulty learning multiplication tables. Note from teacher. The days of the Commodore 64. I wrote a program that quizzed her and gave a happy/neutral/sad face result. Made it fun. In a few days, note from teacher, she has advanced beyond the rest of the class, what did you do? Does the child have a parent who can and will help with the learning process.
For my youngest daughter's science fair project she had asked me about the seasonal sunlight hours difference in Arizona and Thailand. I had her do, with guidance from me, a lat/lon calculation using a home made sextant to shoot the North Star for true North elevation angle and the shortest shadow length for true noon vs WWV time for distance into the time zone. The novelty may have been a factor, but she got first place. What I noticed was that the kids with good projects had dads standing with them checking out the dads of the other kids with good projects. Engineers from Honeywell, Intel, Motorola most likely it seemed. Again, parents capable and who will take the time to help.
How does a kid with a Spanish speaking single mom with two jobs compete with that?
None of that is about tooting my own horn. It's about the advantage of having educated parents with time and inclination to provide help and guidance.
As an aside, by the time my multiplication table daughter made it to HS she was a paid tutor. In business school she had her own accounting/tax prep business so when she earned her degree in Accountancy, she already had the required experience to test and obtain her CPA. Now a partner in an accounting firm. She did it, I'm not taking credit. But ask, how much difference in what she came home to made.
My first partner was a Tejano and taught ESL to a mixture of Latino and Asian kids from several language groups. He spoke Spanish with the Latino kids a lot.
One day he told me that the Asian kids were learning both English and Spanish. They didn't know that they were supposed to be learning only English. "Colors." ¡Si! ¡Colores!
My second was Malaysian Chinese. He spoke Cantonese at home. In kindergarten (!) the kids began learning
* Mandarin
* Malay
* English
at the same time. And they thought nothing of it. Kindergarten.
When we went to Malaysia, whose language he had not spoken in many years, he talked to the taxi driver in Malay like a native speaker. He spoke six languages, four of them Chinese dialects (Hakka and Hokkien were the others; his mother was Hakka) and thought nothing of it.
We have a number of Vietnamese friends. Their children it to the 3rd generation the children all speak accented English because they learn Vietnamese first.
My wife was at a friend's house a couple of days ago. She remarked that's their dog understood Vietnamese but not English. "What language did you speak at home?"
Thai is a tonal language, and my damaged ears have difficulty with that. I once had "market That" ability and knew enough of the alphabet to make menu decisions and navigate. I always had the "that's what I said" "no you didn't" problem. If you can't hear the nuisance, you can't speak it. Mispronunciations in Thai can be beyond embarrassing, they could get you in a fight.
My grandfather came to America from Germany when he was 12. He spoke with a German accent all his life but I never heard him speak a word of German. I am fluent, from high school. My teacher was later called the best German teacher in the country.
The Chinese railroad workers who came to the USA in the 1840s were from Toisan province. Ten generations later they still speak Toisan at home.
My wife's accent will never go away, but there is never a day that I don't hear Thai on the TV or her talking on the phone with friends. In her case it is constantly reenforced.
I can do Vietnamese tones perfectly, I can even do both northern and southern "dialects." And my grasp of the idiom is good; where most westerners can only point at a sandwich and hold up a finger, I use the counting-word ô for sandwich (same word as for "umbrella") that shows I actually know idiomatic Vietnamese. Between tones and idiom, people think I am fluent, which I am not.
Today, living here 13 years, today I learned the word for "wrong." I am far from fluent.
But I can't speak fast. In any language, unless I am near passing out from barbituates or benzos, then I speak like an auctioneer. And Vietnamese is spoken very fast, like most tonal languages.
There was a phrase in the book I learned from that I could hear on the recordings, three difficult tones in a row, VERY fast. I was finally able to do it after the tones were solid. "There will be a big storm."
