The academy is a lot like the United States: it has never lived up to its ideals, but it has always had ideals worth living up to.
Ideally, universities represent the shared, disinterested, fearless, collegial pursuit of truth. They provide an environment where disagreement is an opportunity, where no idea is off limits, where the unthinkable is dispassionately tested. Ideas that emerge from the rigorous crucible of seminar rooms and scholarly journals are our closest approximations to truth, at least to date.
We are so far from that ideal that 280 STEM professors across the University of California system report having to reteach middle-school math to their students, who are woefully unprepared for the rigors of a STEM curriculum.
Some academic home may well exist for those who don’t have the mathematical chops to survive in a STEM field. Only a total departure from the pursuit of truth — and the replacement of academic judgment with misguided compassion — would insist that academic home be an elite engineering program like UC San Diego’s.
University of California campuses are research-focused. Seventy-five Nobel Prizes have been awarded to University of California faculty and staff. Taxpayers are asked to subsidize basic research at universities because it is a public good (in theory, anyway) that is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable and therefore possibly under-provided in a free market. Like most universities, UC’s mission combines research and instruction, but at a level of expertise that few public institutions can rival. For some of the world’s greatest researchers to teach remedial math to students underprepared for college is a terrible waste not only of money, but of extraordinary minds.
Certainly some students will arrive underprepared and go on to excel at elite, selective schools. But there are too few diamonds in the rough: the UC STEM faculty is calling for a return of SAT/ACT requirements to screen prospective students.
If admissions and allocation decisions are seen as sponsoring knowledge creation and transmission with taxpayers’ funds, the receiving university’s job should be to admit and resource those best positioned to make the most of the unusually scarce and expensive expertise elite college provides.
Preferential admissions policies often place students in institutions or programs where their preparation makes them less likely to succeed. Peter Arcidiacono is a Johns Hopkins University economist who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions in their Supreme Court victory against Harvard’s admissions policies. Arcidiacono’s work has examined more than two decades of data and finds that admissions preferences applying different standards to different groups — whether they be racial preferences, athletic preferences, or “legacy” preferences — encourage mismatch between students and majors, and students and institutions. In a 2012 paper, he and his coauthors found that Duke University students with weaker academic preparation were more likely to leave STEM and economics majors for other fields.
Tragically, many of these students would likely have succeeded in technical fields at very good, though not hyper-elite, schools. Students who struggle at Duke might thrive at a lower-ranked (but still very distinguished) private institution like Brandeis, Tulane, Howard, Baylor, or SMU, or even a state flagship or land-grant school. If the goal is a new graduate with a degree in economics or engineering, admitting the prospective student to Duke was a disservice.
A lack of ultra-elite credentials hardly spells doom for one’s career and life prospects. When I was applying to PhD programs in economics, a professor was willing to write me a letter of recommendation to some very good schools, but he declined to write one for an elite school where he thought I would not succeed. He was surely correct. A couple of other schools turned me down flat, even with his recommendation. They were surely correct, as well.
But I went on to earn a PhD in economics from one of those very good schools, because there was a place for me in graduate school, and ultimately in the academy. It hasn’t been among the economics profession’s elite, but things have turned out OK.
Universities have many responsibilities to taxpayers, donors, professors, students, and other constituencies. By refusing to write me a letter of recommendation and by turning me down, a professor and a couple of excellent programs kept slots open for someone better prepared to succeed and made better use of their faculty’s time and resources.
If the University of California showed more of that kind of discretion, its top faculty would be stewarding taxpayer funds, and the reputation of its institutions, much more wisely.
The author wishes to acknowledge ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and GPTZero for valuable research and editorial assistance.
