Is Affirmative Action Fair? The Myth of Equity in College Admissions

Matthew Rascoff: My name is Matthew Rascoff. I'm vice provost for digital education at Stanford University. We are so glad you're joining us for this first of eight dialogs in our series on academic innovation for the public good in 2023. The series are monthly online conversations about the future of higher education and how we can change it for the better. We have a fantastic lineup of authors for you this year, organized around two themes. Part one asks the question "Who belongs in college and university?". And part two explores how higher education can unlock our knowledge and share it more openly with the world. We encourage you to join us for this year's series by registering for our upcoming events at the link that we'll post in the chat right now.

The series is co-organized by Stanford Digital Education and Trinity College, and I am particularly grateful to all of our contributing partners this year at Brown University School of Professional Studies, Dartmouth College, Mount Holyoke College, Notre Dame Learning and the University of Michigan Center for Academic Innovation, as well as our ten co-sponsoring institutions. If you or your institution would like to join us in making this series happen, please reach out to me. We would love to have you. Each event in the series features a prominent author in conversation with a practitioner or colleague who will be me tonight. Our goal is to help translate cutting edge ideas from research and scholarship into practice in classrooms or policies and technologies.

If you want to buy a copy of tonight's book or other books in the series, please visit the next link in the chat that we'll post and all of our purchases support independent bookshops selected by the authors in our series. With that, I am pleased to introduce today's author, Natasha Warikoo, who is the Lenore Stern Professor in the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Tufts University. She's a former Guggenheim fellow and an expert on racial and ethnic inequality in education. Her book Is Affirmative Action Fair? The Myth of Equity in College Admissions argues that we need to rethink college admissions. And walks readers through evidence suggesting the value of affirmative action, which we'll talk about today.

She offers ideas that education innovators can follow to develop new approaches to achieving diversity in higher education and other goals of affirmative action. So thank you so much to Natasha for joining us tonight. We're so grateful for you being part of this series and for being a return to the series because you served last year as a moderator for one of our talks. Before I begin our conversation, I just want to briefly outline the format of tonight's program. If you want to submit a question for Natasha, and we'll do the Q&A in the latter half of this hour, please use the Zoom Q&A feature. It's at the bottom of your screen.

We'll also use the Zoom chat room and we'll leave that open and invite you to engage there with others in the audience. And we will monitor the Zoom chat for instances of inappropriate or destructive language. And if necessary, we will remove users, which we hope will not be necessary. Thank you so much for joining us. And let me start by opening this up actually with a poll. And we are going to ask the Zoom team to set up our poll and let the audience participate in this. And then I will move to the questions for you, Natasha. So a pop up should come up on your screen.

Question one "Does your college or university practice affirmative action in undergraduate admissions?". And if you don't work in an institution, you can answer for the school that you attended or that you wish to attend. And number two, if selective college in the US should consider race in admissions in order to increase the representation of Black, Latinx and Native American students. Do you agree or not? And you've got some choices there. Let's give people a couple of seconds to respond to that and then we will see the responses. And I'll come to you, Natasha, momentarily. Okay, "So does your college or university practice affirmative action?".

52%. Yes. 13%. No. 35% unsure. And selective colleges should consider race in admissions. 57% strongly agree, 36% agree, Only 4% disagree and 3% strongly disagree. Very interesting. And a really great starting point, I think, for you, Natasha, in making this case in defense of affirmative action and arguing even for its expansion. So maybe before we dive in, maybe you can just summarize the four rationales for affirmative action in your book, which you lay out and just give us the lay of the land, which I think is the basic framework for your book. And I think it's just important that we understand what is the key idea here among you know the argument for affirmative action, can you lay those out for us and then I'll have more questions for you.

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, great. Well, first, let me just say thank you so much, Matthew, for inviting me back to this wonderful series. And thank you all for being here and taking up time in your afternoon to join this conversation. So that was an interesting poll and, you know, somewhat resonates. You know, I realized this is a higher education heavy audience with practitioners in higher education who tend to be much more supportive of affirmative action. And we see more ambivalence in the wider population. So there are kind of four arguments for affirmative action that I lay out in the book. And I'll start with the most common one, which is what we sometimes call the diversity rationale.

And this is the idea that a diverse learning environment, affirmative action creates a racially diverse learning environment, and that is one that benefits all students because it creates a lot of different viewpoints in the classroom. And so and the reason that this one is so common is that this is the one justification that the U.S. Supreme Court has said is a legally valid justification for affirmative action. So, you know, the consideration of race has to be very narrowly tailored, as they say in the law, because it is a kind of suspect class. Right. We have anti-discrimination laws. And so the court has said, well, if you are doing this to create a diverse learning environment, that is allowed.

So that's the one that we hear the most, the kind of what we call the diversity rationale. But there are other reasons for affirmative action that I think are perhaps even more compelling to me as a kind of social scientist who has looked at the data. One is, you know, the origins of affirmative action, which were about racial equity. So, you know, we have and continue to have racial inequality in American society. And that's kind of incontrovertible. And I go through some of the data on that in the book. And, you know, racial inequality is a separate form of inequality from class inequality. So when we compare Americans of the same social class and by race, we see racial differences, even among people, say, in the same profession or the same income level.