I got Cantonese tones in six weeks, one day I realized they were like G C E in music and after that I had no more trouble. Vietnamese tones took me a year to get right and several more to make them second-nature. Now they're easy.
I live in the south but I use the Hanoi dialect because it makes me sound more educated. But I doubt I will ever understand the spoken language very well.
I know four words spelled cu with different tones.
* old (things, not people)
* counting-word for underground vegetables (onion, etc)
* owl
* penis
Nobody smirks if I say onion or garlic, nobody thinks it sounds like penis. The tones are too fundamental for that.
My Vietnamese was very limited. There were plenty of Vietnamese people with functional English around US installations.
When not in convoy on the road between LZ Baldy and FSB Ross two young boys came running out of a field carrying mortar rounds. The big boy an 81mm, the little boy a 60mm. They were supposed to get 500 piasters for each round. The Marine at the fire base always shorted them. I'd ask if they had more. They always said no, but they became a regular feature of that ride while I was in that operations area. Impressive that the kids picked up the English they needed so quickly. Smart, they correctly assumed that since they were not carrying rifles, we would not shoot them, and we would know what they were up to. They were in more danger of getting caught by the VC who's cashe they were robbing than from us. They probably knew that too. They always came out where people were sparse.
The grammar is ridiculously simple. Subject, verb, object. “Want eat what.” “Want eat noodle.” Pronunciation is an obstacle but I’m past it. But my hearing isn’t great either and spoken Vietnamese is just too fast for me. Half the time I’m dumbfounded it turns out that every word I didn’t understand is in my vocabulary.
I had a few students whose English was astonishingly fluent. Idiomatic, clear American regional accent, never been outside Vietnam.
I experienced the same in Japan. American night at a hotel, two stupefyingly beautiful hostesses. I commented to one that her (American) English was perfectly unaccented Midwestern and asked how long she had lived in America. "Oh, you flatter me. I have never been outside of Japan and learned entirely in a university" Holy wow!
Can we explore some ideas here? I don't have pre-formed solutions to propose.
If a college cannot accept everybody who applies, then they have to filter the applicants somehow (even if it was by first come first served or by lottery). Instead there's usually filtering by some other criteria, but to what purpose? To select the applicants who are most likely to succeed academically? Or those who have somehow "earned" admission? Or what?
"Merit" is sometimes an unfortunate word in this context, as it has a degree of connotation of moral judgement, like that anybody who was not admitted didn't "deserve" admission.
But what if the concept was to pick those who are most likely to (1) be able to succeed and benefit from the kind and level of education a given college is good at providing, and (2) be able to contribute to the intellectual environment of the college, other students, and eventually the world (through intellectual creations that benefit the world). In other words, to find the most productive matches, rather than to reward the deserving? This puts it on more of a pragmatic framing, rather than moral.
Suppose that a moderately good student applies to a top notch university, but that student really is not prepared to handle the coursework at the university. A moral argument could be made that IF that student was actually accomplishing quite a bit, from their personal background, to even be above average - so they should be given a slot on that basis. But a contriving a good moral argument doesn't make somebody well enough prepared to succeed, and admitting a student whom experience indicates is likely to fail, wasting their time and money as well as the school's (and the admissions slot that another better prepared student could have thrived within) may not make sense in the larger picture.
So this moderately good student, who is doing remarkably well given their background, might well do better in a lesser school.
This 'matching for best outcome' process is sometimes called "merit based" but it's more about pragmatic optimization than *moral* merit.
There is room for judgement here of course. Perhaps there is good reason to believe that a given moderately good student is likely to adapt and thrive in a tough educational competitive environment, so it would be mutually beneficial (see above) to give them priority over another student for limited space.
That subjective evaluation can also be bent towards political agendas, of course.
I think that one problem is lack of a closed feedback loop for self-correction. Suppose that a university tracked which students were admitted based on a given admission officer's subjective judgements, and tracks the progress of all students. If over time, the real world feedback (averaged over many students to reduce noise) shows that a given officer's subjective judgements of predicted success are too often wrong, they could be given feedback to become less optimistic. On the other hand, an admissions officer who never takes a chance would also show up in the stats.
