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Ethics and Job Apps: Goodhart’s Law and the Temptation Towards Dishonesty

photograph of candidates waiting for a job interview

In the first post in this series, I discussed a moral issue I ran into as someone running a job search. In this post, I want to explore a moral issue that arose when applying to jobs, namely that the application process encourages a subtle sort of dishonesty.

My goal, when working on job applications, is to get the job. But to get the job, I need to appear to be the best candidate. And here is where the problem arises. I don’t need to be the best candidate; I just need to appear to be the best candidate. And there are things that I can do that help me appear to be the best candidate, whether I’m actually the best candidate or not.

To understand this issue, it will be useful to first look at Goodhart’s law, and then see how it applies to the application process.

Goodhart’s Law

My favorite formulation of Goodhart’s law comes from Marilyn Strathern:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. 

To understand what this means, we need to understand what a measure is. Here, we can think about a ‘measure’ as something you use as a proxy to assess how well a process is going. For example, if I go to the doctor they cannot directly test my health. Rather, they can test a bunch of things that act as measures of my health. They can check my weight, my temperature, my blood pressure, my reflexes, etc. If I have a fever, then that is good evidence I’m sick. If I don’t have a fever, that is good evidence I’m healthy. My temperature, then, is a measure of my health.

My temperature is not the same thing as my health. But it is a way to test whether or not I’m healthy.

So what Goodhart’s law says is that when the measure (in this case temperature) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. What would it mean for it to become a target? Well, my temperature would be a target if I started to take steps to make sure my temperature remains normal.

Suppose that I don’t want to have a fever, since I don’t want to appear sick, and so, whenever I start to feel sick I take some acetaminophen to stop a fever. Now my temperature has become a target. So what Goodhart’s law says is that now that I’m taking steps to keep my temperature low, my temperature is no longer a good measure of whether I’m sick.

This is similar to the worry that people have about standardized tests. In a world where no one knew about standardized tests, standardized tests would actually be a pretty good measure of how much kids are learning. Students who are better at school will, generally, do better on standardized tests.

But, of course, that is not what happens. Instead, teachers begin to ‘teach to the test.’ If I spend hours and hours teaching my students tricks to pass standardized tests, then of course my students will do better on the test. But that does not mean they have actually learned more useful academic skills.

If teachers are trying to give students the best education possible, then standardized tests are a good measure of that education. But if teachers are instead trying to teach their kids to do well on standardized tests, then standardized tests are no longer a good measure of academic ability.

When standardized tests become a target (i.e., when we teach to the test) then they cease to be a good measure (i.e., a good way to tell how much teachers are teaching).

We can put the point more generally. There are various things we use as ‘proxies’ to assess a process (e.g., temperature to assess if someone is sick). We use these proxies, even though they are not perfect (e.g., you can be sick and not have a fever, or have a fever and not be sick), because they are generally reliable. But because the proxies are not perfect, there are often steps you can take to change the proxy, without changing the underlying thing that you are trying to measure (e.g., you can lower people’s temperature directly, without actually curing the disease). And so the stronger incentive people have to manipulate the proxy, the more likely they are to take steps that change the proxy without changing what the proxy was measuring (e.g., if you had to make it to a meeting where they were doing temperature checks to eliminate sick people, you’d be strongly tempted to take medicine to lower your temperature even if you really are sick). And because people are taking steps to directly change the proxy, the proxy is no longer a good way to test what you are trying to measure (e.g., you don’t be able to screen out sick people from the meeting by taking their temperature).

The thing is, Goodhart’s law explains a common moral temptation that we have to prioritize appearances.

Take, as an example, an issue that comes up in bioethics. Hospitals have a huge financial incentive to do well on various metrics and ratings. One measure is what percentage of patients die in the hospital. In general, the more a hospital contributes to public health, the lower the percentage of patients who will die there. And indeed, there are all sorts of ways a hospital might improve their care, which would also mean more people survive (they might adopt better cleaning norms, they might increase the number of doctors on shift, they might speed up the triage process in the emergency room, etc.). But there are also ways that a hospital could improve their numbers that would not involve improving care. For example, hospitals might refuse to admit really sick patients (who are more likely to die). Here the hospital would increase the percentage of their patients who survive, but would do so by actually giving worse overall care. The problem is, this actually seems to happen.

