Asymmetrical Information

So your saying students were able to form longterm corporations, government lobbying,daddy's money to get their grades. Hmmm! I see. Oranges and apples have the same taste as long as you use the same container to drink from.

The idea that social class and wealth can (indirectly) influence grades is hardly a new one. Private schools, tutors, advanced studies programs, even ordinary public school districts that happen to cover particularly wealthy districts -- there's nothing even remotely controversial over the idea that having parents who are rich and powerul make one more likely to enjoy academic success, so I'm not sure what purpose is served by trying to ridicule the notion.

Perhaps I don't understand what you're trying to convey fully, so I'm going to address what I feel are the two issues addressed in your post separately.

There is a common misperception "on the right" (and I say "on the right" in quotes, since I, as someone "on the left", dislike being told what I think and feel, but no matter) that "liberal-elitists" want to be communists and give generally undeserving people everything that deserving people have in an effort to make everyone equal. I have no doubt that some do, but in a general sense I have not noticed this trend.

In general, we would like some of the economic realities of life balanced so that those one the lower end of the scale were allowed to have the same opportunities that those on the higher end of the scale have. Cream rises to the top, but you actually have to look to see it is there.

For the most part academics would like to see everyone who is capable of being well served by an education get one, and the best one available to them. If that means that someone who perhaps did not get straight As in high school, but who worked part time to support their family, a family who comes from limited means and limited access to education, they might very well get into a college that someone who had straight As from a very good high school but came from a secure and stable background where discussions of physicists and literature abounded might not get into. While I agree with those who are against affirmative action on the basis of race, I have always been in favor of it on the basis of economics. Colleges and Universities want the best and the brightest and sometimes the best and the brightest don’t have the best numbers for a variety of reasons. It doesn’t necessarily mean that society is not very well served by allowing those students into a competitive academic environment.

Once the underprivileged student is in the difficult college or university, it is their responsibility to stay there. The school makes every effort for the student to live up to their potential. Most colleges (even the really elite ones) give tutoring and writing assistance to their students. But the student is responsible for grabbing the brass ring and running with it. I suspect all of us who went to college have at least one friend who came from difficulty circumstances, and perhaps borderline grades, to do exceptionally well in college and go on to their chosen field. It can make a huge difference in that persons life. Quite honestly I came from what most American’s would view as a privileged home and childhood. If I had not gotten into the school I eventually went to, I would have gone to another equally good one. I would have had the opportunity regardless. The borderline student from the non-privileged background has fewer opportunities available to them.

The second piece, what you bring up yourself, is what I think is a bit of a stretch. You then state the following:

I find it odd, too, that so many academics profess to be egalitarians, yet academia as a whole has produced one of the most radically inegalitarian societies to be seen since Louis XVI fled Versailles. Many academics of my acquaintance profess to be aghast at the "status seeking" in which their neighbours engage--and yet I have never met anyone as obsessed with collecting professional merit badges as an academic. Nor have I experienced any other organisational culture, even in hyper-competitive consulting or investment banking, in which professional success is so readily confused with personal worth.

You seem to be confusing a monarchy with a meritocracy. Now I completely agree that all the status seeking and political wrangling within the academic community is silly bordering on pathetic (I remember I once read a quote which said something to the effect of, “Academic politics are the most cut-throat because they are the least important”) but there is a reason for it. The only way an academic can ensure that they get something for their work is by using this status. They certainly didn’t go into the professor business for the vast quantities of cash left on their doorstep on a daily basis. They went into the business because they love to think, they want respect and they want accolades. Most of the professors and Ph.D. students I know (my own spouse very much included) love that people stop and listen to them. They don’t want to devalue that wonderful aspect of a Ph.D. by allowing just anyone into their little club. You want to be a professor, you must show that you’re worthy. That you can write articles and presentations and kiss a$$ with the best of them. But it’s not monetarily based and therefore I don’t think you can equate the two issues.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, but I just don’t think the two issues are analogous. And I find it a little disingenuous that you link the two issues together.

Academia requires you to put in your time and demonstrate merit, and political preferences -- left or right -- can happily march out the fifth-floor window once they apply to me in my natural habitat. What self-respecting academic would put in the effort to advance through (and enjoy the satisfaction of) demonstrated merit, and then have any desire to hand unmerited advantages to the students s/he proctors? If that requires cognitive dissonance, so be it. Academia is where you prove yourself! "Out there" is where we'll worry about social-policing the consequences if you didn't make it.

Other related business:

Kate raises one of my favorite pet peeves, the one which holds that opportunities are distributed unequally and that we must then go about leveling them somehow. In my mind, this is a gross misrepresentation of the real world by oversimplification, and leads to bad social policy.

IMO what is most uniquely unequal is not the opportunities themselves, but advantages in accessing them. This is not a mere semantics game: if we start by positing that an upper-middle class child in the suburbs and a low-income child in the inner city both have the opportunity to attend Harvard, but note that the inner city child has far fewer advantages to access, then we should leave well enough alone where the opportunity is concerned and focus on why the advantages are skewed.

For example, a child who did not do well in primary schooling, due in some part to living in a crummy school district and being unable to afford the costs of private tuition or commuting to a different district, is not adequately prepared for Harvard. Giving him or her a special weighting to enter Harvard -- based on race, economic status, or anything else -- is not an optimal solution. Better to focus first on why that school district isn't producing quality students, and try to rectify the situation. Then let merit have its way.

Of course, this requires somewhat less of getting the government involved and a whole lot more of getting the community involved. That in turn requires a lot of work and a customized approach in each case, and does not have the simple, formulaic, "one-race-qualifies-all" appeal of affirmative action. But as I already said, I think simplistic solutions lead to bad social policy.

Anony-mouse,

I see your point, I really do, but I respectfully disagree. Curriculum is mandated, in many cases, by the state. Therefore the courses I took in my public high school are demonstrably the same as the courses everyone else took in their public high school in the same state. The difference is not the curriculum or the way it is taught, it is much more the way education among peers is viewed.

I knew of many students when I was in college who should have been “unprepared” for the rigors of top notch academics. Either they were successful, and most of them were, or the dropped out and went to a less rigorous academic institution. Most of them flourished given the opportunity. Please keep in mind, especially with high school students, grades are only one measure of a student. I think most undergraduate institutions realize that. There is a bigger picture involved. There is a benefit to society when you given an opportunity to someone who may not otherwise have it. This is not a zero-sum game. Someone like me was predestined to become a successful adult. Many others need a bit of encouragement along the way.

This seems like a silly line of attack. They have the obvious response that (unlike most other goods one might redistribute) if credentials are distributed according to some metric other than merit, they have no value.

Kate, I realize that there are differences in preparedness that derive from peer influences, but no state-mandated curriculum ensures an even presention by gifted professionals, and a high-quality educational environment in which to study it. Failure to provide those produces students with a distinct lack of advantages in accessing opportunities thereafter.

Save for a few missionary types willing to undertake heroic measures and an income reduction for the sake of trying to make a difference, lower-income districts will tend to be the last resort for motivated education professionals UNLESS resources can be custom-targeted at a particular school's problems, and the community can be successfully drawn into the cleaning and maintenanace process.

