I would like to see universities take a more socioeconomic approach in admissions. Race based admission will advantage even the richest of "preferred" groups against the most disadvantaged of...
I would like to see universities take a more socioeconomic approach in admissions. Race based admission will advantage even the richest of "preferred" groups against the most disadvantaged of non-preferred. IMO we should be trying to make sure we get proper admissions and representation from both the rich and poor from all races without race being a strict qualifier and, honestly, Asians being discriminated against for being overachievers is highly problematic
That feels like whataboutism. The case brought to the Supreme Court was by Asian Americans suing Harvard and UNC for racial discrimination. The Court decided on that case. We can speculate what...
That feels like whataboutism. The case brought to the Supreme Court was by Asian Americans suing Harvard and UNC for racial discrimination. The Court decided on that case.
We can speculate what they would do with a case that sued universities for legacy admissions, but it seems irrelevant to say whether or not they should or should not have ruled against AA because of that. Something can be bad, in addition to another thing being bad.
I don't think it's whataboutism, but you're right that the two issues aren't mutually exclusive. At the heart of this case is a question of fairness: is it fair for someone to receive a...
I don't think it's whataboutism, but you're right that the two issues aren't mutually exclusive. At the heart of this case is a question of fairness: is it fair for someone to receive a boost/demerit in their application for some non-meritocratic reason? The majority seems to think yes when that factor is race while remaining quiet on legacy admissions.
Of course, there's good reason this case doesn't address legacy admissions -- that's not the issue they were deciding, after all. But it's hard not to feel suspicious when 5/6 of the majority is white, 5/6 of the majority is male, and 5/6 of the majority went to elite law schools.
Honestly, I suspect legacy admissions play a larger role than affirmative action at elite universities. Affirmative action is never the deciding factor on enrolling someone; ultimately all applicants must pass some "minimum" bar, which is going to be rather high at the most prestigious universities; it's not like anyone's accepted to Harvard solely by virtue of being black. On the other hand, legacy admissions absolutely can work like that.
It's such a joke that these institutions are held in such high regard when its such a bought system. I was watching a reality show recently and one of the people on it was just this really...
It's such a joke that these institutions are held in such high regard when its such a bought system. I was watching a reality show recently and one of the people on it was just this really unintelligent young, blonde, and blue-eyed white woman but incredibly incredibly rich. Her family was certainly in the billionaire class. I was unsurprised to learn she had just graduated from Yale with an engineering degree.
I went to school with a girl who got into Yale and she was such an incredibly talented and smart person and she worked hard to get in. Her family was not rich but she scored in the top 97% of SAT scores in my state. There is no way for a second that I believe this woman on this show was at her level and in engineering to boot.
These wealthy families use these schools as a club they buy into.
I’m probably stating the obvious but legacy admissions are about money. The rich former Ivy graduates are more likely to give money to the university, or pay full tuition for their kids, if their...
I’m probably stating the obvious but legacy admissions are about money. The rich former Ivy graduates are more likely to give money to the university, or pay full tuition for their kids, if their kids are guaranteed a spot.
I’m also not sure to what extent, if any, those funds end up subsidizing the educations of other students. Or to what extent, connections made to rich kids helps the other students later in life.
I agree 100% that it’s blatant discrimination in favor certain classes of people, who may not be able to get in under their own merits. I just doubt it ever goes away so long as money is involved.
Ultimately there's no rules against favoring people who have parents that went to your school, so the Supreme Court wouldn't be able to ban this unless they really stretched things. Plus, the...
Ultimately there's no rules against favoring people who have parents that went to your school, so the Supreme Court wouldn't be able to ban this unless they really stretched things. Plus, the universities use these students to get funding, if they cut the system they'd need some other way of getting money and encouraging alumni to donate.
The vast majority of university funding comes from federal/state/local grants (see Fig 9 here). Elite universities are an exception (somewhat; see figure), but I don't think we should worry too...
The vast majority of university funding comes from federal/state/local grants (see Fig 9 here). Elite universities are an exception (somewhat; see figure), but I don't think we should worry too much for them when they have endowments measured in the tens of billions of dollars.
Colorblind approaches to racism don't work because people aren't actually colorblind. Diversity can mean a lot of things, so let's nail down a definition: colleges should try to mirror the...
Colorblind approaches to racism don't work because people aren't actually colorblind.
Diversity can mean a lot of things, so let's nail down a definition: colleges should try to mirror the racial/gender/etc profile of their state. Not a perfect definition, but a serviceable one. Now if an admissions committee has two candidates who are roughly equal, one white and one Native American, and the committee decides to accept the non-white candidate over the white candidate, then I suppose you could argue that the white candidate has been discriminated against. However, if the admission committee ignores race altogether, deciding only to choose the most "meritocratic" candidates, and if that class ends up disproportionately white (compared to the state census), then that admission committee has now perpetuated a sort of systematic discrimination.
That's the nuance that's lost in your example: if you only focus on any two people, then you're ignoring the larger systematic effects. Discrimination by race occurs in either case. And anyway, admission committees generally don't A/B test candidates (unless the pool is very small). They vote to accept or reject a candidate before moving on to the next one.
As for career issues: you're right that universities can't fix these, but why would they be able to? They're universities. However, presumably the careers @ZeroDarkRainbow is referring to are predicated on having a college education. Eliminating affirmative action would only increase the number of barriers.
Once prevention is in place, only then does it make sense to remove treatment. Clearly, it's not a perfect solution, but in lieu of nothing for decades, it's preferred. Removing this tool for...
Once prevention is in place, only then does it make sense to remove treatment. Clearly, it's not a perfect solution, but in lieu of nothing for decades, it's preferred. Removing this tool for racial equality cannot be justified with "maybe we'll do something better in the future"
I agree it was imperfect, and biased by the colleges themselves, but revoking affirmative action as a concept will only damage access to education for minority groups who are not afforded the same...
I agree it was imperfect, and biased by the colleges themselves, but revoking affirmative action as a concept will only damage access to education for minority groups who are not afforded the same educational opportunities and financial stability. There is no secondary protection to help colleges remain diverse, to overcome intentional, manufactured inequalities in education.
Here's a clumsy analogy. Seatbelts are not designed for women. They don't really work great and have a higher fatality rate compared to the physiology of men. The solution to this issue is better designed seatbelts, not removing all seatbelts in the name of a superficial notion of equality. Now nobody survives car crashes, but you can sleep at night knowing everyone dies equally?
My point is that this appeal to moral purity is a convenient excuse to remove protections with no replacements in the works. Colleges want more donations and racists want education to be a segregated whites-only club. They're the driving force behind this decision, and the pretense of "unfair discrimination" in college acceptance is just a vehicle for them to get EXACTLY what they want.
an interesting aspect of this ruling I haven't seen much discussion of: Service academies exempt from Supreme Court affirmative action ruling the federal government wanted to keep the option of...
Exemplary
an interesting aspect of this ruling I haven't seen much discussion of:
The justices writing for the 6-3 conservative majority noted the federal government had written a friend-of-the court brief urging them to protect the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions — often called affirmative action — in part to ensure racial diversity in service academies.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a footnote in the majority opinion, “No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context.”
“This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
the federal government wanted to keep the option of race-conscious admissions for military academies (West Point etc). their argument was that it's important for officers in the military to be as diverse as the enlisted soldiers they're leading.
the majority opinion, written by Roberts, is pretty clear that race-conscious admissions aren't just bad, they're invidious, and must be eliminated entirely because they violate the 14th Amendment:
These decisions reflect the “core purpose” of the Equal Protection Clause: “do[ing] away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.”. We have recognized that repeatedly. “The clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States.”
