You aren't being cynical enough. Legacy admissions are about driving alumni donations. As long as that continues to be a viable strategy and they can avoid huge public outcry it is going to stick around.
But at least Asians are likely benefiting from legacy admits at Caltech (not sure they admit they offer a legacy bonus but pretty sure they do).
"Merit" is an overrated quality in student admissions. There are other qualities like communal networking effects and interdependencies that legacy admissions foster. Colleges are not and should not be mere factories for producing educated people. This is a very reductive way of understand higher education.
I think your framing of the nation essentially outgrowing affirmative action is uniquely persuasive. Also probably explains why even lifelong liberals have turned away from it, even in California where it was recently voted down on a statewide ballot (Prop 16). I attended college just as Prop 209 hit and was very active in a number of clubs that promote diversity...and support for affirmative action has waned while other progressive leanings (including for racial justice) deepened in this cohort.
SCOTUS may strike this down for bad reasons but I think we have the tools to build something better for the 2020s. I finally feel old enough to recognize I'm not seeing the world through the lenses of my youth (which explains why I'm wearing bifocals now).
Affirmative action in California wasn’t just rejected by “lifelong liberals.” It was rejected by most minorities in California themselves. It was defeated in every single majority Hispanic county. They don’t want to be treated that way.
“Lifelong liberals” have a real blind spot about how resentful the objects of their paternalism can be about it. They alienated working class voters through that attitude, and it’s beginning to wear on minorities as well. Particularly Hispanics and Asians who, unlike many black people, don’t see their oppression and struggle against white people as central to their identity. Which is how white “lifelong liberals” tend to see Hispanics and Asians as well.
And the Supreme Court is striking down affirmative action for the right reasons. People shouldn’t be treated differently based on their skin color. That’s it.
I would dare say most Black people do not see struggle and oppression against whites as central to their identity. This is specially the case among black immigrants who are becoming an increasing proportion of so-called Black people. Most Black people nationwide actually oppose the use of race encountered missions and have for decades when asked.
Yeah, the salt from the woke lunatics will be delicious when the decision comes out. Their hopes and dreams need to be repeatedly crushed if we are to achieve social peace. I don't want my community to become chum in their quest to funnel more racial patronage to their designated victims.
Absolutely. The lifelong liberals I was referring to included a lot of ethnic minorities (in my story most were actually Asian and Hispanic). Attitude was more "I'll have to work 2x harder to prove I didn't need AA. And even if I benefited I want to lay the groundwork for future generations to not need this." Even back in the '90s I thought socioeconomic status was the better metric but a switch to that required an uncoupling of class and race. That hasn't fully happened but enough changed after a generation (the population itself diversified) that it's just not as useful a proxy even though inequality remains.
Some of this is about cutthroat admissions to Harvard and other elite universities. But college itself (with the upward mobility it provides) became so more accessible to the point where we probably overshot.
This is the part where Freddie deBoer pops in and points out that we need to radically re-evaluate our system that overemphasizes intelligence and college-track curriculum as having social value relative to other abilities. But that’s two or three steps ahead of sorting out the post affirmative action regime.
Also because a lot more high school graduates go to college. The population of people aged 15-19 went from about 19.5 million in 1970 to about 21 million in 2020. That's less than a 10% increase even as the population grew by over 50%. Meanwhile college enrollment went from 7.5 million to a peak of 18 million, more than doubling. About 45% of all HS graduates went directly to college as opposed to almost 70% today.
The elite schools have generally increased their enrollments. Harvard had about 4400 undergraduates back in 1970. It's more like 5700 now, a 30% increase. MIT had about 4000, and it now has about 4400, for a 10% increase. My guess based on this is that the top schools have grown along with the population aged from 15-19 while the demand for college has increased much more rapidly.
So less than population growth. It’s about elitism—they have the resources, and enough qualified applicants, to enroll an order of magnitude more students.
I would love for them to split out American admit rates with international admit rates. Both have gotten much more competitive but I suspect that the international admit rates much more so -- I lived in China for some years and I know Harvard applications from Chinese went up an order of magnitude in a decade once there was a critical mass of English-educated Chinese high school students.
It was just after my high school graduation when universities rolled out the uniform application form, and admittance rates at selective schools dropped precipitously from something around 15% to something on around 6%
I feel like there's a rhyme between YIMBYism and the call to expand the number of seats available at "elite" schools. The most important place to build more housing, or add more seats for students, is in the neighborhoods / schools that most enhance the productivity of the people who get to be there.
And in fact, considering the recent battle over expanding UC Berkeley, these two policy issues seem pretty closely intertwined.
Some food for thought on the decreasing acceptance rates at elite universities … I think this mostly has to do with inflation of the number of applications going to these top schools. Not sure there’s really anything to address there.
“Among students in the top 5% of graduating seniors, the inflation in the number of schools is even more dramatic, with many (if not most) students who are applying to the most selective colleges applying to 15 - 20 schools, with some even submitting 25 or more applications.”
I definitely didn’t apply to that many schools when I got into Stanford in 2001.
Who really cares about the percent of applications that are accepted? That's an artificial figure. What matters is whether it would actually make real people better off if they increased the class size.
