Potential immediate criticism
Applicants may not be willing to share detailed background information for various reasons, including e.g., fear of discrimination. However, it is difficult to envisage the design of a fair system that makes fair judgements but which does not take into account factors that are the source of injustices. In other words, how can an academic institution correct for unfairness (in a fair and objective way) if academic institutions are not given the data necessary to account for the source of such unfairness?
Another criticism and limitation of the framework proposed here is that, with the aid of technology, the academic institutions should not have access to (all of the) ecological information of the applicant, and therefore the applicants’ data should remain private and if shared at all, confidential. This opens up for the possibility of ‘cheating’ behaviour where applicants claim to have had ecological conditions that they did not, for which veracity of claims cannot be checked. Academic cheating is not exclusive of this framework (Anderman & Murdock, 2011; McCabe, Treviño, & Butterfield, 2001) and thus, it is not a fatal limitation of this approach in particular, but an issue for all aspects of human interactions. As it stands, the costs of the lack of diversity and opportunities far outweighs the costs of potential cheaters in the system, although this limitation should be addressed once an application of this framework is put into practice.
Another source of criticism, and perhaps a more difficult to rebut, is that this framework is likely to make the entire selection process ‘too personalised’ and the cut-off point for collecting information may be obscure. Academic institutions may raise questions such as: what are the factors that influence academic opportunities and merit in the first place? How much details should we record for each individual? I propose a pragmatic response to this matter, based on the literature in social sciences and psychology. An ecological factor should be recorded if and only if there is substantial scientific literature demonstrating the role of such ecological factor on the opportunities for an individual to develop. Earlier, I used the example of poverty, which can have major impact on individuals’ academic potential (Johnson et al., 2016). Thus, socio-economic status of an applicant during development should be collected during the application process. Similar procedure should be followed in the decision pertaining other ecological factors of human development [see for instance (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998) for discussion on human developmental ecology]. It will be important for practical applications to be implemented – even if as pilot experiments – to provide information on the computational limitations that may constrain the amount of data that can be collected and process.