Admissions AI: Not Fully Thought Through

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Stacey Brook, "creator of CollegeEssAI, an ethical AI tool for college essay writing," believes that there is an ethical way to use artificial intelligence (AI) in admissions essays. [bold added]

If, for instance, a student tells an AI platform they want to write a personal essay about their love of crafting intricate Halloween costumes, requesting prompts to help them explore this topic, AI might ask things like: What is a Halloween costume you created that you are especially proud of, and what was the inspiration? What does the process of creating a costume look like for you? Where else does this creative instinct manifest itself in your life?

Those questions are comparable to those posed by writing tutors, and, better still, they come free of charge to anyone with access to technology. They also represent potential pathways for more directed storytelling and reflection than a student would likely generate independently. Most students don’t have experience writing personal narratives before they are asked to do so for a college admissions essay.

While students applying to college should check a school’s specific policies on using AI on an application, using it as an assistive, self-teaching tool instead of as a ghost writer can lead to essays that are complex, contemplative and more authentic than something ChatGPT simply spits out. AI can actually help applicants hone creativity and strategic thinking, but only when used properly.

Using Ai as a spell- and grammar-checker is ok, IMHO, since those capabilities were included in word-processing software before AI. What Stacey Brooke suggests is reasonable but goes against the strict prohibitions demanded by college admissions offices.

Better--and it does involve more work by colleges--would be for candidates to attach all communications with AI that they used in composing their essays. As we are all feeling our way at the dawn of a new age, disclosure is the way to go, not imposing rules that haven't been fully thought through.

WSJ: Stanford is #1

Rodin's Burghers of Calais in Memorial Court, Stanford

Many years ago I was accepted to Stanford's undergraduate program but didn't go. Though grateful for how everything worked out, I do feel a twinge of road-not-taken regret when I see yet another article extolling the glories of the Farm:

Stanford University tops the list of the best U.S. colleges in the latest WSJ/College Pulse rankings.

Unlike other school rankings, this list emphasizes one point: How well did the college prepare students for financial success? More than any other factor, it rewards the boost an institution provides to its graduates’ salaries, beyond an estimate of what they could have expected from attending any college.

Stanford returns to the top of this list for the first time since the 2017 rankings. Ivy League schools also figure prominently, with Yale University, Princeton University and Harvard University finishing third, fourth and fifth, respectively. Two other Ivy League schools—Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania—come in at eighth and ninth, respectively.

Beyond the marquee names, the rankings’ distinct methodology highlights some institutions that don’t have as much name recognition but still help their students achieve remarkable success.

Babson College—the small Wellesley, Mass., school focused on business and entrepreneurship—retained its No. 2 spot from last year. Claremont McKenna College, near Los Angeles, clocked in at No. 6, and Davidson College, near Charlotte, N.C., ranked 10th.

The University of California, Berkeley, is the best-ranked public school, at No. 7 overall, and five other public schools from the state cracked the top 25...

The value of Stanford
Stanford scored well across the rankings’ metrics, including a high graduate salary score and a short amount of time to pay off the net price of college.

Raj Palleti, a 2024 Stanford graduate, says his computer-science education at the school has opened doors. While at Stanford, he interned at Nvidia and co-founded an AI startup, alphaXiv, where he is the chief operating officer. The company’s community platform helps researchers accelerate work with AI tools.

Palleti credits Stanford for fueling students’ drive and talents for innovation. “They have so much of an emphasis of like, ‘Oh, you should just build cool things,’ ” he says.

Karuna Taesopapong, a Stanford economics major who graduated in 2024, recalls discussion-focused, hands-on courses. One involved an energy-market simulation, where students had to navigate supply shortages and power outages to maximize profits.

“That’s the reason why you go to Stanford, because you try to get those niche insights and hear about stories that you wouldn’t necessarily get anywhere else,” she says. She now is the growth leader at a startup called Onton, an AI-powered home-decor shopping engine.

Ever since Business School Dean Jonathan Levin became its president, Stanford has been tacking toward the political center, a wise place to be for one of the world's top universities.

Illiquidity + Greed = Disaster

(Table from University Business)

The nation's largest universities have tens of $billions in endowment funds, yet are experiencing a cash squeeze. [bold added]

Over the past couple of decades, no group of investors has piled into what are called alternative assets more eagerly than the endowment funds of major colleges and universities. In their rush to emulate the stellar success of Yale University’s endowment head David Swensen, who died in 2021, educational institutions pulled tens of billions of dollars out of stocks and bonds and poured it into hedge funds, private equity, venture capital and other investments that don’t trade publicly.