...
Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. And the Equal Protection Clause, we have accordingly held, applies “without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality”—it is “universal in [its] application.”
...
Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
if race-conscious admissions are as bad as they say...why exempt military academies?
why have sweeping language about how all racial discrimination needs to be ended, how this is a "universal" principle, but then toss in a footnote that military academies can continue to discriminate, because they might present different arguments?
also, military academies such as West Point are a relatively small source of officers. 70% of US Army officers come from ROTC, a training program that exists on college campuses throughout the country. Harvard and UNC both have ROTC chapters.
if having a diverse officer corps is important enough that military academies can still use race-conscious admissions...shouldn't that same logic also apply to ROTC programs at other schools, including Harvard and UNC?
and if the general argument is that the military should have diversity in its leadership that reflects the diversity of the people it leads, and race-consciousness is necessary to achieve that...shouldn't that same logic apply outside the military?
elite colleges like Harvard produce leaders in civilian positions in the same way that West Point produces military leaders. for example:
is there value in having judges be racially representative of the population they make rulings about, for the same reason there's value in racial representation among military leadership?
That’s not how this works, you can’t just change things in the judicial process because you want to. As Roberts wrote, academies are not Party to the case. Why was it not banned for them? Because...
That’s not how this works, you can’t just change things in the judicial process because you want to. As Roberts wrote, academies are not Party to the case. Why was it not banned for them? Because no one has sued. Bring a suit and then we’ll see where they really stand
no...that is patent nonsense. the parties in these two cases were Harvard and UNC. if what you're saying was true, the ruling from SCOTUS would only apply to those two colleges, and not any...
As Roberts wrote, academies are not Party to the case. Why was it not banned for them? Because no one has sued.
no...that is patent nonsense.
the parties in these two cases were Harvard and UNC. if what you're saying was true, the ruling from SCOTUS would only apply to those two colleges, and not any others. SFFA would need separate lawsuits for Yale, MIT, and so on (possibly including West Point, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, etc)
courts, especially the Supreme Court, have a lot of flexibility in how narrow or broad they make their rulings. they chose to make this a broad ruling, that struck down race-conscious admissions nationwide, for both public (UNC) and private (Harvard) colleges. and they chose to exempt military service academies from the decision.
Link to PDF of actual decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf 6-3, liberal members in dissent. To opine on it, honestly I'm not going to pretend I'm not somewhat...
To opine on it, honestly I'm not going to pretend I'm not somewhat biased as someone of asian descent, but if nothing else, from a legal standpoint, it's hard to say how this isn't textbook race-based discrimination, of which we have multiple laws against in the US. If race-based AA is something desired, then there should explicitly be a amendment to the civil rights act passed by congress adding that, for education, schools may discriminate against asian and white students.
I'm asian american, and everyone is conveniently ignoring the fact that AA is one of the foremost ways we have to combat systemic and intentional discrimination against minority groups in the...
I'm asian american, and everyone is conveniently ignoring the fact that AA is one of the foremost ways we have to combat systemic and intentional discrimination against minority groups in the United States. Switching to a meritocracy is all well and good, but how can you justify denying racial groups admittance to higher education when we've specifically stacked the deck against them for centuries? America has spent years and years denying and removing every possible opportunity for minority racial groups, worse housing, worse health, worse education, lower standard of living. Unless these issues are rectified, how can we justify removing one of the few equalizers we have?
Was I discriminated against during college admissions? Maybe, but I'm not subject to centuries of directed racial malice. I think we should argue for more Asian American representation, certainly, but not if that means less representation for other groups who to this day struggle for true equality.
I think hyper-focusing on whether or not AA is 'textbook race-based discrimination' (not picking on you @stu2b50, but I see this sentiment a lot) loses sight of this bigger picture. Yea, it is...
Was I discriminated against during college admissions? Maybe, but I'm not subject to centuries of directed racial malice. I think we should argue for more Asian American representation, certainly, but not if that means less representation for other groups who to this day struggle for true equality.
I think hyper-focusing on whether or not AA is 'textbook race-based discrimination' (not picking on you @stu2b50, but I see this sentiment a lot) loses sight of this bigger picture.
Yea, it is discrimination, that's the entire point. Trauma propagates through generations, and black people in the United States have historically been subjected to extreme, unimaginable trauma sanctioned by the state itself. Nothing I've seen leaves me confident we're anywhere close to that signal being close to fading on it's own, so it makes sense to introduce some time-limited positive bias as an attempt to counteract that. It's not a perfect tool by any means, but I'm not sure there is a better one.
Well, it depends on what angle you're taking it. That's a utilitarian one, which isn't invalid by any means, but there's more than just that. From a legal standpoint, the US does have laws that...
Well, it depends on what angle you're taking it. That's a utilitarian one, which isn't invalid by any means, but there's more than just that.
From a legal standpoint, the US does have laws that protect race-based discrimination in things like admissions: it's the Civil Rights Act. If the angle is to "fight fire with fire", so to speak, then it is still not permissible under the equal protections clause of the Civil Rights Act, and if that's the policy we want to pursue, it should be amended to it, that racial discrimination is permitted under certain circumstances.
From a more theoretical point of view, the utilitarian argument takes that although this is racial discrimination, it is "canceling out" historical racial discrimination. When another minority is brought into this, that becomes more dubious though. Asians in the US have never had political power, were certainly not the ones enacting racial prejudice against black and brown people, and were subject to systematic discrimination themselves. What injustice is being cancelled out?
And finally, there's a point of view that it's just dangerous. To allow for racial discrimination as a solution to fix the past, you have to assume that it's being done in good faith, but without oversight, it can just easily do all the bad things racial discrimination is capable of.
Yea I think those are all valid concerns to have, absolutely. I'll leave the technical details for you Americans to sort out, but I'll touch on your other points. Fair point. Like many utilitarian...
Yea I think those are all valid concerns to have, absolutely.
I'll leave the technical details for you Americans to sort out, but I'll touch on your other points.
When another minority is brought into this, that becomes more dubious though. Asians in the US have never had political power, were certainly not the ones enacting racial prejudice against black and brown people, and were subject to systematic discrimination themselves. What injustice is being cancelled out?
Fair point. Like many utilitarian arguments, it's quick to get lost in details of measurement, the so-called moral calculus of oppression thresholds and extent, etc. But I think if we step back and take a pornography "I'll know it when I see it" approach, the trauma of centuries of slavery, rape, indentured servitude, extrajudicial killings stands alone among American minorities. Yes, that does minimize the very valid concerns of other groups but I think that we're also talking different orders of magnitude of generational trauma.
And finally, there's a point of view that it's just dangerous. To allow for racial discrimination as a solution to fix the past, you have to assume that it's being done in good faith, but without oversight, it can just easily do all the bad things racial discrimination is capable of.
Absolutely true, but I think the specific question of abuse is best left to the government and voters instead of a court. A functioning government should be able to co-ordinate oversight of these initiatives, conditions of success, and make the case for these to voters.
To be honest, I don't think it's productive to get into minority misery wars, so I'll ignore the first part. Sure, but that was in effect what the court decided, no? Like I don't think there's any...
To be honest, I don't think it's productive to get into minority misery wars, so I'll ignore the first part.
Absolutely true, but I think the specific question of abuse is best left to the government and voters instead of a court.