I'm unsure it would. I'd argue that the biggest effect on student achievement is their peers and having a class composed of the most motivated and intelligent students will push their peers to new heights. At least that was my experience at Caltech maybe not true for liberal arts institutions.
Also, there is probably some very real value to having smaller classes. If you have to dole out chances to work in labs or do summer research over a huge population you probably produce fewer graduates who have had the chance to do research every summer or gotten to speak to the professor at length during discussion. Also you would increase teaching burdens and one of the biggest benefits of universities is the research produced.
OTOH it does seem plausible that the upsides would exceed the downsides for some degree of expansion. Doubling or quadrupling enrollment would be very different than increasing it by 10x or 100x.
Though lots of universities might have trouble constructing new dorms to house the students. But Stanford surely could.
The problem is that the elite schools have increased their class sizes to keep up with the 15-19 demographic, not the dramatic increase in high school students who then go on to college.
Given the battles that go on whenever a school, elite or not, tries to increase in size, it isn't clear that they can expand all that much more rapidly. Look at the various conflicts over expansion at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and MIT. I'm sure there have been others up and down the line. Those schools don't pay property taxes, and they put huge demands on housing and traffic facilities. Throw in the "elite" factor for the elite schools and it becomes obvious why the various schools have to choose which fights to focus on.
But should they keep up with the fraction of people going to college? Or does it make more sense for Harvard etc to try and always educate the best x% of US students (while not universally true I expect for the last 50ish years it was generally the best students who went on to college...tho that's not same as most innate talent, but focus on GPA makes it dubious that's any more true now) and for other less elite schools to open up to handle the increasing fraction of ppl who go on to college?
Let's do some math. Harvard had 4400 undergraduate slots back when there were 7.5 million college students. There are now, let's lowball this, 16 million, so Harvard should have 9500 undergraduates. They have 5700 undergraduates now, so they'd have to add 3800 undergraduates. Where are they going to house them? Harvard is at constant war with Cambridge over even minor expansion plans. How are they going to hire the faculty? Where are they going to hold the classes? How are they going to feed everyone? Right now, freshmen live in Harvard Yard, a set of historical buildings at the core of the university. How are they going to expand this?
I'm just picking on Harvard because I know a bit about the situation there. I went to school downriver at another elite institution that has had frequent battles with Cambridge over expansion and has expanded, at the undergraduate level, much less than Harvard. It was originally in an industrial part of town, but that didn't insulate it from local push back even as the industrial area emptied out. If it tried to get on track and grow to meet the demand for college as opposed to the rising college population, it would need even more massive growth.
Assuming we could bend time and space and local politics to our will, we have the more serious problem of whether a university can maintain its quality and character as it roughly doubles in size. You can really only make a lecture hall so big, ditto a dining room, ditto a laboratory, ditto a dormitory. How do you maintain the feel of a place when one moves from six story dormitories to high rises? If you split a common core class like composition or calculus, how to you control the internal competition for the "better" section? I'm not saying it is impossible, but it would be quite difficult to manage and fund that level of growth.
Well yes, but then if the top 5% of high school seniors started using AI apps that allowed them to apply to the top 100 schools, acceptance rates would go down again. Or if the behavioral trend of submitting ~25 applications expanded to the top 10% of seniors, same thing.
My point is that acceptance rates are a misleading indicator for what you are trying to measure here (abundance in education opportunity). Really what we want to measure is the total number of high school seniors that want (or will) attend a university and the total number of high school seniors accepted to each school (and across all schools).
The solution you've pointed out (expanding class size at elite universities) is one solution, but probably only going to make a marginal difference (e.g. these universities might increase class sizes 5-15%, but they aren't going to 2x or 3x their class sizes). I think a better solution would be expansion and improvement in education at other universities ... build more UC system caliber schools and improve the ones that exist for example.
Also, separate topic .... but if we just made education free (or close to it) in this country, much of the equity issue / conversation goes away. But I realize that is quite another topic in itself. ;-)
I agree with most of this. But if Harvard or wherever is only claiming to admit the most exceptional kids - wouldn’t variance from their peer group be a better sign of that than absolute sat scores. Understand defining peer groups will become increasingly difficult though per your point.
But some peer groups will be better or worse than others. If you start admitting people who merely stand out at their school to Harvard I bet you some parents start moving their kids into crappy schools just to get the leg up.
But you can set up a full statistical model using economic status etc to predict likely achievement at the school and I believe that's what many elite universities do (it was what Caltech did back in late 90s).
I don't think most schools use naive SAT scores in the way you suggest. Well maybe some do just to game us news.
Rich parents moving their rich kids to shitty schools would be an undeniably awesome outcome.
What I genuinely wonder though is if your goal is to admit exceptional kids and define that as who is most unique compared to their set of circumstances isn’t a poor kid, especially a poor black kid with like a 1350 on their SATs more exceptional than a legacy who is at Dalton with a 1550 SAT
Not that they are not talented nor that they don’t have the requisite scores. But certain $$$ feeder schools - like Andover and Roxbury Latin send 30%+ of their class to the Ivy League. The only really barrier to getting into these schools is your parents having money. If 30% of your cohort ends up somewhere I would say that is not indicative of you being exceptionally gifted for you to end up doing the same.
