For decades America’s universities have made extensive efforts to achieve racial diversity within their student bodies. The official justifications for these efforts have changed depending on political currents and Supreme Court whims: What began as explicit redress for African-Americans eventually morphed into a commitment to diversity as an educational good unto itself. But the implicit goal has always been a kind of elite legitimation, a demonstration that the meritocracy is actually fair and open and representative of the society that it aspires to rule.
For a long time this system was challenged mostly from the right, by critics of affirmative action who argued that it legitimized meritocracy at the expense of academic merit.
But lately the critiques have come from all directions. Asian-Americans have noticed that the current racial balance on campuses is sustained, in part, by suppressing Asian numbers. Populists of the left and right have pointed out that meritocracy often has racial diversity without socioeconomic diversity, reproducing a multi-hued but still immensely privileged elite. And the new progressivism has attacked that racial diversity as insufficient, because it still leaves blacks and Hispanics alienated within the system dominated by rich white kids.
In general I think the meritocracy deserves almost all the criticism it gets. But in this column I want to strike one note of sympathy for its mandarins: There is no obvious reform that would satisfy all of these objections, no simple step that would bring the idea of meritocracy, the diversity of class and race, and the need to attract tuition dollars into balance.
[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]
Consider the reform that has the most bien-pensant support — the abolition of legacy and athletic preferences. The theory is that these preferences amount to affirmative action for well-off white kids, and phasing them out would improve class and racial diversity and reduce the need for anti-Asian bias — with only a bunch of lacrosse jocks as the losers.
This argument seems to be buttressed by a new paper that uses Harvard admissions data, exposed by the lawsuit against its treatment of Asian applicants, to estimate the importance of preferences for athletes, legacies, the children of donors and Harvard faculty. The authors find, not surprisingly, that those preferences benefit the white and well-to-do: More than 43 percent of white admittees to Harvards had those advantages, and roughly three-quarters of that 43 percent wouldn’t have gotten in without them.
However, dropping those preferences might not alter the racial mix dramatically. In the study’s simulations, the white share of the Harvard student body fell by 4 percent without legacy admissions and 6 percent without athletic preferences, while minority shares increased by comparable percentages. The authors suggest their statistical methods are limited and the real changes could be larger. But it’s still a sharp contrast with the simulation that eliminated racial preferences. That change reduced Hispanic and black numbers by about 40 percent and 70 percent, while Asian numbers climbed by over 50 percent; white numbers barely budged.
It may be that white percentages stay pretty stable, even without upper-class affirmative action, because white legacies and athletes are often admitted at the expense of less-affluent white kids, rather than minorities. As the authors note, the “holistic” approach to admission, supposedly fairer than a test-centric approach, often benefits the affluent “within racial groups” because they know how to stack up extracurriculars. And prior research suggests that many kids presently overlooked in the admissions process are lower-income white kids from outside the corridors of coastal privilege.
If this is right, then abolishing upper-class affirmative action could make the system fairer, but many beneficiaries would be white –— meaning the reform wouldn’t eliminate Asian quotas or satisfy racial progressives.
Unless you went further, and imposed tacit quotas on white applicants. But leaving aside the justice of such a policy, it’s not clear how colleges would pay for such a shift, because tuition from well-off white kids is what keeps many of them solvent.
True, Harvard and the other elite-of-the-elite have plenty of financial flexibility. But many private colleges have a business model that’s under strain already, and likely to become more untenable thanks to the birth dearth of the last 10 years. The progressive mood may call for ever-greater diversification, but the economic realities predict consolidations and closures just ahead.
So what is to be done? One answer is that there isn’t a single answer, and that we need to weaken the Ivy cartel and allow other schools to go different ways — some more SAT-centric; some with frank racial quotas; yet others focused on socioeconomic mobility alone; all seeking more economical ways to educate.
Another, grimmer answer is that the modern meritocracy has too many flaws and contradictions to either allow dramatic reform or to command widespread support without it. Which means that a system lacking legitimacy and under siege from all directions may be with us for many matriculations yet to come.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram, join the Facebook political discussion group, Voting While Female.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.”
