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American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

economist.com

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Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#511

Post by nonethewiser »

coyotespike wrote: post #187

Here in Texas, any student from the top 10% of their high school is guaranteed a place at the flagship University of Texas at Austin. This is widely understood to be a form of affirmative action. Naturally, high schools in underprivileged areas - rural or urban - will produce students who are nowhere nearly as prepared as students from elite or wealthy schools. We ignore that difference as a policy matter. Top 10% is…

> This is widely understood to be a form of affirmative action.

That's a misunderstanding then because that's not affirmative action. Affirmative action is targeting specific groups of people to achieve some desired makeup. That's literally what affirmative action means.

It doesn't ensure you get all the best students. That's true. But that doesn't make it affirmative action.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#512

Post by wheels »

nwiswell wrote: post #444
imgabe wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the goal of a nursing school to provide the best possible nurses to the healthcare industry? If we assume that: Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance and that men are admitted with lower performance on these metrics than some women Then removing the affirmative action should result in the school graduating nurses who perform better, right? Why…

> Why wouldn't we want that? Because it's possible to have multiple goals at the same time. Reality is a co-optimization problem. The points that you have made above are why there are still many more female nurses -- it's not like they will accept every single man, there's simply a lower threshold than there is for women. I think a lot of the arguments about whether AA makes sense at all should really be reframed as…

> Because it's possible to have multiple goals at the same time. Reality is a co-optimization problem.

And one thing to consider is that people don't choose colleges just based on academics, they also choose them based on social environments, and as such universities have an incentive to try to create amicable social environments to attract the best students.

Case in point: I decided not to go to a good engineering school because it was more than 80% male and in a small town. The social environment was desperately bro-ish. I backpedaled and went to a liberal arts college primarily because of vastly superior social environment.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#513

Post by systemvoltage »

627467 wrote: post #343

The narrative of meritocracy is so old and running out of fashion. Merit confers privilege and you can spend privilege in many things but the most important thing you can spend it on is investing in maintaining that privilege via less than mertitocratic means. Privileged classes have become very good at keeping the privilege: they have built a large moat (wall?) around them at the top floor of the social ladder using…

As an immigrant to US and being a POC with literally no savings, parents dropping me off in college, obtaining scholarships, working tirelessly to succeed in life; I couldn't disagree with you more. Even the most marginalized people in US have better resources than where I grew up.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#514

Post by nonethewiser »

quantified wrote: post #49

> Nothing the Supreme Court says about the consideration of race in college admissions will affect the more basic problem, that too few Americans from poorer families are sufficiently prepared to apply to college. About sums it up. Though if there are any visible disparities in the populations that produce poor children who are prepared, I expect a loud argument.

Meanwhile, president of 50k/year liberal arts college says student debt "gets a bad wrap" and warns that alternatives include colleges having to "eat the cost" https://www.marketwatch.com/story/debt-gets-a-bad-rap-as-a-c...

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#516

Post by klipt »

Vecr wrote: post #479
imgabe wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the goal of a nursing school to provide the best possible nurses to the healthcare industry? If we assume that: Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance and that men are admitted with lower performance on these metrics than some women Then removing the affirmative action should result in the school graduating nurses who perform better, right? Why…

I suppose one argument is that men in general are stronger, and it's probably a good idea to have strong nurses around, especially with the current obesity rates. I'm absolutely making things up though, not sure if any studies on that kind of thing have been done recently.

Yes male nurses already get drafted into lifting the heavy patients, and dealing with the ornery patients, just because they're male, so it's no surprise many men nope out of nursing.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#517

Post by nonethewiser »

kube-system wrote: post #18

Yeah, I agree that it is important to take into account disadvantages that people may have unfairly experienced due to no fault of their own. But, why do we need to use race as a proxy? Presuming something about someone based on their skin color is prejudice regardless of your intentions. If people are disadvantaged, let's measure those disadvantages directly and adjust for those factors.

> Yeah, I agree that it is important to take into account disadvantages that people may have unfairly experienced due to no fault of their own.

>But, why do we need to use race as a proxy?

There are two possibilites:

1. They dont see the logical fallacy, perhaps because they are clouded by empathy.

2. They fully understand that they are discriminating by race and think its good.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#518

Post by zhoujianfu »

RigelKentaurus wrote: post #437

Indian-American father here, living in the Bay Area. My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars between us and have worked hard to reach where we’re at. We're far from privileged. I am 100% against affirmative action on the basis of race. I think there should be some measure of AA on the basis of economic status. It's quite personal for me this year. My 17-year old is applying to universities to st…

I just wanna say… apply to Harvey Mudd! Way better than those ivies anyway!

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#519

Post by xbar »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #488
xbar wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that point obvious? Perhaps the point is taking race completely out of the equation is going to descimatr Native American Latino and black attendance at Harvard. ~11% of white students will be be replaced by Asian students but the population will remain overwhelmingly white. I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffe…

> but the population will remain overwhelmingly white. That is highly unlikely. As a comparison, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Northern Virginia that has often been ranked the best high school in the US, had a student body that was 73% Asian in the last year that they had completely race-blind admissions (largely based on scores on an entrance exam and grades) despite Asi…

My statement was based solely on the 2010-2015 data where 14% more than the 18% of 1950. 18% of 1950 = 351 * .14 = 49 Asian students per year that scored above whites and should have been admitted. This is from the filing, but I can't verify externally.

If the data in this thread is correct: LatinX, Native American, and Black students averaged lower scores than whites on those same GPA/Tests. Those 49 Asian students would have displaced, therefore, more of those groups than whites. How many more? It's not clear--as few as 1 each for those groups (but those scores would have been outlier-bad) but likely, more black students than any other category (again just based on the numbers presented here).

Will there be more Asians than whites in the Harvard freshman class if Harvard goes race-blind? I appreciate why that question is very important to Asian applicants, but I am more concerned about the further-marginalizing of the other groups.

Re: American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

#520

Post by boppo1 »

kodah wrote: post #435
givemeethekeys wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, it'll be awesome. In the short term, the few black kids and women who end up in engineering will get respect for making it into the program. And, hopefully a few years later, they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires.

I'm not really sure how I feel about this. I'm white, not a woman, and I've been (almost certainly) a diversity hire. In some ways, someone arbitrarily opening the door for you sheds a lot of load in the short-term. You still need all the grit that a chip on your shoulder gives you in order to succeed in the long run. When you do succeed you'll have to shed that load unless you want to sound like a bitter ass the res…

How did you wind up a diversity hire?
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