I think the attention on college admissions is entirely misplaced. As a country, we're expending resources on the wrong equity problem. Racial segregation at the K-12 level of schooling, as well...
Exemplary
I think the attention on college admissions is entirely misplaced. As a country, we're expending resources on the wrong equity problem.
Racial segregation at the K-12 level of schooling, as well as educational asset stripping for voucher and charter schools, guarantee inequitable outcomes.
By the time students are applying for college, the damage is well past done. College admissions are just extending the inequalities already baked in. Lower-income students are less prepared for the challenges of college, as indicated by dropout rates.
The Ivy League colleges are anomalous with respect to dropout rates, though - students are intensively selected regardless of their racial makeup, and they get intensive support for their tuition money. Graduation rates are actually higher for Black students who make it through the doors. Which begs the question, why can't the Ivies' secret sauce be replicated at less "competitive" institutions, and down the education chain through public schools?
It costs a lot but we're trying! I work in university student support and my institution has peer academic coaching, tutoring and academic support, mental health support (not just clinical...
It costs a lot but we're trying! I work in university student support and my institution has peer academic coaching, tutoring and academic support, mental health support (not just clinical counseling) peer basic needs support, Trio, etc.
But we have a different budget than the Ivies and different tuition costs and a different endowment and donors and all the things. And we're accepting people with lower academic preparedness. People I think can do well but we'd need a higher level of staffing to support all of them at that level.
I don't have all the answers either. But we've gone from 1 position in my department that partially does this work, to 3.5, one of which is the supervisor. That's because we're trying. (And all of those different roles I listed are supported by different departments.)
Totally agree on all points! Highlighting this as well: I'd guess there are less legacy cases with black students so one could assume they got in on academic rigor not lineage. Makes sense that...
Totally agree on all points! Highlighting this as well:
Graduation rates are actually higher for Black students who make it through the doors.
I'd guess there are less legacy cases with black students so one could assume they got in on academic rigor not lineage. Makes sense that there would be a higher grad rate.
Wasn’t the main thing people were afraid of that the case decision would be used as a “backdoor” for more white people to get it? Sounds like it didn’t happen, at least for this year. With results...
In recent years, around 25% of enrolling undergraduate students at MIT have identified as Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander. For the incoming class of 2028, that number is about 16%. The percentage of White students was little changed at 37%.
Wasn’t the main thing people were afraid of that the case decision would be used as a “backdoor” for more white people to get it? Sounds like it didn’t happen, at least for this year.
With results like this it’s hard to argue the plaintiffs in the case vs Harvard didn’t have a point when Asian enrollment went up exclusively.
It seems like Asian students are heavily overrepresented and white students are heavily underrepresented. So unless MIT wants to basically just say "sorry, no more Asians, we've got enough"...
It seems like Asian students are heavily overrepresented and white students are heavily underrepresented. So unless MIT wants to basically just say "sorry, no more Asians, we've got enough" There's not much they can do.
The best way to make universities more equitable is to stop making kids go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt in order to attend them :)
You're limited by your campus resources - from housing to faculty. I'm at an institution with large incoming classes and a focus on getting people now before the enrollment cliff (dropoff in # of...
You're limited by your campus resources - from housing to faculty. I'm at an institution with large incoming classes and a focus on getting people now before the enrollment cliff (dropoff in # of HS grads), and it's straining everything, dining, housing, counseling, student health, academic advising, faculty, classroom size, classrooms at all, availability of required classes so those students graduate.
Not every school wants to go that route. Elite schools can choose for "quality" not quantity.
That makes sense. I still think elite, very selective schools with lots of money should use that money to expand. They are turning away good students, and some of those students are minorities! It...
That makes sense. I still think elite, very selective schools with lots of money should use that money to expand. They are turning away good students, and some of those students are minorities!
It does take a lot more money and more growing pains than a quota system would, though.
Coming from inside the institution that really isn't how that works, you cannot just expand your way into diversity without other changes, and you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars....
Coming from inside the institution that really isn't how that works, you cannot just expand your way into diversity without other changes, and you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Our current system is absolutely systemically biased against many minorities and the removal of any ability to account for that is harming both the student body and the students being overlooked.
