I discuss 10 key graphs related to meritocracy and university admissions. Predictive power of SATs and other factors in elite admissions decisions. College learning outcomes - what do students learn? The four paths to elite college admission. Laundering prestige at the Ivies.
Richard Hanania, Rob Henderson, and I were scheduled for a June 2023 panel as part of the University of Austin (UATX) Forbidden Courses series. I missed the panel due to travel issues, but we gathered on this podcast to recreate the fun!
Topics:
0:00 Introduction
1:20 The University of Austin and forbidden courses
17:37 Will woke campus culture change anytime soon?
29:57 Common people vs elites on affirmative action
35:42 Why it’s uncomfortable to disagree about affirmative action
41:22 Fraud and misrepresentation in higher ed
44:20 The adversity carveout in the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling
50:10 Standardized testing and elite university admissions
1:06:18 Divergent views among racial and ethnic groups on affirmative action; radicalized Asian American males
1:10:00 Differences between East and South Asians in the West
1:23:03 Class-based preferences and standardized tests
Richard Sander is Jesse Dukeminier Professor at UCLA Law School. AB Harvard, JD, PhD (Economics) Northwestern.
Steve and Richard discuss the recent Supreme Court ruling in Students For Fair Admissions vs Harvard and UNC.
Sander has studied the structure and effects of law school admissions policies. He coined the term "Mismatch" to describe negative consequences resulting from large admissions preferences.
0:00 Introduction
1:09 Richard Sander’s initial reaction to the Supreme Court ruling
4:03 How data influenced the court’s decision
7:58 Overview of the court’s ruling
11:27 Carve outs in the court’s ruling
16:59 The litigation landscape
21:25 Workarounds to race-blind admissions and the UC system
32:22 Remedies: What will happen with Harvard and UNC now?
38:02 The landscape of college admissions
44:47 Effects of the Supreme Court ruling beyond higher education
Gilles Saint-Paul is Professeur à l'Ecole Normale Supérieure. He is a
graduate of Ecole Polytechnique in Engineering and received his PhD
from MIT in Economics. Gilles and Steve discuss the French elite
education system, the Yellow Vest movement, French politics and
populism, and Saint-Paul's paper on marriage markets and hypergamy.
0:00 Introduction
1:43 Gilles Saint-Paul's background and education
6:31 French and American elite education - Les Grandes Ecoles
Steve discusses the AI competition between Microsoft and Google, the competition between the U.S. and China in STEM, China’s new IVF policy, and a Science Magazine survey on polygenic screening of embryos.
00:00 Introduction
02:37 Bing vs Bard: LLMs and hallucination
20:52 China demographics & STEM
34:29 China IVF now covered by national health insurance
40:28 Survey on embryo screening in Science: ~50% of those under 35 would use it to enhance congnitivie ability
Geoffrey Miller is an American evolutionary psychologist, author, and a professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. He is known for his research on sexual selection in human evolution.
The state of Michigan required all public HS seniors to take the SAT last year (~91k out of ~107k total seniors in the state). This generated an unusually representative score sample. Full report.
I'm aware of this stuff because my kids attend a public HS here.
To the uninformed, the results are shocking in a number of ways. Look specifically at the top band with scores in the 1400-1600 range. These are kids who have a chance at elite university admission, based on academic merit. For calibration, the University of Michigan median SAT score is above 1400, and at top Ivies it is around 1500.
Some remarks:
1. In the top band there are many more males than females.
2. The Asian kids are hitting the ceiling on this test.
3. There are very few students from under-represented groups who score in the top band.
4. By looking at the math score distribution (see full report) one can estimate how many students in each group are well-prepared enough to complete a rigorous STEM major -- e.g., pass calculus-based physics.
Previously I have estimated that PRC is outproducing the US in top STEM talent by a factor as large as 10x. In a decade or two the size of their highly skilled STEM workforce (e.g., top engineers, AI researchers, biotech scientists, ...) could be 10x as large as that of the US and comparable to the rest of the world, ex-China.
This is easy to understand: their base population is about 4x larger and their K12 performance on international tests like PISA is similar to what is found in the table above for the Asian category. The fraction of PRC kids who perform in the top band is probably at least several times larger than the overall US fraction. (Asian vs White in the table above is about 6x, or 7x on the math portion.) Also, the fraction of college students who major in STEM is much larger in PRC than in the US.
The guest for this episode is a recent graduate of Harvard College, now pursuing a STEM PhD at another elite university. We have withheld his identity so that he can speak candidly.