Student Evaluations?

So how does Goodhart’s law apply to my job applications?

Well, there is an ever-present temptation to do things that make me appear to be a better job candidate, irrespective of whether I am the better candidate.

The most well-known example of this is student course evaluations. One of the ways that academic search committees assess how good a teacher I will be, is by looking at my student evaluations. At the end of each semester, students rate how good the class was and how good I was as a teacher.

Now, there are two ways to improve my student evaluations. First, I can actually improve my teaching. I can make my class better, so that students get more out of it. Or…, I can make students like my class more in ways that have nothing to do with how much they actually learn. For example, students who do well in a class tend to rate it more highly. So by lowering my grading standards, I can improve my student evaluations.

Similarly, there are various teaching techniques (such as interleaving) which studies show are more effective at teaching. But studies also show that students rate them as less effective. Why? Because the techniques force the students to put in a lot of effort. Because the techniques make learning difficult, the students ‘feel like’ they are not learning as much. (Here is a nice video introducing this problem.)

One particularly disturbing study drives this point home. At the U.S. Air Force Academy, students are required to take Calculus I and Calculus II. They are required to take Calculus II even if they do very poorly in the first class (you can’t get out of it by becoming a humanities major). The cool thing about this data is that all students take the same exams which are independently graded (so there is no chance of lenient professors artificially boosting grades).

So what did the researchers find when they compared student evaluations and student performance? Well, if you just look at Calculus I, the results are what you’d naturally expect. Some professors were rated highly by students, and students in those classes outperformed the students of other teachers on the final exam. It seems, then, that the top-rated teachers did the best job teaching students.

However, you get a very different result if you then look at Calculus II. There, what they find is that the students who did the best in Calculus I (and who had the top-rated teachers), did the worst in Calculus II.

The researchers conclude that “our results show that student evaluations reward professors who increase achievement in the contemporaneous course being taught, not those who increase deep learning.” Popular teachers are those who ‘teach to the test,’ who give students tricks to help them answer the immediate questions they will face. Teachers who actually force students to do the hard work of understanding the material receive worse evaluations because students find the teaching more difficult and less intuitive. And because difficult, unintuitive learning is what is actually required to learn material deeply, there is an inverse correlation between student ratings and student learning.

Student evaluations are intended to be a measure of teaching competence. However, because I know they are used as a measure of teaching competence, there is constant temptation to treat them as a target – to do things that I know will improve my evaluations, but not actually improve my teaching.

Generalizing the Problem

Student evaluations are one example of this, but they are not the only one. There are tons of ways that measures become targets for job applicants. Take, for example, my cover letter.

For each job I apply for, I write a customized cover letter in which I explain why I’d be a good fit for the job. This cover letter is supposed to be a measure of ‘fit’. The search committee looks at the letter to see if my priorities line up with the priorities of the job.

The problem, however, is that I change around parts of my cover letter to fit what I think the search committee is looking for. My interests are wide-ranging, and my interests are likely to remain wide-ranging. But in my cover letters I don’t emphasize all of these things to the extent of my actual interest. In jobs in normative ethics, I focus my cover letter on my work in normative ethics. For teaching jobs, I focus on my teaching. In other words, I write my cover letter to try and make it look like my interest concentrations match up with what the search committee is looking for.

My cover letters become a target. But because they become a target, they cease to be a good measure.

Another example is anything people do just so that they can reference it in their applications. If a school wants a teacher who cares about diversity, then they may want to hire someone involved in their local Minorities and Philosophy chapter. But, of course, they don’t want to hire someone involved in that chapter just so that they appear to care about diversity.

Similarly, if a school wants to hire someone interested in the ethics of technology, they don’t want to hire someone who wrote a paper on AI ethics just so that they can appear competitive for technology ethics jobs.

Anytime someone does something just for appearances, they are targeting the measure. And by targeting the measure, they damage the measure itself.

Is This a Moral Problem

As a job applicant, I face a strong temptation to ‘target the measure.’ I am tempted to improve how good an applicant I appear to be, and not how good an applicant I am.

When I give into that temptation, am I doing something morally wrong? I think so, pursuing appearances is a form of dishonesty. It’s not exactly a lie. I might really think I’m the best applicant for the job. In fact, I might be the best applicant for the job. So it’s not that by pursuing appearances I’m trying to give the other person a false belief. But even when I’m trying to get them to believe something true, I’m presenting the wrong evidence for that true conclusion.