The result looks nothing like the portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds that has long been a guidepost for many investors. On average, in fiscal 2024, educational endowments with more than $5 billion in assets held only 2% in cash, 6% in bonds, 8% in U.S. stocks and 16% in international stocks, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. That left two-thirds of their total holdings in private funds and other non-traditional assets that can’t readily be turned into cash.

Now you understand the life-or-death panic that seized such elite institutions as Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern and other universities when the Trump administration threatened to cut off their federal funding. Even though their endowments hold billions of dollars, much of that immense wealth might as well be stored on the planet Proxima Centauri b, about 4.2 light years away.

These universities are slashing budgets, freezing their hiring and scrambling to raise money any way they can.

An investment rule that's easy to understand but emotionally difficult to implement is to keep enough liquidity to cover cash needs, even during a down market or a shortfall from a funding source like the Federal government. It's a hoary lesson that one doesn't need an MBA from Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton to follow: greed and pride can be your downfall.

Still Appreciated by Termites, Though

Your humble blogger went to school before mobile phones, before the Internet, even before there were personal computers (I received my MBA in 1975, one year before Apple was incorporated).

Mine was a generation that did all its research in libraries, and index cards were the pathway to getting information. Today most index card drawers are empty--if they haven't been tossed out--but at Yale they have been repurposed:

If you open one of the hundreds of card catalog drawers that line the south side of the Sterling Memorial Library nave, you won’t find any cards; online catalogs have rendered them obsolete.

But you might find a surprise. Over the past few years, students and other visitors to the library have created a tradition of leaving notes in the drawers to be found by others. Some are inspirational (“keep chasing your dreams, but don’t be afraid if the path to your dream changes”) and some are aspirational (“2016. In eight years, I’ll return as a Yale student”), and they are written in many languages. It’s a delightful adaptive reuse: hardware that was once used to organize the search for knowledge now holds the promise of serendipity.

Now if I can just find a use for my slide rule....

Sticky Ivy

Harvard and Yale: joining against a common enemy?

The Trump Administration claims that Harvard University has violated civil rights laws through Harvard's DEI programs and threatens to withhold $9 billion of funding and Harvard's accreditation.

Influential Ivy alumni seem to be supporting Harvard, at least for now.

“You know the world is going crazy when Yale alums are making donations to Harvard!” —Ross Eaton ’03 on the Yale Alumni Facebook group on April 16, shortly after the federal government began freezing grants to Harvard.

Old School

In order to minimize cheating using artificial intelligence tools, colleges are requiring handwritten test answers in blue books:

Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it.

It’s called a blue book.

The mere thought of that exam booklet with a blue cover and blank pages is enough to make generations of college kids clam up—and make their hands cramp up.

But inexpensive pamphlets of stapled paper have become a surprisingly valuable tool for teachers at a time when they need all the help they can get.

Your humble blogger is familiar with the argument that artificial intelligence will be so intertwined with their lives that students should be encouraged, not discouraged, from using AI to solve exam problems. I think the counter-arguments are stronger: 1) college is perhaps the last environment where students can be forced to think for themselves without the use of AI, and tuition monies would be better spent on thinking rather than looking up information; 2) how hard is it, really, to learn how to use artificial intelligence? An employer who thinks AI is both necessary and difficult can easily sponsor a one-day class for its employees.

Blue books were good enough for us, and they should be good enough for our grandchildren.

Democrats: You Created Your Own Destructor

President Trump will sign an Executive Order that will keep biological males out of women's sports in schools and colleges.

Trump will sign an order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” Wednesday afternoon, said people familiar with the matter, including a White House official and a member of Congress...

It wasn’t immediately clear exactly what the contents of the order would entail, but one option is for the president to direct the Education Department to interpret federal Title IX rules as barring the participation of transgender girls and women in female sports categories. People on different sides of the issue have anticipated that the department would then base its policies and future regulations around this interpretation, issuing guidance to schools to act accordingly—and investigating alleged violations.

The scope of the order stands to instantly affect any educational institution that receives federal funding—which includes almost every college in the U.S., as well as the majority of K-12 schools. The Title IX provision in the Education Amendments Act of 1972 prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational activities, though the meaning of that has been hotly contested for decades, mostly recently focusing on its application to transgender students.

