@sorghum
So the percent rule, which requires a student to be at the top of his/her class, does not give regard to academic achievement???
Really?
@al2simon, in this case, Aricidiano proves (or assumes) way too much. The argument he is making is:
(A) Students are rational beings who perfectly maximize their utility over the long term; AND
(B) A student who perfectly maximized their utility over the long term, and who had perfect information, would make the choice that produces the best long term outcome; AND
© Black students who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action are not choosing the school that produces the best long term outcome; SO THEREFORE
(D) Black students must have imperfect information
But if you use this same argument but substitute
© Students who procrastinate or fail to study so much they get thrown out of school are not choosing the behavior that produces the best long term outcome
then you have to conclude
(D) Slacker students must have imperfect information
And that’s not a reasonable conclusion. Ariely and others have done a lot of work in behavioral economics that speaks to why people make choices that are irrational. You don’t need to depend on imperfect information to explain seemingly irrational choices. Humans are not perfectly rational. People systematically overrate their abilities.
And, as you point out, Aricidiano’s claimed result is not restricted to affirmative action students. It applies to everyone in the bottom quartile, or quintile, or whatever. Are all of them victims of imperfect information? We see on CC, and it’s confirmed in the literature, that a large majority of students choose to go to the most selective school that admitted them. And we see on CC that when they don’t, it’s most often not because they think they couldn’t succeed at the more selective school but that the less selective school offered them more money. So, apparently, virtually no student is making the “rational” choice to forgo the more selective school because they’d be less prepared than their classmates.
“The mismatch theory folks are making specific claims, namely that black students who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action at more selective institutions would be better off enrolling at less selective institutions. I’m interesting in knowing whether that specific claim is true, or partly true in the case of some students (e.g. students who hope to get science degrees), or in general not true at all. Nobody disputes that an illiterate is going to have trouble graduating from Harvard.”
The mismatch can be shooting too high. The data tells us more often though the mismatch comes from shooting too low.
A kid coming out of an inner city charter school more often under-enrolls at a directional college. The kid is above average on academics, but the chances of graduation/success are pulled down by the overall environment of such a school.
This thread focuses on the legality of racial preferences to get kids INTO top schools. Frankly, that’s not so important in the big picture. More important is to get URM kids into schools that are appropriate for them (neither too high or too low). MOST important though is supporting those kids after enrolling. So those kids can get OUT of college with a degree.
The whole literature on grit and persistence is key on this. Non-academic factors are huge. Who cares if a URM kid can get INTO UT Austin, TAMU, SMU, Rice, UT Dallas, an HBC or some other school. What matters is if the URM kid can get OUT of the school.
What is more important for the “mismatched” URM student, a degree or a STEM degree they were initially seeking?
I also notice that universities never discuss what percentage of students who aspired to be doctors actually get accepted. I know where I went to school back last millennium we had about 150 students who started in the program, but after the weeding out in numerous classes, about 30-40 were left who went to medical school. They will discuss the percentage accepted with the 30-40 who applied to medical school.
It makes it difficult for a student to make the best decision on where to attend if they don’t know their likelihood to make it through the STEM program. If I wanted to be a doctor as a URM who didn’t go to a rigorous high school, would Harvard or Howard be a better program. I would be more likely to graduate from Harvard with a degree, but in what field? I know many here would say it doesn’t matter as it is a degree from Harvard and we are using the advantage of a parents hindsight. To the student who really wants to be a doctor, could Harvard be the wrong choice?
How could it be discredited? My D was advanced into Chemistry class earlier than she was prepared. She was struggling, working hard, getting B/C grades. I pulled her out of this class (counselor was surprised by my decision, but accepted). Next school year she repeated Chemistry (to everyone’s surprise, somehow counselor though that she gave up). She got easy A. Does it make sense? Yes.
She was originally mismatched and it was not helping anyone. I “delayed” her for a year. Next year she perfected the subject. Mismatch theory as it is.
I’ll never bring a “blue” skier to a “black double diamond” slope. It would be a mismatch.
My prediction is - affirmative action will survive Fisher v Texas. Maybe narrowed. Maybe delayed. Justices worry too much about their pubic image.
My prediction is - AA will stay for another 20-50 years, as generations are getting used to it. Next, it would be replaced by quotas. Just IMHO.
This year I volunteer to help students with college admission plans. Grrrr! Again and again, I see low income students, first generation, who wish to become engineers, etc. without any background in physics and Algebra 2 level math. I am printing out freshmen Engineering curriculum, I bring freshmen Calculus textbooks to these kids and tell them - “look! This is engineering! If you are accepted, you are expected to study this!”. It is like throwing kittens into cold water and expecting them to swim.
Oh, I hope not. I don’t even want to go there.
I think Robert worries about the image of the Court, and it influences his decisions. The rest try to do what they think is right, which of course differs widely sometimes.
^I posted upthread that I think that Roberts is also concerned about his legacy as Chief. (I don’t blame him, as I’d probably do the same.)
