FIRST REFLECTIONS THE DAY AFTER THE BAN ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ADMISSION TO HIGHER EDUCATION

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the USA deemed it unconstitutional for colleges and universities, except, inexplicably, military colleges, to apply separate admission standards to applicants based on "race." This fundamentally re-designs the system of higher education, not only in the United States, but, in its implications, world-wide. 

Let's start by stating the obvious: "Academic performance," very much including academic performance by high school graduates who apply for admission to colleges and universities is a variable that is statistically associated with a multiplicity of determining variables, embedded in complex historical processes. 

Statistically to model inequalities in educational performance--a procedure that would be required to parse out talent from statistical variables that suppress or enhance it, i.e., to help colleges and universities find, ostensibly, the "best" talent from their large applicant pools--what is required, at the very least, is a very large amount of data, including longue-durée historic data on each applicant's concrete family history, community, migration and mobility histories, and very complex, multivariate, hidden-variable time-series analytical techniques. I have no doubt that such data could only be obtained from all college applicants only with extreme information loss, and I would be astonished if all US colleges / universities had the scholarly and technical expertise in their admissions offices to run such models on applicant pools. As for the information loss, it is also clear that the availability / unavailability of such data is also highly associated with very important variables that structure US society, including class, income, ethnicity, "race," migration history, etc. . . . i.e., those variables whose effects colleges and universities would like to filter out. This is a clear case of extreme information bias in the data input field, invalidating whatever "results" the computers might spit out at the end of the process.

On top of that, much of the application process includes text-based elements, i.e., would-be students are required to submit narratives about themselves; their experiences, their desires, overall how they see the world, etc., to tease out how they think and how "useful" members of society their abilities make them. Writing samples, etc., would of course be very sensitive and meaningful tools, had the world not been taken by large "language bots,"--computers that produce texts by demand--that do so at a split moment's notice, in frighteningly good, and increasingly good, quality--i.e., it will be, or has already become basically impossible to tell, just by looking at texts of applications, what the quality of the applicant's mental abilities might be, since soon practically no-one will be able to tell what text has been written by a human and what's been written by a cluster of computer servers. Or if it is possible to tell, the process of ascertaining that will become increasingly cumbersome and expensive, and the results of such "tests" will be probabilities, with relatively low levels of certainty.

On top of it all, the Court's ruling ignores the fact that college and university admissions serve a number of simultaneous purposes; in addition to selecting the most talented applicants, whatever that means, admissions are used to create a mix of students among a huge variety of variables, simply to create opportunities to in-class, and more widely, on-campus discussions that reflect perspectives, experiences and overall interests of a wide and complex set of constituencies around society. This is particularly, although by no means exclusively, an issue that is directly relevant to public universities.

To me, the only solution--if we wish to keep institutions of higher education at all--is OPEN ADMISSION as a universal human right. For that to have a real impact on society, the entire gamut of the system of education would, of course, have to become effectively, not just nominally, free, from kindergarten to PhD, for all humans. That in turn requires the fundamental re-design of college and university finances world-wide. 

I would be astonished if that could be done. Short of that, we'll just keep doing the incredibly unfair job of exacerbating inequalities--undeserved advantages and totally unacceptable disdavantages--in social, cultural "capital."