The best way for a college to improve its admissions process would be to abolish the admissions office. A simple formula involving high school grades and SAT scores would be best. If many applicants meet the minimum standards for admission, then a lottery can be used to select those to whom to offer admission.

Admissions offices have always worked to undermine standards. In the summer of 1974, when I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore, Professor Ooms had me work on a project for him to study the undergraduate admissions process. He was disappointed at the caliber of the student body at the time, and he wanted to see what was going on.

We used statistics to uncover the factors that determined admission and the factors that were correlated with getting a good rating on the applicant interview. At the time, every applicant was interviewed, either by the admissions office or by an alumnus.

We found that the interview rating was a very important determinant of admission. We also found that interviewers did not like applicants with spectacularly high SAT scores. The SAT influenced admissions in two ways. Controlling for the interview score, a higher SAT score increased the chances of admission. But when the effect of the SAT on the interview rating was included, the highest SAT scores decreased the chances for admission. If Swarthmore had abolished its admissions office, it would have admitted many more students with higher scores.

Once you have an admissions office, the last thing they will do is try to maintain the role of standards for admission. Their power goes up by including more factors, especially subjective factors. The admissions officers can help promote legacies, athletes, students who are well-rounded (i.e., not Asian), and so on.

Incidentally, I got into Swarthmore in spite of my high SAT scores, because I interviewed with a local alum whose son I had watched wrestle in the state championship. I talked about that match during the interview. When I arrived at Swarthmore, the Dean of Admissions said that the wrestling coach was looking forward to having me on the team. I never went near the coach. After all, I had never won a single wrestling match in high school.

Taking the pool of high school graduates as given, it is very hard to give African-Americans the comfort of being fully qualified for admission to a selective college as part of a large cohort of qualified African-American students. They can either be part of a small cohort or part of a large cohort that includes less-qualified students.

Suppose that you are an administrator at a selective college, and that if you admit students based on their apparent qualifications to succeed at your school, African-Americans will be under-represented. If you want to talk candidly to the qualified black applicants, which speech would you rather give?

(a) Most students who come here are nervous about whether they can make it here. So if you’re nervous, too, we understand that. But you should know that you are as qualified to be here as the typical student. You should not be at any disadvantage because of your skin color. If you see any unequal treatment be sure to let me know about it. I do have to tell you that on our campus the proportion of black students is smaller than that proportion in the general population. That is because we compete with other schools for qualified students, and other schools are willing to lower their standards for African-Americans while we are not. I hope that you will not feel uncomfortable about being one of the relatively few black students here. Again, I can assure you that you are qualified, and I expect all of our faculty and students to welcome you and respect you.

(b) Most students who come here are nervous about whether they can make it here. So if you’re nervous, too, we understand that. But you should know that you are as qualified to be here as the typical student. You should not be at any disadvantage because of your skin color. If you see any unequal treatment be sure to let me know about it. I do have to tell you that in order to meet our diversity goals we have admitted some other African-American students whose backgrounds are not as strong. As a result, faculty and other students may look at your skin color and presume that you are not as qualified as other students. I hope that you will not feel uncomfortable about having to fight this presumption. Again, I can assure you that you are qualified, and I expect all of our faculty and students to welcome you and respect you.

College administrators being what they are, they would never give either speech. But if it were me, I would much rather give speech (a). I think that (a) has a better chance of producing better race relations and maintaining the school’s pride in its intellectual standards.

My preferred policy is not going to be good at finding the “diamond in the rough,” meaning the apparently less qualified student who can be successful at my college. And the rest of society may not like the fact that I am not seeking out the diamond in the rough within the black community. But my view is that college is not the place to try to fix racial inequalities. The attempt to fix these inequalities has to take place much earlier in young people’s lives, so that more black students graduate high school with strong educational backgrounds.

Affirmative action in higher education is supposed to a free lunch. You can reduce social inequality and improve race relations without corrupting our standards. My guess is that you corrupt your standards without reducing social inequality, and you make race relations worse. If I am correct, then the unintended consequences of affirmative action have been severely adverse.

In 1975, I heard second-hand about an informal session where Robert Solow spoke with a group of MIT economics grad students. One of the students, apparently feeling guilty about his fellowship from the National Science Foundation, asked, “Why does society pay me to go to graduate school in economics, given all the benefit that I get from having the degree?” Solow, known for his caustic wit, shot back, “Society doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.”

Government money has played a role in the decline of quality in academia. Programs like the GI bill and student loan programs have swelled the ranks of college students. Programs like the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities have dumped huge amounts of money into higher education. The net effect has been harmful.

The conventional wisdom, which comes from college professors, is the exact opposite. They argue that we should be putting more young people through higher education than we do. That funding for research produces great positive externalities and we should do more of it. The same with funding for the humanities.

Average returns to higher education have gone up. But some of this has been due to government-engineered regulations that require firms to be bureaucratized for compliance purposes. Both the regulators and the corporate bureaucrats have college degrees.

More important, at the margin, we are sending people to college who do not belong there. This is demonstrated by low graduation rates as well as a significant number of graduates working at jobs that do not use anything they learned in college. Credentialism is out of control. Somebody could learn to be a physical therapist as an apprentice, but instead many states require a Ph.D for new PT’s.

The expansion of higher education increased the demand for professors. In the 1960s and 1970s, graduate schools cranked up the volume of post-graduate degrees. The results were excessive, in two senses. A lot of mediocre intellects acquired advanced degrees. And a lot of people with advanced degrees could not obtain full-time academic positions.

Expansion also lowered the quality of classrooms at all but the very top colleges. Teaching is emotionally rewarding only if your students want to learn. But most of the students that we send to college these days are not highly-motivated learners. Below the top tier in higher education (the best 150 colleges, plus or minus), a typical class has poorly motivated students in a class taught by disappointed professors.

IfW. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola are correct that the U.S. already had the leading research universities before World War II, then the postwar government programs were not necessarily responsible for the growth of research. Instead, it is plausible that government money bureaucratized and homogenized research. Of course, now that government provides so much of the funding for research, professors are loathe to bite the hand that feeds them. I am sure that for every published paper questioning the value of government-funded research you can find at least a thousand lauding its achievements. But we cannot go back and run a controlled experiment to see where research would have headed in the absence of government funding. We can be sure that there would have been less junk research. But the question is what would have happened to quality research. I would speculate that it would not have been any less.

Maya Escueta and others write (AEA access required),

Two interventions in the United States stand out as being particularly promising—a fairly low-intensity online program that provides students with immediate feedback on math homework was found to have an effect size of 0.18 standard deviations, and a more intensive software-based math curriculum intervention improved seventh and eighth grade math scores by a remarkable 0.63 and 0.56 standard deviations.

This is from a survey article on the effectiveness of various forms of educational interventions that use technology.