I don't think anyone was using a 'quota system' as that's mostly used to misrepresent the more recent state of affirmative action.
But frankly the idea that expanding is easy, ideal, or diversity increasing is not supported by evidence IMO
Expanding is a hugely difficult problem for education, if you're already at capacity and aren't willing to sacrifice quality. Say you want to increase enrollment by just 100 students. If you want...
Expanding is a hugely difficult problem for education, if you're already at capacity and aren't willing to sacrifice quality.
Say you want to increase enrollment by just 100 students. If you want a max class size of 50 for a lecture, you need to add a minimum of 2 additional sections for each of your mandatory first year general requirement courses. Each of student will take somewhere around 5 classes. So now we're needing a bare minimum of 10 additional class sessions. That requires at least one additional full-time professor (glossing over critical details like subject matter expertise), as well as finding 30+ free hours in a 50-person lecture hall and another several for office hours.
That alone gives me a headache, and I could probably list off a dozen more if I had more time.
And 50 beds in housing and an additional workload on your advisors and X% staff in dining and y% of equipment and staff in the fitness center and so on.
And 50 beds in housing and an additional workload on your advisors and X% staff in dining and y% of equipment and staff in the fitness center and so on.
Yes, I know they don’t use quotas, but I think of them as a transparent way to meet the stated goal of racial diversity. It seems like if that’s a goal that everyone agrees is top priority, they...
Yes, I know they don’t use quotas, but I think of them as a transparent way to meet the stated goal of racial diversity. It seems like if that’s a goal that everyone agrees is top priority, they should be used?
But that’s a political and legal no-go, so instead we try to get certain outcomes in more opaque and less effective ways.
Regarding expansion: it also benefits students who aren’t minorities, and that’s a good thing too, even if it’s not very efficient at reaching minorities. You are right that it’s not easy. But if giving students more access to top-quality education is as important as people seem to think it is, then it’s very beneficial, life changing for the additional students admitted.
I don’t think so. For me the important thing is that nobody’s family history or other circumstances of birth affects their chances of getting in. Quotas just mean privileged people get in, of a...
It seems like if that’s a goal that everyone agrees is top priority, they should be used?
I don’t think so. For me the important thing is that nobody’s family history or other circumstances of birth affects their chances of getting in. Quotas just mean privileged people get in, of a slightly different ratio of skin tones.
Couldn’t admissions go beyond the constraint and look at family history, like they do without quotas? It’s a constraint, but doesn’t have to be the only criteria.
Couldn’t admissions go beyond the constraint and look at family history, like they do without quotas? It’s a constraint, but doesn’t have to be the only criteria.
The two main issues I see are basically Goodhart’s law. Racial inequality in admissions is a valuable signal — it tells us that there is a problem, because in a fair system there would be more or...
The two main issues I see are basically
Goodhart’s law. Racial inequality in admissions is a valuable signal — it tells us that there is a problem, because in a fair system there would be more or less statistical equality among subgroups. It is not itself a problem though, and by targeting it as a metric it almost entirely misses the point.
race is a fundamentally unsound way to characterize people, and its only value is in happening to be pretty easy to put in a radio button list.
The gist is essentially that there's going to be a huge drop off in high school graduates in the next year or two, leading to fewer students available to enroll in college (assuming they continue...
The gist is essentially that there's going to be a huge drop off in high school graduates in the next year or two, leading to fewer students available to enroll in college (assuming they continue to enroll at similar rates.)
Some small universities in my state are likely to close due to not being able to compete against larger or more elite schools for students. You either have to contract and do less with less, or take a bigger slice of a smaller pie.
Note: this says ten percent-ish, and that isn't "huge" in some senses but it is in that those 400k students go to a lot of small, city, liberal arts, and state universities. My institution is probably over worrying about it, but a flat ten percent decline is a problem, a larger than that decline because more slots are open at all the more prestigious schools? Huge
A ten percent drop in admission would translate to over a $10,000,000 budget shortfall at the large university I work for. It will be a worse crisis than COVID if it persists and state/fed funding...
A ten percent drop in admission would translate to over a $10,000,000 budget shortfall at the large university I work for. It will be a worse crisis than COVID if it persists and state/fed funding doesn't rise to the occasion.
