A Judge Advised Harvard to Give Its Admissions Officers Training to Stop Bias. Will That Help?

Jonathan Wiggs, The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Lurking in a federal judge’s decision this week to uphold affirmative action in Harvard University admissions was a suggestion.

Allison D. Burroughs, a U.S. district judge in Boston, noted in the conclusion of her 130-page ruling that while the university’s policy “survives strict scrutiny, it is not perfect.” Among her recommendations for improvement? Training to avoid implicit bias for Harvard’s admissions officers.

Training to stop bias that is implicit and not overt, commonly known as “implicit-bias training,” is a contemporary outgrowth of sensitivity and diversity training. It has been used by both companies and colleges, including on faculty-hiring committees. But its reach into admissions has been limited, and some question how it would be carried out there.

“The work is rich, the work is deep,” said Lawrence Alexander, director of equity and inclusion for Carney Sandoe & Associates, an educational consulting firm. “And few, frankly, are the schools that have begun to do this work formally, though there are many who are now interested in it.”

Alexander, who earlier in his career was a college counselor, conducts implicit-bias training with the admissions and enrollment-management staffs of 15 universities.

His approach to the training involves two stages: first, meeting with employees in the summer to discuss how to curb bias in recruiting; and second, a more-intense phase working with officers when they’re reading applications. It’s that direct intervention, Alexander said, that his clients value most, and that is in most demand in admissions offices.

Michael N. Bastedo, director of the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, uses a similar approach in his consulting work with admissions offices, though he focuses more on recognizing cognitive bias.

He uses large-group sessions to explain common biases documented in social psychology and offers examples from his own admissions fieldwork. In separate meetings with senior admissions officials, Bastedo examines granular details of the application-review process — when and how readers get information about applicants, how many “reads” an application gets, if scoring and admissions decisions are done individually or by committee, and so on.

“Admissions work is all full of ambiguities,” Bastedo said. “All the cases are lots and lots of different pieces of data that you’re trying to pull together to ultimately make a decision. If you have a read sheet that’s full of test scores and GPAs and things, it can be difficult to do a complete, holistic review if you’re overly influenced by the numbers on the front.”

‘Very Slippery’

Calvin K. Lai said situations with that degree of ambiguity are often the subject of implicit-bias research. Lai is an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and research director for Project Implicit, a nonprofit group that seeks to “educate the public about hidden biases.”

That’s why college admissions is a sweet spot for bias research. “It’s often ambiguous about who really deserves it, who deserves a spot. There’s a lot of wiggle room to kind of justify your biases to others,” Lai said. “By giving people that wiggle room, it can be a really insidious tool for justifying the biases that you might have.”

The lack of uniformity in how implicit-bias training is conducted, Lai noted, makes judging its impact difficult. “There isn’t a standard curriculum in the way that there might be for teaching high-school math or even teaching introductory psychology,” Lai said. “It’s been very slippery to try to figure out how to answer a question like ‘Does diversity training work or not?’ because it depends so much, presumably, on all these different ways that you could implement it.”

Harvard on Trial

Detailed background on the lawsuit over the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, the case’s implications for selective colleges, and coverage of the trial as it unfolded, in a federal court in Boston.

• Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants, U.S. Appeals Court Rules
• 3 Takeaways From the Appeal of the Harvard Admissions Lawsuit
• The Nation’s Students Have Grown More Diverse. Has Harvard’s Enrollment Kept Pace?

Anthony G. Greenwald, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and co-founder of Project Implicit, is one of three creators of the Implicit Association Test, which measures one’s subconscious associations across such markers of diversity as race, gender, and age. He’s not convinced Burroughs’s suggestion is feasible.

“It’s a well-meaning recommendation, and it sounds like it’s the right thing to do,” Greenwald said. “But it assumes that there exists implicit-bias training for admissions officers that is scientifically known to produce desirable effects. And that’s actually what’s not known yet.”

The Implicit Association Test is often used to measure the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce bias in a variety of environments, including judicial systems, hospitals, police forces, and, yes, universities. While reductions in implicit bias might be observed shortly after such an intervention, Greenwald said, “when you measure the effect a day later, you don’t find anything.”

He’s more inclined to support another of Burroughs’s recommendations: that Harvard monitor and analyze “any significant race-related statistical disparities in the rating process” of applicants.

“You don’t actually have to know what caused the disparities, and you don’t have to know whether training is effectively designed,” Greenwald said. “If you are observing the disparities over time, and you find that the disparities are declining on the basis of the data you’re keeping, you know that someone is doing something right.”

Alexander hopes Burroughs’s ruling prompts a sea change in how race is considered in admissions.

“The admissions process has really felt impervious to the impact of implicit bias,” he said. “I just think what’s coming to the surface is that which we’ve known for some time: Our process is imperfect. And that is not a benign revelation. We must do something about it.”

Megan Zahneis is a reporting fellow for The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter at @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.