Let’s consider three versions of our temperature example.

Case 1: Suppose as a kid I wanted to stay home from school. Thus, I ‘fake’ a fever by sticking the thermometer in 100ºF water before showing it to my mom. My mom is using ‘what the thermometer says’ as a measure of whether I’m sick. I take advantage of that by targeting the measure, and thus create a misleading result.

Clearly what I did was dishonest. I was creating misleading evidence to get my mom to falsely believe I was sick. But the dishonesty does not depend on the fact that I’m healthy.

Case 2: Suppose I really think I’m sick (and that I really am sick), but I know my mom won’t believe me unless I have a fever. And again I stick the thermometer in 100ºF water before showing it to my mom.

Here I’m trying to get my mom to believe something true, namely that I’m sick (just as in the application where I’m trying to get the search committee to reach the true conclusion that I’m the best person for the job). But still it’s dishonest. One way to see this is that the evidence (what the thermometer says) only leads to the conclusion through a false belief (namely that I have a fever). But the dishonesty does not depend on that false belief.

Case 3: Suppose I know both that I am sick and that my mom won’t believe me unless I have a fever. I don’t want to trick her with the false thermometer result, and so instead I take a pill that will raise my temperature by a few degrees, thereby giving myself a fever.

Here my mom will look at the evidence (what the thermometer says), conclude I have a fever (which is true), and so conclude I am sick (which is also true). But still what I did was dishonest. It was not dishonest because it brought about a false belief, but because in targeting the measure. It’s dishonest because I’m giving ‘bad evidence’ for my true conclusion. I’m getting my mom to believe something true, but doing so by manipulation. I’m weaponizing her own ‘epistemic processes’ against her.

Now, this third case seems structurally similar to all the various steps people take to improve their ‘appearance’ as a job applicant. Those steps all ‘target the measure’ in a way that damages the sort of evidential support the measure is supposed to provide.

It seems clear that honesty requires that I not take steps to target my student evaluations directly. Similarly, it would be dishonest to put extra effort into classes that will be observed by my letter writers. I recognize that it is morally important to avoid this sort of propaganda. For example, if I’m going to give end-of-semester extra credit, for instance, I will wait till after evaluations are done just to make sure I’m not tempted to give that extra credit as a way to boost my evaluations.

But those are the (comparatively) easy temptations to avoid. It’s easy to not do something just to make yourself appear better. What is much harder is being equally willing to do something even knowing it will make me appear worse. For example, there are times when I’ve avoided giving certain really difficult assignments or covering certain controversial topics which I think probably would have been educationally best, because I thought there was a chance they might negatively affect my teaching evaluations. It’s much easier to not do something for a bad reason, than it is to not refrain from doing something for a bad reason.

Conclusion

Once you start noticing this temptation to ‘play to appearances’ you start to notice it everywhere. In this way it’s like the vice of vainglory.

In fact, you start to notice that it might be at play in your very posts about the problem. If a potential employer is reading this piece, I expect it reflects well on me. I think it gives the (I hope, true) impression that I try to be unusually scrupulous about my application materials. And that is not necessarily dishonest, but it is dishonest if I would not have written this piece except to give that impression. So is that the real reason I wrote it?

Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t think so, but self-knowledge is hard for us ordinary non-saintly people. (Though I’ll leave that topic for a future post.)

Ethics and Job Apps: Why Use Lotteries?

photograph of lottery balls coming out of machine

This semester I’ve been 1) applying for jobs, and 2) running a job search to select a team of undergraduate researchers. This has resulted in a curious experience. As an employer, I’ve been tempted to use various techniques in running my job search that, as an applicant, I’ve found myself lamenting. Similarly, as an applicant, I’ve made changes to my application materials designed to frustrate those very purposes I have as an employer.

The source of the experience is that the incentives of search committees and the incentives job applicants don’t align. As an employer, my goal is to select the best candidate for the job. While as an applicant, my goal is that I get a job, whether I’m the best candidate or not.

As an employer, I want to minimize the amount of work it takes for me to find a dedicated employee. Thus, as an employer, I’m inclined to add ‘hoops’ to the application process, by requiring applicants to jump through those hoops, I make sure I only look through applications of those who are really interested in the job. But as an applicant, my goal is to minimize the amount of time I spend on each application. Thus, I am frustrated with job applications that require me to develop customized materials.