And so this can be something that can increase access because of that racial inequality. Related to racial inequality but perhaps we're taking it one step further is this idea of reparations now. You know, reparations, I think, is an increasingly compelling idea in the United States. Actually, Boston's Mayor Wu just appointed a commission to kind of think about reparations in the city of Boston. You know, Congress passed this commission to kind of look at this idea of reparations recently as well. And so this idea that, you know, these universities in particular have been built on the backs of slave labor, they have and in other ways have benefited from, again, racial exclusion and that the universities owe reparations to African-Americans.

You know, if we think more broadly about, you know, our land grant universities, we might think about reparations to Native American students as well. And so this idea that it's a kind of giving back because of what's been taken away. And the last rationale that I go through in the book is this idea of contributions to society and diverse leadership. So, you know, the mission of a lot of most college, actually four year colleges in the United States says something about wanting to contribute to kind of the good of society. And we know that there are a lot of positive benefits of affirmative action. We can think about the kind of what some, you know, Caroline Hoxby has called the quote unquote, lost talent, that there are all of these amazing young people, particularly who are underrepresented minorities who don't even think to apply to these colleges and that, you know, if they do, maybe don't have the same record because they haven't had the same opportunities and that is a loss to society.

We can also think about leadership. Sandra Day O'Connor, in her decision, in her comments in the Grutter decision in 2003, talked about leadership. That we need affirmative action to create diverse leadership, because if the leadership in a society doesn't reflect the population, then it may no longer be seen as legitimate in the eyes of ordinary people. And so another kind of reason for affirmative action. So in the book, I kind of go through these different arguments and look at the empirical evidence. What evidence do we know that a diverse learning environment has these positive impacts that we think they might that, you know, of kind of racial inequality and the impact that affirmative action might have or has had in the past?

What, you know, diversity in leadership. Reparations. And so this is sort of the kind of that kind of key ideas in the book.

Matthew Rascoff: Thank you. And I appreciated how the book kind of zoomed out from the legal question to think about these like broader or policy questions like the legal aspect as part of it. But one thing that you argue compellingly is like we kind of put all of our eggs in this single basket of reasoning, of diversity, campus diversity, and that has left us in this fairly precarious decision in anticipation of a Supreme Court decision that leaves the other three rationales kind of on the table and doesn't actually use them, even though they might actually be in the long term, stronger arguments for preserving affirmative action.

So like, how do you see this book kind of in the context of a Supreme Court that seems likely to strike down the affirmative action decision, like is this your amicus brief for the court or is this your effort to reestablish affirmative action after that decision on some more solid footing?

Natasha Warikoo: So, yeah, that's a good question. You know, I'm not a legal scholar and I try to sort of, you know, not be sort of, you know, narrowed, constrained by the legal case. And I think that allows us to see to kind of take a step back and think more broadly. Right. And because, you know, I think that higher education has gone, you know, since the 1978 Bakke decision, which kind of started the sort of focus on the diversity rationale.

We've sort of moved away from this racial justice kind of focus that was really that the origins of affirmative action. And I think that's problematic. And I think, you know, when we look at higher education, even going beyond the admissions office, we see it. And, you know, my book, The Diversity Bargain, is all about how students really internalize this diversity rationale and the ways that they think about race and admissions and meritocracy really seems to only have room, particularly among white students, for this diversity rationale. And it really limits them because they have a harder time making sense of racial inequality. And you know why we might need a Black students association on campus and why, you know, it's important to think about race outside of the context of class, because there's less exposure to these, to an understanding of how racial inequality has been created in the United States beyond, you know, the kind of lasting impact of slavery and residential segregation in 20th century policy.

And so I really think it's important for universities to come back to the origins of affirmative action and really to kind of center racial equity and right. And so and justice as we think about race more broadly.

Matthew Rascoff: One thing kind of zooming out from affirmative action. To just think about admissions policy more generally. You argue in the book that we shouldn't think of admissions as a referendum on individual applicants, but really more of that as an expression of a university's goals. But you also say in the book that admissions policy has become unmoored from the missions of colleges and universities, and it's kind of taken on a life of its own.

So it's not really an expression of the intent of the institution and aligned with the institution. Is that a contradiction? Like, how should we think of those two ideas? But both of which I see in your scholarship?

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, what I try to say is that, you know, it's wrong to sort of see the admissions decision even today as a kind of referendum on a student's worthiness. Right. And how, you know, good or deserving they are. Because what colleges are doing, colleges are organizations. Right. And these organizations are, you know, trying to have certain kind of goals that they needed to fulfill to kind of keep moving to kind of exist.

