I remember when an admissions lottery was a big left-wing idea. I remember Duncan Kennedy's "Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System" — published in 1982 and referred to fondly as "the little red book."
It contains a "Utopian Proposal." Part B of the proposal is headed "The Law School as a Counterhegemonic Enclave" ("This is a set of proposals designed to reduce illegitimate hierarchy and alienation within the school, and to reduce or reverse the school’s role in promoting illegitimate hierarchy and alienation in the bar and the country at large"). And the first item under Part B is "Admissions":
There should be a test designed to establish minimal skills for legal practice and then a lottery for admission to the school....To be fair to the righties who are now talking lottery, Professor Kennedy also wanted "quotas within the lottery for women, minorities and working class students."
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The lottery idea seems to be premised on the idea that there is no value to exceeding the minimum standards, or that the amount of excess cannot be measured, or that such additional value is not worth the trouble.
I can certainly see why those in the fat part of the skill distribution right around the minimum standard would wish that to be the case.
" a test designed to establish minimal skills for legal practice "
Racist !
Opportunities for graft, corruption, and power-mongering will be reduced by this plan, which means it will never be implemented unless forced upon the universities by outside authority. So, state legislatures, get to it.
If there are only "holistic" approaches to applications, there is no objective standard applied by which one can determine the success or failure of an applicant. Thus, the personal or political whims of the authorities can be expressed at will.
I compare this to the difference between "may issue" permits for concealed carry of firearms, granted at the whim or favor of a mayor, sheriff, or other official, versus "shall issue," wherein if one meets known criteria the permit is issued.
It took decades but most states are now "shall issue" and the rest are on their way, lawsuit by lawsuit.
And I am proud that the University of Texas, my daughter's alma mater, has succeeding in throwing off the bonds of racism requiring affirmative action 13 years in advance of Justice O'Conner's predicted date!
As I just commented over at Instapundit, California was doing with with their state college system back in the early 1970s. I was a National Merit finalist, won numerous awards in high school, had a 3.91 GPA, played varsity football, was in the (excellent) school choir -- and was rejected by Humboldt State College. BYU offered me a full scholarship (two, actually), so I went there. :-)
What Scalia is talking about is the idea that different colleges have different academic starting points, and that this is very important when it comes to scientific or technical fields. There are people that can't learn at MIT but could learn at another college that didn't assume so much.
By qualified applicants, it has to be people whose preparation is what the program of the institution is geared to. Now it may very well be that it requires too much - that is definitely possible.
It is also true that a person benefits from attending lectures that are too difficult for them, because there is still something that they pick up, but they have to be able to transfer out and drop back down. And this is not common with clleges when people take out student loans.
Wow.
To reduce "illegitimate hierarchy and alienation" (whatever that means) we should have a lottery. Ok, I guess if we don't care about grades as an indicator of past performance and aptitude tests as an indicator of future performance, then at least a lottery is fair and impartial.
But wait... then we have to have quotas 'within the lottery' for women minorities and working class students?
Seriously, WTF?
In what circles is The American Conservative considered right wing?
I remember when an admissions lottery was a big left-wing idea.
This will never happen because the elite schools would have to lower the standards too much in order to claim the number of minorities they want are "qualified". They're willing to admit smart but the smartest minorities as a political position but ultimately they believe in the qualification criteria they set. Letting in whites and asians on this basis will hurt the brand in a way that racial preferences to blacks and to a lesser extent hispanics will not.
Ultimately their preference is race-norming, setting quotas by race and ranking members only within their race. But Universities had to renounce that practice decades ago due to public objections. The current model is to loosen the criteria sufficiently that motivated admissions staff can replicate race-norming outcomes using whatever criteria they can best justify.
Evidently the irony of quotas within a lottery system was lost on the good professor. But then, irony is a strong suit of progressives or utopia.
Instead of a lottery, you could have a competition, which would make your university worth attending.
Affirmative action is bull%@@!, and it's mostly a lie. When it gets down to crunch time, the advocates toggle back to "diversity" as some noble objective, which, of course, just means "racial diversity" and "left-wing thought uniformity."
If there is to be affirmative action, it should simply be based on income, nothing else. This, at least, would exclude Malia and Sasha and rich black kids going to Sidwell Friends, and would open the door up for poor white kids from West Virginia mining towns.
I would support this.
If that won't work, then, Yes, based on historical discrimination against blacks, Yes, I would support a very narrow affirmative action policy for black folks only, but no other race, sorry. This would not involve lowering standards, though. It would involve allocating funds to go into black high schools, work them hard academically, so that they could meet higher academic standards.
