All Intensive Purposes

Jane Galt finds Steve Teles writing about the academic labor market:

[Q]uality (as measured by scholarly productivity) is to a significant degree endogenously produced by initial allocation to institutions. . . . PhDs at higher ranked institutions will find it considerably easier to produce a stream of high-quality work than their counterparts at lower-ranked institutions.

The consequence of this is that initial allocations of individuals to institutions will tend to be highly sticky—high potential PhDs who end up at the “wrong” institutions in the original sort will have a hard time producing the scholarship that shows that they “deserve” to be at the higher ranked institutions (that is, that shows that at the higher ranked institutions they would produce more quality scholarship than incumbents). At the same time, those who have the good luck to end up at the “right” institutions will produce significantly more quality work than they would if they had been sorted into the institutions that matched their inherent potential.

Prompted by this, Jane Galt observes that worries about the victims of higher education's affirmative action:

There is one side effect that he doesn't address, which is that if he's right, the costs of affirmative action to those who are displaced by it are very large. A white male academic shunted off to a lesser institution will never, ever get out of it. And given that the number of good research universities is so small, there is a substantial chance that that is where a displaced candidate will end up.

But why focus on affirmative action (which plausibly has other costs as well)? The problem is not strictly with affirmative action, but with the pretense that the system is meritocratic when it fact its results appear instead to be the result of the initial placement of candidates. Is there any doubt that the same is true, many times over, of public elementary, junior high, and high schools in this country? Why do Galt and other conservatives spend so much time thinking about affirmative action instead of thinking about why it is that minority academics (or graduate students, or college graduates, or high-school graduates) are underrepresented to start with? How many were shunted to "lesser institutions" that they never got out of?

To be fair to Galt, maybe that second-to-last sentence does not reflect the her preoccupations, or her blog's, which I should read more often. Nevertheless, in the context of a conversation and merit and equity in the educational system, perhaps academic hiring is not the most pressing inequity facing us.