I think a major cultural shift that is needed in this country is to normalize and promote the idea that the majority of students should attend (and graduate from) a two-year community college before attending a four-year institution. There is no significant difference in what one can learn in an English 101 class taught at Harvard and one taught at Northern Virginia Community College (Go Nighthawks).
In fact, it will likely be a better learning environment for most students because they’re more likely to be taught by a professor who is focused on teaching the subject and not a researcher who couldn’t be bothered and who shirks most of their duties to a grad student that has almost no teaching experience. (No, I’m not bitter about some of my intro comp-sci classes. Why do you ask?)
Finally, community colleges are almost guaranteed to be more diverse campuses than even the most affirmative-action-practicing elite institution. Not just racially, but also in terms of economics, age, and life experience. There is a genuine benefit for all students to be part of a diverse community that allows them to meet and interact with a broad range of people, and community colleges are far more likely to actually provide this benefit than most four-year institutions.
It's hard to get high level STEM education at a community college. If you're serious about lab science you need four years working in a research lab. There is no way you get a good proof based math curriculum at the community college. Several friends who went on to elite law schools did 4 years of mock trial.
Your typical high school student is probably fine with a two year degree and a job. If you're good enough to get into a selective school, you should be taking advantage of challenging opportunities right out of the gate and build for 4 years.
Sort of chicken and egg problem. There are some good community colleges that offer the intro math classes you'd want in your first two years of undergrad (analysis, linear algebra, multivariable calculus, differential equations, maybe groups/rings/fields or discrete math). Most don't but if more people planning on advanced STEM did 2 year degrees, it would probably be standard.
It's not like there's a shortage of math PhDs who could do this (and while many of them would find it demoralizing to teach college algebra to demotivated students, I think many would find undergrad advanced math to be more rewarding).
It is absolutely false that there is no difference in the curriculum or education in those first two years. Especially if you are talking about a high level STEM career. The first two years at a highly selective school and a Tier 1 public school aren't even the same.
In a STEM degree you should be starting your coursework for your major in you second year already. Those classes won't even be offered at the CC. Maybe that's not how it works at UVA, but UVA STEM students are starting out behind if so. And that's before we even get to the question of whether the first two semesters of Calculus or similar at CC actually cover all the same topics as the same two semesters at a 4 year school. CC are serving, on average, much lower capability of students compared to a STEM sequence at a 4 year college so they have to move much slower - how could it be any other way? My guess is that if you take 2 years of CC you're going to have add an extra year in undergraduate or graduate school to have the same level of preparation at the end.
By the way, I agree with your point that it could be better if 2 CC + 2 year at a 4 year university were more normalized. But I just disagree that it's a good idea if you want to pursue a STEM career. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself from a public policy perspective why CC is less expensive than the first 2 years at a 4 year university. Maybe there is something wrong with the way the 4 year university is operated with respect to costs?
Engineering is tough though - most universities want 4 years of cumulative specific engineering courses, in addition to the math and science courses. And most community colleges don't offer engineering. Fixable by the community colleges of course, but not currently viable for engineering students.
I ended up getting my mechanical engineering degree from University of Maryland, a very good engineering program. I took 3-4 of my intro classes at a community college and I think the CC was the superior experience, at least for the basics.
My classes for Intro to Engineering and Statics and stuff were much smaller at CC than at UMD, my professor was a professional engineer who spent zero of his time doing research or writing grant proposals, and it was way, way cheaper. So I'm in full agreement with you. If circumstances afford you the ability to do some CC education before transferring to a 4-year, even for something STEM, you should!
Also, my intro to engineering class project was a solar-powered drag racer. If I'd gone to UMD for this class instead, the project would have been bridge de-icers. Way more fun.
I had great experiences at my community college, and would highly recommend it to anyone willing to listen. Also, I saved, like, so much money and my bachelor's degree doesn't have an asterisk on it or anything....looks exactly the same for me as it does for anyone who went to U of I @ Chicago for all four years.
Exactly. My brother went to community college before he went to Oklahoma State, and his experience was significantly better than my time at the University of Texas fresh out of high school (pursuing a degree I never received because I was not nearly mature enough to handle college at the time, saddling me student loans that I am still paying to this day).
Community colleges are great, but this is a bit of an overstatement. A very large percentage of learning in college comes from your classmates, either directly or through peer pressure to study, not through the in-class instruction per se.
I think there's a plausible argument that community college students are as or even more motivated than students at Big State (I was often struck by how little my friends from such schools studied when I went to visit). But I still think that students at "elite" colleges are the most motivated.
Not completely relevant, but I did a lot of premed classes at my alma mater (University of Maryland) at night classes while working post-graduation. Everyone there had jobs and, often, families. Point being we were there by choice. We were paying for it credit-by-credit because we wanted to get into medical school.
We took the same exams as the undergrads and consistently had FAR higher exam averages, to the point where the professor used a different curve for our class (usually no curve at all).
My experience in my one year of pre-UMD CC was similar. We were all there because we wanted to transfer to a 4-year school and many of us were paying for it out-of-pocket while holding down jobs. Everyone I knew at CC was very, very driven.
Adding to this: until well into the nineteenth century, it was normal to go to a higher education institution well before your eighteenth birthday. Only rich people and brilliant students went to higher education in those days, but they would often get there at 14-16.
Shifting the norm to educating in high school until 18 happened gradually over the course of the nineteenth century, but by 1900 it was very unusual to attend college before your eighteenth birthday - other than some high school students attending a college class or two at their local college, which of course goes on to this day.
However, at the same time as the beginning of college was shifting, so was the ending of college education shifting to 22, when it had often been 19 or 20 in 1800.
Right now, the numbers of people achieving a master's degree (or a JD/MD) is rather higher (as a fraction of population) than those obtaining a bachelor's in 1900. It would make a great deal of sense to shift to adding two years to the education one is expected to complete while living with one's parents, and then having a four year expectation of education while attending a residential college, rather than extending residential education to six years.
That would mean that the norm is to attend a two year community college while still residing with your parents, though being given (as an adult) much more independence both socially and financially than they were as highschoolers.
Then the students who currently go to four-year colleges would move on, with the expected course of study being two more years to a BA/BS and then either a masters in two more or a professional doctorate in three (JD) or four (MD) more. If admission to a college would also include admission to a master's program (at the same institution) subject to successful and timely graduation from a bachelor's, then four years of college from 20 to 24 could be funded much more easily than it is at present. Funding master's like undergraduates would definitely help with the financial burden that many MA/MS holders currently carry.
This would also mean restructuring student finance so that masters and professional doctorates are funded more like the way that bachelors are - ie including financial aid, Pell Grants, etc - rather than funding them the way a PhD program is funded, which is primarily through scholarships and research grants (and then actual master's students end up carrying large amounts of debt).
Incidentally, if this did become the norm, here's what I would expect to happen:
Private high schools and super-elite selective public high schools would become six year institutions and grant Associate's degrees on graduation, rather than their students attending community colleges.
Certain community colleges would develop very high reputations - especially in the bigger cities where a student has a choice of where to commute to - and would place many more students at elite universities.
Some states, particularly rural ones, would set up well-funded residential community colleges for students who graduated from a rural high school and whose parents live too far from a city for them to attend community college on a commuter basis.
Universities would be very happy to get rid of large gen-ed 101 classes and focus on 3000+ level courses at bachelor's; students would be expected to complete gen-ed at community college before attending the university.
For what it's worth, this approach would break a lot of STEM tracts of study. Near and dear to all of my colleagues' hearts was the Official Curriculum Flowchart that you had to follow rigorously if you wanted to graduate in four years. From your first semester of freshman year, you had to follow exactly that structure of prerequisites in order to even be eligible to enroll in later required courses.
Hmmm, couldn't community colleges offer those freshman/sophmore classes?
Would need to be standardised across lots of universities and community colleges, but that's no different in principle from doing this same thing with the AP curriculum.
Some yes, some no. You're probably going to find calc I and II, but you're probably not going to find some of the more specialized courses.
Even in my freshman year, we had several required courses that were only offered yearly rather than every semester--I think it's probably unrealistic to offer this curriculum at local community colleges (or, put another way, such specialized offerings would probably wipe out the cost advantage that the CC is attempting to provide in the first place).
Hmmm. Interesting. I wonder whether it would be possible to juggle the course structure so that courses that could reasonably be delivered at CC level could all be in the first two years and ones that couldn't can be reserved for the upper classes.
Most people likely to succeed in fields requiring an advanced degree absolutely should be graduating highschool at 16. Similarly there should be other viable tracks available at 16 for people who absolutely will not be pursuing a higher liberal arts education.
A coherent Ed system would be providing economically viable paths on each of a skilled labor, highschool diploma, and higher Ed tracks.
Pretty much agree. I think the govt should pay for 3 years of college at a public institution for anyone with a diploma. That's more than enough time to get an AA, knock out 75% of a BA, or get a full BA if you really load up. And the left should stop talking about "free college" and start using the phrase "expanding public education."
I get the point about community colleges but aren't the needs of someone who knows they are trying to get a 4 year degree much better served by attending a 4 year state school in the "secondary" state system like Cal State? They are pretty cheap but also will generally be a lot more set up to help you get your degree than a community college... community colleges basically have three goals: technical/certificate education, community education (hence the name) where folks can take whatever classes they are interested...
the goal of helping 19 year olds get their pre-reqs out of the way is sort of ancillary to these other goals. As much as folks talk about their success with "2 cheap years at CC + transfer to prestigious private or state school" my guess is the overall numbers on success of this path are quite low. If the goal is to get people 4 year degrees I would argue much more for increasing slots and improving facilities at state 4 year schools where that's the real goal.
Co-sign x 100. I went to a top 5 public university, and the majority of my freshman and sophomore courses were bad giant lectures in poorly designed courses led by TAs and profs whose career incentives clearly focused on research, not teaching.
Later took some community college classes, which especially for those 101/102/201/202 courses, were almost uniformly superior. For $100/course.
That being said, community colleges struggle with retention and degree completion. For some marginal student, moving to a campus is going to increase the likelihood of degree completion, right?
I think that there might be case where the inverse of the selection effect that makes elite institutions appear to elite (since they can choose the best students) might play into the retention and degree completion issues with community colleges. When a school will accept essentially all who apply, they are by default going to have a larger portion of students who aren't able to complete the work. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly better to come to the realization that you can't complete the work at a place that charges much less.
ETH in Switzerland is regarded as one of the best technical universities in the world. They have essentially open admissions (for domestic students), and just fail a lot of people. No one is bothered by this because tuition is like a thousand bucks and people drop out quickly.
I think letting lots of students fail to graduate is fine as long as they aren't coming out in heavy debt.
<That being said, community colleges struggle with retention and degree completion. For some marginal student, moving to a campus is going to increase the likelihood of degree completion, right?>
That would match my personal anecdotal observation, yeah. I was one of those young adults who took more than two years to get my two year degree (like, embarrassingly long), and at least part of the reason is that when you live near where you grow up, you still have lots of friends around who are not going to any kind of school after high school, and it's pretty easy to fall into a cycle where you putz around and take 2 or 3 classes a semester, take one semester off and then go back, etc., at community college, whereas maybe at a 4-year university there might be some social pressure to graduate with the friends you made as a freshman.
The counseling/advising center at my community college actually did an excellent job of pointing me in the right direction once I decided to get serious, but I did kind of have to get myself to the office in the first place. Once I got to my four-year university, there were specific benchmarks where you were required to meet with an advisor to make sure you were taking the classes you needed and had a plan to graduate.
Those giant lectures likely work better on Zoom - the chat stream gives some students a chance to ask questions and others a chance to answer them that no one would take in a lecture hall.
I'm going to avoid the temptation to pontificate on the injustice of race-based affirmative action and try to focus on Matt's stated thesis: What we should do after (race-based) affirmative action (assuming it gets overturned by the SC) is redistribute resources away from the richest, most exclusive schools. Like many of Matt's culture war-type posts, I feel like he buries his unique stance on these topics by dedicating too much ink to relitigating the heavily debated aspects. I kind of had to force myself to re-read for the meat.
Matt proposes:
-Putting less emphasis on elite school credentials when selecting candidates for elite positions like the SC
-Consider using the Top X% approach more broadly, which would have the effect of racial diversification while staying truer to progressive values
-Spend more resources on low-income students (specific method not shared here)
I agree with all of that. I think Matt kind of misses the heart of the issue here, which is, what problem are we trying to solve with any of this? Increase ease of upward SES mobility? Reduce the structural advantages of being born into a privileged, connected class? Maximize return on investment (of time and money) for every college-aged American? Make America fairer? More competitive? So much of this discussion is based on people's unstated values and goals. It's pretty easy to poke holes in the hypocritical values vs. actions approach of elite private universities, and it's fair to say that it's within the scope of the federal government to outlaw race-based discrimination in college admissions. But answering the question of "what next" requires some clearly stated public domain goals, and I don't think we have those as a nation when it comes to this discussion. I think Matt's unstated goal/value, which I share, is that we should make circumstances of birth less of a dominant factor when it comes to access to opportunity (which I personally think should be the goal of any morally consistent social justice movement) but this isn't necessarily the goal of American conservatives or progressives. Conservatives might prioritize American competitiveness, which might say it's more important to be brutally cutthroat about elite institution admissions, and progressives might prioritize group-based equality of outcomes. These unstated value judgements will influence one's ideas of what steps would be "fair" or "right."
Given that conservative TX is the biggest implementation of the Top % percent plan, it seems like a policy that could be in a sweet spot that (partially) fulfills both conservative and progressive goals, right?
I would think so! I actually also think people “gaming” the system actually works in favor of progressives’ stated goals around integrating schools… the much bigger problem than elite college admissions is the K-12 school zoning system… but that’s a discussion for another day!
I'm not sure if TX would go for the plan now, and that it doesn't just survive from inertia. Or that red states would be open to adopting the plan in the aftermath of a high-profile AA decision, making AA highly salient.
This is well put. The problem is circumstances of birth are not equally distributed (if you have dumb parents your chances of being a genius and getting onto Harvard are probably lowered), so what do we do as a society to equal out opportunities for the dumb. I don't think it's statewide foster care for kids with dumb parents. More investment in public education maybe could help, but if you don't have parents who care about your education, writ large, and invest time in it you're probably out of luck. Smartness though isn't just a case of book smarts, and lots of people have had successful lives from skills not tested by the SAT, but skills taught by their parents.
It seems like the goal was "improve outcomes of lower performing and poorer students while hardly affecting the outcomes of higher performing and richer students"?
This is a good point. People need to be explicit about their social values. I'll outline mine below.
1. US is a diverse society. It will become more diverse based on current demographic trends. I want to accelerate that by opening our borders as much as possible politically to help people in the developing world.
2. Multi-racial societies are inherently unstable. A major reason for that instability is demographic disconnect between the population and the elites. I want to use government policy to ensure the power elite, and every country will have one, is demographically similar to the country they lead.
3. Universities play a significant role in deciding who joins the power elite. I want to use that gatekeeper function to accomplish goal 2.
