Sharad Goel

@5harad.com

Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, co-director of @comppolicylab.bsky.social, applying a computational approach to public policy, including to issues in education, healthcare, and criminal justice. https://5harad.com

Standardized test scores improve predictions of academic performance but matter relatively less for admissions decisions, since few applicants are near the decision threshold, from Johann D. Gaebler, Calvin Isley, Christopher Avery, and Sharad Goel www.nber.org/papers/w35407

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📣 Job alert! 📣 Harvard Kennedy School is running 2 open-rank faculty searches in technology & public policy. One position is specifically for scholars using data science to address public problems. Please help us spread the word! academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15561

Technology and Public Policy Search (open rank)

Harvard Kennedy School invites applications for two open rank appointments in technology and public policy. We seek applications from scholars whose research and/or practice focuses on the intersectio...

academicpositions.harvard.edu

NEW in Management Science! My coauthors and I came up with a new consequentialist approach to designing equitable algorithms. Instead of imposing fairness criteria on an algorithm (like equal false negative rates), we aim for good outcomes. More in the 🧵 below! (1/)

A screenshot of the first page of our paper, Learning to Be Fair, showing the title and abstract.

Naviance is widely used by high school students to help them decide where to apply to college. In our new PNAS paper, Sabina Tomkins, Josh Grossman, Lindsay Page and I show it can inadvertently dissuade qualified students from applying to selective schools. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Our paper "The Measure and Mismeasure of Fairness" — long in draft form — is now out in JMLR! We show that common error rate measures are often misleading indicators of algorithmic bias, and argue it's better to evaluate algorithms by looking at their effects. 5harad.com/papers/fair-...

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We find that Asian American applicants — especially South Asians — are much less likely to be admitted to selective colleges than white students with similar test scores, GPAs, and extracurricular activities. Much of the gap is due to geography and preferential treatment of legacy applicants.

Josh Grossman@jdgrossman.com · 3y ago

There is considerable debate over whether Asian American students are admitted to selective universities at lower rates than similar white peers. In new work with Sabina Tomkins, Lindsay Page, and @5harad.com, we explore this issue using nearly 700k college applications. 🧵 nber.org/papers/w31527

The Disparate Impacts of College Admissions Policies on Asian American Applicants

Joshua Grossman, Sabina Tomkins, Lindsay Page, Sharad Goel

There is debate over whether Asian American students are admitted to selective colleges and universities at lower rates than white students with similar academic qualifications. However, there have been few empirical investigations of this issue, in large part due to a dearth of data. Here we present the results from analyzing 685,709 applications from Asian American and white students to a subset of selective U.S. institutions over five application cycles, beginning with the 2015-2016 cycle. The dataset does not include admissions decisions, and so we construct a proxy based in part on enrollment choices. Based on this proxy, we estimate the odds that Asian American applicants were admitted to at least one of the schools we consider were 28% lower than the odds for white students with similar test scores, GPAs, and extracurriculars.