That’s why I prefer to look at scientific measures like IQ scores and market-based indicators like wages earned than university admissions. Uni is supposed to prepare us for the job market and separate the wheat from the chaff anyhow; the numbers ought to all roughly match up if it’s working properly.
Wages earned are a rather poor proxy for cognitive ability, or for that matter for productivity, since people in different careers can capture markedly different amounts of the value they create. For instance, a person working in the financial sector may have the opportunity to capture a very high proportion, whereas a person working as a public school teacher who performs way above the norm and produces tremendous long term value in increased productivity of their students will not capture any of that value.
Using wages-earned as a proxy to compare output between groups is only useful if we can assume that both groups are on average working in positions where they capture an equal proportion of the value they produce, something which is very much an unsafe assumption in this case.
(This is of course setting aside the issue of whether there are existing biases in our population which affect wages earned between groups given equal quality workers.)
Wages earned are a rather poor proxy for cognitive ability, or for that matter for productivity, since people in different careers can capture markedly different amounts of the value they create. For instance, a person working in the financial sector may have the opportunity to capture a very high proportion, whereas a person working as a public school teacher who performs way above the norm and produces tremendous long term value in increased productivity of their students will not capture any of that value.
Using wages-earned as a proxy to compare output between groups is only useful if we can assume that both groups are on average working in positions where they capture an equal proportion of the value they produce, something which is very much an unsafe assumption in this case.
(This is of course setting aside the issue of whether there are existing biases in our population which affect wages earned between groups given equal quality workers.)