Right. They need to, like, balance their books, right admissions officers have a certain amount of financial aid, and once that is dried up, they can't admit any more students who need financial aid. They you know, they have to answer to the faculty. Right. The students need a certain amount of academic preparation. They need to answer to the coaches. The coaches want athletes. They want to you know, when all their you know, they want to win games, they need to answer to the development office again, you know, there's the money issue. And so they're doing all of these things and, you know, that is what is happening in admissions rather than, you know, ranking young people from like zero to, you know, however many thousands of applications they have and say, okay, we're going to take the top, you know, however many seats we have.

And then if a few people say, no, we'll go to the next, that's not how it works. These are organizations and, you know, admissions is trying to meet those needs. Now, that is true. And what I but what I try to say in the book is that I think colleges need to do a better job and really kind of do a little bit of soul searching on what is our mission and is what we're doing really aligned with our mission? Right. And if you go back to the mission statement, you know, and say, look at what colleges are saying is their mission, a lot of it has to do with, you know, teaching and has to do with research, it has to do with our contributions to society.

And when we think about that, it's not obvious why we do things the way we do, right? So, of course, colleges have to, you know, pay the bills. And we need to think. And I think we need to think more creatively about how to do that and have, you know, really have a broader access for ordinary families. But, you know, beyond the finances, are sports really central to our mission? They might be or maybe they're not as central as we have made them in admissions. You know, there's been a lot of discussion about legacy like is that, you know, central to our mission. Again, if it's about the financial, then, you know, being upfront about that and how do we really and so thinking about the what are our core goals and how do we align admissions to those goals and then be honest about what we're doing.

Right? It's not that we're, you know, taking the quote unquote best of the best. And it's hard to make that argument when, you know, working class students, even kind of middle class and lower middle class students, Black students, Latinx students, Native Americans students are underrepresented in who gets selected. Right. If we think that, you know, there are deserving people, young people all over the country from all backgrounds, then it's hard to make the case that this is the quote unquote, best of the best, but rather that's not what we're doing. Right. We're trying to you know, and the teams we're trying to, you know, this year, the orchestra I need an oboe player, because the star oboe player graduated.

It's you know, it's all of these things. We you know, we need to raise money. And this family has a history of giving money to the university. And I think it's important to remember what is our mission, and how do we create a class that best aligns with that mission. And I think we've lost our way. I think colleges have lost our way a little bit in terms of that.

Matthew Rascoff: So let's talk a little bit about alternatives to affirmative action. So you talk in the book about how the system like UT Austin's, which admits the top 10% of high school students across the state or the University of California system they designed in the wake of Proposition 209 in the late nineties, neither of them have really served as sufficient alternatives to affirmative action, and there has been a loss of minority students in Texas.

You cited research about long term wage declines for minorities in the wake of Proposition 209 in California. So what do you see as like possible alternatives, like in the area of outreach like UCLA has pioneered or efforts, that you mentioned Caroline Hoxby's research to reduce under matching through outreach via the College Board, other programs like that. Do you see a potential in those programs to provide a reasonable and maybe better, more solid alternative to affirmative action and what is the potential in those in that research and the practices that have basically been designed as alternatives?

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, so nine states have bans on affirmative action due to either state referenda or the state legislature decisions, bills.

And, you know, California's, I believe, is the most longstanding in over two decades. And so there's a lot of research on what happens. And so, you know, I think like, you know, the people who are on this webinar, higher education administrators tend to be supportive of affirmative action. They want racial diversity on their campuses. So they have been working very hard to figure out how to do this right, to create racial diversity absent affirmative action. And, you know, I think the reality is that what they have been doing can help, but it doesn't get us to where we could be with affirmative action.

So, you know, they use. So, yeah, recruitment is an important tool. Things like the top 10%, you know, Texas' top 10% plan the UC's did a similar kind of top percent plan for a little while. And so you know Michigan has been doing things like having a diversity essay. And so, you know, these things can help. But they are you know, the research suggests from all of these states that they're not a replacement for affirmative action, that the percentages don't come back to what they were pre the end of affirmative action. So I think that colleges will do things like those and will continue to be creative.

And I think we need to think creatively about what those things will look like. And it partly it's going to depend on what the Supreme Court says is allowed and is not allowed. But I think I also want to remind listeners that this is very expensive, right? It's very labor intensive. The recruitment, the — you know — all of that holistic review, all of these kind of policies. So it's not a — you know, there is this sort of, I think, among critics of affirmative action that there are all these things that you could do. Some of those just aren't really possible, particularly if you're not, say, a Stanford or a Harvard with sort of nearly — I wouldn't say unlimited resources, but seems like close to unlimited resources.

Matthew Rascoff: So what about the more radical idea of an admissions lottery that would be pretty cheap to implement? And you cited Michael Sandel you know, with kind of philosophical rationale for a lottery. What do you see? Or maybe there's something like the medical residency matching system where you just put your name in, you rank your institutions and the residency programs, rank the candidates, and you just get sent to a single program. Other countries have a model like this. Yeah. So what about something that goes quite a bit further? Do you see any potential in that? And how do you mitigate that sense of kind of, you know, randomness and the context where people do have an affinity for institutions and yeah, family connections, for example?

