This is a great post. Harvard in particular is about building leaders. If you want great front-line employees it would seem there are other hundreds of other

This is a great post. Harvard in particular is about building leaders. If you want great front-line employees it would seem there are other hundreds of other schools that can do that. When it comes to having great leaders, race matters. I wish it didn't, but its naïve to think otherwise. That said, simply awarding points for race (if that's what is actually done -- or if they have just regressed it to show the differential) seems inefficient. You want people with great upside to make a positive change in the world. Being around some of the highest SAT/GPA people in the world for my life has shown that most end up having good, but mundane careers. And what I find surprising is that I probably could have predicted which of my cohort, colleagues, and associates would go on to have outsized impacts -- and it was rarely (or more like never) a product of their SAT score. Sports is one of the better professions where performance trumps almost everything. If you talk to NFL scouts you'll find that they look numbers, but they realize that the numbers come with very strong context. Incredible passing numbers in the SEC are different than from a DIII school. They want to know if you've peaked in college, or if you have upside in the NFL. The NFL also does something similar to college -- they have later rounds in the draft, because they have a large enough roster to take some risks (and practice squads). These later rounds are where they often take riskier players. This is where Seattle takes a slower cornerback named Richard Sherman or a shorter QB named Russell Wilson. Based on the tape, neither of these players should be in the NFL, much less excelling. But the upside potential was huge on them -- so Seattle picked them. I'm sure Harvard could have found someone with better numbers than Barack Obama, but the upside on him was huge. Given the ridiculous importance our society puts on race, I'm not against using race a metric. I'm just not sure we're efficient about it.