Diversity, noise, and merit in college admission

I have not studied the recent US Supreme Court decision that ended affirmative action in college admissions, but I have followed the issue in news reports and have other relevant experiences.

For a few years including 1990-92 (details lost) I was head of the committee that supervised undergraduate admissions to the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn. My main goal was to study the "predictive index", a formula used by the admissions office to predict academic achievement after admission. The index was an equally-weighted sum of the SAT aptitude test, the mean of three achievement tests (typically including math and English), and high-school class rank. Working with Frank Norman, a colleague, I discovered that the the aptitude test was essentially useless once we had the other two predictors, and we tried to get the admissions department to drop it, as described in https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/sat.htm/.

Around the same time, I attended a meeting of Ivy League admissions people at Harvard. This was after the "Ivy overlap" meeting was abolished by overzealous anti-trust action, as described in https://news.mit.edu/1992/history-0903. The overlap meeting was a discussion of applicants for financial aid at more than one college in the elite group. It was designed to insure that colleges were not competing for applicants on the basis of financial aid, hence insuring that the "colluding" colleges would "admit students solely on the basis of merit and distribute their scholarship money solely on the basis of need." When this policy was in effect, Penn had a hard time funding need-blind admissions, so it limited this policy to Americans, although Harvard did not. The meeting was to discuss the situation.

There I had occasion to discuss our SAT report with the Harvard dean of admissions, William Fitzsimmons. In passing, he pointed out something that helps to explain some of the apparent irrationality of admission systems in general. He said, roughly, "We could fill the entire freshman class with students who got straight 800s [perfect scores] on all the tests." (He might have added "from India".) But, he might have gone on to say, we don't want a class that is full of academic achievers. We want variety. We want a lot of students who are satisfied with passing grades. These students may not become scholars, but they may benefit from an education that will help them and others in many different ways. And they will dilute the competitive atmosphere that would result from a focus on achievement alone. (Is that what "merit" means when people argue that merit should be the sole basis for admisison?) So we must use other criteria.

The usual way of getting the desired variety/diversity is for admissions staff to read applications and make judgments about "character" or something like that. The psychological literature on selection is fairly clear that such judgments are very poor at predicting anything, in contrast to measures like grades and test scores (like our predictive index, suitably revised), which are pretty good at predicting other grades and test scores. The main result of these "personal" judgments is to add noise, random error, to the process (unfortunataly at considerable cost, since the admissions staff are well paid, and this is a substantial part of their jobs).

In sum, current admissions policy at Harvard, Penn, and similar colleges, is not based on "merit" alone, if that is taken to mean prediction of academic achievement. Instead, "pretty good" applicants who rank high (but not at the very top) on merit are rejected so that applicants lower in merit can be admitted for the sake of diversity. These decisions about acceptance and rejection are made in ways that are noisy, similar to the results of a lottery.

The same sort of noise was introduced by the 1978 Bakke decision of the Supreme Court, which prohibited colleges from doing affirmative action by exactly the method that would have been best according to the psychology literature, which is to rank all applicants by objective criteria and then, if you want more Blacks, use the same ranking but a lower cut-off. This method would optimize the academic performance of both groups. And, in particular, it would minimize the number of affirmative-action admits who were not ready for academic work of the sort expected at the elite colleges. These students exist, and many of them suffer from failure that would not have occurred had they gone to a less demanding college. But the court demanded that students be evaluated "holistically", which served to increase noise and not do much else.

Now it seems that many colleges intend to do more holistic admissions in hopes that they could find minority students who deserved admission. Note that this policy is fully consistent with Fitzsimmons' desire for diversity. A big problem is that, by definition, elite college are those that teach courses at a fairly high level, for example, those that use my textbook "Thinking and Deciding" in undergraduate courses. Students with weak numeracy skills will have trouble. Thus, it is still important to select students who can do the work. Failures in courses and in graduation itself are bad outcomes and should not be seen as a "cost we must pay" for diversity.

Thus the big trouble with holistic judgment as a way of promoting diversity is that it will lead to admission of too many students who are predictably not ready for academic work at the level required. These students are "cannon fodder" for the supposedly enlightened policy that admits them.

Ideally, colleges that use any sort of holistic criteria should also use the best statistical predictors to eliminate applicants who are high risk for failure, thus setting a lower bound to be applied to the students already selected by holistic criteria. This won't be perfect, but it seems worth a try. The Supreme Court, loose cannon that it is, might find that it is unconstitutional, just as it prohibited the optimal use of predictive indices for affirmative action.

When I was a student at Harvard 1962-66, it was just beginning a sort of affirmative action. My first-year roommate was Black. Charlie was a friend from Andover, an elite prep school that we both attended.  We both would have been admitted if admission was base fully on merit, but Harvard often rejected pretty-good students like Charlie, or me, just to make room for those less qualified.  But he was Black and clearly capable of doing the work. So they took him. (And so did Harvard Law School, 4 years later.)

