Word: klitgaard
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...Though Klitgaard's analysis is ostensibly applicable to any elite institution, he devotes great attention to admissions at Harvard, both on the undergraduate and graduate level, and in many ways the book reads as a rationalization of the selection process within the Yard. Harvard is the archetypal institution confronting the complex problems of selection at the "right tail"--that is, the last part of a bell curve representing all of society--from which minute percentage the most selective institutions call their members...
...right tail--the central issue of the book--is fraught with difficulties and contradictions. What, first of all, ought to be the objective of selection? To say that universities ought to select the "best" possible students is nothing but a platitude. How should merit be defined? As Klitgaard points out, at universities today "merit" is not simply confined to academic merit as measured by grades and test scores. Leadership, motivation, and diversity of background and race are all among the criteria schools consider in selecting their members...
...Klitgaard uses as a baseline the economist's notion that universities should select students to maximize the value added of the education an institution provides. Crudely put, universities want to select those students who, with the help of the education they offer, have the greatest potential for later-life contributions to society. There are, to be sure, a host of problems with this view--not least of all that it takes society's established reward structure as a given, Klitgaard says--but nevertheless it provides the basis for drawing up an admissions policy...
...Klitgaard then proceeds to deal with the problems raised in attempts to meet whatever objectives are chosen for an admissions policy. The central problem is how universities can, with "incomplete and imperfect" information, select the best candidates to meet those objectives. Klitgaard utilizes the vast realm of literature on the various factors aiding prediction both of academic success in universities and of later-life success: grades, standardized tests, interviews, letters of recommendation, intelligence tests, and the like. He closes with a chapter on preferential admissions for minorities, the topic that inflamed the campus five years...
...would be fruitless to try to summarize in detail here the corpus of Klitgaard's analysis. Suffice it to say it is heavily quantitative, loathe to make categorical statements, and in general correctly skeptical of making too much of our ability to predict "success." But from his research, Klitgaard does hazard some striking and, in many ways, unsettling conclusions...