Legacy preferences are part of the product Ivy League colleges offer to the other students. Mingling with the families of the rich for four years is way more valuable than what you learn in the classes.
This is a good reason to abolish the elite undergrads, which are not educational institutions but rather prestige granting institutions for producing more meritocrat elites that hate people like me.
What is the point of punishing them except good old fashioned resentment. A new set of elite schools is waiting for its crown. I suppose we could do the Maoist thing and wipe out ALL educational institutions, but that didn't work out all that well in China.
Yes, it is resentment. They think they're better than the rest of us, and they deserve some comeuppance. It certainly makes more sense than the billionaire hate that's popular on the left - the rest of us get nothing for our hard work, and they get everything.
Is wiping out the institutions the answer? Would we be better without institutions that only look for certain subclasses of people and then reward them?
I'm glad you are up front about your resentment. The elite universities are only a tiny part of the problem. As far as I am concerned, the real problem is the rising inequality in our society. I grew up in a very different US. One where wealth was heavily taxed and the revenues used to make everyone's lives better. One where government programs built our industrial and commercial might. One where education was available for all. One where powerful corporations and the individuals behind them were heavily regulated rather than pampered. One where the government sided with workers against management.
Then American voters decided that they didn't want those things. They wanted to grovel and get by on the leavings of their betters. The elite colleges were there back then and they served a useful purpose. Now they are part of the rot just like everything else.
How is this an argument? They admit 5% of the people they apply, that's elite. They grant elite status. Who cares if the people were homeless before or Preston Bezos? They still hate the rest of us the same way.
Removing race-based AA, and especially replacing it with SES-based AA, should also help reduce the grievance felt by poorer whites towards minorities and the Democratic Party.
Growing up poor in rural Alabama, with no one else in my family ever having gone to college, few things pissed me off as a young man more than having progressive peers (usually from UMC+ families) tell me about my 'privilege'.
That stuff is poison for the soul. And also pushed me more towards conservatism. Or at least made me distrustful that left-spectrum folks had my interests at heart.
I don't even dispute the existence of actual privilege. But whatever advantages accrued by my race as a kid were dwarfed by that of SES/class.
And having classmates that did benefit from SES/class act as if I was in the same overall privilege category as them because I'm white...wasn't exactly endearing.
Also, I was never in 'misery'. But I don't think you have to be some kind of suffering martyr to object to that kind of nonsense.
I also grew up a poor white person in a rural and very white area--just about the only non-white people around were semi-migrant ag workers. Those folks, also poor, were treated materially much, much, much, worse than I. Should I have been mad if a middle class person in my area pointed out that I was in fact still better treated, simply on account of my race, than those derided by the large slice of racist rubes?
I recall a study, which now I cannot locate, from perhaps 15-20 years ago, looking at law school admissions for public university law schools (back when it was still common to have fairly direct racial thumbs on the scale versus hypothetically race neutral criteria) that concluded that income-based class preferences (versus no direct preferences at all - just things like LSAT scores) would simply result in a slightly greater number of whites from moderately tight circumstances with getting in (at the expense of richer whites with slightly better LSAT scores), while doing nothing for blacks in terms of boosting their total, and we couldn't have that.
In terms of admission to the hyperselective universities, where admission is practically a Veblen good so we absolutely mustn't have a supply side solution, I think you are right that solutions which are notionally race neutral but actually designed to boost black admit fraction will need fairly opaque tuning (I agree with you re boosting the group labelled Native American, but for obvious reasons that goal will be extremely low salience). Adding wealth would be one - another that seems fairly obvious to me is to give bonus points based on poor average performance of the applicant's high school, which would at least in some cases provide a boost not just for people of the correct color, but also ruralia, which could use some boosting.
As you say, it will be a spoils system regardless.
Very interesting take on the AA issue. UC system and Prop 209 seems to show that AA doesn't really matter. Whether that's because administrators are using race or race proxies (SES?) anyway, or some other system, it is clearly Prop 209 hasn't hurt racial diversity in any meaningful way, at least not as it stands today.
Though Black enrollment did decline as a percentage of students post 209, it only dropped by ~1% of total enrollment. Meanwhile, Hispanic enrollment, which dropped initially since prop 209, has doubled from 13% to 26% since Prop 209, White enrollment has fallen and Asian enrollment has increased slightly (as percentages). Both Asians and Hispanics individually outnumber Whites by a good margin on UC campuses now. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/admissions-residency-and-ethnicity
Also your source on black enrollment is way old (2014), since then Black enrollment has increased above pre-prop 209 levels by percent. It is now at 4.4% and total enrollment (of actual people, not percent) is nearly double what it was then. It should also be pointed out that this number is not far off the K-12 demographic split of CA schools, which is 5.2% Black. Relative to the younger K-12 ages, Hispanics are underrepresented in the UC system, Asians are over represented, and Whites are proportionately represented.
Anyway, just some musings since you got me curious.
You've buried the lead a bit. It's the stratification of the system and the shortage of places in the top tiers that makes the problem so intractable. I've been banging on about this for ages. https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/20/the-eye-of-the-needle/
By definition the top tiers will be stratified - admission to those colleges is primarily a positional good - Hell, I would argue that it's most of the way to being a Veblen good.
