Suppose we incentivize educational institutions to do a good job by asking them to maximize alumni donations. The general idea is that higher income after graduation leads to higher donations. Alternatively, directly measure personal income (or household income if marrying rich is an acceptable goal) after graduation, though that misses the effect of producing "happy" alumni more likely to donate.
Unfortunately, this will likely lead to all sorts of perverse behavior (selecting high income students for admission), unless we control for how much the student would have made had it not been for that institution (as opposed to, say, some other institution). We wish to measure, and reward, the delta improvement the educational institution is making over "the next best" thing. This is similar to the idea of economic profit which subtracts opportunity cost. How can we measure this? I don't think I've done a good job of defining it.
Tie public funding, especially including subsidized student loans, to this metric. This helps avoid predatory lending to fund education that doesn't actually help that much in earning more income after subtracting opportunity cost.
The oblique motivation was the hiring bias against female faculty. In general, bias in any action is an unavoidable aspect of human behavior (leading to seemingly paradoxical results where those people intentionally trying to not act biased end making the most biased decisions). However, bias can (and should) be corrected by a negative feedback mechanism.
Is a biased hiring practice objectively hurting the institution? Perhaps fewer female faculty in STEM fields cause fewer female graduates, and ultimately fewer total graduates, in high-income STEM fields. Is there a feedback mechanism by which members of a faculty hiring committee are rewarded for ultimately producing high-income or happy alumni (and punished if not)?
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