Given that, I think your proposal fails to answer the most basic point: a student who obtained a crappy primary education for any reason -- including factors completely outside his/her control -- is not somehow better prepared for a particularly challenging higher education just because we can find a simplistic policy prescription for bending the admission rules. I have nothing against limited discretion, but quotas breed discontent. A focus on equalizing opportunities after the fact is just an indirect form of welfare, really: "You're poor; here, have money!" rather than "Why are you poor and what fundamentals can we work together toward rectifying so that you can have the satisfaction of being productive on your own merits?"

Or, going back to the meat of Jane's post: Why do academics grade on merit and fight for merit-based ascension in academia, even if they strongly advocate NOT judging on merit in other areas?

Related to that, do you suppose the average black person who benefited from affirmative action is going to enjoy their later earnings if they constantly have the spectacle of someone else saying "you know, if it weren't for affirmative action, you wouldn't be..." contantly looming overhead? Or worse, having that same specter present even if s/he never benefited from affirmative action? This perverts both incentive and reward.

And why is maintaining that system, but shifting the weighting criterion to something else (e.g. "economic status," assuming we could even find an objective way to measure such a thing), plausible?

I'd say that grades, and academic degrees, are not "things" in the sense that money and objects are, and cannot be redistributed; rather, they are statements by a teacher, or by an institution, that someone has completed some task. To "redistribute" grades, then, would simply involve lying. (Note that this contradict's Caplan's claim that "grades are based on merit", unless you insist on defining merit as "that quality that grades are based on"; in my idealization, grades are based on performance as opposed to "merit".)

Now, employment as an academic -- that's a different matter, and the discussion on who gets hired into universities, and why, is loudly ongoing in various places.

I am not as convinced as Caplan that leftwing professors grade solely on merit. In fact I have the strong impression that white students in a black studies class or male students in a womyns studies class are apt to be at a disadvantage when grades are handed out.

Julian Sanchez, you are incorrect in asserting that credentials awarded on a basis other than merit necessarily have no value. If the credential is necessary to practice a lucrative profession they can be awarded at random and still be valuable.

Left-leaning academics DO use more "egalitarian" grading systems than "moderate" academics do! Just compare grading in left-dominated departments (humanities -- no curve, no clear performance standards, common grade adjustments for sympathetic, "deserving" students) with departments dominated by moderates (natural sciences and economics -- strict curve, clear performance standards, no adjustments for "deserving" kids).

So your saying students were able to form longterm corporations, government lobbying,daddy's money to get their grades

Because it is, of course, almost unheard-of for parents to contribute to a child's college education...

And we all know that the parents' education level and wealth level have nothing to do with how well the child does in school...

And naturally it goes without saying that even the poorest Americans can easily afford to shell out $150,000 for undergrad and graduate work at a public university...

So, yes, oliver, I'd say you're right. Ph.Ds come by their education without enjoying any of benefits of the economic and social circumstances they were born into, and it is merely a peculiar coincidence that American-born Ph.Ds are almost exclusively the children of middle and upper-class parents with college educations.

Nor have I experienced any other organisational culture, even in hyper-competitive consulting or investment banking, in which professional success is so readily confused with personal worth.

Ever take a look at Brian Leiter's blog? I've never seen someone so obsessed with his own status and everyone else's. He's been justly mocked for having the mentality of a supremely-status-conscious high schooler.

This is pretty funny. One of my friends once wanted to argue to Ian Shapiro, a prominent Rawlsian at Yale Poli Sci, that his grading scheme, like Rawls' society, should also be organized in such a way as to benefit the most disadvantaged. Those who find his class boring should receive A's simply because if HE wasn't interested in studying Rawls, he would understand one's boredom. The Veil of Ignorance at work, ladies and gentlement.

Of all people, Julian, I'm shocked to hear you say that. Surely someone writing for Reason is familiar with the Hayekian notion that prices and wages, like college educations, are a signal?

The 'economically disadvantaged' paradigm suffers from the plain flaw that being EC translates into reduced academic performance and hence reduced opportunity. This is almost certainly not the case, especially in rural and semi-rural communities, where it is quite common for students of modest means to do very well academically and on standardized testing. The problem lies in the fact that these students, if they lack certain other objective criteria, namely membership in an underrepresented minority, are not actively recruited and subsidized by major state and especially private universities. These students typically turn out to be the curve-busters in smaller, less rigorous state-funded institutions.

Kate's point that many students whose academic performance was indifferent at one point in their career still managed to excel at a later point proves only that some people--myself included--don't work any harder than they have to absent individual and highly subjective motivations that are neither economic nor ethnic in origin. She offers no criteria for identifying those academically indifferent students with the capacity to excel from those who are merely indifferent. Admitting a cohort of modest achievers in the hope that some will flourish arbitrarily excludes a corresponding portion of those who did the heavy lifting, and worse, forces the entire cohort of hard workers to compete for an artificially reduced number of admissions slots.

Generalizing on the basis of ethnicity or economic class or gender is a subset of the leftish fetish for group identification and redress. Better, if class of any kind is to be a marker for preferential treatment, to examine members of the class on merit rather than membership. If this produces a continuation of under-representation of a particular identifiable group, then so be it.

The notion of 'distributing' opportunity as opposed to earning or seizing it is absolutely bizarre. There would be no value whatsoever in the kind of hard work and deferred gratification that drives many young people. Further, the notion implies that equality of opportunity is measured on the back end by how many people of whatever class achieve success.

A final note: my general sense is that middle and upper middle class children are over-represented in the academic high achiever group. Is this mainly a function of environment or were the authors of the Bell Curve on to something? In other words, is IQ heritable and does it predispose toward success in life which in turn creates a stratified society in which those of roughly equal genetic material tend toward the same strata, intermarry and tend to self-perpetuate? I am not raising the issue of IQ distribution by race, but rather the Bell Curve’s larger thesis that, in a meritocratic society, IQ drives success, produces strata determined by success and that people marry and reproduce within their strata or within one layer above or below. Because I can already feel the knives coming out on the race issue, I re-emphasize that I am not raising that issue. In fact, the main theme of the Bell Curve has nothing to do with race, and would be valid for discussion if the chapter on IQ distribution by race had not been included or if IQ were evenly distributed by race (which it may well be--again, dammit, I am not arguing that point!).

ah, what a great post, Jane Galt.... worthy of the character of your fictional namesake.

rewarding (grades, admission, salary, etc.) on anything other than merit is such a bad policy. affirmative action, whether race or class-based is wasteful of precious resources and based on some perverse, Orwellian logic of perpetual discrimination for perpetual equality.

of course the children of top-flight scientists, doctors, lawyers, etc. will be smarter and better prepared to take in the wealth of knowledge a good school has to offer than those of 'welfare' children. whether IQ is the result of 'smart' genes, better environment during the brain's formative years, or some combination thereof, the former should clearer outperform the latter. i agree that k-12 public schools should strive for equality in education, but we should realize that the teachers are only 1/3 of the education equation, the students and parents are the other 2/3's. so there is a limit to how equal test scores from a wealthy and poor districts will be.

and your comment about the motivations of scientists is spot-on from my experiences managing dozens of professors, post-docs, and other researchers. they are primarily driven by their emotional attachment to their creative achievements, even to their own monetary detriment sometimes.

