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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

latimes.com

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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#251

Post by EatingWithForks »

skrebbel wrote: post #162

The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people…

One of the things of "why not class only" is because in America race matters a lot. I mean it quite literally: studies have shown simply having a black-sounding name makes you equivalent to a white-sounding name of an order of magnitude less qualification. In some cases black people with a college degree have job prospects similar to a white person with a felony record.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#252

Post by duped »

jeffbee wrote: post #225
duped wrote: post #158

I admittedly skimmed the opinion, but is this the first case that establishes a private entity like Harvard University is bound by the Equal Protections Clause? I thought existing law and precedent only had it applied to state/state actors (and a few cases where private businesses acted like governments, eg company towns).

The private nature of Harvard is debatable. The value of the subsidy represented by the tax exemption of their endowment is $50k per student per year.

It's not debatable, Harvard is a private entity. The fact they receive tax preference or federal funding and whether they should if the government considers their acceptance policy to be racist is a very different question than the one in the opinion, as far as I can tell.

And whatever debate could be held seems to be absent in the opinion, which is why I asked.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#253

Post by deilline »

xyzelement wrote: post #176
arpyzo wrote: post #63

If you agree with this decision on the grounds of supporting meritocracy, consider that the real travesty with regards to meritocracy in college admissions are legacy admissions.

How big a deal and how common is it in reality? "We have one fewer spots because we admitted the son of a donor" and "we won't accept you based on race" are different magnitude.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1060361

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#254

Post by BlueTemplar »

falcolas wrote: post #160
brodouevencode wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I went to MIT ... I was valedictorian [presumably in high school] and had a perfect score on the SATs > I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishmen…

> AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed. Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place. I think it's a mistake to say that absent AA we have a pure meritocracy. Instead the discr…

Sure, but we're talking here specifically a policy based on a racist concept, which goes on to normalize it, aren't we ?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#255

Post by mcv »

pjc50 wrote: post #222
skrebbel wrote: post #162

The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people…

> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia ), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether peopl…

Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those descendants are very successful now and some descendants of slave owners are probably very poor now. And some people are descendants of both.

And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people, and lynchings into the 1950s, and the extremely hard fight the civil rights movement had, and even legal discrimination up to 1971, not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that. And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.

Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. I do know plenty of black people still live in fear of the police, and that when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot.

Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down?

> America is not in the least social-democratic,

It used to be, though. The New Deal and many of the social policies of the 1940s and 1950s were very social democratic. Well, except that they tended to exclude black people.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#256

Post by joh6nn »

euix wrote: post #167
brightball wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something else that isn't really factored into most of these conversations is the level of gatekeeping around professions and schools where a much larger group of people can succeed or even flourish, yet never get the opportunity due to limited class sizes. Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as w…

What's that saying? Something like: "It's not that Einstein was so brilliant, it's that so many more Einsteins spend their whole lives in the farm fields" and in between is there is a whole spectrum of talent vs opportunity and recognition going from brilliant and unknown to famous and undeserving.

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." ― Stephen Jay Gould

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#257

Post by _gabe_ »

peruvian wrote: post #88
zapataband1 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your family benefited from it and taking it away is now 'good' then it sounds like you're saying you couldn't care less about any future generations who could've used this ladder to better their lives. As the immigrant, much like your father, whose father is a construction worker, that's how it reads.

This. “I got mine so no one else needs it”. And sorry GP but you absolutely got into MIT partly because of your ethnicity - along with your grades of course. I benefited from that as well and it was fairly clear.

>> I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs

Sounds like OP certainly deserved it to me. Instead we have these perverse incentives to go to "elite" schools purely because of the school's name (not because you're really getting that much of a better education than you would in a different top 100 university). These schools end up with thousands of applicants who definitely deserve to get in, but they need to cull the group of perfect candidates somehow because of practical considerations like faculty to student ratio. Whether they discriminate using race, or implement a lottery system, there's plenty of candidates that deserve the entry but don't get in because of practical limitations.

I certainly didn't get perfect scores on the SAT and I certainly wasn't valedictorian.

This mentality is very gross, and treats life like it's a fair game with clear winners and losers. Life is messy, and you can still do every single thing right and end up worse off. Likewise, you can, and many people do, fail "up" into extraordinary positions of power due to no merit of your own.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#258

Post by arpyzo »

xyzelement wrote: post #176
arpyzo wrote: post #63

If you agree with this decision on the grounds of supporting meritocracy, consider that the real travesty with regards to meritocracy in college admissions are legacy admissions.

How big a deal and how common is it in reality? "We have one fewer spots because we admitted the son of a donor" and "we won't accept you based on race" are different magnitude.

Legacy admissions are not just a few spots. They constitute a high percentage of admissions. I've seen estimates ranging from 10% to 35%.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#259

Post by purpleblue »

I'm happy this happened because Asians are the only ethnicity that suffers true systemic racism when it comes to education.

However, my fear is that the universities are working hard to figure out ways to continue this practice against Asian Americans by skirting around the rules.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#260

Post by ben7799 »

losvedir wrote: post #41

As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor. But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my back…

You have standard high achiever imposter syndrome and probably would if you were white/non-hispanic as well. You deserved to be there...
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