In the face of such an order likely affecting all but a handful of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s 1,100 member schools, the NCAA has indicated that it will move rapidly to change its rules.

“We’re a national governing body and we follow federal law,” NCAA President Charlie Baker told Republican senators in a series of contentious exchanges over the issue during a hearing in December. “Clarity on this issue at the federal level would be very helpful.”

...There are 27 states that have sweeping restrictions on the participation of transgender girls and women in school sports. There are policies mandating their inclusion in another 14 states, which are estimated by transgender-rights advocates to have a larger population of transgender students.

The point of this post is not to debate the rightness or wrongness of President Trump's men-in-women's-sports Executive Order but to point out the dangers of allowing the Federal Government to have financial sway over society's institutions. Perhaps, if you are a liberal, you quietly cheered when the Federal Government threatened to withhold payments to Catholic hospitals that refused to provide abortions.*

How does it feel now that the Trump Administration is using the power of the purse to bend society to its will? You created your own Destructor.

*Question, answered by Grok: did the Federal government threaten Catholic hospitals if they did not provide abortions?

The situation regarding the federal government and Catholic hospitals providing abortions is complex and has evolved over time. Here's a detailed overview based on the available information:

Legal Background:
Federal law, specifically the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), mandates that hospitals provide necessary stabilizing treatment in emergency situations, which can include abortion if a woman's life or health is at risk. However, this conflicts with the religious directives of Catholic hospitals, which generally prohibit abortion.

Legal Cases:
In 2016, a federal court dismissed an attempt by the ACLU to force a Catholic hospital system to provide abortions, calling the challenge "dubious" and stating that the ACLU lacked standing to sue (Washington Times, 2016).

In 2022, a federal appeals court ruled that the U.S. government could not require Christian medical groups, including Catholic hospitals, to perform abortions or gender transition surgeries under the Affordable Care Act, affirming their religious freedom (Reuters, 2022).

Investigations and Warnings:
In 2023, the federal government conducted an investigation where it was found that two hospitals, which included a Catholic facility, violated federal law by refusing to provide an emergency abortion, putting a woman's life in jeopardy (PBS News, 2023). This was a warning to hospitals about the necessity to comply with EMTALA over state abortion laws.

Policies and Practices:
Catholic hospitals operate under the "Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services" set by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which prohibit abortions except in very specific circumstances where the life of the mother is at immediate risk. This often leads to conflicts with federal mandates like EMTALA, where emergency care might necessitate an abortion.

Public and Legal Discourse:
There have been instances where women reported being denied emergency abortions at Catholic hospitals, leading to severe health risks or the need to seek care elsewhere. This has sparked legal battles and discussions about the balance between religious freedom and patient rights to emergency care (ACLU reports, various dates).

In summary, while there have been instances where federal agencies have highlighted that Catholic hospitals must comply with federal emergency care laws, these are not typically framed as direct "threats" but as enforcement of existing laws like EMTALA. The tension arises from the intersection of religious directives and legal obligations, leading to legal disputes rather than explicit threats. However, enforcement actions or investigations by federal agencies can be perceived as pressures or threats to change practices to comply with federal law.

The Education Bureaucracy's Priorities Aren't Yours

Mercury News graphic: Bay Area students can book an
SAT reservation at least an hour's drive away in the spring.
Many students won't know where they're admitted,
much less if they have financial aid, until they graduate.

Now that some top colleges are requiring standardized admissions tests, there's a shortage of test sites, as we noted four months ago:

Fewer than half of the schools that served as testing centers before the pandemic have returned

Since many California educators subscribe to the ideology that testing is racist and inequitable, that ideology is probably a factor in their dragging their feet on resuming "School Day" testing, where the test is held at the students' school on a weekday. Some test-takers have to travel out-of-town on weekends in order to sit for the exam, which, of course, adds to the stress and inequity for students who can't afford to do so.

Some high-achieving but underprivileged students want to better their lives by going to and winning scholarships at out-of-state colleges, but educators won't support testing because they think they know what's better for the students than the students themselves.

With total education expenditures of $109 billion (nearly $24,000 per pupil), Californians might suppose the money could be found to support some of our best and brightest students for one day, but the educators have other priorities, like teaching the racist history of the United States or pushing gender transitioning on impressionable children. Meanwhile, parents must spend hours trying to reserve a seat at testing sites. [bold added]

But as elite schools like Stanford, Caltech, Harvard and Yale reverse their test-optional policies, Bay Area students attempting to take the SAT before college applications are due this winter might have to travel several hours or even out of state to nab a coveted spot — an especially challenging situation for lower-income students.