Ms. Galt,

I think you and Prof. Caplan are both making a critical error. Left-wing professors are not egalitarians. Instead, they believe that all none professors/academics should be equal, but those within academia itself should be the ruling class (think politburo here.) After all who but the smartest and most brilliant would have the ability to rationally order society?

Hayek's rational constructivist fallacy is alive and well.

DT

I can tell there aren't any academics posting here, or at least none that understand the tradition they are part of. I'll go ahead and state things baldly. Academia is about maintaining and advancing permanent human knowledge. Next to this all considerations of wealth, power, luxury, and so on are secondary, subsidiary matters of a merely practical nature. (Academia is similar to religion in this respect.) The philosophy that follows is that secondary things should be distributed at least in such a way that those pursuing the primary don't have to waste time worrying about them, even better if possible such that _no one_ has to worry about them. Compromise cannot be allowed in connection with primary matters, however, and meritocracy follows, within the constraints of needing to carry out teaching responsibilities (to supply the next generation and, increasingly, to help out on the secondary resource front -- engineering, economics, medicine, etc.), and of course it does not follow that a _strict_ meritocracy is the most efficient way to advance knowledge -- you need team players and organizers / consolidators in addition to the leading lights.

Why stop at money and PhDs?

For example, why should physically attractive people have that advantage in society? Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this in his short story "Harrison Bergeron" many years ago. If you REALLY want true equality....

Here's a link - it's a very short read.

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html

A few years ago I was watching the summer Olympic games with a friend who is scandinavian and very left-wing. She also happens to be quite athletic and loves the Olympics. I said that I thought it was unfair that only certain people who were priviliged to have superior athletic genes should be able to compete in the games, and that anyone should have an equal right to win a gold medal, no matter how clumsy and untalented. I suggested that the starting line should be staggered so that the naturally slower runners get to start closer to the finish line, and that logically any race that didn't end in a tie was an indication that someone had an "unfair" advantage. I've never seen her get so angry so fast...she said "that's not the same thing [as socialism/affirmative action/etc] at all!" but she couldn't explain why it was different.

It's interesting that we can celebrate the beauty of superior human achievement in sports without envy, and we can desire that athletic competitions be decided purely on merit, but not marketplace competition. After all, you get rich by providing value to a lot of people. Shouldn't we celebrate that even more than athletics, which after all doesn't actually improve anyone's circumstances?

Shame on you, MarkJ. The difference is that athletes are rewarded based on skill that is a combination of genes and training, whereas the accumulation of wealth has nothing to do with ability.

Get it right, next time.

Ok, I hope it was obvious the above wasn't remotely serious, but on rereading it...consider this notice.

Seriously? There's no correlation, not even a weak one, between ability and wealth? To cherrypick an example, Larry and Sergey seem at least a little able.

Apropos of nothing, Louis XVI never had the opportunity to flee from Versailles. His family was roughly escorted to Paris by the mob, and his flight to the border began at the Tuileries.

I was supposed to read _Citizens_ for a college course ten years ago but didn't get past Chapter 2 until I picked it up again last year. It's an excellent read on the theme of bashing effete academics.

Jim, white students from rural or remote parts of the country are certainly sought-after by Ivy League schools in the interest of geographic diversity. You don't even have to be rural--any white kid improves his chances of getting into an Ivy if he leaves suburban Connecticut or New Jersey for, say, suburban Texas or Florida.

yeah, plus they avoid those cold winters by going south.
it would still be my preference that the admitting school didn't even ask the applicant's race, location, social-status, or whatever else they're trying to 'diversify'. I'd prefer that they stuck with relevant questions on ability to take advantage of the education being offered.

I find it odd, too, that so many academics profess to be egalitarians, yet academia as a whole has produced one of the most radically inegalitarian societies to be seen since Louis XVI fled Versailles.

Never mind the grading of students, how about the rigid class stratification of the faculty? Is there any group of workers in the country more exploited, with lower pay and less job security than adjunct faculty? Do those folks make hourly wages even as high as the average at Walmart?

How on earth can you say that adjunct faculty are exploited? Working as an adjunct is strictly voluntary--it's not a person's primary profession. As with all voluntary jobs, there is no such thing as exploitation, because you can always vote with your feet.

I find it telling that many people that support socialism exempt themselves from the very rules they want everyone else to follow.

I love it how very wealthy millionaire leftists say the "rich" should pay their "fair share", but yet, I don't see these very same millionaires giving vast amounts of their own personal money to charities and giving up their mansions, yachts, and $500 a head parties. They set up tax shelters, have many accountants to help them shield their money from the IRS.

Their mantra is: take EVERYONE ELSE'S money and redistribute, but oh no, not mine.

ns - Completely idiotic comment. Left wing millionaires don't mind giving their money, its just that they want all millionaires to give an equal proportion.

Jane and others - credentials and gold medals are symbols of merit alone, they have no other value other than a symbol of merit. If you distributed PhDs or gold medals equally, rather than by merit, they would lose any significance. Money, on the other hand, is a medium of exchange needed by all to live. Distribute money more equally, it will still buy a loaf of bread. Totally different concept. Apples and oranges, like the orignal poster said.

I detect quite a bit of bile here against “left-wing professors”. Your respondents would call me left wing. I’ve taught at 4 different Universities, undergraduates, graduate & medical students over a span of 30 years, mostly elective courses. I have some opinions.
a. I see more left than right wing professors, but the ratio hasn’t been more than 2 to 1 at any of my Universities.
b. Pat Buchanan said a long time ago that the C students generate more millionaires (a higher %) than the A students (he was talking about college students and the context was all colleges, not just the elite colleges). Two of my high school peers became millionaires, not by inheritance. They were C students, not stupid, just not much interested in school.
c. I can’t defend academic ranks, distinctions etc.
d. I’ve failed a fair number of students over the years, and of course many protested. Not a single one raised the point of being from a poor background, or having bad preparation. They said that they had special needs, had been too sick to study, etc.
e. I’m in Neuroscience, and I love it. To give someone a good grade who hasn’t learned would make me ill. It isn’t open for discussion. I respect and love my discipline. It takes work and concentration to do well in my subject/course. I’m sure that some who fail or get Cs are bright but distracted or disinterested. Obviously, learning most subjects is complicated. There is learning what (learning facts) and learning how (learning how to proceed with difficult future issues- memorization certainly isn’t the answer). It’s very difficult to test anything other than facts, learning what, but that’s a part of the subject only. I’ve usually given students a choice between a final exam and a long final essay on a topic which I choose, which I will grade by a very high standard- I give the students who choose this examples of A and C papers and they must meet with me half way through, at which point they can still take a final exam if they feel that I’m asking too much. The long essay gets more into learning how but is difficult for those without writing skills. Students can take an incomplete but they must decide to do this before the day of the final exam. I tell students on day 1 that I am tough and expect them to learn if they want to pass- usually this causes about half to drop out.
g. grade inflation is real and is destructive. I don’t believe that teachers’ politics have much to do with their grading, but I really can’t tell. Getting a degree should reflect what the student has done, not who her parents are.

grandstand...since you're in Neuroscience, I wonder if the 2:1 ration reflects your discipline more than the general university environment.

