Holistic Admissions Are Weird

And may not do what we want them to do

A couple weeks ago the American Justice Department found that Yale systematically discriminates against Asian and White applicants on the basis of their race. Relative to Black applicants of similar qualifications, Asians and Whites are 90% and 75% less likely to get in, respectively.

This isn’t new — Harvard was recently caught up in another race-based admissions scandal where it was found to artificially “cap” the number of asian students they admit. While the school cannot legally institute a quota, the plaintiffs in the legal case contend that the school systemically downgraded Asian students in its “personality rating” — Asian students were consistently determined to have blander personalities than similarly-qualified applicants.

The judge in the Harvard ruling ended up claiming the university’s practice was “not perfect”, but that when the university looked at an applicant’s race it never penalized them, only gave a boost to marginalized students. At face value this sounds nice until you realize admissions are still zero sum — simply because there are only so many offers to hand out. Giving an advantage to one group is the equivalent of disadvantaging every other group.

This is further made complex by the fact that a key figure in these cases is Edward Blum, a conservative anti-affirmative action advocate. While the concerns of Asian students may be legitimate, Blum is clearly in this to fight affirmative action in general, and would do so even if there wasn’t a minority group experiencing challenges.

At the core of these issues is elite universities having relatively opaque admissions processes that they claim to be “holisitc” and “considering the whole person”. While I think there’s a case to be made for affirmative action-type policies, I think the current method of implementation is deeply flawed — and new actions being taken by universities to improve their own diversity metrics are likely to result in worse outcomes for the very students intended to benefit.

Bad History

I think it’s important to realize that arbitrary admissions standards are morally neutral — they’re tools that can be used for good or bad. Holistic admissions and race-based quotas don’t have a great history, because they’ve been used in ways we now find morally bankrupt.

In the early 1900s, Harvard noticed something uncomfortable about its student body — there were so many Jews attending the university. In 1900, Jews were 7% of the school, and by 1922 they’d risen to 22%. The president at the time was deeply concerned about this:

“The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also” — Lawrence Lowell, 1922

Lowell isn’t saying having Jewish students is bad, only that having too many will drive away the groups Harvard really likes: non-Jews. In fact, Harvard’s statistics were a bit more granular than just Jew and non-Jew, they had a few categories in which they placed students:

• J1: A bona fide Jew
• J2: More than likely a Jew
• J3: “Might be” a Jew
• Other

Harvard didn’t just want fewer Jews, they also wanted anyone who “might” be a Jew to seek other educational opportunities. Gentiles with names ending in -stein are on thin ice.

Harvard’s ultimate decision was to cap the percentage of Jewish students admitted to 15%, foregoing the opportunity to admit many deserving applicants on the basis of real or suspected Jewishness.

I’m writing about Jewish admission caps because this is something that would have affected me. I’m Jew-ish in that my family is Jewish, but I’m also an atheist — which in retrospect is also a Jewish stereotype. Perhaps I’d be in J2.

Harvard had similar practices in their consideration of Black applicants too. Frankly, Harvard was extraordinarily racist and didn’t want Black people around. Creating quotas and pointing towards vague concerns about the well-being of “Gentiles” or “Whites” was how they justified their discriminatory practices.

There’s a reason articles about Harvard and other Ivy League schools’ racial admission scandals keep bringing this up — the negative stereotypes attributed to Asian applicants are eerily reminiscent of past discrimination. Like Jews, Asians are now considered to not have the “right personality” for the Ivy’s. Like Jews, the fear is that not penalizing Asians in their admission would lead to the Ivys being overrun with Asian students.

I think an important thing to take away from this history is that racial admission standards can be used for bad ends. I think it’s important when thinking about policy to consider: could this be used in a way I don’t like by my enemies? You might like Obama signing a lot of executive orders, for instance, but that makes it harder to complain when Trump does the same for things you don’t like.

The SAT

The University of California, among others, has publicly announced they will stop using standardized tests like the SAT for admissions purposes. This is done in an effort to boost representation in their student bodies for poor, Black, and Hispanic students.

From a New York Times article:

“These tests are extremely flawed and very unfair,” said Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a member of the board who supported the decision, adding, “Enough is enough.”

This move away from the SAT will further push universities like UC to consider more “holistic” factors in applicant evaluation — the expected result being increased representation of marginalized communities. Part of this was done in reaction to the college admissions scandal, where it was found that some students with very wealthy parents were “buying” SAT scores, either through more lenient proctoring or straight up having other people take the test for them.