Anyway, I think it's important to distinguish between "merit" seen as a morally neutral assessment of likelihood of success, and "merit" seen as a moral judgement of a person, as a matter of "fairness".
-----
background context:
One of my themes is that a dysfunctional or counterproductive policy doesn't magically become functional and productive just because someone constructs a moral argument around the cause or outcome the policy is nominally justified by. For example, a policy intended to reduce racial bias but which in the real world increases it, cannot be justified by moral arguments about how important it is to reduce racial bias.
One of the common rhetorical tools of Critical Social Justice ideology is to shift disputes about truth or pragmatic issues, into a subjective tarpit of moral and emotional reframings where its other rhetorical tools and weaponization of guilt gives it the advantage. Companies MUST implement a CSJ based DEI program, not because that program has a record of success in improving conditions, but because racism and sexism are so terrible. Metrics of success are irrelevant when Black women and children are being gunned down in the streets every day by racist cops! How can you talk about statistics when a person's very identity is being erased from the planet, you monster!
I'm trying to keep the issue of college admissions from falling into the fringes of this dynamic.
"Merit" is sometimes an unfortunate word in this context, as it has a degree of connotation of moral judgement, like that anybody who was not admitted didn't "deserve" admission."
Merit in this context is simply a euphemism for ability. How well did the student do on test scores or taking part in extracurricular work. It has no connotation about judgment, which, incidentally, has no central E in American English. "Judgement" is Commonwealth, though, as with "grey," it's in common enough use that it isn't flagged anymore.
I'm of mixed feelings in setting lower standards for people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, that being the topiic of thiis column, but in the end I come down on the side of doing it. Because any kid who manages to rrxcel academically despite uh socioeconomic disadvantages is likelier to have the motivation to grow in college and deserves admission more than someone who excelled a little more but came from a privileged background.
Let's agree that for this discussion, "merit" refers to demonstrated ability, not to morality.
You say a person coming from less advantage "deserves admission more than someone who excelled *a little more* but came from a privileged background."
[core assertion I take from your post follows below, will reference]
That seems to argue for merit based admission, albeit with a more nuanced concept of academic merit than a just a point in time assessment of current ability. A fuller concept of merit would take into account that an individual who had to overcome disadvantages to get to a given level of ability, has a brighter prognosis for succeeding academically in the future, than a student who achieved a little better but did not have those disadvantages.
In a sense, you are arguing that any predictions of future academic performance should consider the trendline or slope, not just a point in time assessment, in the assessment of merit.
So you present an argument for a "little bit" of "positive discrimination" (UK term; usually called by the more opaque euphemism "Affirmative Action" in the US), based on a better predictor of individual future performance which takes into account not just current ability, but also trendline, in predicting that person's future academic success.
So far, so good. That's a pretty easy sell - preserve a wiser meritocracy by taking a broader scope in predicting future success when deciding admissions, and making minor adjustments.
Where it gets tricky in in practice.
(1) Are the adjustments minor or major? Is it putting less-advantages beneficiaries ahead of peers who "excelled a little more" or "excelled a lot more".
The admissions offices desperately try to avoid any transparency on that issue, keeping stats about magnitude of "positive discrimination" a closely held secret. Why? The only disclosure I know of was due to the Asian student suit against Harvard, which forced the latter to disclose that there was a 250-280 point SAT gap between thresholds for being solicited, and about a 120 point gap between averages for those admitted, between Asian Americans and African Americans. (Whites and Latinos were in between). A difference that large could move people many thousands of places ahead in the queue. Is that just "excelled a little more"?
There is likely a reason that no admissions office ever voluntarily releases such statistics, which they could do to show they are only make tiny adjustments.
