Rethinking Higher Ed with Harvard’s Former President
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Are we recording? I think that's looking great. That's looking good. If you guys stay there, if you move it closer, it goes real up. I'm not moving. I'm sitting right here. I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. Are you sure? 100%. It's on maximum right now. Last week, I found myself in Sun Valley, Idaho, at a conference with a lot of bigwigs. As you might be able to tell, I didn't have my regular producers with me. So my wife, Nellie, stepped in as my field engineer. So it's quiet. Yeah, I see it. Nice to see you, Kelly.

Among those bigwigs was former Honestly guest Larry Summers. Larry's also the former secretary of the Treasury, an economist, and the former president of Harvard University. The timing was fortuitous.

That's because last month, Harvard went before the Supreme Court to defend its race-based admissions policies. The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to affirmative action in higher education, striking down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

and lost the case. The court found Harvard was essentially filling quotas here when a minority applicant was granted admission. The Chief Justice wrote that Harvard's admissions policies, quote, "cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution."

Now, this ruling has led to a massive debate in American life right now about the future of higher education. And it's led to many questioning another admissions policy that many American universities have long taken for granted. And that is the policy of giving preference to college applicants whose family has already attended the school. It's called legacy admissions.

In light of the Supreme Court ruling just over the past few weeks, legacy admissions have been scrapped at top schools, including Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon in my home city of Pittsburgh, and just this week at Wesleyan University.

So I wanted to sit down with Larry Summers to talk about all of it, the future of American higher education, whether scrapping legacy admissions actually goes far enough, what he thinks admissions departments will do in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, and what he might have done differently as president of Harvard if he could go back in time. And last and most fundamentally, what makes American higher education worth saving in the first place? We'll be right back. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Okay, well, we're here at Sun Valley with every single master of the universe. I'm grateful to you for taking the time to talk to me. Glad to be with you, Barry. Well, Larry Summers, welcome to Honestly.

Okay, so a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court decided in the 6-3 decision to strike down the ability of both public and private universities to use race explicitly in the admissions process. They struck down affirmative action.

The cases brought to the court were by students for fair admissions, and they had cases against UNC, the oldest public university in the country, and against Harvard, the oldest private university in the country. And basically, the court argued that Harvard had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that UNC had violated the 14th Amendment of the Civil Rights Equal Protection Clause.

Larry, you were the president of Harvard for five years between 2001 and 2006. So I guess I just want to start with, you know, as the former president of the oldest private university, arguably the most prestigious university in the country, what did you make of the court's decision? I wish they hadn't reached that decision.

I think private universities should have very wide scope to set admissions policies as they wish to. But I think the kind of discrimination in favor of groups that have traditionally been underrepresented

is a reasonable step towards fairness in our society, and certainly is one that courts should not be getting involved in prohibiting private universities from engaging it. I worry that a consequence of this decision is that

universities are going to try to resurrect the old order using different admissions criteria. And that means the old order being the same percentage of different groups that are admitted. And what they'll do is they'll move to admissions criteria that don't pay attention to standardized tests.

or they'll move to admissions criteria that are based on arbitrarinesses of geography. And the result will be that you'll get less worthy applicants, that you'll get less excellent students, and that you'll get worse educational outcomes. I think this debate has lost the thread in a very important way, Barry.

We focused on making as precious as possible the educational experience on these campuses that educate far less than 1% of the college kids in the country. The right focus is on maximizing opportunity for excellence for as many people as possible in our country. And the places where the great universities should start

is by focusing on the word opportunity, by eliminating legacy admissions, by not giving special privileges for people who are good at what you might call aristocratic sports. Like rowing. Where you need extensive private coaching and being more open to everybody. That's the first thing they should do. Second thing they should do is they should admit larger classes. Ultimately,

Any institution has to decide whether it's going to define its greatness by its reach or by the number of people it excludes. The Augusta Golf Club defines its greatness in part by how exclusive it is. I think that's the wrong way for our greatest universities to think. I think our greatest universities should be thinking about how many people they reach.

And to start with, that means that classes in the Ivy League should be substantially larger than they are 40 years ago, keeping pace with the population. I just want to stay on the court's decision for one second, because for those of us who followed the trial from the beginning, as I'm sure you did, from the district court case which started in 2014, there were some really damning and disturbing details, I think, there.

that came out. For one, it came out that when Harvard was sending recruitment letters, they required a lower SAT cutoff score for white applicants than for Asian applicants. The other thing that came out is while Asian applicants on average had much higher test scores and grades than white applicants, the Asian applicants were consistently getting lower scores on their overall admissions rating, what they called the personal rating.

