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Plenary 4

Greg Anderson at Plenary 4 from Future Diversity Conference 2008
 
Greg Anderson at Plenary 4 from Future Diversity Conference 2008

Reconnecting Merit and the Mission of Higher Education: Innovative Frameworks and Strategies

From the 2008 Conference: The Future of Diversity and Opportunity in Higher Education

Held on December 4, 2008, 10:45 to 12:30

Table of Contents

The following resources and materials are available for this session:

Panelists

  • Gregory Anderson, Education and Scholarship Program Officer, Ford Foundation and Associate Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Thematic Summary & Analysis

This panel laid out a central theme of the conference: how does the merit system for applicants, students and faculty connect to higher education’s democratic mission?   

Democratic Merit: Moving From Selection Effects to Treatment Effects

Lani Guinier framed the discussion by suggesting that merit currently operates as a prize that is valued by individuals, their families and educational institutions.  Universities develop their reputational index based on their selectivity.  Lani used Malcolm Gladwell’s comparison of beauty schools and the marines to illustrate how merit currently operates within higher education.

A beauty school or a modeling agency looks for people who are already beautiful, and it wants to associate itself with those people. It enhances its brand by that association. By contrast, the Marine Corps says, “We are going to train people to be marines.”  And it looks for people who are willing to come to that institution meeting a basic level of aptitude or skill, and then it makes those people into marines.

The beauty/modeling school approach advances merit by selecting people who already have the necessarily qualities (selectivity effect).  In contrast, the marine corp enhances merit by developing people’s strengths and capabilities (treatment effect). Our institutions of higher education are too focused on selection effect. Institutions have defined merit as a device to select people whose credentials will enhance their status; this approach treats higher education as if it were a scarce private resource.  It also reserves higher education largely for the privileged.  If we move into thinking about higher education as a public resource, we would think more about treatment effects.  How do we develop students’ potential to function as citizens, leaders, generators of knowledge?

The solution Lani proposed is to move to democratic merit (instead of private merit).  Democratic merit frames merit at the group and institutional level – how do universities admit and educate people to advance the mission of diversity – developing citizens and leaders, producing new knowledge that is useful, and providing upward mobility to larger sector of the population.  Lani illustrates the idea of democratic merit with the Texas Ten Percent Plan and the Posse program, described by Debbie Bial. Students that come in through Ten Percent Plan outperform the students that come in through discretionary admit plan (based on SAT scores, GPA, and recommendations); students succeed in part because they come in not individually but as a “posse” from their high school.  The “critical mass” provided by the group supports each other, enhances learning, and brings new knowledge and perspectives that enhance the capacity to solve complex problems.

Connecting Admissions to Public Mission

Designating Lani as the idealist, Colin Diver, the president of Reed college claimed the label of the realist.  He noted that university presidents are in the business of maximizing prestige, which accounts for their preoccupation with US News and World Report rankings.  In shifting from being a law school dean to being president of Reed College, however, Colin has erased the term merit from his vocabulary, at least when it comes to admissions. Ad-mission – for the mission – should be a process to serve higher education’s mission; it is not a reward for anything. In keeping with this approach, Reed College has refused to participate in the US News and World Report ranking process.  “I realized after I finally stopped being dean of a law school that my mission there was essentially to maximize prestige largely as defined by a ranking in the US News and World report. That was not our stated mission, but it probably was our real mission.” 

President Diver’s emphasis on connecting admission to mission puts tremendous pressure on the college to look in mirror and ask, what are we? Reed College determined that its mission is to prepare scholars, meaning people who will, in whatever walk of life they choose, add to the stock of useful knowledge. Reed has developed criteria for selection that are designed to help institution fulfill this mission.  The school seeks students that demonstrate the 5 I’s, which President Diver listed and then explained:

intellectualism or love of knowledge for knowledge’s sake; initiative, which means fire in the belly; self-motivation; inquiry, a burning curiosity; independence, an unwillingness to accept the prevailing wisdom or the conventional wisdom; and interdependence, an understanding that you only learn from each other. You only learn by exchange, debate, discussion, and argument.

What do these have to do with inclusiveness? They counsel against relying on past achievement because it turns out that traditional indicators of achievement actually go against the 5 I’s.    Too often students train for the test; this is conventional, and not what Reed is looking for. “Mission can shape admission” rather than letting a prestige-driven concept of merit define what the mission is.

