24A003 College Admissions by Jim Davies, 1/16/2024

Selection of applicants by colleges is important, because it's long been clear that a college degree leads to better-paying jobs. For half a century past, "affirmative action" laws have forced admission boards to bias selection by race rather than simply on merit. Last year, SCOTUS scrapped that.

The satirical folk at Babylon Bee think that momentum will still move them to go on preferring applicants with black skins, but eventually that kind of racism will end. Good thing too. But is that the end of the story? - not exactly.

First, the basic premise above needs to be questioned: does a college degree lead to more lucrative careers? Yes, the correlation is quite clear, the two things do go together. But which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Meaning: if a student is bright enough to get in to a good college assuming that selection is solely by merit, (s)he would develop a good career anyway, even if colleges did not exist. He would have to learn things in other ways, and that might slow him down a bit, but in relation to others less smart. on average he will do better than they do. Success relates to the person and his work, not to how he spent four years around the age of 20.

Second, I doubt that there are - or ever have been - colleges that discriminate applicants on the basis of merit alone (and it's fair to include a variety of talents and achievements at school as well as pure acedemic success.) When "Higher Ed" began in Cambridge and Oxford for example. all students were destined for a career in Holy Orders; those who preferred a life in trade did not need to apply. Later, curricula widened and admission criteria became a blend of academic aptitude and "pull", meaning parental influence and money for fees. That brings us to the Ivy League in the US from the seventeenth Century, and those factors remained in place until after the mid-twentieth. Colleges were eager to attract talented but impoverished students too, and used endowment money to award them scholarships, but they were a small if important minority.

Notice then that the ability to pay fees was until recently a big factor. Admisson, in other words, was never purely about merit. For example, G W Bush got in to Yale because his father and grandfather did, and old Prescott went there thanks to the prominence of his father, Samuel Bush - who had succeeded in business from modest beginnings.

I don't have a problem with parents giving a helping hand to their sons and daughters; it's natural. My point is just that merit alone may never have been the only criterion for entering a good college.

All that said, when "affirmative action" came into play half a century ago, it made nonsense of both the prevailing factors: parental help and academic aptitude. During his interview at Prager U (see from 15:15), Professor Boghassin pointed out that if SAT scores alone were followed,

Asian Americans are 6% of the population but would take 31% of Ivy-League places
White         "                 62                             "                                30
Black           "               12.5                            "                               0.9
Other           "              19.5                            "                              18.1

Yet "affirmative action" aimed at taking the left-hand column instead of the right-hand one, and, as he said, that is ludicrous. It means that by deliberate action of government, for the past fifty years America has given the best higher education to those least able to benefit from it, and we are now living with the result. In January that absurdity came to prominence when Claudine Gay, the Black President of Harvard, was found to have plagiarized several of her academic papers, and resigned in disgrace. Such is American scholarship, in 2024.

In the coming zero government society these problems will dissolve, for at least a couple of reasons.

First, there will be far fewer colleges, because a combination of home schooling and for-fee commercial schooling will produce school graduates (aged under 20) with the abilities of today's college graduates, or probably more. That's because they'll focus on education not indoctrination, and because fees received will be contingent on excellence of results, in a competitive environment.

So "Higher Ed" will be needed only by a relatively small number of students, who are aiming for careers in medicine or other specialist fields.

Second, such colleges as survive the shake-out will offer courses that attract customers, and will have no interest in racial backgrounds or other irrelevant factors. The whole industry will operate on rational grounds. The results will be amazing.