Wow, what a great read—Colleges and Universities – Education and Schools – Admissions and Testing – Affirmative Action – Discrimination – New York Times. My reaction points to a few worthy issues:
- It is incumbent upon Blacks’ in America to improve the focus on education for their children. Ward Connelly argues, the existence of Affirmative Action programs have harmed the drive of America’s black population, I don’t truly know. But I do understand, the responsibility for the population rest with the population itself.
- The idea of outsourcing elements of admissions to concerned alumni or other self interest groups seems highly appropriate to me. While we, the majority of US citizens, agree that discrimination and racism are evils, we simultaneously acknowledge the evils exist. Therefore, at some place in the society, institutions that make a preference for helping must use race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation as a basis for their existence.
- If universities, and public schools districts for that matter, believe themselves to be meritocracies then they owe the rest of society assurance, that the measures of merit they choose to use are without systematic bias. This point is lacking in the analysis of UCLA’s behavior, but an important one none the less.
Black America’s Responsibility
It seems to me, that there is indeed an unintended side effect of helping those in need, making them loose the connection between hard work, learning and progress. This connection is critical for people to progress and develop. Without a growth mindset (the term of C. Dweck author of Mindset), a focus on achieving the ends by any means necessary becomes the goal. For the ethical we look at such behavior as a question of ethics, and morals cheating, or fraud for example. But in the poorest and most excluded people, “by any means necessary” becomes manipulation, and dispensing guilt. Hence, for example, why too many Black parents delegate the education of their children to the school. They proclaim, my child would learn more if only the environment were different. Too often the environment change they seek is “whites” take the child under their wing as opposed to making education the priority of everyone in the household. A growing mindset does not come from being around more intelligent people, it comes from being around people who face problems by coming up with new solutions rather than blaming others and manipulating the system for the next form of assistance.
Proper Uses of Diversity Attributes
The desire for state institutions (those charged with collecting or spending the mixed funds of all citizens) to treat each citizen equally seems universal. Without such a feature, people have disincentives to participate in the public good. However, private institutions are different. On the one hand, private institutions cannot deny jobs or access to education services based on protected classes of citizens, but on the other there are actions where it is acceptable to help one group and not another for example giving scholarships or charity services. So the society has made distinctions and over time we will debate and move the line of acceptable actions.
The actions described by UCLA alumni appear very appropriate in my opinion. As relevant stakeholders of the university they should have the right to raise money for dedicated purposes. To the extent the school does not exclude cooperation from other interested groups there should be no problem. My challenge indeed all our challenges is to identify a cause we feel so strongly about as to take action.
Measuring Merit Without Bias
Universities are in an interesting predicament. They want to be fully based on merit, yet they cannot seem to find attributes they can measure that offer a completely meritorious view of their applicants. How easy life would be if standardized test really distinguished people or any other measure for that matter. It is sad and funny that when people what to claim foul, they run to equally biased measures. In the article for example, the recent UCLA class of African-Americans had a drop in average score while other groups did not. I say interesting fact but it proves nothing.
The problem is the complainer never really explains their true concern. They raise beneficial statistics to their cause, without having to demonstrate the relevance of the statistic. The analogy would be in a court of law, having no rules of evidence; just say what you think will get the jury’s vote. This absurdity plays out every day in the press as reporters often do not take the effort to judge the viability of credible sounding but often flawed statistics and other forms of evidence.
Universities then have difficult job, how to lay out the rules for acceptance (because they have greater demand the spots available) so that everyone is happy. The problem with most schools is their unwillingness to stand up and say the quantitative measures give us little value because the basis for comparison is flawed (for example GPA from one high school to the other) and or the measurements correlate poorly with success (SAT or ACT predictability on graduation rate, first year GPA, or wealth for example).
Without this admission, millions walk around with false beliefs of what predicts success, and what it takes to get in a certain school. A circular problem indeed.