Hasn't this already happened with grade inflation? Nobody flunks out of Harvard, or even gets a C.

There are interesting theories as to how grade inflation came about, and seems in part to be driven by the Vietnam War. But certainly part of it is reluctance on the part of leftist academic establishment to eliminate distinctions between deserving and non-deserving academic efforts. this has especially been true in the humanities, where the leftist influence is largest.

"To give someone a good grade who hasn’t learned would make me ill."

...but to give money to someone who hadn't earned it would be ok?

"To give someone a good grade who hasn’t learned would make me ill."

...but to give money to someone who hadn't earned it would be ok?

Plenty of money is already being given to people who have done nothing to earn it, or haven't you heard of inheritance?

Isn't it strange that egalitarianism seems to stop at the water's edge of academia? The reductio ad absurdum of equalization efforts is not pass-fail but the worthless childhood sports "participation" ribbons.

It would be anathema for a leftist to admit that merit had, well, merit.

Isn't the egalitarian/leftist/socialist/Marxist ideal something along the lines of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"? Income falls on the "to each" side of the equation, responsibilities fall on the "from each" side. Grades and degrees are one way - or at least, an attempt - to sort out abilities, and thereby help determine responsibilities (as well as whatever attendant social status people tend to confer to the holders of such, which after all no economic/political system can change).

Marxist PhD's probably do believe that the janitors who clean their lecture halls should earn as much as they do, they just don't think their roles should be switched.

I'm as gung-ho a free-market type as you'll ever find, but I'd rather not see the loonies who inhabit our humanities departments unfairly portrayed as hypocrites, when there are so many legitimate criticisms that can be leveled at these idiots.

When has anyone ever been graded according to merit or egalitarianism? Certainly not in graduate school. There, you receive grades according to a) the convenience of the instructor, or b) their impression of you before you enter the course, or c) whatever whim they have.
You may misinterpret it as egalitarianism when a tenured prof gives everyone an A- or above, but that's simply because it would interfere with his scuba trip in the Caribbean to attend the midterm, let alone grade it.

I know of no one in the sciences at MIT or UC Berkeley who ever received less than a B unless they had *personally* angered their professor. Again, neither lofty marxism nor merit, simply the worst of impulses.

i think the cliche applies: why are the battles in academia so vicious? because the stakes are so low.

"if you think that we should equalise the distribution of income, why do you not think that we should equalise the distribution of PhDs?"

But they did. Isn't that why they are upset? A phd is not a symbol of enough status anymore.

"Distribute money more equally, it will still buy a loaf of bread. Totally different concept. Apples and oranges, like the orignal poster said."

If you distribute money equally, there is a good chance our economy would collapse and there wouldn't be many loaves of bread to distribute. Granted, limited income redistribution benefits those who recieve it, but so does limited grade redistribution.

The problem here is that *most* professors aren't strict egalitarians. You can support equality at three levels: 1. process (is process of selection fair) 2. opportunity (do we have equal opportunity) 3. outcome. And while libertarians are at level 1, most liberals are at level 2, not level 3.

True you can make a case that at level 2 students should all be given the same opportunity....But given the possibility of maintaining distinctions between the three levels, it's simply weird to hold liberals accountable at level 3, when their personal beliefs are more about level 2.

Actually, the notion that the grades simply reflect an honest recognition of superior quality is pretty much bunk. When I say this, I say this as someone who graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with honors research. By and large, especially at the college level and above, The difference in subject mastery between an A-student and a C-student is modest, to say the least, and probably isn't discernable beyond a year or two. As has been noted, the grade represents a signaling mechanism. The A-student is someone for whom mastery comes pretty easily (hence the marginal performance gain) or is willing to expend a great deal of effort to achieve a marginally better performance. What that says about the student is valued highly both within academia (I suspect due to its expressed reverence for the values held within academic culture) and in highly competitive environments outside of academia. To say, then, that the transferred grade has little value other than as a recognition of fact, is misguided. The A provides both labor markets with the same signal regarding the candidate in question.

Nobody flunks out of Harvard,

Totally untrue. I've personally known several people who failed courses and were put on leave. Some never returned because they couldn't hack it. Others graduated, only barely, and by switching into easier majors.

Does anyone have any practical ideas as to how grading would be equalised?

Equalisation of income is relatively easy - "How much does someone earn? Does the State deem this amount enough to live on, given an individual's current circumstances?" Of course there are problems with this method, such as an individual choosing to live in such a way that their own income is not enough to live on without state support, but these are minor in comparison the potential benefit to be gained from a certain level of state welfare.

Equalisation of grading (or general educational credentials)is much more difficult because the qualitative variables such as educational oppportunities at home and at school, and any genetic influence (sceptics guffaw here) etc. are much harder to measure. Furthermore, the judgement of what level each factor has to be at before assistance is given is far more subjective than comparing actual income to some nominal income required to live with any quality of life.

Answers on a postcard.

P.S. You may have noticed I ignored the question of whether grade equality would be a Good or Bad Thing. This is due to the fact that I'm currently wearing my Armchair Statistician's hat, as opposed to my Armchair Civil Servant's hat.

"Distribute money more equally, it will still buy a loaf of bread. Totally different concept. Apples and oranges, like the orignal poster said."

Here it is, the fundamental socialist fallacy. Bread doesn't just appear in the store. A number of people have to risk their money in investments in farm land, tractors, seed, flour mills, bakeries, delivery trucks, etc., and work pretty hard to raise the grain, bake the bread, etc., before it appears in the store. They expect to get paid for their work and for their investments. If you take part of their money and give it to some slacker, then why would they work so hard?

Redistributing money does reduce the value of it - in the long run, there will be less to buy with it. In the perfect communist world, there would be nothing.

The difference in subject mastery between an A-student and a C-student is modest, to say the least, and probably isn't discernable beyond a year or two.

This is an interesting observation, but one that's more applicable to elite environments like Harvard, or most grad schools. By the time you've passed through the various obstacle courses to get to that point, you've proven that you're pretty good at the work. We still gotta assign them grades, though, so it's the ordinary genius who gets the C, and the extraordinary one who gets the A. Roughly speaking.

Waaay up there, Rex writes:

How on earth can you say that adjunct faculty are exploited? Working as an adjunct is strictly voluntary--it's not a person's primary profession.

Apparently you haven't gotten the recent memos. An adjunct professor is no longer an outsider who teachers every now and again so he can put "professor" on his resume. Now adjuncts are people who are qualified and willing to be actual professors. But it's cheaper to hire two or even three adjuncts than it is an assistant professor. They don't get the bennies a real professor does, for example. Also, in a first-rank research university, a professor will typically only teach one class a semester. But you can load up the adjuncts with as many classes as you like! What are they going to do, complain? Hah!

This is in the sciences, mind you. Don't know what it's like in the humanities.

I agree about the voluntary, vote-with-their-feet part, but when a large number of universities are doing the same thing -- and considering how few good universities there are -- then voting with your feet gets a bit difficult. And, of course, there's the whole self-delusion thing. A lot of people will keep on adjuncting at Snooty P. Sniffington University, rather than take a real job at Stumpwater State, in hopes that one day they'll be able to get on permanently at Sniffington or some other elite institution. Muahaha. Fools!

