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.