I’m sure Yglesias' post in response to the recent SCOTUS ruling against affirmative action will generate plenty of heated debate. But I was struck by one of the points that’s not really about affirmative action at all, or at least not along the dimensions of identity we mostly commonly think about with this topic.
Part of the benefits of being allowed into an elite US university is that they’re tremendously well resourced. Harvard’s endowment fund was worth an astonishing $53 billion recently. It could provide a huge amount of the best quality educational resources to it’s ~21k students.
But should it?
“…the smarter you are at age 18, the more educational resources you should receive” is not an obviously correct allocation of social resources.
It may be an empirical matter as to what educational distribution model is best for a given society. But first we’d have to define what “best” even means. I’m sure there are many highly conflicting opinions out there on that.
Perhaps today’s division of educational resources is the ideal arrangement for some outcome. But it’s certainly not some kind of natural law that the lion’s share of these resources must go towards the people who already did particularly well on a test when they were a child.
Especially insomuch as the sort of people who do well on school tests and, even moreso, gain access to elite institutions today tend to be those who already had access to the most resources since the day that they were born.