“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of ‘discrimination.’ The ability to discriminate is a precious facility; by judging all members of one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”

Attributed to Christopher Hitchens

“Discrimination” is condemned widely nowadays, but usually not understood. Without committing the etymological fallacy, the word “discrimination” comes from the Latin “discriminare”, meaning “to divide”, which comes from “discernere”, to discern. Someone who can discriminate is someone who can tell the difference between things or people, and treat different things or people differently. We discriminate all the time: it’s part of ordinary life. Clearly, some (most) discrimination is good.

In the case of universities, an admissions tutor who admits the most intelligent or promising students is discriminating between candidates: namely, the good-enough candidates and the not-good-enough candidates. This discrimination is good because it is relevant. If we failed in our duty to discriminate between candidates, given the limited supply of places at Cambridge University, we would end up admitting worse candidates at the expense of better ones.

If, on the other hand, admissions tutors were to be influenced by irrelevant factors, such as race or background, and discriminate on those grounds, we would also end up admitting sub-par candidates.

Too often, people criticise “discrimination” when they really should be criticising “irrelevant discrimination”. Discriminating on irrelevant grounds creates sub-optimal outcomes, but failing to discriminate on relevant grounds also creates sub-optimal outcomes. We have a duty not to discriminate on irrelevant grounds, but we also have a duty to discriminate on relevant grounds. Sloppiness with language prevents useful debate on this issue from taking place.

I was pleased, therefore, to read that Vice-Chancellor Alison Richard has condemned attempts by the government to encourage universities to recruit more pupils from state schools.

Obviously admissions tutors should only take into account a candidate’s ability. There is no such thing as “positive [irrelevant] discrimination”: any irrelevant discrimination is bad.

As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, “You are not doing anybody a favor by sending them where they are more likely to fail, rather than where they are more likely to succeed.”

In the case of “affirmative action” in the US, “where the racial preferences in admissions are not as great, the differences in graduation rates are not as great. The critics of affirmative action were right: Racial preferences reduce the prospects of black students graduating.”

Discriminating on the grounds of race is irrelevant discrimination and reduces efficiency and overall welfare. Discriminating on the grounds of what school someone went to is also irrelevant discrimination and will have the same effect, ultimately hurting those it is intended to help.

41% of the students at Cambridge went to private school, but private schools educate only 7% of the pupils in the country. Why do so many more (proportionally) private school pupils get into Cambridge?

One explanation would be discrimination in their favour. However, there is no evidence for this¹. Laudably, the copies of our UCAS forms that are given to admissions tutors do not mention which schools we went to. There is no reason to believe that Cambridge admissions tutors do not simply admit whichever candidates seem the best.

This leads us to the conclusion that private schooled pupils are better, on average. This may be because the pupils were better in the first place, because private schools are selective. Or it may be because private schools make their pupils better, through better teaching. It is probably a bit of both.

We can fix both problems by closing state-run schools, and making paying for education through a voucher system the state’s only involvement. That way, the market can improve the schools, something the government cannot do, but everyone would still be able to go to school regardless of their income.

The government are putting pressure on universities because they do not want to admit the real cause of state-schooled-pupil under-achievement: government involvement in education.

“A spokesman for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills insisted that any measures to encourage widening participation at universities were voluntary. ‘We value the independence of universities, but we also want to get the best students into the best courses,’ he said.”

Note the implication that universities are using their “independence” to discriminate against the “best students”, without any evidence to back it up. On the contrary, universities are using their independence to admit the best students, and it is the government that wants them to apply other criteria. And voluntary measures are merely a prelude to non-voluntary ones, of course. There is a chilling effect here, because universities are likely to do what they know the government wants, even without it asking, in an attempt to forestall more government meddling, since the government provides the money. As another vice-chancellor said: “The Government gives me a cheque every year. I have a public duty to do what the Government says.”

I applaud Cambridge University’s long-term project to become financially independent of the government, so that it can pay for the education of the best pupils, regardless of their financial background, without being subject to government meddling.

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1. There is a tendency to assume that disparity in figures automatically implies bad discrimination. Both of the poisonous candidates for the CUSU Women’s Sabbatical Officer mentioned that more men than women studied maths at Cambridge, and of those, proportionally more achieved firsts. They ignorantly assumed this was caused by irrelevant discrimination. Of course, it is actually due to the fact that maths geniuses are more likely to be men. While men and women have the same average ability at maths, variance is higher in men, so there are more male maths geniuses and male maths morons. This is explained by Charles Murray in “The Inequality Taboo”. The following diagram (not to scale) shows this intuitively:

See also http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/04/06/inequality-how-much-is-too-much/