Regardless of what your take is on the substance, as a former lawyer, I was really struck at the language in the various concurrences and dissents. They are very clearly pissed and/or disgusted with each other in a way that is very not-normal, even for hot button cases.
Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
431–440 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#432As 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…
Hah this mirrors my life & experience to a T! [1] I had other "high-achieving" kids at my school be sour grape-y about the MIT thing, saying I only got in because I was Mexican. On the one hand, it probably helped. On the other, I was imo clearly a cut above them academically. I've never really had an identity crisis about it though. I'm white, but I'm also Mexican. The majority of my extended family is Mexican (I ba…
> Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting.
This is a good point. I've always thought that my esteem of anybody should not change based on immutable characteristics of that person, or other factors that they had no material choice in being.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#433The 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…
> 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 California], they already for a long time do not consider race as a factor in admissions, as per law.
They do to an extent, they just try to hide it as "holistic review" or such, make it hard to prove.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#434Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#435Earlier 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.
Sounds like the equally-ridiculous "cultural fit" part of company interviews. Even if candidates pass all the measurable, competence-based criteria for the job, companies have the cultural fit card to play against those candidates for whatever unsavory reason the company wants to exclude them.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#436The 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…
It's worth thinking about this beyond the money— what values does the USA and its people want to stand for? Affirmative action can be viewed as an obstacle to individualism and self-determination, but as a boost to multiculturalism and tolerance.
Specifically in the context of education, do we want to think of universities as institutions that help people earn more money and affirmative action as the university deciding who _will_ earn more money, or do we want to think of universities as institutions formative of the American zeitgeist, and affirmative action as the university ensuring the zeitgeist involves said multiculturalism and tolerance?
My experience, as a foreigner who went to a university in the USA, is that the cost of college leads a lot of students to think of universities as the former— one can't really blame them. Another thing I noticed, and this might be cultural, is that at my university I saw a lot of fear of mediocrity and a very clear idea in students of what their "path path success" was. I came in quite lost and undecided, thinking of college as a place to explore, take different classes, figure what I want to study and what I want to do with my life as I go. Some of my peers seemed to think as college as a step in a grander plan, and were doing internships freshman summer already aiming for a specific job at a specific company after graduation.
For people in that mentality it's not hard to see why affirmative action very much matters, and why they might think of it with so much disdain.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#437The 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…
Pasadena, a decent sized city in Los Angeles County that houses Caltech of all places, was forced to officially desegregate in the 1970s but they've still got tons of policies left over that discriminate in housing [1]. South Pasadena real estate agents unofficial redlined the neighborhoods well into the 1980s and possibly even the 1990s. Schools, especially in Altadena, were still highly segregated when I went to elementary school there in the 2000s. In the 21st century, for f**k's sake.
And that's in a city adjacent to Los Angeles. We don't see many rebel flags in Southern California but the segregation is just staggering.
IME it's even worse in the East coast cities, especially with the way roads, highways, and mass transit are built. I'll admit I had no idea what true segregation looked like until I lived in Ft Lauderdale/Hollywood in Florida (in the mid-2010s).
[1] https://makinghousinghappen.net/2020/06/23/pasadenas-raciali...
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
America has long had most of the best universities in the world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.
Standardized tests have been known for years as an very unfair way of judging students. People with resources to prepare and study for those tests often end up with inflated scores than for people who don't have the resource to prepare for them. High school grades have been consistently found the be #1 leading indicator of how well a student is going to do in college.
And the alternative is letting rich parents hire agencies who will prepare their kids with a perfect portfolio of extracurricular activities starting year 10 that poor kids have no chance to match.
At least poor people have a chance when it comes to standardised testing.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#439The 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 the US has systematically disenfranchised ethnic minorities over the course of its history. Any time there was a non-white person or community that was starting to become prosperous, the power of the state could be used to crush them. At times it was overtly murderous[0], but as that became unfashionable, it was relegated to more subtle methods. Some of the most blatant examples include:
- Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black or brown neighborhood.[1]
- Want a stadium? Build it in a black or brown neighborhood.[2]
- Black folks got a nice property? Just take it from them.[3]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre [1]https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-... [2]https://americanhistory.si.edu/pleibol/game-changers/big-lea... [3]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/01/bruces-beach...
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
America has long had most of the best universities in the world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.
Standardized tests have been known for years as an very unfair way of judging students. People with resources to prepare and study for those tests often end up with inflated scores than for people who don't have the resource to prepare for them. High school grades have been consistently found the be #1 leading indicator of how well a student is going to do in college.
The question is not "Does being rich help you with the SAT?" The question is "Does being rich help you more on the SATs the other possible criteria?" Because being rich and having resources helps with everything.
And being rich benefits GPA, extracurriculars, and college essays far more than it helps SATs where prep costs a couple hundred dollars and a month of weekends.