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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

#371

Post by raincom »

newacct3 wrote: post #114
raincom wrote: post #26

Harvard used "personality score" to sort out applicants. Now, they got rid of "personality score", SAT/ACT/LSAT/MCAT, etc., scores. They can tell their feeder schools even four years earlier, how to prepare admission packets for prospective students. Schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford can pick whatever students they want.

At the risk of getting sued and having it go back up to the same court that gave us this decision

Adcoms (admission committees) have learned their hard lessons. Williams R. Fitzsimmons and Rakesh Khurana of Harvard might have told everyone to not put everything in writing, just as CEOs tell underlings to not put in writing in order to not be found in the discovery process. And these professors and deans we ordinary mortals should emulate for ethical exemplars. Maybe, they should follow what they preach to students.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#372

Post by thereisnospork »

cogman10 wrote: post #234
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…

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Mostly it was a justice thing. The US spent decades disadvantaging people based on race and this was a step to try and reverse some of that. I agree that changing it from race to economic class is probably the right move at this point. That being said, I don't like that the SC is legislating from the bench. They are striking this down for purely political reasons.

> They are striking this down for purely political reasons.

On its face affirmative action is pretty blatantly a violation of the 14th amendment:

Which to a trivial reading would come out as 'All persons [black, white, rainbow] shall have equal rights to attend [state funded school], and as such a right to a fair and impartial admissions process'.

Affirmative action adds the clause: "except those whose skin color we do not like today, those shall have to score higher on tests. Those whose skin color we do like today, those shall not have to score as high. Those whose skin color we do not care about can score the same as before."

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#373

Post by verteu »

kaitai wrote: post #311

A white legacy applicant at Harvard is 5 times as likely to be admitted as a non-legacy white applicant. "Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as typical white applicants." All of you writing that if a Black kid gets admitted then some white or Asian kid gets bumped off are scrapping for the little bits the rich have left to y…

And "over 43%" of white admits are legacy ("ADLC"). I had no idea the proportion was so high!

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#374

Post by arcticbull »

0xcafefood wrote: post #332
JohnMakin wrote: post #188

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?

I expect part of this was just retaining their right to do so as they are losing a degree of flexibility in admissions here.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#375

Post by Volundr »

treis wrote: post #313
crooked-v wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racial discrimination in the US significant enough that, for example, merely having a "Black" name leads to worse results from job applications, regardless of other factors [1]. Merely focusing on wealth levels won't counteract that kind of effect. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/distincti...

They never run these experiments right and this one looks to be no different. What they choose as "Black" names are those associated with lower class blacks but they do not do the same with "White" names. In this case, they use names like Latonya for blacks and Heather for whites. You never see them use names like Cletus or Billy Bob or other names associated with lower class whites.

> What they choose as "Black" names are those associated with lower class blacks but they do not do the same with "White" names. In this case, they use names like Latonya for blacks and Heather for whites.

Is Latonya associated with lower class the way Cletus is? I honestly don't know, and I'd be surprised if most of the people hiring did. What are some "black" names not associated with lower class? My sneaking suspicion (without evidence) is that "black" names in general are more likely to be associated with lower class and to escape those connotations one would have to avoid the more ethnic names, but I'm open to being educated on this point.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#376

Post by DesiLurker »

mtklein wrote: post #218
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…

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…

Hmm, I can definitely say I've seen a version of that at Indian IITs. all great students but most feel like imposters there. also the subtle thing is that the risk/reward calculus gets f-ed up, meaning, for all the students who have been at the top of their games wherever they came from now the rewards for significant incremental efforts were minuscule. So I have seen many disengage & get into 'enjoy life' mode.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#377

Post by AlanYx »

ecshafer wrote: post #291

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 practices affirmative action by giving certain ethnic minorities additional points on the gao kao. There's a good 2017 paper by Ding et. al. that explores the effect this has.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#378

Post by VirusNewbie »

chimeracoder wrote: post #364
mcpackieh wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. More or less, but not precisely. How do you define a "minority race"? Universities in America discriminate against Asian Americans despite them being a minority of the American population generally, ostensibly because they're over-represented in universities.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#379

Post by pessimizer »

purpleblue wrote: post #250
BobbyJo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Rich ADOS should still benefit, though. We should be looking at lineage instead of skin color, because thinking all black people are the same is a handicap of both

the left: who think that all "people of color" should be compensated for slavery, and

the right: who love to say that US blacks were sold by "their own people." That's like claiming innocence for molesting a child because their parents sold it to you.

(I know you know this:))

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#380

Post by commandlinefan »

cpascal wrote: post #118

I think universities can probably come up with a different set of non-protected criteria to lift underrepresented communities out of social/financial oppression. This might even provide greater access to some equally needing students that are looked over by racially-based criteria. In a perfect world, everyone would have equal opportunity and support throughout their primary education, and college admission could be…

> lift underrepresented communities out

There already is, though - study hard!

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