Sure, but that was in effect what the court decided, no? Like I don't think there's any argument it doesn't violate the equal protections clause of the civil rights act. If fire is illegal, using fire to fight fire is still illegal. Because fire is illegal.
Under the current law, it really always should've been illegal.
It can be legal again, if Congress passes new laws amending the CRA's clauses to have those exceptions. And if you believe that it's the best way forward, then this is also something that should happen, because as you said, it should be left to the government and voters. AA was always murky business, because it was basically just let to exist.
How are the "races" defined (does it make any sense for indians and koreans to be the same race? Filipinos? They were literally a colonial subject - what about recent immigrants?) How much is the penalty and/or bonus to each race given? What is the criteria to which success is measured? What is the precise goal of this carve-out for racial discrimination?
All those should be defined if nothing else. The default should be that racial discrimination is not allowed in things like admissions, that's entirely what Brown v. Board of Education was about in the other direction.
In the current state, admission offices are given blanket power to discriminate by race. Who knows if they do so responsibly.
Prop 16 in California gives a clear picture of what happens when you eliminate affirmative action from admissions, and Asian enrollment absolutely increased significantly. As someone that is Asian...
Prop 16 in California gives a clear picture of what happens when you eliminate affirmative action from admissions, and Asian enrollment absolutely increased significantly.
As someone that is Asian American, there is definitely a pretty strong feeling in the community that colleges discriminate against Asians. I think saying that they're just some kind of puppet republicans are "using" is taking a lot of agency from them.
Usually the arguments for AA is about correcting systematic discrimination from the government in the past, which is a little dubious anyhow, but is hard to argue for Asian Americans. The US actively colonized Asian countries pre WW2, then did things like put the Japanese in interment camps or literally pass a law called the "Chinese Exclusion Act". If that isn't historical systematic discrimination, then I don't know what is.
Penalizing the group for succeeding despite government oppression just seems silly.
Also Asian American here. Your comment articulates a core feeling of mine about the liberal reaction to the case. Affirmative action is an issue that a lot of Asian Americans have genuine feelings...
Also Asian American here. Your comment articulates a core feeling of mine about the liberal reaction to the case.
It seems to me that those opposing affirmative action are mostly just rich white Republicans trying to use Asians as a wedge issue.
As someone that is Asian American, there is definitely a pretty strong feeling in the community that colleges discriminate against Asians. I think saying that they're just some kind of puppet republicans are "using" is taking a lot of agency from them.
Affirmative action is an issue that a lot of Asian Americans have genuine feelings about. In AA there is an assumption that we are an undifferentiated mass of academic drones. In Harvard admission's personal assessments, we have markedly less "personality" than others; we do things not out of our own agency because others (our tiger parents or Republicans) have manipulated us into doing them.
We're not drones, robots, or puppets. We have just as much agency as anyone else.
It just so happened that a (significant) part of the Asian-American community found its interests coinciding with a Republican group's interests. It does not make those feelings illegitimate: all ideologies have overlap.
To me, these feel like two separate issues: Harvard was wrong for artificially lowering the "personality" scores for Asian Americans, but that doesn't mean that affirmative action needs to go --...
To me, these feel like two separate issues: Harvard was wrong for artificially lowering the "personality" scores for Asian Americans, but that doesn't mean that affirmative action needs to go -- it just means universities shouldn't discriminate against Asian Americans. A more narrow ruling could've addressed this particular issue without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
This ruling will increase the number of Asian Americans at elite universities, which is probably fair and desirable. But I fear it's disparate impact will be to increase the number of white people at mid-tier universities at the expense of other minorities. (But then again, maybe not?)
One is Prop 209, where a state with a higher population than Canada experimented on removing race from admissions. Asian enrollment jumped from 34 to 43.7% after prop 209 passed. Secondly, Harvard...
One is Prop 209, where a state with a higher population than Canada experimented on removing race from admissions. Asian enrollment jumped from 34 to 43.7% after prop 209 passed.
Secondly, Harvard itself found that it discriminated against Asian Americans in a file revealed in discovery in the initial case
The court documents, filed in federal court in Boston, also showed that Harvard conducted an internal investigation into its admissions policies in 2013 and found a bias against Asian-American applicants. But Harvard never made the findings public or acted on them.
And finally, believe it or not, but the NCAPA does not speak for all Asian Americans.
At UC-Berkeley, for example, Asian-American enrollment (“first time in college” enrollment) jumped from 37.30% in 1995 to 43.57% in 2000 following the implementation of Proposition 209, and, since that date, the number and percentage of Asian-Americans has increased steadily at both UC-Berkeley and UCLA, reaching 46.59
Legacy and student athlete admissions would only make the point further, as Asian Americans are disproportionately not included in either group. Excluding those is bias in the other direction.
You can see that after 1998 AA enrollment went from 39.6% to 44.7, whereas white enrollment went from 30.2 to 30.8. The zero sum reduction in black and hispanic enrollment went mostly directly to Asian Americans at the flagship UC.
That link was just the first Google result I found, I later found the raw statistics and edited that in. The quote is just repeating back statistics; in the +-5 years of prop 209, white enrollment...
That link was just the first Google result I found, I later found the raw statistics and edited that in. The quote is just repeating back statistics; in the +-5 years of prop 209, white enrollment at UC Berkeley only changed by 0.5 while asian enrollment increased by 5.1%, being the vast majority of the decrease in enrollment of other minorities. https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/12/enroll_archival.shtml
I think this is basically going in circles at this point. It is my lived experience as an Asian American who went to college in California that Asian Americans are penalized in admissions in other states and in private schools. I have a mixed friend who was quite literally told by our high school counselor to put "white" instead of "asian" on non-UC applications.
We shall see what happens to demographics at large, but I suspect that we will see the trends in the UC schools. If nothing else, if schools want to bias their admissions towards race, I am glad that it will require further legislation and would hopefully be transparent if nothing else.
I feel like you're gaslighting at this point. This is an act of taking a comically absurd stance and taking a very very selective group of facts to support your position. Like this. They wanted to...
I feel like you're gaslighting at this point.
This is an act of taking a comically absurd stance and taking a very very selective group of facts to support your position.
The complainant in this case that has killed affirmative action did not get into Harvard, but still got into an elite university
Like this. They wanted to get into Harvard right? They weren't able to thanks to their race. While they were able to find an alternative, there are plenty who are on the edge of viable that would have to take a substantial hit to their education thanks to this.
So you're citing this irrelevant statistic, focusing on this one person because it's convenient, and claiming that there's "no evidence" for something that's observed over and over and over in the real world and was explicitly known to be happening in the case of Harvard.
Other people in this thread also gave statistics that indicated the same, pointing to when over AA policies were killed Asian attendance at schools immidiately skyrocketed.
I think the two of you just disagree. please remember that Tildes tries to operate on the principle of charity. if we assume that Harvard admissions is a zero-sum game, which seems to be the...
I feel like you're gaslighting at this point.
I think the two of you just disagree. please remember that Tildes tries to operate on the principle of charity.
They wanted to get into Harvard right? They weren't able to thanks to their race.
if we assume that Harvard admissions is a zero-sum game, which seems to be the underlying assumption in the entire affirmative action conversation, then someone else did get in, in part thanks to their race.
it seems like that other student is getting ignored here. the story isn't "someone wanted to get into Harvard and was rejected". the story is that two people wanted in, both of them were well-qualified, and Harvard had to make a tie-breaking decision.
the people at Harvard, who make these admissions decisions for a living, decided that considering race as one possible factor in those tie-breaking decisions was helpful to them. they are considering not just purely meritocratic "who is the best student", but other factors like ensuring the diversity of the student body as a whole.
