A Suggestion for College Admissions Offices

One of the skills that colleges are looking for in their incoming students is the ability to write. Currently, they have two ways of judging it. One is the short essay that is part of the SAT writing exam, the other is the collection of essays that are required as part of a college application.

The SAT essay is written in pencil by students whose previous writing experience is probably on a word processor. It is graded by the sort of mechanical standards that you have to use if you want comparable measures for millions of essays graded by (I'm guessing) tens of thousands of graders. One result is that, so far as I can tell, colleges do not put much weight on that particular piece of evidence.

Application essays have another, and potentially more serious, problem—the college has no way of knowing who wrote them. They may represent the work of the student, they may represent the work of his parents, they may represent the work of an admissions adviser paid by the parents to help get their kid into a good school. Even if the student sending them in played some role in the writing, the college has no way of knowing how much what they are getting reflects his ability, how much editing by others.

There is a simple solution to this problem, one which no college I am aware of has used: Have the applicant write an essay that they know is his. Put him in a room with a word processor—also pen and paper for those who prefer to write that way—and a short list of possible topics. Give him an hour and see what he produces. That should sharply distinguish applicants who can write coherent and grammatical English prose from those who cannot and, less sharply, distinguish the minority who are actually good writers.

The mechanics of the proposal should be pretty straightforward. Many applicants visit the colleges they are applying to, take a campus tour, attend a presentation by the admissions office, perhaps have an interview. For those, all that are required are a few rooms in the admissions office provided with computers.

What about students who do not visit, perhaps because they live far away? Colleges have alumni, and use them in the admissions process, often to interview such students. Alumni have computers. Arrange, in each region of the country from which students apply, for at least one alumnus to invite applicants to demonstrate their writing ability.

Once such arrangements become reasonably common, it should be possible to do the same thing in a more organized form, with someone in each major city in charge of supervising such essays on behalf of any college who wants them.

Merit Scholarships and Conspiracies in Restraint of Trade

We spent last week visiting colleges that my son is thinking of applying to. The experience reinforced the impression I had earlier gotten from web pages—that what Harvard (and, mutatis mutandis, Vassar and ...) wants are students who decided, at age fourteen, that their highest priority for the next four years was doing whatever it would take to get into Harvard. It also raised an interesting puzzle. A number of the schools we visited claim to have very generous financial aid programs based on need, but no merit based scholarships at all. How and why?

Why the schools, collectively, would want such a policy is pretty clear. Bidding against each other for the very best students—which is what merit based scholarships amount to—is costly. From a financial standpoint, they are better off if they all refrain. From an ideological standpoint, I expect most of those involved in the process would rather spend their money on smart poor students than on very smart rich ones.

But what is in the collective interest of all is not necessarily in the private interest of each. Schools benefit by having extraordinarily good students—and even the Harvards and Vassars of the world do not have an unlimited supply of such. Brilliant students are fun to teach, which makes the school more attractive to potential faculty. They create intellectual excitement, which makes it more attractive to applicants. And, with luck, they end up with fame and/or fortune, some of which may get shared with their alma mater. If all the elite schools refrain from bidding for such they save a good deal of money, and lose only to the extent that some brilliant students who can afford Harvard decide to go to some less elite but more generous school instead—which should not be too much of a risk if the lack of generosity applies only to students whose parents can afford Harvard without financial aid. But if an individual elite school breaks ranks, it has the opportunity to push itself higher in the select company of elite schools.

The logic is very much the same as in an ordinary cartel agreement. All firms in the industry benefit by keeping output down and prices up, but each firm benefits even more if the others follow that policy while it cuts prices a little and expands output a lot.

Which raises an obvious suspicion—that what I am observing is indeed cartel pricing, that some subset of elite schools, containing schools that believe they are competing mostly against each other, have made an implicit agreement to refrain from competing for potential students who are both extraordinarily able and financially well off.

About twenty years ago, eight Ivy League schools were accused by the Justice Department of just such an arrangement—sharing information on student applicants, agreeing not to offer merit based scholarships, avoiding competition for the best students. The controversy was settled by a consent agreement, in which the schools agreed to a variety of things, including ending the annual meetings at which they, along with 15 other schools in the Northeast, discussed the financial aid applications of students that had been accepted by more than one of the schools. My observation of current financial aid policy suggests that at least some of the schools involved may have continued, or resumed, the same practices, probably in a less visible form.

