HESA: EDI and the Measurement of Merit

Good primer on EDI/DEI considerations:

…Now it is not obvious (to me at least) that the overall results of such a system are any worse than the overall results of the current system. You gain a little bit of equity in one direction and (perhaps) lose it in another. But there are winners and losers when switching from one system to another and the losers tend to scream louder than the winners.

In an ideal world, of course, one would be able to measure everyone individually by distance travelled, without the use of proxies. That way, “elites” from disadvantaged groups would not be unduly rewarded, and financially disadvantaged whites’ underprivileged position would be recognized. There would still be screaming, of course—people who were in danger of losing their position of privilege would still claim that a context-free, single-point-in-time definition of merit is “better” and “more objective” than a context-dependent one (this is more or less the position taken by the Students for Fair Admissions in the Harvard admissions case decided by the US Supreme Court in 2023). But it would have fewer drawbacks than other schemes which measure disadvantage via proxies.

Why don’t we do that? Well, I would argue it is for two reasons. The first is simply that using proxies to measure disadvantage is a whole heck of a lot cheaper than measuring it at an individual level. With proxies, you can reduce disadvantage to a set of categories that can be indicated by a tick in a box, something that reduces complexity and obviates the need to treat each case individually.

But the second and probably more important reason is that distance travelled is not an entirely straightforward and measurable proposition. It is by no means impossible to create methodologies to look for it: the Loran Scholarships and McGill’s McCall-MacBain scholarships both train assessors to look for precisely this (which is a very good reason why the former is so good at picking future Rhodes Scholars). But the problem is that there is no hard-and-fast algorithm here. You have to put selectors in a position where they can exercise judgment. And frankly, in an increasingly low-trust society, that’s hard to do (Phillip K. Howard’s Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society is very good on the unfree consequences of depriving administrators of the ability to exercise judgement).

And so here’s the thing: if you don’t want to measure disadvantage individually because you are too cheap to do so, and/or you can’t allow people freedom of judgement in assessing disadvantage for the purpose of measuring distance travelled, then what you’re left with as options are measurement by proxy, or settling for a definition of merit that unabashedly favours the members of the lucky sperm club. There is not really a fourth option.

Source: EDI and the Measurement of Merit