2) Are these Positive Discrimination adjustments being made based on a more nuanced and accurate assessment of real academic potential? If taking appropriate account of the trendline as well as the snapshot of ability produces better predictions of academic success, that should show up in the stats. If they track how well beneficiaries of PD perform over the course of their academic experiences, that could show that the admissions office's wiser predictions are paying off. But if the stats show that PD recipients underperform their non-PD peers, then maybe the admissions office is not using a wiser and more accurate assessment of merit after all.
A policy which is justified based on a "wiser meritocracy" (per the original assertion), can actually be implemented based on a very anti-meritocratic ideology instead.
And the admissions offices consider any data on the effective criteria by which they grant favors to be another deeply held secret, along with any data reflecting whether their adjustments paid off for the school, the students, or society. This operates in strict darkness, allergic to transparency.
3) Advantage and disadvantage are predominantly individual. The variance within a large population group (eg: race) is FAR larger than the variance between group means. Individuals of all groups can be personally advantaged or disadvantaged. Treating individuals as if their ability or advantage/disadvnatage is primarily determined by their race, rather than varying individually, is absurd today.
Backing up, the paragraph labeled "core assertion" above does not mention race. For example, it could apply to a person of any race whose high school academic performance is unusually good given their personal history. If they had to overcome disadantage to achieve their current merit/ability, then their future prospects may be higher than somebody with the same current merit/ability who did not have such disadvantages to overcome.
That rationale is more about socio-economic class, than about race. But it's used to justify blanket polices which are intended to systematically apply positive discrimination based on group membership, not individual circumstances.
Apparently, from reports, nearly all of the Black students in the Ivy League schools, come from middle to upper middle class families and had the advantage of educated parents, good schools and a network of high achieving acquaintances - not from urban ghettos. That is, many of the benefits of Positive Discrimination go to the most advantaged subsets of a population group, while being sold as if they were primarily going to the most disadvantaged subset of that population group. There's some degree of bait and switch going on, to evoke emotional respnses and inhibit critical thinking.
----
What this comes down to is that we can accept the "wiser meritocracy" arguments of the "core assertion", without automatically agreeing that the current implementation of Positive Discrimination are actually adhering to it's principles in practice.
Beware the bait and switch tactic. "Shouldn't we give an individual some minor bonus for having personally overcome disadvantages" gets transformed into a mandate for ideology based administrators to use their power to attempt to reshape society without need for transparency or accountability.
I support some of the arguments for positive discrimination - but I see any kind of racial discrimination to be akin to to chemotherapy - using something which is inherently toxic and dangerous in carefully limited doses and carefully monitored treament for limited time, based on evidence that this is statistically likely to result in more good than harm, and always subject to modification based on observed actual effects. I do not see current PD applied in even vaguely that manner, which makes me suspect that the good intentions may have been hijacked by people with vested interests which are not openly disclosed for discussion.
I call for much more transparency as a first step. If the programs are actually producing positive results, I will support them. But if they are hiding bad results, then they need to be reformed and reshaped to better implement that goals they were created to serve. If they desperately have to avoid transparency, that's a bad sign.
I think merit-only would be a bad idea. A kid who has managed to achieve above-average in a poor home where the TV is never off, parents offer no help, constant racket and stress, may have in college the first opportunity to take off and grow.
I will never forget going to the home of one of my partner's Vietnamese friends, Saturday night and the kids are all at the dining table studying. Dad is just there letting them work, encouraging by presence alone.
I will also never forget the kid who came in 2nd in his whole school of over a thousand on the aptitudes, expecting congratulations. Instead the parents turned away. "why were you not 1st?"
"I think merit-only would be a bad idea. A kid who has managed to achieve above-average in a poor home where the TV is never off, parents offer no help, constant racket and stress, may have in college the first opportunity to take off and grow."
Yeah, I do agree. Like I said, what bothers me is that this first opportunity is pretty late in the day for that kid. I can't believe there aren't good ways to offer that support earlier in life.
