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 w…
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.
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.