Follow us on Instagram
Try our daily mini crossword
Play our latest news quiz
Download our new app on iOS/Android!

Reevaluate the values

in a column called for an “enhanced commitment to recruiting underprivileged applicants.”
ADVERTISEMENT

The debate surrounding family background and Princeton admission is often rich in anecdotes and passionate appeals to higher justice. However, in my opinion, the best case against trying to approximate the national income distribution in the demographics of an incoming class is quite devoid of histrionics: Let us assume for a moment that Princeton was purely trying to assess some kind of intrinsic academic potential and rank applicants accordingly. In that case, what should our admission outcomes look like if we succeeded? Due to Princeton’s stellar reputation, our admission officers are already fortunate enough to cherry-pick only among students in the extreme end of the measure of achievements. Consequently, although admitted students’ abilities will vary in various ways, they will all be very intelligent in the grand scheme of things and have above-average leadership potential.

Moreover, the scientific evidence is quite firm on the fact that children’s performance on various measures of intelligence is positively correlated with their parents’ performance on the same measures. Consequently, we should expect the income distribution of the parents of these extreme-ability students to be at least somewhat skewed towards the higher end, because their parents are likely to succeed. In fact, if that were not the case, it would suggest that something is wrong with our admission system.

Going beyond this specific argument, however, this kind of debate betrays a common mental shortcut that we make when talking about “The University”: We implicitly assume a goal that the administration is pursuing and then go on to complain about its failure to achieve that goal. In this case, the implicit assumption of the arguments cited above seems to be that Princeton is trying to admit students with intrinsic potential who would outperform the others academically in a world of completely equal opportunities and is hindered in this search by the distorting factor of “disadvantages of growing up in a lower-income family,” as Bradlow puts it.

However, this premise seems quite unlikely to reflect the real interest of the University. On one hand, actual academic success and demonstrated leadership potential are probably very good indicators of similar achievements at Princeton. Whether these credentials were obtained on a level playing field or not, if we are trying to admit the students that will succeed at Princeton, intrinsic potential can never be the sole admission criterion. This is because some high-potential students might plainly not be as prepared as others for the level of coursework they will encounter and might thus not be able to make the most of it. Try telling a football coach not to recruit the best players, but those that might have been the best in an equal opportunity world, and see how far you get!

This analogy also illustrates the second problem with assuming that our admissions should consider intrinsic potential rather than apparent achievements: There are many other criteria that distort our admission process and are based on something other than innate intelligence. Arguably, race and athletic recruitment needs are only the tip of the iceberg of apparent differences among students that are taken into account.

One of the most obvious characteristics that is allowed to dominate academic success in the admission process is origin. It would be naive to think, even if all the international applicants in some year were vastly superior (or inferior) to the domestic ones, that the share of international students among the admitted students would be allowed to stray very far from 10 percent. Given that our motto proclaims Princeton to be “in the service of all nations” this concept is probably not fair in the abstract, but it illustrates that such compromises are an inevitable part of the admissions reality.

ADVERTISEMENT

Consequently, an admission process based solely on intrinsic potential would not only fail to resemble the national income distribution, but also be incompatible with historical practice and some of the demonstrated needs of the University. Nassau Hall clearly is the “best old place of all” but we should not hold it to standards for which there is no evidence it ever strove.

Gregor Schubert is an economics major from Leipzig, Germany. He can be reached at gregors@princeton.edu.

Subscribe
Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »