Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions [pdf]

I would like to see in admissions systems some kind of quantification and attestation of the applicants’ capabilities and also their shortcomings. Balance this with the sum total of all educational investment individually by their parents/teachers/schools, and also the collective investment in their peers and across all schools. It’s one thing to know someone is a good applicant. But if we argue that this is a meritocratic system that also accounts for inequality of opportunity, we should do more to articulate what it means to be a good student.

What does it mean to be a good student versus a potentially good student? How do you tell the difference between a good student with test anxiety, an average student who tests well, and a below average student who has been tutored to compensate for their lack of discernment? How do you compare a good student in a severely disadvantaged intellectual and/or economic environment with a student who rates the same on educational attainment as the prior student, but lacks meaningful barriers to learning?

Differences and advantages in stimuli and investment in intellectual activity exist in continuum that isn’t just what happens at school or at home but also what happens in the hands and minds of students. It also touches on funding of public schools, and how that funding is levied mainly by local municipal and county property taxes with federal and state contributions. This reliance on local tax base creates intellectual deserts in many of the same places you find food deserts. For a fair system to be possible, we have to have a conversation about goals in admissions process and what is fair and what is unfair in the current system to inform us about what a fairer system might look like.

If college admissions is a measure of success, the measure should not be the target and be gamed by those with power and influence to do so. There must be some accounting for this disparity in opportunity for the student and their representatives to game the system. It’s fine to have a legacy system but I see it as opening the door to this kind of anti-meritocratic behavior by students, their families, their schools and counselors, and especially by the colleges and universities they apply to.

In order to know how good an individual is we need to know both how big a fish they are, and how big the pond is. But we can’t stop there. We need to know how much food they ate and how much energy they expended to get it. Would they have done better in a different pond? Possibly. Should they have done better considering how much opportunity they and their peers had? Also a question we should be able to answer. We should have better tools to know how to better teach and also to better learn.

This is all too complicated. Harvard has a simple objective function: To maximize the future positive “impact” on society its alumni have, and the resulting prestige reflected on their alma mater.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22975148

Title IX and the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal demonstrate that the government has authority to determine what form the admissions process is allowed to take, and intervene if necessary to ensure whatever process in place is fair in a legal sense. My comment was an exploration of the idea of fairness in admissions and not a case study of any institution’s individual admissions process.