Transparency in college admissions

Daniel Golden (Bloomberg) reports that the Department of Education is now investigating both Princeton and Harvard regarding discrimination against Asian-American applicants.

Below is an excerpt from an op-ed Bloomberg asked me to write on this topic.

What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

It’s a common belief among Asian- American families that their children are held to higher academic standards than college applicants from other ethnic groups. Such practices were openly acknowledged after investigations at universities like Berkeley and Stanford in the 1980s and 1990s.

Have they been corrected?

The U.S. Education Department is investigating complaints that Harvard University and Princeton University discriminated against Asian-Americans in undergraduate admissions.

Statistics seem to support the claim of bias across most of elite higher education. For example, in comprehensive data compiled as part of Duke University’s Campus Life and Learning project (as reported in a recent analysis by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono and collaborators), Asian-Americans who enrolled at the school in 2001 averaged 1457 out of 1600 on the math and reading part of the SAT, compared with 1416 for whites, 1347 for Hispanics and 1275 for blacks.

Holistic Admissions

There is every reason to believe that a similar pattern holds at nearly all elite universities in the U.S., with notable exceptions such as the California Institute of Technology. In fact, Duke may be one of the mildest offenders when it comes to Asian-American admissions: With the goal of increasing its overall student quality, Duke has reportedly been more friendly recently to Asian-American applicants than traditional powers such as Harvard and Princeton.

Schools like Harvard and Princeton brag that each year they reject numerous applicants such as Jian Li (who filed a complaint against Princeton) who score a perfect 2400 on the SAT. How would we feel if it were revealed that almost all of these rejected top scorers, year after year, were Asian- Americans? I challenge Harvard and Princeton to refute this possibility.

To be fair, most elite universities practice what is known as holistic admissions: Each candidate is evaluated on a variety of measures, including athletic and leadership activities in addition to academic performance. It is possible that the gap in academic average between Asian-American and white admitted students is compensated by gaps in the opposite direction on these other variables. Looking again at internal evaluations by Duke’s admissions office, we find Asian-Americans had higher averages than whites in the following categories: achievement, curriculum (each about one-third of a standard deviation) and letters of recommendation, while trailing very slightly (less than one-tenth of a standard deviation) in personal qualities.

Lacking data on factors such as legacy and recruited athlete status, we can’t make a complete determination of the fairness of the process, and in fact the appropriate weight of the various factors in a holistic admissions process will be subject to vigorous debate. ...

Inside Duke: hurting the ones we love?

This very interesting study had access to comprehensive data ranging from Duke admissions office evaluations of applicants, to students' intended majors and subsequent shifts, to grades awarded and student composition (including abilities!) for each course offered at Duke. Interesting factoid: 40% of fathers of White students at Duke have doctorates.

For similar studies (although not emphasizing ethnicity) using U Oregon data, see Data mining the University , Psychometric thresholds for physics and mathematics.

What Happens After Enrollment? An Analysis of the Time Path of Racial Differences in GPA and Major Choice

Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban M. Aucejo, Ken Spenner

May 24, 2011

Abstract
If affirmative action results in minority students at elite schools having much potential but weak preparation, then we may expect minority students to start off behind their majority counterparts and then catch up over time. Indeed, at the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students' freshmen and senior year. However, this convergence masks two effects. First, the variance of grades given falls across time. Hence, shrinkage in the level of the gap may not imply shrinkage in the class rank gap. Second, grading standards differ across courses in different majors. We show that controlling for these two features virtually eliminates any convergence of black/white grades. In fact, black/white gpa convergence is symptomatic of dramatic shifts by blacks from initial interest in the natural sciences, engineering, and economics to majors in the humanities and social sciences. We show that natural science, engineering, and economics courses are more difficult, associated with higher study times, and have harsher grading standards; all of which translate into students with weaker academic backgrounds being less likely to choose these majors. Indeed, we show that accounting for academic background can fully account for differences in switching behaviors across blacks and whites.

For a review of Richard Sander's analysis of affirmative action in law school admissions, see here.

The results of all of these studies can be summarized as: to first approximation, psychometric predictors work, and in an unbiased way across ethnicities.

Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans on subjective personality evaluation

Harvard and Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA), which is suing Harvard over discrimination against Asian-American applicants, have released a large set of documents related to the case, including statistical analysis of records of more than 160,000 applicants who applied for admission over six cycles from 2000 to 2015.

Documents here and here. NYTimes coverage.