While they were able to find an alternative, there are plenty who are on the edge of viable that would have to take a substantial hit to their education thanks to this.
if you have the SAT scores etc to be a competitive applicant to Harvard, chances are you're going to do just fine, even if you end up going to a "lesser" college.
as has already been said elsewhere in this thread, Harvard rejects ~97% of applicants. so a hypothetical student who thinks their college education and future career will take a "substantial hit" if they don't get into Harvard is probably in for a rude awakening.
From the New York Times in 2018, below I provided a paywall bypass archive.org link:...
The court documents, filed in federal court in Boston, also showed that Harvard conducted an internal investigation into its admissions policies in 2013 and found a bias against Asian-American applicants. But Harvard never made the findings public or acted on them.
From the New York Times in 2018, below I provided a paywall bypass archive.org link:
Nobody is saying that Asians aren't overrepresented in terms of numbers, but the thing is Asians in general just study really hard and deserve to be overrepresented by even more than than 5x factor.
Nobody is saying that Asians aren't overrepresented in terms of numbers, but the thing is Asians in general just study really hard and deserve to be overrepresented by even more than than 5x factor.
I deserve to be able to use the courts to force my way into a private university, even though it demonstrably creates a worse outcome for everyone (including me) 👍
I deserve to be able to use the courts to force my way into a private university, even though it demonstrably creates a worse outcome for everyone (including me)
As someone not from the US, Affirmative Action seems batshit crazy. (But so do private pay-to-play universities, too). Just enforce actual anti-discrimination laws, which would make it illegal to...
As someone not from the US, Affirmative Action seems batshit crazy. (But so do private pay-to-play universities, too).
Just enforce actual anti-discrimination laws, which would make it illegal to use race as any factor (Even collect it on forms like Americans like to do).
Any school offering degrees that are official should be required to a certain admission standard and to follow actual discrimination laws.
Heck, in my country we even have a country wide admissions program to universities. Specifically to keep it fair to everyone, university education is still a scarce resource.
I can understand that position, but I think the one thing you don't realize is how bad a problem racism actually is in the US. I can't even begin to express how many times I've heard "anti-racism...
I can understand that position, but I think the one thing you don't realize is how bad a problem racism actually is in the US. I can't even begin to express how many times I've heard "anti-racism is the real racism" schtick from people, and it's hard to get a real pulse on how bad racism is because being seen as racist is taboo, but there is so much casual racism out there that people aren't always conscious about it so everyone is constantly assured that they just couldn't possibly be a part of the problem. And of course, if you have to explain to a person why their behavior or thought patterns are problematic, they will not listen to you because whatever you say "can't possibly be true because I'm not a racist!"
And I assure you that if you found that frustrating, the reality is much worse because there are thousands of regional variations on this theme.
That's some incredibly messed up culture. So basically the problem is so bad that if you'd use rely on normal discrimination laws people would end up STILL being racist AND in many places the laws...
That's some incredibly messed up culture. So basically the problem is so bad that if you'd use rely on normal discrimination laws people would end up STILL being racist AND in many places the laws wouldn't be followed because no one thinks the behaviour is wrong?
It’s more nuanced than that. The racism that actually hurts people the most is systemic in nature, and there is a large number of people who want to pass laws that make life worse for people who...
It’s more nuanced than that. The racism that actually hurts people the most is systemic in nature, and there is a large number of people who want to pass laws that make life worse for people who are not white, usually under the guise of “law and order”. Immigration is a big one, and while it’s too big a topic for me to fully cover, I would like to highlight Arizona’s “show me your papers” law, which has the effect of making Hispanic people targets to be stopped by police regardless if they are citizens or not. Or look at any conversation about Voter ID laws; when people point out that poor people and people of color will have a hard time getting those IDs, they get called racist for saying that people of color are “too stupid to get an ID” (which of course was not what the arguement was in the first place; it’s just a very childish talking point to attempt to shut down the conversation).
Wouldn't the whole voter ID issue just be solved by having federally mandated state IDs that are just given out to everyone? Like every country in Europe does?
Wouldn't the whole voter ID issue just be solved by having federally mandated state IDs that are just given out to everyone? Like every country in Europe does?
That might be possible if these voter ID laws were federal, but they're state level. They also disallow other forms of ID that might be easier to get a hold of, like student IDs. Beyond that, the...
That might be possible if these voter ID laws were federal, but they're state level. They also disallow other forms of ID that might be easier to get a hold of, like student IDs.
Beyond that, the proponents of these laws don't seem to understand exactly how difficult it is to get these IDs if you don't already have one. The first time I got an ID, it took me over a month because of all the hoops that I needed to get, and it could have taken longer if I didn't have a certified copy of my birth certificate. I had to go to a social security office that was something like 50 miles away and wait in an extremely long line just to start the process of getting a physical social security card because my idiot father had lost mine. I had to go there again to actually finish the application, and wait two weeks for them to send it to me. Then I had to get an appointment for the DMV to apply for the ID, after which I still had to wait for hours at the DMV to even be seen. and then I had to wait for them to print and mail me the card itself. Both the social security card and the ID card had fees for me to get them. What would I have done if I were homeless and couldn't afford it because it was either that or food? What would I have done if I didn't have transportation to those offices? What would I have done if I had a job and couldn't afford to spend the time off work waiting in those offices?
I agree that the impact on the AA community is problematic, however I'd still like to find a way increase university attendance/acceptance in underserved black and hispanic communities. I like the...
I agree that the impact on the AA community is problematic, however I'd still like to find a way increase university attendance/acceptance in underserved black and hispanic communities. I like the idea of using an economic based system but it seems like a bill like that would face similar pushback.
I don't think any of us that have gone to university actually think that it is a merit based system. Most of the application process is checking boxes and polishing your CV, things the wealthy and connected are very good at. An OChem class at Michigan State will teach the same material as an OChem class at Harvard. What Harvard provides is access to a network, resources, and branding that ensure the recipient of their degree never has to worry about instability in employment and provides a fast track to wealth building. With that in mind, I would absolutely like to see underserved communities have access to those same privileges.
We don't have to select preference based on race, we could do it via economics, but I fear if the outcome were measured by race, and had similar outcomes, we would end up with the same discussion.
I’m just spit balling here but reading your comment now has me wondering if it’s not access to universities for black and Hispanic groups we should be focusing on but rather lower education....
I’m just spit balling here but reading your comment now has me wondering if it’s not access to universities for black and Hispanic groups we should be focusing on but rather lower education. Better performance there would ensure higher university enrollment rates in a racially blind system
That's a whole complex can of worms to dig through. To put things as simply as I possibly can, the reasons why black and Hispanic children have worse outcomes than white children is most strongly...
That's a whole complex can of worms to dig through.
To put things as simply as I possibly can, the reasons why black and Hispanic children have worse outcomes than white children is most strongly related to their economic standing, which a large portion of Americans think that trying to help them is a form of robbery against them. To solve that problem you would first have to solve the problem of the ideology that drives American conservatism.
I think you're right it's a multi-pronged approach. One of the things poorer folks lack is access to tools to prep for college (i.e. SAT prep, tutors) and support from parents/family (often...
I think you're right it's a multi-pronged approach. One of the things poorer folks lack is access to tools to prep for college (i.e. SAT prep, tutors) and support from parents/family (often parents will need to work more than one job). Another big factor is that first generation college students don't have the same kind of guidance that kids with parents who did attend college do. As my mom liked to repeat on end, "the value of a college education is learning how to manipulate a large bureaucracy". It's hard when you have support from people who have navigated it first hand, if you're doing it without guidance it can be near impossible.