I feel that I am judged by how my students perform in future years. Of course, I contribute only a small amount to their knowledge, appearance etc. but my professional pride would be hurt if someone that I passed appeared to be unsophisticated in my subject. On the other hand, suppose I gave money to a do-good project and corruption, office expenses, etc ate it all up. I’d feel foolish but not incompetent.
I give money to charities and I’m sure that some squander it. I’m a bit leery about giving money to most organizations to help starving Africans, not because they do or don’t deserve it but because so much of those donations have gone into the pockets of politicians. I believe that Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders for example are honest outfits that do help people. Whether they teach them to fish rather than just giving fish is another matter. Giving the money to organizations in my own city and county is the best way to know what is done with it, but even that is imperfect. I want my grandchildren to have a better world, but I acknowledge that that is easier said than done.

Angie,

...so it's the ordinary genius who gets the C, and the extraordinary one who gets the A. Roughly speaking.

Given that I'm getting a 3.74 at Stern, thanks, I'm flattered :-) That said, I'm not so sure it only applies to elite environments. When I graduated college (pretty much an unknown in Southern Virginia), I doubt that my knowledge was much better than those in the middle of the pack. What had been established was that I was "smart". Not really being all that smart, I struggled for a few years after graduation with jobs that the marginal performance wasn't really all that important (temp, actuarial analyst,...). What really launched things for me was a job with the Fed. In that case, there was an expectation of performance. In that case, my transcripts mattered (although, admittedly, I was asked by a new PhD to explain heteroschedasticity -- but I later learned that he was considered a bit eccentric.).

Actually, my story reminds me. Within Econ Research at the Fed (perhaps the most academic environment I've worked in), the newly minted PhD was only a Research Associate. He was, without a doubt, one of the absolute best quantitative, empiricists I've ever run accross - bar none. The staff economists regularly went to him to explain econometric techniques. When a staff position opened up for an economist, he not only had to interview for the opening with the economists he had effectively been tutoring, he was turned down for the job. You see, he got his PhD from Temple, which was viewed as, well, the wrong sort of school. Do the defenders of academia really want to pretend that pure merit determines academic success?

Here's a bit of a different slant on the issue. Professors feel justified grading on merit because they understand, at a gut level, the kind of work that it takes to get a good grade in a college course--having done it themselves.

When it comes to the economy, many professors have no personal experience as to what it takes to succeed as a small businessman, or a corporate executive, and hence the outcomes seem more arbitrary to them.

Distribute money more equally, it will still buy a loaf of bread

No it won't, because nobody is going to bother baking bread when they can earn the same salary sitting on their ass watching television.

Dan: "No it won't, because nobody is going to bother baking bread when they can earn the same salary sitting on their ass watching television."

Actually you will be getting plenty of bread bakers. If the money is equally redistributed then you must look for other means of power. Those who control a source of food, water, what-have-you may find money meaningless, but they can now ask for favors. I feed you today, you do something for me tomorrow. The currency has just changed form from paper/coin/big-stone-wheels to something less material. What is money, after all, besides a form of quid pro quo?

Jane: Question, did the title for this post come from Super Milkchan?

Milkchan: "It's always money money money money!"

The reason science Ph.D. students often get A's in all of their courses (and some of the time courses have no actual work) is because graduate school in the sciences is more about working on your specific project and going to class only to get a perspective on other areas of your discipline. It would take Ph.D. students 10 years to finish if they actually had to do serious work in every course. The reason that they get A's is that the university demands some sort of grade, so the professors just satisfy the bureaucrats.

At Princeton math, I believe that you don't have to take a single course for a grade. You just go to the lectures you want. I think that that's the point of graduate school.

At NYU math (Courant Institute), where I am a grad student, grades in the first two years actually mean something. After that, when you're taking Special Topics seminars, "A is for attendance." But that's only because the university demands grades and will close down courses with low enrollment.

Actually you will be getting plenty of bread bakers. If the money is equally redistributed then you must look for other means of power. Those who control a source of food, water, what-have-you may find money meaningless, but they can now ask for favors

I had assumed that "equalizing money" would involve the government forcibly preventing people from doing that.

After all, the only way anyone stays poor for any length of time in America is if they (a) have no useful knowledge or skills and/or (b) are mentally and/or physically incapable of working. Such people will be poor under any system that doesn't involve the government forcibly and regularly equalizing them. And if the government forces everyone to the same wealth level, there's no reason to work, hence no bread.

Something that puzzles me -- how could a Ph.D be in favor of race-based affirmative action, but against overtly giving higher grades or more lenient treatment to black or hispanic grad students?

There's difference between the two things. Passing over an B-average Chinese high school student for a C-average black high school student is exactly the same thing as giving black students a +1 grade bonus. If it is fair and reasonable to do this at the high school level, and fair and reasonable to do it at the college level, why does it suddenly stop being fair in grad school? Or am I way off base, and do pro-affirmative-action Ph.D.s regularly give credit for inferior work if the student's ethnic credentials are the rights ones?

how could a Ph.D be in favor of race-based affirmative action, but against overtly giving higher grades or more lenient treatment to black or hispanic grad students?

Something that puzzles me is that this has been explained twice already in the comment thread, but people are still talking about academics as unreconstructed Marxists instead of the garden-variety moderate liberals that most of them are. See the comment about three different levels of equality. Improving someone's access to an institution of higher education is not the same as wanting to improve the outcome of their access.

Garden variety moderate liberal vs. Marxist? See the above posts where people continue to argue that equalizing/redistributing income will not affect the incentive to work. Redistrubutive economics is marxist in origin and a basic tenet of economic liberalism (in the modern sense).

Ditto for arbitrarily redistribuing grades or any other form of personal achievement calculated to advance an individual's interests. Read Dan's last post--either you inflate/redistribute on the front end, or in the middle or for outcome, but the principle remains the same: taking from one to give to another, not to level the playing field, because the game is over when the grades are earned, but rather to readjust the score.

Right, mckinney, and that's why every libertarian believes that people have the right to build nuclear-powered meth labs in their backyard and auction their livers and small children on eBay. Everything that can be taken to an extreme, is taken to an extreme. Forget what people actually say or believe, just push their beliefs down a slippery slope as far as you can and then confront them there.

Actually you will be getting plenty of bread bakers. If the money is equally redistributed then you must look for other means of power. Those who control a source of food, water, what-have-you may find money meaningless, but they can now ask for favors. I feed you today, you do something for me tomorrow. The currency has just changed form from paper/coin/big-stone-wheels to something less material. What is money, after all, besides a form of quid pro quo?
- Inquiring

Yes, it's well documented that communism gives rise to black markets. People will always seek material gain through trade, and when trade is outlawed, it goes underground. But these black markets are mostly concerned with smuggled goods, and certainly aren't capable of actually producing much more than the simplest of goods and services on their own.