The following point does not require any sophisticated modeling (with inherent assumptions) or statistical expertise to understand.

Harvard admissions evaluators -- staffers who are likely under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities each year -- rate Asian-American applicants far lower on subjective personality traits than do alumni interviewers who actually meet the applicants. The easiest way to limit the number of A-A admits each year would be to penalize them on the most subjective aspects of the evaluation...

As stated further below: When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are assigned the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian-Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants...

SFFA Memorandum: Professor Arcidiacono found that Harvard’s admissions system discriminates against Asian-American applicants in at least three respects. First, he found discrimination in the personal rating. Asian-American applicants are significantly stronger than all other racial groups in academic performance. They also perform very well in non-academic categories and have higher extracurricular scores than any other racial group. Asian-American applicants (unsurprisingly, therefore) receive higher overall scores from alumni interviewers than all other racial groups. And they receive strong scores from teachers and guidance counselors—scores that are nearly identical to white applicants (and higher than African-American and Hispanic applicants). In sum, Professor Arcidiacono found that “Asian-American applicants as a whole are stronger on many objective measures than any other racial/ethnic group including test scores, academic achievement, and extracurricular activities.”

Yet Harvard’s admissions officials assign Asian Americans the lowest score of any racial group on the personal rating—a “subjective” assessment of such traits as whether the student has a “positive personality” and “others like to be around him or her,” has “character traits” such as “likability ... helpfulness, courage, [and] kindness,” is an “attractive person to be with,” is “widely respected,” is a “good person,” and has good “human qualities.” Importantly, Harvard tracks two different personal ratings: one assigned by the Admissions Office and another by alumni interviewers. When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are assigned the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants and higher than African-American and Hispanic applicants.

From the Crimson:

The report found that Asian American applicants performed significantly better in rankings of test scores, academics, and overall scores from alumni interviews. Of 10 characteristics, white students performed significantly better in only one—rankings of personal qualities, which are assigned by the Admissions Office. [italics added]

See also Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions. (Source of figure at top; the peak in A-A representation at Harvard, in the early 1990s, coincides with external pressure from an earlier DOJ investigation of the university for discrimination.)

A very sad tweet:

Here's an exchange in the Harvard lawsuit in which a a teacher at Stuyvesant started to cry when she was shown data that showed her Asian students were *half* as likely to be admitted to Harvard as her white students in 2014 pic.twitter.com/EfjBeBFgfy

— Molly Hensley-Clancy (@mollyhc) June 15, 2018

For the statistically sophisticated, see Duke Professor Arcidiacono's rebuttal to David Card's analysis for Harvard. If these entirely factual and easily verified characterizations of Card's modeling (see below) are correct, the work is laughable.

Professor Card’s models are distorted by his inclusion of applicants for whom there is no reason to believe race plays any role.

As my opening report noted, there are several categories of applicants to whom Harvard extends preferences for reasons other than race: recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff, those who are on the Dean’s List or Director’s List [i.e., Big Donors], legacies, and those who apply for early admission.1 Because of the significant advantage that each of these categories confers on applicants, my report analyzed the effect of race on an applicant pool without these special categories of applicants (the baseline dataset), which allowed me to test for the effect of race on the bulk of the applicant pool that did not fall into one of these categories.2

Professor Card, however, includes all of these applicants in his model, taking the remarkable position that there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant. But this is an untenable position. I do not assert that Harvard uses race to penalize Asian-American applicants who are recruited athletes, children of donors (or others identified on the Dean’s List), legacies, or other preferred categories. By including these special recruiting categories in his models, Professor Card obscures the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for all other applicants.

Professor Card further exacerbates this problem by including in his calculations the large majority of applicants whose characteristics guarantee rejection regardless of their race. Harvard admits a tiny fraction of applicants – only five or six percent in recent years. This means that a huge proportion of applicants have no realistic chance of admission. If an applicant has no chance of admission, regardless of his race, then Harvard obviously does not “discriminate” based on race in rejecting that applicant. Professor Card uses this obvious fact to assert that Harvard does not consider race at all in most of its admissions decisions. Further, he constructs his models in ways that give great weight to these applicants, again watering down the effect of race in Harvard’s decisions where it clearly does matter. (To put it in simple terms, it is akin to reducing the value of a fraction by substantially increasing the size of its denominator.)


Professor Card removes interaction terms, which has the effect of understating the penalty Harvard imposes on Asian-American applicants.

