The American Talent Initiative Was Doomed From the Start

I try to be charitable towards well-meaning efforts to improve the lives of others, but on the other hand, it is frustrating to see so much money flushed down the drain on initiatives that were fundamentally flawed from the get-go.

As recently reported by Melissa Korn and Matt Barnum at The Wall Street Journal, a $140 million initiative funded by Michael Bloomberg through the American Talent Initiative, with the intention of identifying low-income students and helping them get into more selective colleges with higher graduation rates, has failed in its goal. The needle has not been moved.

Was this predictable? Absolutely, but the findings are worse than predictable, because the entire initiative was pointless from the get-go, at least if we measure success in terms of the effectiveness of our education systems as a system, as opposed to a marketplace where individuals compete for primacy.

This initiative is ill-conceived in a number of different ways.

1. It conflates individuals with averages, suggesting that if poorer students get into colleges with higher graduation rates, they will therefore be more likely to graduate. This ignores that the most significant barrier to graduation is lack of money and resources necessary to succeed in college. What good is it being admitted if you can’t afford to fund the time in college?
2. It ignores that admission to highly selective colleges is a zero-sum game, so while moving some number of poorer students into those colleges may be a benefit for those individual students who get in, they could just as easily be displacing existing low-income students.

3. Because getting into highly selective colleges is indeed a competition, even if low-income students are given additional help on navigating the admissions process, they will likely never be able to compete in the ever-escalating arms race that is selective college admission.
4. If we’re talking about the most selective, elite institutions, we must recognize that the reason they are the most selective, the reason that they are the elite, is because they cater to the elite. If they stop catering to the elite, they are no longer elite, and there is no world in which they will stop being elite.

In a recent interview about his new book, Revenge of The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell, in discussing the core precept of how schools like Harvard operate, puts things rather plainly: “So you’re compelled, if you want to explain this phenomenon, to come up with a more convincing reason why they’re doing it, and my argument is that a school like Harvard is powerfully incentivized to maintain a certain kind of privileged culture. It’s the basis on which their exclusivity and their brand value rests, and to do that, they would like to maintain a certain critical mass of wealthy, privileged, largely white—not exclusively—kids, and it’s very difficult to do that if all you’re doing is picking the smartest, because the overlap between rich and smart is limited.”

Gladwell is speaking in context of Harvard’s aggressive and extensive recruiting of athletes in sports like fencing, rowing and rugby, sports primarily—for now, anyway—played by wealthy, mostly white students.

Harvard has no incentive to become a meritocracy where socioeconomic class is irrelevant to one’s chance at admission, because doing so would be a threat to its elite status and the self-perpetuating wealth that comes with it.

This is not a good thing for a system of higher education. Moving a handful of low-income students into elite spaces via big-money philanthropic swings does nothing to address the much greater needs of the vast majority of students who are matriculating through the system.

Few institutions are like Harvard, but for some reason, many institutions are forced to play the game that is stacked in favor of the Harvards of the world. There will always be some new barrier erected to keep the proportions in line with historical norms. This was the original purpose of the SAT, which was conceived to keep Ivy League colleges from being overwhelmed by Jewish students.

It is strange to invest so much money in trying to get low-income students to compete in a game of admissions they are never going to win because their exclusion is part of the whole point. It would have been more cost-effective to try to seed fencing programs in low-income communities in an effort to identify promising young athletes who can excel in the rich-kid sports.

Seeing college admission as a competition with a constrained number of worthy landing spots is pretty much endemic to the “rich people get involved in education” industry. I recall a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative program I wrote about in 2018 that invested in providing “customized SAT practice” through Khan Academy. The theory was akin to the Bloomberg effort on admissions counseling—help the “worthy” kids get access to the good schools.

These programs, as well meaning as they may be, only perpetuate a bad system that treats success in school like a game, a transaction to be fulfilled, rather than a journey of development to be experienced by everyone inside the system.

I don’t want to come off like too much of a pie-eyed dreamer, but what’s the problem with bringing increased resources to the schools that low-income students already attend?

Is it because some folks have internalized that only a select number of students are worthy of the opportunity of a quality secondary education experience? How does this fit with the broader notion that education is, in the words of Barack Obama, “the great equalizer”?

What if, rather than deciding that we need to quantify a student’s “talent” at age 17, to determine if they deserve extra help, we instead conceive of a system where the development of talent is an ever-present goal?

This attitude is not foreign to classrooms. It’s the attitude that infuses the work of the best teachers I’ve experienced as a student or worked among as an instructor.

Given this fact, it doesn’t seem like to big an ask for the institutions where this learning is supposed to happen to operate from the same set of values.