Harvard, Resentment, Legacies, Class Size, Etc.

There’s been a fair amount of commentary on the Harvard column I wrote for The Chronicle last week. This critique in Harvard Magazine was thoughtful, as were many of the comments under the piece on the site itself. Not all, though: For the record, I’ve never applied to or been rejected by Harvard, although if I had applied the university certainly would have rejected me for completely justified reasons. I wasn’t a very conscientious student in high school, or as an undergraduate for that matter. Nor do I bear the university any personal grudges. Working in the D.C. think tank / journalism / legal world, I know dozens of Harvard graduates and they’re all wonderful, smart people. I’m also pretty baffled by this:

I registered with this website specifically to comment on this story. As a Harvard Alum (class of 08), I can’t help but wonder what made this writer so bitter. Do you not understand that admitting more students would dilute the value of a Harvard degree?

The idea that increasing the freshman class from 1,600 to 2,400 would discernibly dilute the value of a Harvard degree in a nation of 300 million people and a world many times larger is so laughable that in some ways this post is the strongest counter-argument to my thesis yet devised, because if people are really graduating from Harvard with such a weak sense of proportionality then perhaps the university shouldn’t be educating more undergrads after all.

Some more pointed critiques from members of the Harvard faculty can be found here and here. Judith Ryan (who I assume is this Judith Ryan) points out that one of the benefits of spending many millions of dollars hiring more faculty without teaching more students is that it reduces the faculty / student ratio. I responded:

The question of class size comes up a lot in these dicussions, and in the most general way it’s probably true that small faculty / student ratios are better. But studies of class size and other educational factors (most of which have been conducted in K-12 schools) tend to show an inverse relationship between effects and student preparation. In other words, class sizes matter a lot for students who are unprepared, come from disadvantaged backgrounds, etc., but matter little for students who bring more in the way of social capital, aptitude, and other resources to the classroom. Since Harvard admits the smartest, best-prepared students in the universe, I wonder how sensitive to class size they are. But if there’s any elite college-level evidence to bring to bear on this point (Big surveys like Pascarella and Terenzini provide little) I’d love to see it. And even if the general point is granted, it still leaves the question of whether the marginal loss of learning all other students experience as a result of having one more student in class outweighs the marginal benefits that one more student receives at Harvard compared to where they would have otherwise gone.

In reply, Ryan said:

The matter of class size at the college level has not been as much studied as it has at the elementary and secondary-school level. Studies that do exist work with different university systems and thus aren’t entirely compatible. There’s no space here to give a disquisition on research on this question. Students themselves tend to have divided opinions. The Light report showed that they say they get more out of a course when the class size is small. Yet practical experience at Harvard suggests that many students choose large-enrollment courses. We don’t know exactly why this is, but it may be because an individual student is less likely to be called on to answer a question. In my view, class size matters most in certain kinds of courses. Writing courses and foreign language courses are excellent examples of subject areas where smaller class size improves students’ performance.

There’s more to the post, based on Dr. Ryan’s personal experience teaching literature, which I have no reason to doubt. That said, “There’s no space here to give a disquisition on research on this question” is unsatisfying. First, because this is the Internet, so there’s actually infinite space. One of the consequences of the IT revolution is that you have to come up with new euphemisms for “I’d rather not take the time to track down and cite actual research findings to support my case.” But in any event, there’s not much research. Pascarella and Terenzini’s authoritative How College Affects Students says: “We uncovered 10 studies that focus on the effects of class size on course learning. All of the investigations are quasi-experimental or correlational in design. … Unfortunately, five of the studies used course grade as the measure of learning. … The conflicting evidence and continuing methodological problems surrounding this small body of research make it difficult to form a firm conclusion.”

This is pretty astounding. There’s a whole body of K-12 class size research despite the fact that class sizes don’t vary all that much — the vast majority of classes are between 15 and 35 students. College classes, by contrast, range into the thousands, and there are plenty of courses among and inside of colleges with similar curricula that could be used for study, yet there’s an absolute paucity of research. Meanwhile, the lead article in this week’s Chronicle Review begins as follows:

Michael Sandel, a 56-year-old political scientist who teaches one of Harvard’s most popular courses, “Justice,” shrinks that university’s cavernous Sanders Theatre down to a seminar room. An exaggeration, yes, but not by much. Sandel handles 1,000 students more adroitly than most teachers can a tenth, a fiftieth, that number.

There’s a picture accompanying the article (the online version really doesn’t do it justice) of Sandel standing in the packed theater. Look at it and ask yourself: If they could fit in some more rows and bump up the class size to, say, 1,600, would they? Should they? I think the answer in both cases is obviously “Yes.” At that size, the class is lecture as performance. Sandel is good at it, the students want it, of course it would be a good idea. All of which is to say that “we reduced class size” is not nearly a good enough answer, given the lack of evidence that it matters very much for students of Harvard caliber.

Meanwhile, I was going to respond to Emily’s post in which she gets defensive about legacy admissions, but current Harvard legacy Dylan Mathews did such a thorough job here I have little to add, other than to say that while Emily is right to call me out for sloppy writing w/r/t “children of legacies,” otherwise I think the point stands. Of course many legacies are terrific students (Dylan is a very talented writer and journalist, for example, and began writing sharp political analysis when he was, like, 15, that is, the same age I spent all my time playing Strat-o-matic baseball.) But in the end admissions preferences are what they are. They matter, even if it hurts to say so. Emily says:

The conversation about legacy admits seems very personal to me, and it’s very hard for me to get away from that. I’ve had people here on campus and elsewhere who have heard me talk about being the daughter of an alum say to me, “You took a place away from a more deserving, more qualified student.” And all I’m saying is, I don’t think that’s the way these statistical patterns operate, on that kind of personal level, and I don’t think it’s fair to have to feel guilty about going to the same college as your mom, even if it is Princeton. I don’t think its fair to have to feel guilty about going to Princeton.

Being a legacy doesn’t make you history’s greatest monster. But admissions is a zero-sum game. Harvard admits 1,600 and some students per year, and no more. There’s no way to know for sure if you edged out a more deserving candidate by checking the legacy box, but, not coincidentally, that ambiguity also serves the interests of legacies. It’s a little like being on a firing squad where everyone is shooting blanks except one, and nobody knows which one. You can tell yourself “I might not have fired the fatal shot,” but you were still on the firing squad. Admissions preferences of any kind — faculty, athletics, affirmative action — only matter at the margins. The only reason to check the box is to push yourself over the line.

Legacy status isn’t a reason to be wracked with guilt for the rest of your life, and I don’t think we’re doing students any favors by forcing them to make these kinds of difficult ethical choices when they’re 17 years old. But I would say that being a legacy increases your moral obligation to use your Ivy league education to benefit the common good.