I appreciate that you laid out a clear-eyed justification for your position on this, even though I disagree. US is not becoming "more diverse" demographically, at least not as much as has been hyped. (Assuming that by "more diverse" you mean "less white," but maybe you mean a broader mix of ethnicities and countries of origin.) The US census is showing more people choosing to identify as "multiracial" instead of one race, but even the Census says they believe this is due to the way the question is asked and the way people think about themselves, not any real demographic shift: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/22/1029609786/2020-census-data-results-white-population-shrinking-decline-non-hispanic-race So this kind of flies in the face of your overall thesis that one's racial category is permanent, discrete and forever highly salient. Anyway, my social values are that we should encourage everyone to see the common humanity they share with others regardless of the racial category they assign to themselves or others, making "race" less salient whenever possible, and that any major social efforts that push in the opposite direction will make an ethnically diverse nation less stable, not more.
There is nothing unjust about being disallowed to go to a particular university. Despite the incessant whining (not yours), nobody has a "right" to be taught by any particular teacher.
Well, setting aside whether intelligence and diligence are as inherited as race (which is 100% inherited), they do have some bearing on one's ability to benefit from teaching, which race does not.
And on one's ability to function in society. I don't get the point of this line of questioning from REF. I think we all agree with and live our lives in full agreement with the idea that discriminating on race is bad but discriminating based on other markers of competence is good.
If I switched dentists or plumbers or accountants because they didn't seem very bright, or weren't diligent would you have a problem with that? Now what if I switched because they weren't the right ethnicity?
We are not talking about punishing someone because of their race. We are talking about trying to undo previous punishment to someone because of their race (quite possibly by equalizing other systemic imbalances).
I strongly believe that the "UT 10% method" discussed is not just more politically palatable but also fairer and better for more people. Underprivileged people should be helped independent of race. I just cannot stomach this, "They are discriminating against me for being white," BS.
I am not asking anything of the sort. In fact, I have 3 replies since the one you are responding to. Why not read the entire sub-thread before jumping to conclusions.
Yes, and… I still think it’s fair to set some national rules about what is and is not morally acceptable under civil rights laws. Capping the number of Jewish students is morally repugnant; capping the number of Asian or white ones seems arguably repugnant as well.
Yeah I wasn't expecting you to agree that there is a difference. I was just trying to figure out what possible difference there could be. it seems like virtually an identical situation.
In the interest of not fighting a strawman, I looked up a summary of the amici filed in support of Harvard. The gist is Harvard is not capping the number of Asian students and the portion of the student population that identifies as Asian has actually been ticking upward. The SFFA argument is that Harvards “holistic” admissions that take into consideration an applicants life experiences (including those impacted by their race) is implicitly biased against Asians. This is, to be fair, a more nuanced moral conundrum than “no more than 12% Jews allowed.”
I don't think they have an argument because they don't admit to capping Asian applicants to the classes. It just so happens that Asians tend to score poorly on the Personality assessment portion of the admissions process and don't get admitted at rates they otherwise might.
There isn't a difference with respect to race, but I think that there is arguably a difference related to country of origin (although reasonable people might disagree). Without getting into the weeds too much, within the world of academic institutions I think there are perfectly sensible reasons for an institution to limit admission from foreign applicant pools, or that those pools might be systematically less attractive for a constellation of reasons.
The Economist chart that Matt includes to substantiate the claim about anti-Asian discrimination apparently includes foreign-born applicants as part of the Asian population, which I suspect makes up a substantial portion of the applications being counted (although the article is paywalled so I don't know if this is a big issue or not). The conversation would be much better informed if the comparison involved a more apples-to-apples comparison where country of origin effects were controlled better.
That's a very good point and kind of a thorny issue. If that was being debated i could definitely see both sides making good points.
And I agree the Economist chart has all kinds of problems.
That all said the % of Asians in America increased from 2.5% to 5% or so from 1990 to 2010, and I'd guess the number of 2nd generation (potential native-born college applicants) grew even faster.
Totally agree with that- my comment isn't meant to dismiss the issue, just to highlight that we could have a better conversation if the effect that we are talking about was clearer.
I can't get too worked up over the dangers of "capping the number of white" students at Harvard when almost half of them are rich kids and dumb jocks.
The whole point of this lawsuit is to increase the number of Asian students at the expense of Black and Hispanic ones, while the undeserving (using that term consciously) white students just skate on by.
That strikes me as morally repugnant.
If Harvard were truly meritocratic, I could see more of an argument against race-based admissions. But they aren't. So we're really arguing about whether deviations from pure merit should be based on race or being rich or an athlete. I know which side I'd come down on.
I don't think the point of the lawsuit is to increase the number of Asian students at the expense of Black and Hispanic ones; it's to get the Asian students fair treatment. If the Asian students feel that a wrong is being done to them—that they're being discriminated against—what would be a morally okay way of fighting that?
Does the lawsuit say "we want you to stop discriminating against Asians, but make sure you don't touch legacy admissions and athletic scholarships"? Or does it just say the first thing? Where does it target Black and Hispanic students? How could a lawsuit be filed that targeted the unfair admissions you want targeted?
That's not quite the full picture though. Rich kids aren't getting in "just" because they're rich. They're getting in because they're legacies, or rich and likely to to donate, or they're the daughter of Xi Jinping or they're Chelsea Clinton or James Franco or a star Lacrosse player.
My point being - the motivation behind it isn't to be fair in some way that you and would both disagree with. The motivation is to keep the fame, renown and business model of Harvard, Inc running. Fairness wasn't really ever the point. Which might be why it's extra awful that every Supreme Court Justice nowadays has to come from that little corner of the elite sphere.
But in any case, MY and you and me are not up against a vision of societal fairness, we're up against a self-interested business model.
Wading into this food fight. I don't think the Ivies and the equivalent little Ivies have increased their enrollment in my lifetime, even though the US population has doubled. Would be great if they could all announce a doubling of their admissions this year. I understand this would also double the population in lecture halls and small sections and require more bunkbeds in their dorms, but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Given the sizes of their endowments, this should be doable and would be good for the country. They could also stop admitting the children of foreign kleptocrats and fire half their deans when they announce the enrollment increase.
I think Harvard, like the service academies, sees itself in large part as a leadership school for the undergraduate population attached to a research university. If what it's looking for are young people with leadership potential it's not surprising it takes athletics and parentage into account. If it had a different mission, it could drop sports and become another Caltech or MIT, which haven't had the same success at developing leaders. JFK and Teddie Kennedy didn't get into Harvard based on smarts.
A major reason to care about racial composition at elite universities is social stability.
Elite universities are gatekeepers to social power. And every society will have some type of gatekeeper that fills this role.
Multi-racial societies face a stability risk in that people care that people like them are represented in positions of authority. Minority underrepresentation is destabalizing for society. Most people who read Slow Boring are familiar with this. US society has been destabalized by this for centuries, among other reasons it is bad.
Major under-representation can also be de-stabalizing. Amy Chua wrote a fine book on this, World on Fire. This hasn't been a US problem but has crippled other countries in the world
So yes ensuring the racial demographics bear some relation to the US demographics is a legitimate societal goal, for both majorities and minorities.
I respect this argument although I don't agree. Curious, then, how you feel about race-based affirmative action to a non-elite private university (let's use Drexel and Gonzaga as examples).
I don't enough about these universities beyond google. Both have acceptance rates above 70% at that rate. I don't think affirmative action matters at the margins for these universities one way or another.
Sorry if that seems like a copout. And I attended a non-selective public university FWIW so this is purely an outsider looking in
Problem with that is the Harvard cartel has a lot of power and they will use that power to maintain their position even if it isn't beneficial for society.
I’d like to share my experience as a first generation college student who went to an elite school (Vanderbilt) and credits it with much of my success in life. In my mind there are four main factors that made the education good:
1. It’s free. Vanderbilt and many other elite schools are essentially free if your parents make less than $70,000 a year which is the median American income. This is only about 15% of the student body which is a problem…
2. Meeting elites. Most readers of this blog probably don’t understand that when you grow up in a middle class life in an unfashionable town, you don’t understand possibilities. Your neighbors are plumbers, grocery store managers, and maybe a marketing guy who works in the city. The richest people in town are the car dealership guy and the local surgeon. If you’re smart, people tell you to be a doctor or lawyer. Finance? Consulting? Never heard of ‘em until I went to college. It’s nice to have friends with parents that actually have connections and can set you up with job interviews! I ended up become a doctor so this didn’t really matter but when I was considering finance it sure as hell would have.
3. Prestige. People and jobs respect you. You get boost just by saying where you went to college. People assume you’re smart in a way that even saying a top state school like UT Austin doesn’t give you.
4. Academic rigor. Like most of my classmates, I was top of my high school class and it wasn’t particularly difficult for me. Competing against a class of valedictorians is extremely difficult but brought out the best in me academically. Med school was easy compared to college. This was not the case for my med school classmates that went to state schools.
Anyway only tangentially related to the post but I think #2 is the biggest benefit for low-income students. If your dad is gonna get you a job at Citigroup or help you start your politics website a fancy college doesn’t help. If you never even though about working for McKinsey until you heard what that was in college that can change your whole life. I saw this first hand as lower-income friends (who universally all came into college for pre-med, teaching, or pre-law) switched into more exotic career tracks like “marketing analytics” or “financial analyst” that the rich kids had wanted to do from the start.
I friend of mine who went to Harvard explained his undergrad experience this way:
You know how you might meet someone at school and through the course of conversation might mention that you're going to go into sales, and they respond "Oh, you want to be in sales? My dad is in sales. I'll introduce you..." Well, at Harvard the same thing happens, it's just more like "Oh, you want to be president? My dad was president. I'll introduce you..."
They really don’t like it. The nice thing though is that an elite college teaches you to dress and talk and do activities that let you fake it though. You learn how to act at a fancy dinner and learn that spending $100 on a shirt should be treated as normal. I remember going to a fancy brunch place with my college girlfriend’s parents. The meal was $60 a head and I commented “Wow this is the nicest meal I’ve ever eaten!” (I think the most expensive restaurant I’d ever eaten at before that was a $20 steak) She got a lecture afterwards about how if we stayed together we would have very different attitudes about money and she couldn’t let that bother her. Learned my lesson from that lol
Undoubtedly true but owning a car dealership is impossible without already being rich and a lot of people don’t want to be doctors. It’s nice to know about other pathways to wealth
Regarding students and early-career folks not succeeding in opportunities given due to affirmative action.
I was a very high-achieving upper-upper-middle-class white dude who took a nose dive at age 19 because my brain decided alcohol was delicious. At 27, while my college roommates were working at Goldman and McKinsey or finishing med school, I was making minimum wage and living in a terrible roach-infested apartment.
Quit the booze. Did well in a grad program at directional state commuter university. Started climbing the career ladder from many rungs below where I would have started had I not screwed up college/early-to-mid 20s.
My initial colleagues included many first-generation college grads. At the next rung up, I started running into young graduates who had benefited from diversity hiring programs.
Despite having a privileged background, I did not have any family or other connections that got me jobs or promotions. However, it was immediately striking how my background made moving up much easier.
Knowing how to behave in social settings was a big leg up. How to play golf or tennis. More importantly - the etiquette of those sports. How to act at a sporting event or fancy dinner.
The bigger advantage was the vaccine, if you will, that having grown up around very successful career people, provides against imposter syndrome. The corporate world is complicated. The list of skills and experiences you're supposed to have at leadership levels is beyond daunting. Of course, almost no one actually has all these skills. Of course, most managers and directors are as clueless about many aspects of their jobs as one would expect. But first-gen folks frequently struggle to understand this and get intimidated about moving up. When your idiot uncles are both VPs at big banks, you understand that it's all a Potemkin Village.
There's probably a lot to this but for whatever reason I can't say I've noticed the same things personally. I was thinking about the people I went to college with and how they turned out - I actually went to Caltech, which has a much more diverse social class background than other elite schools. A fair fraction of my classmates were the children of single moms, or blue collar parents, or dirt poor immigrants from very different cultures.
I have observed that the classmates who were sons and daughters of doctors or college professors, etc.. have by and large done much better than the children of single moms, social workers or mailmen. And the children of immigrants from places as culturally foreign as Albania or Kenya have done just as well as the children of doctors or professors, which makes me think "knowing how to act" is less of a factor.
But from what I observed it had little to do with imposter syndrome or knowing how to act. It's hard summarize, but a much larger fraction of the lower SES classmates went on to live more disorganized lives. There were messier choices around taking or leaving jobs or how they partnered romantically and a higher share with drug and alcohol problems. In the cases where I was close enough to basically know what they were thinking it didn't seem to be a lack of confidence. More often it was goals and prioritization of short-term versus long term.
I've noticed the same thing in high school friends; the ones who I thought of as organized and able to plan, even if not brilliant, have done well by and large, and the ones who were both brilliant and organized own start-ups or have great management consulting careers or are doctors. The ones who weren't able to plan, delay gratification, or exert discipline are, by and large, living off their parents' money.
I went to a private Catholic prep school, so the latter had a nice safety net to fall back on, but if they didn't they'd be no better off than the disorganized peers you name.
Plus one. I owe my career (and because that's how I met my future wife, my entire family) to knowing the right person so I could get my foot in the door. I'm aware of what an advantage that was, so it's hard to begrudge people who never had that kind of advantage other forms of assistance.
I also think what you think of as "good money" has a huge influence on your earnings. If you grow up in a world where your idiot uncles are making $750k and $750k is considered about the minimum required to live respectably - then you'll know how to make that and make it a priority. If you grow up thinking $75k is good money- the same holds true.
“ possibly by intensifying the test-optional trend so it’s harder to quantify discrimination against Asian applicants.”
It will be amusing to watch a future Republican government in California mandate SAT/ACT-only admissions decisions. The party of merit, ladies and gentlemen!
Christ, is there anyone outside of the activist community the left is *not* trying to piss off?
When I read the dek, I was all ready to snark that we need to "[r]edistribute Supreme Court seats away from the richest, most exclusive schools", and thankfully as I continued to read, Matt included an entire paragraph on that. Well done!
Would SES based affirmative action pass SCOTUS muster? Matt has mentioned that since Black people are disproportionately low income, programs that target low income people help Black people. It’s also a lot more politically palatable.
And I think we should also take seriously the proposition that it's just straight up more just. That in fact black people in the 1% are not more worthy of educational subsidies than white people in the bottom 10%.
Yeah, I'm not sure I agree totally with your last point- credentials help black job applicants more (as in they'll hire a white guy from State Central University over a black dude from Harvard in many cases, but the white guy does mostly just as well with high or mid tier credentials). But I'd agree the current system is unjust both economically and racially. I don't know how racial justice can be claimed when Asian Americans who have definitely experienced state racism as a historical group (internment in WWI, Chinese exclusion act, etc etc) are actively disadvantaged by the current system in favor of rich whites.
I'm not denying some amount of validity to the insight that a black person can offset racial bias by more-elite credentials, but I think you're overstating the magnitude of the effect considerably there.
I also think that class bias is real, and people who have the various mannerisms and tells of someone who grew up in a low-education/low-income environment can also benefit from credentials in a similar way.
Yes I totally agree, it's both and. Just specifically they do studies where they trick interviewers into revealing those biases, the same as they do with housing discrimination where black families have their home appraised lower than a white family in the same exact house under experimental conditions. But I totally agree that class performance- in the sense of knowing how to act around rich people- is a big part of it too.
Yeah, I mean I definitely see the value in affirmative action. I would really like for schools to take a broader definition of what it means to be disadvantaged or discriminated against.
