STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSION VS. HARVARD

One implication of this evidence is that diversity in the student body of educational institutions is valuable in and of itself, because it durably affects preferences. Affirmative action was originally envisioned in the United States partly as compensation for historical injustice, and partly as a way to level the playing field between the whites, who had the advantage of many generations of advanced education, and the rest.

In the spring of 2018, New York City struggled with the redesign of the admission system for its elite public schools, which is currently based on an exam and lets in very few Latinos and African Americans. At the same time, Asian Americans were suing Harvard for discrimination, on the grounds that, in order to achieve its diversity goals, Harvard artificially limits the number of Asian American students it admits. Additionally, the Trump administration has been urging schools to stop taking race into consideration in their admission decisions. The US Supreme Court has so far resisted pressure to forbid any discrimination based on race, but it is not clear how long it will hold out.

In India, the debate is framed in terms of the actual quotas in educational institutions and government jobs for the castes historically discriminated against. These quotas are much resented by the upper castes, resulting in frequent protests and lawsuits challenging the validity of the law, especially on the grounds that a disproportionate share of the reserved slots end up with the more privileged among the lower castes, who perhaps need them less.

The idea of “merit” plays a key role in this debate. At the heart of the argument is the idea that test scores provide an objective measure of merit, a measure of how suitable the candidate is for the job or a place in the university, and therefore affirmative action discriminates against “meritorious” candidates, as they are called in India. Given everything we have seen in this chapter, that seems like a very unlikely proposition. Self-discrimination undermines confidence and test performance. A history of being underestimated, patronized, ignored, or despised by teachers and supervisors because you happen to be from a particular group will make it harder to achieve. Moreover, as we both know, growing up in a household where books are everywhere and dinner table conversation often centers around fine points of mathematics or philosophy, whether or not you always enjoy it, becomes a distinct advantage when you are writing your college essays. A lower-caste candidate who performed as well as Abhijit in the high school leaving exam had to jump through more hoops to get there and is for that reason likely to be more talented.

The fuzziness of the notion of merit was the bone of contention between two first-rate empirical economists, David Card and Peter Arcidiacono, who were retained by the two sides in the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard trial. On the plaintiffs’ side, Arcidiacono argued that Asians must be discriminated against because admitted Asians have higher grades and higher test scores than any other group. In other words, given the same test scores, an Asian student is less likely to be admitted to Harvard than a white student (or an African American).

On the Harvard side, Card had a number of objections to Arcidiacono’s analysis, including the point that the objective of diversity in parental background and intended major was legitimate. But the most striking difference came from their interpretations of the “personality rating,” meant to capture the candidate’s leadership qualities and integrity. Asian students systematically have higher academic and extracurricular ratings, but lower personality ratings, and once we account for that they are no less likely to be admitted than white students.

For Card, this proves there is no discrimination. Arcidiacono contends that the personality rating is exactly the way Harvard discriminates against Asians. In the debate, a rather ironic parallel with history did not go unnoticed. In the 1920s, then Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell attempted to introduce quotas to limit the admission of Jews to the university. This failed, but he put in place the system of “holistic” admission, meaning a system that values personal characteristics beyond grades, which was used to limit the number of Jews. Students for Fair Admission wants to make the case this is happening again.

The debate illustrates the essential treacherousness of the idea of merit, and the very notion of what constitutes quality. On the one hand, “personal qualities” may reflect (perhaps unwittingly) a form of belonging to a club, with secret handshakes not taught in the average public school. The personality rating may indeed be a not so subtle way to keep a certain type of student out (whether or not they are Asian) and ensure the smooth intergenerational transmission of elite status. On the other hand, the fact that among applicants African Americans systematically have higher personality ratings than whites or Asians may well reflect what we mentioned earlier: since admissions at Harvard require a sterling academic record, a child from a disadvantaged background must have quite unusual personal skills to be even considered, especially since the child might have had to survive worse schools and perhaps a more challenging home environment.

There is no evident solution to this problem. As a flagship producer of the next generation of leaders, Harvard clearly needs to find a place for students from all social groups, and a massive overrepresentation of any particular social group relative to its weight in the population is both perhaps undesirable in a democracy and likely to lead to political problems. But we need a more transparent social conversation about the design of affirmative action. The current implementation of affirmative action policies, which dances around the concept of race instead of directly confronting it, is probably not anywhere close to ideal. The Harvard challenge is both inevitable and perhaps desirable in that it makes society confront its own inconsistencies.

From the perspective of the narrow objective of affecting preferences by increasing contact between social groups, the growing resentment of affirmative action poses a problem. Allport’s original hypothesis was that contact would reduce prejudice, but only if some conditions were satisfied. In particular, he held that reduced prejudice would result when the contact happened in a setting where there was equal status between the groups in the situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and the support of authorities, law, or custom. Extremely contentious integration is unlikely to produce these conditions. For example, if high school students feel they are competing for slots in college and, worse, if they have the impression this competition might be tilted against them, they may come to resent the other group even more.