My 2 cents.
A mandatory DNA test will have to be be taken. Any White people passing as black would be cheating on the cheaters.
So the professor did not want a lottery?
Internal logic and Leftists are not friends.
"hold a lottery for all qualified applicants."
That implies the "qualified" level is too low.
If a school wanted to admit the best N students it could get, the "qualified" level would be that which only N applicants meet.
Yeah, that solves nothing and accomplishes nothing. Administrators will just cheat the definition of "qualified," as they do now.
They will add "leadership" and "initiative" and "creativity" to the "holistic" list of qualifications, and magically discover that all the black students have massive amounts of each, and that no Asian student has ever had any of those in any amount ever.
Information age. Getting away from bricks, mortar and extra-legal separate world living might be very egalitarian. Let educators compete for students based on their quality, not geography.
There should be a test designed to establish minimal skills for legal practice and then a lottery for admission to the school....
Then the only difference between schools would be their physical locations.
"quotas within the lottery for women, minorities and working class students."
Always a thumb on the scale, trying to bend reality to fit their delusions and warped sense of morality.
group rights. disgusting, unamerican concept. we've lost freedom of association and the government, which should be strictly neutral, is the biggest discriminator of all.
Better still just hold a lottery based on meritocracy.
Lottery won't help. The qualified applicant pool won't look like America.
So the qualifications will be lowered until the pool looks like America, or the qualified pool will be dominated by Asians and so will the entering class.
Math is a harsh mistress. And too few people understand it.
As long as you set the quota for females no higher than 51%, I'm thoroughly on board with that.
Elite institutions are all about creating a hierarchy -- that their graduates become certified, card-carrying members of the 'elite' by that fact alone is what generates the huge crush of applicants seeking entry to those institutions rather than others in the first place. A lottery system, where those offered admission are chosen at random from the entire pool of those meeting minimal admission standards, would quickly destroy that notion of elitism, and with it the underlying idea of meritocracy. The idea that some are better than others, measured against some generally accepted scale, is what elitism is all about. Across pretty much every aspect of human endeavor, that idea that 'some are better than others' gets validated by experience daily. Radical egalitarianism doesn't fit with that idea or that experience very well.
Duncan Kennedy has been a fixture at Harvard LS for decades, an institution that embodies better than most the reality of an elite institution in America today. Whether an admissions lottery makes sense depends on whether the distinctions that elite institutions like HLS draw today -- emphasizing achievement and test scores -- strike you as important or essentially arbitrary. It would be fitting indeed if HLS were the first elite institution to give an admissions lottery a go. But it will never happen.
Replace "college" with "horse race" and if this proposal works with that substitution, it will be a winner.
After all, the important thing is the (we the) people placing the bets at the window.
Public colleges should accept all high school graduates that apply. Those that survive the first semester can stay.
And no grading on curves!
Loser has to go to college.
"There should be a test designed to establish minimal skills." Sure. Catnip for lawyers. Griggs v. Duke Power redux.
"quotas within the lottery." Like, separate but equal lotteries. And this would be very, very different from affirmative action. Very.
The lottery idea, in its best form, is a simple deduction for conscientious planning. It is still, presumably, a merit-based system, but with arbitrary priority decisions to resolve competing requests within a window.
They are still stumbling over their purported principles in a race to to preserve the political leverage and financial benefits of prejudice-based civil rights.
AlbertAnonymous said...
Wow.
To reduce "illegitimate hierarchy and alienation" (whatever that means) we should have a lottery. Ok, I guess if we don't care about grades as an indicator of past performance and aptitude tests as an indicator of future performance, then at least a lottery is fair and impartial.
Grades at the high school level are a poor indicator of past performance. Even within a single state, curriculum and grading standards vary too widely to make comparisons between schools relevant. National standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT do provide a measure for comparing students from across the country. Whether they are an accurate predictor of future college performance is a matter for debate. It seems they're good predictors. How well do the LSAT and MCAT tests predict law and medical school performance respectively?
Nothing says "good idea" like quotas within an already anonymous lottery.
When you're adding epicycles like that, you might as well just admit that your desire for "fairness based only on qualification" and "exactly the right number of people in special categories" are fundamentally incompatible.
