To imagine that today’s college-admissions officers can step outside the failings of humanity, making subjective judgment calls in secret with racial enlightenment that is unprecedented in human history, is folly. It may have seemed possible and even done more good than harm when America was mostly grappling with black and white. Now that we’re asking people to calibrate the “diversity value” of American blacks, Africans, Hispanics, Thais, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, and many more besides? The prudent course is acknowledging the limits of our wisdom. Alas, intellectual humility and restraint are not among the Ivy League’s virtues.
I strongly recommend taking judgment out of the college admissions process altogether. Humans over-emphasize their skill. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow, describes a formative experience in which he and others thought that their judgments in placement decisions for the Israeli army were sounder than they actually were.
In the case of elite colleges, does judgement really have anything to do with these unofficial Asian quotas? I suspect that something else is really going on. Perhaps the schools are worried about alienating affluent white alumni who might be less generous with donations if they see the mix of students on campus has changed substantially since they attended or feel as though their kids’ chances of getting in have shrunk because a slew of tiger-mothered Asians are crushing the SAT.
Alternatively, it’s possible these elite colleges want the mix of students on campus to more closely mirror the racial make-up of America more generally so as to maintain the perception of fairness (we’re just taking the best of the best from each demographic!) in the eyes of the public and thus protect their reputation and their brand. To do that, they pretty much have to hold down the number of Asian students admitted to an arbitrary percentage.
Or it might be some combination of the two. Or it might be something else altogether that I’m not thinking of. I will say, though, that I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand the stereotypes Conor refers to as being being without validity. It may very well be the case that many of the top Asian students are terrific test-takers, but are decidedly less terrific in other applications. But like Conor, I seriously doubt that elite colleges reached this conclusion via rigorous review of Asian student performance in classroom discussions, 3 am dorm room banter, and other “interpersonal dynamics.” That claim, even if true, is merely serving as a cover for some other goal to be achieved.
If the goal really is a smell test–to make the college *look* right–then there is no substitute for human judges.
Indeed I have a hard time knowing what else the purpose of a top college is. I figure, they should try to look college-ey, so as to be a honeypot for grants and donations, and to be a suitable meeting place for an exclusive social club.
> I strongly recommend taking judgment out of the college admissions
> process altogether.
So true. From a 2005 New Yorker review of a book by Philip Tetlock:
“In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. ***Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate***….”
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1?printable=true
Now, wait a minute Conor. Why, on the one hand, is it fine to believe Unz’s well-demonstrated premise but not the corollary? Asians are different in one psychological characteristic – cognitive talent – but it’s racist to believe they’re different another way – personality and temperament?
Unz shows convincingly that Asians, held back by an open-secret, race-conscious quota system, should be even more demographically-disproportionately overrepresented in the elite institutions if they judged on merit – and that therefore Asians are significantly different on average – certainly in their grades and test-scores – from the rest of the applicant population. So much so that the admissions committees admit that they put their thumbs on the scale to keep them out.
It’s not just ok to believe this true fact, – it’s what the admissions committees actually believe and admit they believe. Otherwise they would simply try to deny the charge of ethnic bias – which still rankles many Americans. Instead, in that NYT discussions, they defend their “subjective, holistic” (legally inscrutable) capricious, black-box admissions system, with the implication that any seeming “merit-underrepresentation” of Asians is merely an inadvertent and non-invidious “disparate-impact” on that population because of their other correlated personality differences.
In a way, it’s progress towards accepting human reality. Not too long ago, the default ideological position would have been one of equality of groups, which is at least a consistent position. And so the charge would have been the opposite – that obviously elite institutions (and, by implication, the test-makers) are discriminating in favor of Asians which is the only thing that could explain their over-representaiton. This dogma is, of course, so absurd that no one makes that charge. It cannot survive contact with reality, and it continues (popularly, though just as absurdly) only to be made when a non-white group is under-represented in some selection process, in an argument in favor for affirmative action in that field.
The other consistent position, human biodiversity, is that average characteristics of different ethic groups can vary in all sort of ways – physical and psychological, and in correlated manners. And that different ethnic proportionate representations in any institution which has a selection mechanism which chooses from the far right of the tail of the distribution for any characteristic are simply bound to come up – which of course is what we actually observe. You might, with full justice, call this the Larry Summers (or Razib Kahn) position.
This perspective would have no difficulty accepting the fact that Northeast Asians have higher cognitive abilities on average, but that they also tend naturally to have more reserved and docile personalities and shy and introverted temperaments. This is not just important to providing students with things like lively discussions and vigorous debates in class participation, but it also seems to go along with general social skill and a a predictor of alumni leadership / management ability- something of critical significance to all colleges, and especially the Ivy League. Unz says that Jews seem to be “overrepresented” given their recent group achievements, but it seems just as likely that Jews tend to disproportionately contribute just these desirable characteristics to their campuses. Furthermore, being a generation or two longer in the country than most Asians, their equally admissions-obsessive parents have figured out that it is these attributes, and no longer sheer academic proficiency, which are the ones to emphasize in their children’s experience, education, and applications. The focus in Jewish families on math, science, engineering, and medicine, in particular, has plummeted as they seek a kind of “comparative advantage” elsewhere in their skill set.
Again – these are not idle speculations. There is a whole industry of admissions counselors and consultants, (from two of whom I’ve learned much of this inside-baseball) headquartered in Manhattan, naturally, who will, in private, tell you precisely everything that I’m writing here. They are astonishingly (and refreshingly) frank about ethnic issues will parents, who value this honesty and pay through the nose for it.
