Fryer, the Harvard economist, is arguing that elite admissions are built to avoid embarrassment rather than to take good bets — his phrase is that if you're going to take someone low-mean, you should want high variance. The admissions officer's own example was Olympiad gold medallists who get passed over because one of them once trashed a common room. Fryer's point is that a school that admits on a different standard then owes those students the developmental support to make the bet pay off.
Yeah, I mean, well, that's a lot to chew on. First, you know, thank you for even mentioning me in the same paragraph as Thomas Soule and Glenn Lowry, both of them. I know Glenn, I know very well, and they're both brilliant. So that's an honor. You know, as you were talking, I was kind of chuckling to myself because I thought, well, maybe the reason that R day got all that attention was because not a lot of folks can run a marathon like that. No one would ever confuse me as someone who liked to run. Look, I'm really, really saddened by the whole R day stuff. And I don't know all the details like most do, but I know a couple of things that seem pretty obvious. One, I just don't think you got really, really tough feedback. And it's really hard to get tough feedback. I remember a distinct part of life in 2003 or so. And I was at the University of Chicago and I was given a seminar and I was about to pack up my U-Haul and drive to Cambridge. I was in the Harvard Society of Fellows. And I gave the seminar at Chicago. And I mean, you know, I survived, but it was, it was, you know, it was a full-contact sport. And it just seemed like everything I said there, you know, I have this idea. That's not good. Oh, I have this idea. I'm not sure. You know. And then literally two weeks later, I'm Harvard's campus. And I say something similar. Oh, I'm thinking, oh, wow. And I thought to myself at the time, and mentioned it to my grandmother at the time, something has changed. I did not get this much smarter in the last two weeks. Something is really different. And I don't trust this process, I said to her. And I think that that is part of the issue. And that's what my focus has been about the RDA case and many other cases like this, which is if you're going to give someone an opportunity, I'm all for that, perhaps more than most, because I've been given a lot of opportunities. But if you're going to do that, then the burden is on you to then develop them. And in some sense, you know, one of the key ideas behind DEI is: hey, these 18-year-olds have really noisy signals. Or heck, even these 20-year-olds coming out, 23-year-olds coming out of graduate school have really noisy signals. So can we really have an up-down decision based on something that isn't very predictive for the entire population? And we're making fine distinctions based on people? I can understand that. But that means if you take a lower signal on someone because you think they have potential, the burden is on you to make sure you get clear signals before the next time you have to decide promote or not. And that's where I think things break down in the academy and elsewhere is that we get excited about the opportunities and then are worried or perhaps even scared to hold people to a line. Let me give you one clear example. I was talking to an Ivy League admissions officer, the head of an Ivy League Admissions School. And I said, look, I have this intuition. A 1,200 SAT coming from the Atlanta Project. Is more impressive than a 1,300 coming from a private school. I
have the same intuition.
That's my view. I said, but can we test this? And the admissions officer said to me, Roland, let me get this straight. If we admitted 50 people and 45 of them worked out and five got in fights in the common room, I was told, would you think that's success or failure? I said, that is a resounding success, in my view. He says, I view that as failure. And said, look, it's not about race. You know, we don't, sometimes we don't admit the Olympiad gold medalists because we're worried that they're going to, you know, a few years ago, someone couldn't figure out a proof and they trashed the common rooms or something like that. So that is the issue, which is if you're going to have a different standard at the time of admission or what have you, then again, it is on you to figure out developmental opportunities for them to show that they were worth taking a bet on. And I think that's what's gone, that's what went wrong in the RDA case and likely many others.
That's very interesting. So in the case of those 50 admitted students, we're going to admit 50 students on the intuition that their lower test scores represent more potential than meets the eye because of their background. In that hypothetical, 90% of them were great successes and ended up by some later meritocratic benchmark proving that that was correct in the case of 90%, but 5% had behavioral issues. And so this was viewed by this person as a failure. Does that mean that Ivy League admissions people are prioritizing having no bad cases as opposed to having many good cases? And if so, how does that actually square with affirmative action as it's been practiced? Because it has been practiced at all these schools.
Yes, great question. Just one tiny thing, because I'm a nerd. It's 10%, so it would be 90 and 10%. Oh, sorry, yeah. But I think it is minimizing, you know, it's downside risk protection. I think, and look, I don't know. This is one, you know, one person I chatted with a few years ago, but since it's more applicably, more widely applicable. I think, you know, the thing that the 1,300 from the private school has, even if they're in the middle of the distribution, they understand the social parts of being in an Ivy League school in ways that I certainly did not when I showed up. You know, I showed up wearing jerseys and people are like, what's wrong with you? And so I think that is part of the calculus. It's not just academics. It is, can they fit in socially here? Are they going to, and so this part of it is a social club, not just an academic institution. And I believe if you're trying to say, look, how can we get a distinguished class but minimize the chance for true disruption, then I can imagine that this would be, if those were your preferences, they're not mine, but if they were your preferences, I can imagine that this would be a rational choice.
That what would be a rational choice?