So the state still controls all of the important industries, and these are generally run incompetently and unproductively, and with little or no innovation, since nobody has any personal stake in running them well. There may still be some artistic and academic achievements in these societies (although even these are usually greatly stifled by authoritarian politics), because the motivation for these achievements is often non-pecuniary. Also, a small handful of boutique arts and industries can thrive if they are highly glamorized and touted by the government (e.g. Soviet Olympic athletes, chess players, and cosmonauts; Cuban baseball players and biotech lab workers). But overall, most people charged with the thankless and non-glamorous jobs that are so important in serving the needs and wants of their fellow citizens - say, running a furniture factory? - have little or no motivation to actually meet those needs and wants. So you get breadlines and black markets.

I guess some transactions in underground economies take the form of barter as you claim, but for the most part it's probably still currency changing hands.

Brittain33:

No, I think you're missing the point. What is affirmative action in college admissions except equality of outcome for high school education, or affirmative action in hiring except equality of outcome for the post-collegiate world?

After all, for anyone intending to continue their education, their college admission opportunities are the outcome of their secondary education, and for anyone leaving academia, their employment opportunities is the outcome of their collegiate education.

The fact is that the only difference between an outcome and an opportunity is your point of view.

So why would people who support equality of outcome everywhere else cease to support it when they are involved?

Something that puzzles me is that this has been explained twice already in the comment thread, but people are still talking about academics as unreconstructed Marxists instead of the garden-variety moderate liberals that most of them are

I wasn't aware that only "unreconstructed Marxists" favored affirmative action. Last I checked, support for affirmative action was a mainstream liberal position.

So go peddle your straw man arguments someplace else, and answer my question honestly. How can a person in favor of awarding undeserved academic honors to a person with the right skin color at the high school and college levels be against doing it at the grad school level?

I wasn't aware that only "unreconstructed Marxists" favored affirmative action. Last I checked, support for affirmative action was a mainstream liberal position.

Indeed. And last time I checked, redistribution of all income equally was not a mainstream liberal position, but some are arguing that it is, because they think mainstream liberals are Marxists and should believe that. People can hold some beliefs and not others, the same way people can eat one scoop of ice cream and not 50.

How can a person in favor of awarding undeserved academic honors to a person with the right skin color at the high school and college levels be against doing it at the grad school level?

There are several assumptions you make that I question, including
* conflating admission to college with "academic honors" because you want to make a comparison to academic honors later in life, whereas academic honors has a different meaning in high school
* conflating or ignoring different rationales for affirmative action, among them the wish to create an undergraduate student community reflecting different experiences and perspectives
* oversimplifying the college admission process, privileging some measures (SAT scores, GPA) over others
* not acknowledging how wealth and social access can corrupt the objectivity of those measures--ever hear of Princeton review?
* not engaging the argument made about training role models for communities where identity is, for better or worse, defined by race

Now, many of these argument correlate equally well with SES and race, and affirmative action may not be the best tool to carry out all these objectives and to rectify these problems. There's a sophisticated argument to be had about the merits and demerits of affirmative action on that basis.

Sadly, that argument is absent when people are instead saying that academics are really Marxists who want to create a Harrison Bergeron society, and only hypocrisy prevents them from applying these Harrison Bergeron standards to their own bailiwick. Please. What a waste of time.

What is affirmative action in college admissions except equality of outcome for high school education, or affirmative action in hiring except equality of outcome for the post-collegiate world?

Was the first day of work for you the same as the 1,000th? Was the first semester at college the same as the eighth? I should hope not.

Admission is the first step. Where you go from there is up to you. This is why I disagreed strongly with whoever above claimed you can't fail out from Harvard--plenty of people do, of all backgrounds.

As for the difference between high school and college, people should bear in mind how extraordinarly narrow the pre-college experience can be for many people. Growing up in an exurb and attending a large, "good" school, my experiences still had huge gaps that manifested themselves when I went to Harvard and had to encounter situations my prep-school colleagues took in stride. It would have been even worse for someone who didn't come from the background I had, who didn't know people who went to college or knew the range of jobs out there.

It limited my sense of my own potential, and it limited my confidence. I've overcome both with time, but also with mentorship and the opportunity to grow as an individual in a safe place. Too many people who grow up in straitened circumstances lack those opportunities.

This is why it's, at best, an academic enterprise to compare people across high schools as if they had objectively equal experiences. College is the first opportunity many people have to find a mentor and learn what the world is about. By their late 20s, they should have had many more opportunities to take advantage of and found their way.

Brittain33:

Your post on 5:13 is much more consonant with my thinking. I agree with you that it's largely an academic exercise to try to normalize for experience in undergraduate admissions, and only after having competed for a while on a level playing field can you fairly compare people. But that statement does not provide justifification for race-based affirmative action for undergraduate admissions and actively argues against AA in post-graduate studies.

Brittain33,

Growing up in an exurb and attending a large, "good" school, my experiences still had huge gaps that manifested themselves when I went to Harvard and had to encounter situations my prep-school colleagues took in stride.

Is it not possible that your "prep-school colleagues" also encountered "situations" that you "took in stride"? Is the prep-school environment so all-preparing that that it prepares one for anything that might happen at Harvard?

Is the prep-school environment so all-preparing that that it prepares one for anything that might happen at Harvard?

They're called preparatory schools for a reason--they were designed to prepare students for the college experience. Prep school graduates had experience with individual study, with critical reading of secondary sources, and with classes where student participation was encouraged instead of a luxury or actively discouraged by other students. I have nothing against prep school students, many of them are wonderful people, but their transition to college was different from mine because their schools were in the business of making it so. My public high school had many missions, of which college prep was only one. AP American History and World History proved almost useless for preparing me for how history is studied at a college level.

Going to a public school MIGHT have exposed me to a broader range of people than prep school students encounter--if I hadn't been such a raging nerd.

Brittain33,

Prep school graduates had experience with individual study, with critical reading of secondary sources, and with classes where student participation was encouraged instead of a luxury or actively discouraged by other students.

Look, I went to a decent public high school in a NY "bedroom community" (not the Westchester class, a little further from the city than that), and I could work alone (I imagine that's what you mean by "individual study"), and I could so work from secondary sources, and frankly I had spent at least six years shouting out answers by the time I got out of high school, and I had no intention of stopping there. Of course, I was a hopeless nerd, but that's obvious, yes?

Just wanted to add my personal experience to bolster Brittain33's most recent point. I went to an elite private urban high school, and I heard from my school's graduates that college - at big name elite schools - was easy compared to high school. I ended up going to the University of Chicago - by many accounts, one of the harder schools out there. I basically found that doing about +5% of the work I'd done in high school got me about -5% of the GPA (being of intermittent motivation, I settled there). I knew a bunch of kids in my first year who were freaking out about how hard school was, and how unprepared they were, and they'd been the valedictorians/etc. of their high schools. I knew quite well two in particular who were astonished at what I'd done/been exposed to in high school, and then learned that I wasn't even in the top quartile of my high school class, GPA-wise. One of them went pretty much crazy by the end of the year, but he graduated; don't know more specifically. The other one worked his ass off and graduated with a much better GPA than I did. There are excellent public schools out there, and the best school is only as good as a student's desire to make use of its opportunities, but I'm pretty sure I had a massive leg up on the average public schooler at Chicago, and some of those I considered just as smart as I was never caught up.

isn't Julian spot on? What would an academic grade signal, if it was awarded on any basis other than merit? This response exposes the mistake:

Julian Sanchez, you are incorrect in asserting that credentials awarded on a basis other than merit necessarily have no value. If the credential is necessary to practice a lucrative profession they can be awarded at random and still be valuable.