In this post, I want to do three things. First, I want to describe one central problem I see with application systems — what I will refer to as the ‘treadmill problem.’ Second, I want to propose a solution to this problem — namely the use of lotteries to select candidates. Third, I want to address an objection employers might have to lotteries — namely that it lowers the average quality of an employer’s hires.

Part I—The Treadmill Problem

As a job applicant, I care about the quality of my application materials. But I don’t care about the quality intrinsically. Rather, I care about the quality in relation to the quality of other applications. Application quality is a good, but it is a positional good. What matters is how strong my applications are in comparison to everyone else.

Take as an analogy the value of height while watching a sports game. If I want to see what is going on, it’s not important just to be tall, rather it’s important to be taller than others. If everyone is sitting down, I can see better if I stand up. But if everyone stands up, I can’t see any better than when I started. Now I’ll need to stand on my tiptoes. And if everyone else does the same, then I’m again right back where I started.

Except, I’m not quite back where I started. Originally everyone was sitting comfortably. Now everyone is craning uncomfortably on their tiptoes, but no one can see any better than when we began.

Job applications work in a similar way. Employers, ideally, hire whosoever application is best. Suppose every applicant just spends a single hour pulling together application materials. The result is that no application is very good, but some are better than others. In general, the better candidates will have somewhat better applications, but the correlation will be imperfect (since the skills of being good at philosophy only imperfectly correlate with the skills of being good at writing application materials).

Now, as an applicant, I realize that I could put in a few hours polishing my application materials — nudging out ahead of other candidates. Thus, I have a reason to spend time polishing.

But everyone else realizes the same thing. So, everyone spends a few hours polishing their materials. And so now the result is that every application is a bit better, but still with some clearly better than others. Once again, in general, the better candidates will have somewhat better applications, but the correlation will remain imperfect.

Of course, everyone spending a few extra hours on applications is not so bad. Except that the same incentive structure iterates. Everyone has reason to spend ten hours polishing, now fifteen hours polishing. Everyone has reason to ask friends to look over their materials, now everyone has reason to hire a job application consultant. Every applicant is stuck in an arms race with every other, but this arms race does not create any new jobs. So, in the end, no one is better off than if everyone could have just agreed to an armistice at the beginning.

Job applicants are left on a treadmill, everyone must keep running faster and faster just to stay in place. If you ever stop running, you will slide off the back of the machine. So, you must keep running faster and faster, but like the Red Queen in Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass, you never actually get anywhere.

Of course, not all arms races are bad. A similar arms race exists for academic journal publications. Some top journals have a limited number of article slots. If one article gets published, another article does not. Thus, every author is in an arms race with every other. Each person is trying to make sure their work is better than everyone else’s.

But in the case of research, there is a positive benefit to the arms race. The quality of philosophical research goes up. That is because while the quality of my research is a positional good as far as my ability to get published, it is a non-positional good in its contribution to philosophy. If every philosophy article is better, then the philosophical community is, as a whole, better off. But the same is not true of job application materials. No large positive externality is created by everyone competing to polish their cover letters.

There may be some positive externalities to the arms race. Graduate students might do better research in order to get better publications. Graduate students might volunteer more of their time in professional service in order to bolster their CV.

But even if parts of the arms race have positive externalities, many other parts do not. And there is a high opportunity cost to the time wasted in the arms race. This is a cost paid by applicants, who have less time with friends and family. And a cost paid by the profession, as people spend less time teaching, writing, and helping the community in ways that don’t contribute to one’s CV.

This problem is not unique to philosophy. Similar problems have been identified in other sorts of applications. One example is grant writing in the sciences. Right now, top scientists must spend a huge amount of their time optimizing grant proposals. One study found that researchers collectively spent a total of 550 working years on grant proposals for Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council’s 2012 funding round.

This might have a small benefit in leading research to come up with better projects. But most of the time spent in the arms race is expended just so everyone can stay in place. Indeed, there are some reasons to think the arms race actually leads people to develop worse projects, because scientists optimize for grant approval and not scientific output.

Another example is college admissions. Right now, high school students spend huge amounts of time and money preparing for standardized tests like the SAT. But everyone ends up putting in the time just to stay in place. (Except, of course, for those who lack the resources required to put in the time; they just get left behind entirely.)

