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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

#381

Post by trompetenaccoun »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #352
scohesc wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the identity and diversity stuff was a thing long before that time.

Don't get me wrong, politicians and elites are absolutely using identity to play the populace against each other. But this is less part of a grand conspiracy and more the oldest trick in the book of politics, there's evidence of it going back all the way to classic antiquity.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#382

Post by arcticbull »

naveen99 wrote: post #324
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…

math needs to work out. if you have a 100 people and 50 defined to be poor, but can only admit 5 people. How do you decide which of the 50 poor come first ? The top 5, and you are back to square 1. The bottom 5, and you have the devil's problems. Remember the poorest people, the people with billions in negative wealth, are in jail or worse. You do not want to bring them back to the top !

Lottery? Seems to be the foundation of the immigration system.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#384

Post by HeavenFox »

One thing I never understood is why colleges themselves fight so hard for affirmative action? Wouldn't admitting the most qualified students, regardless of race, be in their own interest? If they are afraid of the political pushback for having too few Black and Hispanics, doesn't this decision give them cover?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#385

Post by prossercj »

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…

For many in America, the race issue is more about who we are as a nation than it is about practical results. We want to identify as abolitionists, who defeated the slaveholders and moved toward "a more perfect union" (a line from the Constitution which Lincoln echoed in relation to the war).

The disagreement is essentially about the best way to achieve equality, which though a nebulous term is accepted as a goal without debate, even though the definition of the term can be widely different, as in this case. The conversatives argue that we can only achieve equality by being colorblind. The progressives argue that we can only achieve equality by consciously addressing inequality.

I see some merit on both sides. I tend to lean toward the conservative view, but I recognize moments in our history where active intervention was both noble and necessary (desegregating schools, for example). The question is whether those actions were special cases or are examples for us to follow going forward.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#386

Post by xienze »

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…

> I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...

What I find amusing is that black college students tend to have a MASSIVE chip on their shoulder about people assuming that affirmative action helped them get in or get a job, but suggest that affirmative action should be eliminated and here comes the rhetoric about how black people will be banned from ever attending college or getting a good job. Affirmative action helps everyone else, but not me! No sir, I was 100% merit-based!

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#387

Post by djur »

spacephysics wrote: post #335
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…

The underlying important question is what do you define as equality? Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? This is a very slippery slope when some definitions are not equal, or stated, as we’ve come into a recent crisis of definitions being rewritten unnaturally (I understand the meaning of words change over time, but there have been recent inorganic changes, I’d argue) The classic opportunity of outcome…

How exactly has equality of outcome been "proven to be doomed"? At the aggregate level, at least?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#388

Post by mcpackieh »

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]

> it's been debunked countless times

Change my mind then, and debunk it. Refuting isn't debunking.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#389

Post by NoRelToEmber »

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…

> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status.

Let's explicitly look at how this affected race (instead of leaving it to readers imaginations), since that was the issue the court was asked to consider. The student body of the US Ivy League looked as follows, circa 2019 (international students excluded):

                          Ivy League   US      Ratio  Mean nationwide SAT score [1]
  Jewish                  17.2%         2.4%    7.16
  Asian                   19.6%         5.3%    3.71  1216
  White (incl. Jewish)    50.3%        61.5%    0.82  1148
  Hispanic                11.4%        17.6%    0.65  1043
  Black                    7.8%        12.7%    0.61   966
  White (non-Jewish)      33.1%        59.1%    0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate)
SAT score seems to offer no benefit, up until the magic cutoff somewhere between 1142 and 1216.

The numbers don't sum to 100% because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities were excluded from analysis. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.

No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias.

[1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...

Edit: Clarified that the SAT scores are nationwide, and not just of the Ivy League students. Thank you to stanford_labrat for bringing it up.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#390

Post by jasonlotito »

vorpalhex wrote: post #270
ricardoplouis wrote: post #62

Worth noting that while affirmative action has been banned, we still have proxies for race (aka legacy admissions) which overwhelmingly favor rich and white students. And given the historical discrimination of elite universities, this ban on affirmative action without addressing legacy admissions or historical harm will only increase the number of white students at universities. We can't pretend that eliminating race…

From your source > In addition, 70 percent of Harvard’s legacy applicants are white. From US Census: > Race and Hispanic Origin > White alone, percent > 75.5%

From the source of the source you quoted:

> Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected absent their ALDC status.

So, three-quarters of those individuals didn't earn their place academically.

> Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students away from whites.

So, the mechanisms in place for academics currently favor white people.

Yes, 70% vs 75% is about the same, but it was helped that way in part because of legacies, and would be much lower otherwise.

Which supports the original comment:

> [legacy admissions] overwhelmingly favor rich and white students.

Maybe the paper itself has more details. I'm only going by the abstract. But unless the abstract is lying, I think it makes sense.

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