You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter: @DouthatNYT
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | The College Admissions Trilemma
Opinion | The College Admissions Trilemma
For decades America’s universities have made extensive efforts to achieve racial diversity within their student bodies. The official justifications for these efforts have changed depending on political currents and Supreme Court whims: What began as explicit redress for African-Americans eventually morphed into a commitment to diversity as an educational good unto itself. But the implicit goal has always been a kind of elite legitimation, a demonstration that the meritocracy is actually fair and open and representative of the society that it aspires to rule.
For a long time this system was challenged mostly from the right, by critics of affirmative action who argued that it legitimized meritocracy at the expense of academic merit.
But lately the critiques have come from all directions. Asian-Americans have noticed that the current racial balance on campuses is sustained, in part, by suppressing Asian numbers. Populists of the left and right have pointed out that meritocracy often has racial diversity without socioeconomic diversity, reproducing a multi-hued but still immensely privileged elite. And the new progressivism has attacked that racial diversity as insufficient, because it still leaves blacks and Hispanics alienated within the system dominated by rich white kids.
In general I think the meritocracy deserves almost all the criticism it gets. But in this column I want to strike one note of sympathy for its mandarins: There is no obvious reform that would satisfy all of these objections, no simple step that would bring the idea of meritocracy, the diversity of class and race, and the need to attract tuition dollars into balance.
[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]
Consider the reform that has the most bien-pensant support — the abolition of legacy and athletic preferences. The theory is that these preferences amount to affirmative action for well-off white kids, and phasing them out would improve class and racial diversity and reduce the need for anti-Asian bias — with only a bunch of lacrosse jocks as the losers.
This argument seems to be buttressed by a new paper that uses Harvard admissions data, exposed by the lawsuit against its treatment of Asian applicants, to estimate the importance of preferences for athletes, legacies, the children of donors and Harvard faculty. The authors find, not surprisingly, that those preferences benefit the white and well-to-do: More than 43 percent of white admittees to Harvards had those advantages, and roughly three-quarters of that 43 percent wouldn’t have gotten in without them.
However, dropping those preferences might not alter the racial mix dramatically. In the study’s simulations, the white share of the Harvard student body fell by 4 percent without legacy admissions and 6 percent without athletic preferences, while minority shares increased by comparable percentages. The authors suggest their statistical methods are limited and the real changes could be larger. But it’s still a sharp contrast with the simulation that eliminated racial preferences. That change reduced Hispanic and black numbers by about 40 percent and 70 percent, while Asian numbers climbed by over 50 percent; white numbers barely budged.
It may be that white percentages stay pretty stable, even without upper-class affirmative action, because white legacies and athletes are often admitted at the expense of less-affluent white kids, rather than minorities. As the authors note, the “holistic” approach to admission, supposedly fairer than a test-centric approach, often benefits the affluent “within racial groups” because they know how to stack up extracurriculars. And prior research suggests that many kids presently overlooked in the admissions process are lower-income white kids from outside the corridors of coastal privilege.
If this is right, then abolishing upper-class affirmative action could make the system fairer, but many beneficiaries would be white –— meaning the reform wouldn’t eliminate Asian quotas or satisfy racial progressives.
Unless you went further, and imposed tacit quotas on white applicants. But leaving aside the justice of such a policy, it’s not clear how colleges would pay for such a shift, because tuition from well-off white kids is what keeps many of them solvent.
True, Harvard and the other elite-of-the-elite have plenty of financial flexibility. But many private colleges have a business model that’s under strain already, and likely to become more untenable thanks to the birth dearth of the last 10 years. The progressive mood may call for ever-greater diversification, but the economic realities predict consolidations and closures just ahead.
So what is to be done? One answer is that there isn’t a single answer, and that we need to weaken the Ivy cartel and allow other schools to go different ways — some more SAT-centric; some with frank racial quotas; yet others focused on socioeconomic mobility alone; all seeking more economical ways to educate.
Another, grimmer answer is that the modern meritocracy has too many flaws and contradictions to either allow dramatic reform or to command widespread support without it. Which means that a system lacking legitimacy and under siege from all directions may be with us for many matriculations yet to come.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram, join the Facebook political discussion group, Voting While Female.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, “To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.”
You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter: @DouthatNYT
Source: Read Full Article