My unEducated opinion about Education. Trying to get in
My Point of View © 1996
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA, ICCP.
With the controversy about student debt forgiveness and affirmative action college Supreme Court decisions getting our divided and partisan attention, you wouldn’t expect me, a retired university faculty member and holder of several degrees financed partly by me, but mostly by my employer, to remain away from the ongoing arguments. So yes, you are right, expect me not. When I was teaching, I never asked my students if they had pushed another different student to get in or was attending on a scholarship, on a reduced or full tuition basis. It was irrelevant.
I will try to stay away from extreme right-left points of view in my argumentation and will try to use a commonsense approach proved by facts ignored by the opinionated of both sides.
I’ll start with the affirmative action decision against the programs of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. I should say that I have never been employed by those universities and I am not familiar with my former college employer’s admission policies, reason enough to avoid naming it. These ideas, whether used or not previously by others, are mine.
The leaders of those two universities and the others who offer similar opportunities are letting the goodwill social intentions of opening their doors to all students by closing them unfairly to some. I have no problem with giving minorities a fair chance at an education that will give them the keys to open doors available only to those who try. I am a minority who spent hours doing it. But I don’t want to create for others the same pain suffered by the forgotten.
If my understanding of those challenged programs is correct, the schools had added one component to the complex admission selection process that was positive for some, they were minorities, but unfair for others, they were not. If Johnny, Mary, and I apply to one of those schools, the color of our skin would be a qualitative element that was given to us at birth, preceded us before we applied to those universities and we could not control it and obviously was not measurable.
I am not saying that those who carried the skin color of the misrepresented or discriminated groups in society do not deserve some kind of reparation, but there is a better and fairer way to address the old issue without creating a new problem. Let’s use a mathematical model to prove my point. Presume that one school has fifteen hundred openings for the starting class this Fall. And presume that we have seventeen hundred acceptable applications, all worthy of acceptance and none deserving rejection, two hundred students more than available seats. Let’s say that applicants, in this case, are seventy percent White, twenty percent African American, six percent Latinos and four percent Asian Pacific. That makes for one hundred percent if my calculation is correct.
If the school starts to pick minorities for the Fall 2023 class, no matter how blind it tries to be or claims to be in the process, there is no one in either of those groups who weren’t selected or the Supreme Court for that matter, that will be satisfied with the outcome. However, if the school decides to assign every applicant a number between one and seventeen hundred and conducts a lottery of fifteen hundred winners, chances are that in what is called in Statistics “representative sampling,” seventy-five percent of the winners will be white, twenty percent African Americans, six percent Latinos and four percent Asian Pacific. The disappointment may end up being two hundred broken down by the same percentages. It is a probability result that cannot be guaranteed, probabilities never are, but certainly not interpreted of being discriminatory by any group. This means that no Supreme Court in the world, no matter how Supreme or Extreme, can argue against that methodology successfully.
There may be programs that have no appeal to specific groups, although I can’t think of any, where educational institutions may feel tempted to offer special awards to reluctant applicants to stimulate demand. But the answer to those cases, in my opinion, lies with the professions that would benefit from those students when they graduate and not from the institutions that teach those programs now.
I understand that a group of PhDs and EdDs cannot see their roles and their responsibility in those universities limited to managing a lottery game. But losing to a game of chance is less painful than losing to a game of color, and winning is also less guilt-ridden. Besides, lotteries are legal in this country.
And that is my Admissions unEducated solution point today. Next week I will deal with the student debt issue. So Long.
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