Steve and his guest discuss:
0:00 Anonymous student’s academic background and admission to Harvard
21:37 Intellectual curiosity at Harvard
29:36 Academic rigor at Harvard and the difference between classes in STEM and the humanities
46:47 Access to tenured professors at Harvard
50:08 The benefits of the Harvard connection and wider pool of opportunities
58:46 Competing with off-scale students
1:00:48 Ideological climate on campus, wokeism, and controversial public speakers
1:23:11 Dating at Harvard
1:26:52 Z-scores and other metrics to add to the admissions process
Typology used for all applicants, at least as late as 1988:
1. S First-rate scholar in Harvard departmental terms.
2. D Candidate's primary strength is his academic strength, but it doesn't look strong enough to quality as an S (above).
3. A All-Amercan‚ healthy, uncomplicated athletic strengths and style, perhaps some extracurricular participation, but not combined with top academic credentials.
4. W Mr. School‚ significant extracurricular and perhaps (but not necessarily) athletic participation plus excellent academic record.
5. X Cross-country style‚ steady man who plugs and plugs and plugs, won't quit when most others would. Gets results largely through stamina and consistent effort.
6. P PBH [Phillips Brooks House] style: in activities and personal concerns.
7. C Creative in music, art, writing.
8. B Boondocker‚ unsophisticated rural background.
9. T Taconic, culturally depressed background, low income.
10. K Krunch‚ main strength is athletic, prospective varsity athlete. [ Sometimes also "H Horse" :-) ]
11. L Lineage‚ candidate probably couldn't be admitted without the extra plus of being a Harvard son, a faculty son, or a local boy with ties to the university community.
12. O Other‚ use when none of the above are applicable.
Richard Lowery is a professor of finance at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin. In this conversation, he describes the ideological climate of his university and the consequent negative effects on undergraduate education and freedom of expression on campus.
Steve and Richard discuss:
0:00 Richard Lowery's academic and political background
9:01 Campus environment for academics and faculty members
12:19 Cultural and political dynamics at academic institutions
23:04 How students experience campus culture and political influences
32:13 Public awareness and interest in campus culture
35:50 What happened to the Liberty Institute at UT Austin
This is a long interview I did recently with Cactus Chu, a math prodigy turned political theorist and podcaster. (Unfortunately I can't embed the podcast here.)
Richard Sander is Jesse Dukeminier Professor at UCLA Law School.
AB Harvard, JD, PhD (Economics) Northwestern.
Sander has studied the structure and effects of law school admissions policies. He coined the term "Mismatch" to describe negative consequences resulting from large admissions preferences.
Topics discussed:
1. Early life: educational background and experience with race and
politics in America.
2. Mismatch Theory: basic observation and empirical evidence; Law
schools and Colleges; Duke and UC data; data access issues.
3. CA Prop 209 and Prop 16.
4. SCOTUS and Harvard / UNC admissions case
5. Intellectual climate on campus, freedom of speech
A Conversation on the Nature, Effects, and Future of Affirmative Action in Higher Education Admissions (with Peter Arcidiacono, Thomas Espenshade, and Stacy Hawkins), University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 683 (2015)
By coincidence, I was just in contact over the weekend with several of the people involved in the effort to end discrimination against Asian Americans in elite college admissions.
This has been a long road, but perhaps victory is near.
... SFFA founder Edward J. Blum, who has spearheaded more than two dozen lawsuits challenging affirmative action and voting rights laws around the U.S., heralded the court’s move.
“Harvard and the University of North Carolina have racially gerrymandered their freshman classes in order to achieve prescribed racial quotas,” he wrote in a statement. “Every college applicant should be judged as a unique individual, not as some representative of a racial or ethnic group.”
... The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard that with some modest adjustment in its admissions practices it might be able to absorb a judgment against it and get on with life more or less as usual. The vagueness of the category on which Harvard was relying to make sure that it kept its Asian undergraduates at the level that it wished, the so-called personality score, is such a floppy nothing of an empty basket — that’s not gonna do anymore.
There is something profoundly disturbing about Harvard using these flaccid categories to achieve something like a quota. The court papers show how the system was invented to keep the number of Jews down in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It’s all pretty bad, and part of the badness is that colleges have been both compelled and allowed to do what they’re doing under the rubric of "diversity," which conceals from view the actual operation of the whole system, and what they are in fact aiming to achieve. It’s substituting one vocabulary for another in a way that creates a climate of dishonesty. What goes on in the admissions office is increasingly mysterious, and what happens once students are admitted — that is something to which little attention is paid by educators themselves.
Despite generous social programs such as free pre-K education, free college, and massive transfer payments, Denmark is similar to the US in key measures of inequality, such as educational outcomes and cognitive test scores.
While transfer payments can equalize, to some degree, disposable income, they do not seem to be able to compensate for large family effects on individual differences in development.