Lani responded that higher education institutions receiving public funds through tax exemptions and public subsidies should have some accountability for defining a mission that advances democratic values.  “I don’t think an institution that is getting public subsidies should be allowed to function as a beauty school.”  Phillip Ballinger linked this argument to questioning admissions policies aimed at private institutional advancement:  “There has been an intense focus on admissions policies as realizing outcomes that are for institutional benefit—pure and simple. And there has been, in my opinion, a diminishment and even an undermining of admission policies in the public interest.”

Transcending the “Testocracy” through Holistic Evaluation

Like Diver, Phillip Ballinger joined others at Washington State nd deleted the use of the term merit in admissions because it was thought of as explicitly exclusionary.  He also noted that traditional approaches to merit often serve as wedge between admissions policy and practice, a point he illustrated with the recent example of a university that offered additional scholarships to its admitted students if they retook the SAT and improved their scores.  Instead of relying on a test-based ranking system, University of Washington has become “radical users of context” by moving entirely to a holistic review system, which is described below in “Why and How Socio-Economic Factors Should be Used in Selective College Admissions”.   They have found ways to make this process efficient by initially relying on student reported data, and have been able to identify students with tremendous ability and potential who would not show up using conventional measures.  For example, high achievement by an applicant from a school with a culture of poverty is astounding compared to a student with strong SAT scores and GPA who has failed to utilize the resources at a more privileged school. This use of context enables the staff to give the student a more holistic evaluation that goes beyond traditional standards of merit.

The Posse Effect: Identifying and Nurturing Potential

Debbie Bial, the Founder and President of The Posse Foundation, described the Posse Foundation as an organization that has found ways to redefine merit so that mostly selective colleges and universities can choose from a broader pool of students. Posse identifies students that can succeed at a Vanderbilt or a Berkeley, but that might not be visible based on traditional merit criteria. The Posse selection process involves an innovative means of identifying non-cognitive traits through DAP: Dynamic Assessment Process.  Through a series of three interviews, the first starting with 100 students in a room at a time, Posse uses innovative methods to identify communication, leadership and teambuilding skills, to name a few.  The result is a diverse group of students that are nurtured by Posse and enter the University campus as a cohort capable of supporting each other so that the group succeeds and, at the same time, effecting change in the current environment.  Over time, Posse is in the process of creating a new kind of leadership network based on people who have been cultivated as transformative leaders who work effectively in diverse groups.  As Lani Guinier elaborated on the Posse effect: Posse brings about change in the campus environment in part because “you have a group of people who come in together, reinforce each other, and are committed to collaborating, and supporting each other.”

The Merit of Merit

As Greg Anderson from the Ford Foundation noted, the panelists had different views on merit’s merit as a term: Collin and Philip are rejecting the term merit, erasing it from the vocabulary. Lani observed in response that that we cannot simply excise the word “merit” from our vocabulary because it is too much a part of our nomenclature. Lani and Debbie have undertaken the project redefining merit, both to identify people with potential who are excluded by conventional measures and to reconnect merit with the public mission of higher education.

Changing the Public Discourse about Merit

The dialogue also highlighted strategies for putting the project of rethinking merit on the public agenda.  Philip suggested that the issue is ripe because of scarce resources and the public perception that current merit approaches advance university interests rather than the public interest. Lani urged changing the discourse around merit and admissions, noting that  “institutions are functioning as agents of our democracy; they are directly subsidized by public money, and thus have an obligation to articulate and advance a public mission.  Colin noted the problem of collective action  - presidents feel forced to do things we don’t like because of market pressure. Prestige has become monolithic, there has become a single metric for prestige, and university presidents are in the game of maximizing prestige. Citing the need for collective action, Colin suggested that the institutions of higher education, particularly the most elite, ought to go to congress and say, “We think you want to take away our tax exemption unless we admit at least 30% of Pell eligible students.”

Finally, Greg Anderson from the Ford Foundation raised some concern that the rethinking merit conversation has focused mostly on the most selective universities, and has not taken sufficient account of institutions attended by most students of color, which have already assumed responsibility for educating those who are not privileged.  As he put it, “maybe we’re looking for the moral imperative in the wrong institutional type.”   The scope of the merit conversation itself needs to be expanded.

Session Transcript

Click here for a full transcript of Plenary 3.

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Lani Guinier

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