Academia burying the lede

From Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard by Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, and Tyler Ransom. From the Abstract:

The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.

I am of mixed minds about the broader issue of preferences. On the one hand, private institutions should be able to choose who they wish to admit. On the other hand, we do not want institutional racism, picking candidates by race. On yet another hand, are these institutions private anyway given that if the Federal government were to stop all research funding and guarantying student tuition loans, they would collapse?

That is a whole separate discussion.

What I am focused on here is the biases of academic researchers. They are researching the impact on admissions of the big four non-merit admissions categories - athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs).

As always, the researchers make claims without indicating the effect size.

Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.

Well, how big a change.
Table 11 provides the answer.

By race, the base model looks like

White - 49%
Black - 14%
Hispanic - 14%
Asian - 24%

In this model of institutional racism, elite status protection (legacies and Dean's special interest and faculty children preferences), and athlete exploitation, blacks and hispanics are near their population representation, whites are materially underrepresented (by about ten percentage points or more) and Asian Americans are dramatically overrepresented. Whether you like the underlying principles or not, those are the results.

Table 11 lets us see the impacts of no legacy allowances.

White - 46%
Black - 14%
Hispanic - 14%
Asian - 25%

That doesn't look like a significant alteration to me.

How about when we get rid of athletic preferences?

White - 45%
Black - 14%
Hispanic - 15%
Asian - 26%

Again, not much significant alteration.

The researchers do not run the analysis for the single criterion of racial preferences, but they do run the analysis of what the admitted class might look like if you got rid of all these non-merit, back-room preferences: no legacies, no dean's secret list, no race preferences, no athlete exploitation. If you went solely by merit, what might the class look like?

White - 51%
Black - 4%
Hispanic - 8%
Asian - 37%

Now that is a significant alteration.

It looks somewhat like New York City's eight elite high schools such as Stuyvesant and Bronx High School of Science.

White - 32%
Black - 4%
Hispanic - 7%
Asian - 57%

Granted, there are differences in that Harvard is selecting nationally and internationally, while NYC is selecting based on the much different population mix of New York City. But it is striking that the Black and Hispanic scores are virtually identical.

So why are the researchers claiming significant changes arising from getting rid of legacies and athletes when it only shifts the distribution of races by a couple of percentage points here and there. Looks to me like legacies and athletic admits don't change much of anything.

I am guessing there is some underlying bias against legacies and athletes. OK, I suspect most people have mixed-to-jaundiced views of those sorts of admits. But why hide the impact of race admits? It clearly swamps the effect of legacies and athletes.

This seems like straight-up researcher bias burying the lede.

As long as decisions are made in back rooms without the consent or understanding of the public, as long as researchers present their findings to feed their biases rather than uncover reality, we will continue to mire ourselves deeper into the morass of distrust and tribal identities which were disappearing before they were resurrected by postmodernism and social justice theory.