It’s also a demeaning system where white gatekeepers are empowered to judge minorities on their “diversity.” I’m certain I’m not the only minority who hates having to perform a “diversity jig” for white people for access to opportunities.
The NYT ran an article on Nov 2, “Has America Outgrown Affirmative Action” by Spencer Bokat-LIndel. Surprisingly for the NYT the article had some balance and nuance and is interesting to compare to Noah’s commentary on the potential for the Supreme Court to do away with AA in higher education. Both articles start with a history of AA but Noah’s focus is the changing demographics of America and the impact those changes have and will have on how America manages affirmative action. The Times completely misses this fundamental point which is the crux of what has happened to AA over the past fifty years. The NYT article makes a big deal that if legacy, athletic etc. programs were to go away at the Ivy League schools white admission would fall by the same amount that Asian would increase, that preferential treatment for white, wealthy, connected students is the problem. Noah agreed that it would be good to end this preferential treatment but shows that it does not lead to lower overall white enrollment (at least in case of Harvard) since higher achievement non-connected whites would take their place. A nice graph is presented to prove his point. Black and Hispanic enrollment would fall.
The Times article then goes on to make the argument that the only solution to keeping Black, Hispanic enrollment at current levels is raced based and that class based solutions will not work. Only support for this is quotes from The Times Nicole Hannah-Jones. Noah has a much more in-depth analysis, presents data and a graph showing impact of different admission policies including those using SES (social economic status). The information came from the Century Foundation; it seems the NYT does not have the resources to find this type of information?
Both Noah and the Times do bring up the problems with the University of California system and both discuss the problem with elite universities more interested in prestige than in educating students. Noah shows a graph on admission rates and failure of universities to keep up with population growth; these universities think turning away great students is something positive. NTY times goes off on the solution of taxing endowments and that the main problem is the US is fundamentally a crappy, merit based society.
Noah’s basic point is that if AA was just black versus white it could be justified and be a valuable tool but in our diverse, multi-cultural society affirmative action has the most likely outcome of becoming a racial spoils system that will only tear the nation apart more than it already is. This very basic point was not even comprehended by the NYT article.
I pay more for Noahpinion than for my on-line NYT, I ask is this reasonable? Then I look at these two articles as example of excellent writing versus mediocre and I get why it is.
Good article, but Noah’s repeated references of Hispanics as a “race” and sometimes being “mixed race” underscores our general confusion. Hispanic is a marker or *national origin* not where your ancestors lived in 1491. The average Hispanic has a mix of Native American and European ancestry and those from the Caribbean often have significant African ancestry. Many, many Hispanic families have been of near complete European ancestry, or near complete African ancestry, for decades or centuries. The fluctuating percent of Hispanics who call themselves “white” is due to flaws in the category.
Also not sufficiently acknowledged is that first and second-generation immigrants are now a huge proportion of the “Black” population in major metro area like New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Houston, Miami, and Washington DC, and are becoming that way nationwide, but are treated as being the same historical ethnicity.
I’m Cuban-American. Both sides of the family had been in Cuba for many generations/centuries, according to family trees the old great aunts kept in Santa Clara. Those trees traced us back to Castilla La Vieja (northern Spain).
I arrived in NYC as a child. I’m fluent in Spanish, cook Cuban food, play & dance to Cuban music — just generally love being Cuban.
My WASP husband gave me a DNA test kit for x-mas, thinking it’d be fun. I was (laughingly) devastated by the results.
It turns out I’m mostly Norwegian, with French and northern Spanish rounding out the rest.
My husband googled up a map of Viking trade routes, one matched the 3 spots listed on the dna results. He turned to me and said, “Well, this explains a lot honey, you’re a Viking.”
Should descendants of a Viking clan who made it to Cuba centuries ago receive affirmative action to get into Ivy League law school in the U.S.?
There isn’t a separate race called Cuban. Hispanic is not a race. Most Cubans I talk to in Florida look very white to me and could easily be Italian or Greek if not from northern Europe.
Exactly. There is no such thing as a “Hispanic” or “Latino”, genetically speaking. There is no “Hispanic/Latino” race. We had never thought of ourselves as a “race” until we got to the U.S. The issue is an utterly ridiculous construct in the American mind — Americans are obsessed with this “race” thing. I had just assumed I was White & “from Spain”.
The Ivies will abolish legacies just in time so that the Asian grad wave can't use it.
Ugh, probably true.
They'll never abolish legacy willingly (nor should they).
MIT did
You aren't being cynical enough. Legacy admissions are about driving alumni donations. As long as that continues to be a viable strategy and they can avoid huge public outcry it is going to stick around.
But at least Asians are likely benefiting from legacy admits at Caltech (not sure they admit they offer a legacy bonus but pretty sure they do).
I still think it's a good thing. Legacies and AA are two anti-merit policies that need to go.
It I get to define “merit”, a merit-based system will work out quite well for me.
"Merit" is an overrated quality in student admissions. There are other qualities like communal networking effects and interdependencies that legacy admissions foster. Colleges are not and should not be mere factories for producing educated people. This is a very reductive way of understand higher education.
I think your framing of the nation essentially outgrowing affirmative action is uniquely persuasive. Also probably explains why even lifelong liberals have turned away from it, even in California where it was recently voted down on a statewide ballot (Prop 16). I attended college just as Prop 209 hit and was very active in a number of clubs that promote diversity...and support for affirmative action has waned while other progressive leanings (including for racial justice) deepened in this cohort.