Yeah I felt like 10% doesn't speak to the severity of it. But also that shortfall would be much greater at those smaller schools who will lose students to a larger school that can still draw...
Yeah I felt like 10% doesn't speak to the severity of it. But also that shortfall would be much greater at those smaller schools who will lose students to a larger school that can still draw students and thus get that bigger piece out of a smaller pie. I think my institution probably will be successful at that but there's no guarantee
I believe Illinois is looking at reinvesting and supporting public universities in a way that the state has not in a long time. But I'm not sure that will come before we see a number of schools close.
Fair in what sense though? Fair can mean many things to different people. Fair as in the people with the best grades get in? Or fair as in we take other factors into consideration that might...
Fair in what sense though? Fair can mean many things to different people. Fair as in the people with the best grades get in? Or fair as in we take other factors into consideration that might impact a person’s grades, such as their socioeconomic status or background?
I agree with you that your latter definition can be more fair, but feel the need to point out that the "socioeconomic status" part wasn't happening before. The Supreme Court banned race based...
I agree with you that your latter definition can be more fair, but feel the need to point out that the "socioeconomic status" part wasn't happening before. The Supreme Court banned race based admissions, not socioeconomic based admissions.
Yet, admissions are still shifting. In an ideal world, I would be in agreement with you, but we do not live in an ideal world. SES data is not the end-all-be-all. Within SES groups we will find...
Yet, admissions are still shifting. In an ideal world, I would be in agreement with you, but we do not live in an ideal world. SES data is not the end-all-be-all. Within SES groups we will find all kinds of folks with more and less privilege. But perhaps more importantly, SES is also not a protected class, and thus discrimination on the basis of SES is legally a different concept than discrimination based on race. The issue with the removal of race as an explicit factor was not just one of 'fairness' but of opening the door to legally allow them to discriminate without recourse.
At a high level I agree that we should, in the future, abstract away from messy ideas such as race to more objective things like SES, but I also want to point out that the messiness is actually one of its strengths. It shouldn't be the only factor, and it should certainly be a lesser factor when quality SES data (and other SDOH) are available. However, I think it's important to point out that race happens to be a locus point around which discrimination is centered. It's not just that the poor blacks have less access to schooling than the rich blacks, which is objectively true, but that blacks in general have less access to schooling as well as other programs unrelated to their social status. This is an extremely complicated web to untangle, but one such example of this is how even poor areas are often racially or ethnically segregated, meaning that depending on your background your poor experience will differ because you will be in a different part of town (or different town altogether). The poor white area , for example, might get access to rich teachers who volunteer their time because it is much closer for that teacher to volunteer there than across town at the poor black area. The poor white area might have better public transit to rich white areas, further increasing access, whereas the poor black area might be more dilapidated. The poor white folks might get discriminated against less when applying for aid than the poor black folk and their parents might suffer less setbacks and annoyances (for example here, a recent study proved that black tax payors were 3-5 times more likely to be audited by the IRS and those who filed for EITC were nearly 30x more likely to be audited than their white counterparts). The poor black area might be a food desert, might have less quality doctors, and might be a place in which kids can't play in the streets because it's cut by large highways. All of these factors and more contribute to a disparity between SES when examined by race. In short, some of these factors are measurable and others are just really hard to pull apart because they are a direct reflection of systemic racism.
A note that's entirely missing from this discussion is also one of diversity. Ignoring whether a system is fair or not, without the ability to use factors such as race or ethnic background, how can we ensure places are diverse? There's ample evidence that diversity is critically important for large groups of humans because it reduces group-think, it increases the amount of ideas generated, it results in products and outcomes which are more human-centered and which perform better and is often considered a critically important part of the college experience. If we claim to value diversity, how can we do that without some kind of category like race or ethnic background? I do think that there's value in understanding a person's personal background and understanding what they bring across a number of social axes (an artist is likely to have a very different worldview than someone who plays sports, for example), but I cannot think of a situation in which race or ethnic background does not play a significant role in this (a black artist is likely quite different than a white one).
They might be diverse in the sense of having a wide variety of Asians :) And that’s actually a serious issue. “Asian” is a catch-all category that itself includes a lot of diversity and they don’t...
