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On Admissions Preferences

Following on last week’s post about the college-admissions bribery scandal, I’m sure it’s no surprise that this has been a frequent topic of conversation in my little world. In particular, this whole mess has fed into a larger conversation about non-academic factors in college admissions decisions as a general matter. That is, since one of the “side doors” exploited in this scandal involved bribing coaches to pretend that students were recruited as athletes, this opens the question of whether there should be any preference given to athletes in the first place.

This is, as you might imagine, a common bugbear in discussions among faculty, many of whom feel that there shouldn’t be any preference given to applicants for being good at sports. As is often the case, I’m more conflicted.

Some of this is because even though I was never good enough at anything to benefit from an athletic preference in admissions, playing rugby was an enormously important part of my college experience. I wouldn’t want to deprive current and future students of the same sort of experience that I found meaningful as a student.

Of course, you could have sports at the collegiate level without giving a boost to the applications of recruited athletes, but things just work better on the sporting side if you can have some idea of what sort of team you’re going to put together. And that makes the experience more positive for the students involved, which is a good thing.

I’m also generally okay with some admissions boost for athletic performance because I think that’s a factor that reflects well on the student. That is, competing in sports at a high level requires a good deal of persistence, concentration, and discipline, all of which are also factors that contribute to academic success. Putting in the hours of practice needed to succeed in sports while also maintaining good enough grades to be a plausible candidate for elite college admissions says something good about the applicant’s personal character.

(I should probably note here that for the most part, my experience with having athletes in my classes has been positive. They do miss the occasional class due away games and the like, but those absences are made up for by generally having better discipline and time management skills than many non-athletes. They’re used to being given orders, so when you tell them to do something, they do it. The good ones also accept that failure on a first attempt is part of the process, and keep at it longer than some students who are more purely academically oriented.)

The same is true of students who benefit from most of the other non-academic factors that come into play– music, arts, community service, etc. are all activities that take time and dedication, and a student who can do that while also doing well in school is, to my mind, more impressive than a student with slightly better grades who does nothing outside of class.

Of course, the obvious objection to these is that doing those things also requires free time and as a result gives an extra advantage to applicants from affluent families over those who might have to be working jobs to help support their family. That’s true to a point, but as these things go, talent-based preferences (be it for sports, or music, or arts) are much less bad than many of the other options– there are at least some mechanisms out there to identify talented students from underprivileged backgrounds and give them opportunities that they might not be able to afford otherwise. And if nothing else, all of these extracurricular activities at least require the applicant to take some concrete action on their own to get the benefit.

This is in stark contrast to “legacy preferences” which are probably the second most objectionable kind of preference given in admissions decisions. This is a boost given to applicants whose ancestors previously attended the school in question, and there’s really very little you can offer as a defense of this, other than the financial incentive to keep your alumni happy. If you put a gun to my head and asked me for a non-financial justification of legacy preferences, I’d seriously question your life priorities, but about the best I could come up with would be that children of alumni are more likely to have a sense of what they’re getting into when enrolling at an elite college, and thus are less likely to freak out and withdraw after a semester or two. That’s really weak, though, and I’d fully expect a bullet.

(Of course, even legacy preferences are more defensible than straight-up big-donor preferences, for people with no pre-existing relationship with the school who write a large check to get their kids in. As noted in the previous post, this is harder to arrange in reality than in the popular imagination, but there’s really no non-financial justification of it.)

And, of course, from a purely logistical standpoint, most elite colleges need to consider something other than “pure” academic matters, because most of these schools could fill their entering class several times over with students whose grades and test scores are “good enough” to get in. Unless you want to do a straight-up lottery among those passing some threshold level, you’re going to need to look at something else to winnow the applicant pool down further. I’d prefer for that to be based on something that the kids have done themselves, rather than just where their parents went to college.

The March Meeting in Twitter Threads II

Same deal as the previous post, but I didn’t get to it yesterday. My talk was the first one in the early morning session, on “Sharing Science,” so the live-tweets pick up halfway through the second speaker:

I sat out or did minimal live-tweeting of a couple of other sessions Tuesday, but here’s a thread from the advanced lab teaching session:

Yesterday was a slow day for me, because there was a happy hour Tuesday night that ran very late and combining a hangover with the nasty cold I’ve had all week was… sub-optimal. I did check out one of the industrial sessions, though, on “The Future of Transportation”:

I didn’t do any other substantial live-tweeting after that; I started on the Kavli symposium, but the first speaker was pretty overwhelming, and I opted to go back to the hotel for a nap instead.