A recent search by a reporter of SAT testing centers through the College Board found disheartening results. Seats for the August, October and November testing dates were fully booked within 100 miles of San Jose and San Francisco, while just a handful of seats remained for the December and March exams — most of which were in locations several hours away, in cities like Sacramento, Sonora and Folsom.

...The College Board blamed the lack of availability on host schools unwilling to staff and run weekend test centers, but others pointed to low pay for proctors and schools ditching the testing requirement

To be fair,

Some Bay Area districts — including Dublin Unified and San Jose Unified — participate in “SAT School Day,” a designated day where high school juniors and seniors can take the test during class time. Some districts even offer it at no-cost.

But the College Board said most California schools do not participate in the program, which accounts for the majority of the tests administered nationwide.

It's fair to say that the majority of California schools exist to serve their administrators and teachers' unions, not their students.

Still Second Place

A problem that concerns approximately zero percent of the American population: some Manhattan Ivy League social clubs can't attract new members and are shutting down: [bold added]

New York’s storied Ivy League club circuit dates back to the 19th century. For years, these membership organizations were considered among the most prestigious in the country.

These days, say alumni and former members, the clubs have fallen out of fashion. The venues are victims of dated decor, mediocre food and in some cases lingering dress codes—for most of their histories, these clubs have required men to wear coats and ties—out of step with young alums.

It appears that the Yale Club will do almost anything to stay in business:

The Yale Club changed its admission process to accept members without an affiliation to the university. Most anyone can now apply to the club if she or he has the endorsement of at least two members, according to a club document.

...Still, the clubs have loosened their rules to some degree over the past several years. For decades, dress codes have been a fault line between older and younger alumni. In 1999, the Yale Club became the first of Manhattan’s Ivy clubs to allow casual dress on Friday in an attempt to attract younger members and creatives.

The Yale Club today allows jeans throughout the clubhouse, and the Harvard Club now permits “casual attire”—except in two of its main halls after 5 p.m.

The Harvard Club:  inviting guests is a good way
to let them know you went there.

Harvard has the oldest (1865) and wealthiest social club, and its membership is one of the few that appears to be growing. Yale's social club, as the New Haven university does in other areas of endeavor, is trying to keep up with Harvard's.

Your humble blogger thinks that Yale's strategy of letting anyone in is misguided. If the price of membership growth is the loss of exclusivity, the price is too high.

"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."--Groucho Marx

Spreading the Gospel of Net Present Value

Your humble blogger studied accounting and finance before the personal computer was invented.

The only electronic devices that we brought to class were calculators that performed basic arithmetic. And so it was that we labored over present value/future value problems, pencilling out intermediate solutions so we at least could get partial credit from the proctor.

After learning how the basic formulas were derived, we were taught how to use books of tables to bypass much of the repetitive drudgery in financial calculations. The future-value table below is from McGraw-Hill.

Until financial calculators and PC's came on the scene, such tables were used in finance for 3½ centuries(!) These tables seem extraordinarily crude today, but when they were first published in the 1600's, it sparked the widespread acceptance of "discounting" as an alternative payment. It wasn't businessmen or bankers who spread the word, but the Anglican church. [bold added]

In the early 1600s, the officials running Durham Cathedral, in England, had serious financial problems. Soaring prices had raised expenses. Most cathedral income came from renting land to tenant farmers, who had long leases so officials could not easily raise the rent. Instead, church leaders started charging periodic fees, but these often made tenants furious. And the 1600s, a time of religious schism, was not the moment to alienate church members.

Interest-calculation book from 1700.

But in 1626, Durham officials found a formula for fees that tenants would accept. If tenant farmers paid a fee equal to one year’s net value of the land, it earned them a seven-year lease. A fee equal to 7.75 years of net value earned a 21-year lease.

This was a form of discounting, the now-common technique for evaluating the present and future value of money by assuming a certain rate of return on that money. The Durham officials likely got their numbers from new books of discounting tables. Volumes like this had never existed before, but suddenly local church officials were applying the technique up and down England.

Spreading the "Gospel of Net Present Value" was one of the most important developments in capitalism. With apologies to the bard,

Neither a borrower or a lender be
But if you are either
Be mindful of the NPV.