I think also I feel a little weird about focusing on getting people into elite schools. To me, it feels a little like conceding the point that there is extra value in a person who went to one of them, which I dislike tremendously and at the end of the day will only ever help a miniscule number of people.
I definitely think you need to incorporate SES. Like, it seems like affirmative action doesn't distinguish between an Asian kid who had private tutoring vs. and Asian kid who grew up poor in a bad school district. Those are two very different people even if they are the same race.
I get what you’re trying to say, but among the reasons “Asians” outperform academically is that those two groups of students are often made up of the same individuals.
Asian parents both here and in East Asia scrimp and save for anything presenting an educational/academic edge for their kids.
Is there some evidence for that? Tbh, it sounds like a stereotype to me. Also, a lot of things that get kids ahead, like tutoring or SAT classes, are expensive so there's a question of who can afford it for their kids in addition to who wants it for their kids
Is there evidence in the sense of rigorous survey or study data, not that I've seen.
Is there evidence in that even lower-income Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese-American neighborhoods nationwide are awash in test preparation centers, fliers for extra class work, language schools, and whatnot, and that the children of middle- and lower-income Asian immigrants tend to outperform expected metrics for academic attainment, yes.
As for the East Asia bit, I lived there and taught SAT prep and elite college admissions courses on the side for extra pocket money. Not all (not even a majority) of the students were upper-middle class or wealthy; quite the opposite actually.
Totally agree ^ and also it's not clear to me that affirmative action currently helps either group bc I think it's tailored to proportion of US population or something? I know specifically it targets Black representation from my own family experience but I'm not sure Asians "count" as nonwhite currently. (Even though they are)
I think that's super interesting b/c there's tons of arbitrariness in defining race. It's not really a crisply defined, scientific concept. I might be wrong but I think you can define yourself however you want on these applications
Other problem is Harvard and other elites aren't really aggressively help African American decedents of slaves. Instead they use Affirmative Action programs to recruit disproportionately African immigrants.
That does nothing to mitigate the harms of slavery and 5 centuries of brutalization of African Americans.
The framing “SES-based affirmative action will still help black people” was brought to you by the same sponsors as “Medicare for all will help historically marginalized populations”.
Both because there's no possible way to confine them to the appropriate audiences in the age of social media, and because the only "appropriate audience" which thinks in these terms is the 5% of young people in the activist community.
There are two appropriate framings for almost everything:
"Here's how X will help everyone." and "Here's how X will help you."
And "here's how X will help you" is what "SES-based affirmative action will help black people" is, when speaking to a black audience.
As to the idea that people will notice that you say different things to different audiences, that really only hurts if you say untrue or risible things to one audience.
If politician X goes to a black church or NAACP meeting (or for that matter a majority-white college group where the audience does really want to hear about how historically marginalized communities will be aided) or whatever and says, "SES-based affirmative action will help black people," and then someone says, "LOOK WHAT POLITICIAN X SAID," then the appropriate response is, "Yeah, I did say that, it was true, and I stand by it."
Your "black church meeting" is hilarious. I've been to Philadelphia political events held in black churches. One of the larger ones is right freaking across the street, and it's rather politically active. On the basis of that experience, I can't even *fathom* getting up in front of an audience of my neighbors and saying something like "I support M4A because it will help historically marginalized populations like you access healthcare."
They don't want to hear it and many of them would find it actively annoying or insulting, at least as much as so as a room full of Latino immigrants and the descendants thereof would find being referred to repeatedly at Latinx.
"I support M4A because it will make sure all of us, everyone in this room, has good access to healthcare their whole lives" is a better framing literally 100% of the time for any and every audience.
The only thing that would permit someone to believe otherwise is if they've surrounded themselves by the college-educated white kids you name in your latter example, and I find it profoundly stupid that anyone should ever have to pander to the racial sensibilities of a bunch of lily-white, mostly privileged youth activists.
Doubly so when such pandering comes at the expense of crafting a durable coalition to actually govern.
Look, in the end you'll get what you want, and that makes the contours of the future pretty clear; the Democrats are going to first lose commanding advantages in Hispanic and Asian-American voting habits, and then watch even black votes slip away as people fail to respond to or connect with this sort of language and the zero-sum IDpol thinking that underlies it.
What the Republicans *do* with that dominance could be just about anything, but I'm increasingly certain they're going to achieve it.
Well, Matt mentioned the Top X% plan from Texas, which is kind of SES based due to how high schools typically are composed, and that was directly upheld by SCOTUS. Granted, it was a 4-3 decision (Scalia was dead and Kagan recused due to past SG work on the case), and as usual, Kennedy was the deciding crossover vote that's no longer on the Court, thus I wouldn't put it past this SCOTUS to overturn such a fresh precedent, but at least it is a precedent.
I really like the top x% plan because it helps rural white working class as well as non-white working class, and ceases to give advantages to the thin sliver of the most privileged people of color.
That means that it is both a more soundly-based program in technocratic terms and that it is a much broader political base, making it much more secure against interference.
I attended a very competitive public magnet high school in Texas shortly after the top 10% rule was implemented.
I knew people with 95th+ percentile SATs rejected by UT-Austin, which was packed with top 10% admits. I knew people who avoided competitive high schools to get top 10%. I attended a public university in Texas (not UT-A) and saw a bunch of top 10%ers crash and burn.
A rigid "top %" admission plan is subject to gamesmanship. It should be coupled with a SAT/ACT minimum to prevent mismatch & there should be an alternate admission path (perhaps based on SAT/ACT percentile) so kids aren't penalized as much for attending competitive high schools.
The other thing is that kids going to ultra-selective privates/magnets/publics are often not shooting to go to public schools at all-they trying to get into ivies/private colleges. I went to Rice University in Houston and a good chunk of my class all came from fancy texas private schools (which again gets back to top 10% lifting up the marginal student while selective students/schools still get to be selective)
I also went to Rice (hi!) and I remember being surprised by this—I had gone to a middle-of-the-pack public high school out of state and knew one person who went to a private school locally, and suddenly in college I knew multiple people whose private Texas high schools cost more than Rice did (sticker price). Anecdotally it seemed like the phenomenon of only shooting for private colleges was concentrated among private high schools, not so much public, even competitive public.
Top 10% doesn’t mean that most of the students are from that group - people who did well at good schools but not in the top 10% are still a lot of the incoming class.
On the one hand I understand this is _kind_ of a thing here in Austin in that there are some really top tier high schools etc where top 10% is super competitive. But...
Most people who do well there can go to one of the more selective non-public schools.
Fisher v. University of Texas was not upholding the Top X% policy, it was about affirmative action for the students being holistically reviewed who were not automatic admits under the Top X%. UT Austin has a carveout to the Top X% policy where they can cap the Top X% admits to 75% of the incoming freshmen class, and the remaining 25% are admitted through holistic review where some amount of affirmative action policies probably take place.
On the narrow question of whether it would be legal -- yes. Race-based affirmative action is specifically in dangerous territory because racial discrimination is illegal, and SCOTUS has basically been making an exception for pro-minority discrimination for the last half century. But discriminating on class is a perfectly acceptable action. I can't say "I only want white kids at my school", but I'm perfectly allowed to say, "I only want rich kids at my school." Thus the status of the reverse ("I want to give black people a leg up" and "I want to give poor people a leg up")
It would be darkly funny if right-wing jurists of the future start warming up to "disparate impact" reasoning and strike down SES-based affirmative action too on that basis.
It would help some low SES whites, some Black and Latine students, and some groups of Asians, while middle and upper class members of those groups would be worse off. To my understanding this does not solve the problem of Asians vs whites outside the affirmative action purview. Like, right now if admissions were just test and grade based Asians would be much larger proportions of elite student bodies.
I have a friend who is Korean American and she married a white guy. The running joke is the kid comes home from school with a B+ and the dad goes, “Wow, a B+ that’s pretty good.” And she’s furious.
The question then is are the grades and test scores repressing superior ability or more parental pressure and involvement. And absent parental pressure, will those high grades and test scores translate into a similarly high level of career success.
If it’s mostly due to parental pressure then more Asians at highly selective schools would tend to weaken those schools hold on access to elite careers.
Well, besides specific roles like surgeons or maybe certain engineers, career success is much more based on social status/networking/prestige vs book smarts. Like I think the parental pressure encourages them to outperform but they're not *cheating*. If they weren't smart enough no amount of pressure would work.
And I went to a school that was about 50% white 30% Asian, and I was a black honors student (one of a handful, immigrant background) but I remember us being so amazed and confused that many, many white parents did not seem to care at all as long as the kids passed/graduated high school. Or cared way more about sports performance or other values. I don't know if millennial us-born Asian parents will replicate their experience with their kids, is my main thing. We were not having a lot of fun being elite.
Yes same. If I have kids the whole point will be they'll be the third generation and inherit wealth from my parents owning a home and me making upper middle class money, so they can enjoy their lives and be mediocre if they want (or good at stuff that's less prestigious! Whatever they want!) Like my experience paid off monetarily imo but at what cost? Why did a high PSAT score (a test I took at 15-16) get me a full ride at a private university? I totally totally agree with that as a goal for the next gen.
This feels like a very bold claim to me. My prior would be that the vast majority of American workers serve in an organization that has a modestly functional pay scale and that most of them receive promotions on the basis of doing good work.
Not 99% of workers and not every last dime of their salary, but definitely not "besides specific roles" and "much more based".
I think good work in the workplace bears very little resemblance to good academic work, is what I'm saying. I don't think academic performance is as predictive as people think. Like, it can help select for drive and those kinds of intangibles, but working in a corporate setting requires learning an additional skillset. I don't mean to disparage how hard people work or say they're undeserving; almost all these aspects are skills that come easily to some and not to others, and I don't think they're objectively less valuable. Being a good manager/knowing how to delegate for example when in school incentives usually push the highest achievers to do all the work of a group project to ensure a good grade.
Also sorry just reread your comment- very few companies have reasonable pay scales. Post recession you have to change companies every couple years and that's how you get a 20% raise. It's not very efficient but firms are not as willing to invest in talent over the long-term as they apparently once were.
Well, my parents were a first gen black immigrant and a first gen to attend college black woman who went to segregated elementary schools. So they got me into the room with the rich kids but I still felt like I had a lot to prove? I feel like so much of this is human and therefore messy and not easily reducible to data. But I want to be in a position where my kids can take more than four years to finish college, or come home for a year, and it not ruin their entire lives bc I can be a safety net. That's third gen 😂
Living in a capitalist society and economy without capital sucks. That's a different question from how you raise your kids and what expectations you instill in them.
There is fundamental value to composing a class not just of the most technically smart, but putting together a class that includes driven and well connected individuals. Maybe I’m biased by my own experiences attending two top 5 public universities, but there was nothing wrong with the instruction there. And knowing many friends who went to UCF, USF, FSU, FIU, FAU, etc (the lower UCs of Florida), there’s not much throwing money at the problem would do to make the experience better. The curriculum is the same, especially for hard sciences and engineering.
What you’re missing is the competition and connections. Students at the lower schools care less about learning and care more about finishing college with the least amount of effort (and learning!) possible. And they have worse connections to start life, and given their lack of drive, will have worse connections throughout life.
That’s my take — at least as someone who went to top public universities and works in places where almost everyone went to an Ivy or equivalent (Eg MIT).
This just isn't true. Anyone who has studied math knows, for example, that Calc 2 is the killer. If you can learn it and survive it you'll probably be fine with higher math classes. But lots of students in CS, Engineering, etc. decide to change majors to something less useful specifically because they get to Calc 2 and fail it.
So, if we were going to construct a high-impact intervention, would it be to help a group of students who were already going to pass Calc 2, or the marginal group of students who probably could pass it IF they had opportunities like tutoring or supplemental instruction for that class? The curriculum might be the same, but the role of a school (should be) to help people get through the curriculum, not just to provide a venue where high-achieving students learn what they could've learned anyway on their laptops at home.
As for your claim that students care less about learning, that's certainly true in the aggregate! There are more students at UCF who meet your description than at an elite school, obviously. But that doesn't mean that population is all, or even a majority, of the student body. Believe it or not, most people who attend college are interested in succeeding. That is why they are in college. Many of them don't even know that according to the elite striver class norms they're supposed to think that college is about meeting important people and doing things outside of class -- they just think school is about passing their classes with good grades. That's another area where additional resources make a big difference. First generation students need a lot of help forming connections and networks.
> Many of them don't even know that according to the elite striver class norms they're supposed to think that college is about meeting important people and doing things outside of class -- they just think school is about passing their classes with good grades.
For this, I would like this comment fifty times if I could.
Totally. When I was still in community college, I dated a girl who grew up in an affluent suburb and was attending UNC, and the difference on this front was very stark, to the point where it was a bit of a culture shock for me. The kids at UNC weren't really any smarter, or even harder-working, but they had the idea of making connections and forging relationships for the future kind of drilled into their heads in a way that we had not. Like, these kids prepped for their ACTs and SATs, and I....just kind of didn't take mine? LIke, I didn't consciously avoid them out of some rebellious streak, they just kind of came and went when I was in high school and I never really noticed. It's weird in retrospect, because I wasn't a burnout or anything, I was like a B student, it just wasn't part of the culture at my high school that the ACT or SAT was a thing that you automatically do.
Yes this is the biggest thing. Like my mom came from a background (single mother who didn't finish high school) where she had to learn all that stuff from scratch, and then it was *drilled* into us. I'm often dismayed by friends who don't know you're supposed to negotiate salary when you get a job offer or other things that feel "obvious" to me but are actually more like the which fork to use kind of class signifiers in terms of access to the Rules of Success or whatever.
I think that's a little too generous to the CC students, many of whom would not be capable of succeeding in a more challenging environment. I agree though that, just as your case shows, the distributions overlap. (FWIW I took a couple CC classes.)
Your point about not taking the SAT/ACT is a great one. I saved this tweet from Susan Dynarski, who found in a study of students in Michigan that you get a 50%(!) increase in identification of college-ready students among low income kids by mandating the ACT/SAT.
We all know social science is full of crap, so I'd love to see it repeated. But it makes a certain sort of sense that SAT/ACT tracks with income in part because even those who take it in the first place already start to be sorted by income.
OT but had to note your reference to "burnout!" I once spent many hours with a bunch of friends, most of them Japanese, discussing the regional US etymology of "burnout" (which was definitely the preferred term in my part of the Rustbelt) and its synonyms in other parts of the country. Memories!
(Also, I took the tests but wasn't even aware that prepping was a thing! I happened to be an unexpectedly great standardized test taker, but I was so clueless I didn't even understand my scores at first.)
Furthermore, this may be true in the Discourse Class, but it *just isn't true* for many others.
The owners of my firm all went to my alma mater's biggest rival. There's ribbing about it from time to time. But guess what? They hired me because I was highly qualified and they retain me because I'm highly effective, not because my diploma has the correct sigil stamped on it.
I might go so far as to wonder if those professional classes that are most sorted by the good old boy's network are ones that probably didn't require a college education at all.
If you have kids who wouldn’t otherwise pass Calc 2 to pass, would they be as likely to succeed in a highly cognitively demanding career as someone who passed it without help?
If not, isn’t failing Calc 2 giving them valuable insight into their ability?