The elite institutions want future leaders, wielders of power, and elite influencers and opinion-makers – CEO’s and pundits – and that takes a savvy that is, indeed, not captured in grades and test scores, and also not equally distributed. Not only that, but the schools aren’t merely guessing. The organizations who look at their graduates to recruit their future elite leadership communicate quite openly with the academic institutions and their career offices about what kind of characteristics and people they are looking for. This is based on their deep experience of who tends to be successful in these positions – and this drives more of the admissions process at elite places than people usually suspect. Let’s be frank – there are plenty of astonishingly brilliant and admirably studious Asians who will go on to achieve impressive things in life for a good deal of compensation, but who nevertheless do not have what it takes to succeed at the top levels in these kinds of positions. If you want to see how this looks in real life – look at the demographic structure of the hierarchies of most Silicon Valley companies.
Anyone who cares to look will find that almost all research into the subject supports these quantitative and qualitative ethnic differences in IQ and personality. This is no longer a controversial scientific question, and is only held to be so by those who prefer to ignore the accumulating research results.
As far as “clannishness” goes, it is also an easily observed fact on any campus that social networks are incredibly ethnically-based, especially for Asians, and even for individuals who are second or third generation Americans. Now some of this is due to the incoherent policies of most universities to emphasize group-identity while also hoping for the social mixing and exposure that is supposed to yield the nebulous fruit of the ubiquitous sacred Diversity policies. If one really does want the Diversity policy to work, then even anecdotal experience that certain ethnic groups won’t mix well with others, especially if they rise above a certain “critical mass” of the population (showing that the concept of “critical mass” works both ways), would support a judgment constraining their enrollment.
Let’s get down to the brass tacks here – almost every informed person knows that this are the actual beliefs and the actual policies of the admissions departments of these institutions, but that it’s not polite to discuss them explicitly in public. And frankly, if they were at least fully transparent – honest and open – about all this, and if they truly acted as purely private institutions then they can do what they want. But everyone knows these places have something like a monopoly on a certain kind of credential-status-social networking capital, and they take oodles of federal dollars, and for both reasons they justifiably deserve intense public scrutiny, and I’d argue, control. If they’d like to give up their public funding in exchange for pure autonomy, they can be my guest, but we know what their real bottom line is, and so they’d never actually do that.
Conor’s position, on the other hand, is inconsistent. Asians have more merit – and believing that isn’t racist. But Asians are just as likely to have whatever personality traits or to make particular social contributions to a campus as individuals from any other ethnic group – and believing otherwise is probably racist, even when practiced by the most zealous ant-racists the world has ever seen. But racism and stereotyping is so pervasive and insidious that you cannot even trust these people to recognize it (unlike Conor, of course, who can) and neutralize it in themselves and do the right thing. Sorry – it’s just an obviously ridiculous contradiction.
Look, for those that don’t get it yet – here’s how it really works for undergrad at any of the Top-5. “What we want is to remain the pipeline which eventually conveys America’s best and brightest high school graduates to what Charles Murray calls, “the narrow elite.” It should remain that fact that in this country, and indeed in this globalized age – the world – that power is wielded, influence is extended, the big-money is earned, and the major breakthroughs and innovations are achieved, all successfully and sustainably, by our graduates, and in every field as much as possible. It’s like Governor Rod Blagojevich said, ‘We got this thing, and it’s f’ing golden.‘
“But remember, to do this, we don’t just need the smartest grinds. They have a role and a place, of course, but only to a limit. We need folks with the whole package. We are a school who aims to turn out a lot of quarterbacks – and you don’t just pick the fastest running guy to be your quarterback – it takes a lot of different characteristics – mental, physical, and social.”
“The fact is, given the relatively small size of our class, we have so many incredibly talented applicants to choose from that we believe we can continue to accomplish this goal and simultaneously achieve both a certain kind of lively, dynamic, and stimulating ‘campus experience’ and also to do a little affirmative action, (only to a point, of course) for ideological reasons and according to fairly strict quotas we’ve found to be ideal – but which we, for legal reasons, we must continue to claim result inadvertently (despite their precise consistency across time and institutions) from some vague and inscrutable subjective holistic process.”
“But really, still trying to optimize the above mission overall, given our experience at how to best achieve our goals, the class should generally look something like this: Whites – 40-45% (but no more than 50%), Blacks and Hispanics – 7-10% each (but no less than 6%), Asians 14-16% (but no more than 18%), and about 10% International Students. By implication, if you have a year where you’ve got a dearth of qualified Black or Hispanic applicants, then you’re going to have to loosen up the holistic machinery for them to pull some more in from the bottom. Conversely, if you’ve got a year where you are inundated with an exceptionally high number of highly-talented Asians or Whites, then just pick the best of the best, and kick the rest to other places.”
“Remember, it’s all about that conveyor belt pathway to the elites, which is far from being a purely “invisible hand” process. And so it’s important to remember that the structure of who gets to sit in those elite positions in our society is now also overtly and explicitly racially conscious. If, say, any important graduate school, or Goldman Sachs, or the top levels of Government agencies, are committed to hiring no less than 8% Blacks and no more than 16% Asians – then it certainly doesn’t make any sense for us to produce numbers out of line with those preferences – that just means that some of those Black positions will be filled by folks from other institutions (gasp!) and some of our Asians won’t have enough places to go (double gasp!). Yes, given the subtle links of influence between schools and employers, it’s true that it’s sometimes hard to tell which is the cart and which is the horse when it comes to whether its us or them who are really supporting the race-quota agenda causing the other side to react. But, look, at this point, it really doesn’t matter anymore. Alea iacta est.”
If they selected purely by SAT and grades when incentives would make. Go to schools that grade easy and do SAT prep all the time? Never the less I agree with you Arnold.