SCOTUS may strike this down for bad reasons but I think we have the tools to build something better for the 2020s. I finally feel old enough to recognize I'm not seeing the world through the lenses of my youth (which explains why I'm wearing bifocals now).
Affirmative action in California wasn’t just rejected by “lifelong liberals.” It was rejected by most minorities in California themselves. It was defeated in every single majority Hispanic county. They don’t want to be treated that way.
“Lifelong liberals” have a real blind spot about how resentful the objects of their paternalism can be about it. They alienated working class voters through that attitude, and it’s beginning to wear on minorities as well. Particularly Hispanics and Asians who, unlike many black people, don’t see their oppression and struggle against white people as central to their identity. Which is how white “lifelong liberals” tend to see Hispanics and Asians as well.
And the Supreme Court is striking down affirmative action for the right reasons. People shouldn’t be treated differently based on their skin color. That’s it.
I would dare say most Black people do not see struggle and oppression against whites as central to their identity. This is specially the case among black immigrants who are becoming an increasing proportion of so-called Black people. Most Black people nationwide actually oppose the use of race encountered missions and have for decades when asked.
Yeah, the salt from the woke lunatics will be delicious when the decision comes out. Their hopes and dreams need to be repeatedly crushed if we are to achieve social peace. I don't want my community to become chum in their quest to funnel more racial patronage to their designated victims.
Absolutely. The lifelong liberals I was referring to included a lot of ethnic minorities (in my story most were actually Asian and Hispanic). Attitude was more "I'll have to work 2x harder to prove I didn't need AA. And even if I benefited I want to lay the groundwork for future generations to not need this." Even back in the '90s I thought socioeconomic status was the better metric but a switch to that required an uncoupling of class and race. That hasn't fully happened but enough changed after a generation (the population itself diversified) that it's just not as useful a proxy even though inequality remains.
Some of this is about cutthroat admissions to Harvard and other elite universities. But college itself (with the upward mobility it provides) became so more accessible to the point where we probably overshot.
Thanks!!
This is the part where Freddie deBoer pops in and points out that we need to radically re-evaluate our system that overemphasizes intelligence and college-track curriculum as having social value relative to other abilities. But that’s two or three steps ahead of sorting out the post affirmative action regime.
Much of the decline in admission rates to elite schools is just because people apply to so many more schools these days. I don’t know how much though.
Also because a lot more high school graduates go to college. The population of people aged 15-19 went from about 19.5 million in 1970 to about 21 million in 2020. That's less than a 10% increase even as the population grew by over 50%. Meanwhile college enrollment went from 7.5 million to a peak of 18 million, more than doubling. About 45% of all HS graduates went directly to college as opposed to almost 70% today.
The elite schools have generally increased their enrollments. Harvard had about 4400 undergraduates back in 1970. It's more like 5700 now, a 30% increase. MIT had about 4000, and it now has about 4400, for a 10% increase. My guess based on this is that the top schools have grown along with the population aged from 15-19 while the demand for college has increased much more rapidly.
So less than population growth. It’s about elitism—they have the resources, and enough qualified applicants, to enroll an order of magnitude more students.
Clearly not all, since we know that the elite schools are educating a small proportion of college students now than they used to
Hey we can make a SWAG:
https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
About half is due to increased enrollment, assuming class sizes are the same, which I believe us mostly correct.
I would love for them to split out American admit rates with international admit rates. Both have gotten much more competitive but I suspect that the international admit rates much more so -- I lived in China for some years and I know Harvard applications from Chinese went up an order of magnitude in a decade once there was a critical mass of English-educated Chinese high school students.
It was just after my high school graduation when universities rolled out the uniform application form, and admittance rates at selective schools dropped precipitously from something around 15% to something on around 6%
I feel like there's a rhyme between YIMBYism and the call to expand the number of seats available at "elite" schools. The most important place to build more housing, or add more seats for students, is in the neighborhoods / schools that most enhance the productivity of the people who get to be there.
And in fact, considering the recent battle over expanding UC Berkeley, these two policy issues seem pretty closely intertwined.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/uc-berkeley-university-enrollment-nimby/622927/
It's the Abundance Agenda. Matt Yglesias wrote the textbook. Brad Delong wrote the history book. Noah is the resident economic advisor/propagandist.
Totally — feels like Ezra has some role as well.
Well written and thought out.
Some food for thought on the decreasing acceptance rates at elite universities … I think this mostly has to do with inflation of the number of applications going to these top schools. Not sure there’s really anything to address there.
“Among students in the top 5% of graduating seniors, the inflation in the number of schools is even more dramatic, with many (if not most) students who are applying to the most selective colleges applying to 15 - 20 schools, with some even submitting 25 or more applications.”
I definitely didn’t apply to that many schools when I got into Stanford in 2001.
Source 👇
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-number-of-college-applications-per-student-in-the-United-States/answer/David-M-Joseph-1?ch=15&oid=78108093&share=4d109dba&target_type=answer
Yes, must be true. But if class sizes increased, acceptance rates would go up!
