Episode 26: Do the ends justify the means?
Posting has been slow lately because all my writing energy has gone into campaign pieces over the last couple weeks.
You’ve probably noticed I don’t write very often about current events. That’s because there’s a whole ecosystem of pundits/bloggers who are happy to write about whatever the news du jour is, and who needs another one of those? That said, I’ve been either a producer or a consumer of education for almost my entire life, so I can’t resist writing about the recent Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action in education.
At its core, these cases considered one fundamental question:
Is present racial discrimination an acceptable strategy for combating past racial discrimination?
There are plenty of folks who would answer “yes” to that question. This is the entire basis of Ibram Kendi’s philosophy, for instance. A big part of why I drifted away from the political left over the years is not so much that I personally would answer “no” to that question [though I do, in fact, answer “no” to that question], but rather that I chafed at the attitude that no reasonable person could possibly answer “no” to that question, which is the attitude I got most of the time when I had conversations about the issue.
The vast majority of the many pieces I’ve read about the cases focus on two ideas:
Why the Supreme Court was wrong to rule the way they did
What will be lost because they ruled the way they did
What I’d rather do instead is ask: what might be gained because they ruled the way they did?
My hope is that this decision will force society to confront something it has long avoided, which is that this country has a two-tiered lower education system: for instance, if you graduate 8th grade from the Ravenswood school district, you are most likely 2 years behind a kid graduating from the Menlo school system next door. What affirmative action always did was provide an easy way of avoiding fixing that system: it just accepted the two-tiered lower education system as is and then screwed around with the *higher* education system to try and compensate for it. But even that policy only helped a tiny fraction of minority students, as this NYT article points out:
“Fewer than 200 selective universities are thought to practice race-conscious admissions, conferring degrees on about 10,000 to 15,000 students each year who might not otherwise have been accepted, according to a rough estimate by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University. That represents about 2 percent of all Black, Hispanic or Native American students in four-year colleges.”
So minority students who never go to college at all (which is a meaningful fraction of them) will receive their entire education in a substandard lower education system, while 98% of minority students who *do* attend college will attend community colleges or public universities, which are in pretty severe need of investment. This situation was true before the Supreme Court rulings, and it’s true since the ruling as well. But everyone is rending their garments over these decisions because it will be somewhat harder for minority kids to get into Ivy League schools. As my friend Gregg D likes to say, the ship is sinking and everyone’s in a tizzy because the Supreme Court has made it harder to polish the bell.
By the way, minority kids will still get into Ivies. Already everyone has figured out that the game now will be to write an admissions essay in which you talk about the challenges you’ve overcome that are related to your race. The Ivies will talk about how they are looking for kids who have demonstrated “resilience”, and within a few admissions cycles everything will be pretty much back to the status quo ex ante.
So what would I do instead? Let me throw this idea for a proposed rule out there for your consideration:
“Any selective college or university that accepts even a dime of taxpayer money anywhere in its ecosystem must publish a list of qualifying objective admissions criteria for applicants on its website. Everyone meeting those standards gets put in a pool, and all offers of admission will be awarded solely by lottery from the pool of qualified applicants.”
This proposal offers the following benefits:
If Harvard doesn’t want to do admissions by lottery, they don’t have to! They just have to stop accepting any taxpayer money. But that’s fine- there’s no inherent reason why taxpayers should be subsidizing an arbitrary, black box admissions process.
If 25% of the qualified applicants turn out to be Black, then the admitted class will be around 25% Black, since admission offers will be awarded randomly. Math, after all, is colorblind in a way people can only dream of.
If 25% of the qualified applicants turn out to be from low-income families, then the admitted class will have about 25% representation from low-income families.
What are your thoughts on this proposal? What would you do differently in higher education admissions, given the new legal landscape?
I also have some ideas to improve our two-tiered lower education system, but they will have to wait for the second round of policy videos I’ll add to my campaign website. The website will launch next week or the week after. Stay tuned!