Why on earth would the gatekeepers to a lucrative profession pay any attention to a credential awarded at random?

This whole argument reminds me of the dumbass moral relativism "if you think terrorism is bad, how come the US army terrorises people in Iraq/Afghanistan etc." .... "if you think money ought to be redistrubuted, how come you don't 'redistribute' grades?"

The argument is based on no more than superficial linguistic equivalence.

"And last time I checked, redistribution of all income equally was not a mainstream liberal position." Welfare isn't a mainstream libersl position??? Welfare is forcibly taking money from those who've earned it and giving it to those who didn't. Just because it doesn't completely level incomes doesn't mean it's not redristribution, just that liberals don't go as far as communist theorists. (Real live communist governments never went all the way, either.)

Also, every so often I see some columnist complaining about a widening gap between the rich and the poor. I don't think these columnists are conservatives...

"Why on earth would the gatekeepers to a lucrative profession pay any attention to a credential awarded at random?"

When the gatekeepers are out to keep the numbers down and the prices up, any credential that is issued in limited numbers will do. Consider taxi medallions in cities that limit the number of taxis...

Brittain33,

Unfortunately, pretty much none of the proposed you cited for affirmative action really seem to materialize in practice. The reason, by and large, is that admission is not equal to getting through. A fact you yourself acknowledge. To get a good sense of why this fact results in the proposed benefits not being realized, you only need to consider the relative attrition rates for "diversity" students vis-a-vis the the attrition rates for traditional students (Hint: There's a reason diversity data is cited for incoming as opposed to graduating classes.) The very fact that you cite the benefits you do and omit considering that the "first step" (your term, not mine) has done little to achieve these benefits, gives reasonable people reason to conclude that you may be being dishonest with the rest of us (by hiding your actual intentions) or yourself (by refusing to acknowledge where your goals and methodologies lead)

Michelle, by "independent study" I don't mean working alone, I mean coming up with a personal research project and working with a teacher on an individual or small-group basis and having that be your class for the year. I knew people who did that at Phillips Academy.

How does one determine how much of an effect economic, social, etc... background situations affect grades?

I am willing to accept that some marginal high school students would excel in a better environment or in college or whatever.

I would be happy to see colleges make room for some of these students along with those who demonstrated aptitude/determination/etc... by getting good grades and/or test scores.

My problem is in how you determine which of these marginal students to accept and which to not accept? You are going to have a lot more marginal students than you are exceptional students. You can't just accept all of them. You must pick and choose. How do you do so? How much weight does economic status get? How about number of parents? Presence of child abuse? Neighborhood violence? Etc..?

There are a lot of ways in which market and competitive systems fail. Unfortunately, fixing many of these failures requires an outside force to be competent and honest. I would love to see poor people fed, marginilized people given better opportunities, etc... but I don't know who I would want to put in charge of doing it.

In general, I'd rather muddle along with a competetive market system and merely make some adjustments to the system rather than putting someone ("the Government") in charge of issuing "corrections" by decree.

Earnest Iconoclast

While I hear a lot of people talk about "equal opportunity", I see most of the efforts going into equality of result. Affirmative action is a classic example. By lowering the standards for some groups, you do increase opportunity, but most of the time the success is measured by the outcome (how many minorities/women/etc... are enrolled/graduate/etc...).

While there are no government mandated minority employment quotas, disproportionate representation can be used as evidence of discrimination. This creates a de facto quota. Quotas, of course, measure result.

Measuring true opportunity is much, much harder than measuring result. It's understandable that people would want to measure result as a proxy for opportunity. I'm not sure that it is a very good one, though.

Academics may want to see equality of opportunity, but they often, in fact, strive for equality of result.

Oh, and I don't buy for a second that university professors are all about expanding human knowledge and blah blah blah. They are all about the same thing that everyone else is all about. They seek to improve their own lot in life and increase their own happiness. Altruism is certainly part of this, but so is status-seeking, power mongering, etc...

I got a glimpse into the world-wide fusion research community and understand, now, why we are so slow in developing the technology. The community of fusion research scientists is not interested in learning all they can about fusion reactions. It is interested in maximising research grants and making slow, steady, conservative progress to maintain their jobs for as long as possible. I worked for an outsider who had some good ideas that were somewhat radical for ways to research fusion reactions. He was dismissed and his ideas criticised. Some of the criticisms were legitimate but fixable. Others were stupid for various reasons (they criticised his experiment for failing to do something it was not intended to do, for not providing data that some other scientists wanted, for not fitting smoothly into currently ongoing research, etc...).

And don't get me started on the altruism of profressors like Ward Churchill and their desire to altruistically increase human knowledge.

Earnest Iconoclast

Brittain33,

Michelle, by "independent study" I don't mean working alone, I mean coming up with a personal research project and working with a teacher on an individual or small-group basis and having that be your class for the year. I knew people who did that at Phillips Academy.

Oh, I see. Nope, nothing quite like that at my high school, though my senior English course involved a long paper on an individually-chosen topic (well, it had to be Shakespearean, but aside from that you got to choose the theme), and much class time allotted to working on it individually in the library.

But what you describe doesn't sound "preparatory" to college. (Grad school, sure.) I'd think students used to such individual attention and guidance would be rather bewildered by your average freshman-level huge lecture class than otherwise.

markm - riiiight. so you're in charge of recruitment at Freshfields/ World Bank / Goldmans Sachs / etc. and you recruit on the basis of randomly assigned certificates, because it keeps the numbers down. purlease.

The question is, what is the signal signalling?

Grades, according to Caplan (and most academics I know) are supposed to signify mastery of the material. But most students and parents don't care whether the student has mastered the material. They are primarily interested in sending a signal to a future employer--who also doesn't care if the student has mastered the material. The employer wants to know if the student is reasonably intelligent and hard working.

But a reasonably intelligent student with a good work ethic but inadequate preparation for the class could easily do less well than, say, an English major from a New York City prep school who covered all the core material while still in high school, and reads and writes abnormally quickly, and therefore gets A's in all her classes despite being lazy and extraordinarily disorganised, and spending something like three hourss a week on her coursework. (Just a hypothetical). By "redistributing" the best grades away from the student who was privileged, genetically, environmentally, and educationally, to the less bright and over-educated, but more motivated and disciplined, students down the line, teachers would be increasing the value of the signal *and* helping to overcome the invidious forces of inequality. Yet they gave me A's just because my papers were better written and had more mastery of the material, something that no one but them cared about.

At the society-level, grades, like prices, are primarily a signal that is used to determine allocation of resources, in this case the opportunity that will be afforded to each new adult. Grades, like money, tend to accrue in hereditary hierarchies; in fact, I seem to recall reading that educational attainment is better correlated with parental education than the income of the child is correlated with the income of their mother and father. The value of grades is not strictly monetary, but it does pretty efficiently determine who will have access to rewarding work opportunities, whether those rewards be monetary (think investment banking) or hedonic (think journalism). And the value of grades is sufficiently monetary that you would think that professors would be interested in redistributing them.