I think it's unclear whether they could eventually understand calc 2 if given more time and help, or if everyone who isn't immediately good at something is in a lower tier of general cognition. I really think making those calls when people are 17-22 for the most part is a dumb waste of human capital. I almost failed AP micro and then graduated with a 3.8 in my econ major because I got some help with that first roadblock and could take it from there. How much of this is about the ego of people who pass calc 2 the first time, or a culture where any failure is unacceptable?
“I almost failed AP micro and then graduated with a 3.8 in my econ major because I got some help with that first roadblock and could take it from there.”
So you failed AP micro and changed majors to accounting. Maybe that would have been a better fit and you’d be much more successful now?
It’s like if someone wanted to major in math but couldn’t quite do it. So they switched to economics as the math was easier and ended up in a successful career in finance. That’s better than being the world’s worst mathematician.
But I wasn't failing because I was incapable lol. There are other reasons students struggle. I didn't like my teacher and I was overloaded on AP coursework (AP is a program in high school) and travel debate tournaments etc. I'm saying, once I got over the psychological block of being challenged for the first time, I was perfectly capable. Also people don't work in their specific major most of the time, besides engineers. At least in the US you're not walled off from potential careers that firmly.
I did very well in school, and have a double major in math and computer science. But for some reason Linear Algebra was always a pain for me, and this also manifested in giving me a lot of trouble in an Electrical Engineering course I had to take where I had to calculate things about circuits with resistances etc - I barely passed that class (that is, got a C - anything less wouldn't have counted for credit). After that I never had to deal with the stuff again.
The evidence is not that this reflects a general lack of math ability on my part. Maybe I'm just really bad at linear algebra in particular (possible!) but I might have benefitted from getting additional help/tutoring on this. So I tend to agree with Chloe and hate to rule out targeted interventions to help people get over a hump. They might _not_ help in any individual case, but don't write people off.
I mean, I don't think Bronx is entirely wrong that it's a sign that I might not want to focus on something that was ALL linear algebra - but graphics programmers need to worry about this sometimes and if it's only 2% of your job, you don't have to be awesome at it to do the other 98%, but you have to be passable.
It is of course a mixture of time/help and cognition. *One of* the reasons why some college students are able to pass classes like these "without help" is that they had more help before college. They had better instruction, more practice doing other kinds of difficult math (or whatever the subject is), and are more used to having to push themselves to keep up with their peers. In some cases, though, it is about cognition. Usually it's a mixture of the two, but it could be 90%/10% for one kid and 10%/90% for another kid.
The liberal mindset says: Our highest priority should be ameliorating the unfairness of some kids not doing as well in college math only because they didn't the benefit of the same kinds of prep in high school. The conservative mindset says: That unfairness is not my problem, and if it is at all possible for those kids to overcome that unfairness on their own, then it's on them to do so.
I think (as Rory pointed out once) that passing advanced math (and thus tutoring) is often about having a rock solid grasp of the previous level of math. I think anyone who is capable of passing Calc2 with assistance can likely pass it without assistance, assuming they are rockstars at algebra.
Maybe? My personal feeling is that being a web developer is much easier than learning calculus, though. And if, once you get calc 2, you can proceed to learn calc 3 or diffeq or linear algebra or [whatever], obviously you're good enough.
This might be a fair point if we had a shortage of cognitively demanding jobs and we needed a filtering mechanism to get the best candidates, but in fact we have the opposite situation. We will be better off with more programmers, engineers, etc. graduating than do currently.
Sure, but these kids aren't idiots. It's not like you can take a stupid person and teach them calculus with enough effort, let alone getting them to pass classes after calc 2. Higher math requires a sort of paradigm shift and comfort with alien concepts that comes more quickly to some than others. Doesn't mean the people it comes to more slowly are incapable of doing math.
Wild to speak so authoritatively on the inner desires and ambitions of like, 95% of college attendees. I mean if you were right it would justify privilege but not why Whites should be privileged over Asians. I don't think the literature backs you up, though; more educational resources for worse schools have a much bigger impact for similar reasons as why fiscal stimulus money has a higher multiplier effect in the hands of the poor and middle class. Maybe I'm wrong and you are inherently better than everyone else, I don't know you, but I don't think your experience is generalizable especially since you never attended a mid tier school or ran any studies on their students.
I think you may have an issue with selection bias. You’re not dealing with those who had a deep passion for learning but struggle to translate that passion into a successful career.
My overarching theory on everything college admissions/pricing/attendance/etc. is that the source of the problem is the lack of rigor in public high schools. We've incentivized graduation rates and college attendance rates at the cost of actual education. Grade inflation has moved us into a world where a BA is now what a high school diploma was 50 years ago. The answer is to raise public school year to year standards, hold more kids back and give out fewer diplomas, while offering more non-four year college tracks to success in the workforce. Offer 16 year-olds a 2 year program at the local CC to learn a skill. Make an 18yo with a high school diploma a valuable asset. Constrain college admissions to those likely to succeed pursuing a truly advanced degree.
This is all well and good but I think misses the core political question. Is affirmative action supposed to be the end of a racially gerrymandered past or the beginning of a (differently) racially gerrymandered future? People are right to read proponents as supporters of the latter, and, based on the polls Matt cites, I think it's a good sign for America that healthy majorities reject that approach to public policy.
How robust is the conclusion that "meritocratic sorting generates an inefficient outcome because educational resources are more valuable when targeted at low-SES students than when targeted at the best students"?
I find that very surprising, so much so that I just don't believe it. I would've guessed that resources are more valuable when targeted at the highest-potential (i.e. best) students, who would probably have good outcomes without any resources, but even better outcomes with more resources. Is the research measuring the upper tail of outcomes? How can it be that the best students don't benefit from the best education?
I think it might depend. My gut reaction is that I would want *teaching* resources to be directed at lower-SES students: the "best students" in college often teach themselves most of the material anyway, at least until they get to upper-level classes. But I would want the best research lab opportunities to be directed toward the "best students."
One reason why I think this is that AFAIK real-world outcomes are quite right-tailed. It's common for one "successful" person to have 10x better outcome than another "successful" person - there's lots of inequality even at the top, and probably measuring by money understates reality - so I would expect improving top students could be quite impactful.
I think there is a missing "at the margin" from that sentence, though it did appear several times.
This is, the most efficient outcome has a slope where the top academically talented get more spent on them, but the current slope is steeper than the most efficient outcome.
I went to an elite publicly-funded high school and an elite university and as a personal life experience, it's absolutely delightful to be an academically-oriented young person surrounded by academically-oriented peers and have excellent teachers and lots of resources.
I really wish it were true that it was the correct way for society to spend limited educational resources. Unfortunately, Matt keeps presenting evidence that it is not.
This presumes that the current shape of our “meritocracy” succeeds in finding the best and brightest, for one. It also presumes that they need massively greater per capita resources to reach their potential compared to “ordinary” students, which seems to cut against the limited evidence we have.
Either proposition being incorrect would doom your theory, and it seems that both are.
Test scores seem to do pretty well at predicting life outcomes; is there some reason to think they aren't identifying the best and brightest?
I'm not sure "reach their potential" makes sense as a concept; I would just expect everyone to have better outcomes the more resources they get, rather than a ceiling after which more resources are useless.
Surely there is, if not a hard ceiling, at least a less and less favorable cost curve on further improvement. We can't just take a random basically strong student, lavish $50M on them, and produce a superhumanly intelligent result.
Test scores are good at telling 40th percentile from 60th percentile. Is there any evidence that they’re good at telling 99th percentile from 98th? On your story, that is what matters.
Yes because grades only go up to 100. So as long as you are in a limited program of a certain amount of credits, help past perfect performance in every class doesn't really matter?
Actually there are some studies that say more resources lead to worse outcomes. A lot of these are related to pre-k and the cause could be pressuring kids to learn things they aren’t developmentally ready for.
But the same could be true of college. If you have a prof teaching accounting at East State U so someone can get a job as an accountant and maybe become a CPA one day and replace them with someone with a PhD in accounting who focuses on the “theory of accounting” and delving into the history and arcane of accounting that might similarly backfire.
I think this depends on how the meritocratic qualifications are weighed and how you weigh your results. If the goal was to find the next Einstein (or Feynman) then I suspect meritocratic sorting as done now is probably optimal. If you are looking to maximize total earnings gain from attendance then it makes sense to add lower performers who would benefit more.
First - those ED medications actually have a number of other uses as well. One of my colleagues mentioned she was taking one to assist with poor circulation in her hands, fingers, etc.
Second - Do you really think this is why there is insufficient supply for nurses if the demand is so high?
Beyond Matt's main point, but I do think the fact that you have a significant Affirmative Action case about to be decided by the Supreme Court that has drawn a lot of interest from Asian-Americans and the President has basically come out and said he will not consider an Asian-American for the court (despite there never being Asian representation on the court) is a pretty good distillation of the problems with the current trajectory of the Democratic Party.
Obama played the politics on that one wrong. He went with a bland moderate. Conservatives opposition was already maxed among right-wing court watchers because it meant a liberal filling a conservative spot.
Obama needed to get Democrats to care about the court. He should have picked a candidate that would have excited core Democratic voters in the MidWest: African Americans.
Note: I am normally go for the median voter. I am not one of these Warren voter types who think the key is always moving left.
The chart from The Economist is misleading. The Asian-American % of students shouldn't necessarily track with the absolute population of Asian-Americans. Since 1990, the total US population has grown from 250mm to 330mm. So it seems that the share of CalTech students that are Asian-American has probably grown faster than the Asian-American share of the broader population.
None of that matters to me, personally. I'm part of the 73% that believe in race-blind admissions. But let's be careful about the data we use to argue for this.
I was going to write the exact same thing, that chart made my head explode. And the little asterisk note that seems to imply that they're counting non-Americans, ie foreign nationals??? Am I misreading that? I feel like the Economist is just trolling us with this chart...it's totally obfuscating.
It's truly a terrible chart. Switching from counts to %s in unforgivable, haha. And that's a nice catch on that asterisk, that also confuses things.
But...all that said, I think the share of Asians at Caltech has actually trended fairly closely with the broader population % from the Census. And Caltech has a much higher % of Hispanics than peer elite schools as well. So I think it is a decent proxy for what admissions without athletics / legacies and AA would look like.
I have another comment where I laid out a bunch more stats and links if you're curious.
Placing all the costs of affirmative action on Asians (which is probably the most diverse intra-racial category) to win social justice points and to maintain a large proportion of an admitted cohort as rich & white is pretty perverse.
Separate and apart from the larger argument, I would like to quibble with the Economist graph (2nd graph), from which Matt draws the (unsupported, IMO) conclusion, "A large share of elite universities seem to be applying de facto quotas to prevent the Asian-origin share of their student body from rising in line with their share of the population." It's a mis-leading graph - the conclusion it is clearly trying to lead you to is that Caltech is just following population trends, and the Ivies are not. But it's an apples-to-oranges comparison - the bar graph is comprised of raw numbers; the trendline is share. As a % of California's population, some light googling tells me that Asians made up 13.0% in 2010 versus 9.6% in 1990 (though I didn't break it down by age cohort, as this graph did, and the graph goes to 2013, I assume the numbers are roughly similar for this critique).
Without seeing the underlying data and just eyeballing the chart, it looks like the median Asian-American Ivy enrollment has ticked up from maybe the low teens to the upper teens - in any event, not dramatically dis-similar to proportional growth in the population.* Whereas Caltech has jumped from the low-20's to the low-40's. So if anyone is an outlier versus overall trends, it's Caltech, not the Ivies - the exact opposite to what the graph purports to show.
Long-time subscriber/reader (via the morning email), first time commenter. Love the overall quality of the content, but this could be better.
*It's also unclear whether the graph is talking about Californian Asian-American admittance rates, or the entire population, so that may also have an impact. Have I mentioned I think it's a terrible graph?
That's a very good catch - switching from raw counts to proportions is a huge problem.
It's worth noting that probably 70-80% of Caltech undergrads come from outside the state, and the national percentage of Asians grew a fair bit faster than it did in California. I found 2.5% Asian nationally in 1990 vs 5.4% or so in 2010 when I googled for that stat.
It's also worth plugging into the analysis that the share of Hispanic Undergrads at Caltech is currently 22% - unusually high for an elite school and close to tracking the share of the general pop in that age bracket. It was much much lower in the mid 90s (and so was the % of college-aged Hispanics with a high school diploma).
Maybe a better compare is Stanford, since it's also a private California school. Google tells me Stanford is 25% Asian, 18% Hispanic, 7% Black, 28% White, 36% California origin, which is a bit higher Asian than the Ivies.
Or MIT, being a heavy STEM school: 18% Asian, 9% Hispanic, 30% White, 4% Black
Caltech's admission's has some "soft" affirmative action but as far as I can tell it's just at the pipeline and advertising portion of the process (free airfare for females who want to visit, for example), even though their official admission's office talks the usual stuff about "safe spaces" and "we're not doing enough" etc.
So I feel like they are a pretty good proxy for what admissions look like without affirmative action.
I think a major cultural shift that is needed in this country is to normalize and promote the idea that the majority of students should attend (and graduate from) a two-year community college before attending a four-year institution. There is no significant difference in what one can learn in an English 101 class taught at Harvard and one taught at Northern Virginia Community College (Go Nighthawks).
In fact, it will likely be a better learning environment for most students because they’re more likely to be taught by a professor who is focused on teaching the subject and not a researcher who couldn’t be bothered and who shirks most of their duties to a grad student that has almost no teaching experience. (No, I’m not bitter about some of my intro comp-sci classes. Why do you ask?)
Finally, community colleges are almost guaranteed to be more diverse campuses than even the most affirmative-action-practicing elite institution. Not just racially, but also in terms of economics, age, and life experience. There is a genuine benefit for all students to be part of a diverse community that allows them to meet and interact with a broad range of people, and community colleges are far more likely to actually provide this benefit than most four-year institutions.
It's hard to get high level STEM education at a community college. If you're serious about lab science you need four years working in a research lab. There is no way you get a good proof based math curriculum at the community college. Several friends who went on to elite law schools did 4 years of mock trial.
Your typical high school student is probably fine with a two year degree and a job. If you're good enough to get into a selective school, you should be taking advantage of challenging opportunities right out of the gate and build for 4 years.
Sort of chicken and egg problem. There are some good community colleges that offer the intro math classes you'd want in your first two years of undergrad (analysis, linear algebra, multivariable calculus, differential equations, maybe groups/rings/fields or discrete math). Most don't but if more people planning on advanced STEM did 2 year degrees, it would probably be standard.
It's not like there's a shortage of math PhDs who could do this (and while many of them would find it demoralizing to teach college algebra to demotivated students, I think many would find undergrad advanced math to be more rewarding).
It is absolutely false that there is no difference in the curriculum or education in those first two years. Especially if you are talking about a high level STEM career. The first two years at a highly selective school and a Tier 1 public school aren't even the same.
In a STEM degree you should be starting your coursework for your major in you second year already. Those classes won't even be offered at the CC. Maybe that's not how it works at UVA, but UVA STEM students are starting out behind if so. And that's before we even get to the question of whether the first two semesters of Calculus or similar at CC actually cover all the same topics as the same two semesters at a 4 year school. CC are serving, on average, much lower capability of students compared to a STEM sequence at a 4 year college so they have to move much slower - how could it be any other way? My guess is that if you take 2 years of CC you're going to have add an extra year in undergraduate or graduate school to have the same level of preparation at the end.