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, I find both of those ideas very compelling. I've written about the lottery in particular, and I think that, you know, what a lottery does is one, it kind of makes it less labor intensive. But it also, you know, in some ways, admissions is already a lottery, right? I mean, these colleges, they're admitting nobody right, they're you know, Akil Bello talks about them being highly rejective colleges they're not highly selective like nobody's getting it, you know. And so and it's kind of you know, there are so many amazing young people with these, like stellar records, but they can't there's not enough space for them. And so, you know, is it are we going to need a, you know, a pitcher for the baseball team this year?

You know, Well, you can probably find out, but that's kind of random. It's always there's already, you know, did you grow up in a neighborhood or did you have access to a school that enabled you to take, you know, X number of advanced placement courses or what have you? That's all already, not just random, it's like it's regressive, right? And so a lottery would sort of kind of acknowledge that and it would change. I think more important for me is that would change the meaning of admission, right? To say that, you know, you could no longer say that this is the best of the best, which is what people kind of you know, maybe the colleges sometimes talk about this, you know, this is the best class ever.

But also, I think in the popular imagination, it's like these are the best young people in the country because they go to the Ivy League or what have you. And I think that a lottery would kind of call a spade a spade. That's not true, right? That there are so many more young people who applied and didn't get and who didn't even apply because they didn't think that they could, had a chance of getting in or didn't even know about the college, etc.. And so, you know, I think that it would change the meaning of admission. It would, you know, then employers wouldn't you know, have sort of a bias against students coming from other kinds of colleges, less known colleges who might be equally as worthy, for example.

And so to me, that's very compelling. And the match, I think also it is, you know, there could be some kind of lottery mixed with match. I think with both of these policies. You know, the series is about sort of an academic innovation for the public good. I really think it's time to start thinking about things like this. And I think that it would have to be a kind of a group of colleges that would do this together. Right. So we're going to sort of be and I think if the, you know, the elites did it, if, you know, Stanford and Harvard and these places did it, then others would follow.

Right. But because all these places are always looking up and they're trying to sort of increase their status and, you know, but, you know, truth be told, there are places where that are, sorry, I forgot which state it is, there is there's a state somewhere in the Midwest that's doing this kind of match, this system where it's a kind of you're automatically admitted to the state universities if you have a certain state exam score or a standardized test score.

I'm blanking on which state. But so there are innovations like this happening at other colleges. And so I think, you know, these highly selective or highly rejective colleges need to sort of be thinking about these things as well, because, you know, ultimately, are we going to what are we going to do? Are we going to get to like less than 1% like admissions And then what does that really mean? You know, it's a lottery. Right.

Matthew Rascoff: So related to that, you cited the research by Peter Blair and Kent Smetters. Why don't elite colleges expand supply, which and I wonder if you could connect that to the recent moves to pull out of U.S.

News and World Report, because part of their analysis is that institutions that are participating in a ranking system that rewards rejectiveness, you know, they want to keep their admission rates low. Keeping the class sizes smaller is a way of keeping those rates low and boosting their rankings. But if U.S. News and World Report loses some of its control over the ranking system, do you think institutions will expand and then and then reduce some of that arms race dynamic for admissions?

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, I think it's going to have to go beyond leaving U.S. News and World Report, but I think that's a great, fantastic start. You know, I think this.

This idea of a ranking is, you know, it's been problematic for so many reasons. And it's this sort of low risk. Sometimes it's the lower case colleges who care most about the rankings because they're trying to increase and increase. You know, I don't know how much again, the Harvards and the Stanfords and the Princetons, they're always sort of vying for first. But I do think that so, you know, so I think that that is compelling as well. Yeah.

Matthew Rascoff: So last question and then we're going to open it up for the audience. The series is called Academic Innovation for the Public Good, as you mentioned.

Are there innovations that you think offer a promise, you know, other than the lottery, the ones that we've talked about before are there innovations beside that that would preserve or even expand some of the benefits of affirmative action? And how would you think about applying some of the lessons of your scholarship to encourage higher education institutions to engage in this kind of innovative process?

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, I mean, I really think and I talk about these in the book, you know, we really need to rethink this whole idea of selecting kind of, quote unquote, top students to top colleges, because, again, our spending on higher education is regressive.

So I do you know, in the book I say, you know, it's not all that obvious why we are taking. If our institutional mission is in part about education, why are we taking the highest accomplished students? Why are we admitting that maybe we should be admitting the students who could benefit the most from an elite education that is those who have low levels of achievement? Right? And because then the added value will be so much more right to an elite education, Right? Because our selective colleges are spending so much more per pupil than, say, our community colleges, even our flagship state schools. So why not admit the lowest?

I mean, you know, I think we really need to like, really rethink, like, why are we doing things the way we're doing. I think funding for higher education is extremely regressive. You know, I keep thinking about all of the fundraising and the crazy kind of capital campaigns of these universities. And, you know, for those with large endowments, you know, why not divert a percentage of donations to a kind of sister community college in the state? You know, for every dollar that Harvard, you know, is donated to Harvard, why not say we're automatically giving $0.10 of that to Bunker Hill Community College or to the UMass system?