Brittain33, you're wrong on several counts. First of all, having attended one of those expensive prep schools, I can testify that the education is better, but it is not as much better as you are making out. Extraordinary students had resources available to them--but extraordinary students at large public schools tend to find teachers clearing a path for them to excel. The general run of students at prep school don't take independant studies, and for those who do, the experience does little in the way of preparing them for college. Most of the kids I knew from prep school got a lot more mileagee out of the unbearable snobbishness they acquired, which goes a long way towards impressing insecure freshmen, than they did out of their superior educational opportunities.

Second of all, most college professors are not run-of-the-mill liberals. The political spectrum in academia starts at "run-of-the-mill liberal" and marches rapidly leftward. While I doubt that a majority of academics would support making all incomes exactly the same, I'm pretty sure you'd find staunch support, outside of the economics department, for radical income compression; say, 90% tax rates on incomes above $100K or a number not too far above it, depending on the department.

Finally, the argument for not redistributing grades is the argument for not redistributing money: that if you destroy the value of the signal, the mechanism breaks down and chaos ensues. Mosts liberals believe that this argues for limited redistribution, not for laissez faire. Yet why not limited grade redistribution, then?

There are several assumptions you make that I question, including * conflating admission to college with "academic honors"

Giving a C-student black guy the same treatment as a B-student white guy is exactly the same as simply awarding a free bonus letter grade to black guys. If that's fair to do when deciding which people to admit to your university, why is it wrong to do when deciding who gets a PhD?

conflating or ignoring different rationales for affirmative action, among them the wish to create an undergraduate student community reflecting different experiences and perspectives

Ah, so it is important that the student body reflect different experiences and perspectives, but unimportant that the academic community do so?

oversimplifying the college admission process, privileging some measures (SAT scores, GPA) over others

Oh, please. What aspect of college admissions are you claiming that affirmative action makes up for, if not lack of sufficiently good grades? A poorly written essay? Speaking Ebonics during the interview? Get real; GPA and standardized test scores are almost entirely responsible for determining entrance to most universities. At the University of California, for example, ALL you need to get in is decent grades and test scores. So by definition, anyone who needs affirmative action to get in isn't up to snuff, academically.

not acknowledging how wealth and social access can corrupt the objectivity of those measures--ever hear of Princeton review?

And grad school isn't biased in favor of people who come from privledged backgrounds?

not engaging the argument made about training role models for communities where identity is, for better or worse, defined by race

You're ignoring the obvious fact that a PhD is much more impressive than a bachelor's degree. So if a major concern behind affirmative action is "making role models", affirmative action supporters should most definitely support the relaxation of PhD requirements for minorities.

Sorry, you'll have to do better.

Here is the real reason: PhDs are smart, educated, at least middle class, and so (with few exceptions) are their children. Smart, middle-class white and asian kids don't get significantly harmed by affirmative action -- average and/or poor white and asian kids do. So a PhD who supports affirmative action gets to feel good about helping the "needy" and never has to meet the people he's hurting.

But academia is different. It DOES hurt PhDs when they have to compete for work against intellectual inferiors who have been given bonus points for skin color. It WOULD hurt them if their paper was rejected in favor of a less-qualified paper written by an author with a personal sob story about growing up poor and black in a broken family. And so on, and so on.

"You seem to be confusing a monarchy with a meritocracy. "

There are meritocracies and there are meritocracies. One kind is a meritocracy such as a mass market, where you have to build brands at huge effort and expense to skew buyers' choices toward shoddy goods. Ohterwise, buyers tend to make impartial decisions. Then there is the sort of meriticracy you had in Imperial China - so much ofr the difference between a monarchy and a meritocrcay - where a small clique of experts decides what is or isn't good performnace. Which one do you think the academic world most resembles. Oh, and by the way, do oyu suppose that small clique of experts had children of its own it wanted to see succeeed to power?

"Academia is about maintaining and advancing permanent human knowledge."

This is the ideal. It is a struggle to keep any instituion or commuhnity to its ideal. History is full of examples of academics who have corrupted their disciplines for all sorts of rewards.

"Jane and others - credentials and gold medals are symbols of merit alone, they have no other value other than a symbol of merit."

Again, would that it were so, but this is naive. Credentials have huge value when they figure in employment decisions, and that is why so many of them are faked, and why degree mills exist.

Last note. There is a fallacy in comparing inheritance of wealth with academic grades. Inherited wealth is a measure of how well a family competes in the economy, where grades show how well an individual does. You inherit wealth only as a member of some fmaily, not as an individual.

There is a fallacy in comparing inheritance of wealth with academic grades

Actually, Megan has been comparing income, not wealth, to grades. Income, like grades, is a measure of individual performance, not familial performance.

But Jane,

What makes you think that liberals haven't destroyed the signaling?

Grade inflation is rampant at all universities, the most elite as much as the rest, if not more. Given that such institutions are overwhelmingly filled with academics who are politically left of center, isn't it obvious that the signaling was destroyed? Why not consider that this was obstensibly on purpose?

Yet another expensive-prep-school attendee weighing in here. Jane's right that most students, no matter how prestigious or rigorous the place, don't do independent study in the high-school years. But Brittain and Quarterican have the better of the general point, that a proper prep school makes at least the first year of college much, much easier. In the sophomore year, if you pick a hard major, you can get into classes which will be a serious challenge despite your preparation; but the freshman-level stuff is cake. Ah, the hours I misspent arguing on Usenet and playing Civ...

And I say this as a staunch libertarian and opponent of government schooling. I think a large part of the reason that prep school prepares you so much better is that you are treated intellectually as an as-yet-undereducated adult, not a herd animal. (The bitter contrast between the respect for one's freedom and responsibility in the classroom, and the multitude of in loco parentis rules restricting one in every other sphere, is a principal component of teenage prep-schooler angst.) This has more than a little to do with the fact that prep schools are not answerable to a centralized bureaucracy, entrenched unions, fickle voters, etc.

What a worthless ideological polemic.

Merit has so many different incognate meanings. As measured by success-in-field, academic merit, enrichment merit, athletic merit and electoral merit have stuff all to do with each other. Some rely as much on vice or fortune as they do on virtue.

Sorry, folks -

I said distribute money MORE equally, not equally.

Progressive tax rates do not discourage work as much as ardent right-wingers and those who desperately stand by the pissed-on ashes of supply-side theory would have you believe.

I said distribute money MORE equally, not equally

Well, why not distribute PhDs "more equally", then?

You argued that PhDs measure nothing other than merit. This is, of course, false, since they also measure things like your ability to pay for higher education. But even if it were true, how could that be an argument against equalizing the distribution? Income is a measure of merit, too. Your argument seems to be that it is wrong to redistribute PhDs because PhDs are less useful than money is (i.e., they measure only merit, rather than measuring merit AND purchasing power). I don't see how that makes sense; if PhDs are less useful than money, it should be *more* acceptable to redistribute them, because doing so does less harm to their rightful owners than redistributing money does.

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