By the way, I agree with your point that it could be better if 2 CC + 2 year at a 4 year university were more normalized. But I just disagree that it's a good idea if you want to pursue a STEM career. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself from a public policy perspective why CC is less expensive than the first 2 years at a 4 year university. Maybe there is something wrong with the way the 4 year university is operated with respect to costs?
Engineering is tough though - most universities want 4 years of cumulative specific engineering courses, in addition to the math and science courses. And most community colleges don't offer engineering. Fixable by the community colleges of course, but not currently viable for engineering students.
I ended up getting my mechanical engineering degree from University of Maryland, a very good engineering program. I took 3-4 of my intro classes at a community college and I think the CC was the superior experience, at least for the basics.
My classes for Intro to Engineering and Statics and stuff were much smaller at CC than at UMD, my professor was a professional engineer who spent zero of his time doing research or writing grant proposals, and it was way, way cheaper. So I'm in full agreement with you. If circumstances afford you the ability to do some CC education before transferring to a 4-year, even for something STEM, you should!
Also, my intro to engineering class project was a solar-powered drag racer. If I'd gone to UMD for this class instead, the project would have been bridge de-icers. Way more fun.
I was just looking at NVCC's course listing and was about to say that I don't think my own local CC had anything like that!
I had great experiences at my community college, and would highly recommend it to anyone willing to listen. Also, I saved, like, so much money and my bachelor's degree doesn't have an asterisk on it or anything....looks exactly the same for me as it does for anyone who went to U of I @ Chicago for all four years.
Exactly. My brother went to community college before he went to Oklahoma State, and his experience was significantly better than my time at the University of Texas fresh out of high school (pursuing a degree I never received because I was not nearly mature enough to handle college at the time, saddling me student loans that I am still paying to this day).
Same
Community colleges are great, but this is a bit of an overstatement. A very large percentage of learning in college comes from your classmates, either directly or through peer pressure to study, not through the in-class instruction per se.
I think there's a plausible argument that community college students are as or even more motivated than students at Big State (I was often struck by how little my friends from such schools studied when I went to visit). But I still think that students at "elite" colleges are the most motivated.
Not completely relevant, but I did a lot of premed classes at my alma mater (University of Maryland) at night classes while working post-graduation. Everyone there had jobs and, often, families. Point being we were there by choice. We were paying for it credit-by-credit because we wanted to get into medical school.
We took the same exams as the undergrads and consistently had FAR higher exam averages, to the point where the professor used a different curve for our class (usually no curve at all).
My experience in my one year of pre-UMD CC was similar. We were all there because we wanted to transfer to a 4-year school and many of us were paying for it out-of-pocket while holding down jobs. Everyone I knew at CC was very, very driven.
Adding to this: until well into the nineteenth century, it was normal to go to a higher education institution well before your eighteenth birthday. Only rich people and brilliant students went to higher education in those days, but they would often get there at 14-16.
Shifting the norm to educating in high school until 18 happened gradually over the course of the nineteenth century, but by 1900 it was very unusual to attend college before your eighteenth birthday - other than some high school students attending a college class or two at their local college, which of course goes on to this day.
However, at the same time as the beginning of college was shifting, so was the ending of college education shifting to 22, when it had often been 19 or 20 in 1800.
Right now, the numbers of people achieving a master's degree (or a JD/MD) is rather higher (as a fraction of population) than those obtaining a bachelor's in 1900. It would make a great deal of sense to shift to adding two years to the education one is expected to complete while living with one's parents, and then having a four year expectation of education while attending a residential college, rather than extending residential education to six years.
That would mean that the norm is to attend a two year community college while still residing with your parents, though being given (as an adult) much more independence both socially and financially than they were as highschoolers.
Then the students who currently go to four-year colleges would move on, with the expected course of study being two more years to a BA/BS and then either a masters in two more or a professional doctorate in three (JD) or four (MD) more. If admission to a college would also include admission to a master's program (at the same institution) subject to successful and timely graduation from a bachelor's, then four years of college from 20 to 24 could be funded much more easily than it is at present. Funding master's like undergraduates would definitely help with the financial burden that many MA/MS holders currently carry.
This would also mean restructuring student finance so that masters and professional doctorates are funded more like the way that bachelors are - ie including financial aid, Pell Grants, etc - rather than funding them the way a PhD program is funded, which is primarily through scholarships and research grants (and then actual master's students end up carrying large amounts of debt).
Incidentally, if this did become the norm, here's what I would expect to happen:
Private high schools and super-elite selective public high schools would become six year institutions and grant Associate's degrees on graduation, rather than their students attending community colleges.
Certain community colleges would develop very high reputations - especially in the bigger cities where a student has a choice of where to commute to - and would place many more students at elite universities.
Some states, particularly rural ones, would set up well-funded residential community colleges for students who graduated from a rural high school and whose parents live too far from a city for them to attend community college on a commuter basis.
Universities would be very happy to get rid of large gen-ed 101 classes and focus on 3000+ level courses at bachelor's; students would be expected to complete gen-ed at community college before attending the university.
You might want to take a look at Quebec's CEGEP system.
For what it's worth, this approach would break a lot of STEM tracts of study. Near and dear to all of my colleagues' hearts was the Official Curriculum Flowchart that you had to follow rigorously if you wanted to graduate in four years. From your first semester of freshman year, you had to follow exactly that structure of prerequisites in order to even be eligible to enroll in later required courses.
Do local community colleges not have access to those charts?
You only get access to them if your mother or father had them or if you have a gymnasium bearing your grandfather's name.
Sorry, thems the rules.
Hmmm, couldn't community colleges offer those freshman/sophmore classes?
Would need to be standardised across lots of universities and community colleges, but that's no different in principle from doing this same thing with the AP curriculum.
Some yes, some no. You're probably going to find calc I and II, but you're probably not going to find some of the more specialized courses.
Even in my freshman year, we had several required courses that were only offered yearly rather than every semester--I think it's probably unrealistic to offer this curriculum at local community colleges (or, put another way, such specialized offerings would probably wipe out the cost advantage that the CC is attempting to provide in the first place).
Hmmm. Interesting. I wonder whether it would be possible to juggle the course structure so that courses that could reasonably be delivered at CC level could all be in the first two years and ones that couldn't can be reserved for the upper classes.
Interesting curriculum design question.
Most people likely to succeed in fields requiring an advanced degree absolutely should be graduating highschool at 16. Similarly there should be other viable tracks available at 16 for people who absolutely will not be pursuing a higher liberal arts education.
A coherent Ed system would be providing economically viable paths on each of a skilled labor, highschool diploma, and higher Ed tracks.
Pretty much agree. I think the govt should pay for 3 years of college at a public institution for anyone with a diploma. That's more than enough time to get an AA, knock out 75% of a BA, or get a full BA if you really load up. And the left should stop talking about "free college" and start using the phrase "expanding public education."
I get the point about community colleges but aren't the needs of someone who knows they are trying to get a 4 year degree much better served by attending a 4 year state school in the "secondary" state system like Cal State? They are pretty cheap but also will generally be a lot more set up to help you get your degree than a community college... community colleges basically have three goals: technical/certificate education, community education (hence the name) where folks can take whatever classes they are interested...
the goal of helping 19 year olds get their pre-reqs out of the way is sort of ancillary to these other goals. As much as folks talk about their success with "2 cheap years at CC + transfer to prestigious private or state school" my guess is the overall numbers on success of this path are quite low. If the goal is to get people 4 year degrees I would argue much more for increasing slots and improving facilities at state 4 year schools where that's the real goal.
Co-sign x 100. I went to a top 5 public university, and the majority of my freshman and sophomore courses were bad giant lectures in poorly designed courses led by TAs and profs whose career incentives clearly focused on research, not teaching.
Later took some community college classes, which especially for those 101/102/201/202 courses, were almost uniformly superior. For $100/course.
That being said, community colleges struggle with retention and degree completion. For some marginal student, moving to a campus is going to increase the likelihood of degree completion, right?
I think that there might be case where the inverse of the selection effect that makes elite institutions appear to elite (since they can choose the best students) might play into the retention and degree completion issues with community colleges. When a school will accept essentially all who apply, they are by default going to have a larger portion of students who aren't able to complete the work. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly better to come to the realization that you can't complete the work at a place that charges much less.
ETH in Switzerland is regarded as one of the best technical universities in the world. They have essentially open admissions (for domestic students), and just fail a lot of people. No one is bothered by this because tuition is like a thousand bucks and people drop out quickly.
I think letting lots of students fail to graduate is fine as long as they aren't coming out in heavy debt.
<That being said, community colleges struggle with retention and degree completion. For some marginal student, moving to a campus is going to increase the likelihood of degree completion, right?>
That would match my personal anecdotal observation, yeah. I was one of those young adults who took more than two years to get my two year degree (like, embarrassingly long), and at least part of the reason is that when you live near where you grow up, you still have lots of friends around who are not going to any kind of school after high school, and it's pretty easy to fall into a cycle where you putz around and take 2 or 3 classes a semester, take one semester off and then go back, etc., at community college, whereas maybe at a 4-year university there might be some social pressure to graduate with the friends you made as a freshman.
The counseling/advising center at my community college actually did an excellent job of pointing me in the right direction once I decided to get serious, but I did kind of have to get myself to the office in the first place. Once I got to my four-year university, there were specific benchmarks where you were required to meet with an advisor to make sure you were taking the classes you needed and had a plan to graduate.
Those giant lectures likely work better on Zoom - the chat stream gives some students a chance to ask questions and others a chance to answer them that no one would take in a lecture hall.
I like this, but I think kids need to get out of the house ASAP to be their own person. Living at home ain't it
We really do it right here in the commonwealth with regard to the structure of higher ed. Such a value add over where I grew up in NJ.
I'm going to avoid the temptation to pontificate on the injustice of race-based affirmative action and try to focus on Matt's stated thesis: What we should do after (race-based) affirmative action (assuming it gets overturned by the SC) is redistribute resources away from the richest, most exclusive schools. Like many of Matt's culture war-type posts, I feel like he buries his unique stance on these topics by dedicating too much ink to relitigating the heavily debated aspects. I kind of had to force myself to re-read for the meat.
Matt proposes:
-Putting less emphasis on elite school credentials when selecting candidates for elite positions like the SC
-Consider using the Top X% approach more broadly, which would have the effect of racial diversification while staying truer to progressive values
-Spend more resources on low-income students (specific method not shared here)
I agree with all of that. I think Matt kind of misses the heart of the issue here, which is, what problem are we trying to solve with any of this? Increase ease of upward SES mobility? Reduce the structural advantages of being born into a privileged, connected class? Maximize return on investment (of time and money) for every college-aged American? Make America fairer? More competitive? So much of this discussion is based on people's unstated values and goals. It's pretty easy to poke holes in the hypocritical values vs. actions approach of elite private universities, and it's fair to say that it's within the scope of the federal government to outlaw race-based discrimination in college admissions. But answering the question of "what next" requires some clearly stated public domain goals, and I don't think we have those as a nation when it comes to this discussion. I think Matt's unstated goal/value, which I share, is that we should make circumstances of birth less of a dominant factor when it comes to access to opportunity (which I personally think should be the goal of any morally consistent social justice movement) but this isn't necessarily the goal of American conservatives or progressives. Conservatives might prioritize American competitiveness, which might say it's more important to be brutally cutthroat about elite institution admissions, and progressives might prioritize group-based equality of outcomes. These unstated value judgements will influence one's ideas of what steps would be "fair" or "right."
Given that conservative TX is the biggest implementation of the Top % percent plan, it seems like a policy that could be in a sweet spot that (partially) fulfills both conservative and progressive goals, right?
I would think so! I actually also think people “gaming” the system actually works in favor of progressives’ stated goals around integrating schools… the much bigger problem than elite college admissions is the K-12 school zoning system… but that’s a discussion for another day!
I'm not sure if TX would go for the plan now, and that it doesn't just survive from inertia. Or that red states would be open to adopting the plan in the aftermath of a high-profile AA decision, making AA highly salient.
This is well put. The problem is circumstances of birth are not equally distributed (if you have dumb parents your chances of being a genius and getting onto Harvard are probably lowered), so what do we do as a society to equal out opportunities for the dumb. I don't think it's statewide foster care for kids with dumb parents. More investment in public education maybe could help, but if you don't have parents who care about your education, writ large, and invest time in it you're probably out of luck. Smartness though isn't just a case of book smarts, and lots of people have had successful lives from skills not tested by the SAT, but skills taught by their parents.
This is the topic of Freddie DeBoer's book The Cult of Smart.
(His answer: we should take care of those the are not great at academic pursuits and stop trying to prop up a system to make everyone an academic)
It seems like the goal was "improve outcomes of lower performing and poorer students while hardly affecting the outcomes of higher performing and richer students"?
This is a good point. People need to be explicit about their social values. I'll outline mine below.
1. US is a diverse society. It will become more diverse based on current demographic trends. I want to accelerate that by opening our borders as much as possible politically to help people in the developing world.
2. Multi-racial societies are inherently unstable. A major reason for that instability is demographic disconnect between the population and the elites. I want to use government policy to ensure the power elite, and every country will have one, is demographically similar to the country they lead.
3. Universities play a significant role in deciding who joins the power elite. I want to use that gatekeeper function to accomplish goal 2.
I appreciate that you laid out a clear-eyed justification for your position on this, even though I disagree. US is not becoming "more diverse" demographically, at least not as much as has been hyped. (Assuming that by "more diverse" you mean "less white," but maybe you mean a broader mix of ethnicities and countries of origin.) The US census is showing more people choosing to identify as "multiracial" instead of one race, but even the Census says they believe this is due to the way the question is asked and the way people think about themselves, not any real demographic shift: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/22/1029609786/2020-census-data-results-white-population-shrinking-decline-non-hispanic-race So this kind of flies in the face of your overall thesis that one's racial category is permanent, discrete and forever highly salient. Anyway, my social values are that we should encourage everyone to see the common humanity they share with others regardless of the racial category they assign to themselves or others, making "race" less salient whenever possible, and that any major social efforts that push in the opposite direction will make an ethnically diverse nation less stable, not more.
There is nothing unjust about being disallowed to go to a particular university. Despite the incessant whining (not yours), nobody has a "right" to be taught by any particular teacher.
There is if you were excluded on the basis of race
Disagree strongly. Why is race injustice but intelligence or diligence (also both inherited traits) perfectly just?
Well, setting aside whether intelligence and diligence are as inherited as race (which is 100% inherited), they do have some bearing on one's ability to benefit from teaching, which race does not.
And on one's ability to function in society. I don't get the point of this line of questioning from REF. I think we all agree with and live our lives in full agreement with the idea that discriminating on race is bad but discriminating based on other markers of competence is good.
If I switched dentists or plumbers or accountants because they didn't seem very bright, or weren't diligent would you have a problem with that? Now what if I switched because they weren't the right ethnicity?
We are not talking about punishing someone because of their race. We are talking about trying to undo previous punishment to someone because of their race (quite possibly by equalizing other systemic imbalances).
I strongly believe that the "UT 10% method" discussed is not just more politically palatable but also fairer and better for more people. Underprivileged people should be helped independent of race. I just cannot stomach this, "They are discriminating against me for being white," BS.