You know, our state education systems? I've been so there's been a severe decline in funding for state education or community college. So why not take those donations and just say, hey, every ten, $0.10 of your dollar that you give to us, we're just this is where it's going. It's or it's going to like an HBCU. That's our sister school. You know, I think we need to really think about the money and why we have such an unequal higher education system. And how can elite higher education play a role in, alleviating that? Because the truth is that, you know, the vast majority of students going to college are not going to colleges that practice affirmative action because the vast majority are open admissions.

Right. And so and those are the places that are particularly serving working class students, Black students, Latinx students. And, you know, when we think about that, it's important that those kinds of places also are getting the support that they need to help their students be successful. And, you know, we've actually moved away from that as a society in the last few decades, which I think is incredibly problematic.

Matthew Rascoff: Thank you. Let's encourage our participants to use the Q&A feature. We're going to start taking questions from there. I see a bunch of them have come in already and then I'll read it out to you so you don't have to worry about that.

But I'm not able to see all of the engagement in the chat. So if you do want to ask a question of Natasha, please use that Q&A tool in the bottom and that'll allow us to moderate. So here's a question, an anonymous question about how to talk to students about these issues. You're an educator as well as a scholar in this area, and especially first gen, low income and minority students at elite institutions, like how do you kind of articulate this issue to them? I think it touches on the point you made about diversity and putting too much of the rationale on diversity, which is really about the benefit for the white students or the majority of students or everyone you could say, rather than fairness or equity for a specific community like so.

So are you asked to talk about these issues like in your class and your teaching, the students come to you. How do you frame this when you're engaging with students?

Natasha Warikoo: I think it's important for students to understand the history of, you know, racial exclusion in the United States and the 20th century history that goes again beyond, you know, legal segregation. And so and, you know, again, you know, when I did this research for my book, The Diversity Bargain, I really found that students didn't know, didn't understand why, you know, why we have these differences by race in society. But they, you know, white students understood that, you know, there are a lot of them came from, you know, predominantly white neighborhoods or white and Asian-American neighborhoods and were experiencing this diversity for the first time on their college campus.

Now, interestingly, you know, students of color also really express this diversity rationale. They appreciated diversity on campus as well, and meeting, you know, students even of their same race from different backgrounds. Right. With from a different social class background. You know, Black students who met immigrant Black students, you know, Asian students from whose families were from different parts of Asia. And so there were these connections, students of color connecting across lines of difference. And so that there was this appreciation, but I think a lot less attention to understanding kind of racial exclusion in the United States. And I think that's what I tried to kind of convey.

And, you know, I am a sociologist. I teach about, you know, and so, you know, I teach a lot on education. And how is it that our students of color have been underserved in our school system for decades and decades? And what is the driver of that? And I think it's really important that they understand that.

Matthew Rascoff: So here's a related question about kind of campus dynamics from Kristen. If network effects are a leading indicator of social mobility, is there a ratio of low middle, high income or race you could say too that maximizes opportunity for a given class? In other words, if you admitted a class in your thought experiment, there was all low income students, would these selective institutions stop being as powerful an engine of mobility because they were not plugging those students in to the networks of power and capital?

That is part of what they offer. So like, is there kind of a formula that says, okay, you are 20% Pell, you could be 40% Pell and you'd maximize the social benefits without diluting some of these kind of class sharing benefits that Raj Chetty has described as the basis for social mobility. It's these friend networks that occur inside churches and schools how do you think about that.

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, you know, that's a to me, that's an empirical question. And I think we don't know because we have never done that in American society, right? We have never, you know, provided equal resources to schools that are serving predominantly low income kids, let alone, you know, more resources to those schools to know whether that would make a difference.

And, you know, then also, what would that percentage look like? So I think it's a good question. And it also depends on what's happening inside the walls of those schools. Right. Because a lot of schools that are integrated are often segregated or tracked. And those tracks, academic tracks kind of race tracks. Race is sort of you can see you can walk into a classroom and if it's predominantly white and Asian-American, it's more likely to be one of the advanced classes if it's predominantly Black and Latinx, it's more likely to be one of the lower level classes. And this is, you know, then, you know, those network effects get lost because of that.

So I think it's a great question. I think we don't have the answer to that because we haven't been willing to try it, to be honest.

Matthew Rascoff: I think that's a very compelling point. And that. A very strong argument for innovation and experimentation in this space and trying different models and partnering with researchers like yourself to try to understand how we can accelerate the positive impacts. Here's a question from Rick Shaw who's dean of admissions at Stanford University and one of my closest colleagues. What is the role of the faculty in advocating for diversity, broadly defined? Can they get beyond thinking about academic excellence framed by how they look at graduate students?

Faculty at times criticize those less prepared even though they arrive from an under-resourced K-12 program. So if you want to give faculty the easiest to teach students, you would admit a very different class than the one you are describing where you're offering the most value add for the students who may have come from less preparation and you're giving them the most at your well-resourced institutions. How do you think about bringing faculty on board in this project that you're describing?

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, So, you know, it sounded like that he was talking about graduate admissions. But I think, you know, for both of these, I think it's going to take a culture change, right.