There used to be a theory that if people owned their own homes, they would post hoc develop the values of middle class homeowners. Hence low equity and even NINJA loans. These were later considered predatory loans by the banks, but they were originally encouraged by utopian social thinkers........Something like this may happen with elite schools, especially those that don't offer affirmative action students full scholarships. Most of these students don't have the nexus of family connections and expectations, social self confidence, drive, and ambition that contribute to upper middle class success. A degree from a prestige school is only one element--and not the most important element--in that success. How long before these schools get criticized for their predatory admission practices by students with more debts than prospects.
Questions for pro-AA fans:
1) How do we determine who fits into which race? Are we going by self-identification? Does a committee have to meet the candidate and determine who fits into what race? How about mixed race people?
2) Why should race trump individual obstacles? Is it not at least somewhat absurd that a black son of doctors who went to exclusive private schools should get points over a white kid from an impoverished and broken home who went to underfunded schools?
3) Is a student really benefitting from being "upjumped" into a program that they could not get into without racial preferences (and if they could have gotten in, then the racial preferences were at best useless), or is that student more likely to fail? In such case, wouldn't the student be better off in a less competitive school, as Scalia suggested? I know that at my age I couldn't succeed at Navy SEAL training, and being accepted into a SEAL program probably wouldn't be good for me or my fellow trainees.
4) Considering racial preferences have been the norm for over forty years, at what point can we consider that they don't work?
It's a silly idea, but no sillier than our current system, and certainly fairer.
Liberals like the idea of diversity, but liberal academics want their schools to be as elite and selective as possible. So they go with meritocracy for most of their slots, and reduce standards for a few.
Since conservatives have largely been locked out of those schools, they can entertain selection methods (lottery) that reflect their values (color-blind) without worrying about the consequences (reduced quality). How many conservative base voters have a material interest in preserving UW Madison or UT Austin's rank in U.S. News and World Report?
Wait a minute. According to the SCOTUS, the reason that affirmative action is legal is that diversity is educational in and of itself. Which is to say, the reason black people are admitted to universities is the same reason elephants are admitted to zoos; to provide an edifying spectacle for the paying customers.
Qwerty: My daughter is an alumna of The University of Texas, Austin. In her freshman year, she and all other first years were required to take a humanities course - and those offered were mostly of the Political Indoctrination 101 sort.
My daughter was in a class of about 150, with about half engineering students like her. Those kids knew their GPA depended only on the grades in their major, not this pass/fail class. They rebelled at the idiocy presented, and in only a few weeks reduced the commissar, I mean professor, to showing films and assigning reading rather than lecturing. They asked questions. They provided facts not given by the prof. They pointed out bad math, bad science, bad conclusions based on ideology rather than facts. And the other half of the class came around after just a handful of lectures, and also gave the prof hell for his idiocy. The class ended up uniformly passing.
Don't worry about the kids at UT. They are all right.
Look around. Some Bus. Ad. courses also carry Econ. numbers which are acceptable as "Humanities," and there must be others such that are either interesting or useful for something.
However, I still was short in "humanities" and just plain hours, since for some reason a certain number of hours were required, and they did not care care what kind, so I took some liberal arts courses just because they fit between my engineering classes and work. 10-15 years later I would meet someone from one of these, and he would say, "Oh, I remember you! You are the one who argued with the pofessor!"
The fact that these leftist elites favor racial preferences says a lot about them. Clearly the primary reason blacks are underrepresented at elite schools is due to economic factors which disproportionately affect blacks. So a reasonable method to fix that is to assign points based on economic factors--so many points for the first in your family to attend college, so many points for those who come from low-income families, etc. (Obviously this would be tricky to implement, as anyone could game the system, but this is also true of race-based preferences).
But then, overhauling admissions to give advantages to poor and unconnected students (at the expense of wealthy and connected ones) across the board would be far more revolutionary, and a genuine threat to elite privilege. You spend money sending your kid to prep school, hiring tutors, etc., and those advantages can be blunted by some kid from the projects or rural Appalachia who is high achieving for their area! You can see why its far easier to simply hand out a few slots to the "right" kind of black kids (i.e., the sons of doctors and lawyers). It looks better on a brochure compared to poor kids, and you don't really risk your own kids losing their advantage.
Then there's the other option of just rating people by universal standards of merit. Sure, the connected and wealthy will have advantages--as they already do--but if you want to help the disadvantaged you'd be better off reaching them when they're younger and your efforts won't set them up to fail at a school too competitive for them.
The race, gender, orientation, etc. criteria to arbitrarily discriminate between individuals originates with pro-choice doctrine, which includes selective-child policy adopted by the Democrat Party and progressive liberals in their constituency.
