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

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231–240 of 286 posts

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

#231
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the point. This court has been shredding the rule of law in this country for the last year, and is systematically replacing our democracy with fascism. Their ruling is definitely going to be more damaging to minorities than anything I can come up with. Hell, they banned abortion by eliminating the right to privacy in the US. They were even complete assholes about it. Despite being minority (and a…

> This court has been shredding the rule of law in this country for the last year, and is systematically replacing our democracy with fascism. If you think that, it's probably a sign you need to come up for air. What you write is simply not true unless you're examining things with a partisan funhouse mirror that shows myside as righteous and true and the otherside as cartoon villians. Admittedly, those mirrors are ge…

I got this from reading Supreme Court rulings.

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

#233
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Taking an admissions slot from an Asian student" is a very opinionated way to describe the situation and strictly speaking it isn't true.

I’m not an expert on these admission practices, so I can’t say whether the claim is true, but that is what is being claimed, no?

Yes, that is what's being claimed by the plaintiff and if you accept their characterization it does seem like an easy case. That's probably true for most cases.

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

#234
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the distinction between old-school liberal (judge by content of character not colour of skin; what you do behind closed doors is your business as much as possible; free speech) and more recent liberal, which seems far more likely to keep the middle of those three, but jettison the others. Bill Maher's journey over the last 2 years has been interesting to watch as he tries to berate the modern left into return…

Are you conflating liberal and libertarian? MLK, of course, coined the phrase "content of character not color of skin" and he was very much in favor of affirmative action.

> Are you conflating liberal and libertarian?

I don't think so. Old school liberal and modern libertarian are fairly closely related. The term libertarian has appeared I think due to the changing of the word liberal.

> MLK, of course, coined the phrase "content of character not color of skin" and he was very much in favor of affirmative action.

Sure, at least sort of. But this conflates a principle (the thing I quoted) with one man's politics.

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

#235
post #174

I have a feeling that in hindsight, 30-40 years from now, this will seem like no brainer and that the period prior was heavily anti-meritocratic and counterproductive.

> anti-meritocratic How do you measure merit, though? People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason. I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair? People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defi…

But we can for sure say what is not merit. Choosing or discriminating against a person for their race is not merit

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably if you cannot use race to decide who gets a place, you cannot use race to decide who get's a scholarship. At least as Harvard University, different rules might apply for the NAACP etc.

Who said anything about race? If you can afford Choate, you can afford $250k/year at Harvard. But the kid from Biloxi, MS gets a "scholarship" so she only pays $25k/yr.

Less clear than you might think. Choate isn't as rich as Harvard, but it's still on a tier with, say, Wesleyan (for context, not as a fair comparison), with the finaid apparatus to match. They are absolutely capable of letting you "afford" to attend if they want you there, not quite orthogonal to whether you can afford $250k/year (more than Harvard sticker price anyway) but maybe at a 60-degree angle or so.

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

#237
post #47

About time. The whole idea behind it is stupid and racist... "if you're a certain skin color, you're too stupid, to compete on merit"... then when people complain, they add the "socioeconomic" factors: "if you're a certain color, you're too poor to compete on merit, but instead of looking at your family income, we'll look at your skin color". I have no idea how something like this gets support in developed western co…

> "if you're a certain skin color, you're too stupid, to compete on merit" Hold on. You realize Harvard's policies have historically been designed to favor Whites, right? The whole "holistic review" process was invented to favor Whites. See https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...

Specifically, it was invented because Jewish people performed too well on objective metrics and of course we cannot have too many Jews. So they did away with those pesky objective metrics and came up with an opaque system that no one could easily audit but at the same time they could easily apply their racial biases

On a completely separate and unrelated note Harvard is also getting rid of objective metrics now.

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

#238
post #174

I have a feeling that in hindsight, 30-40 years from now, this will seem like no brainer and that the period prior was heavily anti-meritocratic and counterproductive.

> anti-meritocratic How do you measure merit, though? People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason. I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair? People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defi…

> People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter.

Both of those have predictive value for success in university.

So if "merit" means "well prepared to learn the material in a university curriculum", these are both useful measures for predicting it.

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

#239

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 su…

I think that's a fair point. Then it's worth noting the Supreme court is not considering ending affirmative action at all, just the race-based selection.

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

#240

About time. The whole idea behind it is stupid and racist... "if you're a certain skin color, you're too stupid, to compete on merit"... then when people complain, they add the "socioeconomic" factors: "if you're a certain color, you're too poor to compete on merit, but instead of looking at your family income, we'll look at your skin color". I have no idea how something like this gets support in developed western co…

> I have no idea how something like this gets support in developed western countries.

In the US at least, it doesn't. Affirmative action proposals are consistently rejected by voters and in opinion pools, across races.

Seems like it mainly has support in university admissions offices.

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