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National News See other National News Articles Title: American Meritocracy Revisited Elite Admissions, Asian Quotas, and the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard Campaign The Disappearance of American Meritocracy For at least the last two generations, American conservatives have been loudly complaining about the racially-based employment and admission policies widely described as “affirmative action.” I know this to be true because as a youngster in the 1970s, strong opposition to affirmative action was the primary issue that gradually drew me towards the Republican Party, until I finally cast my first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Yet although Republicans have held the White House and Congress during much of this period and placed numerous conservatives on the Supreme Court, the policies in question are vastly stronger today than they ever were in the past. Indeed, the racial positions publicly espoused by some wildly popular recent “rightwing” presidents as Donald Trump and George W. Bush surely would have utterly appalled such prominent liberals of the 1960s as Hubert Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy. However, hope springs eternal, and although most of the Republican Party establishment has long since grown silent on the issue, a small band of determined conservative-activists has persevered, and earlier this year the Supreme Court agreed to take up a racial discrimination case brought by Asian plaintiffs against Harvard University, together with a similar case against the University of North Carolina. I wish them well and I even have a proprietary interest in their success since the lawsuit was reportedly inspired by my 2012 Meritocracy article, whose findings of anti-Asian discrimination provoked a considerable flurry of attention both in the media and among Asian- American organizations. But after nearly fifty years of overwhelmingly negative progress, I’m quite skeptical that nine justices will suddenly provide a deus ex machina to remedy this unfortunate situation, especially since the Covid outbreak has provided many of our most elite colleges an excuse to sharply reduce their reliance upon standardized tests. If admissions are increasingly based upon entirely subjective factors such as personal essays, admissions officers can produce whatever racial or demographic results that they and their academic masters desire. Indeed, despite its role in prompting the current lawsuit, relatively little of my analysis had focused upon traditional affirmative action, and my harsh conclusions were far more sweeping. As I wrote: In recent decades, elite college admissions policy has frequently become an ideological battlefield between liberals and conservatives, but I would argue that both these warring camps have been missing the actual reality of the situation. Conservatives have denounced “affirmative action” policies which emphasize race over academic merit, and thereby lead to the enrollment of lesser qualified blacks and Hispanics over their more qualified white and Asian competitors; they argue that our elite institutions should be color-blind and race-neutral. Meanwhile, liberals have countered that the student body of these institutions should “look like America,” at least approximately, and that ethnic and racial diversity intrinsically provide important educational benefits, at least if all admitted students are reasonably qualified and able to do the work. My own position has always been strongly in the former camp, supporting meritocracy over diversity in elite admissions. But based on the detailed evidence I have discussed above, it appears that both these ideological values have gradually been overwhelmed and replaced by the influence of corruption and ethnic favoritism, thereby selecting future American elites which are not meritocratic nor diverse, neither being drawn from our most able students nor reasonably reflecting the general American population. The overwhelming evidence is that the system currently employed by most of our leading universities admits applicants whose ability may be unremarkable but who are beneficiaries of underhanded manipulation and favoritism. Nations which put their future national leadership in the hands of such individuals are likely to encounter enormous economic and social problems, exactly the sort of problems which our own country seems to have increasingly experienced over the last couple of decades. So I think the serious ills plaguing our elite universities are far broader and deeper than merely the question of racial discrimination under affirmative action, and even if the latter were rectified, I suspect that few would notice much improvement. A perfect illustration of the dismal state of college admissions came a couple of weeks ago in a front-page Wall Street Journal story regarding a graduating Texas teenager who had been denied admission to all of the selective colleges to which she had applied. The first few paragraphs explained the details of her plight: Kaitlyn Younger has been an academic standout since she started studying algebra in third grade. She took her first advanced-placement course as a freshman, scored 1550 on her SATs as a junior at McKinney High School near Dallas and will graduate this spring with an unweighted 3.95 grade-point average and as the founder of the school’s accounting club. Along the way she performed in and directed about 30 plays, sang in the school choir, scored top marks on the tests she has so far taken for 11 advanced-placement classes, helped run a summer camp and held down a part-time job. “She is extraordinary,” said Jeff Cranmore, her guidance counselor at McKinney High School. Ms. Younger, 18 years old, was cautiously optimistic when she applied to top U.S. colleges last fall. Responses came this month: Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern all rejected her. “I expected a bunch wouldn’t accept me,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be this bad.” What made her situation so surprising was that her standardized SAT test scores of 1550 out of a possible 1600 placed her in the 99+ percentile, an especially impressive achievement since she had gotten those scores as a junior, being a year younger than nearly all of her competitors. Her ranking was substantially above the average for all of America’s most elite colleges, including those that rejected her, and far surpassed those of many of the other schools that had also returned thin envelopes. She had done very well in 11 AP classes and her application was overflowing with exactly the sort of impressive extra-curricular activities expected in the well-rounded applicant. And the result was still uniform rejection everywhere. Based upon these apparent facts, the unfairness of her fate seems manifest, but it is much less clear to me that she was a victim of racial discrimination. I certainly don’t doubt that a large fraction of all the blacks or Hispanics admitted in her place had considerably lower test scores and less stellar academic transcripts. But given her extremely impressive record, the same was probably also true for most of the whites and Asians favored over her. My suspicion is that she and her middle-class family lacked the special “hooks” that admissions consultants charge huge sums to arrange, and so she fell victim to the random whims of the bored or ignorant admissions officers who seem so typical of that profession. The obvious, almost inevitable consequence of the elimination of objective, meritocratic admissions criteria is that the process will increasingly be governed by corruption, connections, and favoritism, certainly very negative social ills but not necessarily violations of Civil Rights statutes. So with the tenth anniversary of my Meritocracy monograph fast approaching and a Supreme Court ruling also on the horizon, I’ve decided to provide a lengthy summary of that analysis as well as a retrospective account of my own unsuccessful efforts to achieve reform via my Free Harvard/Fair Harvard campaign of 2016, starting with lengthy excerpts from my most recent 2018 discussion and the original 2012 article. Asian Quotas in the Ivy League Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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