Lani Guinier on Meritocracy

The brilliant and courageous scholar Lani Guinier died on January 7 at the age of 71. It just so happens that I was reading her book on meritocracy when I heard the news. In this work, as elsewhere, Guinier considered how American institutions and society could be transformed to promote both greater fairness and increased efficiency. I’ll lay out some of her key arguments here, as best I can, by way of tribute.

Meritocracy has been the subject of intense scholarly attention in recent years. The idea itself has ardent defenders and passionate critics. Among the latter, it has been variously described as tyranny, trap, and myth. Moreover, there does not appear to be a consensus on what precisely the concept entails. As Amartya Sen has observed, “the idea of meritocracy may have many virtues, but clarity is not one of them.”

Guinier, thankfully, brings a great deal of clarity to the debate. She makes clear that she is “not trying to destroy the concept of merit” but rather to redefine it, by focusing attention on skill sets that “better serve the challenges of a twenty-first-century world, which demands complex problem solving and collaboration.” In the process, she distinguishes between two notions of merit that she calls testocratic and democratic. The former corresponds to the principle that the assignment of scarce positions, such as seats at elite institutions of higher learning, should be made largely or exclusively on the basis of quantitative assessments of prior performance such as grades and test scores. The latter corresponds to selection on the basis of anticipated future performance in alignment with broader social and institutional commitments. These categories correspond roughly to Steven Durlauf’s distinction between merit as reward and merit as effectiveness.

The two principles are often conflated—it is commonly argued, often implicitly, that prior accomplishment is indeed the best predictor of future performance. A key part of Guinier’s argument is that this perspective is hopelessly naive. It treats institutions themselves as largely mechanical and passive, able to screen and select but unable to truly transform and add value.

To make her point, Guinier begins with a fascinating case study:

In the spring of 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend John Brooks… drove up and down the eastern seaboard to hand select a number of African American men for admission to the College of the Holy Cross… Brooks drove south from Massachusetts, searching for young men who had ambition, leadership potential, and strong character rather than the right family pedigree or the right test scores. Brooks found the qualities he was searching for in a young man who was determined to become the first black priest in Savannah, Georgia; in another who had performed under pressure to elevate his basketball team to the state championship; and in still another whose “quiet intensity,” molded by a childhood spent moving from one rat-infested place to another, spoke more to his character than his poor grades.

Brooks ultimately selected twenty black men: nineteen freshmen and one sophomore. The men started at Holy Cross in the fall of 1968, and during their years there, Brooks mentored them, affirming their potential and cultivating their merit rather than expecting their individual merit to arrive whole and intact…

Father Brooks never gave up on these twenty black men, and he provided them with unwavering support throughout their time at Holy Cross. He cultivated the potential he saw in each man, guiding them as they were challenged academically, shaped socially, and strengthened by the racial isolation that defined their campus and the racial tumult that defined their country. Brooks’s students eventually graduated from Holy Cross and went off to storied careers. Among the twenty men are Clarence Thomas, associate justice of the US Supreme Court; Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize winner; Theodore Wells, renowned defense attorney; and Stanley Grayson, former deputy mayor of New York and president of M. R. Beal & Company, one of the country’s oldest black-owned investment banks. Even today, decades after their graduation, the men attribute their success to Father Brooks… with Brooks’s unwavering mentorship, each man’s democratic merit was forged.

Note that this was not a process of selection by lottery. Nor was it a minor adjustment of conventional admissions criteria in the name of achieving what Guinier calls “cosmetic diversity.” Her point is not that candidates from underrepresented groups should be selected in this way, but that all candidates should.

In a 2005 essay, Malcolm Gladwell likened admissions practices at elite institutions to selection at modeling agencies, contrasting this with selection into the United States Marine Corps:

The Marine Corps… doesn’t have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It’s confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modeling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don’t become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you’re beautiful… The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modeling agency than like the Marine Corps.

Gunier, citing Gladwell, would like elite universities to put greater emphasis on treatment and less on selection based on quantitative measures of past performance. At present, in her view, they operate more like the elite hospitals in the fabled Republic of Invertia, where highly skilled medical professionals lavish attention on an “Adonis with a Pimple” on the grounds that he is “obviously bursting with good health and natural physical gifts… needing only the very slightest medical adjustment to emerge in perfect condition,” and for whom the “chance of success is virtually one hundred percent.” Meanwhile, patients in acute medical distress are admitted only if they “can reasonably be expected to recover… quickly and live a long, healthy, productive life without further medical intervention.”

Now one might object that finding diamonds in the rough, as Father Brooks did, is enormously time-consuming and resource intensive, and that a shift away from quantitative assessments to more nebulous selection criteria opens the door to patronage, nepotism, and influence-peddling. There are well known historical examples of this, including Harvard’s reaction to the rising presence of Jewish students on campus in the 1920s, and to Asians in the 1980s. And if material resources can be used to improve test scores, surely they can be used with even greater effectiveness to shape biographical essays in ways that are known to find favor.

This problem of manipulation is a serious one. Given the enormous demand for positions at elite institutions relative to the available supply, resources will be invested in gaming any system that universities adopt. And this will result in advantages to those who have the resources to invest. So immunity from manipulation is an important virtue of any selection system.

The question then is, can one design a system that promotes fairness and efficiency, while also being relatively difficult to manipulate?

Recent empirical work by Sandra Black, Jeffrey Denning, and Jesse Rothstein suggests that the Texas Top Ten Percent (TTP) Rule may satisfy all of these properties. In principle, one can affect the odds of being in the top ten percent of one’s graduating class by moving to a different school, but this is costly in a number of ways. And the policy did indeed broaden access to the flagship Austin campus quite substantially. But what about efficiency? The authors find, remarkably, that while the policy “improved outcomes for students who would not have attended absent the TTP,” it did not “substantively damage graduation rates or earnings for students who were displaced.” They conclude that a rule that was “introduced for equity reasons… also seems to have improved efficiency.”

This is not an isolated finding. In an earlier post, I discussed a fascinating study by Ursina Schaede and Ville Mankki that found efficiency losses in the wake of the removal of a gender quota in Finland. And, consistent with this, Zachary Bleemer’s study of the effects of Proposition 209 in California finds that the move towards a more conventionally meritocratic system did not result in the kinds of efficiency gains that supporters might have anticipated.

Lani Guinier’s scholarship helps us understand why. We are fortunate to have had her in our midst.