These observations raise the following questions:
1. What is the best case scenario for the US if all progressive government programs are implemented with respect to child development, free high quality K12 education, free college, etc.?
2. What is the causal mechanism for stubborn inequality of outcomes, transmitted from parent to child (i.e., within families)?
Re #2: Heckman and collaborators focus on environmental factors, but do not (as far as I can tell) discuss genetic transmission. We already know that polygenic scores are correlated to the education and income levels of parents, and (from adoption studies) that children tend to resemble their biological parents much more strongly than their adoptive parents. These results suggest that genetic transmission of inequality may dominate environmental transmission.
Note: Denmark is very homogenous in ancestry, and the data presented in these studies (e.g., polygenic scores and social mobility) are also drawn from European-ancestry cohorts. The focus here is not on ethnicity or group differences between ancestry groups. The focus is on social and educational mobility within European-ancestry populations, with or without generous government programs supporting free college education, daycare, pre-K, etc.
Abstract
Many progressive American policy analysts point to Denmark as a model welfare state with low levels of income inequality and high levels of income mobility across generations. It has in place many social policies now advocated for adoption in the U.S. Despite generous Danish social policies, family influence on important child outcomes in Denmark is about as strong as it is in the United States. More advantaged families are better able to access, utilize, and influence universally available programs. Purposive sorting by levels of family advantage create neighborhood effects. Powerful forces not easily mitigated by Danish-style welfare state programs operate in both countries.
Also discussed in this episode of EconTalk podcast. Russ does not ask the obvious question about disentangling family environment from genetic transmission of inequality.
The figure below appears in Game Over: Genomic Prediction of Social Mobility. It shows SNP-based polygenic score and life outcome (socioeconomic index, on vertical axis) in four longitudinal cohorts, one from New Zealand (Dunedin) and three from the US. Each cohort (varying somewhat in size) has thousands of individuals, ~20k in total (all of European ancestry). The points displayed are averages over bins containing 10-50 individuals. For each cohort, the individuals have been grouped by childhood (family) social economic status. Social mobility can be predicted from polygenic score. Note that higher SES families tend to have higher polygenic scores on average -- which is what one might expect from a society that is at least somewhat meritocratic. The cohorts have not been used in training -- this is true out-of-sample validation. Furthermore, the four cohorts represent different geographic regions (even, different continents) and individuals born in different decades.
Where is the evidence for environmental effects described above in Heckman's abstract: "More advantaged families are better able to access, utilize, and influence universally available programs. Purposive sorting by levels of family advantage create neighborhood effects"? Do parents not seek these advantages for their adopted children as well as for their biological children? Or is there an entirely different causal mechanism based on shared DNA?
1. Asian Americans (not foreign students from Asia, but individuals of Asian heritage who are US citizens or permanent residents) have been discriminated against in admission to elite institutions of higher education for over 30 years.
To put it bluntly, Asian Americans must, on average, outperform all other groups in order to have an equal chance of admission to universities like Harvard or Yale. If one were to replace Asian Americans with Jews in the previous sentence, it would describe the situation in the early 20th century. Looking back, we are rightfully ashamed and outraged at the conduct of elite universities during this period. Future Americans, and observers all over the world, will eventually have the same reaction to how Asian Americans are treated today by these same institutions.
2. Asian American success, e.g., as measured using metrics such as income, wealth, or education, is problematic for simplistic narratives that emphasize race and "white supremacy" over a more realistic and multifaceted analysis of American society.
3. Efforts to guarantee equal outcomes, as opposed to equal opportunities, are anti-meritocratic and corrosive to social cohesion, undermine basic notions of fairness, and handicap the United States in scientific and technological competition with other nations.
The Table of Contents, reproduced below, gives an idea of the important topics covered. Xu had an insider's view of the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard trial, now awaiting appeal to the Supreme Court. He also describes the successful effort by a grass roots coalition of Asian Americans to defeat CA Proposition 16, which would have reinstated racial preferences in the public sector (including college admissions) which were prohibited by Proposition 209 in 1996.
Over the years I have had many conversations on this topic with well-meaning (but often poorly informed) parents of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I cannot help but ask these people
Are you OK with discrimination against your child? What did they do to deserve it?
Are you going to let virtue-signaling administrators at the university devalue the hard work and hard-won accomplishments of your son or daughter? Are you going to do anything about it?
and I cannot help but think
If you won't do anything about it, then f*ck you. Your kids deserve better parents.
Kenny calls it a Fight for Meritocracy. That's what it is -- a fight. Don't forget that Meritocracy is just a fancy word for fairness. It's a fight for your kid, and all kids, to be treated fairly.
I highly recommend the book. These issues are of special concern to Asian Americans, but should be of interest to anyone who wants to know what is really happening in American education today.