Part II—The Lottery Solution

Because I was on this treadmill as a job applicant, I didn’t want to force other people onto a treadmill of their own. So, when running my own job search, I decided to modify a solution to the treadmill problem that has been suggested for both grant funding and college admissions. I ran a lottery. I had each applying student complete a short assignment, and then ‘graded’ the assignments on a pass/fail system. I then choose my assistants at random from all those who had demonstrated they would be a good fit. I judged who was a good fit. I didn’t try to judge, of those who were good fits, who fit best.

This allowed students to step off the treadmill. Students didn’t need to write the ‘best’ application. They just needed an application that showed they would be a good fit for the project.

It seems to me that it would be best if philosophy departments similarly made hiring decisions based on a lottery. Hiring committees would go through and assess which candidates they think are a good fit. Then, they would use a lottery system to decide who is selected for the job.

The details would need to be worked out carefully and identifying the best system would probably require a fair amount of experimentation. For example, it is not clear to me the best way to incorporate interviews into the lottery process.

One possibility would be to interview everyone you think is likely a good fit. This, I expect, would prove logistically overwhelming. A second possibility, and I think the one I favor, would be to use a lottery to select the shortlist of candidates, rather than to select the final candidate. The search committee would go through the application and identify everyone who looks like a good fit. They would then use a lottery to narrow down to a shortlist of three to five candidates who come out for an interview. While the shortlisted candidates would be placed on the treadmill, a far smaller number of people are subject to the wasted effort. A third possibility would use the lottery to select a single final candidate, and then use an in-person interview merely to confirm the selected candidate really is a good fit. There is a lot of evidence that hiring committees systematically overweight the evidential weight of interviews, and that this creates tons of statistical noise in hiring decisions (see chapters 11 and 24 in Daniel Kahneman’s book Noise).

Assuming the obstacles could be overcome, however, lotteries would have an important benefit in going some way towards breaking the treadmill.

There are a range of other benefits as well.

  • Lotteries would decrease the influence of bias on hiring decisions. Implicit bias tends to make a difference in close decisions. Thus, bias is more likely to flip a first and second choice, than it is to flip someone from making it onto the shortlist in the first place.
  • Lotteries would decrease the influence of networking, and so go some way towards democratizing hiring. At most, an in-network connection will get someone into the lottery but it won’t increase you chance of winning the lottery.
  • It would create a more transparent way to integrate hiring preferences. A department might prefer to hire someone who can teach bioethics, or might prefer to hire a female philosopher, but not want to restrict the search to people who meet such criteria. One way to integrate such preferences more rigorously would be to explicitly weight candidates in the lottery by such criteria.
  • Lotteries could decrease interdepartmental hiring drama. It is often difficult to get everyone to agree on a best candidate. It is generally not too difficult to get everyone to agree on a set of candidates all who are considered a good fit.

Part III—The Accuracy Drawback

While there are advantages accrue to applicants and the philosophical community, employers might not like a lottery system. The problem for employers is that a lottery will decrease the average quality of hires.

A lottery system means you should expect to hire the average candidate who meets the ‘good fit’ criteria. Thus, as long as trying to pick the best candidate results in a candidate at least above average, then the average quality of the hire goes down with a lottery.

However, while there is something to this point, the point is weaker than most people think. That is because humans tend to systematically overestimate the reliability of judgment. When you look at the empirical literature a pattern emerges. Human judgment has a fair degree of reliability, but most of that reliability comes from identifying the ‘bad fits.’

Consider science grants. Multiple studies have compared the scores that grant proposals receive to the eventual impact of research (as measured by future citations). What is found is that scores do correlate with research impact, but almost all of that effect is explained by the worst performing grants getting low scores. If you restrict your assessment to the good proposals, researchers are terrible at judging which of the good proposals are actually best. Similarly, while there is general agreement about which proposals are good and which bad, evaluators rarely agree about which proposals are best.

A similar sort of pattern emerges for college admission counselors. Admissions officers can predict who is likely to do poorly in school, but can’t reliably predict which of the good students will do best.