They might be diverse in the sense of having a wide variety of Asians :)
And that’s actually a serious issue. “Asian” is a catch-all category that itself includes a lot of diversity and they don’t normally measure diversity within that group, so we don’t know anything about things like caste discrimination.
Yep. A group of students comprised of an Indian, Sri Lankan, Mongolian, Filipino, and Korean would technically be 5 “Asians” under US Census guidelines, but certainly in every metric these 5...
Yep. A group of students comprised of an Indian, Sri Lankan, Mongolian, Filipino, and Korean would technically be 5 “Asians” under US Census guidelines, but certainly in every metric these 5 people come from very different cultures, speak different languages, and don’t particularly look like each other either.
Is it necessarily more or less diverse than a room with 3 white students and 2 black students?
The removal of race as an explicit factor was not opening the door to legally discriminating without recourse, because race as an explicit factor was literally discrimination to begin with. It was...
The removal of race as an explicit factor was not opening the door to legally discriminating without recourse, because race as an explicit factor was literally discrimination to begin with. It was discriminating largely against Asians. There's a reason that race based admissions is considered a form of affirmative action, aka reverse discrimination". This moves official race based discrimination back to where it originally was: disallowed.
We do not agree that it is a goal that college admissions should be at the lines it was at a few years ago. Shifting is a result of the Supreme Court ruling, but there is nothing inherently wrong with shifting. We would find it ridiculous to argue that there's too many black people in the NBA, too many women in nursing, or too many women in teaching, even though there's obviously discrimination in the teaching example.
EDIT: You very thoughtfully wrote out a great reply, but since I (supposedly) use my real name on Tildes, I will refrain from commenting further unless it's really important to me.
Maybe not by itself, but I think race as a component of those issues should be included though. Countless studies have shown over the years that those two factors are tied together due to the way...
Maybe not by itself, but I think race as a component of those issues should be included though. Countless studies have shown over the years that those two factors are tied together due to the way the U.S. was run for centuries.
I will never forget when I tried to attend a special breakfast in high school celebrating minorities that achieved over X on the ACT, only to be turned away because I wasn't the right minority....
I will never forget when I tried to attend a special breakfast in high school celebrating minorities that achieved over X on the ACT, only to be turned away because I wasn't the right minority. Every minority except "Asian" was invited. That was not listed on the flyer, of course, but I just had to embarrassingly walk away from my peers. This is the only topic where people can tell me it's okay that my skin color should be allowed to hurt me and get upvoted for it. (You're not one of those. I'm just making a point about other discussions I've been in about this topic.)
I do not deny that race can hurt people, in subtle and in overt ways. But that is not something that can be measured and is not only exclusive to certain minorities. We have no way of knowing whether or not my race caused me to be discriminated against me. We'll never be able to capture every nuanced difficulty an applicant experienced, but at least with socioeconomic factors we have something that can be measured and compared directly. As one of the "free lunch" kids in high school, I can tell you that many, many of my minority peers that were allowed to attend the breakfast came from more privileged backgrounds than I did.
It's common in STEM and most academic programs. "We run a program for underrepresented minorities" just means "No Asians." It's a stupidly broad category that doesn't care whether you're a first...
It's common in STEM and most academic programs. "We run a program for underrepresented minorities" just means "No Asians." It's a stupidly broad category that doesn't care whether you're a first generation immigrant from rural Mongolia or the heir to a Korean chaebol. This comes up constantly in education and gets brushed under the rug.
I'm actually viscerally disgusted by race-based criteria. If there's a correlation between "race" and some other factor that we care about (eg. socioeconomic status), we should just use that factor.
I'm actually viscerally disgusted by race-based criteria. If there's a correlation between "race" and some other factor that we care about (eg. socioeconomic status), we should just use that factor.
I’m not entirely sure what you technically mean by that. For example, household income is a factor that has a correlation with “race” but does not explicitly include race. Is that what you mean?...
I’m not entirely sure what you technically mean by that. For example, household income is a factor that has a correlation with “race” but does not explicitly include race. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean something like, assigning points to various criteria like black, white, poor, disabled and adding them up to make a combined metric that explicitly includes race as a factor?