And I was a legacy. My father, class of '37, was admitted at a time when Harvard was trying not to admit too many Jews (a situation that seems analogous to its attitude toward Asians today). My son also went there, and was thus 3d generation and from a minority that was once discriminated against. Another roommate of mine after the first year was 7th generation, and at least one of his daughters also went to Harvard. Sure, this is a way of preserving privilege, and it has the effect of admitting not-so-great students, thus increasing diversity of achievement, but probably without as much risk of failure as other ways of doing this, such as sports admissions, and with less than average need for financial assistance. Family traditions are also important to some families. Legacy preference for students who need it would increase diversity simply because some of these students will not be competitive high achievers. Many other legacy students would probably be admitted anyway.

My father's situation seems similar to the situation of many "Asian" students today. Harvard in particular does seems not to want "too many Asians," and that outcome would result from selection by merit alone. Yet, since merit is still part of the story, Asians who are admitted have higher test scores and high-school grades, which means that they are predicted to get better grades in college. That happens. We do not need some psychological explanation of why Asian student are relatively high achievers in college. The same used to be true of Jews, but now I think that colleges are no longer biased against them. (A small literature on "calibration" and "predictive bias" looks at the possibility of determining systemic or intentional bias on the basis of performance after selection. I think that it would show bias against Asians in some colleges today.)

In 1962, women were admitted to Radcliffe College, which was much smaller than Harvard College. As a result, the cut-off for admission of women was higher, and "Cliffies" got better grades and often dominated class discussions. Women are not generally that much smarter than men. We had a biased sample.

On the other side, affirmative action for under-represented minorities means that they are admitted with lower test scores and high-school grades. This fact can (fully or partially) explain why they get lower grades once admitted.

In sum, merit still matters, and it still predicts achievement. When students are more selected, they will achieve more on the average. Students selected with less attention to scores and grades will have lower achievement in college, although some ways of doing this seem better than others.

Some affirmative action for under-represented minorities seems reasonable (to me). Cultural diversity, which in the U.S. is correlated with "racial" diversity, is important for the education of all students. The increase in diversity is targeted and predictable, not simply random. But this is now off the table.

One response to the recent court ruling is to aim at diversity in ability to pay, by applying affirmative action to poor students (coupled with attempts to recruit them), those students who would ordinarily require maximum financial aid. Such a policy would deplete funds for financial aid, possibly increasing the difficulty of maintaining need-blind admissions for other students who required moderate amounts of aid. However, a policy favoring legacies would reduce the need for financial aid. Keeping legacy admission might help pay for more poor students.

Affirmative action of under-represented minorities, including the poor, must be done in combination with a strong effort to avoid predictable failure after admission. There is some optimum amount of affirmative action, and some colleges may have gone beyond it for minorities, although not for the poor.

More generally, admission to most selective colleges has never been done on the basis of merit alone. If other criteria are used, it is not unreasonable to know what they are, rather than relying on noise alone.

Cluster munitions for Ukraine

 The New York Times editorial of July 10, "The flawed moral logic of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine," opposed the U.S. decision to do just that. It tried to rebut some of the arguments made in favor of the plan, but it missed at least one, the fact that most of the area involved would already be littered with mines and unexploded cluster munitions used (extensively) by Russia, so the additional care required to try to avoid them later would already be required.

The editorial, the statements of governments opposed to the plan, and some of the published letters to the Times, seemed to follow the principle that these munitions are morally wrong, whatever the consequences. Such absolute principles are, in the sense I have used (e.g., Baron and Spranca, 1997) protected values. Ideological adherence to such values surely has considerable political influence. These commitments may be held unreflectively. When people are forced to confront specific situations where the principle conflicts with some other principle, such as avoiding terrible consequences, they often admit that their principle is not absolute after all (Baron and Leshner, 2000).

In "Rules of War and Moral Reasoning" (1972, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2264969), R. M. Hare criticizes the "absolutist" deontological views of Thomas Nagel, who advocated strict adherence to accepted rules, such as those prohibiting the use of poison gas, or attacks on the Red Cross.

"The defect in most deontologica theories ... is that they have no coherent rational account to give to any level of moral thought above that of the man who knows some good moral principles and sticks to them. He is a very admirable person, and to question his principles ... is indeed to 'show a corrupt mind'." However, to achieve such an account, "we have to adopt a 'two-level' approach, ... to recognize that the simple principles of the deontologist, important as they are, have their place at the level of character formation." Although we should be careful about violating principles that have been drilled into us (including those inculcated by military training), we need to be willing to override them on the basis of a higher level of analysis, that is, to make exceptions when they clearly lead to worse consequences than some alternative, even if our attachment to the broken rules leads us to feel guilty (just as the failure to prevent terrible consequences can also lead to guilt feelings).

Absolute rules represent a hardening of moral intuitions that are usually sufficient but should sometimes be overridden by more reflective reasoning, as suggested by Greene ("Moral tribes") and others. The opponents of cluster munitions seem to illustrate these hardened intuitions, which are protected values. Once having decided that cluster munitions are morally wrong, whatever the consequences, some opponents then engage in belief overkill, finding ways to ignore relevant facts on the other side, or to exaggerate the probability of harmful consequences resulting from action.