The traditional meritocratic function of the admissions office is to obscure what weights are assigned to grades from different high schools. A 4.0 at a crappy school doesn't mean as much as a 3.0 at a good one, and while we could be transparent about that with a published model people tend to be happier having it obscured.
"Right-wing populists argue that [meritocracy] is the ideology of the smug global elite."
To cite leading populist thinker Angelo Codevilla:
<blockquote>
In France, with which you tell me you are acquainted, you have meritocracy in government and institutions. Meritocracy ensured by competitive exams. I, and a bunch of nonliberal democrats as myself, would be absolutely delighted if institutions like The New York Times, The Atlantic, were to open their pages to people who bested others in competitive exams. But of course, they’re not thinking at all of doing that. As a matter of fact, the institutions of liberal America have been moving away from competitive exams as fast as they know how.
In living memory, and I’m an example of that, it was for a time possible for nonliberal Democrats to get into the American foreign service, and if they did as I did, and scored number one in their class, they would have their choice of assignments. But now, you have all sorts of new criteria for admission into the foreign service, which have supposedly ensured greater diversity. In fact, what they had done was to eliminate the possibility that the joint might be invaded by lesser beings of superior intelligence.</blockquote>
The problem isn't that the rationing mechanism for higher education is broken (although it is), but that both the supply and demand for higher education is subsidized at enormous levels.
A rule based meritocracy for college admissions would mean almost nothing without changes to these subsidies because the institutional profit maximizing incentive (outside of a very few schools that are truly, competitively elite) will STILL be to reduce their cut-off rule and squeeze in every marginal student they can.
It seems to me that successful societies tend to have a mixed aristocracy - both of virtue and of tradition (or lineage, etc.). You need to incorporate Cicero (the self-made man) into the government or he will become another seditious Catiline. But if you discard tradition completely you will need to make up the resulting legitimacy gap with brute force - as shown by Robespierre, Stalin, etc. And even monarchy can be (surprisingly) flexible; when the king is competent, he rules; when he is an idiot (or a toddler), somebody often rules for him. Pure meritocracy is probably a myth, but so is pure ancien regime.
And the smug global elite really are making a mess of things at the moment, regardless of what they call their ideology.
And yet. The real case for meritocracy should - as per Specialization and Trade - reject emphatically the one-dimensional merit of standardized testing. It should also probably reject the one-dimensional thinking of class rank and university rankings. It isn't that there aren't great and mediocre universities. It's that there are more kinds of 'things' in the university bin than belong there and too few variables conflates and confuses. We shouldn't abandon excellence, but there are more kinds of excellence than most measurement systems could admit.
Lottery for those with test scores seems more reasonable than most.
I would push the "top 500" colleges, based purely on endowment per student, to ensure diversity of parental income: at least 50% admitted whose parents are at median wage or less; no more than 10% of students from top 10% (/ 90 percentile) income, no more than 1% of students from top 1% (99 percentile).
The rich elite schools have too many above average kids of elite parents who are less deserving than the kids of poor parents.
Yes to SAT testing & grades & essay & possible recorded interview. But let's push the rich elite schools to be more test elite over parental cash elite.
At risk of the not-for-profit tax benefits. (Harvard today is a hedge fund with a college...)
Maybe there's an analogy here to cost disease in health care. As we get richer, we tackle harder problems - going beyond infectious disease control (pandemics notwithstanding) to general population health; going beyond antidiscrimination to promoting real DEI.
For health, unglamorous neglected approaches may include improvements to diet and exercise; for DEI maybe things like anti-rent-seeking, zoning reform, occupational licensing reform, school choice, payroll tax reform.
Instead, we flail about, putting more resources into less effective or counterproductive approaches. Instead of healthy experimentation, we get stuck, due to lack of metrics for success, and to signaling/principal-agent issues that sustain failed strategies.
Hopefully a renewed meritocracy would promote the unglamorous work of experimentation - which would require its leaders to manage their own rent-seeking and signaling incentives.
To the extent that markets remain sufficiently competitive and new entrants can still come around, shouldn't this just create a market advantage for corporations that either don't play this game, or that succeed in playing it only from an optics standpoint?
Isn't an alternative hypotheses that this will basically just lead to the withering away of the corporations that over-emphasize this stuff and we can get some positive "creative destruction"? I.E., there could survival of the fittest and adverse selective pressures against these behaviors.
Alternatively, perhaps this will just accelerate the trend whereby most innovation is happening at smaller firms that are focused on innovation/making a good product. There may remain legacy firms that can then purchase the smaller firms. As an example, the small biotech made up of scientists with VC funding will be the ones finding most of the future blockbuster drugs; the big Pharma company that has the huge DEI office will perhaps buy the biotech and may not be as efficient as one would hope in mass producing/selling it. But the truly difficult innovation of discovering the drug will have been done and so some loss of efficiency/competency at the distribution side may not be as deleterious as feared.
Of course if the economy is insufficiently dynamic/competitive and there are too many roadblocks to starting new enterprises, etc, then I can see a path whereby these things ultimately do start to have very negative effects.
“These mediocrities end up trying to drag the rest of the organization down to their level.”
Another concern I have is the effect that DEI jobs have on those holding them. I think many people that take these positions are not radicals to begin with—it’s just the easiest route to a decent paying job.
Over time, being a DEI careerist changes your views in the direction of the incentives.