Those who are curious what a student body would look like at an elite school that admits on a race blind basis, with no legacy or athletic preferences, either, should look at CalTech: 1.7% black, 13.5 % hHispanic, 30% white and 48% Asian.
Qualifications for President of the USA: natural born citizen, a resident for 14 years, 35 years of age or older.
Why vote when we could just select by lottery?
Let me get this straight: someone, in case this a conservative of some sort, is proposing a lottery for all universities, private, religious, and public? How is that constitutional? This is sort of a law blog.) Does it include seminaries and theology faculties?
I suspect that this is just a way to stir the masses. If the government can't get Harvard to accept NROTC (banned for years until lately and then it is really at MIT) except by persuasion, how will it be able to force them to accept by lottery? And what minimal standards will they use?
If it is like most of Europe and India, they parse out the top 5% academically and the rest go to an apprenticeship of some sort. The University to person ratio is drastically changed in this scenario and students get a free ride as long as they stay in school. Then if you want to b e a doctor, you have to pass another test - Spain has a lot of cab drivers with MDs.
"The fact that these leftist elites favor racial preferences says a lot about them. Clearly the primary reason blacks are underrepresented at elite schools is due to economic factors which disproportionately affect blacks."
Not true. Even correcting for all economic factors, whites, east Asians, and Hispanics outperform Blacks. i.e, if you reserve a slot for a low-income student from a broken family with one or more siblings in the prison system, and with no close relatives who are college graduates, the top applicants who fit those criteria are far more likely to be white or Asian than Black or Hispanic. This is why universities insist on a race-conscious admissions policy.
It is an ugly problem. Any race-blind admissions process will result in student bodies that are overwhelmingly east Asian and white. At this point in American history, a college education is closely correlated with traditional measures of success -- high income, family stability, good health, and a leadership position in the private or public sector. Like I said, it is an ugly problem.
Let's do a lottery for medical school too. Minimal entrance requirements, blind lottery, all races graduate in same ratio as general population. We'll put the excitement back in medicine.
Same with airline pilots, prosecutors, judges, guy who designs next space shuttle, etc.
Look how well it's worked out with the White House.
@ Brandon -
"Clearly the primary reason blacks are underrepresented at elite schools is due to economic factors which disproportionately affect blacks."
I do not think that's correct. I believe that the tremendous pressure to produce (at consistently high levels) is what most sets elite schools out of reach for disadvantaged (you know...ethnic minority for the most part) students. It is both base education (= reading skills) and learned study habits, managing time, that are deficient.
Just my personal experience, which may be dated.
"Those who are curious what a student body would look like at an elite school that admits on a race blind basis, with no legacy or athletic preferences, either, should look at CalTech:"
Yeah, CalTech is almost a good example.
The female to male admit ratio at Caltech has risen steadily over the past four years, even though the percentage of applicants that are female has stayed steady at around 25%.
Four years ago [2007], Caltech admitted females and males at roughly the same rates, and the admitted class was 28.5% female. This year, Caltech reached an all-time high: females were admitted at nearly three times the rate of males, and the percentage of admitted females hit 45%.
The problem with basing admissions on a quality that has nothing at all to do with academic performance is that unless a college also practices affirmative action on the grading - i.e. giving minorities it has admitted based on affirmative action a bump in the actual grade - then arguably the administration has inflated a student record only for the purposes of gaining an admission, tuition money, and a stat to boost their own image. Whether the student succeeds or not seems to be rather a secondary consideration.
What this reminds me of most is the K-12 practice of socially promoting students who have not mastered the present grade on to the next grade. Since many urban K-12 schools are failures at educating their students, and that's where many minorities reside, the colleges and universities are trying to make up for it with what amounts to yet another free pass to an educational level the students may not be ready for (except this level comes with things like loans and debts). Minority students who need the help are probably better served with assistance coming somewhere in grades K-3 than at college application time.
What many colleges and universities may not realize is that employers are not stupid. If a student is awarded a college degree it is not a guarantee of a bright future. Aside from situations where a degree is required from certain licenses or certifications necessary for a job, the college degree is mainly useful in getting your foot in the door with an employer and pretty much ceases to be relevant upon being hired - what matters then is performance.
If an employee turns out to be poorly educated in fact, difficult to train, bad with communication, poorly behaved, or otherwise not worthwhile to the employer, they will be quickly shown the door (and at least locally, more employers are requiring a trial period be served as a temporary employee with a temp agency to avoid the mess that comes with formally hiring and then firing an employee who doesn't work out).
At some point, performance matters, at least in the private sector.
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