Assuming that is what is going on, what are the implications–aside from the possibility of future collisions with the Justice Department? The obvious one is that wealthy schools will be a little richer, and wealthy parents of very smart kids who want to go to those schools a little poorer; off hand I don't see anything particularly bad (or good) about that.

The less obvious one is that the position of elite schools, at least the ones refusing to compete for top students, will be a little less secure. A few years ago, when my daughter was looking at colleges, one of the ones she seriously considered was Saint Olaf. One thing that struck us in the process was an email from their admissions officer, informing us that by applying a little earlier our daughter could be considered for a merit scholarship. Saint Olaf was, and is, a school a little below the level of Harvard, Vassar, and the like—and trying to work its way up.

A second thing that struck us about that particular interaction is relevant to my earlier post about the desire of elite colleges for students whose academic records all fit the same pattern—the desire for a cookie-cutter elite. The reason the admission officer gave for sending the email was that our daughter was home schooled, and Saint Olaf had found that home schooled students were sometimes very well qualified, hence potential recipients of merit scholarships.

That was very nearly the opposite of the reaction we were getting from other schools, whose attitude was that they were willing to consider home schooled students but not at all sure how to handle their applications, and would much prefer that such applicants do their best to obtain conventional credentials by taking some graded courses somewhere, anywhere, before applying. It was the admission officer at Saint Olaf who told us that what blew them away was the list our daughter included in her application of books she had read—four hundred of them.

All of which suggests that the indirect effect of the policies of the elite schools may be to open up American collegiate education to a little more competition. Which might be a good thing.

Accidental Incentives: Speculation and Reputational Enforcement

If a copper mine shuts down in Chile the price of copper goes up, giving other producers an incentive to produce more copper, consumers an incentive to consume less. The objective of the individual producer or consumer is to improve his own welfare, not the functioning of the economy, but he is led, as Adam Smith long ago pointed out, as by an invisible hand to achieve a desirable objective that is no part of his intent.

Seen from the individual's point of view, the effect on the market is an accident—indeed, an undesirable one. Producing more makes prices go down, which is not what the producer wants to happen. But seen in a broader sense, the market is a system of feedbacks, signals, that give the individual actors the right message, make it in their interest to produce more copper or consume less when and only when doing so improves the overall outcome. The gain to the individual actor is a measure of the social gain from his action.

There are some cases which look very similar but are actually quite different—where the link between what it pays an actor to do and the benefit his action produces is in some sense an accident.

One example is speculation. A successful speculator buys things when they are cheap, sells when they are expensive, and so both makes a profit for himself and smooths out price movements. The latter effect can be a very large benefit to other people. A speculator who sees a food shortage coming well in advance and takes the opportunity to buy up grain early gives other and less well informed people an incentive to use less grain, to plant more of other food crops, and thus to alleviate what might otherwise be a serious famine.

Unlike the usual case, however, the profit to the speculator is not a measure of the benefit produced. To see that, consider a case where the speculator learns of the shortage only a short time before everyone else would have learned—short enough so that the increase in price due to his activity does not have any significant effect on other people's behavior. He can still make a lot of money—not because he has produced valuable information but because goods belong to him instead of someone else when their price goes up. One implication, pointed out long ago in a classic article by Jack Hirshleifer, is the possibility of inefficient speculation. A rational speculator might spend a million dollars acquiring information about future price movements whose social value is zero—his whole profit is coming at the expense of whomever would have held the goods when their price went up if he hadn't bought them first.

The point is illustrated by a famous law case, Laidlaw v. Organ. A tobacco trader in New Orleans somehow got advance word of the treaty that ended the war of 1812 and took the opportunity to buy a large quantity of tobacco at the low price that had resulted from the British blockade. When the seller discovered that the war was over he attempted to reneg on the contract. The court held that the contract was binding.