Great! Now rich people can’t take advantage of the system and we’ve won a big victory in the fight for equitable admissions.

Right?

A faculty task force at UC found that the SAT and other standardized tests were a better predictor of success in college than “high school grades or other factors”. Additionally, the same task force found that many Black, Hispanic, and Poor applicants were admitted on the basis of SAT scores despite having worse grades — suggesting these standardized tests might actually help make admissions for equitable.

Here’s my take: If you think rich people are buying SAT scores, I can promise you that it is way cheaper for them to simply manufacture extracurricular experiences for their kids, travel opportunities, funds to run charity drives, and every other thing you could think of that factors into a “holistic” admissions process.

Marginalized applicants don’t have access to the same resources as their more privileged counterparts; Marginalized students may have less time to focus on their grades because they’re more likely to need a job to support their family, they’re more likely to be discriminated against by their teachers, and they’re more likely to not have the support structures they need to be the star applicant that raised $10M to save the Dolphins in Florida while maintaining a 4.0 GPA. The SAT and ACT measure applicant ability to succeed in a way that’s less dependent on hitting home runs every year of high school.

With virtually every university dropping these tests as admissions criteria due to the ongoing pandemic, there are calls to make dropping these tests a permanent thing. This seems to be an issue where we don’t know what would best advance equitable outcomes for all students — though my priors lean towards standardized testing being more “fair”.

Moving towards holistic admissions isn’t necessarily a good thing here. It could put undue pressure on low-income or underprivileged students to find other, more expensive ways of boosting their resume to get into the college of their dreams.

The Real Enemy

This all, of course, distracts from the elephant in the room. The Legacy students.

Pop quiz: The children of previous students should _____

A) Be given preferential treatment?

OR

B) Have to prove their worth like everyone else?

If you answered A, I don’t know what to tell you. If B, congrats! This is one of the single biggest steps we can take to reduce racial and economic inequality in elite admissions.

We talk about how Asian students are downgraded on personality and Black/Hispanic students are given a boost, but that pales in comparison to the increased odds that legacy students have. These students are disproportionately white (because their parents went at a time when inequality was even worse), and disproportionately wealthy (because their parents have elite degrees, which tend to boost income).

Legacy students, in the absence of legacy admission criteria, may still attend at higher rates. Intelligence and behavioural traits are highly heritable, so if their parents had good traits that got them in, they‘re likely to have passed that on to their kids. At the same time, many past students haven’t been admitted on merit, but on the basis of financial promises.

This focus on the relative merits of race-based, holistic, or standardized admissions never really centres on the incredible advantage legacy students have. Here’s a relatively unobjectionable case I think everyone can get behind: get rid of legacy admissions and you’ll see a more diverse student body as a result.

Final Thoughts

It’s weird to write pieces like this. I think everyone reading this is pretty much on board with the goal of having better representation in our universities, but there’s wide disagreement in the best method to achieve it. This shouldn’t be taken as an attack on diversity — only pointing out that the ways we seem to be going about it may not work, and could even hurt that cause.

I don’t buy the laissez-faire approach that assumes that, if left long enough, we’ll achieve racial/gender/other-minority equality absent intervention. There’s vicious cycles at play that need to be broken; If there’s very few Black doctors, then the smart Black kids of the next generation don’t have role models that look like them to encourage them to pursue medicine.

At the same time, intervening at the end of the admissions stage seems to admit a sort of pessimism at changing upstream factors influencing admission disparities. There’s very real cost barriers to attending and applying for university that may cause certain populations to self-select out of applying in the first place. Additionally, there’s a very real lack of outreach on the part of universities to underserved communities. I suspect I’m not the only one that finds the standard maximally-diverse pamphlets distributed by university marketing teams to be a little too virtue-signal-y without accompanying material changes.

This may be cynical, but it’s awfully convenient the change universities want to make are the ones that don’t reduce revenue; If making tuition more affordable improved diversity, this may still be a “bad” thing for the school. Increased outreach efforts are similarly more expensive. Intervening at the final stage of admissions is the one mechanism that doesn’t come with a revenue tradeoff.

Here’s what I’d want to see:

• Make university generally more affordable — stop pricing out low-income people. Canada’s better than the US, but my own tuition was still $30k/year
• Fix our pipeline problems — encourage greater numbers of applicants from under-represented communities
• Get rid of legacy admissions
• Admit the best people you can

If there’s still problems after that, we can talk about quotas on otherwise qualified applicants — but that should be a last resort.