College Admissions: Inside the Sausage Factory

Of course, this is the real reason why things like Proposition 209 are completely futile and stupid. Leaving aside for the moment the racist intent of the law, there are a million ways around it using other factors as a proxy for race.

I have to admit, though, that I prefer some of the proxies.

Consider a highly simplified model. Rather than using "race" as a proxy, we'll use "family wealth."

Because of an unfortunate and long history in this country, blacks tend to have lower wealth than white. I use "wealth" rather than "income" because the disparity in wealth tends to be higher, and because (I believe) wealth will correlate better with pre-college educational opportunities than present income. Obviously present income is a component of wealth, but it's not the whole story.

The reason I'd prefer to discriminate on family wealth as opposed to race is first that it's better PR. Discrimination on the basis of race is... well, do it the wrong way and it's racism. I hear all the arguments as to why doing it the other way isn't, but they always sound a little bit rationalized to me; I know that the term "necessary racism" isn't as nice as "necessary discrimination on the basis of race in order to enhance diversity," but discrimination on the basis of race is discrimination on the basis of race. On the other hand, if the social goals are going to be largely achieved by discriminating on the basis of family wealth -- there is something that really should correlate with academic performance more directly, and there's no racial discrimination at all.

The second reason is individual fairness. From the institution's point of view, individual fairness is moot. The institution values diversity because it builds the sort of community that they want to have. As such, broad group-based discriminators that don't worry too much about individual fairness are able to achieve the institution's own personal goals. But if you value individual fairness-- racial discrimination can be a problem. While, yes, in the majority of cases the right thing may happen, the whole point of individual fairness is the individual, so you need something that will work in the greatest majority of cases.

There are no shortage of extremely bright minority children who come from well-off enough families that they've had access to all of the best educational opportunities. Yes, there are fewer of those than there are whites with the same opportunities. Yes, a much smaller fraction of minorities has access to those than do whites. But they exist. On the flip side, there are whites from extremely depressed areas, who are first-generation college students, who never had the opportunities that we always assume all whites have when we overinterpret he term "white privilege." What's to help them? Discrimination on race won't do it; discrimination on family wealth might.

In the end, there are historical imbalances between white and minorities in this country that need to be addressed. Race-based affirmative action addresses them-- but, unlike you Chad, I think that family-wealth-based affirmative action not only addresses them better (in terms of really targeting those who need to be targeted), but is also less scary in terms of putting us in a position of arguing against racism while meanwhile discriminating on the basis of race.

As such, I don't think it's stupid. I do fear that we never really have the full conversation; "affirmative action is racism, end of story" is damaging, because it's not the end of the story. You can't throw out affirmative action without replacing it with something that fills the same need. I advocate replacing it with something better, not just throwing it out and hoping that something will crop up. (The latter is what California did, but fortunately, at least for the Universities, they are replacing it with something else. Whether it really is better, I don't know, but it can be.)

-Rob

In the end, there are historical imbalances between white and minorities in this country that need to be addressed. Race-based affirmative action addresses them-- but, unlike you Chad, I think that family-wealth-based affirmative action not only addresses them better (in terms of really targeting those who need to be targeted), but is also less scary in terms of putting us in a position of arguing against racism while meanwhile discriminating on the basis of race.

Actually, I also think that economically based "affirmative action" would be better than a lot of the explicitly race-based programs out there. The real goal of an educational access program ought to be to ensure social and economic mobility on a societal level, to provide talented students the opportunity to advance themselves through education.

However, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with a school deciding that they specifically want racial and cultural diversity in their student body, and selecting students accordingly. And if they're going to do that, I'd rather have them do it out in the open than by some roundabout proxy method.

My main problem with affirmative action, in the sense of race as a selection factor towards achieving racial targets, is that I just don't think that it works. It's not supposed to be a forever policy, but a policy to last until the desired social changes take effect.

Of course, I'm an evil conservative and don't see achieving 'diversity' as an overriding aim. I do think that the issues that lead to a lack of diversity are, in many cases, extremely serious, but I don't see that the affirmative action policies, which are applied down the line, are feeding back to do much to solve the underlying problems that caused the lack of diversity in the first place.

If there were significant signs that it's working to address the underlying problems like often horrible educational opportunities at K12, crime, low family wealth, etc, then what might be seen as temporary unfairness to 'majority' students would be more palatable in the long run.

However, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with a school deciding that they specifically want racial and cultural diversity in their student body, and selecting students accordingly.

If they are totally private institutions, that's perhaps OK, although it would appear to be discrimination on grounds of race, which isn't something I much like. If that institution is taking government money for anything, however, which comes in part from my own pocket, or taxbreaks as a charity, well I don't want to be helping fund those institutions while they are aiming towards a desired ethnic and/or cultural makeup, unless I think that there's real merit to it. If you can show that it's helping solve the underlying societal problem that do bother me, then that's OK, that's real merit; otherwise, I don't want my tax dollars going to an institution inside this country that is practicing racial discrimination to no purpose other than their own preference for racial or cultural diversity.

