What is Merit?

One of the frustrating aspects of current discourse on merit is the widespread presumption that an individual’s potential for success can be identified based on some transparent measure of past performance. For higher education, the measure that most advocates of meritocratic selection have in mind is something like a test score or composite academic index. Taking account of extraneous factors that are not directly and causally linked to performance is viewed as a departure from meritocratic selection.

I have contested this perspective in several earlier posts and a recent article, on the grounds that factors not directly and causally linked to performance may still be useful for the interpretation of prior accomplishment, and hence can be informative about the potential for future success. Under such circumstances, the neglect of such factors is inconsistent with meritocratic selection.

A recent article by Roland Fryer makes this point very effectively. He argues that “opponents and supporters of DEI have very different ideas about what it is” and expresses the hope that the “parts of DEI that the majority of us agree on don’t become collateral damage” in the rush to dismantle it. He expands on these positions in a recent conversation with Bari Weiss; see especially this segment.

These two conflicting conceptions of DEI may be summarized as follows: opponents view it as preferential treatment, and supporters as talent optimization. Using his own example to illustrate, Fryer makes a case for retaining focus on the latter:

DEI as talent optimization is good for disadvantaged groups, good for organizations that embrace it, and good for America.

DEI at its best is about developing talent, measuring it in a fair way, selecting the best people for important roles, and finding hidden talent in a world where not everyone has an equal chance to exhibit their abilities… At the college level, an admissions policy focused on talent optimization would take into account the obstacles a student has faced. Imagine a rich kid who has had private schools and tutors and a poor kid from a broken home and an underfunded public school. If they have roughly similar academic performance after adjusting for their backgrounds, the poor kid has demonstrated more latent ability even if his unadjusted scores are lower. A talent-focused admissions policy would admit him over his rich competitor. But it wouldn’t do the opposite—accept a rich applicant over a poor one because the former is of an underrepresented race, or because his private-school counselors were able to massage his application to make him seem cultured…

The tumult around DEI has given me many sleepless nights. I received a minority scholarship to attend graduate school; I assume I was a DEI admit. My math GRE scores were in the 95th percentile, while my study partners’ scores hovered around the 99th. But what I endured to achieve those scores—a father in prison and a mother I had yet to meet—were important context.

I worry that the desire to take down DEI in its entirety will make successes like mine harder, even impossible, to realize. What gives me hope is that there are important parts of DEI almost anyone can believe in. Optimizing talent and giving all the opportunity to reach their full potential are at the core of what it means to be American.

Was Roland a beneficiary of DEI policies, or was he selected based on merit? The question itself is poorly formulated—he was both.

In her book on meritocracy, Lani Guinier made the same point using the example of a remarkable cohort of students selected for admission to the College of Holy Cross:

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… 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… 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.

Were these individuals selected based on a proto-DEI policy, or were they selected based on their potential for success? Again, the answer is both.

Selection policies at institutions of higher education are certainly in need of reform. For one thing, they need to be in compliance with last year’s Supreme Court ruling against Harvard. But they also need to ensure that their focus remains on the potential for success, which includes the identification of diamonds in the rough. And they need to communicate these efforts in a transparent manner to a very skeptical public.

Lani Guinier in 1993 (source)