The futile quest for college fairness The futile quest for college fairness
Posted on Mon, Jan. 27, 2003
EDWARD WASSERMAN
Helping your daughter apply to college is like helping her jump into a Cuisinart. You wish she didn't have to, you hope she's ready for a nasty ride, you're standing by with bandages. You also wonder how the goop that comes out relates to the quality of the ingredients that go in. This is our family's third go-round with college applications. Spending time and tears scratching at the window of admissions offices gives you a jaded perspective on the current flap about race-based preferences.
The system at the University of Michigan law school, now before the U.S. Supreme Court, has drawn energetic opposition from the Justice Department and President Bush. Michigan awards points to applicants on a complex basis that includes membership in under-represented minority groups. Bush says that it should be scrapped because it's un-American and unfair. Whatever his motives, the president's entry into this dispute accurately reflects the central role that college plays in one of America's core myths: that our country is a meritocracy, that people get what they deserve, that therefore those who own and rule the society do so by dint of their proven worthiness.
College admission is the quintessential ritual of American meritocracy. It's the capstone to the formative years, the authoritative verdict on adolescent attainment, the leading indicator of future success, the official seal of promise. The day when acceptances are mailed out should be a national holiday. (It's already a day of prayer.) But, as the Michigan dustup reminds us, colleges are a poor instrument of meritocracy. The promise of merit-based admission is a hollow one. The kids themselves have no illusions about this.
They're sublime cynics. They know that the selection process is marinated in a quirky favoritism of one sort or another, that an incoming class isn't so much admitted as it is composed. They understand that they compete not on their overall deservingness, but on their ability to edge out others from the same sliver of the candidate pie that they've been consigned to -- whether violinists, linebackers, Florence Nightingales, hunter-gatherers, Wyomingites. The whole affair has been tribalized: You compete with those of your kind. You don't need to beat out the Jewish kid with 1600 SATs from Bronx Science unless you're also a Jewish physics whiz from New York City.
Your biggest rivals are those most like you. If you're heartset on Princeton and two others from your class are applying, they're your competitors. If, on top of that, all three of you are Hispanic, male soccer standouts, you've got a big problem. From the college's perspective, you're equivalents. In fact, no imaginable affirmative-action program would confer anything like the extraordinary advantage that the children of alumni get from some elite colleges.
My alma mater, Yale, where Bush learned to drink, accepts 29 percent of legacy kids like him (the proportion was even higher in his day), compared with 13 percent of the general applicant pool; Princeton takes 35 percent of legacies, and Harvard, the most appalling example, takes 40 percent, compared with 11 percent of all applicants. Where's the meritocracy there? Schools have a good reason to favor legacies: Alumni gave nearly $7 billion, or 28 percent of the private money that went into higher education last year. (Plus, they're more likely to pay extortionate tuitions in full.)
So the schools cordon off a sizable number of seats in their classrooms to ensure a steady inflow of alumni dollars. That may be rational. The point is that the rationale is an institutional one. And that's what's missing from the commentary about affirmative action -- a recognition that much of what colleges do has nothing to do with enhancing some fictive meritocracy, and everything to do with the institution's conception of its own interests. It's hard to quarrel with a favoritism that aims to level the playing field among applicants. Some kids overcome unusual obstacles to achieve modest results; regarding those results as exceptional is right.
Standardized tests are biased, and capable people from some backgrounds don't excel at the skills that the tests measure. Adjusting acceptance criteria to reflect that reality is fair. We're still talking merit; we're just assessing it in more-sensitive and, one hopes, more-accurate ways. What really prompts schools to deviate from merit-based admission is institutional vanity: ¥ÊA regional university, to become a ''national'' one, turns down the applicant from across town in favor of a plainly less qualified one from across the country.
¥ÊA second-tier school, to produce more-selective numbers, solicits applications from students whom it knows it won't admit. ¥ÊAnother school, to inflate its coveted ''yield'' (the percentage of accepted kids who enroll), rejects highly qualified candidates who it thinks won't attend. ¥ÊA Southern college recruits blacks vigorously so that its predominantly white students will be exposed to the people they'll have to work with (and supervise.) A college that considers its job to train the next generation of leaders recruits people who might plausibly lead the society's various sub-groups -- a route to diversity, albeit an elitist route. But then the school no longer can claim to be where the country's most deserving are rewarded with the best education.
It now accepts students not on academic merit, but on the basis of a social mission that it has assigned itself. In short, college admissions are decided on by flawed, self-absorbed institutions, whose chief concern is themselves. We're right to demand that they honor the principles of the meritocracy that we think our country should be. But we shouldn't hold our breath. And for our own kids' sake, we'll keep the bandages handy.
Edward Wasserman is a writer and consultant in Miami. edward_wasserman@hotmail.com
© 2001 miamiherald and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.miami.com
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