Humans are fairly good at judging which candidates would make a good fit. We are bad at judging which good fit candidates would actually be best. Thus, most of the benefit of human judgment comes at the level of identifying the set of candidates who would make a good fit, not at the level of deciding between those candidates. This, in turn, suggests that the cost to employers of instituting a lottery system is much smaller than we generally appreciate.

Of course, I doubt I’ll convince people to immediately use lotteries on major important decisions. Thus, for now I’ll suggest that for smaller less consequential decisions, try a lottery system. If you are a graduate department, select half your graduating class the traditional way, and half by a lottery of those who seem like a good fit. Don’t tell faculty which are which, and I expect several years later it will be clear that the lottery system works just as well. Or, like me, if you are hiring some undergraduate researchers, try the lottery system. Make small experiments and let’s see if we can’t buck the current status quo.

Felicity Huffman Sentencing: Justice and Fairness in Punishment

photograph of Felicity Huffman and William H Macy

The college admissions scandal has come into prominence once more this week with the conviction and sentencing of “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman. In attempting to get her daughter into college, she paid $15,000 to a “charity” controlled by William Singer, a now notoriously corrupt admissions consultant, to have him bribe an SAT proctor to correct her daughter’s answers before submitting the test. For committing “honest services fraud,” Huffman was fined $30,000 and sentenced to 2 weeks in prison, 1 year of probation, and 250 community service hours.

The Washington Post quoted Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School, as saying “Both those who think the conduct here shouldn’t have been prosecuted and those concerned about special treatment for the privileged are bound to be dissatisfied.” And how could they not? On the one hand, the American criminal justice system is already overfull and overworked. The jails and prisons, too, are near their capacity. Essentially, some say, we are wasting resources prosecuting a first time nonviolent offender who has confessed her guilt and shown remorse.

Indeed, this is the attitude people have toward a variety of “white collar” and “victimless” crimes. However, they are only labeled as such due to the invisibility of the consequences, not due to the consequences actually being nonexistent. Every spot taken by a rich person who arrives there unmeritocratically is potentially a spot that could have been given to someone whose life could be changed by the chance. Those people, though, do not even realize a crime has been committed against them, blaming instead their own supposed insufficiency rather than a corrupt system.

Others dismiss these sorts of crimes because they seem inevitable. If they do not illegally bribe their kids into elite colleges, some say, they will do so through legal donations. But, this is a case of whataboutism. “What about kids getting into college because their parents are donors? Isn’t that unmeritocratic too? We’re not prosecuting those people so why are we prosecuting this woman?” However, we need not choose one or the other. They can be separate discussions, considered consecutively, not simultaneously.

Perhaps those parents getting their kids in via legal donations are doing something immoral too (for discussion see A.G. Holdier’s “The Ethics of Legacy Admissions”). The fact that there are multiple problems to consider does not entail that we may only try to solve all of them or none of them. Each can be considered in its own time. Thus, let us consider the fact that, for her crime, Huffman received what amounts to not even a slap on the wrist due to her wealth. Indeed, the punishment Huffman was given by Judge Indira Talwani sheds light on the disparity of punishment between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us.

The median American’s wealth (not average because that value is skewed by billionaires), according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, is $97,300. Even among those above 75, who have accumulated wealth for the longest, that value is only $264,800. In comparison, estimates for the wealth of Huffman and her husband, William H. Macy, each fall in the range of $20-50 million. Even assuming that minimum value, a $30,000 fine only amounts to 0.15% of their wealth. For that median American, the same fine would encompass 30% of all the money they ever made.

Certainly, this is an “equal” punishment, if “equal” is taken to mean the same numerical value, regardless of place or station. However, the impact on Huffman’s life as compared to some ordinary person is drastically different. A fine of 0.15% of that ordinary person’s wealth would amount to only about $150. That is the impact Huffman feels from the fine she was given. The same goes for her prison sentence and community service requirement. Most Americans have to work for a living and need a clean record to get a job. Huffman and her husband have enough money to live the rest of their lives without acting again. A prison sentence like that and so many community service hours are just annoying for the very wealthy, not life-ruining as they can be for many people of ordinary stature.

“So what?” says the cynic, “College admissions are already corrupt and have little to do with real ability. Huffman did not do anything particularly wrong. The only difference between her and the rest of the upper class is that her bribe happened to be illegal. Donors’ kids get into prestigious universities without the requisite ability all the time. There’s no good reason to waste the government’s time prosecuting cases like these.” The cynic may very well be correct, and, in fact, the judge in the case seemed to agree, saying that the college admissions system “has cracks in it with or without what these defendants have done.”