"why were you not 1st."
Yikes. that's heartbreaking.
There are so many influences.
My youngest (adopted) daughter arrived in America with no English and a different alphabet. One thing that Arizona does right is Enough immersion.
At school she was in total language isolation. Her incentive to learn English was high. 1st year, I did her homework with her helping. 2nd year, she did it with me helping. 3rd year, I inspected.
The Spanish speaking kids took much longer because there are so many Spanish speakers here. No social isolation.
Then there is parental help in other ways. One of my daughters was having difficulty learning multiplication tables. Note from teacher. The days of the Commodore 64. I wrote a program that quizzed her and gave a happy/neutral/sad face result. Made it fun. In a few days, note from teacher, she has advanced beyond the rest of the class, what did you do? Does the child have a parent who can and will help with the learning process.
For my youngest daughter's science fair project she had asked me about the seasonal sunlight hours difference in Arizona and Thailand. I had her do, with guidance from me, a lat/lon calculation using a home made sextant to shoot the North Star for true North elevation angle and the shortest shadow length for true noon vs WWV time for distance into the time zone. The novelty may have been a factor, but she got first place. What I noticed was that the kids with good projects had dads standing with them checking out the dads of the other kids with good projects. Engineers from Honeywell, Intel, Motorola most likely it seemed. Again, parents capable and who will take the time to help.
How does a kid with a Spanish speaking single mom with two jobs compete with that?
None of that is about tooting my own horn. It's about the advantage of having educated parents with time and inclination to provide help and guidance.
As an aside, by the time my multiplication table daughter made it to HS she was a paid tutor. In business school she had her own accounting/tax prep business so when she earned her degree in Accountancy, she already had the required experience to test and obtain her CPA. Now a partner in an accounting firm. She did it, I'm not taking credit. But ask, how much difference in what she came home to made.
Very cool. Well done.
My first partner was a Tejano and taught ESL to a mixture of Latino and Asian kids from several language groups. He spoke Spanish with the Latino kids a lot.
One day he told me that the Asian kids were learning both English and Spanish. They didn't know that they were supposed to be learning only English. "Colors." ¡Si! ¡Colores!
My second was Malaysian Chinese. He spoke Cantonese at home. In kindergarten (!) the kids began learning
* Mandarin
* Malay
* English
at the same time. And they thought nothing of it. Kindergarten.
When we went to Malaysia, whose language he had not spoken in many years, he talked to the taxi driver in Malay like a native speaker. He spoke six languages, four of them Chinese dialects (Hakka and Hokkien were the others; his mother was Hakka) and thought nothing of it.
We have a number of Vietnamese friends. Their children it to the 3rd generation the children all speak accented English because they learn Vietnamese first.
My wife was at a friend's house a couple of days ago. She remarked that's their dog understood Vietnamese but not English. "What language did you speak at home?"
Thai is a tonal language, and my damaged ears have difficulty with that. I once had "market That" ability and knew enough of the alphabet to make menu decisions and navigate. I always had the "that's what I said" "no you didn't" problem. If you can't hear the nuisance, you can't speak it. Mispronunciations in Thai can be beyond embarrassing, they could get you in a fight.
My grandfather came to America from Germany when he was 12. He spoke with a German accent all his life but I never heard him speak a word of German. I am fluent, from high school. My teacher was later called the best German teacher in the country.
The Chinese railroad workers who came to the USA in the 1840s were from Toisan province. Ten generations later they still speak Toisan at home.
My wife's accent will never go away, but there is never a day that I don't hear Thai on the TV or her talking on the phone with friends. In her case it is constantly reenforced.
I can do Vietnamese tones perfectly, I can even do both northern and southern "dialects." And my grasp of the idiom is good; where most westerners can only point at a sandwich and hold up a finger, I use the counting-word ô for sandwich (same word as for "umbrella") that shows I actually know idiomatic Vietnamese. Between tones and idiom, people think I am fluent, which I am not.