To your point, we absolutely should put more funding towards k-12 education - everything from more efficient transportation (as lower income kids typically live further from schools*, have parents with less availability and resources to drop them off, and worse access to pedestrian/bike friendly infrastructure), access to additional non-peer based tutoring programs targeted at learning disorder (dyslexia, ADAH), and so much more.
But so many of the things that can get students into University are intangibles that also come with wealth. One of the biggest aids can just be a parents network. If your dad is friends with a board member for a non-profit or company it's easy to get an internship, otherwise good luck. As others in this thread have pointed out, legacy is still a huge issue.
I hope that this decision opens up a much broader societal discussion on inequity in education (both k-12 and university level) but I'm not super optimistic.
*citation needed but I believe that was cited in the podcast "Nice White Parents" that anyone with an interest in this topic should give a listen. It's great!
As someone who works in Higher Ed., I think this may act as a wake-up call to the long-time problematic college admissions system. There's been a growing movement among public universities to make...
As someone who works in Higher Ed., I think this may act as a wake-up call to the long-time problematic college admissions system. There's been a growing movement among public universities to make admissions less exclusive, and focus on providing quality education to as many people as possible. One school leading the way is Northern Arizona University. This is a philosophy I heavily buy into, so my bias is there.
I do think affirmative action/equal opportunity is important, but its implementation has been... less than ideal. A big example, mentioned already here, being ethnically Asian students. Instead of relying on "that's how the federal government said it has to be", I hope universities will take a deep look at how they make these decisions and their values in doing so. It's all a big question mark this early on.
The negative effect that this will have on an entire generation of Hispanic and Black students is truly disheartening. The nuanced understanding of affirmative action and its role in promoting...
The negative effect that this will have on an entire generation of Hispanic and Black students is truly disheartening. The nuanced understanding of affirmative action and its role in promoting diversity will be lost on many of these universities, and the students will be made to suffer. Edward Blum attacked voting rights, and made the entire universe of voting significantly more difficult for people of color. It is no surprise that after losing against affirmative action in 2016, he would come back when the court was more conservative leaning to try again.
Seeing decades of activist work being washed away by the Supreme Court is painful. There is this really weird notion that the US has somehow solved racism, while not actually doing anything all that substantial to handle the issue. There are people that marched during the Civil Rights Movement that are still alive, but we somehow in record time managed to solve the entire issue? No way.
Conservatives love this notion that racism has been defeated and that any mention of it in a contemporary context is to deny this noble victory and sow division. The Supreme Court has legislated...
Conservatives love this notion that racism has been defeated and that any mention of it in a contemporary context is to deny this noble victory and sow division. The Supreme Court has legislated to this fiction, ignoring the truth that the fight against discriminatory practices is ongoing and deeper rooted than simple admissions rates.
An expected opinion delivered by Chief Roberts who famously wrote "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." I think American society...
An expected opinion delivered by Chief Roberts who famously wrote "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
I think American society have progressed far beyond the environment that resulted in Brown vs. BoE or the Civil Rights Act. I understand that AA role in attempting to provide remedy to historically disadvantaged groups, however it's outdated in the modern age where a specific racial group is singled out to be "handicapped" by their race.
Here's to hoping legacy and athletic admission is next.
Any use of grades, "extra-curriculars" and test scores are going to advance the most competitive and the best test-takers and academically oriented applicants. Permit me to observe as a US doctor...
Any use of grades, "extra-curriculars" and test scores are going to advance the most competitive and the best test-takers and academically oriented applicants. Permit me to observe as a US doctor retired 30 years after completion of US medical school the most competitive and academically oriented may not be the best pool to draw from, race or socioeconomic background notwithstanding. Why do you suppose so many patients complain that their doctors seem uncaring and unsympathetic?
I propose that all four-year colleges and universities and also professional schools should have a quota (say 10-20%) of their admissions that are entirely random draws from the pool of applicants.
I would like to see universities take a more socioeconomic approach in admissions. Race based admission will advantage even the richest of "preferred" groups against the most disadvantaged of non-preferred. IMO we should be trying to make sure we get proper admissions and representation from both the rich and poor from all races without race being a strict qualifier and, honestly, Asians being discriminated against for being overachievers is highly problematic
That feels like whataboutism. The case brought to the Supreme Court was by Asian Americans suing Harvard and UNC for racial discrimination. The Court decided on that case.
We can speculate what they would do with a case that sued universities for legacy admissions, but it seems irrelevant to say whether or not they should or should not have ruled against AA because of that. Something can be bad, in addition to another thing being bad.
I don't think it's whataboutism, but you're right that the two issues aren't mutually exclusive. At the heart of this case is a question of fairness: is it fair for someone to receive a boost/demerit in their application for some non-meritocratic reason? The majority seems to think yes when that factor is race while remaining quiet on legacy admissions.
Of course, there's good reason this case doesn't address legacy admissions -- that's not the issue they were deciding, after all. But it's hard not to feel suspicious when 5/6 of the majority is white, 5/6 of the majority is male, and 5/6 of the majority went to elite law schools.
Honestly, I suspect legacy admissions play a larger role than affirmative action at elite universities. Affirmative action is never the deciding factor on enrolling someone; ultimately all applicants must pass some "minimum" bar, which is going to be rather high at the most prestigious universities; it's not like anyone's accepted to Harvard solely by virtue of being black. On the other hand, legacy admissions absolutely can work like that.
It's such a joke that these institutions are held in such high regard when its such a bought system. I was watching a reality show recently and one of the people on it was just this really unintelligent young, blonde, and blue-eyed white woman but incredibly incredibly rich. Her family was certainly in the billionaire class. I was unsurprised to learn she had just graduated from Yale with an engineering degree.
I went to school with a girl who got into Yale and she was such an incredibly talented and smart person and she worked hard to get in. Her family was not rich but she scored in the top 97% of SAT scores in my state. There is no way for a second that I believe this woman on this show was at her level and in engineering to boot.
These wealthy families use these schools as a club they buy into.
I’m probably stating the obvious but legacy admissions are about money. The rich former Ivy graduates are more likely to give money to the university, or pay full tuition for their kids, if their kids are guaranteed a spot.
I’m also not sure to what extent, if any, those funds end up subsidizing the educations of other students. Or to what extent, connections made to rich kids helps the other students later in life.
I agree 100% that it’s blatant discrimination in favor certain classes of people, who may not be able to get in under their own merits. I just doubt it ever goes away so long as money is involved.
Ultimately there's no rules against favoring people who have parents that went to your school, so the Supreme Court wouldn't be able to ban this unless they really stretched things. Plus, the universities use these students to get funding, if they cut the system they'd need some other way of getting money and encouraging alumni to donate.
The vast majority of university funding comes from federal/state/local grants (see Fig 9 here). Elite universities are an exception (somewhat; see figure), but I don't think we should worry too much for them when they have endowments measured in the tens of billions of dollars.
Colorblind approaches to racism don't work because people aren't actually colorblind.
Diversity can mean a lot of things, so let's nail down a definition: colleges should try to mirror the racial/gender/etc profile of their state. Not a perfect definition, but a serviceable one. Now if an admissions committee has two candidates who are roughly equal, one white and one Native American, and the committee decides to accept the non-white candidate over the white candidate, then I suppose you could argue that the white candidate has been discriminated against. However, if the admission committee ignores race altogether, deciding only to choose the most "meritocratic" candidates, and if that class ends up disproportionately white (compared to the state census), then that admission committee has now perpetuated a sort of systematic discrimination.