Regardless of how bad the action was, however, a fair justice system demands that justice be proportional to the crime committed. In Huffman’s case there are two possibilities: either her actions were not of any significance, in which case she need not be prosecuted, or her actions were of significance, in which case she need be punished proportionally. What actually occurred was that Huffman was prosecuted, but given what amounts to no punishment for a minor, but significant, crime. At the very least, a fair punishment for a minor, but significant, crime is a minor, but significant, punishment. However, the nature of sentencing guidelines is such that it does not allow for fines to enact any significant punishment and the alternative, time in prison, seems excessive.

Indeed, it seems inappropriate to put a person such as Huffman behind bars for years for trying to help her daughter get into college with bribes, an action for which she has shown remorse. But, there really is no punishment besides time in prison which can create the same impact of punishment regardless of class. In the case of the crime she admitted to, “honest services fraud,” the maximum fine is $250,000, only 1.25% of her wealth. Now, that percentage of the median wealth actually seems substantial, about $1,200. However, this judgment does not account for another difference between the upper class and the rest.

When a person has millions of dollars, her living expenses are a minuscule portion of her wealth. For most others, living expenses (rent, car payment, gas, food, etc.) take up a much larger portion. In essence, most people cannot pay such a fine without sacrificing some of their basic needs. A proportionally-sized fine for the ultra-wealthy, though, has no impact on their lives. Either fines must be able to cause a proportional impact on the very rich, not simply a flat percentage, or something else valuable must be taken away. For this class of people, the only truly valuable thing they cannot get more of is time. A long prison sentence, regardless of class, has a truly significant impact on one’s life.

As Oren Nimni puts it in Current Affairs, this sort of disparity in punishment,

“fundamentally delegitimizes the entire legal system, by severing the relationship between punishments and their purpose. It makes a joke out of the ideas of both the punishment fitting the crime and equality under the law, two bedrock principles necessary for  “law” to command any respect at all.”

There is plenty of room for discussion about what sorts of crimes ought to be prosecuted, about whether crimes deserve more fines or more prison time, and about the purpose punishment is supposed to serve. However, it seems clear that, regardless of what comes of these discussions, it can be agreed that the impact of a just punishment cannot vary based on class.

College Admissions and the Ethics of Unfair Advantages

A boy walks through an aisle of books in a library.

News broke this month of a college admissions scandal in which it was discovered that wealthy and powerful parents were paying thousands of dollars to have their children admitted to prestigious colleges. The fraud was committed in two ways: in the first, SAT and ACT scores were falsified (generally by having someone else other than the student write the tests), while in the second, profiles portraying students as elite athletes were forged (often with students’ faces being photoshopped onto pre-existing pictures) and used as part of a bribe for admission under athletic scholarship. The primary organizer of the fraud has been arrested and pleaded guilty, while as of writing an increasing number of parents are being sought for prosecution.

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Questions of Access as Harvard Law Accepts the GRE

Since 1947, the LSAT has been a dark cloud hanging over pre-law students. A student’s LSAT score and GPA have been the main considerations in the law school admissions process for almost 70 years. Law schools have become more and more focused on the mean of their LSAT acceptance scores because it determines their national ranking. Thus, students with low LSAT scores but other qualities may not be admitted to prestigious programs.

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Ethics of Early Decision: The Downside of the Common App

When students apply for colleges, one of the most frequent ways is to apply online. With over 700 schools participating, the Common Application appears to make the process much simpler for prospective students; enter your personal information just once, answer some standard questions, and then maybe fill out a few additional questions specific to the university. While the Common App allows students to streamline their admission process, does it do more harm to higher education than good?

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Making Amends: Georgetown University and Slavery

On a Fall day in 1838, a stone’s throw from the Capitol, families were torn apart. Loaded up on boats headed for the Deep South, 272 souls were shipped away to an uncertain future of pain, labor, and separation. This was an everyday occurrence back then; though the international slave trade had been abolished over a quarter of a century earlier, the domestic trade was alive and well, with an estimated 2.5 million enslaved by 1850. However, this case is set apart because the slaves were owned by Georgetown University and were sold to keep the university financially afloat.

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