Today, living here 13 years, today I learned the word for "wrong." I am far from fluent.
But I can't speak fast. In any language, unless I am near passing out from barbituates or benzos, then I speak like an auctioneer. And Vietnamese is spoken very fast, like most tonal languages.
There was a phrase in the book I learned from that I could hear on the recordings, three difficult tones in a row, VERY fast. I was finally able to do it after the tones were solid. "There will be a big storm."
I got Cantonese tones in six weeks, one day I realized they were like G C E in music and after that I had no more trouble. Vietnamese tones took me a year to get right and several more to make them second-nature. Now they're easy.
I live in the south but I use the Hanoi dialect because it makes me sound more educated. But I doubt I will ever understand the spoken language very well.
I know four words spelled cu with different tones.
* old (things, not people)
* counting-word for underground vegetables (onion, etc)
* owl
* penis
Nobody smirks if I say onion or garlic, nobody thinks it sounds like penis. The tones are too fundamental for that.
My Vietnamese was very limited. There were plenty of Vietnamese people with functional English around US installations.
When not in convoy on the road between LZ Baldy and FSB Ross two young boys came running out of a field carrying mortar rounds. The big boy an 81mm, the little boy a 60mm. They were supposed to get 500 piasters for each round. The Marine at the fire base always shorted them. I'd ask if they had more. They always said no, but they became a regular feature of that ride while I was in that operations area. Impressive that the kids picked up the English they needed so quickly. Smart, they correctly assumed that since they were not carrying rifles, we would not shoot them, and we would know what they were up to. They were in more danger of getting caught by the VC who's cashe they were robbing than from us. They probably knew that too. They always came out where people were sparse.
The grammar is ridiculously simple. Subject, verb, object. “Want eat what.” “Want eat noodle.” Pronunciation is an obstacle but I’m past it. But my hearing isn’t great either and spoken Vietnamese is just too fast for me. Half the time I’m dumbfounded it turns out that every word I didn’t understand is in my vocabulary.
I had a few students whose English was astonishingly fluent. Idiomatic, clear American regional accent, never been outside Vietnam.
I experienced the same in Japan. American night at a hotel, two stupefyingly beautiful hostesses. I commented to one that her (American) English was perfectly unaccented Midwestern and asked how long she had lived in America. "Oh, you flatter me. I have never been outside of Japan and learned entirely in a university" Holy wow!
Can we explore some ideas here? I don't have pre-formed solutions to propose.
If a college cannot accept everybody who applies, then they have to filter the applicants somehow (even if it was by first come first served or by lottery). Instead there's usually filtering by some other criteria, but to what purpose? To select the applicants who are most likely to succeed academically? Or those who have somehow "earned" admission? Or what?
"Merit" is sometimes an unfortunate word in this context, as it has a degree of connotation of moral judgement, like that anybody who was not admitted didn't "deserve" admission.
But what if the concept was to pick those who are most likely to (1) be able to succeed and benefit from the kind and level of education a given college is good at providing, and (2) be able to contribute to the intellectual environment of the college, other students, and eventually the world (through intellectual creations that benefit the world). In other words, to find the most productive matches, rather than to reward the deserving? This puts it on more of a pragmatic framing, rather than moral.
Suppose that a moderately good student applies to a top notch university, but that student really is not prepared to handle the coursework at the university. A moral argument could be made that IF that student was actually accomplishing quite a bit, from their personal background, to even be above average - so they should be given a slot on that basis. But a contriving a good moral argument doesn't make somebody well enough prepared to succeed, and admitting a student whom experience indicates is likely to fail, wasting their time and money as well as the school's (and the admissions slot that another better prepared student could have thrived within) may not make sense in the larger picture.
So this moderately good student, who is doing remarkably well given their background, might well do better in a lesser school.
