Thinking like Engineers about College Admissions

Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film “The Fablemans” has a good scene about engineering. While still a child, Spielberg tries to make a cowboy film, using fake guns that don’t even shoot blanks. He runs the film and sees how lame it looks. So he takes the spool of film—yes, a narrow strip of real film in those days—and pokes holes in it right in the barrels of the shooting guns. The projector’s bright light, briefly shining through, makes the fake guns look like real firearms flashing.

His father, a brilliant but phlegmatic computer engineer, approves. “Now you’re thinking like an engineer!” he says.

What do engineers do? They use the matter of our physical world, the laws of science, and their ingenuity and common sense to build things that make life better and easier. They solve problems with their minds and hands, using real, tangible stuff, not vague abstractions. They both invent and make old things work better. When things don’t work, or don’t work well enough, they fix them. They don’t waste time or effort on blame. (For a brief look at what a breath of fresh air an engineering approach can add to our political dystopia, watch this clip of a grid engineer discussing the power grid’s discontents and future in Texas.)

Engineers built this nation. From the canals and locks in the Northeast, through the railroads, interstate highways, jet planes and airports, to space travel, television, the cable network, and now the Internet, engineers have made our nation strong, prosperous and great. And American engineers made, perfected or best exploited the vast majority of the Twentieth Century’s great inventions.

As I’ve outlined once before, our Founders were unabashed social engineers. They weren’t mere rebels who wanted independence from England just so they could do their own thing. They dreamed of building a better society out of the ruins of history. They studied the democracies of ancient Greece and Rome. They poured over the then-recent history of monarchies, the rise of parliaments, and the Enlightenment. They absorbed the findings of nascent science in Europe.

With all this knowledge, they sought to build a society that had never existed before. Well aware of human failings and their dismal historical impact, they sought to “fix” them with checks and balances. They sought to build institutions that could weather, if not overcome, them.

What they built is far from perfect. But they tried to improve the human condition, to make modern democracies more durable than the long-vanished ones in ancient Greece and Rome. They recognized the imperfection of their own work in the preamble to our Constitution, making “a more perfect Union” their very first goal. They knew that everything our species does can be improved.

But one thing they got right from the start. In our Declaration of Independence, they wrote that “all . . . are created equal.”

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that, it was more a wish than a fact. By keeping slaves, he and many other Founders observed it in the breach. It took our bloodiest war ever, and over a century thereafter, to begin to set things right.

But now we know that Jefferson and the rest got it right, despite their hypocrisy. We know with the certainty of Nobel-Prize-winning science that all human DNA is 99.9% identical. Our small differences in skin color, facial features, hair and other bits of outward appearance reflect no predictable difference in character or intelligence. What matters is how people are raised and educated, how they are treated, and how their physical and economic circumstances affect them while growing up. We now know how much “human capital” requires nurturing.

We also know that early-childhood education—so-called “pre-K”—is the most important single social determinant of a child’s future. And at least one governor, Wes Moore of Maryland, has begun to put that knowledge into effect, with the help of a compliant legislature. That, dear readers, is social engineering worthy of our flawed but innovative Founders.

And so we come to affirmative action and the Supreme Court’s recent-decisions in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina. There the court stuck down race-based preferences in college admissions. Since then, a whole lot of good people have worried that we’re going to forfeit diversity in higher education, especially in the Ivy League schools that punch way above their weight in national influence. But are we really?

I think not. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

If the truth be told, we are in this fix because those who decide on college admissions got lazy. Over decades, they relied on standardized multiple-choice tests as a basis for vital “gateway” decisions.

No, they didn’t make final admissions decisions entirely on the basis of test results. But they used them for screening. It often worked like this: (a) higher scorers fell into an “automatic admit” category; (b) low scorers were “automatic rejects”; and (c) the rest got a more complete review. (I know because I once served on an admissions committee at the law school where I taught.)

It’s now well known that students from marginalized communities do worse than others on standardized tests for a variety of reasons. The reasons include: poor parenting, poor early-childhood education, poor grammar schools, poor junior-high schools, poor high schools, poor nutrition, crime, poverty, neighborhood pollution, poor health care, and the inability to afford the training and “coaching” for standardized tests that middle-class and wealthy parents can give their kids.

But cause and effect just start there. With all these causes and their obvious effects, it was inevitable, from the very start, that kids from marginalized minority communities would do worse “on the numbers” than white kids. It followed that affirmative action would let some white kids—and some Asians—who got higher scores be excluded.

That, in essence, is the basis for all the lawsuits and all the sturm und drang about affirmative action since it started. The excluded white and Asian kids’ parents went all tribal, with predictably dismal social and political results. All this was hardly unforeseeable.

But what was the fundamental cause of this debacle? Admissions deans and committees hadn’t been doing their jobs. At least they hadn’t been doing them well.

Sixty years ago, MLK dreamed of Black people being judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” How in hell do standardized college-entrance tests assess character?

