Summer Rerun Time

Now that Washington has gone into Summer reruns - the President is away in New Jersey and Congress is looking for new reasons to blame Hillary Clinton for its lack of accomplishments - it’s time to take a pause and look at some things that seem to have slipped by almost unnoticed.

And to ask why? Or, maybe, how did it happen?

Clearly, North Korea is too important to make it to this list of overlooked things. Climate change isn’t there, either. Too many people are talking about it all the time. Health Care is in a kind of suspended animation - think of it as a Congress-induced coma - and we’ll wake up one day this fall, or more likely next fall, when saving health care for millions of people will mean a better chance of swinging election results.

We could look at the deteriorating state of race relations. Or, more appropriately, the deteriorating race relations in several states. Or sexism in the workplace, especially the techno-wonk workplace.

But, as we go through a time where lots of things are happening and nothing actually changes - heard that before, didn’t you - I think I have a chance to look at an issue that keeps coming up, over and over again, which is really important.

It is one great issue which has been fought over for - well - for all of my life, and from what I read. for a long, long time before I was born. It’s something everyone has an opinion about, and - if I get it right - something that everyone reading this will use as an excuse to get  mad at me,

But, fearlessly, I plow ahead. Let’s look at college admissions, and certain accusations by our federal Attorney General that some colleges in some places are using an admission process which is unfair to white students.

Important? you ask. Well, look what we get from colleges and universities when they turn out the best and the brightest. (No, not the Bay of Pigs or our seemingly endless war in Vietnam). We get things like medical advances, enough food production to keep our nation going as farmland keeps shrinking, plastics, genetic research. Really great video games and FX movies. Deep understanding of cultural changes across the world. New appreciation of history. Warnings about global warming that our politicians often ignore. Good things like that.

Now, we all know just what the ideal of college admissions is. Or, at least, what it should be. Take the best students. Give them the best courses. Graduate the future leaders of our nation, and the captains of industry, the scientists who will cure all kinds of diseases and the artists whose fame will last down through the centuries.

OK. That’s a couple of thousand people for the freshman class.  Add the players on the football teams, those truly talented in math and science, the outstanding historians and musicians and the really energetic mascot at the basketball game, and you have a good 20,000 or 30,000. Enough people to fill the whole class at one or two of our larger public universities.

So, what about the rest of us. What kind of chance do our kids have when they have to compete against others who have an unfair advantage?

Well, let me suggest that we flip the question. What kind of a chance to those undeserving kids - the ones who can only get into the college we want our kids to get into with help from the government - have against our fair advantages?

How’s that again? Fair advantages?

Well, let’s say that every college has the absolute right to set its own admission policies, to take in anybody they feel is appropriate. Just take the best students, just like they did in the good old days.

But, wait. In the good old days, there was no college education for most of us. Certainly not for the middle class, because there really was no middle class. There were nobles and princes, artists and clergy, and - after a bit - the really wealthy.

Yes, in the good old days, the colleges admitted the children of the people who got their names put on buildings, or who were part of the Royal family. Or who were strongly recommended by the clergy. Kind of like the way it is with the service academies, where you get in on the recommendation of your local Congress person.

We do have public colleges, of course, but most of them only really started growing when World War II ended and lots of GI’s came home with guaranteed educational benefits. Public colleges grew to meet the demand, since you couldn’t expand Yale or Harvard to take 10,000 times as many students.

Go from the 40’s to the 50’s and the 60’s, and college education began to be seen as the ticket to a really good job and a really good life. And soon everybody wanted to get in.

Well, not everybody, but a lot of teenagers. Lots more than could be admitted.

That’s when we began a national dialogue about fair admission policies. You know, how should colleges pick students for their freshman class.

Well, in truth, a lot of colleges don’t do a good job in deciding who should get in. I remember going to a freshman orientation assembly - it was typical, I think - and our college president (a distinguished scholar, by the way) told us to look to our left, then look to our right. “One of you won’t be here in four years to graduate,” he said. At the time, I remember hoping it would not be me, and I don’t recall wondering why the college didn’t do a better job of picking its students. And, the college drop-out rate hasn’t changed much since then.

Colleges are still looking for well-rounded students, student leaders, students who had worked hard to serve their community, students with special skills, students who were the first ones in their family to go to college and, of course, students who could get loans to pay their tuition. Stick good SAT scores in the middle of that list somewhere.

