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US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

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Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#211

Post by hot_gril »

adastra22 wrote: post #126
ck2 wrote: post #24

> Nine US states - including California, Florida, Georgia and Michigan - currently prohibit the use of race as a factor in admissions for public universities Sounds like instead of doing polls on opinions and "gut think" that there are already large real-world examples that can be examined precisely to see what that policy does or doesn't accomplish.

At least in California, I don’t think there has been enough time to really know. It was a recent change iirc.

It was 1996, pretty long ago. Looking at a UC vs a private uni, the most obvious difference is how UCs tend to have majority Asian students.

UC Berkeley chancellor publicly denounced the ban when it was upheld a couple of years ago. Then Cal removed SAT/ACT as an admission requirement. Next admission cycle, she sent out an email to all students and alumni (me) cheering that the school is now more diverse. The percentages of White, Black, Hispanic, etc students in the incoming class all increased. Percentage of Asian students sharply decreased. If you ranked the deltas, it was similar to the ranks of average SAT scores for each group (Asian students have the highest SAT scores, etc). I guess the most diverse class would be achieved using a pure lottery system.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#212

Post by whimsicalism »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #108
legitster wrote: post #34

> Institutions like Harvard say they consider an applicant's race as one of several factors - including economic status and religious belief - in order to build classes that accurately represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the country. I mean, this is all kind of window dressing for elite institutions to be elite, right? There are millions of people qualified to attend these university, Harvard gets to hand se…

> Notice that they don't care about diversity of viewpoints or politics Ever talked to someone from Harvard? (they'll usually tell you in the first 4 minutes you meet them telling you they went to school in Boston). They admit quite a number of conservative people if that's what you're worried about, and even their more left people are pretty center-right, as in they really don't want to pay more taxes. > they could…

I went to Harvard and your comment about the leaning of the school is incorrect. Certainly, "even their more left people are pretty center-right" is just... wrong.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#213

Post by abeppu »

hot_gril wrote: post #173
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compare say, Berkeley to Stanford Berkeley is highly exclusive [1], albeit 3x less so than Stanford [2]. The class-size difference, about 12,000, is noise against the millions of degrees conferred to Americans every year. Meanwhile, Stanford produces different graduate as a result of its process. Forcing homogenisation to one model for ideological purity is misled. [1] https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/c…

tl;dr Berkeley is still exclusive even after you're admitted Berkeley has its own way of filtering students once they're admitted. This is most obvious with the computer science majors, of which there are two that involve almost the same coursework. EECS is super hard to get into to begin with. Whereas anyone in the school can intend L&S CS, but there's a rather high GPA cutoff (at like 30th %tile but don't quote me)…

I also want to highlight that this dynamic messes up those adjacent programs. I was a cognitive science student because I thought it was fascinating, and it's unfortunate that the program gets a bit diluted by being branded "the other CS" and some share of students that don't actually care about the other components.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#214

Post by legitster »

My favorite part of the article:

> A 2021 Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans were in favour of affirmative action programmes. A separate poll released by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, however, found that 74% of Americans - including a majority of black or Latino respondents - believed that race should not be factored into college admissions processes.

I think my takeaway is that even if you give a horrendously unpopular program a catchy enough name, people will think they like it.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#215

Post by godelski »

hot_gril wrote: post #193
tonystubblebine wrote: post #125

I look at this through the lens of the San Francisco public schools. When I went to the magnet high school there, Lowell, they had explicit race based standards. We all got scores out of 70 based on our standardized tests and middle school grades. The differences were pretty stark. Chinese kids needed a 68, which could mean they got just one B. White kids needed a 62, black and latino even lower. So I totally get why…

> It's complicated, and you can have your own takeaway, but mine is that merit often defined wrong. I'm on the lookout for people who did more with less, or even did equal or near to it with less. To me, that is more a measure of merit than top line measures like test scores. I agree with this, and the problem is how many schools look directly at race for that. This reminds me of predictive policing ML models that ta…

> This reminds me of predictive policing ML models that take race as a factor.

In statistical systems you often have to take in race as a factor to remove it as one. You can't debias a system if you can't determine the bias. There are many things that highly correlate with race: a notorious one being zip code (byproduct of red lining). But there's also a lot of non-obvious ones and considering historical data is used, the machine will find those correlations. So only with that data can you then analyze and tweak your model to remove the racial biases.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#216

Post by throwaway-9000 »

> Students for Fair Admissions, accuse Harvard of discriminating against Asian American applicants in order to boost representation from other groups.

Why does this argument need to be framed entirely as discrimination against Asian Americans? Affirmative action clearly harms White people too. Are White people so incapable of advocating for themselves that they can only point out a policy is bad when it harms another minority group?

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#217

Post by naniwaduni »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #158
btown wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expanding the size of enrollment isn't just something that can flipped like a switch. One cannot simply build a high-rise dormitory without increasing the capacity of all other facilities in lockstep - and a university designed to be fully walkable can only accommodate so much simultaneous construction. And more generally, you have the use of applicants' race backwards - the entire point of affirmative action is to t…

Ivy schools have some of the largest endowments, rivaling the GDP of some small countries. If Harvard, and Yale were serious about diversity, they would let people attend for free.

If they admit you in the first place, they pretty much do, which was indeed a pretty salient perk of the top-tier colleges among the Asian immigrant parent crowd, at least a decade or two back.

For a particular cohort of second-gens, you were going to an "elite" institution or you were going to state—the family finances weren't going to support sticker price without a near-full scholarship.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#218

Post by legitster »

eli wrote: post #152
legitster wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a conservative, outcomes-driven court. I find this view to be pretty naive. The vast majority of judges in the US legal system are naturally going to be conservative in that the job is to follow the letter of the law. To the extent that progressive justices move up through the legal system is only through political appointments. It seems easier to me to say the vast majority of progressive opinions from the…

> The vast majority of judges in the US legal system are naturally going to be conservative in that the job is to follow the letter of the law. C'mon, who's being naive now? The law was already settled on this issue. This case is being heard with the goal of overturning precedent. It's not because we learned new things about the Constitution in the last 20 years.

> It's not because we learned new things about the Constitution in the last 20 years.

Funnily enough, from the majority opinion of the "precedent" they may overturn: "The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#219

Post by dragonwriter »

legitster wrote: post #214

My favorite part of the article: > A 2021 Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans were in favour of affirmative action programmes. A separate poll released by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, however, found that 74% of Americans - including a majority of black or Latino respondents - believed that race should not be factored into college admissions processes. I think my takeaway is that even if you give a h…

Affirmative action isn’t just for college admissions, and outside of college admissions, affirmative action programs generally do not involve decision preferences, but are limited largely to training programs, outreach efforts, and other funnel-shaping efforts.

So, the poll results are perfectly consistent with people understanding the question and either supporting AAP in general but not in college admissioms, or supporting it in general but not when it goes beyond funnel-shaping to include decision preferences. They are also consistent with them supporting it in college, and involving decision preferences, but only on ethnicity, gender, and other non-race factors, though that seems less likely.

Re: US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions

#220

Post by adastra22 »

danenania wrote: post #188
adastra22 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s written into the constitution.

And?

(1) it is not the case that they serve lifetime appointments "because they don't want to give up power." They serve lifetime appointments because the framers of the constitution decided it was better for the court to be structured that way hundreds of years before they were born.

(2) Forcing them to give up power, as you put it, would require a constitutional amendment, which is not something any one person can do.

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