Who really cares about the percent of applications that are accepted? That's an artificial figure. What matters is whether it would actually make real people better off if they increased the class size.
I'm unsure it would. I'd argue that the biggest effect on student achievement is their peers and having a class composed of the most motivated and intelligent students will push their peers to new heights. At least that was my experience at Caltech maybe not true for liberal arts institutions.
Also, there is probably some very real value to having smaller classes. If you have to dole out chances to work in labs or do summer research over a huge population you probably produce fewer graduates who have had the chance to do research every summer or gotten to speak to the professor at length during discussion. Also you would increase teaching burdens and one of the biggest benefits of universities is the research produced.
OTOH it does seem plausible that the upsides would exceed the downsides for some degree of expansion. Doubling or quadrupling enrollment would be very different than increasing it by 10x or 100x.
Though lots of universities might have trouble constructing new dorms to house the students. But Stanford surely could.
The problem is that the elite schools have increased their class sizes to keep up with the 15-19 demographic, not the dramatic increase in high school students who then go on to college.
Given the battles that go on whenever a school, elite or not, tries to increase in size, it isn't clear that they can expand all that much more rapidly. Look at the various conflicts over expansion at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and MIT. I'm sure there have been others up and down the line. Those schools don't pay property taxes, and they put huge demands on housing and traffic facilities. Throw in the "elite" factor for the elite schools and it becomes obvious why the various schools have to choose which fights to focus on.
But should they keep up with the fraction of people going to college? Or does it make more sense for Harvard etc to try and always educate the best x% of US students (while not universally true I expect for the last 50ish years it was generally the best students who went on to college...tho that's not same as most innate talent, but focus on GPA makes it dubious that's any more true now) and for other less elite schools to open up to handle the increasing fraction of ppl who go on to college?
Let's do some math. Harvard had 4400 undergraduate slots back when there were 7.5 million college students. There are now, let's lowball this, 16 million, so Harvard should have 9500 undergraduates. They have 5700 undergraduates now, so they'd have to add 3800 undergraduates. Where are they going to house them? Harvard is at constant war with Cambridge over even minor expansion plans. How are they going to hire the faculty? Where are they going to hold the classes? How are they going to feed everyone? Right now, freshmen live in Harvard Yard, a set of historical buildings at the core of the university. How are they going to expand this?
I'm just picking on Harvard because I know a bit about the situation there. I went to school downriver at another elite institution that has had frequent battles with Cambridge over expansion and has expanded, at the undergraduate level, much less than Harvard. It was originally in an industrial part of town, but that didn't insulate it from local push back even as the industrial area emptied out. If it tried to get on track and grow to meet the demand for college as opposed to the rising college population, it would need even more massive growth.
Assuming we could bend time and space and local politics to our will, we have the more serious problem of whether a university can maintain its quality and character as it roughly doubles in size. You can really only make a lecture hall so big, ditto a dining room, ditto a laboratory, ditto a dormitory. How do you maintain the feel of a place when one moves from six story dormitories to high rises? If you split a common core class like composition or calculus, how to you control the internal competition for the "better" section? I'm not saying it is impossible, but it would be quite difficult to manage and fund that level of growth.
Well yes, but then if the top 5% of high school seniors started using AI apps that allowed them to apply to the top 100 schools, acceptance rates would go down again. Or if the behavioral trend of submitting ~25 applications expanded to the top 10% of seniors, same thing.
My point is that acceptance rates are a misleading indicator for what you are trying to measure here (abundance in education opportunity). Really what we want to measure is the total number of high school seniors that want (or will) attend a university and the total number of high school seniors accepted to each school (and across all schools).
The solution you've pointed out (expanding class size at elite universities) is one solution, but probably only going to make a marginal difference (e.g. these universities might increase class sizes 5-15%, but they aren't going to 2x or 3x their class sizes). I think a better solution would be expansion and improvement in education at other universities ... build more UC system caliber schools and improve the ones that exist for example.
Also, separate topic .... but if we just made education free (or close to it) in this country, much of the equity issue / conversation goes away. But I realize that is quite another topic in itself. ;-)
I agree with most of this. But if Harvard or wherever is only claiming to admit the most exceptional kids - wouldn’t variance from their peer group be a better sign of that than absolute sat scores. Understand defining peer groups will become increasingly difficult though per your point.
But some peer groups will be better or worse than others. If you start admitting people who merely stand out at their school to Harvard I bet you some parents start moving their kids into crappy schools just to get the leg up.
But you can set up a full statistical model using economic status etc to predict likely achievement at the school and I believe that's what many elite universities do (it was what Caltech did back in late 90s).
I don't think most schools use naive SAT scores in the way you suggest. Well maybe some do just to game us news.
Rich parents moving their rich kids to shitty schools would be an undeniably awesome outcome.
What I genuinely wonder though is if your goal is to admit exceptional kids and define that as who is most unique compared to their set of circumstances isn’t a poor kid, especially a poor black kid with like a 1350 on their SATs more exceptional than a legacy who is at Dalton with a 1550 SAT
Harvard is able to admit, to a large extent, from the absolute top. So no, I don't think those students are less exceptional.