Are you really asking why discriminating on the basis of race is wrong? That's racism it's bad
Moreover the color of your skin has 0 to do with anything else. It doesn't affect your job performance or how well you can do your job
On the other hand not hiring somebody because they're not intelligent enough or diligent enough to do their job is imminently reasonable
It doesn't make them a bad person it just makes some not a good fit for whatever task they need to do
I am not asking anything of the sort. In fact, I have 3 replies since the one you are responding to. Why not read the entire sub-thread before jumping to conclusions.
Yes, and… I still think it’s fair to set some national rules about what is and is not morally acceptable under civil rights laws. Capping the number of Jewish students is morally repugnant; capping the number of Asian or white ones seems arguably repugnant as well.
I'm curious where you see a possible difference between the morality of capping Jewish and capping Asian admits?
Personally, I don’t. I’m curious to hear Harvards argument before the court, though.
ETA: Googled and found this opinion piece. Searched for the heart of his argument and didn’t find much: basically, Jews were universally opposed to caps, whereas Asian Americans are split on affirmative action? Seems like a weak argument. Again, open to the possibility I am missing something. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-harvard-affirmative-action-lawsuit_n_5bbe62b8e4b0c8fa1367c1c1
Yeah I wasn't expecting you to agree that there is a difference. I was just trying to figure out what possible difference there could be. it seems like virtually an identical situation.
In the interest of not fighting a strawman, I looked up a summary of the amici filed in support of Harvard. The gist is Harvard is not capping the number of Asian students and the portion of the student population that identifies as Asian has actually been ticking upward. The SFFA argument is that Harvards “holistic” admissions that take into consideration an applicants life experiences (including those impacted by their race) is implicitly biased against Asians. This is, to be fair, a more nuanced moral conundrum than “no more than 12% Jews allowed.”
I don't think they have an argument because they don't admit to capping Asian applicants to the classes. It just so happens that Asians tend to score poorly on the Personality assessment portion of the admissions process and don't get admitted at rates they otherwise might.
There isn't a difference with respect to race, but I think that there is arguably a difference related to country of origin (although reasonable people might disagree). Without getting into the weeds too much, within the world of academic institutions I think there are perfectly sensible reasons for an institution to limit admission from foreign applicant pools, or that those pools might be systematically less attractive for a constellation of reasons.
The Economist chart that Matt includes to substantiate the claim about anti-Asian discrimination apparently includes foreign-born applicants as part of the Asian population, which I suspect makes up a substantial portion of the applications being counted (although the article is paywalled so I don't know if this is a big issue or not). The conversation would be much better informed if the comparison involved a more apples-to-apples comparison where country of origin effects were controlled better.
That's a very good point and kind of a thorny issue. If that was being debated i could definitely see both sides making good points.
And I agree the Economist chart has all kinds of problems.
That all said the % of Asians in America increased from 2.5% to 5% or so from 1990 to 2010, and I'd guess the number of 2nd generation (potential native-born college applicants) grew even faster.
Totally agree with that- my comment isn't meant to dismiss the issue, just to highlight that we could have a better conversation if the effect that we are talking about was clearer.
I can't get too worked up over the dangers of "capping the number of white" students at Harvard when almost half of them are rich kids and dumb jocks.
The whole point of this lawsuit is to increase the number of Asian students at the expense of Black and Hispanic ones, while the undeserving (using that term consciously) white students just skate on by.
That strikes me as morally repugnant.
If Harvard were truly meritocratic, I could see more of an argument against race-based admissions. But they aren't. So we're really arguing about whether deviations from pure merit should be based on race or being rich or an athlete. I know which side I'd come down on.
I don't think the point of the lawsuit is to increase the number of Asian students at the expense of Black and Hispanic ones; it's to get the Asian students fair treatment. If the Asian students feel that a wrong is being done to them—that they're being discriminated against—what would be a morally okay way of fighting that?
Go after affirmative action for rich kids and dumb athletes.
Does the lawsuit say "we want you to stop discriminating against Asians, but make sure you don't touch legacy admissions and athletic scholarships"? Or does it just say the first thing? Where does it target Black and Hispanic students? How could a lawsuit be filed that targeted the unfair admissions you want targeted?
That's not quite the full picture though. Rich kids aren't getting in "just" because they're rich. They're getting in because they're legacies, or rich and likely to to donate, or they're the daughter of Xi Jinping or they're Chelsea Clinton or James Franco or a star Lacrosse player.
My point being - the motivation behind it isn't to be fair in some way that you and would both disagree with. The motivation is to keep the fame, renown and business model of Harvard, Inc running. Fairness wasn't really ever the point. Which might be why it's extra awful that every Supreme Court Justice nowadays has to come from that little corner of the elite sphere.
But in any case, MY and you and me are not up against a vision of societal fairness, we're up against a self-interested business model.
Wading into this food fight. I don't think the Ivies and the equivalent little Ivies have increased their enrollment in my lifetime, even though the US population has doubled. Would be great if they could all announce a doubling of their admissions this year. I understand this would also double the population in lecture halls and small sections and require more bunkbeds in their dorms, but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Given the sizes of their endowments, this should be doable and would be good for the country. They could also stop admitting the children of foreign kleptocrats and fire half their deans when they announce the enrollment increase.
I think Harvard, like the service academies, sees itself in large part as a leadership school for the undergraduate population attached to a research university. If what it's looking for are young people with leadership potential it's not surprising it takes athletics and parentage into account. If it had a different mission, it could drop sports and become another Caltech or MIT, which haven't had the same success at developing leaders. JFK and Teddie Kennedy didn't get into Harvard based on smarts.
A major reason to care about racial composition at elite universities is social stability.
Elite universities are gatekeepers to social power. And every society will have some type of gatekeeper that fills this role.
Multi-racial societies face a stability risk in that people care that people like them are represented in positions of authority. Minority underrepresentation is destabalizing for society. Most people who read Slow Boring are familiar with this. US society has been destabalized by this for centuries, among other reasons it is bad.
Major under-representation can also be de-stabalizing. Amy Chua wrote a fine book on this, World on Fire. This hasn't been a US problem but has crippled other countries in the world
So yes ensuring the racial demographics bear some relation to the US demographics is a legitimate societal goal, for both majorities and minorities.
I respect this argument although I don't agree. Curious, then, how you feel about race-based affirmative action to a non-elite private university (let's use Drexel and Gonzaga as examples).
I don't enough about these universities beyond google. Both have acceptance rates above 70% at that rate. I don't think affirmative action matters at the margins for these universities one way or another.
Sorry if that seems like a copout. And I attended a non-selective public university FWIW so this is purely an outsider looking in
Problem with that is the Harvard cartel has a lot of power and they will use that power to maintain their position even if it isn't beneficial for society.
I’d like to share my experience as a first generation college student who went to an elite school (Vanderbilt) and credits it with much of my success in life. In my mind there are four main factors that made the education good:
1. It’s free. Vanderbilt and many other elite schools are essentially free if your parents make less than $70,000 a year which is the median American income. This is only about 15% of the student body which is a problem…
2. Meeting elites. Most readers of this blog probably don’t understand that when you grow up in a middle class life in an unfashionable town, you don’t understand possibilities. Your neighbors are plumbers, grocery store managers, and maybe a marketing guy who works in the city. The richest people in town are the car dealership guy and the local surgeon. If you’re smart, people tell you to be a doctor or lawyer. Finance? Consulting? Never heard of ‘em until I went to college. It’s nice to have friends with parents that actually have connections and can set you up with job interviews! I ended up become a doctor so this didn’t really matter but when I was considering finance it sure as hell would have.
3. Prestige. People and jobs respect you. You get boost just by saying where you went to college. People assume you’re smart in a way that even saying a top state school like UT Austin doesn’t give you.
4. Academic rigor. Like most of my classmates, I was top of my high school class and it wasn’t particularly difficult for me. Competing against a class of valedictorians is extremely difficult but brought out the best in me academically. Med school was easy compared to college. This was not the case for my med school classmates that went to state schools.
Anyway only tangentially related to the post but I think #2 is the biggest benefit for low-income students. If your dad is gonna get you a job at Citigroup or help you start your politics website a fancy college doesn’t help. If you never even though about working for McKinsey until you heard what that was in college that can change your whole life. I saw this first hand as lower-income friends (who universally all came into college for pre-med, teaching, or pre-law) switched into more exotic career tracks like “marketing analytics” or “financial analyst” that the rich kids had wanted to do from the start.
I friend of mine who went to Harvard explained his undergrad experience this way:
You know how you might meet someone at school and through the course of conversation might mention that you're going to go into sales, and they respond "Oh, you want to be in sales? My dad is in sales. I'll introduce you..." Well, at Harvard the same thing happens, it's just more like "Oh, you want to be president? My dad was president. I'll introduce you..."
At a certain level this doesn’t hold tho, and I’m curious if there’s any research on elite attitudes on perceived low/middle class entryism
They really don’t like it. The nice thing though is that an elite college teaches you to dress and talk and do activities that let you fake it though. You learn how to act at a fancy dinner and learn that spending $100 on a shirt should be treated as normal. I remember going to a fancy brunch place with my college girlfriend’s parents. The meal was $60 a head and I commented “Wow this is the nicest meal I’ve ever eaten!” (I think the most expensive restaurant I’d ever eaten at before that was a $20 steak) She got a lecture afterwards about how if we stayed together we would have very different attitudes about money and she couldn’t let that bother her. Learned my lesson from that lol
Undoubtedly true but owning a car dealership is impossible without already being rich and a lot of people don’t want to be doctors. It’s nice to know about other pathways to wealth
True but social status does matter. A columnist for the NYTimes probably makes less than a car dealer but who has more power in society?
Regarding students and early-career folks not succeeding in opportunities given due to affirmative action.
I was a very high-achieving upper-upper-middle-class white dude who took a nose dive at age 19 because my brain decided alcohol was delicious. At 27, while my college roommates were working at Goldman and McKinsey or finishing med school, I was making minimum wage and living in a terrible roach-infested apartment.
Quit the booze. Did well in a grad program at directional state commuter university. Started climbing the career ladder from many rungs below where I would have started had I not screwed up college/early-to-mid 20s.
My initial colleagues included many first-generation college grads. At the next rung up, I started running into young graduates who had benefited from diversity hiring programs.
Despite having a privileged background, I did not have any family or other connections that got me jobs or promotions. However, it was immediately striking how my background made moving up much easier.
Knowing how to behave in social settings was a big leg up. How to play golf or tennis. More importantly - the etiquette of those sports. How to act at a sporting event or fancy dinner.
The bigger advantage was the vaccine, if you will, that having grown up around very successful career people, provides against imposter syndrome. The corporate world is complicated. The list of skills and experiences you're supposed to have at leadership levels is beyond daunting. Of course, almost no one actually has all these skills. Of course, most managers and directors are as clueless about many aspects of their jobs as one would expect. But first-gen folks frequently struggle to understand this and get intimidated about moving up. When your idiot uncles are both VPs at big banks, you understand that it's all a Potemkin Village.
There's probably a lot to this but for whatever reason I can't say I've noticed the same things personally. I was thinking about the people I went to college with and how they turned out - I actually went to Caltech, which has a much more diverse social class background than other elite schools. A fair fraction of my classmates were the children of single moms, or blue collar parents, or dirt poor immigrants from very different cultures.
I have observed that the classmates who were sons and daughters of doctors or college professors, etc.. have by and large done much better than the children of single moms, social workers or mailmen. And the children of immigrants from places as culturally foreign as Albania or Kenya have done just as well as the children of doctors or professors, which makes me think "knowing how to act" is less of a factor.
But from what I observed it had little to do with imposter syndrome or knowing how to act. It's hard summarize, but a much larger fraction of the lower SES classmates went on to live more disorganized lives. There were messier choices around taking or leaving jobs or how they partnered romantically and a higher share with drug and alcohol problems. In the cases where I was close enough to basically know what they were thinking it didn't seem to be a lack of confidence. More often it was goals and prioritization of short-term versus long term.
I's a little depressing to think about.
Immigrants come from "striver" families - after all their parents packed up and moved.
People from the American underclass have a lot more longterm family issues than second generation immigrants do.
I've noticed the same thing in high school friends; the ones who I thought of as organized and able to plan, even if not brilliant, have done well by and large, and the ones who were both brilliant and organized own start-ups or have great management consulting careers or are doctors. The ones who weren't able to plan, delay gratification, or exert discipline are, by and large, living off their parents' money.
I went to a private Catholic prep school, so the latter had a nice safety net to fall back on, but if they didn't they'd be no better off than the disorganized peers you name.
Plus one. I owe my career (and because that's how I met my future wife, my entire family) to knowing the right person so I could get my foot in the door. I'm aware of what an advantage that was, so it's hard to begrudge people who never had that kind of advantage other forms of assistance.
That's a brilliant analysis.
I also think what you think of as "good money" has a huge influence on your earnings. If you grow up in a world where your idiot uncles are making $750k and $750k is considered about the minimum required to live respectably - then you'll know how to make that and make it a priority. If you grow up thinking $75k is good money- the same holds true.
“ possibly by intensifying the test-optional trend so it’s harder to quantify discrimination against Asian applicants.”
It will be amusing to watch a future Republican government in California mandate SAT/ACT-only admissions decisions. The party of merit, ladies and gentlemen!
Christ, is there anyone outside of the activist community the left is *not* trying to piss off?
When I read the dek, I was all ready to snark that we need to "[r]edistribute Supreme Court seats away from the richest, most exclusive schools", and thankfully as I continued to read, Matt included an entire paragraph on that. Well done!
Own the Libs by Tax Endowments Ivy League Endowments?
The ultimate own the libs move is to to tax endowments and earmark that revenue for racial reparations.
Douglass-DuBois-X University has a certain ring to it.
Would SES based affirmative action pass SCOTUS muster? Matt has mentioned that since Black people are disproportionately low income, programs that target low income people help Black people. It’s also a lot more politically palatable.
And I think we should also take seriously the proposition that it's just straight up more just. That in fact black people in the 1% are not more worthy of educational subsidies than white people in the bottom 10%.
Yeah, I'm not sure I agree totally with your last point- credentials help black job applicants more (as in they'll hire a white guy from State Central University over a black dude from Harvard in many cases, but the white guy does mostly just as well with high or mid tier credentials). But I'd agree the current system is unjust both economically and racially. I don't know how racial justice can be claimed when Asian Americans who have definitely experienced state racism as a historical group (internment in WWI, Chinese exclusion act, etc etc) are actively disadvantaged by the current system in favor of rich whites.
I'm not denying some amount of validity to the insight that a black person can offset racial bias by more-elite credentials, but I think you're overstating the magnitude of the effect considerably there.
I also think that class bias is real, and people who have the various mannerisms and tells of someone who grew up in a low-education/low-income environment can also benefit from credentials in a similar way.
Yes I totally agree, it's both and. Just specifically they do studies where they trick interviewers into revealing those biases, the same as they do with housing discrimination where black families have their home appraised lower than a white family in the same exact house under experimental conditions. But I totally agree that class performance- in the sense of knowing how to act around rich people- is a big part of it too.
Yeah, I mean I definitely see the value in affirmative action. I would really like for schools to take a broader definition of what it means to be disadvantaged or discriminated against.
I think also I feel a little weird about focusing on getting people into elite schools. To me, it feels a little like conceding the point that there is extra value in a person who went to one of them, which I dislike tremendously and at the end of the day will only ever help a miniscule number of people.
