A Princeton professor said:
At Harvard, more than 80% of recruited athletes are admitted. That’s orders of [magnitude] greater than any racial consideration. It also comes with considerable racial implications. 70% of athletes at Harvard are white, whereas only 40% of the student body is.
This is pretty revealing. You could argue the real enemies of equity, exacerbators of exclusivity, and honestly the most obvious elephants at elite colleges are: sports recruiting and legacy. AOC later quoted the same stats I think so I'm in good company.
But the quote also implies that the 40% white student body, while not even at > 50%, is still higher than it "should" be based on standard considerations. And also that, later in the thread, for colleges that don't consider gender they end up with more women admitted. I think that's fascinating.
Now on to shower-borne solutions. Why do people care about getting into elite colleges? I assume: better job opportunities. And subjectively "social prestige," but I'll focus on jobs for now because I think part of the solution is to undercut prestige. So. What if. Hear me out. We had "college blind" job hiring? Or affirmative action with consideration to diversify educational background?
"That's infeasible."
Is it though?
Federal law already bars employers from discriminating against potential or current employees on factors such as gender, race and age ("equal opportunity employer" or "EEO"). What if we simply tacked on educational background to that list?
"Educational background" is becoming more and more of a subjective bar with less and less utility thanks to democratized online learning materials. Personally speaking, college was the biggest waste of time educationally. I learned nothing that was unique to the particular university, and public high school education was much more meaningful overall.
So how could companies implement this? Google already sort of does this with "hiring committees" and so some of my colleagues didn't even attend college. Hiring committees are a detached cabal that have not interacted with the candidate and only look at the merits of the candidate's interview answers. The committee is blind to educational background, gender, and race. To make this equitable, the top of the funnel needs to include an intentionally diverse pool and that's where Google is imperfect, as are all other companies, since recruiters have extreme leeway and discretion on who to get through the screen.
"So you're saying there should be some federal law that asks recruiters to censor the college a candidate came from before presenting to hiring managers, or companies must consider candidates who attended non-elite colleges (>15% admission rate) in the pool, and the law also asks companies to revamp entire campus recruiting strategies, basically eliminating campus recruiting as it exists today?"
"...Yea!" It only sounds impossible because we settle into artificial constraints on what's possible! I think this is more feasible than fighting at the college admissions level, contending with incentives of endowment and sports economics, VERSUS at the employer level, where it's easier to argue college name != performance. Back to the shower for more thoughts.