The traditional meritocratic function of the admissions office is to obscure what weights are assigned to grades from different high schools. A 4.0 at a crappy school doesn't mean as much as a 3.0 at a good one, and while we could be transparent about that with a published model people tend to be happier having it obscured.
"Right-wing populists argue that [meritocracy] is the ideology of the smug global elite."
To cite leading populist thinker Angelo Codevilla:
<blockquote>
In France, with which you tell me you are acquainted, you have meritocracy in government and institutions. Meritocracy ensured by competitive exams. I, and a bunch of nonliberal democrats as myself, would be absolutely delighted if institutions like The New York Times, The Atlantic, were to open their pages to people who bested others in competitive exams. But of course, they’re not thinking at all of doing that. As a matter of fact, the institutions of liberal America have been moving away from competitive exams as fast as they know how.
In living memory, and I’m an example of that, it was for a time possible for nonliberal Democrats to get into the American foreign service, and if they did as I did, and scored number one in their class, they would have their choice of assignments. But now, you have all sorts of new criteria for admission into the foreign service, which have supposedly ensured greater diversity. In fact, what they had done was to eliminate the possibility that the joint might be invaded by lesser beings of superior intelligence.</blockquote>
The problem isn't that the rationing mechanism for higher education is broken (although it is), but that both the supply and demand for higher education is subsidized at enormous levels.
A rule based meritocracy for college admissions would mean almost nothing without changes to these subsidies because the institutional profit maximizing incentive (outside of a very few schools that are truly, competitively elite) will STILL be to reduce their cut-off rule and squeeze in every marginal student they can.
It seems to me that successful societies tend to have a mixed aristocracy - both of virtue and of tradition (or lineage, etc.). You need to incorporate Cicero (the self-made man) into the government or he will become another seditious Catiline. But if you discard tradition completely you will need to make up the resulting legitimacy gap with brute force - as shown by Robespierre, Stalin, etc. And even monarchy can be (surprisingly) flexible; when the king is competent, he rules; when he is an idiot (or a toddler), somebody often rules for him. Pure meritocracy is probably a myth, but so is pure ancien regime.
And the smug global elite really are making a mess of things at the moment, regardless of what they call their ideology.
And yet. The real case for meritocracy should - as per Specialization and Trade - reject emphatically the one-dimensional merit of standardized testing. It should also probably reject the one-dimensional thinking of class rank and university rankings. It isn't that there aren't great and mediocre universities. It's that there are more kinds of 'things' in the university bin than belong there and too few variables conflates and confuses. We shouldn't abandon excellence, but there are more kinds of excellence than most measurement systems could admit.
Lottery for those with test scores seems more reasonable than most.
I would push the "top 500" colleges, based purely on endowment per student, to ensure diversity of parental income: at least 50% admitted whose parents are at median wage or less; no more than 10% of students from top 10% (/ 90 percentile) income, no more than 1% of students from top 1% (99 percentile).
The rich elite schools have too many above average kids of elite parents who are less deserving than the kids of poor parents.
Yes to SAT testing & grades & essay & possible recorded interview. But let's push the rich elite schools to be more test elite over parental cash elite.
At risk of the not-for-profit tax benefits. (Harvard today is a hedge fund with a college...)
Maybe there's an analogy here to cost disease in health care. As we get richer, we tackle harder problems - going beyond infectious disease control (pandemics notwithstanding) to general population health; going beyond antidiscrimination to promoting real DEI.
For health, unglamorous neglected approaches may include improvements to diet and exercise; for DEI maybe things like anti-rent-seeking, zoning reform, occupational licensing reform, school choice, payroll tax reform.
Instead, we flail about, putting more resources into less effective or counterproductive approaches. Instead of healthy experimentation, we get stuck, due to lack of metrics for success, and to signaling/principal-agent issues that sustain failed strategies.
Hopefully a renewed meritocracy would promote the unglamorous work of experimentation - which would require its leaders to manage their own rent-seeking and signaling incentives.
To the extent that markets remain sufficiently competitive and new entrants can still come around, shouldn't this just create a market advantage for corporations that either don't play this game, or that succeed in playing it only from an optics standpoint?
Isn't an alternative hypotheses that this will basically just lead to the withering away of the corporations that over-emphasize this stuff and we can get some positive "creative destruction"? I.E., there could survival of the fittest and adverse selective pressures against these behaviors.
Alternatively, perhaps this will just accelerate the trend whereby most innovation is happening at smaller firms that are focused on innovation/making a good product. There may remain legacy firms that can then purchase the smaller firms. As an example, the small biotech made up of scientists with VC funding will be the ones finding most of the future blockbuster drugs; the big Pharma company that has the huge DEI office will perhaps buy the biotech and may not be as efficient as one would hope in mass producing/selling it. But the truly difficult innovation of discovering the drug will have been done and so some loss of efficiency/competency at the distribution side may not be as deleterious as feared.
Of course if the economy is insufficiently dynamic/competitive and there are too many roadblocks to starting new enterprises, etc, then I can see a path whereby these things ultimately do start to have very negative effects.
“These mediocrities end up trying to drag the rest of the organization down to their level.”
Another concern I have is the effect that DEI jobs have on those holding them. I think many people that take these positions are not radicals to begin with—it’s just the easiest route to a decent paying job.
Over time, being a DEI careerist changes your views in the direction of the incentives.