No Light and No Truth

When I was here, Frisbees were flying in April, not invective (WSJ)

When college "protestors" call for the extermination of the Jews, I finally saw how the Holocaust could happen. Throughout my high school and college years the Holocaust appeared to be an anomalous event in human history, when a uniquely evil and magnetic demagogue could persuade millions of Germans that all their problems were due to the existence of a specific race of people. That could never happen to us Americans--we could never blame an entire race for our problems, and we had a strong sense of individual morality that would stop us long before such madness took hold.

When I hear the chant, "from the river to the sea" or "death to the Jews," I think of my college roommate--would they kill him, too? He was the first Jewish person I was ever close to, and I admired him. He came from a working-class Midwest background, a graduate of a public school, and was the son of terrific parents who welcomed this nerdy kid from Hawaii to their home over Thanksgiving.

Nearing the end of our college years, when some roommates and I went out partying, he was studying Organic Chemistry--one of the toughest courses in the entire undergraduate curriculum--in order to get into medical school. He passed the MCATs, attended Case Western Reserve Medical School, interned at UCLA, and returned to his hometown where he practices internal medicine to this day.

He was no privileged member of the patriarchy and worked for everything he got. He was certainly no "oppressor" when I knew him, and his lifelong profession belies the notion that he was ever an oppressor lording it over other people in the hierarchy.

Nor would he, as would I, ever call ourselves oppressed. We were just lucky to have gone to a good college, and I, for one, weep for what it has become.

Off-Islander Goes Local, Returns Home, Makes Good

The dorms that are occupied mostly by Mainland
students have expanded a lot since 1970.

When we went to the Mainland for school, we used to joke about the Mainland kids who came in the other direction. The University of Hawaii was a decent college at the time but wasn't renowned in any field of study (except oceanography and bioscience) so we knew what these kids were likely doing here. Overwhelmingly white and upper-middle class (room and board wasn't cheap), they were in Hawaii to have a good time.

Somehow they had sweet-talked their parents to send them across the Pacific and learn the rigors of independent living in a campus where the beach was a mile away.

Whether or not Scott Swift had similar motivations is unclear. He traveled 5,000 miles to spend his freshman year playing Rainbow football.

Scott Swift’s collegiate football career was brief. The lanky teenager from Pennsylvania transferred to a school closer to home after one season and attended the University of Delaware before becoming a successful wealth manager.

Scott and his daughter Taylor in 2015 (Miller/WSJ)

When Scott Swift was in Hawaii, Al Michaels ("do you believe in miracles?") was a young broadcaster who did the radio for UH sports. Scott Swift calls the presence of Al Michaels his "first brush with fame." Unfortunately, Al Michaels did not remember him.

His second brush with fame has lasted nearly two decades and is still continuing. This time the famous person he knows doesn't have to be reminded who he is.

Scott Swift joins the list of Mainlanders (e.g. actor Beau Bridges and talk-show host Michael Savage) who attended the UH and struck gold later in life. So parents, don't discount their pleadings: it might not be for everyone, but the University of Hawaii may provide just the education your son or daughter needs.

Educators Won't Support the SAT Now that Some Colleges Require It

Last month we posted about how some elite colleges are again mandating that applicants submit scores on standardized tests. Yale Admissions' Jeremiah Quinlan:

students with higher scores have been more likely to have higher Yale GPAs, and test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s performance in Yale courses in every model we have constructed.

While neither the University of California nor California State University schools require test scores, many California students now want to sit for the Scholastic Aptitude Test because of the requirement from out-of-state colleges. (California private universities, e.g., Stanford and Caltech still don't require the SAT either.)

Fewer students took the now-optional SAT in 2021-2023 (Chron)

When COVID made group testing impracticable, the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities removed the test requirement in 2020. California high schools immediately stopped setting up testing sites. Now that this admissions precondition has partially resumed

Fewer than half of the schools that served as testing centers before the pandemic have returned,

Since many California educators subscribe to the ideology that testing is racist and inequitable, that ideology is probably a factor in their dragging their feet on resuming "School Day" testing, where the test is held at the students' school on a weekday. Some test-takers have to travel out-of-town on weekends in order to sit for the exam, which, of course, adds to the stress and inequity for students who can't afford to do so.

