14 Comments
Dec 23, 2021Liked by Arnold Kling

I’ll offer another hypothesis on the motives for college admissions which has been put forth by other well before me. Tuition at elite college covers less than 1/3 of the operating costs. The interest /gains from the endowment covers about half the costs. The balance is covered by “annual fund” donations most of which are large $100k+ gifts that come from about 400 individuals in any one year.

Now to make a $100k+ annual gift one needs a least $1M of annual income. There a very few people that earn at that level. My guess is a typical elite college produces around 10 such individuals per year. Most elite colleges admit approximately 10,000 students per year and like a VC firm they in effect are making bets at 1:1000 in the hopes of creating a handful of loyal $1M+ earners in order to stay alive from their future generosity.

They are well aware of this reality but it verboten to discuss. The administration knows it has some leeway on the 10,000 new matriculants, but there are limits to how many subpar candidates they can accept to meet their woke commitments for diversity and inclusion. Serving the alumni donors that give large sums also obligates the universities to admit their children when possible. Additionally, the hope is that the offspring of the wealthy will themselves be wealthy and make large future gifts.

So, the motivation of elite universities for a admissions is to make 1000:1 VC like bets In order to survive. It’s purely economical.

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Absence of evidence frequently is evidence of absence. Correlation is frequently causation too.

The trick is having reasonable conclusions from available evidence and the lack of expected evidence.

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Shouldn't logical principle read 'the absence of evidence is not [necessarily] evidence of absence"? The positive claimant *still* bears the burden of proof. Or did someone disprove 'Russell's Teapot' and I didn't get the memo?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

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Something doesn't add up on the college outrage. Presumably we care about these institutions because of the job prospects they enable. Shouldn't we then be upset with corporate america for their hiring practices? And if corporate america is being systematically hoodwinked into hiring poorly-selected people shouldn't their performance suffer?

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I think the Hannia diagnosis of universities proves too much. And doesn't so much emphasis on WHY people are wrong get in the way of persuading them that they ARE wrong?

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"I’d say that it never ‘made sense’ to use ‘no evidence’ as a synonym for ‘false’ and that this is not a word choice that is made in good faith."

"False" itself is almost always a bad faith word in journalism too. It usually appears lately in the phrase "Falsely claimed" which is the same kind of journalistic tic as "no evidence". But worse, because it's grammatically at odds with itself. If someone makes a claim, it's by definition a disputed fact.

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Hanania's piece also has a nice description of libertarianism:

"This is a good case for being a libertarian; while you might want government interventions that are likely to have a positive impact, in reality government will either be activist or passive, and passive is generally better because, like in any complex system, there are always more ways to interfere destructively in an economy than to interfere in a positive way."

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Hanania's take on colleges seems rather harsh, but this might be important food for thought: "If it wasn’t for wokeness, the people who determine policy in public schools and universities would still need somewhere to direct their energies. One can imagine them turning in a more committed direction towards socialism or extreme forms of environmentalism hostile to economic growth, which would probably be worse for humanity."

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Private universities are one thing; state universities are another. Abolishing college admissions departments and replacing them with simple metrics (i.e., get above this score on the SAT) can be done. The fact that is hasn't already is a policy failure. Republicans completely control state governments in ~20 states. Affirmative action consistently polls poorly. Eliminating it (and making the college application take a few minutes to fill out) would be popular. No one cares... yet.

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