Maggie's Farm

It applies to fishin' as well: Why I Taught My Boys to be Hunters

From The New Yorker's The Sad Death of Affirmative Action. It’s clear that what’s at stake isn’t a vision of social and racial justice that would ameliorate inequalities for a broad swath of people but, rather, a fight for spots in the élite ranks of society.

 The decision to stop requiring the SAT or ACT, which was taken up by nearly every élite college in the country, most likely did not come out of some sudden collective epiphany about the harms of standardized testing. Rather, I’d imagine that those scores could be the potential evidentiary basis for lawsuits that compared admissions rates between applicants of different races. It’s far easier to explain gaps in grade-point average, extracurricular activities, and the like than it is to explain why someone who got a 1590 didn’t get in, but someone who got a 1350 did.

“What colleges and universities will need to do after affirmative action is eliminated is find ways to achieve diversity that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, told me. “So they can’t have any explicit use of race. They have to make sure that their admissions statistics don’t reveal any use of race. But they can use proxies for race.”

The Court's interest in revisiting racial affirmative action got me thinking a bit more about the idea of meritocracy. 

Merit, say, for employment in my field, is relatively easy to assess. We want to hire people who are personable enough to be good colleagues, bright, eager, good writers and speakers, and easily-trainable. If they don't work out, they have to leave. We do not care about your golf game.

So, in my view, merit has to do with the right fit for a job or task. The right talent stack, as Adams would put it.

I know that many private secondary schools (the PSSAT) and, of course, still most higher ed wants test scores.  The SAT and ACT are basically proxies for IQ or, at least, functional IQ as it has to be applied to a test. But is IQ a measure of general merit as a human being? Of course not. It matters, but how much?

Let's say you are head of admissions at a competitive higher ed school with far more applicants than spaces. Your job is to try to field a group of smart kids with enough talents to field sports teams, an orchestra, some math geniuses, etc.  Fill each bucket.

What would you do?