I definitely think you need to incorporate SES. Like, it seems like affirmative action doesn't distinguish between an Asian kid who had private tutoring vs. and Asian kid who grew up poor in a bad school district. Those are two very different people even if they are the same race.
I get what you’re trying to say, but among the reasons “Asians” outperform academically is that those two groups of students are often made up of the same individuals.
Asian parents both here and in East Asia scrimp and save for anything presenting an educational/academic edge for their kids.
Is there some evidence for that? Tbh, it sounds like a stereotype to me. Also, a lot of things that get kids ahead, like tutoring or SAT classes, are expensive so there's a question of who can afford it for their kids in addition to who wants it for their kids
Is there evidence in the sense of rigorous survey or study data, not that I've seen.
Is there evidence in that even lower-income Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese-American neighborhoods nationwide are awash in test preparation centers, fliers for extra class work, language schools, and whatnot, and that the children of middle- and lower-income Asian immigrants tend to outperform expected metrics for academic attainment, yes.
As for the East Asia bit, I lived there and taught SAT prep and elite college admissions courses on the side for extra pocket money. Not all (not even a majority) of the students were upper-middle class or wealthy; quite the opposite actually.
Totally agree ^ and also it's not clear to me that affirmative action currently helps either group bc I think it's tailored to proportion of US population or something? I know specifically it targets Black representation from my own family experience but I'm not sure Asians "count" as nonwhite currently. (Even though they are)
I think that's super interesting b/c there's tons of arbitrariness in defining race. It's not really a crisply defined, scientific concept. I might be wrong but I think you can define yourself however you want on these applications
Other problem is Harvard and other elites aren't really aggressively help African American decedents of slaves. Instead they use Affirmative Action programs to recruit disproportionately African immigrants.
That does nothing to mitigate the harms of slavery and 5 centuries of brutalization of African Americans.
The conflating of African immigrants and ADOS is a bigger and bigger problem each year as the former grows in population
The framing “SES-based affirmative action will still help black people” was brought to you by the same sponsors as “Medicare for all will help historically marginalized populations”.
Lol.
Those seem like perfectly reasonable framings for the appropriate audiences.
No. Literally never.
Both because there's no possible way to confine them to the appropriate audiences in the age of social media, and because the only "appropriate audience" which thinks in these terms is the 5% of young people in the activist community.
There are two appropriate framings for almost everything:
"Here's how X will help everyone." and "Here's how X will help you."
And "here's how X will help you" is what "SES-based affirmative action will help black people" is, when speaking to a black audience.
As to the idea that people will notice that you say different things to different audiences, that really only hurts if you say untrue or risible things to one audience.
If politician X goes to a black church or NAACP meeting (or for that matter a majority-white college group where the audience does really want to hear about how historically marginalized communities will be aided) or whatever and says, "SES-based affirmative action will help black people," and then someone says, "LOOK WHAT POLITICIAN X SAID," then the appropriate response is, "Yeah, I did say that, it was true, and I stand by it."
Your "black church meeting" is hilarious. I've been to Philadelphia political events held in black churches. One of the larger ones is right freaking across the street, and it's rather politically active. On the basis of that experience, I can't even *fathom* getting up in front of an audience of my neighbors and saying something like "I support M4A because it will help historically marginalized populations like you access healthcare."
They don't want to hear it and many of them would find it actively annoying or insulting, at least as much as so as a room full of Latino immigrants and the descendants thereof would find being referred to repeatedly at Latinx.
"I support M4A because it will make sure all of us, everyone in this room, has good access to healthcare their whole lives" is a better framing literally 100% of the time for any and every audience.
The only thing that would permit someone to believe otherwise is if they've surrounded themselves by the college-educated white kids you name in your latter example, and I find it profoundly stupid that anyone should ever have to pander to the racial sensibilities of a bunch of lily-white, mostly privileged youth activists.
Doubly so when such pandering comes at the expense of crafting a durable coalition to actually govern.
Look, in the end you'll get what you want, and that makes the contours of the future pretty clear; the Democrats are going to first lose commanding advantages in Hispanic and Asian-American voting habits, and then watch even black votes slip away as people fail to respond to or connect with this sort of language and the zero-sum IDpol thinking that underlies it.
What the Republicans *do* with that dominance could be just about anything, but I'm increasingly certain they're going to achieve it.
Didn't M4A help marginalized populations? I'm confused what the problem is.
Well, Matt mentioned the Top X% plan from Texas, which is kind of SES based due to how high schools typically are composed, and that was directly upheld by SCOTUS. Granted, it was a 4-3 decision (Scalia was dead and Kagan recused due to past SG work on the case), and as usual, Kennedy was the deciding crossover vote that's no longer on the Court, thus I wouldn't put it past this SCOTUS to overturn such a fresh precedent, but at least it is a precedent.
I really like the top x% plan because it helps rural white working class as well as non-white working class, and ceases to give advantages to the thin sliver of the most privileged people of color.
That means that it is both a more soundly-based program in technocratic terms and that it is a much broader political base, making it much more secure against interference.
I attended a very competitive public magnet high school in Texas shortly after the top 10% rule was implemented.
I knew people with 95th+ percentile SATs rejected by UT-Austin, which was packed with top 10% admits. I knew people who avoided competitive high schools to get top 10%. I attended a public university in Texas (not UT-A) and saw a bunch of top 10%ers crash and burn.
A rigid "top %" admission plan is subject to gamesmanship. It should be coupled with a SAT/ACT minimum to prevent mismatch & there should be an alternate admission path (perhaps based on SAT/ACT percentile) so kids aren't penalized as much for attending competitive high schools.
The other thing is that kids going to ultra-selective privates/magnets/publics are often not shooting to go to public schools at all-they trying to get into ivies/private colleges. I went to Rice University in Houston and a good chunk of my class all came from fancy texas private schools (which again gets back to top 10% lifting up the marginal student while selective students/schools still get to be selective)
I also went to Rice (hi!) and I remember being surprised by this—I had gone to a middle-of-the-pack public high school out of state and knew one person who went to a private school locally, and suddenly in college I knew multiple people whose private Texas high schools cost more than Rice did (sticker price). Anecdotally it seemed like the phenomenon of only shooting for private colleges was concentrated among private high schools, not so much public, even competitive public.
1. Getting rid of magnet school hits me as mostly a good idea.
2. If the top x% leads to parents supporting more class desegregation, that's a huge benefit.
Top 10% doesn’t mean that most of the students are from that group - people who did well at good schools but not in the top 10% are still a lot of the incoming class.
Something like 75% of UT-Austin's incoming freshman are admitted under the Texas top % law.
On the one hand I understand this is _kind_ of a thing here in Austin in that there are some really top tier high schools etc where top 10% is super competitive. But...
Most people who do well there can go to one of the more selective non-public schools.
Very popular with the people who oppose magnet schools, I'd expect.
Fisher v. University of Texas was not upholding the Top X% policy, it was about affirmative action for the students being holistically reviewed who were not automatic admits under the Top X%. UT Austin has a carveout to the Top X% policy where they can cap the Top X% admits to 75% of the incoming freshmen class, and the remaining 25% are admitted through holistic review where some amount of affirmative action policies probably take place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_(2016)
On the narrow question of whether it would be legal -- yes. Race-based affirmative action is specifically in dangerous territory because racial discrimination is illegal, and SCOTUS has basically been making an exception for pro-minority discrimination for the last half century. But discriminating on class is a perfectly acceptable action. I can't say "I only want white kids at my school", but I'm perfectly allowed to say, "I only want rich kids at my school." Thus the status of the reverse ("I want to give black people a leg up" and "I want to give poor people a leg up")
It would be darkly funny if right-wing jurists of the future start warming up to "disparate impact" reasoning and strike down SES-based affirmative action too on that basis.
It would help some low SES whites, some Black and Latine students, and some groups of Asians, while middle and upper class members of those groups would be worse off. To my understanding this does not solve the problem of Asians vs whites outside the affirmative action purview. Like, right now if admissions were just test and grade based Asians would be much larger proportions of elite student bodies.
I have a friend who is Korean American and she married a white guy. The running joke is the kid comes home from school with a B+ and the dad goes, “Wow, a B+ that’s pretty good.” And she’s furious.
The question then is are the grades and test scores repressing superior ability or more parental pressure and involvement. And absent parental pressure, will those high grades and test scores translate into a similarly high level of career success.
If it’s mostly due to parental pressure then more Asians at highly selective schools would tend to weaken those schools hold on access to elite careers.
Well, besides specific roles like surgeons or maybe certain engineers, career success is much more based on social status/networking/prestige vs book smarts. Like I think the parental pressure encourages them to outperform but they're not *cheating*. If they weren't smart enough no amount of pressure would work.
And I went to a school that was about 50% white 30% Asian, and I was a black honors student (one of a handful, immigrant background) but I remember us being so amazed and confused that many, many white parents did not seem to care at all as long as the kids passed/graduated high school. Or cared way more about sports performance or other values. I don't know if millennial us-born Asian parents will replicate their experience with their kids, is my main thing. We were not having a lot of fun being elite.
Yes same. If I have kids the whole point will be they'll be the third generation and inherit wealth from my parents owning a home and me making upper middle class money, so they can enjoy their lives and be mediocre if they want (or good at stuff that's less prestigious! Whatever they want!) Like my experience paid off monetarily imo but at what cost? Why did a high PSAT score (a test I took at 15-16) get me a full ride at a private university? I totally totally agree with that as a goal for the next gen.
Hear hear
This feels like a very bold claim to me. My prior would be that the vast majority of American workers serve in an organization that has a modestly functional pay scale and that most of them receive promotions on the basis of doing good work.
Not 99% of workers and not every last dime of their salary, but definitely not "besides specific roles" and "much more based".
I think good work in the workplace bears very little resemblance to good academic work, is what I'm saying. I don't think academic performance is as predictive as people think. Like, it can help select for drive and those kinds of intangibles, but working in a corporate setting requires learning an additional skillset. I don't mean to disparage how hard people work or say they're undeserving; almost all these aspects are skills that come easily to some and not to others, and I don't think they're objectively less valuable. Being a good manager/knowing how to delegate for example when in school incentives usually push the highest achievers to do all the work of a group project to ensure a good grade.
Also sorry just reread your comment- very few companies have reasonable pay scales. Post recession you have to change companies every couple years and that's how you get a 20% raise. It's not very efficient but firms are not as willing to invest in talent over the long-term as they apparently once were.
Well, my parents were a first gen black immigrant and a first gen to attend college black woman who went to segregated elementary schools. So they got me into the room with the rich kids but I still felt like I had a lot to prove? I feel like so much of this is human and therefore messy and not easily reducible to data. But I want to be in a position where my kids can take more than four years to finish college, or come home for a year, and it not ruin their entire lives bc I can be a safety net. That's third gen 😂
I'm a 20th generation white guy who made sure his kids grinded just as hard and didn't expect any inheritance. They'd earn it on their own.
Lol, my plan is to hand the whole empire over to her if and only if she proves worthy.
Hopefully there will be an actual empire, haha.
Living in a capitalist society and economy without capital sucks. That's a different question from how you raise your kids and what expectations you instill in them.
Yes, because class is not a protected characteristic, it's perfectly legal to target benefits at the poor.
There is fundamental value to composing a class not just of the most technically smart, but putting together a class that includes driven and well connected individuals. Maybe I’m biased by my own experiences attending two top 5 public universities, but there was nothing wrong with the instruction there. And knowing many friends who went to UCF, USF, FSU, FIU, FAU, etc (the lower UCs of Florida), there’s not much throwing money at the problem would do to make the experience better. The curriculum is the same, especially for hard sciences and engineering.
What you’re missing is the competition and connections. Students at the lower schools care less about learning and care more about finishing college with the least amount of effort (and learning!) possible. And they have worse connections to start life, and given their lack of drive, will have worse connections throughout life.
That’s my take — at least as someone who went to top public universities and works in places where almost everyone went to an Ivy or equivalent (Eg MIT).
This just isn't true. Anyone who has studied math knows, for example, that Calc 2 is the killer. If you can learn it and survive it you'll probably be fine with higher math classes. But lots of students in CS, Engineering, etc. decide to change majors to something less useful specifically because they get to Calc 2 and fail it.
So, if we were going to construct a high-impact intervention, would it be to help a group of students who were already going to pass Calc 2, or the marginal group of students who probably could pass it IF they had opportunities like tutoring or supplemental instruction for that class? The curriculum might be the same, but the role of a school (should be) to help people get through the curriculum, not just to provide a venue where high-achieving students learn what they could've learned anyway on their laptops at home.
As for your claim that students care less about learning, that's certainly true in the aggregate! There are more students at UCF who meet your description than at an elite school, obviously. But that doesn't mean that population is all, or even a majority, of the student body. Believe it or not, most people who attend college are interested in succeeding. That is why they are in college. Many of them don't even know that according to the elite striver class norms they're supposed to think that college is about meeting important people and doing things outside of class -- they just think school is about passing their classes with good grades. That's another area where additional resources make a big difference. First generation students need a lot of help forming connections and networks.
> Many of them don't even know that according to the elite striver class norms they're supposed to think that college is about meeting important people and doing things outside of class -- they just think school is about passing their classes with good grades.
For this, I would like this comment fifty times if I could.
Totally. When I was still in community college, I dated a girl who grew up in an affluent suburb and was attending UNC, and the difference on this front was very stark, to the point where it was a bit of a culture shock for me. The kids at UNC weren't really any smarter, or even harder-working, but they had the idea of making connections and forging relationships for the future kind of drilled into their heads in a way that we had not. Like, these kids prepped for their ACTs and SATs, and I....just kind of didn't take mine? LIke, I didn't consciously avoid them out of some rebellious streak, they just kind of came and went when I was in high school and I never really noticed. It's weird in retrospect, because I wasn't a burnout or anything, I was like a B student, it just wasn't part of the culture at my high school that the ACT or SAT was a thing that you automatically do.
Yes this is the biggest thing. Like my mom came from a background (single mother who didn't finish high school) where she had to learn all that stuff from scratch, and then it was *drilled* into us. I'm often dismayed by friends who don't know you're supposed to negotiate salary when you get a job offer or other things that feel "obvious" to me but are actually more like the which fork to use kind of class signifiers in terms of access to the Rules of Success or whatever.
I think that's a little too generous to the CC students, many of whom would not be capable of succeeding in a more challenging environment. I agree though that, just as your case shows, the distributions overlap. (FWIW I took a couple CC classes.)
Your point about not taking the SAT/ACT is a great one. I saved this tweet from Susan Dynarski, who found in a study of students in Michigan that you get a 50%(!) increase in identification of college-ready students among low income kids by mandating the ACT/SAT.
https://twitter.com/dynarski/status/1396161801218400257
I remember that study. That finding was mind-blowing.
We all know social science is full of crap, so I'd love to see it repeated. But it makes a certain sort of sense that SAT/ACT tracks with income in part because even those who take it in the first place already start to be sorted by income.
OT but had to note your reference to "burnout!" I once spent many hours with a bunch of friends, most of them Japanese, discussing the regional US etymology of "burnout" (which was definitely the preferred term in my part of the Rustbelt) and its synonyms in other parts of the country. Memories!
