The federal government wants some changes at Harvard. The most dangerous request is:
Merit-based admissions reform. Harvard must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies; cease all preferences based on race, color, or national origin in admissions throughout its undergraduate, graduate, and other programs; and demonstrate through structural and personnel action that these changes are durable.
Harvard President Alan Garber will probably reply, more or less:
Good news! Although prior to the 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action, we did consider race in admissions, we no longer do so. Nonbinary Scout’s honor!
Of course, anyone knowledgeable about elite admissions knows that Harvard still uses race and wants to continue to do so, regardless of what the Supreme Court rules. What can the Trump administration do?
Require Harvard to publicly release non-identifying admissions data about every completed application to major programs, including undergraduate, law, business, and medicine.
Chris Rufo has argued that “every university that receives federal funding should be required to publish disaggregated data for race, sex, G.P.A., SAT scores and class rank at the back end.” Knowing the average SAT scores for, say, Asian and black students enrolled at Harvard would, indeed, be better than nothing. But data on individual students applying to Harvard would be much better.
First, averages can be calculated from individual data. We lose nothing by requiring individual data.
Second, we want to protect applicant privacy. Fortunately, we want such a limited set of data that its publication would not allow anyone to identify any specific applicant. We won’t ask for an applicant’s address or birthday.
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Third, we only need a handful of variables to ensure—mostly—meritocratic admissions:
Sex: Never pass up an opportunity to require woke universities to follow the federal definitions.
Race: This is the most important variable and also the trickiest. Different universities, and even different schools within the same university, use different definitions. And these definitions have changed over time. The easiest approach is to allow each school to use whatever definitions it uses internally, with the proviso that this data must match any public pronouncements made by the school itself. If Harvard reports that blacks make up 14.6 percent of undergraduate admits, than it must be possible to confirm this percentage from the public data.
Scores: For undergraduate admissions, these would include composite SAT and/or ACT scores—we don’t need every individual component. For professional schools, we want LSAT (law), MCAT (medicine), and GMAT (business). For the most part, however, we don’t want to have to bother being overly specific. Instead, this can be phrased as: “Provide the scores for any standardized tests taken by large numbers of applicants and used in the admissions process.”
Other Variables: Schools should have the option of providing any other variables that they feel are important to their admissions process. We want our demands to be very simple, which is the best way to counter arguments against federal overreach. But if a school wants to provide GPA data or interview ratings, then it should be free to do so.
Decision: We need to know if the applicant was admitted or rejected. Although it might be interesting to know about waitlists and other arcana, we should keep the process as simple as possible, subject to our primary goal of preventing racial discrimination.
Enrollment: Knowing which students enrolled allows us to calculate any average in which Rufo or other observers might be interested.
And that is it! Five or so columns for every applicant would make current discrimination easy to see.
Is this process perfect? No. First, it is difficult to deal with smaller programs, like Ph.D. admissions, because having fewer applicants makes privacy harder to guarantee. Second, more variables would make it easier to check for fairness. Yet, it is best to begin with the biggest and most easily unmasked discriminators. We can always extend the reporting requirements in future years.
The biggest advantage of individual over average data is that it makes non-meritocratic admissions painfully obvious. In recent years, there would literally be hundreds of rejected Asian applicants to Harvard with test scores better than scores of black accepted students. If we only know the averages for enrolled students, then we can’t be certain that there were more qualified applicants who were rejected.
Does the existence of these rejected Asian applicants prove discrimination? No. Yet it sure does put the onus on Harvard to explain precisely what is happening. If there is some variable that explains the discrepancy, then we can ask Harvard to supply it.
A handful of variables from every applicant make significantly non-meritocratic admissions almost impossible to hide.
Image of Harvard by Clay Banks on Unsplash
“Sex: Never pass up an opportunity to require woke universities to follow the federal definitions.”
This will be a problem if it is broken down by BOTH race and sex, as it should be, because it will show the vast discrepancy between Black males and Black females, and then to a lesser extent males and females in general.
Harvard is Harvard with the name attraction of Harvard and may be in a different situation but most colleges now have a lower admissions standard for men than women because they don’t want to be more than 70% female — the elite colleges want to be in the 50%-50% range. (Eyebrows were raised when Amherst College had a majority female incoming class a few years back.)
“Race: This is the most important variable and also the trickiest.”
As I understand it, the Federal Government (I don’t know who) considers all foreign students to be “White.” I know that UMass does — and the majority of their foreign students are from China, India, and the African republics.
And the other thing to ask about is *institutional* financial aid — on the undergrad level this is tuition discounting (aka “university scholarship”, etc) and on the grad level this includes assistantships and fellowships.
This is how some UMass departments can only provide assistantships to Black students — because most of them are also International students, they show up as “White” in the statistics.