You were at this institution. What did you make of, to me, what are pretty blatant examples of anti-Asian discrimination coming to light?

I haven't studied the record closely enough of the admissions practices that I'm prepared to pass judgment. But I certainly think there are grounds for concern that as we focused on attributes like personal qualities and being well-rounded that were subjective.

that the application of that subjectivity may well have worked against some quite extraordinary and quite excellent people. And I think it's appropriate for there to be some careful look at that. I think in fairness to understanding the reality, if you look at the fraction of Asian Americans who got into Harvard or in the Harvard class, it went way up.

between the time when the suit was brought and the current moment. I think that was probably appropriate. Perhaps it was overdue. That's not something I can judge. But it would be a serious mistake for anyone to think that the admissions practices of today, before the case,

were the same as the admissions practices that were studied in some of the statistical work that was presented in the course of the case. There were a lot of people who looked at this broad picture overall that's unfolded

basically over the past decade, and came away with the conclusion that in the very same way that there used to be discrimination in quotas against Jews, that there were now in these elite institutions discrimination in quotas against Asians, and that in a sense Asians were the new Jews. What do you make of that argument? Barry, I'm somebody who probably relative to most people who've been in leadership positions in leading universities have sympathy with some of the concerns that have been raised and

take very seriously that groups with a lot of academic excellence may not have been represented in our classes as fully as they should have been. So I take the concerns very seriously. That said, I think the analogy is a bit overdone. There's a clear, vivid, blatant written record

of anti-Semitism. We want to have fewer Jews in our classes. We have to find a way to have fewer Jews in our classes. With all the discovery that's been done, millions of pages of documents, there is nothing paralleling that with respect to Asian Americans. And that is a huge difference.

I am not saying that the impact of some of the policies that have been pursued in support of diversity have not had unfortunate and possibly even inappropriate consequences for some groups. But there is nothing that says to me that there was the kind of willful, active desire to hold down a group within the population.

that existed in an earlier time. If you read the correspondence of President Lowell of Harvard from the 1920s, there is nothing that remotely approaches that from any senior official of any Ivy League university. So I do genuinely think that that one is a bit overdrawn. At the same time,

I do think that we have had some cultural conceptions of what constitutes a great student and a great member of our community that we probably haven't been broad-minded enough about. That's why the kind of changes that have taken place in classes over the last decade seem to me to be most welcome.

Okay, so right after the decision comes down from the court, you publish a column in the Washington Post with this headline, the affirmative action ruling is big, now elite colleges need to think bigger. And you started the column this way, you said that unless universities now respond dramatically and innovatively, the likely result will be the degradation of an American university system that is the envy of the world.

I think a lot of people in this country see the fact that young Americans have taken on $1.6 trillion in student loans for jobs that may not be relevant to the market today, given the technological change, and say our system is the opposite, Larry, of enviable. Make the case to me that it still remains the envy of the world. So here's the simplest case. Xi Jinping's daughter went to Harvard.

Students from all over the world come to American universities. Higher education services are one of the largest exports that the United States has. That's because people from all over the world want to come study at American universities, even though they're leaving their homeland or leaving a chance to make connections in the homeland. The fact that it is a magnet to the whole world

tells you something about its quality. If you look at the research accomplishments that come out of American universities, in the sciences, in the social sciences, if you look at the dynamic companies that are spawned out of the research that's done on search techniques,

at Stanford that spawned Google, or on mRNA that spawned Moderna and the COVID vaccine at Harvard. If you look at the financial industries, which derive a lot of their innovation from ideas in academic finance at MIT and at the University of Chicago, I think it is hard to believe

that our universities are not, for all their flaws, the envy of the world. And if you look at...

At universities abroad, too often they have admission standards which are by lottery. And so there's no opportunity for the most excellent to distinguish themselves. Too often hiring as professors is kind of done the same way as it's done at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where the people have been there longest.

get the choicest assignments. So I'm no friend of many of the practices in American universities, but people vote with their feet and they vote massively in favor of American universities. So in this column, you give a laundry list of reforms that you think elite colleges in particular need to make.

Ban legacy admissions, eliminate what you call aristocratic sports, which I loved, like crew and fencing, train college admissions counselors to detect when something is inauthentic, and I want to talk about what that means, eliminating early admissions, more explicitly considering family disadvantage in selecting applicants, expanding class sizes, and doing outreach to lower-income schools. So I want to go through those one by one. Let's start with banning legacy admissions.