This 'matching for best outcome' process is sometimes called "merit based" but it's more about pragmatic optimization than *moral* merit.
There is room for judgement here of course. Perhaps there is good reason to believe that a given moderately good student is likely to adapt and thrive in a tough educational competitive environment, so it would be mutually beneficial (see above) to give them priority over another student for limited space.
That subjective evaluation can also be bent towards political agendas, of course.
I think that one problem is lack of a closed feedback loop for self-correction. Suppose that a university tracked which students were admitted based on a given admission officer's subjective judgements, and tracks the progress of all students. If over time, the real world feedback (averaged over many students to reduce noise) shows that a given officer's subjective judgements of predicted success are too often wrong, they could be given feedback to become less optimistic. On the other hand, an admissions officer who never takes a chance would also show up in the stats.
Anyway, I think it's important to distinguish between "merit" seen as a morally neutral assessment of likelihood of success, and "merit" seen as a moral judgement of a person, as a matter of "fairness".
-----
background context:
One of my themes is that a dysfunctional or counterproductive policy doesn't magically become functional and productive just because someone constructs a moral argument around the cause or outcome the policy is nominally justified by. For example, a policy intended to reduce racial bias but which in the real world increases it, cannot be justified by moral arguments about how important it is to reduce racial bias.
One of the common rhetorical tools of Critical Social Justice ideology is to shift disputes about truth or pragmatic issues, into a subjective tarpit of moral and emotional reframings where its other rhetorical tools and weaponization of guilt gives it the advantage. Companies MUST implement a CSJ based DEI program, not because that program has a record of success in improving conditions, but because racism and sexism are so terrible. Metrics of success are irrelevant when Black women and children are being gunned down in the streets every day by racist cops! How can you talk about statistics when a person's very identity is being erased from the planet, you monster!
I'm trying to keep the issue of college admissions from falling into the fringes of this dynamic.
"Merit" is sometimes an unfortunate word in this context, as it has a degree of connotation of moral judgement, like that anybody who was not admitted didn't "deserve" admission."
Merit in this context is simply a euphemism for ability. How well did the student do on test scores or taking part in extracurricular work. It has no connotation about judgment, which, incidentally, has no central E in American English. "Judgement" is Commonwealth, though, as with "grey," it's in common enough use that it isn't flagged anymore.
I'm of mixed feelings in setting lower standards for people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, that being the topiic of thiis column, but in the end I come down on the side of doing it. Because any kid who manages to rrxcel academically despite uh socioeconomic disadvantages is likelier to have the motivation to grow in college and deserves admission more than someone who excelled a little more but came from a privileged background.
Let's agree that for this discussion, "merit" refers to demonstrated ability, not to morality.
You say a person coming from less advantage "deserves admission more than someone who excelled *a little more* but came from a privileged background."
[core assertion I take from your post follows below, will reference]
That seems to argue for merit based admission, albeit with a more nuanced concept of academic merit than a just a point in time assessment of current ability. A fuller concept of merit would take into account that an individual who had to overcome disadvantages to get to a given level of ability, has a brighter prognosis for succeeding academically in the future, than a student who achieved a little better but did not have those disadvantages.
In a sense, you are arguing that any predictions of future academic performance should consider the trendline or slope, not just a point in time assessment, in the assessment of merit.
So you present an argument for a "little bit" of "positive discrimination" (UK term; usually called by the more opaque euphemism "Affirmative Action" in the US), based on a better predictor of individual future performance which takes into account not just current ability, but also trendline, in predicting that person's future academic success.
So far, so good. That's a pretty easy sell - preserve a wiser meritocracy by taking a broader scope in predicting future success when deciding admissions, and making minor adjustments.
Where it gets tricky in in practice.
(1) Are the adjustments minor or major? Is it putting less-advantages beneficiaries ahead of peers who "excelled a little more" or "excelled a lot more".
