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What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

fivethirtyeight.com

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Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#61

Post by taco_emoji »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #33

The article presents an interesting fact. The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system. I was previously told it's racist to believe things like this. The article also begs another question: “The Court expects that 25 years…

> The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

Your curiously unstated but obviously logically necessary premise that non-AA systems are already magically meritocratic is what's racist.

Hope that clears it up for you.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#62

Post by Lawtonfogle »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #44
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has as much to do as bitwize's comment.

No, it really doesn't. Even if someone had an ancestor who was enslaved, they probably couldn't so much as identify the group that enslaved them, and for the vast majority white people making this asinine statement, their ancestors CERTAINLY weren't being enslaved by the government they live under, nor were they being denied the right to be represented until a few generations ago.

>their ancestors CERTAINLY weren't being enslaved by the government they live under

Does they refer to the ancestors, in which case they often were, or does it refer to the present day people, which also describes slavery in the US.

>they probably couldn't so much as identify the group that enslaved them

Could the present day individuals of more recent slavery given an accurate identification of the group that enslaved their recent ancestors? One which wasn't stereotyping, and which neither excluded slave owners or excluded non-slave owners?

>nor were they being denied the right to be represented until a few generations ago.

They probably were. Voting was highly restricted in the past.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#63

Post by kuschku »

hsitz wrote: post #57
T2_t2 wrote: post #31

As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. I wonder if this is a consequence of the "every kid gets a trophy" phenomenon, where merely showing up is seen as the key. Not once in that article were graduation rates from colleges, or post-college outcomes, mentioned. Surely, that is the most important factor in improving…

College admissions are hardly the only arena where affirmative action operates. And of course it's not an ideal solution, but it's at least a start. Where are you from? Quite possibly your country also has some similar sorts of policies, even if it lacks the huge minorities that have suffered past discrimination to the extent some have in U.S. You can start by checking here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_…

Actually, Germany has been replacing Affirmative Action in most areas in the past years with purely random, or purely achievement-based systems.

Due to the simple fact that hiring people based on direct affirmative action violates the constitution.

Even the famous "womens quota" in Germany is just a quota that 30% of each gender have to be represented in a company’s board.

(The official statement of the constitutional court regarding affirmative action, which is called "positive discrimination" here, was that "even positive discrimination is, as the name says, still discrimination")

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#64

Post by dragonwriter »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #37
dragonwriter wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things done specially against African-Americans in particular (or non-whites in general) in the US aren't limited to (or even limited to the parts of the US which practiced), and also aren't all as distant in time as, slavery.

>African-Americans in particular (or non-whites in general) Quite a lot of discrimination has happened against Hispanics, which are largely white. To say nothing of other ethic groups of whites. That Hispanic is even brought up when discussing race shows the absurdity of most of these ideas as Hispanic isn't even a race. (Even better is the concept that there aren't races in nature, but populations, of which we artif…

> Quite a lot of discrimination has happened against Hispanics, which are largely white.

That's true in a fairly meaningless formal sense (which really reflects the history of the evolution of the excuses for why groups were discriminated against as "outsiders" more than substantive differences in the nature of the groups), but not really in substance. The official (e.g., Census) categories pose "race" and "ethnicity" as orthogonal categories, as a legacy of the outdated idea that the former are real biological groupings and the latter cultural (when, in fact, both are cultural constructs, which is even recognized in the way "race" affiliations are actually now defined -- by self-identification, not biology, except in the case of Native American/Alaskan Native, where, for political reasons, somewhat different standards are used.)

OTOH, the ethnicity scale that is posed as orthogonal to the race scale has only two values "Hispanic" and "not Hispanic", and the way results are usually categorized from anything using the notionally two-axis race/category system is usually one combined axis by race for non-Hispanics, and then with Hispanics as its own category on that axis.

In any discussions in any context not controlled by formal (usually, Census bureau) definitions, "Hispanic" is just treated as another category no different from "Black" or "Asian" distinct from White in a flat, one-dimensional space of categories, not an orthogonal distinction.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#65

Post by rmxt »

venning wrote: post #48

Why is 538 selecting public research universities? Is that the full, technical name for typical US colleges, or is there a specific distinction here that would imply they are excluding whatever "non-research" universities are?

I imagine the distinction that they are trying to make is between research universities and liberal arts colleges (most of which are private, though there are some public). The term "research university" has connotations of a place with four-year undergraduate programs, with few or no two-year degree options, and likely the presence of graduate or PhD programs on campus, as well. In many ways, "research university" is the typical US college experience, though there are still many people who only attend "community colleges" or local public institutions where no research is performed and there may only be two-year degree programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_in_the_United...

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#66

Post by yummyfajitas »

taco_emoji wrote: post #61
yummyfajitas wrote: post #33

The article presents an interesting fact. The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system. I was previously told it's racist to believe things like this. The article also begs another question: “The Court expects that 25 years…

> The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system. Your curiously unstated but obviously logically necessary premise that non-AA systems are already magically meritocratic is what's racist. Hope that clears it up for you.

Non-AA systems primarily look at grades, SAT, extracurriculars and the like. They tend to also include small alumni preferences and the occasional "this guy's dad donated $20M" preferences. Why do you believe they are not predominantly meritocratic?

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#67

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Someone1234 wrote: post #21

One issue with affirmative action which rarely gets addressed: What is the definition of a certain race anyway? If someone is from two black parents, fine, they're black. But what if one parent was black and one was white, are they black? Are their children black? What about their children's children? Are we going to spin out genetic testing, color cards, or start looking at people's family tree to decide eligibility…

As an outsider looking in, it seems that the one thing the US hates more than affirmative action is exactly the kind of "socialist" interventions you describe.

I'm also wondering what would stop a structurally racist society from simply choosing poor people from their preferred race? You're begging the question if you assume that people will be chosen fairly with no regard to race under this system.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#68

Post by Lawtonfogle »

danharaj wrote: post #59
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was it more brutal than many of the other instances of slavery throughout history where the owner were allowed to do what they wished with their slaves?

Honestly I don't know what your ultimate point is. Care to elaborate?

The ultimate point of that comment? It was questioning what the point of your comment was as well as some of the content.

The ultimate point of my comments here in general? Quotas and aid should be based off of socioeconomic status (SES), not race. Doing so will disproportionately help racial (and ethnic) minorities because they are disproportionately of low SES.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#69

Post by [deleted] »

T2_t2 wrote: post #31

As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. I wonder if this is a consequence of the "every kid gets a trophy" phenomenon, where merely showing up is seen as the key. Not once in that article were graduation rates from colleges, or post-college outcomes, mentioned. Surely, that is the most important factor in improving…

[deleted]

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#70

Post by taco_emoji »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #54
dghf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system. That assumes that without AA the system would be meritocratic, and not biased in favour of people from particular backgrounds.

Yes, that's because building systems like this is pretty easy. Just use a point system based entirely on grades/extracurriculars/SAT/etc. For example, google the old U-Mich point system - it was entirely meritocratic except for the +1.0 boost to GPA given to non-Asian minorities, a much smaller alumni preference and some "women in engineering" boost.

Is that what meritocracy looks like to you? Kids whose circumstances are highly negatively correlated with grades and test scores get shafted?
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