I think there is too much of a preference. I don't think it serves a useful social function. I think it is unfair and I think it sends a bad signal about the institutional citizenship of elite education. And I think at a time when the issue of estrangement of elites is so big in our politics,

I think the right thing to do is for our leading universities to do what MIT has already done, what Johns Hopkins has already done, what Amherst has already done. I hope everybody follows and that legacy admissions are gone two years from now. And I think if they are gone 10 years from now, people will wonder how they ever lasted as long as they did. There was an interesting op-ed in The Times in the past few days in which this Princeton professor wrote

defended legacy admissions on the grounds that legacy students, because they have privilege, because they have deep social and cultural connections, are part of the reason less advantaged students get so much out of these elite schools. Not to mention the fact that those are the families that give the libraries and endow all of these things. What do you make of that argument? There are plenty of incredibly meritorious children of privileged people.

And so if you want to make sure that your school has leading families represented in it,

you can do that with a total emphasis on merit and without giving a special privilege for the already privileged. So nobody is saying we should discriminate against children whose parents have been fortunate or very successful, just that we should not discriminate in their favor in a major way. I also think that

Thinking about my kids, I'd rather they go to school with the kids who are most ambitious and most hungry and are going to do the most going forward. Right?

rather than the children who were the parents of the people who did the most years ago. So I don't think that's a serious argument for maintaining legacies as part of our system. One other argument that I've seen recently swirling around was that after the affirmative action ruling from the court, a civil rights group filed a complaint about Harvard's legacy admissions with the Education Department on the grounds that it discriminates against students of color and violates civil rights law.

So should we ban legacy admissions because it's illegal or should we ban it just because it's bad practice? I think it is ideally universities' right to make the mistake of continuing legacy admissions if they wish to make it. I don't think it should be declared illegal. I just think it's a mistake and they should change their minds and stop pursuing the policy. If you were president of Harvard today, would you simply come out and make an announcement?

legacy is over, how would you handle it? I would probably make clear that I was moving in that direction, but I would try to consult with others in higher education. And I would hope that this could be a general movement rather than an isolated action. I think that's very important for leading institutions. You know, one of the things I'm proudest of having done

during my time as president of Harvard, was making a policy that everyone with a family income below $60,000 could come to Harvard paying nothing. And I wasn't looking for us to win in competition by doing that. I thought it was great when that policy was emulated by Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and others.

And in the same way, I think this is an area where we should have cooperation. And I hope that on legacy, on aristocratic sports, where it's really important to have fair competition. And if some people are favoring people and other people are not favoring people based on athletic ability, the competition between the schools isn't going to be fair. So that's an area where I think it's important to cooperate.

on early admission and early decision, which are basically systems that favor the clued in who hire coaches over the vast majority of kids in America who aren't clued in.

That's something where it's going to be much fairer if all schools get rid of them together. So I would be trying to lead, but I would be trying to lead in a cooperative way with other institutions rather than trying to peacock by being the first one to make the announcement.

Let's talk about eliminating aristocratic sports, which I don't know why it tickled me. I laughed when I read that. My two associations with aristocratic sports and elite universities are, of course, the Varsity Blues case in which one of the students pretended to be a rower and then the Winklevoss twins in the movie The Social Network. You know, for the kid that has worked really hard as a rower, you know, what do you say to that kid who says, I worked really, really hard and why are you picking on me and basketball and soccer is not part of this?

I'm going to not name sports just so I can preserve all my friendships. But I think we have a general idea of what we mean when I say aristocratic sport. I'm not going to get into naming sports. Look, I think there's a small issue, which is when you make a policy change, how much notice should you give?

And if somebody wants to argue that you shouldn't change the policy for three years so you're being fair to people who've invested heavily in reliance on a policy, I don't have passion as to whether the timeframe is one or three or four years. I think the difference between some sports and others is that in some sports, the vast majority of Americans

can play and can be trained to play and to develop their talent. And there's just vastly more American high schools that have basketball teams than that have squash teams.

And a much larger fraction of developing excellence is something that happens as part of a public process where access isn't rationed by money, then takes place with respect to other sports. And my particular question involves sports where the ability to access training and to achieve excellence really does depend heavily on family resources.

Okay, the next thing you propose is training college admissions counselors to detect when something is inauthentic, which seems to me very challenging. You know, how can you detect authenticity from a 650-word Common App application essay or for teacher recommendations?

Especially, by the way, when, you know, just to pick up on the aristocratic sports, in the very same way that not everyone has the resources or even the connections to know how to become a fencer. You know, the kid that's more privileged, has more resources in their family, is going to maybe have a tutor that's going to help them with that essay, is going to have teachers that care more about their recommendations. Tell me about how you discern authenticity. So I think it's not easy. I think there's some things you can do.

