MORNING GLORY: The best case for AI? Let it decide who gets into college

There is a debate about whether the widespread adoption and application of artificial intelligence models will cost jobs, and if so, in which industries.

If some obvious employment categories can be identified as ripe for replacement by AI, patterns should emerge about which sorts of jobs are in immediate peril.

One obvious candidate for replacement by AI is the staff of admissions offices at the nation’s colleges and universities. There are not enormous numbers of these positions, but there are excellent reasons to put AI to work in those offices, and not just to save money in the budgets of increasingly beleaguered schools.

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The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources released a study in April 2023 of 12,042 admissions employees at 940 institutions. On average, there were more than a dozen admissions staff members at every institution. There are more than 4,000 degree-granting institutions in the U.S., so a workforce of at least 40,000 is a reasonable estimate of the size of one group AI is coming for. (Even at the institutions where cost-cutting pressure is highest, there will still be a need for a couple of admissions officers, so don’t project a 100% loss of jobs here.)

Why the focus on the staffs of admissions offices?

Because the college and graduate application process is driven by paper and numbers: test scores, GPAs, essays, resumes and recommendations from tens of thousands of young people all aiming for a prized result. Almost all of the applicants share a hope for a fair process.

The sorting and scaling of numbers — GPAs and test scores — are exactly what AI can compile and assess in hours, if not minutes. If AI is even a tenth as powerful as advertised, it should be able to sort resumes and recommendations by truthfulness, quality and sincerity. Essays can be combed through for originality as well as for evidence of outside assistance.

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AI can also be given weights for factors that are legitimate indicators of merit beyond academic achievement, such as in-state/out-of-state status, gender, family income, the difficulty of life circumstances and the need for broad geographic and class diversity. AI models can also be trained to evaluate grades and performance based on the nature of the secondary school or college attended.

AI models can be instructed not to give any weight to applicants’ race, ethnicity, or religion — characteristics whose use in admissions is restricted by federal law and Supreme Court precedent.

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Athletic ability and legacy status are legitimate factors, as are musical and theater talent, forensics, foreign-language fluency and many more characteristics. Indeed, AI is going to be a far better agent for modeling an incoming class and targeting the long-term success of that applicant pool on that campus and in later lives than the work of young admissions officers.

AI could also be used to assure many constituencies — donors, evaluators of colleges, and, yes, courts — that the admission process is not tainted by the use of prohibited screens. Indeed, a school that wants a pretty airtight defense against suits challenging its admissions process for relying on prohibited-by-law factors such as race should be greatly assisted by laying out its own AI model’s weights, even if the model’s results aren’t the final word on admissions.

Schools have to worry about many factors beyond academic chops, including the ability to pay tuition, the likelihood of employment after graduation and the likelihood of any particular applicant becoming a financial supporter over the years.

Reputation matters greatly, too, as the benefit of network effects for a student body is a real thing. AI can, of course, be coached to weight markers for all these things, including how much an applicant has worked and whether he or she is a first-generation college student — two indicators generally thought to be predictive of life success.

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The application process has become clouded in recent decades by suspicion of politicization and the use by admissions officers of controversial factors such as race, a practice the Supreme Court has significantly restricted. The collective process across the country could use a large dose of objectivity and a consequent rise in trust in the results. An AI-driven admissions process that is transparent to outside evaluators would be a welcome evolution in the increasingly controversial question of choosing elites.

What about those 40,000 employees for whom AI is like a great white shark just offshore?

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What these folks do now is sort, sift and make recommendations to higher-ups in the chain. They deploy judgment and make conclusions that allow their own biases to play out across a vast ocean of applicants.

Everyone, including them, would be better served doing work that can be objectively evaluated and that does not encourage the exercise of subjective judgment.

AI should be welcomed in any job category where a mass of data must be objectively analyzed. At a minimum, colleges and universities should want to deploy a parallel admissions process run by AI alongside their existing structure. How interesting and illuminating would a side-by-side comparison of accepted applicants be?

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Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.