The same pattern occurs in at least one other important context. I buy a jacket from a department store that guarantees to refund the purchase price if I am not satisfied with the produce, and when I return it they refuse to give me back my money. It is not worth suing them, but it is worth telling my friends—and anyone else who will listen—how badly I have been treated. The result is that other people stop buying from the store. That is a good reason why stores should live up to their promises, even if they are not at risk of being sued if they do not.

This sort of reputational enforcement surely plays a large role in encouraging commercial honesty. But, just as in the case of speculation, the incentive that makes it work is not linked to the actual usefulness of the behavior. The reason my friends—and even enemies—stop buying from the store is not to punish it for mistreating me but to protect themselves from similar mistreatment.

To see why this matters, imagine a case where it is not immediately obvious which party to a dispute is at fault. In order for interested third parties to punish the right person, they have to know who it is. But they have little incentive to investigate the claims of each, since they have the easier alternative of no longer doing business with either. That "punishes" one of us for cheating, the other for reporting the cheat. Anticipating that I realize that, having been cheated, I am better off saying nothing. At which point the mechanism for keeping firms honest stops working.

One conclusion is that reputational enforcement works only in contexts where it is cheap and easy for interested third parties to discover who was at fault; elsewhere I have argued that one function of arbitration is to lower the cost to third parties of doing so. My point here is a more general one—that it is worth distinguishing between those feedback mechanisms that work because the incentive to act measures the value of acting, and those that work, as it were, by accident.

Deleting Comments

It occurs to me that some posters may be curious about the "This post has been removed by a blog administrator" notices on the comments to many of my posts, and wonder if I'm censoring people who disagree with me.

I'm not. So far, all of the posts I have been deleted have been ones that make no contribution at all to the subject and are simply there to get a link up on the web to something else. Recently there have been a bunch of them where the text is "Hi, thank you very much. good job." The link is the name of the poster--not to his blogger.com profile but to a web page.

Cookie-cutter Elites

"There is no single academic path we expect all students to follow, but the strongest applicants take the most rigorous secondary school curricula available to them. An ideal four-year preparatory program includes four years of English, with extensive practice in writing; four years of math; four years of science: biology, chemistry, physics, and an advanced course in one of these subjects; three years of history, including American and European history; and four years of one foreign language."

(From Harvard College Admissions)

Next year my son will be applying to colleges, so we are currently collecting information about colleges he might apply to. One thing that strikes me is the degree to which the elite liberal arts colleges almost all want the same thing in their applicants—a standardized record of academic accomplishment whose production will have consumed most of the educational opportunities of four years of high school.

Consider the passage quoted above. Despite the initial disclaimer, the description of an "ideal four-year preparatory program" implies a pretty uniform picture of the ideal student. It is a picture that any reasonably intelligent and hard-working student should be able to fit—provided that he is more interested in getting into Harvard than in getting an education.

Reading? Four years of English will include lots of it, almost all selected and required by someone else—a pretty good way of persuading a student that reading is someone only to be done when someone makes you do it. Science? There are, perhaps, high school age kids who are interested in every science offered by their school, or at least able to fake it. But they are less likely to make a real world contribution than the enthusiast who reads up on relativity and quantum mechanics when he is supposed to be studying Dickens—and thinks biology is icky.

Studying a language is for some people an interesting intellectual activity; speaking a foreign language can be a useful skill. But the world is full of interesting things to do and skills to learn. This particular skill is well short of essential for someone living in the middle of some three hundred million English speakers. So why make it the key to Harvard—in preference to the ability to build furniture, or write sonnets, or survive in the woods?

It is a poorly hidden secret that the reason professors give multiple choice tests is that, whatever their limitations as a tool for measuring learning, at least they are easy to grade. The attitude seems to have trickled down to the admissions officers. Make sure there is a check mark in each box. If too many applicants manage it, they can always be ranked by SAT scores. Perhaps give an extra point to an applicant who seems to actually know something outside the curriculum or care about something other than checking boxes.

If all else fails, flip a coin.

Perhaps I am being unfair—I have not discussed my reaction with any admissions officers. But reading those web pages leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Salamander is now Webbed

The Usenet group rec.arts.sf.composition, where people talk about writing speculative fiction, has had a number of discussions over the years on whether one should or should not web unpublished work. I offered my experience with my two most recent nonfiction books, both of which were on the web as late drafts well before they were published; the response I got from a number of posters was "fiction is different." Their basic argument was that publishers would be less willing to publish a work that had already been available for free.