Well, is that fair?

Very few students who applied to college back in the day came from really bad public schools. It’s still true today. Certainly, their college enrollment test scores were a big red flag they would not do well, which reflected overcrowded classes and poor teachers in their high school as much as the ability of a single student applicant. On the other hand, some school districts boast that most of their graduating seniors are getting into college. And, they add, to the college of their choice.

Now the really best colleges - proud institutions such as Yale and Harvard and MIT - reject a lot more students than they accept. Yale, for example, took in 6.9 percent of its 2017 freshman applicants, while Harvard accepted 5.2 percent. Princeton was just as exclusive, accepting 6 percent. Meanwhile, the University of Michigan took in 24 percent, NYU accepted 27 percent and the University of Pennsylvania had a more-exclusive 9.1 percent admissions rate.

In other words, for every four students who applied to NYU, one would get in. For every 20 potential lambs seeking admission to Yale, one would get in. That would certainly end the unfairness. Baaa, baaa, baaa.

In short, lots of students did not get into any of those schools. On the other end of the scale, community colleges across the nation accepted lots more qualified applicants, and run special remedial programs to help the ones who were cheated out of a decent high school education because they had the misfortune to live in a place that did not have good high schools, or because they lost a year because of a physical problem or, maybe, because they were just late bloomers.

Fair? Well, depends on which side of the divide you live in. And I am not arguing that going to a community college is a bad thing. In a lot of cases, it’s a highly affordable first step toward a four-year degree, or the place to get enough professional training to have a really good life.

But, back to the question of whether it is fair to discriminate against white students. Well, the answer is likely to be yes and no. I just can’t argue that there is no such thing as discrimination, or that discriminating against one student is the flip side of discriminating in favor of another one.

The real problem is that, if you discriminate in favor of getting someone into Yale’s freshman class, you are discriminating against 20 other people, while if you discriminate in favor of getting one student into NYU, you are only discriminating against three others.

But, after you make it truly impossible for any disadvantaged student to get into a good college - as the Attorney General wants - there are still three out of four kids not getting into NYU, and 19 out of 20 not getting into Yale.

That really makes it more fair, right?

So, what to do? We could just say “hands off” and let every college and university decide who gets in, without any fear or favor from the government. A really good technical school - the ones who are working big time in Artificial Intelligence and self-driving cars - would only take in the smartest geeks. (We can still argue how many of them would be women, but that’s another issue). Fair?

A really prestigious Ivy League school might simply decide its endowment is short a couple of billion, and hike its tuition so much that only the richest people could afford to get in. Fair?

Or, let’s say that you want to put a really good football team out on the field, one that will keep money pouring into the athletics department and let its coaches lead a somewhat shady and clearly immoral lifestyle for years. They can give big scholarships to the best athletes in the nation, and make lots of promises that may not come true once those students leave school. But, the players get admitted. And, someone else doesn’t. Fair?

Now, I will stipulate that most people have worked hard to get where they are in life. Even if they inherit a multi-million dollar real estate business from their parents, they have likely spent a lot of time doing things that take effort or thought or just good luck. In any case, do something long enough and it could be classified as hard work. Even Willie Wonka got to retire.

Ever look closely at some attractive actress schlepping around the country, doing interview after interview to promote a picture? By the 20th or 25th cable show, doing the same thing and answering the same questions just isn’t worth the free bagels in the green room.

Now, I know that the payoff for working really hard in some jobs is a lot bigger than working hard in others. And I know that lots of people will never get the opportunity to get a chance to work at really good jobs.

Just look at the statistics. The single biggest indicator of an infant’s chance of success in life is the income level of his or her parents. And, the idea of upward or downward mobility in society - as measured by a whole bunch of things - is really small.

Sometimes, you know when a game is rigged. Kinda like when the political reformers find out that the biggest reason for change in some elected offices is death of the incumbent. Let’s not dwell on that too much. Senility is in a race to be the third biggest cause.

So, where does that leave our nation’s Attorney General in his quest to stamp out unfairness to white people? Well, it still implies that a college can favor any other white student over the one who did not get in. And it may imply that you can favor Asians or Saudi princess over white students, or at least give them co-equal competitive advantages.

And don’t even think there might be something in the idea that the student body of a college should look a little more like the town or city or state that the college is located in. Or, maybe, even the whole United States of America.

Like I asked at the beginning, Fair?