Not that they are not talented nor that they don’t have the requisite scores. But certain $$$ feeder schools - like Andover and Roxbury Latin send 30%+ of their class to the Ivy League. The only really barrier to getting into these schools is your parents having money. If 30% of your cohort ends up somewhere I would say that is not indicative of you being exceptionally gifted for you to end up doing the same.
The big challenge is defining the peer groups.
Legacy preferences are part of the product Ivy League colleges offer to the other students. Mingling with the families of the rich for four years is way more valuable than what you learn in the classes.
Legacy, affirmative action for the privileged.
Sadly this is probably true
This is a good reason to abolish the elite undergrads, which are not educational institutions but rather prestige granting institutions for producing more meritocrat elites that hate people like me.
They're private schools, we can't abolish them...
That also means we can't/shouldn't interfere in their private admissions process too right? Or force them to admit more people?
We can strip them of any taxable advantages they have. Tax their endowments at 100%. We can punish them if there was political will.
What is the point of punishing them except good old fashioned resentment. A new set of elite schools is waiting for its crown. I suppose we could do the Maoist thing and wipe out ALL educational institutions, but that didn't work out all that well in China.
Yes, it is resentment. They think they're better than the rest of us, and they deserve some comeuppance. It certainly makes more sense than the billionaire hate that's popular on the left - the rest of us get nothing for our hard work, and they get everything.
Is wiping out the institutions the answer? Would we be better without institutions that only look for certain subclasses of people and then reward them?
I'm glad you are up front about your resentment. The elite universities are only a tiny part of the problem. As far as I am concerned, the real problem is the rising inequality in our society. I grew up in a very different US. One where wealth was heavily taxed and the revenues used to make everyone's lives better. One where government programs built our industrial and commercial might. One where education was available for all. One where powerful corporations and the individuals behind them were heavily regulated rather than pampered. One where the government sided with workers against management.
Then American voters decided that they didn't want those things. They wanted to grovel and get by on the leavings of their betters. The elite colleges were there back then and they served a useful purpose. Now they are part of the rot just like everything else.
MIT still doesn't have elite or athletic admits. It might be an elite school, but it is much harder to game.
How is this an argument? They admit 5% of the people they apply, that's elite. They grant elite status. Who cares if the people were homeless before or Preston Bezos? They still hate the rest of us the same way.
Removing race-based AA, and especially replacing it with SES-based AA, should also help reduce the grievance felt by poorer whites towards minorities and the Democratic Party.
Growing up poor in rural Alabama, with no one else in my family ever having gone to college, few things pissed me off as a young man more than having progressive peers (usually from UMC+ families) tell me about my 'privilege'.
That stuff is poison for the soul. And also pushed me more towards conservatism. Or at least made me distrustful that left-spectrum folks had my interests at heart.
"few things pissed me off as a young man more than having progressive peers (usually from UMC+ families) tell me about my 'privilege'"
I really don't want to be a troll, but honestly, this is not a winning entry in the misery olympics.
I don't even dispute the existence of actual privilege. But whatever advantages accrued by my race as a kid were dwarfed by that of SES/class.
And having classmates that did benefit from SES/class act as if I was in the same overall privilege category as them because I'm white...wasn't exactly endearing.
Also, I was never in 'misery'. But I don't think you have to be some kind of suffering martyr to object to that kind of nonsense.
I also grew up a poor white person in a rural and very white area--just about the only non-white people around were semi-migrant ag workers. Those folks, also poor, were treated materially much, much, much, worse than I. Should I have been mad if a middle class person in my area pointed out that I was in fact still better treated, simply on account of my race, than those derided by the large slice of racist rubes?
I recall a study, which now I cannot locate, from perhaps 15-20 years ago, looking at law school admissions for public university law schools (back when it was still common to have fairly direct racial thumbs on the scale versus hypothetically race neutral criteria) that concluded that income-based class preferences (versus no direct preferences at all - just things like LSAT scores) would simply result in a slightly greater number of whites from moderately tight circumstances with getting in (at the expense of richer whites with slightly better LSAT scores), while doing nothing for blacks in terms of boosting their total, and we couldn't have that.
In terms of admission to the hyperselective universities, where admission is practically a Veblen good so we absolutely mustn't have a supply side solution, I think you are right that solutions which are notionally race neutral but actually designed to boost black admit fraction will need fairly opaque tuning (I agree with you re boosting the group labelled Native American, but for obvious reasons that goal will be extremely low salience). Adding wealth would be one - another that seems fairly obvious to me is to give bonus points based on poor average performance of the applicant's high school, which would at least in some cases provide a boost not just for people of the correct color, but also ruralia, which could use some boosting.
As you say, it will be a spoils system regardless.
Very interesting take on the AA issue. UC system and Prop 209 seems to show that AA doesn't really matter. Whether that's because administrators are using race or race proxies (SES?) anyway, or some other system, it is clearly Prop 209 hasn't hurt racial diversity in any meaningful way, at least not as it stands today.