My agent, whose opinion I respect, disagrees. Acting on her advice and my own inclination, have just put the entire text of Salamander, my as yet unpublished second novel, on the web for anyone who wants to read it. Comments are welcome, either here or by email.

The Ultimate Pocket Computer?

A commenter on a recent post points to the availability of a virtual keyboard—a tiny device that projects a keyboard on a nearby flat surface and watches your keystrokes. Combine that with something like the just announced Samsung Beam and a desk and adjacent wall, and you have a cell phone sized device with a desktop sized keyboard and screen. No key travel and you may have to use it in the dark, but it would still be quite a gadget.

Googling around, I found a better price for the keyboard.

Bayh's Withdrawal: A Conjecture

The news stories I have seen on Indiana senator Evan Bayh's decision not to run for reelection have mostly focused on the decision, not the timing, although they usually mention that, by leaving it to the last minute, he made it almost impossible for anyone to collect the signatures required to enter the primary. Nobody seems to be asking why he did it that way.

One interesting possibility occurs to me. Perhaps he believed that an earlier announcement would result in a bruising primary fight and the probable winner would be a candidate unlikely to win the election—roughly speaking, what happened to the Republicans not long ago in a New York congressional district. Resigning only a few days before the deadline for the primary throws the choice to the state democratic committee—which can, and perhaps will, pick the strongest candidate.

I should add that I know very little about Indiana state politics, so this is only a conjecture. Perhaps some better informed reader can tell me if it is a plausible one.

A Suggestion for Samsung

Samsung has just announced at Barcelona a new cell phone, the Beam, that they expect to have on the market this summer. Its special feature is a built-in pico projector, making it a combination cell phone and (very wimpy) video projector. A cute gadget, although not one that I am likely to have much use for. I do, however, have one suggestion for improving it.

The Beam lacks a hardware keyboard, and so will use the usual on-screen virtual keyboard. One disadvantage is that the keyboard takes up a good deal of the screen, reducing how much else you can see. So why doesn't Samsung modify the software to let the virtual keyboard be visible on the camera's screen, where it is needed to type on, but invisible in the image that the pico projector is throwing on the wall, giving the user the best of both worlds?

Meanwhile I continue to wait for Verizon to announce tethering for its Android phones so I can switch from T-Mobile to a mobile network generally regarded as much better, for the Nexus One or its near twin the HTC Incredible to become available on Verizon, for an Android version of the giant screen HD2 to show up somewhere, for ... .

Technology as a spectator sport.

Words: "Reform"

When people are arguing about healthcare reform, it is worth thinking a little about what the word means. Taken literally, reforming something only means changing it, putting it into a new form. In that sense, both the institution of a U.S. version of national health care and the abolition of all government involvement in health care in the U.S. would be reforms—just different ones.

The word is used in practice, however, not to mean "make different" but "make better." Which means that if I disagree with you about what changes would make something better then, from your standpoint, I am against reform—and from my standpoint you are.

Not a usage of language likely to promote productive dialogue.

Words: "Sustainability"

The university I teach at is very big on "sustainability." As best I can tell, what it means is doing things in such a way that you could continue doing them forever, or at least for a very long time. Use of fossil fuels is "not sustainable" since, eventually, we would run out. Use of windmills, on the other hand, is. Similarly for a variety of other issues.

It sounds very nice if you don't think about it. If you do, it may occur to you that belief in the vital importance of sustainability is based on an implicit assumption of stasis—a world where, whatever you are doing, you will keep doing it forever. That isn't the world we live in. The critical resource of today may be irrelevant fifty years from now; the pollution of today may be a resource then--consider manure—or the resource pollution. Rabbits were a resource—until they became, in Australia, a plague. Similarly for Kudzu in the U.S.

We don't know how we will doing things fifty or a hundred years hence, but that it will be the same way we are doing them at present is not a likely guess.

