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But at highly competitive schools you still have several times more students with 1500 SATs than you have available spots. So you eventually need to use holistic judgement anyways.
They could just admit at random from among that group. What would be the downside?
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At UW they call it "race equity" [1]. Meaning that you can't have more than x% of Asian Americans in the UW if the percentage of Asian Americans in the community is x%. The Supreme Court will soon decide if this practice is legal [2], and it is going to be interesting either way! [1] https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/ [2] https://edsource.org/2022/as-supreme-court-considers-affirma...
And yet somehow they never decry the race inequity of lucrative ventures like the NBA player pool.
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Maybe I'm in a bubble, but every anecdote I read online in the past year or two is someone royally fed up with liberal politics. On Twitter, Reddit, and real life, the majority of people keep complaining about crime, drugs, homelessness. Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.
> On Twitter, Reddit, and real life, the majority of people keep complaining about crime, drugs, homelessness. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment but in the US, these issues are the result of conservative politics.
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As a society we got ourselves into a situation where ignoring race now I promotes inequality as it helps those that have benefited from racism in the past. And doing ANYTHING proactive now is racism not. The question is just — what type of injustice do you prefer?
The answer is really simple: discrimination not on race, but on inequalities. Don’t discriminate because someone is black or white, but give due consideration to factors like family situation/income/legacy/etc This seems like the most reasonable solution. If you believe that systemic racism exists in the background, then this corrects for its real effects. If you don’t, I’m sure you at least accept that all else equa…
In the welfare days, those that were in more need were women with children where the man ditched the family. So more effort and money was applied there which seems totally reasonable.
But it also incentivized men to leave their families to qualify, and they did in high numbers.
These type of things made to correct something in the past also have a tendency to incentivize something bad in the future.
This is part of why these things are so difficult in practice.
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A more charitable interpretation is that a student body made up of too much of any one thing is not good. Part of the value proposition for going away to university for four years is to spend that time surrounded by diverse and interesting people. That doesn't excuse the actual racism that we've seen in admissions, of course.
> A more charitable interpretation is that a student body made up of too much of any one thing is not good. So what would you say is “not good” about a “student body made up of too [many]” Indians? Or Jews? Or Chinese people? Are schools in India or China or Israel inherently worse than those in America because those schools have “too much” of a single race?
Both China and India are countries with a number of different races, some/most of which are represented at the top schools (I imagine all of the large racial groups). I’m not sure about Israel, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true there as well.
That said, the prestigious schools in these countries (not sure about Israel) heavily use tests as an admission standard to the best schools. I think that this is part of what makes them less prestigious than their American counterparts.
Elite American universities use social capital as part the admissions criteria, with a reasonably broad definition of social capital. I think that this social capital along with intellectual capital (not always in the same student) is part of what makes the magic work at these schools.
Notes:
- In China (and probably other places), historically the admissions exam was a proxy for social capital, since families with high social capital could prepare their kids better via tutors. This is still somewhat true today, but it’s not as powerful as it was in the distant past.
- State schools in the US, which seem to be the focus of this article since they don’t have a history of holistic admissions, should probably stick with a grades-test score combo for most admissions, and maybe add some “social capital” admits (similar to athletes, who also fall into the social capital category, with the extent of exceptionalism required being equivalent).
- Schools that admit based on tests alone without having some sort of built-in social capital component will end up defaulting towards the creation of a lot of middle management drones rather than future leaders of the country. Many people seem to wish that social capital is not the primary driver of success, but results (historical and anecdotal) seem to suggest otherwise.
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As a society we got ourselves into a situation where ignoring race now I promotes inequality as it helps those that have benefited from racism in the past. And doing ANYTHING proactive now is racism not. The question is just — what type of injustice do you prefer?
The answer is really simple: discrimination not on race, but on inequalities. Don’t discriminate because someone is black or white, but give due consideration to factors like family situation/income/legacy/etc This seems like the most reasonable solution. If you believe that systemic racism exists in the background, then this corrects for its real effects. If you don’t, I’m sure you at least accept that all else equa…
Maybe the "minorities" are actually smarter than you think, do they actually want to study there? What were rejection rates for minorities? In many cases college is a scam, investment is simply not worth the money (future earnings). Diversity studies referenced in article were mostly performed on "liberal arts colleges". Maybe this type of study is good hobby for rich white kids. But most normal people will not throw…
In other words, this was a foreseeable consequence.
> Without SAT and ACT scores, he explained, the job of admitting students had become more subjective and more time-consuming.
It's amazing we are doing a nationwide experiment to find this out.
Even very high scorers sometimes find it impossible to get into top schools. Part of the problem is supply of slots has not kept up with population growth. It's not like Harvard's enrollment has kept up with population growth. Another problem is that the ceiling of standardized tests has been lowered, so top scores more more common.
The state schools may be able to sidestep this a bit.
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> On Twitter, Reddit, and real life, the majority of people keep complaining about crime, drugs, homelessness. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment but in the US, these issues are the result of conservative politics.
Which is why there’s so much violent crime in conservative bastions like Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Baltimore.
Additionally, politics and policies exist at the national level as well and can influence what happens in even liberal cities.