Harvard, HPRgument Blog — February 9, 2010 5:06 pm

Weighing in: The Asian Ceiling

By Max Novendstern

Check out Jon Yip’s post, “The Asian Ceiling” for a review of a Kara Miller’s Boston Globe editorial about Asian discrimination in the college admission process. Asians are the new Jews, Miller explains:

In a country built on individual liberty and promise, that feels deeply unfair. If a teenager spends much time studying, excels at an instrument or sport, and garners wonderful teacher recommendations, should he be punished for being part of a high-achieving group? Are his accomplishments diminished by the fact that people he has never met – but who look somewhat like him – also work hard?

Now, Ms. Miller clearly has lots of opinions about what a “fair world” would look like, and what education is supposed to be all about. (Remember, this is the woman who wrote the Boston Globe editorial a few months ago called “My Lazy American Students.”) She and I could probably quibble all day long about the “justicial,” Kantian categorical importance of things like high GPAs, SATs and nice recommendation letters — my view, for the record, is that these things are pretty non-predictive of the sort of achievement a just society should be promoting, things like creativity, critical thought and democratic experimentalism. And furthermore, GPAs and SATs are highly determined by sociological factors, like culture, affluence, familial support and, yes, ethnicity, which are distributed unfairly. A world where SATs and high GPAs matter less is not a world I’m prepared to protest against (or write Boston Globe articles about).

But the fact is, this entire argument is a big waste of time. Ms. Miller seems to think that certain achievements should “entitle” a person to admission, that people “deserve” or “earn” admission. In reality, the opposite is closer to the truth. As Louis Menand has argued, certain admission “spots” (think of them as needs that the university wants to fulfill) create, as it were, the applicant’s opportunity to fill them. There are no Platonic, unchanging qualifications for a spot at Harvard. Instead, as new needs come about, new spots open up, old ones close down, and an opportunity for admission shifts, erratically, from one student to the next. One year ivy league school X identifies a felt need for a flute player with a certain background and with certain aptitudes. The next year it doesn’t. The real question is how fairness can even be said to apply in such a convoluted, unpredictable process.

The biggest change in college admission is an explosion of demand. In 1932, 1,330 people applied for admission to Yale, and seventy-two percent got in. Today, around 26,000 people apply to Yale, and about 7.5 percent get in. The instrumental value of the University is higher than ever before (see Peter Orszag’s discussion of the “wage premium” of a college education) and, in turn, the demand for a university education is greater than ever before.

So we have a basic supply-side advantage to the universities: an excess of demand gives universities a lot of discretion in determining the make-up of their class. We might disagree with the things they choose to prioritize, but, ultimately, it’s the university’s prerogative to make those priorities. Why? Because, ultimately, it’s the universities’ diverse institutional needs that the admittees are being selected for to fulfill. Harvard “needs” future professors, lax players to fill the stadium and it needs students interested in launching themselves into careers of political power and economic excess. Harvard also “needs” to create expansive international networks and to make old alumni happy.

Harvard’s diversity thus has nothing to do with “reverse discrimination” or “regular discrimination” or any of that. It’s a function of the huge pool that Harvard has to select from and the slightly less huge number of needs that Harvard’s looking to fulfill.

If you want to criticize universities, then, criticize them not for discriminating against anyone, but for turning the admission process into an essentially random crapshoot, a high-stakes contest where applicants have no good way of knowing the roles they are being selected for to play or the rules by which that selection is made. Few people know or can know why one student ultimately gets in and another ten do not. And Ms. Miller is no help in making any of this clearer.

Photo credit: Sarah Ross’ flickr stream

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Author: Max Novendstern is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Political Review.
  • Jeremy Patashnik

    Max, I agree with your main point. Universities are seeking diversity in many dimensions, and thus there’s essentially no difference between admitting an athlete with a slightly lower GPA and admitting a minority with a slightly lower (or higher) SAT score.

    I only disagree with your last point that this has all made the college application process so random. The most elite universities get such a large pool of applicants (many of them all qualified) that any system you employ would be, to some extent, random. You could plug GPA, SAT scores, essay rating, strength of recommendation into a formula, and it would spit out results that would still be arbitrary, just less diverse.

    The ceiling effect makes all the applicants at the top of the pool perfectly qualified candidates and deciding based on a few SAT points–or the strength of a subjective recommendation–doesn’t seem like a better system than deciding based the qualities you discussed in your blog post.

  • Alexander Sherbany

    First, let’s confront the implication that admission to an Ivy League or equivalent university is a shining gateway to riches, happiness, and a successful sex life.

    Generally, you are not bound for success because you were admitted to Harvard; you were admitted to Harvard because the admissions committee thought you were bound for success.

    Once we get that misperception off the table, the stakes seem a lot smaller in these debates over admissions polices.

    Second, I agree on the main point that it is not unfair for an admissions committee to select individual candidates with some attention to what they may contribute to the group, just as employers want to make sure new employees will be a “good fit.” If one of a university’s goals is to develop a student body with greater “intercultural skills” to help them meet the challenges of the “real world,” and it believes that preventing a lopsided demographic is key to that goal, then so be it. My feeling, however, is that admissions officers probably overestimate the importance of preventing demographic imbalances. If Yale were 25% Asian instead of a little over 15%, I doubt that would very significantly impact the ‘cross-cultural development’ of either Asians or non-Asians. So Miller is right to raise the question of whether there is an Asian ceiling, and whether it is too low to make the cross-cultural argument compelling.

    She is totally off base, on the other hand, if she is implying that discrimination against Asians today is parallel to discrimination against Jews earlier in the last century. It is not as if ‘diversity’ on campus were seriously threatened by the sheer quantity of Jews qualified for admission. It was quite the reverse: homogeneity and ethnic purity was on the defensive in this case.

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