More on Cell Phones

As long term readers know, I've long been in search of a better pocket computer/web browser/cell phone. Recent developments:

1. I spent some time with a Droid at a Verizon store and found that, although the physical keyboard is very poor, the on screen keyboard is considerably better than I expected—in part because it provides good visual feedback as you type.

2. While the Android OS does not provide support for bluetooth keyboards in its bluetooth stack, there is now third party software that permits some, but not all, bluetooth keyboards to work with an Android phone. It supports SPP keyboards but not HID ones. Unfortunately, the folding bluetooth keyboard I already own is HID, so I have not yet had a chance to try out the KeyPro software.

Combining these two, I'm wondering if my insistance on a phone with a physical keyboard is a mistake. I might be better off getting a phone with a large screen and no keyboard, plus a suitable bluetooth keyboard to use when I want to enter substantial amounts of text—posting to this blog or Usenet, or editing a book manuscript. That would give me a pretty good laptop substitute. It wouldn't run the same software as my desktop but it would handle the same word processing documents, and I could manage email by a combination of gmail and web access to the server that holds my Eudora mail. It's tempting.

One obvious candidate is the Google phone. One limitation of that is that it doesn't yet run on Verizon, which seems to be generally agreed to have the best 3G network. One problem with most Verizon phones is that Verizon uses a different system from everyone else, with the result that its phones mostly won't work abroad and can not be shifted to another carrier. The one exception I know of is the Touch Pro 2. The Verizon version works both on Verizon and abroad, and I gather it is physically capable of working on (at least) the AT&T and T-Mobile networks, although set up not to. It also has a big screen and a better keyboard than the Droid. Unfortunately, it runs Windows Mobile, and I'm inclined to stick with Android if possible.

Another possibility is the HTC Supersonic, which is apparently an Android version of the HD2, currently available in Europe. It has an even bigger screen than the others and a faster processor. On the other hand, if rumors are correct, it's headed for the Sprint network.

If HTC would produce a Verizon/worldphone version of the Supersonic, or Google produce the equivalent for their phone ... . And while I'm dreaming, perhaps the next upgrade to Android will include HID support in the bluetooth stack.

Jewish and Irish Law

I've been trying to make sense of two different legal systems in order to include them in my seminar this spring. Part of the fun is noticing connections.

One of the striking features of ancient Irish law is that it was privately enforced. If the judge rules that Shawn owes Ian the value of 15 cows as compensation for an injury but Shawn declines to pay, Ian's response is not to ask some authority to enforce the verdict—there is no authority responsible for enforcing court verdicts. It isn't even, as in the corresponding Icelandic situation, to go back to the court and have Shawn outlawed.

The Irish solution is distraint. The first step is for Ian to formally give notice to Shawn that he intends to seize fifteen of his cows. Shawn then has a period of from one to five days—the exact length depends on the details of the case—in which to pay up. If he doesn't, Ian is entitled to enter Shawn's land early the next morning, accompanied by a professional law agent, seize fifteen cattle, and drive them to a private pound, a field on his own property or, with permission, on someone else's.

There is then another period of days during which Shawn can pay up and get his cattle back. Once that has expired, the final stage of the process begins. Each day, cattle to a specified value forfeit to Ian, until eventually all fifteen have forfeited and the debt has thus been paid.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one interesting feature of Jewish law is the way in which it deals with ambiguous cases. If it is unclear whether Joseph does or does not owe a certain amount to Simeon, the usual rule is that the court will not compel Joseph to pay but, if Simeon has seized property of Joseph's corresponding to the amount Joseph might owe him, the court won't compel Simeon to give it back. The underlying principle is that the court can only make you pay money if there is reasonable proof that you owe it. There is no proof Joseph owes the money, so the court won't make him pay it. There is no proof Joseph doesn't owe the money, so if Simeon has seized it the court won't make him give it back.

Comparing the two systems, the obvious suspicion is that Jewish law is built on the remnants of something like Irish law, a system where plaintiffs executed their own judgments by seizing property. In the version of the law that we encounter in Maimonides, the Talmud, and the Mishnah it is assumed that by the time the court gets involved in the case, the plaintiff may already have taken action on his own behalf. Doing so creates a new status quo, and the court requires adequate proof—that the money was not owed—to change it.