The High Court and Higher Education

The Supreme Court issued two high-profile decisions on higher education. Here are my hot takes.

Student Debt

Confession: I wrote the affirmative action part first, and I didn’t realize how carried away I’d get. Not only is my take on student debt much less interesting, I feel like it needs to be shorter given what I say in the rest of the piece.

So my summary is that it was clear from the beginning that Biden was channeling his inner Michael Scott when he said, “I declare student debt forgiven!!”

I think the executive act was a win-win for Biden. If it went through, you get a bunch of voters excited they had their debt forgiven and willing to support Biden. If it get struck down (as it did) you galvanize the base and say, “look at how the rich get whatever they want, but when we try to help the little guy, the system stops you.”

The big takeaway is that I have yet to see a serious plan on addressing the costs of college.

Affirmative Action

Summary: I don’t think this changes much, and Harvard doesn’t either.

The Supreme Court ruled that universities could no longer use race in admissions decisions. This was an interesting one since some of the key witnesses along the chain of decisions were economists.

Before I summarize their work, I’ll reflect on my high school experience. Affirmative action was a fairly hot topic in the early 2000s, according to my memory. Maybe it’s just a hot topic in high schools since it’s a policy that affects the near-term future for teenagers. (Then I imagine it is dormant for most individuals for decades until their kids are teenagers preparing for college.) But I remember hearing stories of kids saying their white friends/relatives were denied admission, despite being highly qualified, because of affirmative action. In retrospect, I doubt those stories were true because I’ve read some admissions essays from honors students. They’re often really bad.

But it turns out that there were indeed people being hurt by affirmative action, just it was mostly not the white students. Peter Arcidiacono is an economist who led the team arguing that affirmative action was hurting Asian applicants. The evidence was pretty straightforward: when you looked at admissions rates for students based on SAT, GPA, and other factors, Asian applicants had some of the highest scores but some of the lowest admissions rates.

On the other side was David Card, Nobel laureate. He agreed with the analysis, but he added that there was another factor that the admissions committee considered: a personal rating. The personal rating measured things like courage and likability. The average personal rating is much lower for Asians, and once you control for that, there is no discrimination against Asians.

Let’s pause to remember what David Card won his Nobel prize for. He shared the prize with Josh Angrist and Guido Imbens for their work in causal analysis. They took the “correlation isn’t causation” problem and figured out when it is. As I wrote when they won, they absolutely deserved it. Their key contribution was giving us the tools to carefully dissect questions like, “Did Harvard discriminate against Asians?”

We can apply David Card’s Harvard reasoning to another discrimination issue. It’s well documented that a full-time working women makes about 80% of what a full-time working man does. Some people point to the gap and cry discrimination. But if we use Card’s same Harvard reasoning, we would say, “Well, once you control for occupation, there is no discrimination.” Which is true! I wrote about how women choose different occupations than men, and it indeed explains most of the gap. But then you have to ask yourself, “Why do women choose different occupations?” And as I explained in the post, it’s because women are expected to contribute more to childcare in the home. That’s a form of discrimination!

And I know David Card knows this. He’s done work on the gender gap. He knows that men are more likely to work at high-wage firms than women, and in the conclusion of his own paper he writes that the underlying cause is probably discrimination.

So where do Harvard’s personal ratings come from? The admissions committee. What does it say that these committees tend to rate Asians really low on courage and likability? Not something good!

What Card’s argument amounts to is, “Once you control for discrimination, there is no discrimination.” And I know that’s not his general view. That’s why I keep saying “Harvard reasoning.” But it’s the argument he put out there!

Now, I’m no legal expert, but it’s not clear to me that this Supreme Court ruling will even change this personal rating. In response to the ruling, Harvard announced (my emphasis added):

Today, the Supreme Court delivered its decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Court held that Harvard College’s admissions system does not comply with the principles of the equal protection clause embodied in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision.

Does Harvard give lessons in condescension?¹ Because that was a masterclass.

If an applicant talks about overcoming racial discrimination, isn’t that a sign of courage? Even without mentioning race, if an applicant writes about how they started playing the piano at age 5 and spent thousands of hours practicing instead of playing with friends, can’t I say, “That sounds like someone who’s not very fun to hang around.”

What that says to me is “The personal rating is still good to go!” Obviously I imagine they will rebrand it, but they can just create a new score that will achieve a similar outcome. So I don’t imagine much will change.

But there’s lots of things that should change! The reason this is an issue at all is because elite education is a zero-sum game. Yet Harvard has a $53 billion endowment. Expand access to education! Give lots more Black, Asian, and Hispanic students an education!

That’s not going to happen. So how about a more reasonable proposal? The personal essay, which is where this personal rating came from, has always been a sham. JFK’s admissions looks like a joke, but it’s real. These essays are even parodied in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, where the guidance counselor starts crafting a story behind the struggling minority student. And now it will get worse as ChatGPT starts churning out the essays that get counselors excited.

So what can you do to replace the essay? There are plenty of qualified kids who would do great at Harvard. You could set a minimum SAT score, then just hold an admissions lottery. “As long as you can pass the classes, you have a shot.” I think that Harvard could add a few weights to the lottery, like everyone in the top 10% of SAT scores qualifies and starts with 100 tickets. You can add tickets for those who have higher scores. If you were in the top 5% of your graduating class, you could get a few tickets. If you are from a low-income background, you get 10 extra tickets, etc. These factors wouldn’t guarantee your admission, but they’d nudge your chances.

If admissions are already arbitrary, why don’t we go the whole way?

1. That was rhetorical, but obviously they do…go Yale!