During my young and single days, I began to feel that I wasn’t meeting smart enough women. So I joined the high-IQ group Mensa. It was easy for me: as a pack rat, I had kept all my standardized test results from grammar-school on. I sent them in and, bingo, became a Mensa member.

But the Mensa social events I began to attend were disappointing. I soon concluded that most Mensa members had one predominant thing in common: high test scores. Many made those scores the focus of their personal pride and self-image. More than a few had little else to show for themselves. Many had poor social skills.

After repeated sad events, I abandoned Mensa. Yet the very same thing—standardized test scores—have been the focus of college admissions for two generations, albeit now in decline.

So how would engineers fix college admissions and maintain diversity? First, they would make character a key factor in admissions, as important as, or more important than, high grades and test scores. Second, they would pick admission deans who are committed to assess every applicant as a whole person. Third, they would totally revamp how admissions committees work.

In many institutions of higher learning, serving on an admissions committee is a thankless chore. Often it’s left to untenured and low-publishing professors who are not doing more “important” work. Is it any wonder that unseasoned and less productive people given a thankless chore have turned to standardized test scores as an excuse to avoid the hard work of effective and fair selection? If the truth be told, the entire field of college admissions could use a revamp. Higher education, both public and private, is a priceless societal resource. Its entrants ultimately determine not just the reputation and ultimately the wealth of the colleges and universities that they attend, but the progress of the society that they serve.

In our generational competition with China, one of the most important factors will be the number and quality of our graduates from college and graduate school. So why should we force reluctant recruits with no experience and little or no interest to pick students for our schools? our best schools?

As a one-time engineer, I would replace this reluctant, half-hearted, inexperienced crew with trained professional staff who make picking winners their whole careers. Ideally, they would be well paid or otherwise rewarded. Together, they would build a whole minor profession, meeting annually in professional conferences to discuss their methods, successes and failures. Colleges would bid competitively for them in the same way they now bid for athletes.

A proper admission process would also exploit current technology that lets every applicant have a full virtual “interview,” at length. Imagine two half-hour interviews by a whole panel of seasoned assessors of character, each followed by full discussion among them. “Inefficient,” you say? But how much more inefficient is mis-spending an “elite” college education, which now costs upwards of a quarter million dollars just for fees and maintenance, on the wrong person?

Would an emphasis on character and the whole person help continue our quest for diversity in higher education? I think so. After all, the progeny of rich, powerful and entitled people are not generally known for their kindness, generosity, or empathy, or for their perseverance and determination against hardship, which many have never known. Wealth, luxury, ease and privilege are not generally known for spurring ingenuity and inventiveness, let alone enlightenment. In general, comfort and wealth provide little incentive for improving the state of things, which is what engineers do.

As for so-called “legacy” admissions, they can never achieve “justice” or diversity in selection, let alone promote the excellence of an educational institution. A story from my first week as a student at Harvard Law School is indicative.

A refugee from poorly funded science (with a Ph.D.), I found my new law-school colleagues extremely bright and articulate. But there was one notable exception. As I talked with one white student for about five minutes, my mind began screaming silently, “How did he get in here!!??” I must have found some more diplomatic way to pose the question, for he told me his dad had endowed a building.

There are at least three things wrong with this picture. First, quite likely (I didn’t follow him), this fellow would have flunked out. If he graduated, he would have had trouble finding a good job, except perhaps in his dad’s business. In either case, he would have deprived a more deserving student of a place, perhaps even a hard-scrabble marginalized one. And his flunking out or graduating would have done nothing for the school, its prestige, or its societal impact. Surely a law school with a multibillion-dollar endowment need not resort to this sort of counterproductive donor coddling and, in the process, help entrench an anti-meritocratic aristocracy.

So our Supreme Court’s legal prohibition of admissions based on standardized test scores and race is an invitation. It invites our institutions of higher education and our government to cooperate in improving a currently abysmal process. It beckons assessment of applicants based not just on their superficial characteristics and their ability to do well on standardized tests, but on their whole character, lifetime history, accomplishments, and especially their ability to succeed in adversity. It bids us to improve a process that has mostly been an afterthought in college administration, which now lacks professionalism, depth and sensible standards consistent with current research.

At the end of the day, lifetime promise in student applicants is a bit like pornography, as described by the late Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. You “know it when you see it,” but only when you take the trouble to know the whole person. Practice, personal growth of the assessors and professionalism can help. So can judicious application of statistics, but only if repeatedly verified, as all good science requires.

If the Supreme Court’s decision can help us build systems to keep from turning out more graduates like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Goetz, Jim Jordan and Ron DeSantis, it will have served its purpose well. Though a graduate of Harvard Law School, DeSantis seems unaware that our First Amendment prohibits government from telling people what to read, teach and think. A person deserving of that kind of education ought to learn better, and the admissions process ought to weed those who can’t out. At least it ought to weed out those prone to ignore or subvert fundamental principles of our society in their lust for fame and power.

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