I wonder what their overall review process is like. I know from looking at changes other elite schools made that it has become common to have relative admissions guidelines based on your...
I wonder what their overall review process is like. I know from looking at changes other elite schools made that it has become common to have relative admissions guidelines based on your highschool and county. So someone at the top of their class in a underfunded highschool still has a chance to get in, and entry isn't limited to people with money to support the extra curriculars and tutors that get you top application packages.
Really assessing if you are the best in the environment where you are. Which seems like a good way to go about it.
I'm generally supportive of focusing on standardized testing in combination with socioeconomics, but also I see why the outcomes are somewhat not ideal. Individually it's not fair, but I think the...
“If MIT cannot find a way to continue to draw on the full range of human talent and experience in the future, it may threaten the qualitative strength of the MIT education, both by a relative reduction in the educational benefits of diversity and by making our community less attractive to the best students from all backgrounds,” Schmill said.
I'm generally supportive of focusing on standardized testing in combination with socioeconomics, but also I see why the outcomes are somewhat not ideal. Individually it's not fair, but I think the universities see themselves as... maybe Kingmakers, people who shape society to their ideals and produce special people. It's not a pure measure of intelligence, even though everyone talks about it that way. If the spots are limited, it could never be a measure of intelligence, even before considering "life experience." (I do think there's some hubris involved in ranking the life experiences of 18 year olds, and in assuming that "Asian" is not an overloaded category.)
If they wanted it to be somewhat fairer yet more varied, they would post very clear minimal requirements for admission alongside a lottery. If the SAT score is irrelevant after a certain point, if it doesn't matter that you have mastery over the violin, then all kids should have the opportunity to do the "minimum" and focus on their own interests.
I wonder also if people would care less if we had a singular national, public, "elite" university-- something that signals to others you're very smart and hardworking even if someone in Connecticut didn't think you were "special." The only ones that immediately come to mind are University of Michigan, University of Texas - Austin, and University of California.
edit: fixed sleepy sentence structures for clarity
What's funny is that, on an individual level, the ivy league tier elite schools aren't demonstrably better than any decent state school. Students with really high ACT scores that graduate from...
What's funny is that, on an individual level, the ivy league tier elite schools aren't demonstrably better than any decent state school. Students with really high ACT scores that graduate from college are generally successful regardless of where their degree is from.
I think the attention on college admissions is entirely misplaced. As a country, we're expending resources on the wrong equity problem.
Racial segregation at the K-12 level of schooling, as well as educational asset stripping for voucher and charter schools, guarantee inequitable outcomes.
By the time students are applying for college, the damage is well past done. College admissions are just extending the inequalities already baked in. Lower-income students are less prepared for the challenges of college, as indicated by dropout rates.
The Ivy League colleges are anomalous with respect to dropout rates, though - students are intensively selected regardless of their racial makeup, and they get intensive support for their tuition money. Graduation rates are actually higher for Black students who make it through the doors. Which begs the question, why can't the Ivies' secret sauce be replicated at less "competitive" institutions, and down the education chain through public schools?
It costs a lot but we're trying! I work in university student support and my institution has peer academic coaching, tutoring and academic support, mental health support (not just clinical counseling) peer basic needs support, Trio, etc.
But we have a different budget than the Ivies and different tuition costs and a different endowment and donors and all the things. And we're accepting people with lower academic preparedness. People I think can do well but we'd need a higher level of staffing to support all of them at that level.
I don't have all the answers either. But we've gone from 1 position in my department that partially does this work, to 3.5, one of which is the supervisor. That's because we're trying. (And all of those different roles I listed are supported by different departments.)
Totally agree on all points! Highlighting this as well:
I'd guess there are less legacy cases with black students so one could assume they got in on academic rigor not lineage. Makes sense that there would be a higher grad rate.
Wasn’t the main thing people were afraid of that the case decision would be used as a “backdoor” for more white people to get it? Sounds like it didn’t happen, at least for this year.
With results like this it’s hard to argue the plaintiffs in the case vs Harvard didn’t have a point when Asian enrollment went up exclusively.
