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.