That's the nuance that's lost in your example: if you only focus on any two people, then you're ignoring the larger systematic effects. Discrimination by race occurs in either case. And anyway, admission committees generally don't A/B test candidates (unless the pool is very small). They vote to accept or reject a candidate before moving on to the next one.
As for career issues: you're right that universities can't fix these, but why would they be able to? They're universities. However, presumably the careers @ZeroDarkRainbow is referring to are predicated on having a college education. Eliminating affirmative action would only increase the number of barriers.
Once prevention is in place, only then does it make sense to remove treatment. Clearly, it's not a perfect solution, but in lieu of nothing for decades, it's preferred. Removing this tool for racial equality cannot be justified with "maybe we'll do something better in the future"
I agree it was imperfect, and biased by the colleges themselves, but revoking affirmative action as a concept will only damage access to education for minority groups who are not afforded the same educational opportunities and financial stability. There is no secondary protection to help colleges remain diverse, to overcome intentional, manufactured inequalities in education.
Here's a clumsy analogy. Seatbelts are not designed for women. They don't really work great and have a higher fatality rate compared to the physiology of men. The solution to this issue is better designed seatbelts, not removing all seatbelts in the name of a superficial notion of equality. Now nobody survives car crashes, but you can sleep at night knowing everyone dies equally?
My point is that this appeal to moral purity is a convenient excuse to remove protections with no replacements in the works. Colleges want more donations and racists want education to be a segregated whites-only club. They're the driving force behind this decision, and the pretense of "unfair discrimination" in college acceptance is just a vehicle for them to get EXACTLY what they want.
an interesting aspect of this ruling I haven't seen much discussion of:
Service academies exempt from Supreme Court affirmative action ruling
the federal government wanted to keep the option of race-conscious admissions for military academies (West Point etc). their argument was that it's important for officers in the military to be as diverse as the enlisted soldiers they're leading.
the majority opinion, written by Roberts, is pretty clear that race-conscious admissions aren't just bad, they're invidious, and must be eliminated entirely because they violate the 14th Amendment:
if race-conscious admissions are as bad as they say...why exempt military academies?
why have sweeping language about how all racial discrimination needs to be ended, how this is a "universal" principle, but then toss in a footnote that military academies can continue to discriminate, because they might present different arguments?
also, military academies such as West Point are a relatively small source of officers. 70% of US Army officers come from ROTC, a training program that exists on college campuses throughout the country. Harvard and UNC both have ROTC chapters.
if having a diverse officer corps is important enough that military academies can still use race-conscious admissions...shouldn't that same logic also apply to ROTC programs at other schools, including Harvard and UNC?
and if the general argument is that the military should have diversity in its leadership that reflects the diversity of the people it leads, and race-consciousness is necessary to achieve that...shouldn't that same logic apply outside the military?
elite colleges like Harvard produce leaders in civilian positions in the same way that West Point produces military leaders. for example:
is there value in having judges be racially representative of the population they make rulings about, for the same reason there's value in racial representation among military leadership?
That’s not how this works, you can’t just change things in the judicial process because you want to. As Roberts wrote, academies are not Party to the case. Why was it not banned for them? Because no one has sued. Bring a suit and then we’ll see where they really stand
no...that is patent nonsense.
the parties in these two cases were Harvard and UNC. if what you're saying was true, the ruling from SCOTUS would only apply to those two colleges, and not any others. SFFA would need separate lawsuits for Yale, MIT, and so on (possibly including West Point, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, etc)
courts, especially the Supreme Court, have a lot of flexibility in how narrow or broad they make their rulings. they chose to make this a broad ruling, that struck down race-conscious admissions nationwide, for both public (UNC) and private (Harvard) colleges. and they chose to exempt military service academies from the decision.
Link to PDF of actual decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
6-3, liberal members in dissent.
To opine on it, honestly I'm not going to pretend I'm not somewhat biased as someone of asian descent, but if nothing else, from a legal standpoint, it's hard to say how this isn't textbook race-based discrimination, of which we have multiple laws against in the US. If race-based AA is something desired, then there should explicitly be a amendment to the civil rights act passed by congress adding that, for education, schools may discriminate against asian and white students.
I'm asian american, and everyone is conveniently ignoring the fact that AA is one of the foremost ways we have to combat systemic and intentional discrimination against minority groups in the United States. Switching to a meritocracy is all well and good, but how can you justify denying racial groups admittance to higher education when we've specifically stacked the deck against them for centuries? America has spent years and years denying and removing every possible opportunity for minority racial groups, worse housing, worse health, worse education, lower standard of living. Unless these issues are rectified, how can we justify removing one of the few equalizers we have?
Was I discriminated against during college admissions? Maybe, but I'm not subject to centuries of directed racial malice. I think we should argue for more Asian American representation, certainly, but not if that means less representation for other groups who to this day struggle for true equality.
I think hyper-focusing on whether or not AA is 'textbook race-based discrimination' (not picking on you @stu2b50, but I see this sentiment a lot) loses sight of this bigger picture.
Yea, it is discrimination, that's the entire point. Trauma propagates through generations, and black people in the United States have historically been subjected to extreme, unimaginable trauma sanctioned by the state itself. Nothing I've seen leaves me confident we're anywhere close to that signal being close to fading on it's own, so it makes sense to introduce some time-limited positive bias as an attempt to counteract that. It's not a perfect tool by any means, but I'm not sure there is a better one.
Well, it depends on what angle you're taking it. That's a utilitarian one, which isn't invalid by any means, but there's more than just that.
From a legal standpoint, the US does have laws that protect race-based discrimination in things like admissions: it's the Civil Rights Act. If the angle is to "fight fire with fire", so to speak, then it is still not permissible under the equal protections clause of the Civil Rights Act, and if that's the policy we want to pursue, it should be amended to it, that racial discrimination is permitted under certain circumstances.
From a more theoretical point of view, the utilitarian argument takes that although this is racial discrimination, it is "canceling out" historical racial discrimination. When another minority is brought into this, that becomes more dubious though. Asians in the US have never had political power, were certainly not the ones enacting racial prejudice against black and brown people, and were subject to systematic discrimination themselves. What injustice is being cancelled out?
And finally, there's a point of view that it's just dangerous. To allow for racial discrimination as a solution to fix the past, you have to assume that it's being done in good faith, but without oversight, it can just easily do all the bad things racial discrimination is capable of.
Yea I think those are all valid concerns to have, absolutely.
I'll leave the technical details for you Americans to sort out, but I'll touch on your other points.
Fair point. Like many utilitarian arguments, it's quick to get lost in details of measurement, the so-called moral calculus of oppression thresholds and extent, etc. But I think if we step back and take a pornography "I'll know it when I see it" approach, the trauma of centuries of slavery, rape, indentured servitude, extrajudicial killings stands alone among American minorities. Yes, that does minimize the very valid concerns of other groups but I think that we're also talking different orders of magnitude of generational trauma.
Absolutely true, but I think the specific question of abuse is best left to the government and voters instead of a court. A functioning government should be able to co-ordinate oversight of these initiatives, conditions of success, and make the case for these to voters.
To be honest, I don't think it's productive to get into minority misery wars, so I'll ignore the first part.
Sure, but that was in effect what the court decided, no? Like I don't think there's any argument it doesn't violate the equal protections clause of the civil rights act. If fire is illegal, using fire to fight fire is still illegal. Because fire is illegal.