(Also, I took the tests but wasn't even aware that prepping was a thing! I happened to be an unexpectedly great standardized test taker, but I was so clueless I didn't even understand my scores at first.)
Furthermore, this may be true in the Discourse Class, but it *just isn't true* for many others.
The owners of my firm all went to my alma mater's biggest rival. There's ribbing about it from time to time. But guess what? They hired me because I was highly qualified and they retain me because I'm highly effective, not because my diploma has the correct sigil stamped on it.
I might go so far as to wonder if those professional classes that are most sorted by the good old boy's network are ones that probably didn't require a college education at all.
If you have kids who wouldn’t otherwise pass Calc 2 to pass, would they be as likely to succeed in a highly cognitively demanding career as someone who passed it without help?
If not, isn’t failing Calc 2 giving them valuable insight into their ability?
I think it's unclear whether they could eventually understand calc 2 if given more time and help, or if everyone who isn't immediately good at something is in a lower tier of general cognition. I really think making those calls when people are 17-22 for the most part is a dumb waste of human capital. I almost failed AP micro and then graduated with a 3.8 in my econ major because I got some help with that first roadblock and could take it from there. How much of this is about the ego of people who pass calc 2 the first time, or a culture where any failure is unacceptable?
“I almost failed AP micro and then graduated with a 3.8 in my econ major because I got some help with that first roadblock and could take it from there.”
So you failed AP micro and changed majors to accounting. Maybe that would have been a better fit and you’d be much more successful now?
It’s like if someone wanted to major in math but couldn’t quite do it. So they switched to economics as the math was easier and ended up in a successful career in finance. That’s better than being the world’s worst mathematician.
But I wasn't failing because I was incapable lol. There are other reasons students struggle. I didn't like my teacher and I was overloaded on AP coursework (AP is a program in high school) and travel debate tournaments etc. I'm saying, once I got over the psychological block of being challenged for the first time, I was perfectly capable. Also people don't work in their specific major most of the time, besides engineers. At least in the US you're not walled off from potential careers that firmly.
But being capable is a far cry from being able
to succeed or thrive in a career.
I did very well in school, and have a double major in math and computer science. But for some reason Linear Algebra was always a pain for me, and this also manifested in giving me a lot of trouble in an Electrical Engineering course I had to take where I had to calculate things about circuits with resistances etc - I barely passed that class (that is, got a C - anything less wouldn't have counted for credit). After that I never had to deal with the stuff again.
The evidence is not that this reflects a general lack of math ability on my part. Maybe I'm just really bad at linear algebra in particular (possible!) but I might have benefitted from getting additional help/tutoring on this. So I tend to agree with Chloe and hate to rule out targeted interventions to help people get over a hump. They might _not_ help in any individual case, but don't write people off.
I mean, I don't think Bronx is entirely wrong that it's a sign that I might not want to focus on something that was ALL linear algebra - but graphics programmers need to worry about this sometimes and if it's only 2% of your job, you don't have to be awesome at it to do the other 98%, but you have to be passable.
It is of course a mixture of time/help and cognition. *One of* the reasons why some college students are able to pass classes like these "without help" is that they had more help before college. They had better instruction, more practice doing other kinds of difficult math (or whatever the subject is), and are more used to having to push themselves to keep up with their peers. In some cases, though, it is about cognition. Usually it's a mixture of the two, but it could be 90%/10% for one kid and 10%/90% for another kid.
The liberal mindset says: Our highest priority should be ameliorating the unfairness of some kids not doing as well in college math only because they didn't the benefit of the same kinds of prep in high school. The conservative mindset says: That unfairness is not my problem, and if it is at all possible for those kids to overcome that unfairness on their own, then it's on them to do so.
I think (as Rory pointed out once) that passing advanced math (and thus tutoring) is often about having a rock solid grasp of the previous level of math. I think anyone who is capable of passing Calc2 with assistance can likely pass it without assistance, assuming they are rockstars at algebra.
Maybe? My personal feeling is that being a web developer is much easier than learning calculus, though. And if, once you get calc 2, you can proceed to learn calc 3 or diffeq or linear algebra or [whatever], obviously you're good enough.
This might be a fair point if we had a shortage of cognitively demanding jobs and we needed a filtering mechanism to get the best candidates, but in fact we have the opposite situation. We will be better off with more programmers, engineers, etc. graduating than do currently.
We wouldn’t be better off with more engineers who really aren’t smart enough to be engineers.
Sure, but these kids aren't idiots. It's not like you can take a stupid person and teach them calculus with enough effort, let alone getting them to pass classes after calc 2. Higher math requires a sort of paradigm shift and comfort with alien concepts that comes more quickly to some than others. Doesn't mean the people it comes to more slowly are incapable of doing math.
+1000. Being fast at learning isn't the same thing as being innately more intelligent, and I say that as a generally fast learner.
Aren’t these courses telling at least some people (correctly) that they just aren’t smart enough.
Again capable vs being able to succeed and thrive in a career.
I never got higher than a C in Calc and failed Calc 2 the first time and am an Actuary now. Calculus is boring haha.
Wild to speak so authoritatively on the inner desires and ambitions of like, 95% of college attendees. I mean if you were right it would justify privilege but not why Whites should be privileged over Asians. I don't think the literature backs you up, though; more educational resources for worse schools have a much bigger impact for similar reasons as why fiscal stimulus money has a higher multiplier effect in the hands of the poor and middle class. Maybe I'm wrong and you are inherently better than everyone else, I don't know you, but I don't think your experience is generalizable especially since you never attended a mid tier school or ran any studies on their students.
We really need a downvote button.
I think you may have an issue with selection bias. You’re not dealing with those who had a deep passion for learning but struggle to translate that passion into a successful career.
My overarching theory on everything college admissions/pricing/attendance/etc. is that the source of the problem is the lack of rigor in public high schools. We've incentivized graduation rates and college attendance rates at the cost of actual education. Grade inflation has moved us into a world where a BA is now what a high school diploma was 50 years ago. The answer is to raise public school year to year standards, hold more kids back and give out fewer diplomas, while offering more non-four year college tracks to success in the workforce. Offer 16 year-olds a 2 year program at the local CC to learn a skill. Make an 18yo with a high school diploma a valuable asset. Constrain college admissions to those likely to succeed pursuing a truly advanced degree.
This is all well and good but I think misses the core political question. Is affirmative action supposed to be the end of a racially gerrymandered past or the beginning of a (differently) racially gerrymandered future? People are right to read proponents as supporters of the latter, and, based on the polls Matt cites, I think it's a good sign for America that healthy majorities reject that approach to public policy.
How robust is the conclusion that "meritocratic sorting generates an inefficient outcome because educational resources are more valuable when targeted at low-SES students than when targeted at the best students"?
I find that very surprising, so much so that I just don't believe it. I would've guessed that resources are more valuable when targeted at the highest-potential (i.e. best) students, who would probably have good outcomes without any resources, but even better outcomes with more resources. Is the research measuring the upper tail of outcomes? How can it be that the best students don't benefit from the best education?
I think it might depend. My gut reaction is that I would want *teaching* resources to be directed at lower-SES students: the "best students" in college often teach themselves most of the material anyway, at least until they get to upper-level classes. But I would want the best research lab opportunities to be directed toward the "best students."
One reason why I think this is that AFAIK real-world outcomes are quite right-tailed. It's common for one "successful" person to have 10x better outcome than another "successful" person - there's lots of inequality even at the top, and probably measuring by money understates reality - so I would expect improving top students could be quite impactful.
Your income can only drop from median to zero. It can rise from median to Bezos. There's your right tail.
I think there is a missing "at the margin" from that sentence, though it did appear several times.
This is, the most efficient outcome has a slope where the top academically talented get more spent on them, but the current slope is steeper than the most efficient outcome.
See also https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-misguided-exam-school-debate
I went to an elite publicly-funded high school and an elite university and as a personal life experience, it's absolutely delightful to be an academically-oriented young person surrounded by academically-oriented peers and have excellent teachers and lots of resources.
I really wish it were true that it was the correct way for society to spend limited educational resources. Unfortunately, Matt keeps presenting evidence that it is not.
This presumes that the current shape of our “meritocracy” succeeds in finding the best and brightest, for one. It also presumes that they need massively greater per capita resources to reach their potential compared to “ordinary” students, which seems to cut against the limited evidence we have.
Either proposition being incorrect would doom your theory, and it seems that both are.
Test scores seem to do pretty well at predicting life outcomes; is there some reason to think they aren't identifying the best and brightest?
I'm not sure "reach their potential" makes sense as a concept; I would just expect everyone to have better outcomes the more resources they get, rather than a ceiling after which more resources are useless.
Surely there is, if not a hard ceiling, at least a less and less favorable cost curve on further improvement. We can't just take a random basically strong student, lavish $50M on them, and produce a superhumanly intelligent result.
Test scores are good at telling 40th percentile from 60th percentile. Is there any evidence that they’re good at telling 99th percentile from 98th? On your story, that is what matters.
Surely the notion of diminishing returns applies at least as much so to the concentration of academic resources as it does anywhere else?
Of course. But are they diminishing more for better students than they are for worse students?
Because they’re receiving vastly more per capita than others or than any point in history with no discernible benefit.
Yes because grades only go up to 100. So as long as you are in a limited program of a certain amount of credits, help past perfect performance in every class doesn't really matter?
What matters is real-life outcomes, not grades, and those are not capped at 100
Actually there are some studies that say more resources lead to worse outcomes. A lot of these are related to pre-k and the cause could be pressuring kids to learn things they aren’t developmentally ready for.
But the same could be true of college. If you have a prof teaching accounting at East State U so someone can get a job as an accountant and maybe become a CPA one day and replace them with someone with a PhD in accounting who focuses on the “theory of accounting” and delving into the history and arcane of accounting that might similarly backfire.
I think this depends on how the meritocratic qualifications are weighed and how you weigh your results. If the goal was to find the next Einstein (or Feynman) then I suspect meritocratic sorting as done now is probably optimal. If you are looking to maximize total earnings gain from attendance then it makes sense to add lower performers who would benefit more.
You're describing a society that doesn't gave enough nurses to care for the elderly, but has developed four different ED medications in only 25 years.
First - those ED medications actually have a number of other uses as well. One of my colleagues mentioned she was taking one to assist with poor circulation in her hands, fingers, etc.
Second - Do you really think this is why there is insufficient supply for nurses if the demand is so high?
That’s a fine argument for the strongly merit-based disbursal of investor and research funding, not educational opportunity/resources.
Beyond Matt's main point, but I do think the fact that you have a significant Affirmative Action case about to be decided by the Supreme Court that has drawn a lot of interest from Asian-Americans and the President has basically come out and said he will not consider an Asian-American for the court (despite there never being Asian representation on the court) is a pretty good distillation of the problems with the current trajectory of the Democratic Party.
I wonder how differently Mitch McConnell's nuclear ploy would have played if Obama had nominated an Asian-American justice instead of Merrick Garland.
Obama played the politics on that one wrong. He went with a bland moderate. Conservatives opposition was already maxed among right-wing court watchers because it meant a liberal filling a conservative spot.
Obama needed to get Democrats to care about the court. He should have picked a candidate that would have excited core Democratic voters in the MidWest: African Americans.
Note: I am normally go for the median voter. I am not one of these Warren voter types who think the key is always moving left.
The chart from The Economist is misleading. The Asian-American % of students shouldn't necessarily track with the absolute population of Asian-Americans. Since 1990, the total US population has grown from 250mm to 330mm. So it seems that the share of CalTech students that are Asian-American has probably grown faster than the Asian-American share of the broader population.
None of that matters to me, personally. I'm part of the 73% that believe in race-blind admissions. But let's be careful about the data we use to argue for this.
I was going to write the exact same thing, that chart made my head explode. And the little asterisk note that seems to imply that they're counting non-Americans, ie foreign nationals??? Am I misreading that? I feel like the Economist is just trolling us with this chart...it's totally obfuscating.
I had the same thought. Given the number though (a million or so), it has to Asian-Americans and people of Asian origin living in the US.
It's truly a terrible chart. Switching from counts to %s in unforgivable, haha. And that's a nice catch on that asterisk, that also confuses things.
But...all that said, I think the share of Asians at Caltech has actually trended fairly closely with the broader population % from the Census. And Caltech has a much higher % of Hispanics than peer elite schools as well. So I think it is a decent proxy for what admissions without athletics / legacies and AA would look like.
I have another comment where I laid out a bunch more stats and links if you're curious.
Placing all the costs of affirmative action on Asians (which is probably the most diverse intra-racial category) to win social justice points and to maintain a large proportion of an admitted cohort as rich & white is pretty perverse.
Separate and apart from the larger argument, I would like to quibble with the Economist graph (2nd graph), from which Matt draws the (unsupported, IMO) conclusion, "A large share of elite universities seem to be applying de facto quotas to prevent the Asian-origin share of their student body from rising in line with their share of the population." It's a mis-leading graph - the conclusion it is clearly trying to lead you to is that Caltech is just following population trends, and the Ivies are not. But it's an apples-to-oranges comparison - the bar graph is comprised of raw numbers; the trendline is share. As a % of California's population, some light googling tells me that Asians made up 13.0% in 2010 versus 9.6% in 1990 (though I didn't break it down by age cohort, as this graph did, and the graph goes to 2013, I assume the numbers are roughly similar for this critique).
Without seeing the underlying data and just eyeballing the chart, it looks like the median Asian-American Ivy enrollment has ticked up from maybe the low teens to the upper teens - in any event, not dramatically dis-similar to proportional growth in the population.* Whereas Caltech has jumped from the low-20's to the low-40's. So if anyone is an outlier versus overall trends, it's Caltech, not the Ivies - the exact opposite to what the graph purports to show.
Long-time subscriber/reader (via the morning email), first time commenter. Love the overall quality of the content, but this could be better.
*It's also unclear whether the graph is talking about Californian Asian-American admittance rates, or the entire population, so that may also have an impact. Have I mentioned I think it's a terrible graph?
That's a very good catch - switching from raw counts to proportions is a huge problem.
It's worth noting that probably 70-80% of Caltech undergrads come from outside the state, and the national percentage of Asians grew a fair bit faster than it did in California. I found 2.5% Asian nationally in 1990 vs 5.4% or so in 2010 when I googled for that stat.
It's also worth plugging into the analysis that the share of Hispanic Undergrads at Caltech is currently 22% - unusually high for an elite school and close to tracking the share of the general pop in that age bracket. It was much much lower in the mid 90s (and so was the % of college-aged Hispanics with a high school diploma).
Maybe a better compare is Stanford, since it's also a private California school. Google tells me Stanford is 25% Asian, 18% Hispanic, 7% Black, 28% White, 36% California origin, which is a bit higher Asian than the Ivies.
Or MIT, being a heavy STEM school: 18% Asian, 9% Hispanic, 30% White, 4% Black
Caltech's admission's has some "soft" affirmative action but as far as I can tell it's just at the pipeline and advertising portion of the process (free airfare for females who want to visit, for example), even though their official admission's office talks the usual stuff about "safe spaces" and "we're not doing enough" etc.
So I feel like they are a pretty good proxy for what admissions look like without affirmative action.
MIT:
https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-institute-of-technology/student-life/diversity/#ethnic_diversity
Stanford:
https://facts.stanford.edu/academics/undergraduate-profile/
Caltech:
https://registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-statistics