I recently came across a paper by Ursina Schaede and Ville Mankki that contains a fascinating empirical finding with major implications for the way in which we think about meritocracy.
This might be too long a time for a response, but the paper was recently mentioned in the Economist and I found this blog post because I was curious if others had talked about it.
I think your premise about the quota being a proxy could certainly be correct, but the article just seems to give an implausible amount of weight to how students are accepted into the university as the only? mechanism for the success of a different cohert of students at least 30 years later. Schaede and Mankki are not talking a quota system for hiring teachers — they are talking about how Education majors get accepted into a university. They aren’t saying that student success at the university changed after the introduction of the quota. They are talking about the performance of 25 year olds whose primary school teacher was accepted into university under different systems (and it certainly complicates stats of matriculation exams when one takes into account that not all beginning Education majors will graduate with a degree in Education, and not all those that graduate will find a job, etc). I just can’t see how the data can be used to support the assertion, even if the underlying premise is correct. In effect, isn’t the article asserting that the education/employment achievements of a 25 year old is due to how their elementary school teacher got accepted to a university?
(As a factual issue, I doubt that retirement was mandatory at 60, but I arrived in Finland after the years in question so I don’t know that for sure. I suspect it was more that primary school teachers *could* retire at 60, with a reduction in pension if they hdn’t worked enough years).
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. What interested me most about the paper was not so much the size and significance but the direction of the effect... Quota removal for the teaching program should have helped students under standard conceptions of meritocracy, and it ends up having the opposite effect. I felt that this supported an alternative conception of meritocracy as discussed here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20221707
Thanks for the response. Personally, I'm neutral about the question of the relationship of quotas and meritocracy. But I just don't think you think you get make that determination based upon the data. We have no idea whether quotas for acceptance into the university are the cause of any purported negative effect. I should think that if you wanted to make such a claim, you'd need to tie the results of students of "quota men" (the men who got accepted under a quota system but wouldn't without one) with the students of "marginal women" (the woman who got accepted under system without quotas but wouldn't have got accepted with a system with one). As far as I can tell, the data can't connect the two: the data is the results of all students, irrespective of whether their primary school teachers would or would have not been selected to the university under a quota system. Again, as far as I can tell, the article just assumes that the negative effects can be attributed to the results of students of marginal women, but there's no data to substantiate it. We don't even know if the "marginal women" got a degree, let alone got hired after they graduated. So at best you could only say that teachers who entered the university later have worse outcomes than the teachers who came through the university earlier. But even if you want to say that a change in selecting students could lead to those effects, you still have the problem that the elimination of a quota probably wasn't the only change: universities may have changed a lot of other things in addition (there has been a steady move to get students into the university soon after high school rather than in their late 20s, but I don't know what procedure for selection were in place during the time-period in question). How do we know that it wasn't the other changes that caused those results if we can't tie the specific scores they received in each of those areas to the outcomes of their students? And you also have the problem that the students share something in addition to the selection criteria: they would have undergone similar training at university. So you could just as easily say that changes to the curriculum produced negative outcomes for the students of graduates of those programmes. But even that is problematic, because 1) students can take an extremely long time to graduate (I've know students who have taken up to 10 years or more) and that many students work as substitutes for years before getting a full-time job. So you can't necessarily say for some years after the quota system ended whether a teacher who retired was actually replaced by a student who came through a non-quota system.
The authors understand these points, which is why they use the age distribution relative to the retirement threshold as an identification strategy. You may not be convinced by that but they have not ignored your concerns. Please look at the papers by Black et al. and Bleemer that they cite, and which are also discussed in my paper. These two papers are much more explicit about pulled in and pushed out students on the margin.
The basic finding in the Finland paper is that students who happened to be in schools with an older age distribution of teachers at the time of quota removal did worse than those in schools with a younger age distribution. This needs explanation. The explanation they offer seems plausible to me. I think the key fact is that male applicants were more likely to come from rural areas and apply from near their place of of birth, which are factors that could affect the interpretation of their scores (for reasons discussed in my paper with Rohini). Had these factors already been considered, quota removal probably would not have had any effect. The quota was just acting as a proxy. That's my interpretation of their findings, at least until I see something more plausible.
This might be too long a time for a response, but the paper was recently mentioned in the Economist and I found this blog post because I was curious if others had talked about it.