Not sure I’ll get to much of anything this morning before it’s time to drive back out the Mass Pike.

24-Hour Media Ruins Everything

This morning’s dog-walk podcast listen was the second half of Bill Simmons’s discussion with Bryan Curtis and Jason Gay about a number of media-related topics. (The first half was last night’s dog walk– they do go on…) It struck me that there was a common theme tying together a couple of their stories that never got brought up, namely the corrosive influence of the 24-hour-media cycle.

This occurred to me when they were talking about content generation by individual players running podcasts and teams developing their own networks, and the move to a less centralized subscription model. They weren’t all that enthusiastic on this, because as they pointed out, there’s a limit to how much even dedicated fans want about a dedicated program– they made jokes about the YES network (“Next on YES, an hour with Scott Brosius!”) and the Texas Longhorns (“Coming up, Vince Young’s cooking secrets…”).

But of course, the whole reason why such eminently mockable content exists is the 24-hour media cycle– those networks are 24-hour tv networks, and need to fill time, and even a franchise as storied as the Yankees only has so many great players to talk about. So you necessarily end up with a lot of marginal content about people who aren’t that interesting, just because there needs to be something on the air at 1:42 on a Tuesday morning.

This same factor is at the root of some of the earlier stuff they talked about, too, like the way media discussion of sports leagues has shifted toward emphasizing transaction talk over actual games. (They were talking specifically about the NBA, but it applies across the board, I think.) The live games take up a few hours apiece, and with a bit of effort you can wring another few hours out of rehashing what happened, but actual game content tends to bunch up– all the football games are on Sunday, and even the NBA doesn’t have interesting games every single night.

That leaves a lot of hours to fill with… something, which is why you get “hot stove” bullshit year-round now, in every sport. There’s only so much you can say about the teams that currently exist and the finite number of games they play, but there’s a potentially infinite amount of content to be wrung from speculating about teams that might exist.

(Mildly interesting note about this on the actual podcast: When Gay brought up the shift to constantly talking transactions, he clearly sounded like he was suggesting it as a problem. Speculating endlessly about trades that might happen is Simmons’s bread and butter, though, so it quickly got flipped into a feature rather than a bug, and that dynamic was, as I said, mildly interesting…)

To a lesser extent, the 24-hour cycle is also at the root of some of the other topics they discussed. Gambling and dopey made-for-tv pseudo-competitions like the Tiger vs. Phil pay-per-view golf match are also filling a need to fill time.

Of course, sports is just a subset of the media landscape, but you see the same effect everywhere. People complain about the constant churn of stories in political news, and the dumb shit that ends up dominating coverage, but that’s largely a function of the need to fill time. It’s a rare event that genuinely demands round-the-clock coverage, but media companies are running around the clock whether there’s a need for it or not, so they need a constant stream of new fodder for yelling about on camera.

This is, unfortunately, a really hard problem to crack. In principle, it’s something that ought to be fixable with a small-subscription sort of model. That is, in the decentralized Internet-based media landscape, you don’t have to commit to a 24-hour network pumping out Yankees content. If people are watching/listening only part of the time, anyway, you can offer just the good stuff– do your podcasts or videos only when there’s something or someone generally interesting to talk about, and skip the shows where some marginal second baseman from the late 80’s does oil paintings in a Bob Ross wig, or whatever the hell they’re running at 3am.

The tricky problem, though, is that for the people who produce the content, all the incentives run toward… more. The obvious way to increase revenue is by maximizing the amount of stuff that goes out on your feed, which leads you right back into the trap of “I don’t have anything really worthwhile to put out right now, but I need to feed the beast, so here’s some marginal crap.” This problem is lessened somewhat when you’re dealing with smaller individually-produced stuff– to pick science-y examples, Veritasium and Minutephysics aren’t pumping out content around the clock, or even on a perfectly regular schedule, but when they have something new, I’m confident it will be worth watching, because they only put out new videos when they have something worthwhile to share. But I think they stick to that model largely because they’re single-author operations, and there’s only so much they can do by themselves. Once you’ve got a company dedicated to aggregating the work of lots of individual authors, though, you end up driving toward more, which almost inevitably leads to a reduction in average quality.

Anyway, as I said at the top, that’s a shared factor in a lot of the Simmons/Curtis/Gay discussion that never gets brought up explicitly, and I wish it had. So you get my half-assed thoughts instead…