What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

    allow_admission( x.copy(race=a) ) == allow_admission(x.copy(race=b))

You're an intelligent guy and have taken part in discussions on this sort of topic many times before here on HN, so why do you persist in advancing simplistic arguments whose specious nature has been pointed out many times before?

So your basic position is that lucky people are better than unlucky people (since nobody gets to select their parents) so that social outcomes are largely a matter of predestination.

Well, at least this saves me the bother of even temporarily taking you seriously in any topic in the future. No doubt this will mean missing out on some correct insights, but I figure that on any important topic I'll hear about it from someone else sooner or later, meanwhile saving myself the effort of seeking good-faith interpretations of what turns out to be self-serving bullshit from your end.

See, there it is again - SHOWING UP. You didn't say "getting a degree" or "graduating to a high paying job" or even "putting themselves in a position to succeed in life" - simply "attending". That's the problem - merely attending isn't enough to address any historical disadvantage other than "spent at least a day on a college campus as a student". In a list of historical disadvantages, this is just above "has used a ski lift at least once" in importance.

Step back, there are four important factors that make up the value of college: 1. Attendance - how many people go to college. 2. Graduation - where total graduates, not a percentage, dictates success. Because 25% of 4 is worse than 10% of 100,000 in addressing disadvantage. 3. Degree choice - the choice of degree is almost as important as getting one. 4. Post-graduation outcomes - like career earnings, opportunities, stability etc.

Attendance does not address true disadvantage unless the other three also improve - and specifically I think what society wants is more absolute numbers of graduates of good degrees, who go on to great post-graduate success. That seems, to me, a pretty uncontroversial summation of the issue.

The goal of uni quotas is to improve 1, so that 2, 3 and 4 improve. It isn't to address historical rates of attendance. But I could be wrong, and if the case is that the goal is simply getting more blacks and Hispanics to go to uni for at least a day/semester, outcomes be damned, then I withdraw my argument.

I think that the idea of addressing disadvantage is a lofty, important and praise worthy goal. And because it is such an important goal, policy choices have to be effective, and rigorously shown to be effective, because failure only fails the most disadvantaged more.

My fear is that a lot of people judge policy by INTENTIONS, not OUTCOMES, and this leads to inbetween goals of attendance trumping deeper issues.

As an analogy, the push to change people from "I donated so I feel good" to "my donations DID good" is a huge mental shift that effective altruists are championing. If quoatas help improve life outcomes, they need to stay. If they don't, if they put black and Hispanic students in positions to fail or almost worse, to choose lesser paths, then they should be replaced by something better.

Rather than quotas, what is needed is policy that puts black and hispanic students into colleges where they get the largest number of the best degrees for to improve their lives. Going to an Ivy league school to flunk out is worse than going to a tier 2 school and graduating with honors.

I could be wrong about the inbetween goals being a focus, and there may be a whole raft of research that shows these inbetween goals achieve positive outcomes making them the metric to focus on. I'd honestly like to be proven wrong, and know that these policies are on the right track, but it seems to me that the circle of policy to outcomes is rarely fully closed, and with even 15 years of data, the outcomes achieved should be dictating policy, not something more immediately measurable, but ultimately less important, like attendance rates.

TL;DR good outcomes dictate the quality of a policy, not intentions.

That's true, and even the fact that taken together the main objective admission criteria aren't (even considered together) strong predictors of performance taken together with that doesn't mean that the systems using them aren't meritocratic, its just strongly suggestive of that.

However, there is plenty of reason to believe that a system that doesn't account for demographics -- including race and income and possibly other factors -- can't be effectively meritocratic or (perhaps surprisingly) race-blind. For instance, studies have shown that the relationship between expected performance (in terms of college grades) -- both in terms of predictive power and expected results -- of SAT scores, college grades, advanced coursework, etc. is not consistent across different racial and income-based demographic groups. [0]

So a system which ignores those differences and just applies the measures by a one-size fits all formula is not adopting a race (etc.)-blind measure of merit.

[0] e.g., this analysis http://ftp.iza.org/dp8733.pdf which itself also references a study identifying that what predictive power SAT scores have is mostly as an indirect measure of the high school the student attended, and that within-school variations in SAT scores have almost no predictive power.