I think your premise about the quota being a proxy could certainly be correct, but the article just seems to give an implausible amount of weight to how students are accepted into the university as the only? mechanism for the success of a different cohert of students at least 30 years later. Schaede and Mankki are not talking a quota system for hiring teachers — they are talking about how Education majors get accepted into a university. They aren’t saying that student success at the university changed after the introduction of the quota. They are talking about the performance of 25 year olds whose primary school teacher was accepted into university under different systems (and it certainly complicates stats of matriculation exams when one takes into account that not all beginning Education majors will graduate with a degree in Education, and not all those that graduate will find a job, etc). I just can’t see how the data can be used to support the assertion, even if the underlying premise is correct. In effect, isn’t the article asserting that the education/employment achievements of a 25 year old is due to how their elementary school teacher got accepted to a university?
(As a factual issue, I doubt that retirement was mandatory at 60, but I arrived in Finland after the years in question so I don’t know that for sure. I suspect it was more that primary school teachers *could* retire at 60, with a reduction in pension if they hdn’t worked enough years).
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. What interested me most about the paper was not so much the size and significance but the direction of the effect... Quota removal for the teaching program should have helped students under standard conceptions of meritocracy, and it ends up having the opposite effect. I felt that this supported an alternative conception of meritocracy as discussed here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20221707
Thanks for the response. Personally, I'm neutral about the question of the relationship of quotas and meritocracy. But I just don't think you think you get make that determination based upon the data. We have no idea whether quotas for acceptance into the university are the cause of any purported negative effect. I should think that if you wanted to make such a claim, you'd need to tie the results of students of "quota men" (the men who got accepted under a quota system but wouldn't without one) with the students of "marginal women" (the woman who got accepted under system without quotas but wouldn't have got accepted with a system with one). As far as I can tell, the data can't connect the two: the data is the results of all students, irrespective of whether their primary school teachers would or would have not been selected to the university under a quota system. Again, as far as I can tell, the article just assumes that the negative effects can be attributed to the results of students of marginal women, but there's no data to substantiate it. We don't even know if the "marginal women" got a degree, let alone got hired after they graduated. So at best you could only say that teachers who entered the university later have worse outcomes than the teachers who came through the university earlier. But even if you want to say that a change in selecting students could lead to those effects, you still have the problem that the elimination of a quota probably wasn't the only change: universities may have changed a lot of other things in addition (there has been a steady move to get students into the university soon after high school rather than in their late 20s, but I don't know what procedure for selection were in place during the time-period in question). How do we know that it wasn't the other changes that caused those results if we can't tie the specific scores they received in each of those areas to the outcomes of their students? And you also have the problem that the students share something in addition to the selection criteria: they would have undergone similar training at university. So you could just as easily say that changes to the curriculum produced negative outcomes for the students of graduates of those programmes. But even that is problematic, because 1) students can take an extremely long time to graduate (I've know students who have taken up to 10 years or more) and that many students work as substitutes for years before getting a full-time job. So you can't necessarily say for some years after the quota system ended whether a teacher who retired was actually replaced by a student who came through a non-quota system.
The authors understand these points, which is why they use the age distribution relative to the retirement threshold as an identification strategy. You may not be convinced by that but they have not ignored your concerns. Please look at the papers by Black et al. and Bleemer that they cite, and which are also discussed in my paper. These two papers are much more explicit about pulled in and pushed out students on the margin.
The basic finding in the Finland paper is that students who happened to be in schools with an older age distribution of teachers at the time of quota removal did worse than those in schools with a younger age distribution. This needs explanation. The explanation they offer seems plausible to me. I think the key fact is that male applicants were more likely to come from rural areas and apply from near their place of of birth, which are factors that could affect the interpretation of their scores (for reasons discussed in my paper with Rohini). Had these factors already been considered, quota removal probably would not have had any effect. The quota was just acting as a proxy. That's my interpretation of their findings, at least until I see something more plausible.
Rajiv:
Regarding "meritocracy," let me reiterate <a href="https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2007/12/04/meritocracy_won/">my point</a> (derived from James Flynn) that meritocracy won’t happen: the problem’s with the “ocracy.”
Thanks Andrew, posting the link again since it didn't appear correctly: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2007/12/04/meritocracy_won/