Check out Jon Yip's post, "The Asian Ceiling" for a review of a Kara Miller's Boston Globe editorial about Asian discrimination in the college admission process. Asians are the new Jews, Miller explains:In a country built on individual liberty and promise, that feels deeply unfair. If a teenager spends much time studying, excels at an instrument or sport, and garners wonderful teacher recommendations, should he be punished for being part of a high-achieving group? Are his accomplishments diminished by the fact that people he has never met – but who look somewhat like him – also work hard?
Now, Ms. Miller clearly has lots of opinions about what a "fair world" would look like, and what education is supposed to be all about. (Remember, this is the woman who wrote the Boston Globe editorial a few months ago called "My Lazy American Students.") She and I could probably quibble all day long about the "justicial," Kantian categorical importance of things like high GPAs, SATs and nice recommendation letters -- my view, for the record, is that these things are pretty non-predictive of the sort of achievement a just society should be promoting, things like creativity, critical thought and democratic experimentalism. And furthermore, GPAs and SATs are highly determined by sociological factors, like culture, affluence, familial support and, yes, ethnicity, which are distributed unfairly. A world where SATs and high GPAs matter less is not a world I'm prepared to protest against (or write Boston Globe articles about).
Yet that argument would be a big waste of time. Ms. Miller seems to think that certain achievements should "entitle" a person to admission, that people "deserve" or "earn" admission. In reality, the opposite is closer to the truth. As Louis Menand has argued, certain admission "spots" (think of them as needs that the university wants to fulfill) create, as it were, the applicant's opportunity to fill them. There are no Platonic, unchanging qualifications for a spot at Harvard. Instead, as new needs come about, new spots open up, old ones close down, and an opportunity for admission shifts, erratically, from one student to the next. One year ivy league school X identifies a felt need for a flute player with a certain background and with certain aptitudes. The next year it doesn't. The real question is how fairness can even be said to apply in such a convoluted, unpredictable process.
The biggest change in college admission is an explosion of demand. In 1932, 1,330 people applied for admission to Yale, and seventy-two percent got in. Today, around 26,000 people apply to Yale, and about 7.5 percent get in. The instrumental value of the University is higher than ever before (see Peter Orszag's discussion of the "wage premium" of a college education) and, in turn, the demand for a university education is greater than ever before.
So we have a basic supply-side advantage to the universities: an excess of demand gives universities a lot of discretion in determining the make-up of their class. We might disagree with the things they choose to prioritize, but, ultimately, it's the university's prerogative to make those priorities. Why? Because, ultimately, it's the universities' diverse institutional needs that the admittees are being selected for to fulfill. Harvard "needs" future professors, lax players to fill the stadium and it needs students interested in launching themselves into careers of political power and economic excess. Harvard also "needs" to create expansive international networks and to make old alumni happy.
Harvard's diversity thus has nothing to do with "reverse discrimination" or "regular discrimination" or any of that. It's a function of the huge pool that Harvard has to select from and the slightly less huge number of needs that Harvard's looking to fulfill.
If you want to criticize universities, then, criticize them not for discriminating against anyone, but for turning the admission process into an essentially random crapshoot, a high-stakes contest where applicants have no good way of knowing the roles they are being selected for to play or the rules by which that selection is made. Few people know or can know why one student ultimately gets in and another ten do not. And Ms. Miller is no help in making any of this clearer.
Photo credit: Sarah Ross' flickr stream
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