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Every year, CESR gives out awards to recognize research excellence and enable new research projects related to environmental sustainability, DEI, and ethics. Ethan Poskanzer is an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business, and his recent paper Through the Front Door: Why Do Organizations (Still) Prefer Legacy Applicants?, co-authored with Emilio Castilla at MIT, was recognized with CESR’s 2024 Highest Impact Paper Award.

We recently sat down with Ethan to talk about the big questions he’s trying to address in his research, how inclusion and sustainability come into his teaching, and how gatekeepers of all kinds can make access to opportunities to innovate more inclusive.  

CESR: How would you broadly describe your research? What big questions are you trying to answer?

Ethan Poskanzer: I’m interested in innovation, and I’m motivated by this idea that our innovative capacity as a society is under-utilized because you need a lot of resources and training to take an idea and make it into a reality.  It’s difficult to get access to those opportunities for certain people based on their identities and the inequalities that exist in our society. Now I’m working on a project in Ghana where the opportunities to get advice and funding for an idea are incredibly limited. I’m conscious of the fact that most people on the planet live under those conditions.

"I’m motivated by this idea that our innovative capacity as a society is under-utilized because you need a lot of resources and training to take an idea and make it into a reality."

-says Ethan Poskanzer

CESR: Could you please share a little bit about your research on legacy admissions? What inspired you to look into this topic, and what did you discover?

EP: We wanted to examine why colleges enact legacy preferences given the amount of hostility that these preferences engender publicly. I also think that legacy preferences are a relatively curious practice, which made us  wonder – why would colleges do this? We tested three possible reasons, which are the reasons that colleges publicly state they consider when admitting students in general.

Universities say that they aim to admit the students that merit it, or the most qualified students, that they aim to admit a diverse student body, and that they aim to admit students who will be financially supportive of the institution. Being financially supportive of the institution means many things, including students who are less likely to need financial aid, who are more likely to matriculate when admitted, and who are more likely to contribute philanthropically in the future.

We tested which of these objectives legacy preferences support. We find that legacies are not any better qualified, so they didn’t merit admission more. The data show that legacies are actually less diverse than the rest of the student body. However, we see that legacies are much more financially supportive of institution in a variety of ways. They are less likely to need financial aid, more likely to matriculate, and more likely to come from families that are flagged as potential donors.

CESR: What are the implications of your findings?

EP: These findings are important because, for better or for worse, who gets to an elite college is very determinative of career outcomes in the United States and the world. There’s a lot of research showing this. It’s predictive of earnings, of the opportunity to go to certain grad schools, and to pursue certain careers. Legacy considerations mean that family connections are predictive of who gets those spots. As a society, we need to decide if that’s how we want to choose who will get these scarce spots.

It's also important because the legacy advantage is really big. I want to commend the college we worked with for letting us investigate this. Legacies have almost double the chance of being admitted to these elite schools. At Ivy Leagues it’s a particularly big deal because the schools are smaller and they have been around for a long time, so they have a lot of legacies and a smaller number of spots.

CESR: How do you see AI and automation impacting innovation and access to innovative opportunities for diverse groups?

EP: Overall, AI and automation are difficult to generalize, because they are blanket terms that cover lots of tools that have different effects. We’re doing a study on code contributions to a larger software infrastructure. Code is fairly objective, in that a machine can evaluate its quality. This tool summarizes the quality of the work and gives that evaluation to a human reviewer. When that tool is there, there’s no difference between how likely they are to accept men’s and women’s code contributions. Without that tool, there is a gender gap where men’s contributions are more likely to be accepted than women’s. This tool can reduce gender inequalities in terms of which contributions are accepted.

We think this is because of time and attention. It takes a long time to read code blocks, so when there is no tool, the evaluator will use the coder’s identity to make a determination about the code’s quality. Whenever there is uncertainty evaluators will use the creator’s identity as an indicator of quality. This is also true when evaluating something requires more resources than the evaluator has at hand.

"I think it’s counter-productive that sustainability is so often seen as a political issue. I use sustainability to talk about the opportunity for new technologies that are cleaner and better. It doesn’t have to be about your political views."

-says Ethan Poskanzer

CESR: What big trends are you seeing in innovation and in equity/inclusion?

EP: I’m curious about what colleges will do after the recent U.S. Supreme Court case that limited the use of race in admissions. College admissions officers are now in a very unknown position because race has been a factor for a very long time. It will be very interesting to see how colleges will navigate the new legal landscape. I would love to have one volunteer for a study. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what is OK to do.

CESR: Have you found opportunities to bring topics of equity, inclusion, or other aspects of sustainability and/or social impact into your teaching?

EP: In my teaching, I talk about inequality in the frame of lost contributions to innovation. Regarding sustainability, I think it’s counter-productive that sustainability is so often seen as a political issue. I use sustainability to talk about the opportunity for new technologies that are cleaner and better. It doesn’t have to be about your political views.  I talk with students about how inventions that allow us to produce the same amount of stuff with less pollution are better for everyone.

I take this approach because it’s better if we are using all of our innovative capacity and having as many people working on sustainability as possible. The politicization of sustainability makes fewer people want to be involved. When things enter a two-party political sphere, we end up with two views on every concept. For a problem like this that would benefit from innovation from everyone, the less it enters a politically divisive realm, the better.

CESR: What can leaders and investors do to encourage innovation in an equitable way across diverse groups?

EP: We see that designing standardized evaluation processes can reduce biases. In other research I’ve done we see that how an evaluation is framed can affect the degree of gender bias. When there are evaluations that are communicated as participatory, there’s less gender bias. When things are framed as being higher stakes, people get really risk-averse and lean on the person’s identity more to evaluate quality. When there is more risk, people will choose the highest status option because there is less personal risk to them. Framing innovation as “Failure is OK,” can help to break people out of that cognitive rigidity.  

For entrepreneurship in science where innovation is a long process, having advisers is really important. Because you learn tacit knowledge from someone over time. Having diversity in the adviser roles is supportive of diverse mentees. We see that people tend to form stronger relationships with people who are similar to them. When the advisers are representative of mentee population, everyone has the same opportunity to bond with advisers who are like them.

CESR: What is one piece of advice you would like to share with current and future business leaders?

EP: Failure is a healthy part of the innovation process. In a lot of ways, larger processes that produce the best ideas have a lot of failures along the way. Early in an idea’s life, it’s really hard to tell if it’s good or not. Innovation processes where people are not penalized for failure when a good faith attempt is made are more likely to produce great ideas. The best process for innovation would allow multiple ideas to grow and be tested before culling them and choosing which ones to select.

Learn more about CESR’s research prizes on our website, and read about other sustainable business research on our blog.

Ethan recently spoke with CU Boulder Today about another project that found people will knowingly support falsehoods when they align with their personal politics.