Is Harvard Suckering Black Applicants?
5th November 2019
Via Tyler Cowen we learn there’s a new paper from Duke’s Peter Arcidiacono — the economist who served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the recent lawsuit against Harvard. (I’ve written about Arcidiacono’s work before here and here.) In this one, Arcidiacono and his coauthors detail a rather bizarre pattern in the school’s admissions data.
Basically, starting about ten years ago — in the wake of some Supreme Court activity that mildly limited affirmative action — the school began seeking out lots more applications from black students, leading the black share of the applicant pool to grow from about 6 percent to about 10 percent. Some of this effort seems to have taken the form of recruitment letters sent out on the basis of test scores, with far lower cutoffs for members of underrepresented groups.
Yet the new applicants apparently had little prayer of getting in. “The share of admits who were African American remained unchanged,” the authors write. “At the same time, the average SAT score of African American applicants fell by 33 points (on an 800-point scale)” between 2008 and 2012, something that did not happen for other racial groups.