Under the current law, it really always should've been illegal.
It can be legal again, if Congress passes new laws amending the CRA's clauses to have those exceptions. And if you believe that it's the best way forward, then this is also something that should happen, because as you said, it should be left to the government and voters. AA was always murky business, because it was basically just let to exist.
How are the "races" defined (does it make any sense for indians and koreans to be the same race? Filipinos? They were literally a colonial subject - what about recent immigrants?) How much is the penalty and/or bonus to each race given? What is the criteria to which success is measured? What is the precise goal of this carve-out for racial discrimination?
All those should be defined if nothing else. The default should be that racial discrimination is not allowed in things like admissions, that's entirely what Brown v. Board of Education was about in the other direction.
In the current state, admission offices are given blanket power to discriminate by race. Who knows if they do so responsibly.
Prop 16 in California gives a clear picture of what happens when you eliminate affirmative action from admissions, and Asian enrollment absolutely increased significantly.
As someone that is Asian American, there is definitely a pretty strong feeling in the community that colleges discriminate against Asians. I think saying that they're just some kind of puppet republicans are "using" is taking a lot of agency from them.
Usually the arguments for AA is about correcting systematic discrimination from the government in the past, which is a little dubious anyhow, but is hard to argue for Asian Americans. The US actively colonized Asian countries pre WW2, then did things like put the Japanese in interment camps or literally pass a law called the "Chinese Exclusion Act". If that isn't historical systematic discrimination, then I don't know what is.
Penalizing the group for succeeding despite government oppression just seems silly.
Also Asian American here. Your comment articulates a core feeling of mine about the liberal reaction to the case.
Affirmative action is an issue that a lot of Asian Americans have genuine feelings about. In AA there is an assumption that we are an undifferentiated mass of academic drones. In Harvard admission's personal assessments, we have markedly less "personality" than others; we do things not out of our own agency because others (our tiger parents or Republicans) have manipulated us into doing them.
We're not drones, robots, or puppets. We have just as much agency as anyone else.
It just so happened that a (significant) part of the Asian-American community found its interests coinciding with a Republican group's interests. It does not make those feelings illegitimate: all ideologies have overlap.
To me, these feel like two separate issues: Harvard was wrong for artificially lowering the "personality" scores for Asian Americans, but that doesn't mean that affirmative action needs to go -- it just means universities shouldn't discriminate against Asian Americans. A more narrow ruling could've addressed this particular issue without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
This ruling will increase the number of Asian Americans at elite universities, which is probably fair and desirable. But I fear it's disparate impact will be to increase the number of white people at mid-tier universities at the expense of other minorities. (But then again, maybe not?)
One is Prop 209, where a state with a higher population than Canada experimented on removing race from admissions. Asian enrollment jumped from 34 to 43.7% after prop 209 passed.
Secondly, Harvard itself found that it discriminated against Asian Americans in a file revealed in discovery in the initial case
And finally, believe it or not, but the NCAPA does not speak for all Asian Americans.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/post-prop-209-asian-students-benefit-and-are-now-almost-50-of-student-body-at-uc-berkeley/#:~:text=At%20UC%2DBerkeley%2C%20for%20example,Berkeley%20and%20UCLA%2C%20reaching%2046.59
Legacy and student athlete admissions would only make the point further, as Asian Americans are disproportionately not included in either group. Excluding those is bias in the other direction.
Direct statistics from UC Berkeley: https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/12/enroll_archival.shtml
You can see that after 1998 AA enrollment went from 39.6% to 44.7, whereas white enrollment went from 30.2 to 30.8. The zero sum reduction in black and hispanic enrollment went mostly directly to Asian Americans at the flagship UC.
That link was just the first Google result I found, I later found the raw statistics and edited that in. The quote is just repeating back statistics; in the +-5 years of prop 209, white enrollment at UC Berkeley only changed by 0.5 while asian enrollment increased by 5.1%, being the vast majority of the decrease in enrollment of other minorities. https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/12/enroll_archival.shtml
That trend has only continued today. Asian enrollment at Berkeley is now at 52.8% in fall 2020 while white enrollment in 2020 fall was 26%. Link: https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-new-undergraduates
You see similar numbers at UCLA.
This is a distinctly different from private schools who are exempt from prop 209. Stanford Asian enrollment numbers are at 26%.
Also a meta analysis from the European Economic Review on the Harvard data: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292122000290
I think this is basically going in circles at this point. It is my lived experience as an Asian American who went to college in California that Asian Americans are penalized in admissions in other states and in private schools. I have a mixed friend who was quite literally told by our high school counselor to put "white" instead of "asian" on non-UC applications.
We shall see what happens to demographics at large, but I suspect that we will see the trends in the UC schools. If nothing else, if schools want to bias their admissions towards race, I am glad that it will require further legislation and would hopefully be transparent if nothing else.
So if Prop 209 isn't helping white and Asian people, then how exactly is it managing to hurt black people and Latinos?
The ones who don't get into the college they wanted because they were Asian don't.
I feel like you're gaslighting at this point.
This is an act of taking a comically absurd stance and taking a very very selective group of facts to support your position.
Like this. They wanted to get into Harvard right? They weren't able to thanks to their race. While they were able to find an alternative, there are plenty who are on the edge of viable that would have to take a substantial hit to their education thanks to this.
So you're citing this irrelevant statistic, focusing on this one person because it's convenient, and claiming that there's "no evidence" for something that's observed over and over and over in the real world and was explicitly known to be happening in the case of Harvard.
Other people in this thread also gave statistics that indicated the same, pointing to when over AA policies were killed Asian attendance at schools immidiately skyrocketed.
I think the two of you just disagree. please remember that Tildes tries to operate on the principle of charity.
if we assume that Harvard admissions is a zero-sum game, which seems to be the underlying assumption in the entire affirmative action conversation, then someone else did get in, in part thanks to their race.
it seems like that other student is getting ignored here. the story isn't "someone wanted to get into Harvard and was rejected". the story is that two people wanted in, both of them were well-qualified, and Harvard had to make a tie-breaking decision.
the people at Harvard, who make these admissions decisions for a living, decided that considering race as one possible factor in those tie-breaking decisions was helpful to them. they are considering not just purely meritocratic "who is the best student", but other factors like ensuring the diversity of the student body as a whole.
if you have the SAT scores etc to be a competitive applicant to Harvard, chances are you're going to do just fine, even if you end up going to a "lesser" college.
as has already been said elsewhere in this thread, Harvard rejects ~97% of applicants. so a hypothetical student who thinks their college education and future career will take a "substantial hit" if they don't get into Harvard is probably in for a rude awakening.
From the New York Times in 2018, below I provided a paywall bypass archive.org link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230525212037/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html
Nobody is saying that Asians aren't overrepresented in terms of numbers, but the thing is Asians in general just study really hard and deserve to be overrepresented by even more than than 5x factor.
I deserve to be able to use the courts to force my way into a private university, even though it demonstrably creates a worse outcome for everyone (including me)
👍
As someone not from the US, Affirmative Action seems batshit crazy. (But so do private pay-to-play universities, too).
Just enforce actual anti-discrimination laws, which would make it illegal to use race as any factor (Even collect it on forms like Americans like to do).
Any school offering degrees that are official should be required to a certain admission standard and to follow actual discrimination laws.
Heck, in my country we even have a country wide admissions program to universities. Specifically to keep it fair to everyone, university education is still a scarce resource.