As Professor Card notes, his model differs from mine in that he removes the interaction terms. An interaction term allows the effects of a particular factor to vary with another distinct factor. In the context of racial discrimination, interaction terms are especially helpful (and often necessary) in revealing where certain factors operate differently for subgroups within a particular racial or ethnic group. For example, if a law firm singled out African-American women for discriminatory treatment but treated African-American males and other women fairly, a regression model would probably not pick up the discrimination unless it included an interaction between African-American and female.

Professor Card rightly recognizes that interaction terms should be included in a model when there is evidence that racial preferences operate differently for particular groups of applicants; yet he nonetheless removes interaction terms for variables that satisfy this condition. The most egregious instance of this is Professor Card’s decision not to interact race with disadvantaged status—even though the data clearly indicate that Harvard treats disadvantaged students differently by race.

...

Professor Card’s report changes none of my conclusions; to the contrary, given how easy it is to alter the results of his models and that my own models report the same results even incorporating a number of his controls, my opinions in this case have only been strengthened: Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants; Harvard imposes heavy racial preferences in favor of Hispanic and African-American applicants; and Harvard has been manipulating its admission of single-race African-American applicants to ensure their admission rate approximates or exceeds the overall admission rate. Professor Card has demonstrated that it is possible to mask the true effects of race in Harvard’s admission process by changing the scope of the analysis in incorrect ways and choosing inappropriate combinations of control variables. But Professor Card cannot reach these results by applying accepted statistical methods and treating the data fairly.

John McWhorter: the truth about mismatch

I'm shocked that CNN published Columbia professor John McWhorter's editorial on Scalia's mismatch comments. His remarks challenge the mainstream media narrative, and require some thought from the reader.

CNN: Those who consider themselves on black people's side are having a field day dismissing Justice Antonin Scalia as a racist. His sin was suggesting that black students admitted to the most selective institutions might perform better at somewhat less selective institutions where instruction is paced more slowly.

I don't usually agree with Justice Scalia's perspectives, but we are doing him wrong on this one. Scalia didn't express himself as gracefully as he could have. No one could suppose that anything like all black students find the pedagogical pace at top-level universities overwhelming.

However, Scalia's comment stemmed not from random intuition but from research showing that a substantial number of black students would do better -- and be happier -- at schools less selective than the ones they are often admitted to via racial preferences.

The reading public's response to Scalia's point shows that few have any idea of this research or assume it was done by partisan zealots. An intelligent discussion of the Fisher v. University of Texas case now before the Supreme Court requires a quick tour of the facts.

... At Duke University, economist Peter Arcidiacono, with Esteban Aucejo and Joseph Hotz, has shown that the "mismatch" lowers the number of black scientists. Black students at a school where teaching is faster and assumes more background than they have often leave the major in frustration, but would be less likely to have done so at a school prepared to instruct them more carefully.

UCLA law professor Richard Sander conclusively showed in 2004 that "mismatched" law students are much more likely to cluster in the bottom of their classes and, especially, to fail the bar exam. Meanwhile, Sander and Stuart Taylor's book argues that the mismatch problem damages the performance of black and brown students in general.

There are scholars who dispute Sander and Taylor's thesis about undergraduate school in general. However, when it comes to the more specific points about STEM subjects and law school, takedown arguments are harder to fashion because of the simple force of the facts.

For example, on Sander's widely publicized law school paper, time has passed and few of us go in for reading law review articles. However, Emily Bazelon's widely read critique of it was hasty in claiming that the responses published along with Sander's piece refuted his claims. Rather, anyone reading them with an open mind would see that they left Sander's basic point standing tall and this applies to any other critique I have seen: there has been no "smackdown." It is similarly unlikely that anyone could tell Arcidiacono, Aucejo and Hotz that what they chronicle was mirages.

... At the University of California, San Diego the year before racial preferences were banned in the late '90s, exactly one black student out of 3,268 freshmen made honors. A few years later, after students who once would have been "mismatched" to flagship school UC Berkeley were now admitted to schools such as UC San Diego, one in five black freshmen were making honors, the same proportion as white ones.

What civil rights leader of the past would have seen this as racism? Who in the future will? Or why are we tarring Scalia as a bigot for espousing outcomes like this in the here and now?

Our national conversation on racial preferences is under-informed and mean when founded on an assumption that anyone who seriously questions racial preferences is naive at best and a pig at worst. Affirmative action is a complex matter upon which reasonable minds will differ. With the well-being of young people of color at stake, we can't afford to pretend otherwise.