Though Black enrollment did decline as a percentage of students post 209, it only dropped by ~1% of total enrollment. Meanwhile, Hispanic enrollment, which dropped initially since prop 209, has doubled from 13% to 26% since Prop 209, White enrollment has fallen and Asian enrollment has increased slightly (as percentages). Both Asians and Hispanics individually outnumber Whites by a good margin on UC campuses now. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/admissions-residency-and-ethnicity
Also your source on black enrollment is way old (2014), since then Black enrollment has increased above pre-prop 209 levels by percent. It is now at 4.4% and total enrollment (of actual people, not percent) is nearly double what it was then. It should also be pointed out that this number is not far off the K-12 demographic split of CA schools, which is 5.2% Black. Relative to the younger K-12 ages, Hispanics are underrepresented in the UC system, Asians are over represented, and Whites are proportionately represented.
Anyway, just some musings since you got me curious.
I wonder if the conclusion to draw is that legal prohibitions on affirmative action aren't enforceable in practice.
You've buried the lead a bit. It's the stratification of the system and the shortage of places in the top tiers that makes the problem so intractable. I've been banging on about this for ages. https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/20/the-eye-of-the-needle/
By definition the top tiers will be stratified - admission to those colleges is primarily a positional good - Hell, I would argue that it's most of the way to being a Veblen good.
It’s also a demeaning system where white gatekeepers are empowered to judge minorities on their “diversity.” I’m certain I’m not the only minority who hates having to perform a “diversity jig” for white people for access to opportunities.
The NYT ran an article on Nov 2, “Has America Outgrown Affirmative Action” by Spencer Bokat-LIndel. Surprisingly for the NYT the article had some balance and nuance and is interesting to compare to Noah’s commentary on the potential for the Supreme Court to do away with AA in higher education. Both articles start with a history of AA but Noah’s focus is the changing demographics of America and the impact those changes have and will have on how America manages affirmative action. The Times completely misses this fundamental point which is the crux of what has happened to AA over the past fifty years. The NYT article makes a big deal that if legacy, athletic etc. programs were to go away at the Ivy League schools white admission would fall by the same amount that Asian would increase, that preferential treatment for white, wealthy, connected students is the problem. Noah agreed that it would be good to end this preferential treatment but shows that it does not lead to lower overall white enrollment (at least in case of Harvard) since higher achievement non-connected whites would take their place. A nice graph is presented to prove his point. Black and Hispanic enrollment would fall.
The Times article then goes on to make the argument that the only solution to keeping Black, Hispanic enrollment at current levels is raced based and that class based solutions will not work. Only support for this is quotes from The Times Nicole Hannah-Jones. Noah has a much more in-depth analysis, presents data and a graph showing impact of different admission policies including those using SES (social economic status). The information came from the Century Foundation; it seems the NYT does not have the resources to find this type of information?
Both Noah and the Times do bring up the problems with the University of California system and both discuss the problem with elite universities more interested in prestige than in educating students. Noah shows a graph on admission rates and failure of universities to keep up with population growth; these universities think turning away great students is something positive. NTY times goes off on the solution of taxing endowments and that the main problem is the US is fundamentally a crappy, merit based society.
Noah’s basic point is that if AA was just black versus white it could be justified and be a valuable tool but in our diverse, multi-cultural society affirmative action has the most likely outcome of becoming a racial spoils system that will only tear the nation apart more than it already is. This very basic point was not even comprehended by the NYT article.
I pay more for Noahpinion than for my on-line NYT, I ask is this reasonable? Then I look at these two articles as example of excellent writing versus mediocre and I get why it is.
Good article, but Noah’s repeated references of Hispanics as a “race” and sometimes being “mixed race” underscores our general confusion. Hispanic is a marker or *national origin* not where your ancestors lived in 1491. The average Hispanic has a mix of Native American and European ancestry and those from the Caribbean often have significant African ancestry. Many, many Hispanic families have been of near complete European ancestry, or near complete African ancestry, for decades or centuries. The fluctuating percent of Hispanics who call themselves “white” is due to flaws in the category.
Also not sufficiently acknowledged is that first and second-generation immigrants are now a huge proportion of the “Black” population in major metro area like New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Houston, Miami, and Washington DC, and are becoming that way nationwide, but are treated as being the same historical ethnicity.
I’m Cuban-American. Both sides of the family had been in Cuba for many generations/centuries, according to family trees the old great aunts kept in Santa Clara. Those trees traced us back to Castilla La Vieja (northern Spain).
I arrived in NYC as a child. I’m fluent in Spanish, cook Cuban food, play & dance to Cuban music — just generally love being Cuban.
My WASP husband gave me a DNA test kit for x-mas, thinking it’d be fun. I was (laughingly) devastated by the results.
It turns out I’m mostly Norwegian, with French and northern Spanish rounding out the rest.
My husband googled up a map of Viking trade routes, one matched the 3 spots listed on the dna results. He turned to me and said, “Well, this explains a lot honey, you’re a Viking.”
Should descendants of a Viking clan who made it to Cuba centuries ago receive affirmative action to get into Ivy League law school in the U.S.?
(Theoretical question, I graduated ages ago).
There isn’t a separate race called Cuban. Hispanic is not a race. Most Cubans I talk to in Florida look very white to me and could easily be Italian or Greek if not from northern Europe.
Exactly. There is no such thing as a “Hispanic” or “Latino”, genetically speaking. There is no “Hispanic/Latino” race. We had never thought of ourselves as a “race” until we got to the U.S. The issue is an utterly ridiculous construct in the American mind — Americans are obsessed with this “race” thing. I had just assumed I was White & “from Spain”.