It seems like Asian students are heavily overrepresented and white students are heavily underrepresented. So unless MIT wants to basically just say "sorry, no more Asians, we've got enough" There's not much they can do.
The best way to make universities more equitable is to stop making kids go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt in order to attend them :)
For the very top schools, I also like the idea of increasing how many students they admit. Why is MIT's enrollment flat? They should be expanding.
You're limited by your campus resources - from housing to faculty. I'm at an institution with large incoming classes and a focus on getting people now before the enrollment cliff (dropoff in # of HS grads), and it's straining everything, dining, housing, counseling, student health, academic advising, faculty, classroom size, classrooms at all, availability of required classes so those students graduate.
Not every school wants to go that route. Elite schools can choose for "quality" not quantity.
That makes sense. I still think elite, very selective schools with lots of money should use that money to expand. They are turning away good students, and some of those students are minorities!
It does take a lot more money and more growing pains than a quota system would, though.
Coming from inside the institution that really isn't how that works, you cannot just expand your way into diversity without other changes, and you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Our current system is absolutely systemically biased against many minorities and the removal of any ability to account for that is harming both the student body and the students being overlooked.
I don't think anyone was using a 'quota system' as that's mostly used to misrepresent the more recent state of affirmative action.
But frankly the idea that expanding is easy, ideal, or diversity increasing is not supported by evidence IMO
Expanding is a hugely difficult problem for education, if you're already at capacity and aren't willing to sacrifice quality.
Say you want to increase enrollment by just 100 students. If you want a max class size of 50 for a lecture, you need to add a minimum of 2 additional sections for each of your mandatory first year general requirement courses. Each of student will take somewhere around 5 classes. So now we're needing a bare minimum of 10 additional class sessions. That requires at least one additional full-time professor (glossing over critical details like subject matter expertise), as well as finding 30+ free hours in a 50-person lecture hall and another several for office hours.
That alone gives me a headache, and I could probably list off a dozen more if I had more time.
And 50 beds in housing and an additional workload on your advisors and X% staff in dining and y% of equipment and staff in the fitness center and so on.
Yes, I know they don’t use quotas, but I think of them as a transparent way to meet the stated goal of racial diversity. It seems like if that’s a goal that everyone agrees is top priority, they should be used?
But that’s a political and legal no-go, so instead we try to get certain outcomes in more opaque and less effective ways.
Regarding expansion: it also benefits students who aren’t minorities, and that’s a good thing too, even if it’s not very efficient at reaching minorities. You are right that it’s not easy. But if giving students more access to top-quality education is as important as people seem to think it is, then it’s very beneficial, life changing for the additional students admitted.
The top schools should be big schools.
I don’t think so. For me the important thing is that nobody’s family history or other circumstances of birth affects their chances of getting in. Quotas just mean privileged people get in, of a slightly different ratio of skin tones.
Couldn’t admissions go beyond the constraint and look at family history, like they do without quotas? It’s a constraint, but doesn’t have to be the only criteria.
The two main issues I see are basically
What's the deal with the enrollment cliff?
The gist is essentially that there's going to be a huge drop off in high school graduates in the next year or two, leading to fewer students available to enroll in college (assuming they continue to enroll at similar rates.)
Some small universities in my state are likely to close due to not being able to compete against larger or more elite schools for students. You either have to contract and do less with less, or take a bigger slice of a smaller pie.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/03/education-enrollment-cliff-schools
Note: this says ten percent-ish, and that isn't "huge" in some senses but it is in that those 400k students go to a lot of small, city, liberal arts, and state universities. My institution is probably over worrying about it, but a flat ten percent decline is a problem, a larger than that decline because more slots are open at all the more prestigious schools? Huge
A ten percent drop in admission would translate to over a $10,000,000 budget shortfall at the large university I work for. It will be a worse crisis than COVID if it persists and state/fed funding doesn't rise to the occasion.
Yeah I felt like 10% doesn't speak to the severity of it. But also that shortfall would be much greater at those smaller schools who will lose students to a larger school that can still draw students and thus get that bigger piece out of a smaller pie. I think my institution probably will be successful at that but there's no guarantee
I believe Illinois is looking at reinvesting and supporting public universities in a way that the state has not in a long time. But I'm not sure that will come before we see a number of schools close.
