Thursday, April 18, 2019

Merit vs. ‘Affirmative’ Action


The college admission bribery scandal brought out the anti-capitalistic mentality of the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Its March 2019 editorial is titled College admissions scandal exposes a corrupt and broken system. The “system” does not refer to college admissions. The Star-Ledger wrote:

It is not news that the dullard scions of the wealthy are afforded the same educational benefits enjoyed by real scholars, who earned their way into prestigious colleges.

But the admissions scandal not only exposes how far parents will go to get their kids into elite schools. It reminds us that the correlation between merit and the just apportionment of rewards isn’t the bedrock American precept we claim it to be.

Still, who knew the new definition of affirmative action involved millionaire parents greasing the volleyball coach?

Apparently missing the extreme irony, the Star-Ledger then writes with a straight face:

Meanwhile, more qualified students who followed the rules were squeezed out.

For those who thought that giving special consideration to a deserving minority is a threat to the integrity of the admissions process, we’ll pause here for cognitive dissonance.

Apparently, it’s ok for more qualified students to be shut out for the sake of some other less qualified student labeled “deserving minority.” Apparently, it’s “far worse [that] Parents were paying to break the rules” by bribery versus by racism. What about these rules, which shut out “more qualified students” because of race or ethnicity? No answer. It’s just assumed that there is some fundamental difference between cheating by Affirmative Action and cheating by bribery. There is not. Both forms of affirmative action are wrong. I left these comments, edited for clarity:

This scandal is a case of the wrongdoing of the few, not the workings of some “master class” of “the rich.” To say it is is bigotry. Such language is the premise of racism applied to economics. Any kind of admission policy that results in “more qualified students who followed the rules [being] squeezed out,” whether based on racial “qualifications” or bribery, is corrupt.

We didn’t get to our material prosperity through cheating, but through the workings of a social system—capitalism, to the extent it is free to function—that, over time, allows rewards to follow value creation through individual merit and voluntary exchange. It’s ridiculous to say otherwise.

This scandal is not a result of “savage inequities”--not in the way it is meant in this editorial. The rush to condemn “the rich” for the college scandal is a primal appeal to ignorance, envy, resentment, hatred of achievement, and to anyone who wants to blame others for their own failures. Justice, not bigotry, should be our standard. Punish the guilty. It is immoral to condemn an entire group, whether by race or by level of wealth, for the wrongdoing of the guilty.

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