Did you receive personalized tutoring for the SATs? Did you have a coach who helped you prepare this essay? What assistance did you get in preparing your application? I think you can ask these questions. The answers won't be perfectly informative, but the demonstration that you care

And will, I think, have some positive benefit. And I think that admissions officers do to some extent today, but to a greater extent, look through purchased experiences.

You know, what about the kid who did a really interesting thing? They spent six weeks on an archaeological dig in North Africa in the summer of their junior year of high school.

Is that a really interesting, valuable experience that our class wants to include? Or is that a particular bauble that their parents' good fortune enabled them to obtain?

And that's a question of balance, but I think we should be tilting more towards regarding it as a bauble that the parents' privilege enabled them to obtain. But it's interesting, the notion of what a bauble is has already changed so radically. You hear from applicants now who want to get into elite colleges, and the thing they know will be appealing to admissions officers is not going to North Africa on the archaeological dig for exactly the reasons you're suggesting. It's starting a nonprofit. Right.

So you could say, well, it's incentivizing them at least to do good. But the authenticity piece is, I think it's just so slippery because is it authentic that that kid went and started a nonprofit for inner city kids, you know, in the neighboring community? Or did they do it so they could get a spot at a Stanford or a Yale? I think it is slippery. I myself am rather...

skeptical of this idea that everybody starts an organization so that they can demonstrate leadership. Seems to me that people make immense contributions as advisors, as

partners, as colleagues, yes, as followers. So the way in which we sort of fetishize leadership experiences seems to me to be a bit misguided. And so I also think that there's another activity that too often these days are undervalued in admissions.

which is reading books and kids who have read and thought widely and deeply. I think that's a very valuable way for a high school kid to spend part of their summer or much of their summer. But I wish we didn't

Sometimes seems to me that we disincentivize that too much. So, Barry, there are no single answers to these things. And it's always going to be a bit of a game where the standards are going to evolve and then people are going to try to adapt to the standards as they change. But I sure think we could be working harder to project experiences

accessibility and welcoming of kids of intellectual excellence who haven't yet

seen enough or done enough to really be thinking about worldly impact when they're 16 years old, but are simply developing themselves as great, curious, creative minds. And I'd like to see more of that emphasis in admissions over time. One thing that you write in this piece is that

Universities should more explicitly consider family disadvantage in selecting applicants. And I worry that will lead to a reorientation around victimhood and suffering rather than academic excellence. Is there a way out of, frankly, the victimhood Olympics that's in so much of our culture? If the result of...

an effort to follow through on that recommendation was to head towards Victimhood Olympics, it would have been a catastrophe. I think if you look since Harvard put in financial aid program that I described a little earlier, that the share of our students

who come from backgrounds where their parents didn't go to college or where they're in the lower part of the income distribution has gone up quite a bit. And I'm not aware of any real concern that our admissions process has become a victimhood Olympics. But you're raising exactly the right kind of question. And this is going to require a great deal of thought. But

The core point, and this is maybe what I want listeners to take away, is are we trying to maximize how much we do for opportunity, for people who would have more opportunity that they otherwise would not have? Is that our test? Or is our test...

what specific demographic percentages we're going to have of which group, because we think that will make our small exclusive community a better one. And I believe that the first is the right question for our great universities to be asking themselves. And if they focus on that question, I think my recommendations are good ones. Maybe there'll be other better recommendations.

But before you have a chance of getting better answers, you have to ask better questions.

The last argument you make in this piece is about expanding class size and doing outreach to lower income schools. How big is the current Harvard class now, freshman class? How big do you think it should be? You know, how do you hold in tension the fact that many people want to go to schools like Harvard and other Ivy League schools, other elite schools, because they are elite, because they are selective? You know, Barry, it's a little bit like the question of how much weight I should lose.

I suppose I could lose too much, but it doesn't seem like it's the pressing danger from where I was starting. And so if Harvard has not grown or other leading universities have not grown at all in 30 or 40 years—

It's hard for me to believe that if they grew at the same pace that their applicant pool grew, or they grew at the same pace that the American population of 18-year-olds grew, it's hard to believe that they couldn't maintain an appropriate degree of exclusivity. And that would involve far more growth than is currently on the table for discussion.

at most of these schools. So would I worry about growth over a 15-year period by a third? I'm sure I would not worry about that.

If you said you were going to double the size in 15 years, I would think that was something you needed to think about carefully, though I wouldn't be sure that that was excessive. But starting from where we are now, the direction of movement is clear. You know, Barry, if you talk to the titans here, the people who run very large companies, they are very focused on their suppliers.