Among faculty, right. That what is our role in our teaching? Right. And to me, it's you know, I think we have to think of ourselves as meeting the students where they are and bringing them to where we would like them to be. And absolutely, students with less skills are to get to the same place are going to take. They're going to need more supports. But that's our job, right? I mean that and I think again, you know, when you ask people what it's going to take to bring the faculty on board, I don't know. But I think there's got to be a kind of moral imperative as sort of mission driven.

This is who we are as a university and this is what we are doing. And, you know, I think we as a faculty need to get on board, and that's our job. You know, we've got a great I love my job. You know, we've got like and the universities are good to us, but I don't think the university has to be beholden to this idea that the faculty needs to be able to just get up there, give our lecture, you know, have the exams roll in or the papers roll in, and, you know, just expect the student to sort of bring themselves up to speed if they haven't had the training that we've assumed that they would have.

And so, you know, when you have a student, a different student body, absolutely. You have to adapt and you have to put in support so that they can be successful and meet the, you know, the high standards that we would want them to meet in order to pass our classes and to graduate. And it also means not just giving students a pass because, you know, well, I don't want to have to deal with this. And, you know, it means really putting in the effort. And so I think it's going to take a culture change to do this.

Matthew Rascoff: Mm hmm. Yeah. And one way that I see this express sometimes is like, are we there for social mobility or are we there for just pure excellence?

And it's a fairly divisive question, and we might get a more divided set of answers if we did a poll around that at a selective institution.

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, and I would argue that those are not incompatible, you know. And in fact, you know, this social mobility is part of the mission of a lot of colleges like that, this idea of, you know, and when we think about higher education in the United States, you know, the way that politicians talk about it, they talk about college education as an engine of social mobility. So we do already in the popular imagination, think about higher education as playing that role.

Right. And so and it's again, I don't think when we think about, you know, what people talk about lost talent that you if you have to also play that role, if you really want excellence and if you want to have, you know, a much broader understanding of how the world works, you need those different voices in the room.

Matthew Rascoff: Thank you. And we are going to have an exercise at the end that asks all of our participants to go find the mission statements of their institutions and post them to our online forum. And we're going to use those mission statements as the basis for some of our ongoing engagement after the session today.

And it'll be interesting for me to see who actually articulates the value of social mobility in a formal document. I agree with you, Natasha. I think it is informally part of the expectations. It's part of the you know academic social contract with society as part of what we offer, but who actually says that we do it and is maximizing it and is willing to commit to doing that in terms of its policies and its admissions as well. So we have a set of questions about the K-12 system. Yeah, why not push back Patricia Suarez asks on the public K-12 system to ensure all students have the knowledge and skill sets necessary to be ready for a selective college educational experience?

Maybe one way to frame this is like in your program that you were envisioning between Harvard and Bunker Hill Community College. Maybe it's Harvard and the public schools of Boston and Cambridge around it rather than the community college, which is kind of an alternative. What could what could institutions do in the K-12 system, which I know you've also written about that would address some of these issues at the root and maybe make the affirmative action question less necessary. If we could reduce some of these inequalities and go after them more, more where they start. How do you think about our responsibility to the K-12 system and the interdependence of higher ed and K-12?

Natasha Warikoo: Absolutely. We should be doing that. You know, absolutely. Higher education has a role to play in supporting public K-12 education, and we need to do better in K-12. And I think that, again, these are not either or. Right? I think there are a lot of creative kind of partnerships between universities. I know Johns Hopkins has the universe as a program with Baltimore Public Schools, a lot of these programs around the country. And that absolutely we should be doing those things. But again, it's not either or. Right. That we and we also need to recognize that in the meantime, there are all these young people who are not being served, who are not getting the same kinds of opportunities and don't they deserve and don't we want them in elite higher education as well?

And so I kind of think that, you know, affirmative action is just one policy and is one among many that, you know, we need to really have equity in our society and the K-12 system. You know, quite honestly, the more that I do research, you know, some of my research is also in K-12, the more that I think about it, the more I realize, you know, it's hard to solve the K-12 problem because of our social inequality, right? Are because of housing. You know, I think sometimes I think K-12, you know, what we need to do? We need housing, right? We need to change zoning laws.

We need to, you know, have a strong we need a stronger welfare state, Right. So that there isn't as much ability for families with resources to hoard those resources and to separate themselves from families who don't have resources because we're so unequal, it makes it very hard for schools to then bring kids up to speed at the same rate.

Matthew Rascoff: And I mean, you mention in the book also like the zip code driven school district driven funding system, only partially mitigated by federal funding for schools, basically ensures future inequality in the next generation, like the way we allocate resources in K-12. It's it tracks for wealth in housing and therefore invests the most in those who already have the most.

Yeah, seems to me such a foundational issue that connects directly to the inequalities that we see show up when students are 18 and they apply to colleges and universities.