The admissions offices desperately try to avoid any transparency on that issue, keeping stats about magnitude of "positive discrimination" a closely held secret. Why? The only disclosure I know of was due to the Asian student suit against Harvard, which forced the latter to disclose that there was a 250-280 point SAT gap between thresholds for being solicited, and about a 120 point gap between averages for those admitted, between Asian Americans and African Americans. (Whites and Latinos were in between). A difference that large could move people many thousands of places ahead in the queue. Is that just "excelled a little more"?
There is likely a reason that no admissions office ever voluntarily releases such statistics, which they could do to show they are only make tiny adjustments.
2) Are these Positive Discrimination adjustments being made based on a more nuanced and accurate assessment of real academic potential? If taking appropriate account of the trendline as well as the snapshot of ability produces better predictions of academic success, that should show up in the stats. If they track how well beneficiaries of PD perform over the course of their academic experiences, that could show that the admissions office's wiser predictions are paying off. But if the stats show that PD recipients underperform their non-PD peers, then maybe the admissions office is not using a wiser and more accurate assessment of merit after all.
A policy which is justified based on a "wiser meritocracy" (per the original assertion), can actually be implemented based on a very anti-meritocratic ideology instead.
And the admissions offices consider any data on the effective criteria by which they grant favors to be another deeply held secret, along with any data reflecting whether their adjustments paid off for the school, the students, or society. This operates in strict darkness, allergic to transparency.
3) Advantage and disadvantage are predominantly individual. The variance within a large population group (eg: race) is FAR larger than the variance between group means. Individuals of all groups can be personally advantaged or disadvantaged. Treating individuals as if their ability or advantage/disadvnatage is primarily determined by their race, rather than varying individually, is absurd today.
Backing up, the paragraph labeled "core assertion" above does not mention race. For example, it could apply to a person of any race whose high school academic performance is unusually good given their personal history. If they had to overcome disadantage to achieve their current merit/ability, then their future prospects may be higher than somebody with the same current merit/ability who did not have such disadvantages to overcome.
That rationale is more about socio-economic class, than about race. But it's used to justify blanket polices which are intended to systematically apply positive discrimination based on group membership, not individual circumstances.
Apparently, from reports, nearly all of the Black students in the Ivy League schools, come from middle to upper middle class families and had the advantage of educated parents, good schools and a network of high achieving acquaintances - not from urban ghettos. That is, many of the benefits of Positive Discrimination go to the most advantaged subsets of a population group, while being sold as if they were primarily going to the most disadvantaged subset of that population group. There's some degree of bait and switch going on, to evoke emotional respnses and inhibit critical thinking.
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What this comes down to is that we can accept the "wiser meritocracy" arguments of the "core assertion", without automatically agreeing that the current implementation of Positive Discrimination are actually adhering to it's principles in practice.
Beware the bait and switch tactic. "Shouldn't we give an individual some minor bonus for having personally overcome disadvantages" gets transformed into a mandate for ideology based administrators to use their power to attempt to reshape society without need for transparency or accountability.
I support some of the arguments for positive discrimination - but I see any kind of racial discrimination to be akin to to chemotherapy - using something which is inherently toxic and dangerous in carefully limited doses and carefully monitored treament for limited time, based on evidence that this is statistically likely to result in more good than harm, and always subject to modification based on observed actual effects. I do not see current PD applied in even vaguely that manner, which makes me suspect that the good intentions may have been hijacked by people with vested interests which are not openly disclosed for discussion.
I call for much more transparency as a first step. If the programs are actually producing positive results, I will support them. But if they are hiding bad results, then they need to be reformed and reshaped to better implement that goals they were created to serve. If they desperately have to avoid transparency, that's a bad sign.
My children felt cursed by the dual cultural influence of their parents.
Me: Don't come home with a report that says could do better, isn't putting best effort, etc. I just wanted them to do their best.
Wife: That's not an A.