Seems like admissions are fair now? Don't see anything wrong with that.
Fair in what sense though? Fair can mean many things to different people. Fair as in the people with the best grades get in? Or fair as in we take other factors into consideration that might impact a person’s grades, such as their socioeconomic status or background?
I’d argue the latter is much more fair.
I agree with you that your latter definition can be more fair, but feel the need to point out that the "socioeconomic status" part wasn't happening before. The Supreme Court banned race based admissions, not socioeconomic based admissions.
Yet, admissions are still shifting. In an ideal world, I would be in agreement with you, but we do not live in an ideal world. SES data is not the end-all-be-all. Within SES groups we will find all kinds of folks with more and less privilege. But perhaps more importantly, SES is also not a protected class, and thus discrimination on the basis of SES is legally a different concept than discrimination based on race. The issue with the removal of race as an explicit factor was not just one of 'fairness' but of opening the door to legally allow them to discriminate without recourse.
At a high level I agree that we should, in the future, abstract away from messy ideas such as race to more objective things like SES, but I also want to point out that the messiness is actually one of its strengths. It shouldn't be the only factor, and it should certainly be a lesser factor when quality SES data (and other SDOH) are available. However, I think it's important to point out that race happens to be a locus point around which discrimination is centered. It's not just that the poor blacks have less access to schooling than the rich blacks, which is objectively true, but that blacks in general have less access to schooling as well as other programs unrelated to their social status. This is an extremely complicated web to untangle, but one such example of this is how even poor areas are often racially or ethnically segregated, meaning that depending on your background your poor experience will differ because you will be in a different part of town (or different town altogether). The poor white area , for example, might get access to rich teachers who volunteer their time because it is much closer for that teacher to volunteer there than across town at the poor black area. The poor white area might have better public transit to rich white areas, further increasing access, whereas the poor black area might be more dilapidated. The poor white folks might get discriminated against less when applying for aid than the poor black folk and their parents might suffer less setbacks and annoyances (for example here, a recent study proved that black tax payors were 3-5 times more likely to be audited by the IRS and those who filed for EITC were nearly 30x more likely to be audited than their white counterparts). The poor black area might be a food desert, might have less quality doctors, and might be a place in which kids can't play in the streets because it's cut by large highways. All of these factors and more contribute to a disparity between SES when examined by race. In short, some of these factors are measurable and others are just really hard to pull apart because they are a direct reflection of systemic racism.
A note that's entirely missing from this discussion is also one of diversity. Ignoring whether a system is fair or not, without the ability to use factors such as race or ethnic background, how can we ensure places are diverse? There's ample evidence that diversity is critically important for large groups of humans because it reduces group-think, it increases the amount of ideas generated, it results in products and outcomes which are more human-centered and which perform better and is often considered a critically important part of the college experience. If we claim to value diversity, how can we do that without some kind of category like race or ethnic background? I do think that there's value in understanding a person's personal background and understanding what they bring across a number of social axes (an artist is likely to have a very different worldview than someone who plays sports, for example), but I cannot think of a situation in which race or ethnic background does not play a significant role in this (a black artist is likely quite different than a white one).
They might be diverse in the sense of having a wide variety of Asians :)
And that’s actually a serious issue. “Asian” is a catch-all category that itself includes a lot of diversity and they don’t normally measure diversity within that group, so we don’t know anything about things like caste discrimination.
Yep. A group of students comprised of an Indian, Sri Lankan, Mongolian, Filipino, and Korean would technically be 5 “Asians” under US Census guidelines, but certainly in every metric these 5 people come from very different cultures, speak different languages, and don’t particularly look like each other either.
Is it necessarily more or less diverse than a room with 3 white students and 2 black students?
The removal of race as an explicit factor was not opening the door to legally discriminating without recourse, because race as an explicit factor was literally discrimination to begin with. It was discriminating largely against Asians. There's a reason that race based admissions is considered a form of affirmative action, aka reverse discrimination". This moves official race based discrimination back to where it originally was: disallowed.
