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I mean, wasn't the whole Supreme Court ruling about the fact that it doesn't matter what percentage of the population a group makes up, all students have to get in on merit. The Supreme Court didn't say that Harvard should get more white people because they're the majority, the Supreme Court said that Harvard should stop discriminating against Asians in spite of their high academic achievement. Given well-documented racial differences in intelligence and grades, we shouldn't expect a purely meritocratic Harvard to be representative of the makeup of the country.
That said, it doesn't look like Harvard has pivoted to meritocracy just yet. It looks like the school changed their measures (no doubt deliberately) but this article does suggest the AA share has reduced from 18% to 14%, while the white/other share has increased from 29% to 32%. Asian enrolment hasn't changed and the proportion of students who refuse to share demographic identity has doubled from 4% to 8%, therefore the new figures are only based on those students who did give their ethnicity. I would assume the non-sharing group is mostly white or Asian which might explain why the Asian share doesn't seem to have increased.
The entire concept of merit-based admissions is bullshit on multiple levels. On one level, because there is such an enormous pool of applicants with stellar academic credentials you are invariably going to need to rely on other criteria, and the criteria you choose is equivalent to choosing a demographic pool. This doesn't apply as much to Black/Latino applicants, as their academic credentials surely fall woefully short of the application pool of Asians and Jews/Whites.
But among the latter groups, how would you possibly select a subpopulation in a way that isn't subjective, and by extension subject to the cultural and political sensibilities of the admissions committee? That admissions committee which, in the future, is going to be composed of the people who are selected based on the criteria of Racial Spoils?
How about- for every person in the world who speaks English, when they are 18, they receive an invitation to a proctored IQ test. The top N are admitted. Wouldn't that be the most meritocratic? If the future Harvard class is 100% Chinese would you be satisfied because that's the most meritocratic outcome?
Why should this not sit well for you? Because these Institutions are feeders into the political, economic, and cultural institutions that rule over us. If you succeed in making Harvard 100% Chinese, you don't get to pat yourself on the back for accomplishing meritocracy, you are accountable for the political and cultural impact for handing over these institutions to Chinese people.
I don't want my children to compete against the entire world to attend the Institutions I had access to. I want those institutions to be partial to them. Why are Europeans the only people in the world that have to open their institutions, the ones they founded, to global competition?
It's time for people, especially Rationalists with an IQ fixation, to accept that admissions to elite institutions can and should never be based on merit alone, it should be based on the type of world you want to build. It should be noted that opening up college admissions- more meritocracy, did not erase ethnic spoils in the college admissions process it just led to those institutions being tipped against the White people who founded them.
The only Meritocracy that matters is on a Civilizational level, and it's not Europeans demanding access to Civilization and institutions founded by Asians or Jews. A pool of billions of Indians and Chinese competing against my child for access to an institution founded in my home state by Europeans, using a roundabout and fancy IQ test, to the extent that's "meritocratic" is the extent to which meritocracy is a false idol.
For posterity should be the goal, and it was the goal of the Founders of all these institutions which are being handed away. Meritocracy wasn't the impetus and it shouldn't be.
I think that this is the real problem.
It is not that Harvard is ten times as efficient at teaching, so if I randomly send one student to Harvard and another to a decent state school, the Harvard alumni will totally destroy the other one on merit.
Or at least, it is not only that. Swimming in money and being able to attract the very best people as tutors will likely help education quality some.
But mainly, I think it is a mixture of two things. First, the pure signaling value. 'That student did something which is very difficult to do and vaguely related with merit, namely getting into an elite school, so we should update towards them being competent'.
The other thing is that you can form connections to other people with high signaling value who have already achieved or will likely achieve positions of power.
I want to contrast this a bit with the system we have in Germany. Here, the choice of university matters a lot less. For example, if you look at the currently serving SCOTUS Justices, you will notice that eight out of nine of them went to either Harvard or Yale. Compare this to the number of universities where the judges of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht studied law. For sixteen judges, I counted some eleven different places of study -- there is remarkably little clustering. Study at Kiel or Konstanz, it will not open or close any doors for you.
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Really? Have you heard of this little thing called "Christianity"?
Not something he’s a fan of, though.
@The_Nybbler also
Misses the point so hard as to nearly suggest you're doing so on purpose. The assertion is so perfectly subverted from the truth that it's almost enjoyable to encounter such chutzpah.
There was not a single missionary to a single country that brought along thousands of his closest friends and demanded the existing institutions provide for them.
They by and large sailed from shockingly modern countries to people who had fundamentally not changed since the pre-historic era because they were still in it before the arrival of the Europeans!
Christian missionaries have, if anything, a reputation for trying to save souls by otherwise withholding necessary aid to the natives
Umm, this was exactly how parts of the new world were converted.
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Plus we aren't 'demanding access' to Christianity - Christianity is not an exclusive club, and enthusiastically welcomes believers of every possible race or culture without distinction. The whole question of 'access' to it is silly.
This may be one of the reasons why people like SS don't like Christianity. If you're focused on race and racial identity politics, the resolutely non-racial and universal Christianity can't help but seem an obstacle.
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Easy peasy, a lottery system that picks X students out all applicants with test scores/GPAs higher than Y threshold.
Ok, so you end up with an entirely Indian/Chinese student body in the Ivy League.
That does beg the question: if they have the most merit why are they the ones seeking access to our institutions and not the other way around?
No, there will still be whites (and blacks and hispanics) over the threshold for the lottery too, just fewer per capita. That said, I would wholeheartedly support severely restricting the amount of student visas we hand out to prioritize American students (and similar solutions).
But why do you support restricting Visas if you care so much about meritocracy? The reason you wouldn't just give every slot to the top N of the world with no visa restrictions shows that it's not all about "meritocracy." There are other, important considerations.
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None of the Ivies / other elite colleges have obscene numbers of international students; the great majority of eg. Asian admits are US citizens.
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Because they prioritized, and therefore optimized for, getting into those institutions more than others (arguably too much, because Goodhart's law will always have its due).
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My guess is these are black students who share their ethnicity through their personal statements.
Why would they be incentivised to refuse to share their identity though? It's not as if Harvard has now decided that it has too many and will start penalising them like it did to Asians before.
On the other hand, Asian and white students who know that Harvard wants to penalise them (because it has strenuously defended doing so in the highest court in the land) may still suspect that it will try, even if it does so while tiptoeing within the law. John Smith or Emily Lee could plausibly be African American, even if they're not, so why reveal their hand to an institution they know wants to treat them unfairly?
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Aren’t these surveys from data collected after admission? I presume practically every non white or Asian student shares their ethnicity in their personal statement.
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