I can see that many people won't agree with me, but I will only support racial discrimination if there is a well-founded belief that it's going to produce benefit with regards to the genuine problems of race that still exist. Affirmative action sounds like it should work, but I'm just not convinced that it has.

The March 29th Issue of the New York Review of Books has a great piece on this topic. The piece claims that a higher proportion of very wealthy students are attending the most prestigous institutions in the United States despite the fact that many people believe that these institutions are more egalitarian today than they were in the past. The authors claim that more schools are basing admissions overwhelmingly on merit (grades and test scores) as opposed to legacies and race. However, basing desicions solely on merit, as defined above, places a large bias in favor of wealthy students who attend better high schools and can afford test prep courses. Central to the piece is a call for income-based affirmative action. The authors claim that controversy surrounding race-based addmissions has drawn attention away from the real divide in the United States--class.

On a related note, I worked for an affirmative action program at a small liberal arts college in New York (not unlike Union). A disturbing number of students in the program were wealthly African American students who attended private schools. I can't help but think that this "problem" would be addressed by income-based affirmative action program.

I've never quite grasped why it's appropriate to admit students on the basis of anything other than their probability of academic success. But if it's going to happen it should be done right: the academically weak candidates should be equally distributed across all majors. Why should someone be denied a degree in physics simply because they can't pass an introductory calculus class?

Reading the article, I couldn't help but wonder: isn't this what they should be doing anyways? Is there really anyone who thinks that the context in which grades, scores, and activities are done is irrelevant?

I appreciate that this article doesn't bring up the mythical "better qualified" student, as if there is some objective ranking by which all undergraduate applicants can be evaluated. There is so much ambiguity to begin with, and to pretend that you can objectively evaluate budding poets with budding philosophers is to build a house of cards. The language of "partially ordered sets" is the best metaphor I know of, but unfortunately people who make admissions policies usually haven't had a sufficiently advanced math course to have heard of partially ordered sets.

There are a million ways that you can try to make a proxy for race without actually invoking race, but the question is: do any of them "work"? Admissions committees would love to achieve a diverse student body without explicitly using race. Prop 209 is forcing admissions committees to pull out all the stops on the proxies, things like family situation and wealth, and my impression is that, no matter what you correct for, there is still an achievement gap.

In California in particular, the (high) achievements by poor immigrant Asians--the folks who work in Chinese restaurants, the families of 6 living on less than $20k/year, those with parents who can't speak English, and cultural backgrounds (in the case of the Hmong) where there isn't even a written language (so forget about parents reading to young children)--have led to a tremendous and understandable resentment when they see--as was plainly observable 15 years ago, at least--Asians being rejected or wait-listed from competitive universities with application portfolios that would have won admission had the applicants been black, and admissions being won by blacks with portfolios that would have led to rejection if the applicants had been Asian.

It remains to be seen if UCLA's admissions reforms can boost the percentage of blacks who matriculate. If it can't, it might be time to take more seriously the notion put forth by writers like John Ogbu and Juan Williams that (provided you accept cultural norms, originating from upper class whites, that value education) too many American blacks grow up in a culture that is incompatible with educational achievement.

I don't know that you can blame 'culture', thm, even if those plans don't work. At worst, it'd be growing up in a 'situation', I'd say (for example, poverty and with crappy public schools). Those are the problems that affirmative action is supposed to be feed back and solve; my concern is that it doesn't work, but the problems are real. I would call it 'culture', though.

Chad, was Proposition 209 genuinely driven by 'racist intent'? I can see that racists would probably support it, but was it driven by that (it did pass with 54% of the vote, after all)? If someone was, say, the parent of a child that didn't get in because of racial admission quotas or preferences, it wouldn't necessarily be racist to want a law to ban it. Even if someone broadly supported affirmative action, it's possible for them not to wish to lessen the chances their kids have, without being racist (you could call them hypocrites, of course, but I think that many parents would be happy to be that with regards to their own kids).

These questions are not meant to be leading (although they probably appear that way); I am genuinely interested to know. I wasn't in the US, then, so my political anorak tendencies weren't fired up.

There certainly appears to be a case that Prop 209 was futile (although presumably many of its opponents didn't think that it would be). All laws are subject to the limitation that some people will do what they can to circumvent them (insider trading is a good example, I think; hard to prove and we pretty much know that it's going on all the time regardless). Once you drive them into subterfuge, maybe the situation gets worse and maybe it doesn't.

The taxpayers of California certainly have a right to a strong opinion on the admissions policies of their state schools, which their taxes subsidise; if those universities then choose to try to get around the legislated limitations on their admissions policies by employing other means, they had best be prepared for consequences, if they piss the voters off. The taxpaying population, after all, provides a non-trivial fraction of the university income.