Some high-achieving but underprivileged students want to better their lives by going to and winning scholarships at out-of-state colleges, but educators won't support testing because they think they know what's better for the students than the students themselves.

The rot is pervasive, and it will take years to clean it up if that's even possible.

They Won a Battle in a Long War

St. Mary's College (Bettag/WSJ)

St. Mary's College, a 180-year-old Catholic college for women in Indiana, had announced that transgender women would be admitted in 2024. Several undergraduates started a petition to reverse the decision, then alumnae and parents signed on. Finally the Church weighed in.

“Saint Mary’s departs from fundamental Catholic teaching on the nature of woman and thus compromises its very identity as a Catholic woman’s college,” Bishop Kevin Rhoades of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend wrote in a Nov. 27 statement. The bishop added that his duty is to “promote and assist in the preservation and strengthening” of the college’s Catholic identity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “each of them, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his/her sexual identity.”

The Board of Trustees and President Katie Conboy rescinded their original decision, making St. Mary's one of the few women's colleges that has refused to bow to Progressive theories about gender.

Commitment to Catholic teaching on sex is what distinguishes St. Mary’s from nearly all colleges across the country. Twenty-three women’s colleges admit “at least some” transgender-identifying male students, according to Campus Pride, a national pro-transgender organization, while only three don’t. The outcry over the policy shows there’s demand for a school that’s different because it’s firm in its faith and principles.

One has to admire the two undergraduates, Macy Gunnell and Claire Bettag, who brooked the opposition of many students, most faculty, and the dominant trans-women-are-women ideology to stand up for what they felt was right. They won this battle because there are enough stakeholders at St. Mary's who adhere to Catholic teachings, but it's only a battle in a long war.

Seeing the Light

Poor little lambs who have lost their way with social justice,
diversity, equity, and inclusion, Yale may be returning to
its motto light and truth (lux et veritas)

After a four-year hiatus Yale University is again requiring standardized tests on admission applications. [bold added]

After four years with a test-optional policy that allowed applicants to decide whether or not to submit test scores, Yale will resume requiring scores of all applicants. But it will expand the list of tests that fulfill the requirement to include AP and IB exams in addition to the SAT and ACT.

Dean of undergraduate admissions Jeremiah Quinlan:

we found that test scores have continued to predict academic performance in Yale College. Simply put, students with higher scores have been more likely to have higher Yale GPAs, and test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s performance in Yale courses in every model we have constructed.

A similar study by Dartmouth and Brown also showed that test scores were an accurate predictor of college grades, and that applicants who did not submit test scores performed less well.

It found that students who didn’t submit scores earned college grades equivalent to students who earned a 1307 or an ACT of 28. The average scores at highly selective schools generally top 1500 on the SAT and 34 on the ACT.

Dartmouth and Yale are the two Ivies who reinstated standardized testing this month.

When my high-school class sat for the exams a half-century ago, there was a different, undoubtedly naïve, perspective about testing. We were asked to perform the best that we could, but on the other hand we wanted to go to schools that were the right "fit." For example, I knew that my science and math skills weren't sufficient to do well at MIT or Caltech, regardless of my scores.

There was very little advance preparation. Your humble blogger took the SATs, six Achievement tests, and four Advanced Placement exams. Our teachers told us that we couldn't really prepare for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests--and I didn't know anyone who did--but because the ACH and AP tests were presumably based on subject knowledge, I did spend a few hours reviewing textbooks and lecture notes; unlike students today I didn't take practice tests or six-week prep classes or had a tutor.

I did well enough to get into some good schools and ended up going to one where I was in the middle of the pack. The important take-away was that I didn't encounter anyone who didn't have the smarts to do the work, and that I attribute to the testing screens.

It's comforting to know that Yale and Dartmouth have seen the light. Perhaps others will follow.

The Academy Oversteps and Begins to Pay the Price

Bill Ackman, 57, is a hedge-fund billionaire who made his fortune by taking unconventional short and long positions.

He always gives interesting business-related interviews on CNBC, and that, frankly, was the extent of my knowledge about him.

Until he took issue with the December 5th performance of Harvard then-President Claudine Gay before Congress on the subject of anti-semitism and free speech at Harvard, his alma mater.

The scales had fallen from his eyes:

Twenty-four hours after Hamas attacked Israel, Mr. Ackman “saw students supporting terrorists—Harvard students, no less.” With astonishment that hardened into outrage, Mr. Ackman witnessed 34 student groups at his alma mater “come out to say that Israel is solely responsible for the most heinous acts we’ve seen in modern history.”

