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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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admissions departments will find proxies for race. The next year of Harvard freshmen will not be majority Asian. The admissions department won’t allow that to happen.

If true, an in-person English fluency and personality interviewing process, even a supposedly race-blind one, tends to skew heavily against a majority of, but not all, Asian college applicants. That’s probably what your theoretical proxy will look like, if you’re correct.

This is something that actually got Harvard in trouble as alumni interviews rated Asians roughly similar to Whites, but the personality scores that the admissions offices gave Asians were lower even though they never met the candidates.

"Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#352
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European naturalized American here and yes I do agree with you. In the few EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies. Just help poor people and that's it. I'll put on my tin foil hat here, but I genuinely believe that "race" (and now "gender") is being weaponized by the American elites/politicians to form nice clear camps/teams for voters. People ne…

I've heard people make references to the Occupy Wall Street protests a decade+ back being the catalyst for corporations and governments to start using "diversity" as a wedge issue to distract and divide people into groups to keep people from organizing. (Further down the conspiracy rabbit-hole, the CIA has been known to work with entertainment and critical industries to push opinions and ideas to sway the populace) I…

That's because it is.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#353

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…

Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us. Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We…

I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress.

Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out:

1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity.

2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge.

3) It's not a meritocracy otherwise. There isn't a single axis of "quality," and if there were, it's not what admissions selects for. A lot of this became public with the Harvard lawsuit, where it turned out close to half of white students at Harvard got in through back doors (alumni, legacy, children of faculty, athletics, etc.). MIT is different, but no better.

4) Where you go matters a lot less than we make it out to. So much of MIT (and other elite schools) is about building out alumni as brand ambassadors. It's like the magic of Disney -- manufactured by PR departments to fool people. MIT builds itself on being hyper-elite, but there's no difference in quality of individuals at MIT, Georgia Tech, or many other good schools.

5) The elite school advantage is mostly in having a brand stamp and a power network when you graduate, not educational. That helps a lot of you're trying to be a CEO, faculty member, or similar, but not so much for the jobs 90% of my MIT-graduating peers are in. The educational outcomes are the same.

Unfortunately, the "best-and-brightest" brand-building leads to things like impostor syndrome. It may help if you know you were manipulated, but it probably won't. It's pretty deeply embedded in most graduates, and even if you know everything in this post internally, most people take decades to internalize it.

Breaking conditioning is hard.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#354
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.

It has a surprisingly strong effect as schools get more prestigious / exclusive. At schools like Harvard, which have in incredibly low admission rate (something like 5% of qualified applicants get an offer, I think?), legacies get a massive bump.

https://admissionsight.com/harvard-legacy-acceptance-rate/ says it's 25-35% of students who're legacies at Harvard.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... is analyzing the admissions data that got released from an earlier lawsuit against Harvard about Asian American admissions bias, and says that although being a legacy isn't as good as being a recruited athlete, it still gets you admitted at about 5x the rate of non-legacies.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#355

The best method of college entrance is whats done in east asia. China does the Gaokao (hard SAT), and students list their university preferences and filters students into colleges based on their score and their preferences. Japan takes entrance exams for a university. These seem like infinitely fairer methods than the US where they try and correct for disadvantage in a variety ways.

China uses an ethnic quota system for underrepresented minorities for university admissions, just like India and the United States (until today).

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's not mostly poor, hardworking ADOS (African descendents of slavery) students that benefit. It's rich, Black students that are benefiting, especially those from outside the US and no lineage from slavery. The problem with affirmative action is that everyone is only looking literally at skin color, which is the opposite of what we should be doing.

Yeah, the point should always have been explicitly to be reparations for slavery/Jim Crow and the Native American genocide. But that was never really explicit, and there was a lot of mission drift over the last fifty years.

and redlining, and other formal, informal, intentional and unintentional institutional (particularly governmental and financial) policies that limited people’s access to success based on their race.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#357
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> You've got to try to make things right. The issue is this has nothing to do with the goal of educating someone in a certain subject based on their academic proficiencies. Go ahead and give poor people money, but no reason to make other processes and institutions less meritocratic. I know legacy/bribed via donation admissions exist, and those are obviously also a problem too.

Sounds like there would be plenty of edge cases in this kind of thing too.

For example, apparently not all the slave owners were white:

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/applied-and-social-s...

That's likely to complicate the heck out of things.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#358

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…

The intent is to factor in some unknown "racism" value. Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average, so if you naively stratified by income, you'd still wind up with a mostly white and Asian student population. There are a lot of reasons Black and Hispanic kids underperform, and it's just easier for the school to short circuit all that and choose based on race rather…

All else equal, poor white kids probably get a leg up as well if they can articulate it in some way in their application.

For example, my (white) dad got into Yale and Princeton, and it probably helped that he was from a podunk town in Wyoming.

For a lot of poor white kids though, their situation isn’t obvious from their application.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program? In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that doesn't exist in the way many people think. In many large states, such as california, they already for a long time do not consider race as a factor in admissions, as per law. And, IMO, california has done a pretty good job of having…

> In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that doesn't exist in the way many people think. In that case, can you explain why two schools would've fought for the explicit use of race in deciding school admissions all the way to the Supreme Court?

Laziness? It’s cheap and it gives them a lever they wanted.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#360

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…

Because we did harm to African Americans and Native Americans as groups, so the remedy has to be to them as groups.

Why did you harm these groups? What are you doing to fix what you have done?
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