Natasha Warikoo: That's right. And when you think about the way that race operates within that, we know that black and white families, there's resources, just like white families who are working class, who are middle class or upper middle class of the same income level. They're living in very different kinds of neighborhoods. So black families of the same income level are much more likely to live in a higher in a lower income or higher poverty neighborhood than whites of the same income level.

And so and with that goes the quality of the schools that their children are able to access. And so, you know, we see the ways that sort of neighborhood differences and income and race are kind of intertwined. Right. And part of this is that, you know, white families have on average ten times the wealth of black families. Right. And so that and that's where you get the resources for a down payment on a home. Right. And so there are all of these things where race and class kind of connect. But it's important that we look at not just kind of economic resources, but also race, because it operates differently for families based on race.

Matthew Rascoff: Thank you. And that is actually there are many questions about class versus race. And I remember like The New Republic, you know, had a cover article, Class not Race, Affirmative action. It was like a big headline.

Natasha Warikoo: Interesting to me. I don't you know, I was just like, why is this like, why do we have to pick one? You know? I mean, clearly, class is an important like plays a big role. And we are a very kind of economically unequal society. And we've chosen to be that in the United States. But we are we also, aside from class, we also have racial inequality. And so to say that we have to pick one of those I think is kind of nonsensical, right?

I mean, they both play a role. And yeah, absolutely. These colleges have to do much better on class diversity, right? And so but again, that doesn't say that, it doesn't negate the fact that race also matters. And so I really think we need to, you know, think more broadly about these issues of equity and access opportunity.

Matthew Rascoff: And, you know, one theme in the book that I picked up on is like, there is no super targeting system that you could imagine. There is no perfect system that you could design that admits like the perfect most meritorious class. Like there is no such system available even in the big data world of Raj Chetty like zip code, class, family income, everything you have in FAFSA or any other form, they're all, you know, approximations and they're not actually perfect.

So what I think what you're saying is like, we need to use all the different variables at our disposal, recognizing that there may be some imperfections in any system that you design. Like it's not the goal is not to have a perfect system. The goal is to have the best expression of the mission of the institution that we can come up with. Am I getting that right?

Natasha Warikoo: You know, when we say perfect, like, what would that even mean? Like, what would that look like? You know, how do we account for and what are we looking for? Right. And I don't think I think it's obvious, right?

I think, you know, we want we want students who are interested in a lot of different subjects to have a certain level of aptitude of the subject. They want to study, I think, a certain level of motivation and interest. And then, you know, people with different personalities. And aside from that, like what exactly are we, you know, looking for like someone who has, you know, ten points higher on the SATs or a, you know, 2% or whatever, ten percentage points higher on their GPA? Like those differences are kind of meaningless. Right? And so that's why I kind of really encourage people to think about like a lottery, like, why are we so against a lottery?

What do we feel would be lost? And then that can kind of push us towards like, well, what are we looking for and why is that important? And, you know, again, what are we trying to do? Like and why are we I mean, we put so much energy into, you know, selecting the quote unquote best or the right young people. But there's so many amazing young people in this country. Right. And, you know, I don't know. It just seems like such a hard job, like, you deserve this. You don't deserve this. Like that's they all deserve an excellent education, I think.

Matthew Rascoff: I see a comment in the chat about how it's a human system that can't be engineered in a mechanical way.

And I think you commented on the SAT in testing. To me, like, you know, the test optional movement is to some extent the recognition that like there is no perfect proxy that will predict how well you're going to perform. You know, I say this sitting outside the Terman fountain where, you know, standardized testing and the IQ test were created in the United States. You know, at Stanford University in the beginning of the 20th century, a kind of keenly aware of the historical weight of the kind of efforts to social engineer a meritocratic class. What are your thoughts on test optional?

Natasha Warikoo: I mean, testing. The idea of testing is incredibly appealing to a lot of people because it's a number.

Right. And it feels objective because it's a number and it's easy. And, you know, really, we're kind of the only country in the world that isn't more obsessed with testing, Right? I mean, other countries. You just you take the national exam and your score on the national exam determines whether, you know, you get an interview at Oxford or Cambridge or whether you get into the IIT in India or what have you. Right. And so or, you know, you get into a particular university or subject in China. And so it that's not it, If anything, in the United States, I think we are more willing to question the test.

Going test optional, I think it's important to recognize is not a panacea. Right. So when we look at colleges that have gone test optional in the past and this is pre-COVID, and we see that, you know, particularly like some of the small liberal arts colleges, it doesn't seem to increase diversity. And the good thing is that we need to understand what replaces the test. Right. So if you go test optional, you are considering other things, but are you considering like extracurriculars? But those are also tied to class. You know, there was this interesting analysis by some of your colleagues at Stanford of college admissions essays. And, you know, they found that essays are very you know, you can there are patterns to what people talk about in their essay that are tied to their class background.

And so, you know, all of the other considerations are also tied to your background. Right. And so going test optional alone is again, not a panacea to, you know, increasing access, though I think that's important to keep in mind. So and it's so none of these things I think are perfect or, you know, but I think it's you know, given the fact that these tests are so clearly correlated with class and race, it seems like a positive move. But again, I think it's important for colleges to pay attention to what they are replacing that with to make sure that it's it's something that is, you know, better or more mission driven than the SAT.