Harvard wasn’t the only American campus where students railed against Israel and at Jewish classmates. But Harvard was the place to which Mr. Ackman, an “absolutely loyal alum in all respects,” had given $50 million over the years. “I lecture at the university multiple times a year,” he says, adding that he’s on the dean’s advisory board. Observing the protests, and the Harvard administration’s refusal to curb them, he mounted a mutiny of donors, calling on them to help drive Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, from her job. He feared that her continued presence at the helm would lead angry donors to stop giving. “I am personally aware of more than a billion dollars of terminated donations from a small group of Harvard’s most generous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni,” he wrote on Dec. 10.

Ms. Gay’s resignation on Jan. 2 was a result of her maladministration as well as of convincing accusations of plagiarism in her academic writings.

After reviewing Claudine Gay's, as well as MIT President Sally Kornbluth's and Penn President Liz Magill's, testimony before Congress, Mr. Ackman came to believe that their tepid response to student groups' calls for genocide against Jews was attributable to the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) practices that have pervaded campuses nationwide. On January 2nd he tweeted: [bold added]

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

Claudine Gay's resignation on January 2nd was only the first battle in what may well turn out to be a long cultural war between wokeness and traditional values. Claudine Gay not only was criticized for her actions as Harvard President but for alleged instances of plagiarism on her scholarly work.

Neri Oxman (WSJ photo)

The Business Insider then accused Bill Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, for plagiarism on her 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT. Ms. Oxman apologized.

Bill Ackman, convinced that the source of the Business Insider report was someone(s) at MIT, vowed to develop AI tools to examine a broad swath of MIT dissertations and publications for plagiarism.

Circling back to the three-presidents testimony before Congress on December 5th, MIT President Kornbluth is the only one of the three who still holds office, Penn's Liz Magill having resigned on December 9th. It would be surprising if she lasts out the year.

After the break is the text of Bill Ackman's January 2nd tweet.


 

The Cock of the Walk

In the buildup to the college football national championship tonight, sportswriters are always searching for new angles. Here's one: Michigan coach's Jim Harbaugh's chickens. [bold added]

Harbaugh is a serious backyard chicken farmer.

“Chickens have made the cut into his pretty small circle of important things in his life,” said Jay Harbaugh, his eldest son and the Wolverines’ special-teams coordinator...

The chickens have become a welcome distraction for Harbaugh during a season that’s been full of them. Michigan has faced two separate scandals and NCAA investigations. Harbaugh’s own future in Ann Arbor is once again the subject of speculation, as professional teams with head coaching vacancies curry his favor for the third consecutive winter.

When it seems like everybody’s out to get Michigan (this year’s team has adopted the slogan “Michigan vs. Everybody”), Harbaugh can count on the undying loyalty of his flock. “There’s times when I’m doing good things for other people, and they’re not as happy to see me as my chickens are,” he said in November.

The Harbaugh chicken coop dates back to 2020, when the family purchased seven chicks—one for each of the coach’s children—just before Easter during the early days of the pandemic shutdown.

The jokes write themselves ("cluck management" WSJ drawing, above right).

On a serious note high-powered individuals often find solace in animals, who unlike two-legged creatures, give them unconditional love.

(photo from KJCT8)

Now that Jim Harbaugh's team, the Michigan Wolverines, won the national championship tonight, it's very likely that several billionaire NFL team owners will want him to be their head coach next year.

At the age of 60 he's about to reach his beak.

Re-Compartmentalization

(Image from weworkremotely)

Back in my day (OK boomer) we compartmentalized, that is, we didn't bring our personal problems to work. Compartmentalization was a societal value: employees wanted privacy, and employers were happy to comply. Managers were taught to evaluate workers on their performance only and ignore the personal stuff.

Then we de-compartmentalized. Over time it became acceptable to discuss family, health, financial, and even political issues, and the red lines between work and personal life were all but obliterated during COVID.

We are now seeing the beginnings of a pushback. Boundaries are re-appearing in worker-to-worker relationships.

Headline: Nobody at Work Wants to Hear About Your Student-Loan Payments

College debt is a new third rail in the workplace. The payment restart [after the COVID payment holiday] is proving more contentious than the halt at the onset of the pandemic...

