Klitgaard's Folly

HARVARD is embarrassed about its secretive preliminary report on admissions, and rightly so. The report suggests that minority students and women at top universities do not perform as well as aptitude test scores would indicate, and that Jewish students perform better. But it makes judgments about student performance and "success" in a vacuum, focusing mostly on standardized test scores and examining them with no attention to social, economic and historical factors, breaking students down instead into groups like "women," "Blacks," and "Jews." It irresponsibly reduces people to statistics; that anyone could consider it valid is cause for fear.

The first question on the lips of many students and others outraged at the report's implications for the future of affirmative action was, why this report now? President Bok, who commissioned the study from Robert E. Klitgaard '68, his special assistant, said in a letter to the Crimson this week that he asked Klitgaard to study five areas: to summarize current admissions criteria at each Harvard school; to discuss "goals that admissions committees might ideally seek to achieve in selecting applicants"; to review literature about the effectiveness of grades and test scores as admissions criteria; to review the effectiveness of other admissions criteria like interviews and letters of recommendation; and to list other questions or topics for further research.

If that is what Bok asked Klitgaard to study, it is not what the special assistant included in his draft of the report--which has not been adopted as University policy or endorsed by Harvard officials, but has been distributed to admissions officers for comment. The report largely deals with test scores. It makes the unproven and often-assailed assumption that standardized test scores are valid predicters of students' performance in college, and it goes on to evaluate how accurately the tests predict performance for different groups.

Bok says he did not ask Klitgaard "to investigate the abilities or performance of particular groups of students--either by sex, race, or religion." But in effect that is what the bulk of Klitgaard's report does, making statements about different groups' relative performance and success on tests and in college and basing these statements only on group identity--Jewish, Black or female, for example--and ignoring any number of other relevant factors that together make each applicant an individual. These conclusions understandably insult students whom the report reduces to faceless members of arbitrarily isolated applicant groups.

Success in college is hardly an easily measured or widely-agreed-upon notion. And Harvard's admissions policy does not, and ought not, choose students according to a single standard of success. Diversity ought to be the goal for admissions officers selecting each freshman class--diversity and the affirmative action goal of opening Harvard to members of groups that have been excluded in the past. Yet Klitgaard complains in his report that he could find no statistical proof of the value of diversity. That is because some issues transcend statistics. No study should question the University's moral commitment to affirmative action.

The Klitgaard report remains a draft, and if Bok is "truly sorry" about the damage the report has done to people at Harvard, as his letter states, he will disavow the report and urge Klitgaard to do the same. And for Klitgaard's next task Bok can come up with a far more urgently needed study project--how to make Harvard's affirmative action program more effective at all levels.