@“Cardinal Fang” - I spent another 20 minutes with the paper. Here’s my take on it – however, I really don’t have the time to study this paper, so this is pretty rough …
Respectfully, I think you’re focusing too much on the motivating assumption of “perfectly rational enrollment decisions” and too little on the bulk of the paper. All the stuff about perfectly rational students is just motivation for what Arcidiacono et al. really want to do. They want to see if Duke has “private information” about students’ future performance. In other words, can Duke predict whether a student would be better off at Duke or at a less selective institution better than the students themselves can?
And the answer seems to be … YES. Duke is able to assess students much better than they themselves can (at least pre-enrollment). Duke seems to have “private information” that they use just for themselves. This is the “smoking gun” of the paper.
Who cares whether or not his starting assumption was right or whether anyone thinks the motivation for embarking on the hunt for private information is convincing? If you want, you can completely disregard the first section of the paper where they try to argue that a selective university needs to have private information before ex ante mismatch can occur. Think of it this way – at least in the common recounting of the story, every educated European knew that Columbus was foolish for trying to reach Asia by sailing west since the Earth was too big for him to survive the voyage. But regardless of whether or not his motivation was right, the fact remains that he “discovered” two entire continents for Europeans to explore / conquer.
So please ignore the motivation, and let’s go explore what the “smoking gun” reveals. Here’s the most nefarious interpretation -
- Duke has a much better idea of how a student will do academically than simple metrics like GPA and test scores would give, and they aren’t sharing this information with the students. Not telling a student that they’re likely to struggle or won’t be able to major in what they want to is simply unfair and wrong.
- More importantly, Duke may even know ahead of time that a student might on average be better off enrolling at a less selective school, but they are acting in what’s in Duke’s best interest even if it hurts the student.
Here’s some more detail behind this second point
- Some authors have claimed that admissions preferences hurt some students. But these authors are all looking at ex post outcomes, i.e. looking at results after the fact. Maybe this was just bad luck, or the result of benevolent but misguided intentions.
- So the question is: what did students and schools believe ex ante? This is a very key point. It’s one thing to admit a student and it turns out later that they would have been better off attending a less selective school; it’s quite another thing to admit a student when you know ahead of time that it's not a good choice for them.
- So the next question is: do either the students or the schools know ahead of time that the decision to enroll in a selective school is bad for a given student? If they don’t, then even if some bad ex post results due to mismatch are occurring then we still shouldn’t change admissions policies since there’s no way to know ahead of time which decisions will end up giving bad results (at least with our current level of knowledge).
- And the smoking gun is that Duke’s assessment of applicants may be good enough to predict ahead of time that a certain student would on average be better off at a less selective college. Much more work needs to be done.
BTW - Personally, I’m only about 10-20% convinced.
And suppose Duke sent out letters to kids, saying “Congratulations! We’ve admitted you to the class of XXXX! You’ll be among the lowest qualified students. We think you have a smaller chance of graduating than more qualified students.”
Which students would that drive away? I don’t think it would drive away very many, because people overestimate their own capabilities. Each student who wanted to go to Duke and who got one of those letters would be thinking, not me, I’m one of the ones who is going to succeed.
Maybe you’re right. There may not be any practical consequence to this line of research. Who knows. I’ll respond with the following bit of mythology a propos the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake …
Benjamin Franklin finishes delivering his report on his famous experiments
with electricity.
Someone asks - "Of What possible use are your researches on electricity?"
Franklin replies - "Of What possible use is a newborn baby?"
That NY Times magazine link that was discussed a few pages ago said that UT has a little application that takes 14 variables about a new freshman (SATs, high school GPA, parental income, and some other stuff) and spits out a probablility that the student will graduate. (I suppose someone did a logistic regression on student data from earlier years.) So I don’t think it’s either controversial or surprising that a college would have info about which students are least likely to graduate.
Well, I think Arcidiacono et al. are trying to go a little deeper than this.
Regardless, I personally don’t think this paper is very interesting, and I regret spending the time reading it. I was really just responding to comments about the paper that you directed towards me.
Something like the expanded calculator linked to from the bottom of http://www.heri.ucla.edu/GradRateCalculator.php ?
But once those least likely were identified, programs were established to turn this around and increase their grad chances, “to take large numbers of highly motivated working-class teenagers and give them the tools they need to become successful professionals.”
@Fredjan - of course it gives SOME regard to academic achievement. But you don’t get the academically highest achieving 7% by taking 7% from every school. You don’t even get the highest achieving URMs, because they could be in the slightly lower percentiles at very strong urban schools.
But you do get representation from every state legislative district, which is probably an important factor in how the state universities in Texas manage their political relationships with members of the state legislature.
Sorry for steering you to that article, @al2simon.
It seems to me that whether the mismatch theory is true and whether affirmative action ought to be continued are orthogonal. Suppose mismatch theory is right: it could still be the case that affirmative action is good policy. Maybe the benefits to the affirmative action students who succeed, and to the rest of the students, and to society, outweigh the disadvantages to the other affirmative action students who freely chose to attend the university.
But it is also clearly the case that if a selective university knows that certain identifiable students are unlikely to succeed without help, it should provide the help.