Though some debt-free colleagues feel pity—and think student-loan forgiveness would be good for the economy—others can’t stand to hear griping. They tell me they know there are borrowers who didn’t understand what they were getting into and that student loans can be most cumbersome for people who didn’t finish their degrees. Yes, they’re aware that debt, or the absence of it, is often a function of privilege.

Mostly they view the college-debt crisis as a morality play. They did the right thing, paying back what they owe or making good decisions to avoid debt. Others should do the same or face consequences.

Better think twice before lamenting your loans in office chitchat.

For the record I had student loans from both college and graduate school. $10,000 seems like a pittance today, but that amount was over half of my annual first-year salary. I feel empathy but not sympathy for those who are saddled with student loan debt and poor job prospects.

If I were working today, I'd like more compartmentalization, please.

Aloha to Affirmative Action

Pre-1995 California's explicit consideration of race would
have admitted a non-white, poor applicant but rejected a
white non-poor applicant of similar achievements. (WSJ video)

Gallons of ink have been spilled (sorry, dear reader, I can't come up with a post-newspaper-age metaphor) over the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action earlier today.

In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard Ccllege

The Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions, eliminating the principal tool the nation’s most selective schools have used to diversify their campuses.

Thursday’s 6-3 decision will force a reworking of admissions criteria throughout American higher education, where for decades the pursuit of diversity has been an article of faith.

A few personal comments:

1) Growing up in melting-pot Hawaii, I hadn't heard the term "affirmative action" until I came to the Mainland.

2) I'm so old that Asian-Americans were viewed as an "underprivileged minority" when I went to college in the 1970's. I could be the beneficiary of affirmative-action policies that began in the late 1960's. (In my defense both my grades and board scores were at least as high as my white roommates'.)

3) I always wondered whether the existence of affirmative action tainted the credibility of Asians' or any other minority individuals' accomplishments. I was happy that Asian-Americans stopped being the beneficiaries of affirmative action, if they ever were, and were evaluated on their own merits by the late 1980's in the Bay Area.

4) I am all in favor of giving special consideration to students who grew up in difficult economic, family, and social environments. And one would have to be blind not to see that black and Hispanic students fall disproportionately into that category. Helping everyone in those circumstances regardless of race, IMHO, is the right policy.

Chinese Young Adults: the World is not Their Oyster

Beijing job fair last August (WSJ photo)

We've noted before how China's one-child policy may have triggered a population bust that will affect geopolitics for the rest of the century. The policy was officially rescinded in 2015, but by then it was too late; births are below replacement level, and the population shrank in 2022.

With jobs going wanting young Chinese adults should expect the world to be their oyster, but they would be mistaken. [bold added]

Last year, Chinese unemployment for those between the ages of 16 and 24 reached 20%—a record high and more than double what it was in 2018. The job shortage is particularly acute for graduates with advanced degrees, people who had expected the most from the job market because their families had sunk up to a third of their income into their education. During last autumn’s hiring season, around 45% of recent college graduates in China received no job offers, according to one published survey.

The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough jobs in China. Rather, it is the acute mismatch between the education and skills of those entering the job market and the jobs that need to be filled.

The manufacturing sector in China is experiencing a severe labor shortage: Four out of five Chinese manufacturers report that their workforces are falling 10% to 30% short of their needs, and the education ministry forecasts a shortage of 30 million manufacturing workers by 2025.

The following description of Chinese young adults is familiar to observers of their counterparts in the U.S.:

A great chasm has emerged between expectations and reality. The glut of diplomas has caused the average starting salary of college graduates to fall below that of workers in the gig economy, such as delivery people. Real estate, finance and IT receive more job applications than they can begin to absorb, and the major online recruiting site Zhaopin.com reports that 90% of applications go to sectors that provide less than 50% of the jobs. Young job seekers face disappointment after disappointment.

The consequences of reduced expectations among unemployed youth are profound. Members of the young generation increasingly are putting off getting married and starting a family, breaking the traditions of a Confucian society. In 2021, there were only 7.6 million new marriages registered, a 38% drop from 2015. Meanwhile the birthrate has fallen to the lowest the country has ever seen.

Discontent among the new generation also represents a threat to the nation’s social stability. In the past, Chinese families, even in the bottom rung, felt content even as income disparities grew, because people believed that their children would have a better life. The erosion of such beliefs poses the risk of unrest.

China has ambitious goals and immense resources, but its visible and growing weaknesses may well make it, as Mao said of the United States, a paper tiger.