Last week MSU hosted a virtual meeting on Freedom of Speech and Intellectual Diversity on Campus. I particularly enjoyed several of the talks, including the ones by Randall Kennedy (Harvard), Conor Friesdorf (The Atlantic), and Cory Clark (UPenn). Clark had some interesting survey data I had never seen before. I hope the video from the meeting will be available soon.
In the meantime, here are some survey results from Eric Kaufmann (University of London). The full report is available at the link.
In this recent podcast interview Kaufmann discusses the woke takeover of academia and other institutions.
Stylized facts:
1. Academia has always been predominantly left, but has become more and more so over time. This imbalance is stronger in Social Science and Humanities (SSH) than in STEM, but even in STEM the faculty are predominantly left of center relative to the general population.
2. Leftists are becoming more and more intolerant of opposing views.
3. Young academics (PhD students and junior faculty) are the least tolerant of all.
In my opinion the unique importance of research universiites originates from their commitment to the search for Truth. This commitment is being supplanted by a focus on social justice, with extremely negative consequences.
Figure 1. Note: Excludes STEM academics. Labels refer to hypothetical scenarios in which respondents are asked whether they would support a campaign to dismiss a staff member who found the respective conclusions in their research. Brackets denote sample size.
Figure 2. Note: Includes STEM academics. Based on a direct question rather than a concealed list technique.
Figure 3. Note: SSH refers to social sciences and humanities. Sample size in brackets. STEM share of survey responses: US and Canada academic: 10%; UK mailout: zero; UK YouGov SSH active: zero; UK YouGov All: 53%; UK PhDs: 55%; North American PhDs: 63%.
The illustration above describes a global population of ~5k researchers whose papers were accepted to the leading 2019 conference in deep neural nets. To be precise they looked at ~700 authors of a randomly chosen subset of papers. There is also a more select population of individuals who gave presentations at the meeting. This is certainly not the entire field of AI, but a reasonable proxy for it.
For its December 2019 conference, NeurIPS saw a record-breaking 15,920 researchers submit 6,614 papers, with a paper acceptance rate of 21.6%, making it one of the largest, most popular, and most selective AI conferences on record.
Key Takeaways
1. The United States has a large lead over all other countries in top-tier AI research, with nearly 60% of top-tier researchers working for American universities and companies. The US lead is built on attracting international talent, with more than two-thirds of the top-tier AI researchers working in the United States having received undergraduate degrees in other countries.
2. China is the largest source of top-tier researchers, with 29% of these researchers having received undergraduate degrees in China. But the majority of those Chinese researchers (56%) go on to study, work, and live in the United States.
3. Over half (53%) of all the top-tier AI researchers are immigrants or foreign nationals currently working in a different country from where they received their undergraduate degrees.
Prediction: PRC share in all 3 categories will increase in coming decades as their K12, undergraduate, and graduate schools continue to improve, and their high-tech economy grows much larger.
See Ditchley Foundation meeting: World Order today.
Using conference papers as the filter probably misses a lot of world class work (especially implementation at scale) that is going on in PRC at tech companies. Note in the list below the only Chinese institutions are Tsinghua and Beijing universities. But I would be surprised if those were the main accumulation of top AI talent in China, compared to large tech companies.
This decision by the UC Regents (most of whom are political appointees) is counter to the recommendation of the faculty task force recently assigned to study standardized testing in admissions. It is obvious to anyone who looks at the graphs below that SAT/ACT have significant validity (technical term used in psychometrics) in predicting college performance for all ethnic groups.
... SAT and HSGPA are stronger predictors than family income or race. Within each of the family income or ethnicity categories there is substantial variation in SAT and HSGPA, with corresponding differences in student success. See bottom figure and combined model R^2 in second figure below; R^2 varies very little across family income and ethnic categories. ...
Test Preparation and SAT scores: "...combined effect of coaching on the SAT I is between 21 and 34 points. Similarly, extensive meta-analyses conducted by Betsy Jane Becker in 1990 and by Nan Laird in 1983 found that the typical effect of commercial preparatory courses on the SAT was in the range of 9-25 points on the verbal section, and 15-25 points on the math section."
Corey and Steve talk to Claude Steele of Stanford about his article Why Are Campuses So Tense? The essay explores stereotype threats across racial lines. Colorblindness is a standard of fairness, but what are the costs of ignoring our differences? Claude describes his research on minority under-performance and why single sex colleges may contribute to women’s success. Corey describes why he believes his daughter's experience is a counterexample to the findings of the experiments that led the Supreme Court to outlaw segregation. The three discuss parenting in a diverse world and how ethnic integration differs between Europe and the US.
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.
Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.
Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.
Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.
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