They want their suppliers to be excellent. They want their suppliers to be as reliable and as strong and as progressive as they possibly can be. The key supplier for our leading universities is our nation's schools. And our universities should be investing in making those schools much better and much stronger than they currently are today.

The way we should be dimensioning ourselves is against the scale of the challenge, which is the promotion of genuine opportunity for every American kid, not against precisely what the nature of the dialogue and set of perspectives on offer within our small and elite seminars is. And I think if that is the takeaway,

by leading American universities from this decision, things can work out for the better. There's something like 3,500, maybe even 4,000 colleges and universities in this country. And we tend, at least in many circles, certainly on the coast, people tend to talk about eight of them. Isn't part of the solution to the problem

Putting some of that fairy dust on some of those other 3,500, 4,000 schools, like, isn't part of the problem that we have fetishized schools like Harvard and Yale? Or do they deserve to be on that pedestal still? I think that, for example, our leading universities should take far more transfer students than they do today.

because that would afford many more paths in to those institutions. That's one way in which they could become more connected with other schools. I already suggested that I think there are things we can do as we develop curriculum materials that can be helpful to institutions across the country.

should we be having federal programs

financial support for public higher education because most kids get their education at a public institution, not at a private institution. Absolutely, they should. Whenever I'm asked at a gathering like this one at Silicon Valley, Sun Valley, what people should do is philanthropic priorities. I always talk about how the resources are so much more scarce

And therefore, the impact is probably greater at community colleges than it is at very rich universities. So absolutely, it is a mistake to associate the health of American higher education with the health of a limited number of elite institutions.

Equally, it's true that because of their history, because they are able to draw in the way they are from across the country, those institutions are very, very closely watched.

And it seems to me that therefore the choices they make are very important and very influential. And that's why it's so important that they respond here in a way that is responsive to the imperative of opportunity. After a quick break, we'll be right back. So we've talked about your proposed solutions.

And I think you make a very compelling argument about why these should be backed. But my immediate reaction when I read that piece and in talking to you now is, you were president of Harvard for five years. You had the power to enact these changes. Why didn't you enact these reforms when you could have? Anybody who has spent a lot of time or much time at all in a leading university knows that there are a lot of limits there.

on the power of a president vis-a-vis a faculty, vis-a-vis trustees, vis-a-vis a wide range of constituencies. We actually did, during my time, do a historic thing to orient around opportunity.

by eliminating any cost for families with $60,000 and by having setting up a summer program for such students and by causing the admissions process to take much closer attention to disadvantage than it had previously.

Should we have done more? I ask myself that question all the time. Quite possibly the answer is yes, but I think these issues in many cases appear different and with a different degree of urgency today.

And there were different set of constraints at that time. But when I look back, do I wish I had been able to do more on some of these things? Of course I do. You said something on stage the first day at this conference when you were speaking about a theme that's come up sort of throughout the week, which is, I would say more strongly than you, the decadence or the corruption of American elites, or at least the sense among Americans

vast majority of ordinary Americans that the elites, the people, sort of the sense-making, culture-making people in American life, the leadership is deeply out of touch with them. And you said to a crowd of many of those elites, we have too much noblesse and not enough oblige. What can elite institutions be doing more to give the people that it's

teaching and shaping more of a sense of oblige? Why are they falling down? I would much rather, rather than trying to inculcate an ethos in a selected few, I would rather these institutions do much more to reach many more people. Harvard should not define its mission as trying to prick the social conscience of the children of the Forbes 400.

It should define its mission as trying through all of its activities, both the students it admits, the curriculum it develops, the scholarship it promotes, the public school teachers it trains, that it does things that touch the lives of as many people as possible.

And that's the way we can ultimately make the largest contribution. As long as we're looking inward to influence the conversation within our small and privileged few, I think there are profound limits on anything that can be achieved. Last question.

There has been a move increasingly on the part of elite colleges to get rid of the SAT. And that's also trickled down to a lot of public elite schools like Stuyvesant in New York, for example, other schools as well, putting pressure on them to get rid of the one meritocratic test that allows admissions into these schools. What do you think of that trend? I think it's very dangerous. I'm sure the SAT can be usefully reviewed and improved.

The SAT was established in service of opportunity so that kids with ability could demonstrate their ability even if they didn't have anybody vouching for them who the people making an admissions judgment knew. We need more and better tests for measuring excellence.

not to move away from tests, to move away from excellence, and to move away towards subjectivity. Because a move towards subjectivity will end up being a move towards mediocrity. Well, Mr. Summers has to go play golf right now, which I'm not sure is an aristocratic sport, but you will tell me later. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

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