Replacing race-based affirmative action with income-based affirmative action would not produce the desired results. Test scores and grade point averages rise with income for every racial group, but Asian Americans and Non-Hispanic white Americans outscore African Americans and Hispanic Americans within every economic group. African Americans and Hispanic Americans are "disporportionately" poor, but there are still as many poor non-Hispanic whites than poor African Americans and Hispanic Americans combined. (Unitl recently, there were more poor non-Hispanic whites, but the tidal wave of immigrants from Latin America has evened up the ratio.) As a result, a switch to income-based affirmative action would produce a increase in non-Hispanic white enrollment and an even bigger increase in Asian American enrollment.(At present, Asian Americans are considered over represented on college campuse and have to outscore all other racial groups to win admission.)

Texas' "10" percent solution, which guarantees admission to any student who graduates within the top ten percent of his or her high school class, offers a better solution. In 1996, the last year of affirmative action in Texas, half of the University of Texas freshman class came from 64 high schools in whealthy school district and the other half came from another 500 or so schools. About 900 schools, many of them predominately Hispanic or African American, weren't even represented. Today, Hispanic and African American admissions, although redued by a horrendous high school dropout rate, to the state's universities is growing, and students admitted under the 10-percent rule appear to be handling the academic work well.

blair: Replacing race-based affirmative action with income-based affirmative action would not produce the desired results.

I don't necessarily desire a higher number of minorities on campuses simply because they are minorities. I think race only has a very minor and subtle impact on academic achievement (as a result of lower expectations, outright racism, etc). However, poverty and class play a huge role in achievement. It is the latter issue that needs to be addressed.

But if it's going to happen it should be done right: the academically weak candidates should be equally distributed across all majors. Why should someone be denied a degree in physics simply because they can't pass an introductory calculus class?

That's a horrible straw man.

The idea is that there are students who are talented and capable, but haven't had the opportunities to get the background they need in order to do really well on tests, in order to be at the truly outstanding private schools, in order to pay for the various test prep classes that advertise adding points to your scores -- plus, students who are talented but grew up in a social setting that was not conducive to academic achievement.

Those students can pass first-year calculus, given the opportunity to make up the background and learn.

Equating students who haven't had the opportunity to get the background they need to take calculus with the students who will never pass calculus is a huge mistake.

Putting somebody who really can't pass calculus into a physics major is also a huge mistake....

-Rob

Michael (& Rob, I guess):
The fact that a student who can't pass freshman calculus (hopefully) can't get a degree in physics is completely irrelevant; the fact is that such a student would never try to get a degree in physics. It's too hardcore for them and they know it. People aren't "put" into majors; it's a choice.

Elitism aside, really, this is the reason why every institution has a major people gravitate towards when they realize they just can't cut it in their major of choice.

Being a foreigner who finished his undergraduate education outside of US, I don't have a firsthand experience with American college application process. But I find it an interesting topic.

Regarding the affirmative action, it is a complicated issue and I don't have an easy answer. On one hand, I feel somewhat uncomfortable using race as a criterion of college admission even if it helps the minorities. On the other hand, I feel some drastic measures are necessary given the racial inequality that exists in the society. I would say I am more in favor of affirmative action than against it, although I think wealth-based affirmative action may be better than purely race-based affirmative action, like Rob says.

What I suspect, however, is that there are so many things that favor rich and white applicants and that dealing with those issues is more important than arguing whether to continue or to get rid of affirmative action. The most glaring example is of course the legacy preferences. But there are more ways to favor rich white applicants. Having come from an Asian country where children and the parents are crazy about test scores, it first seemed refreshing to me that American colleges try to look beyond the grades and test scores and assess applicants' "characters". But now I have a suspicion that considering subjective things other than pure academic merits introduces more room for unfairness. At least historically the motivation behind it was to limit admission of too many Jews. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in a New Yorker article (which in turn owes to the book "The Chosen" by James Karabel), "The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else... Finally, Lowell (Harvard's president)--and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton--realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit." Maybe things are different now - I don't know much about how the college admission process works. I acknowledged that test scores etc. don't favor those who are poor or underrepresented minorities either. It's just that - I may sound like a conspiracy theorist - I have a suspicion that rich white applicants have many advantages over even the so-called overrepresented minorities and yet people don't make a big deal about it just because it is not strictly race-based.

One of the problems with using class-based preferences is that, if your admissions standards are still racist, they can be used to counter any equalizing the scorned race manages; that is, we could easily imagine a system in which the school admitted rich, obviously capable whites, and then poor, plausibly capable whites, and then one or two endowment-rich members of the scorned class and then Oops! full! no room even for the successful middle-class members of the scorned race.

We know how this worked against the Jews in, say, 1850-1950; and they were scorned partly for *having* a culture devoted to academic success and social cohesion. This is why blaming a current group for not having such a culture is only partly convincing; we know we don't really accept outsiders even if they do live up to our standards.