Matthew Rascoff: So this might be our last set of questions around the nonprofit status of the institutions that you're writing about. Not all of them are nonprofit. Some of them are publics, you know, and the Paul Ryan tax bill had an endowment tax that basically punished institutions using a per capita formula basically for punishing them, for having a large amount of resources per capita. So in a way, basically in creating an incentive to increase their classes, you know, do you see potential in that? You were talking about a kind of wealth redistribution system. So do you agree that with Paul Ryan on the endowment tax and is there some kind of convergence of left and right critique of higher education that we're seeing here?

Or is there some other way to think about our resources and how to share them and maybe how to restore some of the faith in our institutions that I think we have lost in traditional higher ed. And that gets to these questions about why it's being litigated in front of the Supreme Court, why we're facing so much pressure.

Natasha Warikoo: Yeah, I'm laughing because I think that was one of the was the only policy that came from the Trump administration that I was like, doesn't seem so bad.

I mean, I don't know. It doesn't seem terrible to say that, you know, if you're per student endowment. I mean, it was a pretty high I forgot what the number was. I think 500,000. Yeah, half a million. If you have half a million dollars in endowment, we are going to tax 1.5% of the earnings of that endowment. I mean it's a very small percentage of the earnings and it would only apply, I think it applied to like around 50 colleges if remember correctly. So I can't argue with that. The only thing that I would say is, you know, an interest that Trump that administration was what were they going to do with that income.

But I would support that if that, you know, then that income was earmarked for our, you know, funding for state colleges and universities, for commute and for community colleges, for HBCUs. I couldn't argue with that. I think that would be a good use of taxing.

Matthew Rascoff: Very interesting. And I think, you know. That's going to get me in trouble but, well, is Tufts subject to the tax or not That's that will determine I know Stanford paid the tax and I think you know it is some and I think your point about where the money goes and our trust in the government to actually implement some kind of fair redistribution system like that is a good that is a good critique.

Natasha Warikoo: And I think that we have to believe in the public. We have to believe in government. We have to believe in a public role for redistribution. Right. We cannot privatize this. Right. We cannot say that. Okay, we're going to let Harvard keep that and Stanford keep that money and decide how we are going to address inequality in the K-12 system. Right. Because I mean, I believe in democracy and I believe in public institutions. And, you know, so, yeah, I didn't, you know, didn't like what the previous administration was doing. But I believe in government. So and I don't think we should privatize things like public education, like, you know, even in higher education.

I think we have to you know, we look at other countries, most other countries have public higher education system, and we do, too. But we also have these our most elite colleges are private and they're not for profit. But, you know, I mean, with these with these endowments, it's. It's complicated. So I think, you know, we have to put our trust in public institutions.

Matthew Rascoff: Thank you. And that ties very nicely to the exercise that we want everybody to do, which is to go find your institutional mission statement. We're going to put a link in the chart and we're going to use that as a starting point for this ongoing conversation that we'll use what we'll do in the online forum on Gather.

Thank you so much, Natasha, for this great discussion. I know we didn't get to all the audience questions, and if we didn't answer your questions tonight, please go to the forum and maybe Natasha will engage with us there. So we'll we'll put that in the chat. And, you know, we're hoping to keep the conversation going after these events and also to use that forum as a way to link all the events in the series. We've got eight and they're thematically connected and we're hoping to kind of keep this community going from event to another among, you know, our monthly series throughout the year. If you want to buy a copy of the book, which you can see here, Is Affirmative Action Fair?

Please go to Bookshop.org and we'll put a link in the chat. I saw you name the Harvard Bookstore, one of my favorite independent bookshops, no affiliation with Harvard University as the independent bookshop that we'll be supporting. And each of our authors has named an independent bookshop, and that's part of that. And we'd love to hear your thoughts about this event and the whole series. And we've got a user survey we'll put in the chat. This really helps us in our efforts to make sure this series is as effective as possible, that is answering your questions that we are engaging in the conversations that you wish to have.

So I would be grateful if you would find that Qualtrics link in the chat and click on it there and give us feedback on how we can make sure this is as dynamic and interesting for you and that we're covering all the topics that we should be. And then last thing I want to encourage you to register for our next event in the series. It's going to be on March 8th, and it's a book called Vital and Valuable The Relevance of HBCU's to American Life and Education by James Koch and Omari Swinton. And that I think ties so nicely in Natasha to what you were talking about, about, you know, the diversity of institutions and the role of the whole system really in shaping opportunity in American higher education and HBCUs are such an important part of that, and we're excited to have this new scholarship about them and about their relevance.

So please sign up for that event. Please continue the conversation with us in the online forum, and please join me in thanking Natasha Warikoo for a fantastic conversation this afternoon. Natasha, this was just great. Thank you again.

Natasha Warikoo: Thanks so much for having me. And I can see all these hearts and hands floating up. I've never seen that. Thank you all for being.

Matthew Rascoff: You're getting a lot of emojis out here.