We do not agree that it is a goal that college admissions should be at the lines it was at a few years ago. Shifting is a result of the Supreme Court ruling, but there is nothing inherently wrong with shifting. We would find it ridiculous to argue that there's too many black people in the NBA, too many women in nursing, or too many women in teaching, even though there's obviously discrimination in the teaching example.
EDIT: You very thoughtfully wrote out a great reply, but since I (supposedly) use my real name on Tildes, I will refrain from commenting further unless it's really important to me.
Thank you both for this extensive discussion.
I’d consider race part of your “background” though. I didn’t word it clearly enough.
That's why I said "can be more fair". I don't think considering race is fair, but do think considering socioeconomic status is fair.
Maybe not by itself, but I think race as a component of those issues should be included though. Countless studies have shown over the years that those two factors are tied together due to the way the U.S. was run for centuries.
I will never forget when I tried to attend a special breakfast in high school celebrating minorities that achieved over X on the ACT, only to be turned away because I wasn't the right minority. Every minority except "Asian" was invited. That was not listed on the flyer, of course, but I just had to embarrassingly walk away from my peers. This is the only topic where people can tell me it's okay that my skin color should be allowed to hurt me and get upvoted for it. (You're not one of those. I'm just making a point about other discussions I've been in about this topic.)
I do not deny that race can hurt people, in subtle and in overt ways. But that is not something that can be measured and is not only exclusive to certain minorities. We have no way of knowing whether or not my race caused me to be discriminated against me. We'll never be able to capture every nuanced difficulty an applicant experienced, but at least with socioeconomic factors we have something that can be measured and compared directly. As one of the "free lunch" kids in high school, I can tell you that many, many of my minority peers that were allowed to attend the breakfast came from more privileged backgrounds than I did.
That’s a shitty thing to have happen to you. It sounds like the people running the event were just morons who didn’t know what they were doing.
It's common in STEM and most academic programs. "We run a program for underrepresented minorities" just means "No Asians." It's a stupidly broad category that doesn't care whether you're a first generation immigrant from rural Mongolia or the heir to a Korean chaebol. This comes up constantly in education and gets brushed under the rug.
I'm actually viscerally disgusted by race-based criteria. If there's a correlation between "race" and some other factor that we care about (eg. socioeconomic status), we should just use that factor.
That’s what I was suggesting. That it should be taken into consideration as part of another metric.
I’m not entirely sure what you technically mean by that. For example, household income is a factor that has a correlation with “race” but does not explicitly include race. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean something like, assigning points to various criteria like black, white, poor, disabled and adding them up to make a combined metric that explicitly includes race as a factor?
I wonder what their overall review process is like. I know from looking at changes other elite schools made that it has become common to have relative admissions guidelines based on your highschool and county. So someone at the top of their class in a underfunded highschool still has a chance to get in, and entry isn't limited to people with money to support the extra curriculars and tutors that get you top application packages.
Really assessing if you are the best in the environment where you are. Which seems like a good way to go about it.
https://archive.is/33rpA
I'm generally supportive of focusing on standardized testing in combination with socioeconomics, but also I see why the outcomes are somewhat not ideal. Individually it's not fair, but I think the universities see themselves as... maybe Kingmakers, people who shape society to their ideals and produce special people. It's not a pure measure of intelligence, even though everyone talks about it that way. If the spots are limited, it could never be a measure of intelligence, even before considering "life experience." (I do think there's some hubris involved in ranking the life experiences of 18 year olds, and in assuming that "Asian" is not an overloaded category.)
If they wanted it to be somewhat fairer yet more varied, they would post very clear minimal requirements for admission alongside a lottery. If the SAT score is irrelevant after a certain point, if it doesn't matter that you have mastery over the violin, then all kids should have the opportunity to do the "minimum" and focus on their own interests.
I wonder also if people would care less if we had a singular national, public, "elite" university-- something that signals to others you're very smart and hardworking even if someone in Connecticut didn't think you were "special." The only ones that immediately come to mind are University of Michigan, University of Texas - Austin, and University of California.
edit: fixed sleepy sentence structures for clarity
What's funny is that, on an individual level, the ivy league tier elite schools aren't demonstrably better than any decent state school. Students with really high ACT scores that graduate from college are generally successful regardless of where their degree is from.