You could also have read about this topic in my NYTimes op-ed from 2012: Merit, Not Race, in College Admissions. The facts supporting mismatch are not disputable, despite the attempts of some ideologues to cloud the conversation.

I sometimes explain the issue as follows. Imagine taking a group of typical engineering students from Iowa State University and transferring them to MIT or Caltech in their freshman year. What are the odds that these students would thrive? What are the odds that they would cluster at the bottom of the class and learn less than they would have had they stayed at Iowa State? Anyone who has taught STEM at both highly selective and less selective universities knows that large differences in admissions selectivity lead to large differences in average ability in the classroom (the whole purpose of selection!), and that the pace and presentation of material needs to be adjusted accordingly. In the example I gave, the SAT gap is perhaps 200 points (on a 1600 scale). But this is smaller than the admissions preference given to African Americans by most selective colleges (see Affirmative Action: the Numbers).

Why do we think the thought experiment would suddenly become a good idea if the students were black?

One might object that SAT or high school GPA are flawed measures of ability, especially for under-represented minorities. But this has been studied carefully. The fact of the matter is that the accuracy of these numerical indicators as predictors of college performance varies little depending on the race or even socio-economic background of the student. (To be technical: adding an additional variable for race or income to the regression changes the SAT coefficient by very little.) That is, a student admitted with lower scores than their peers is unlikely to perform well in difficult STEM majors, regardless of the race of the student, and even if that student comes from a wealthy legacy family.

It's also known that test preparation only improves SAT scores by a small fraction of the typical admissions preference (i.e., less than 50 points vs 300), and that test-retest reliability of the exam is very high. The tests measure something real, which has predictive power.

The consequences of selecting students based on academic ability are clearly manifested in this study by Jonathan Wai and myself: Colleges ranked by Nobel, Fields, Turing and National Academies output. Colleges with the most talented students (selected based on simple measures such as SAT and high school GPA) produce orders of magnitude more top scientists, engineers, and medical researchers per capita than less selective schools.

There is a sad pattern in the comprehensive Duke data that both McWhorter and I reference: students admitted with weak admissions scores are more likely to leave challenging STEM majors in favor of less competitive subjects, and they are more likely to perform poorly overall. This pattern holds regardless of the race or socio-economic status of the student.

Anyone who claims to have a serious interest in higher education (e.g., all professors and administrators) should be familiar with the facts presented above.

Note Added:

Two related editorials, one by Richard Sander in the WSJ and the other by Thomas Sowell.

Most of the analyses attacking mismatch have focused on graduation rates. But these ignore the fact that virtually all colleges have easy majors. Given the widely acknowledged practice of admitting wealthy applicants, legacies, and athletes with significantly below average scores, and the nearly 100% graduation rate at the Ivies, the conclusion has to be that there are paths of little resistance through most elite colleges. Surprisingly, it might be easier for a student of average ability (that is, relative to the overall population) to graduate from Harvard (once admitted), than to graduate from a typical state university -- the key is choice of major.

IIRC, the migration of weaker students from STEM into less challenging majors is revealed in "real time" in the Duke data set, which contains every grade in every course for all students over a number of years. It also contains the application files of students and their original intended majors. Without this level of specificity, one can't really make strong assertions about mismatch. I have yet to see any data-driven analyses which contradict the mismatch hypothesis specifically as it applies to STEM or law school.

We should applaud Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) for taking students with modest test scores and yet producing graduates who go on to earn a disproportionate fraction of STEM PhDs, something Scalia alluded to in his (badly worded) remarks.

NSF: ... Among known U.S. baccalaureate-origin institutions of 1997–2006 black S&E doctorate recipients, the top 8 and 20 of the top 50 were HBCUs. ... The top 5 baccalaureate-origin institutions of 1997–2006 black S&E doctorate recipients were: Howard University, Spelman College, Hampton University, Florida A&M University, and Morehouse College.

Manifold Podcast #6: Richard Sander on Affirmative Action, Mismatch Theory, and Academic Freedom

 

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 

Resources: 

Faculty web page, includes links to publications: 

https://law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/richard-h-sander 

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) 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2625668  

About Prop. 16 and Prop. 209, University of Chicago Law Review Online (2020) 

https://lawreviewblog.uchicago.edu/2020/10/30/aa-sander/ 

Panel at Stanford Intellectual Diversity Conference, April 8, 2016, Stanford Law School 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RZbz-lHwVM 

ManifoldOne podcast (transcript).