I can understand that position, but I think the one thing you don't realize is how bad a problem racism actually is in the US. I can't even begin to express how many times I've heard "anti-racism is the real racism" schtick from people, and it's hard to get a real pulse on how bad racism is because being seen as racist is taboo, but there is so much casual racism out there that people aren't always conscious about it so everyone is constantly assured that they just couldn't possibly be a part of the problem. And of course, if you have to explain to a person why their behavior or thought patterns are problematic, they will not listen to you because whatever you say "can't possibly be true because I'm not a racist!"
And I assure you that if you found that frustrating, the reality is much worse because there are thousands of regional variations on this theme.
That's some incredibly messed up culture. So basically the problem is so bad that if you'd use rely on normal discrimination laws people would end up STILL being racist AND in many places the laws wouldn't be followed because no one thinks the behaviour is wrong?
It’s more nuanced than that. The racism that actually hurts people the most is systemic in nature, and there is a large number of people who want to pass laws that make life worse for people who are not white, usually under the guise of “law and order”. Immigration is a big one, and while it’s too big a topic for me to fully cover, I would like to highlight Arizona’s “show me your papers” law, which has the effect of making Hispanic people targets to be stopped by police regardless if they are citizens or not. Or look at any conversation about Voter ID laws; when people point out that poor people and people of color will have a hard time getting those IDs, they get called racist for saying that people of color are “too stupid to get an ID” (which of course was not what the arguement was in the first place; it’s just a very childish talking point to attempt to shut down the conversation).
Wouldn't the whole voter ID issue just be solved by having federally mandated state IDs that are just given out to everyone? Like every country in Europe does?
That might be possible if these voter ID laws were federal, but they're state level. They also disallow other forms of ID that might be easier to get a hold of, like student IDs.
Beyond that, the proponents of these laws don't seem to understand exactly how difficult it is to get these IDs if you don't already have one. The first time I got an ID, it took me over a month because of all the hoops that I needed to get, and it could have taken longer if I didn't have a certified copy of my birth certificate. I had to go to a social security office that was something like 50 miles away and wait in an extremely long line just to start the process of getting a physical social security card because my idiot father had lost mine. I had to go there again to actually finish the application, and wait two weeks for them to send it to me. Then I had to get an appointment for the DMV to apply for the ID, after which I still had to wait for hours at the DMV to even be seen. and then I had to wait for them to print and mail me the card itself. Both the social security card and the ID card had fees for me to get them. What would I have done if I were homeless and couldn't afford it because it was either that or food? What would I have done if I didn't have transportation to those offices? What would I have done if I had a job and couldn't afford to spend the time off work waiting in those offices?
I agree that the impact on the AA community is problematic, however I'd still like to find a way increase university attendance/acceptance in underserved black and hispanic communities. I like the idea of using an economic based system but it seems like a bill like that would face similar pushback.
I don't think any of us that have gone to university actually think that it is a merit based system. Most of the application process is checking boxes and polishing your CV, things the wealthy and connected are very good at. An OChem class at Michigan State will teach the same material as an OChem class at Harvard. What Harvard provides is access to a network, resources, and branding that ensure the recipient of their degree never has to worry about instability in employment and provides a fast track to wealth building. With that in mind, I would absolutely like to see underserved communities have access to those same privileges.
We don't have to select preference based on race, we could do it via economics, but I fear if the outcome were measured by race, and had similar outcomes, we would end up with the same discussion.
I’m just spit balling here but reading your comment now has me wondering if it’s not access to universities for black and Hispanic groups we should be focusing on but rather lower education. Better performance there would ensure higher university enrollment rates in a racially blind system
That's a whole complex can of worms to dig through.
To put things as simply as I possibly can, the reasons why black and Hispanic children have worse outcomes than white children is most strongly related to their economic standing, which a large portion of Americans think that trying to help them is a form of robbery against them. To solve that problem you would first have to solve the problem of the ideology that drives American conservatism.
I think you're right it's a multi-pronged approach. One of the things poorer folks lack is access to tools to prep for college (i.e. SAT prep, tutors) and support from parents/family (often parents will need to work more than one job). Another big factor is that first generation college students don't have the same kind of guidance that kids with parents who did attend college do. As my mom liked to repeat on end, "the value of a college education is learning how to manipulate a large bureaucracy". It's hard when you have support from people who have navigated it first hand, if you're doing it without guidance it can be near impossible.
To your point, we absolutely should put more funding towards k-12 education - everything from more efficient transportation (as lower income kids typically live further from schools*, have parents with less availability and resources to drop them off, and worse access to pedestrian/bike friendly infrastructure), access to additional non-peer based tutoring programs targeted at learning disorder (dyslexia, ADAH), and so much more.
But so many of the things that can get students into University are intangibles that also come with wealth. One of the biggest aids can just be a parents network. If your dad is friends with a board member for a non-profit or company it's easy to get an internship, otherwise good luck. As others in this thread have pointed out, legacy is still a huge issue.
I hope that this decision opens up a much broader societal discussion on inequity in education (both k-12 and university level) but I'm not super optimistic.
*citation needed but I believe that was cited in the podcast "Nice White Parents" that anyone with an interest in this topic should give a listen. It's great!
As someone who works in Higher Ed., I think this may act as a wake-up call to the long-time problematic college admissions system. There's been a growing movement among public universities to make admissions less exclusive, and focus on providing quality education to as many people as possible. One school leading the way is Northern Arizona University. This is a philosophy I heavily buy into, so my bias is there.
I do think affirmative action/equal opportunity is important, but its implementation has been... less than ideal. A big example, mentioned already here, being ethnically Asian students. Instead of relying on "that's how the federal government said it has to be", I hope universities will take a deep look at how they make these decisions and their values in doing so. It's all a big question mark this early on.
The negative effect that this will have on an entire generation of Hispanic and Black students is truly disheartening. The nuanced understanding of affirmative action and its role in promoting diversity will be lost on many of these universities, and the students will be made to suffer. Edward Blum attacked voting rights, and made the entire universe of voting significantly more difficult for people of color. It is no surprise that after losing against affirmative action in 2016, he would come back when the court was more conservative leaning to try again.
Seeing decades of activist work being washed away by the Supreme Court is painful. There is this really weird notion that the US has somehow solved racism, while not actually doing anything all that substantial to handle the issue. There are people that marched during the Civil Rights Movement that are still alive, but we somehow in record time managed to solve the entire issue? No way.
Conservatives love this notion that racism has been defeated and that any mention of it in a contemporary context is to deny this noble victory and sow division. The Supreme Court has legislated to this fiction, ignoring the truth that the fight against discriminatory practices is ongoing and deeper rooted than simple admissions rates.
An expected opinion delivered by Chief Roberts who famously wrote "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
I think American society have progressed far beyond the environment that resulted in Brown vs. BoE or the Civil Rights Act. I understand that AA role in attempting to provide remedy to historically disadvantaged groups, however it's outdated in the modern age where a specific racial group is singled out to be "handicapped" by their race.
Here's to hoping legacy and athletic admission is next.
Any use of grades, "extra-curriculars" and test scores are going to advance the most competitive and the best test-takers and academically oriented applicants. Permit me to observe as a US doctor retired 30 years after completion of US medical school the most competitive and academically oriented may not be the best pool to draw from, race or socioeconomic background notwithstanding. Why do you suppose so many patients complain that their doctors seem uncaring and unsympathetic?
I propose that all four-year colleges and universities and also professional schools should have a quota (say 10-20%) of their admissions that are entirely random draws from the pool of applicants.
Archived.