Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions • Hacker News Board

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#611

Post by jmoss20 » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

bamfly wrote: post #236

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…

> Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better? I've watched the full set of lectures for a few classes at top universities (Yale, MIT, that kind of thing) for a topic area in which I took a lot of classes at a very-cheap low-tier ex-normal-school state university that's completely unkn…

Really?

Maybe my (large, relatively well respected state school) lectures were uniquely bad. But I found MIT lectures to be leagues ahead of what we got. They covered more content, went deeper and were faster paced. The lecturers were more talented and engaging, and the problem sets were harder and more efficient. It really was night and day.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#612

Post by OkayPhysicist » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

1024core wrote: post #537

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 grew up in India, where they have taken "affirmative action" to the logical extreme: there are explicit quotas in admissions, jobs, etc. You can have up to 50% (if not more) seats in a college reserved for somebody or the other from some historically marginalized/discriminated classes. As a result, you have situations where somebody from a marginalize class scores, say, 30 in the entrance exam and still gets in, wh…

Inner city schools are terrible, not for a lack of resources, but for a lack of familial support. I live in a state where those inner-city schools receive substantially more funding (per student, and total) than ones in wealthy suburbs. Yet, guess what, the wealthy suburbs still have wildly better outcomes. Turns out the parents working several jobs to try to make ends meet have less time to push their kid to succeed than the stay-at-home moms. Why are poor neighborhoods predominantly made up of groups that are minorities in the American population? Because America, within the last few generations by law, and up through today by social convention, has given fewer opportunities to succeed to these marginalized groups, including in education.

Left to its own devices it's a cycle of poverty: Better jobs go to the better educated, better educations go to the people with parents who had better jobs. When you had a legal system actively applying a cap to the success of people in these groups less than 3 generations ago, it should come as no surprise that it takes active measures to unfuck the mess.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#613

Post by zapataband1 » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #203

kneebonian wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? This is what I will never understand, why don't we focus on just helping the poor instead of based on race. If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race. However in…

Dr. Martin Luther King said he dreams that one day his children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Here we are 60 years later still focused on the color of people’s skin.

Bennett conveniently ignores one fact--King was a strong supporter of affirmative action. In “Why We Can’t Wait,” published in 1963, he argued that given the long history of American racism, blacks fully deserved “special, compensatory measures” in jobs, education and other realms. Four years later, in “Where Do We Go From Here?” he wrote: “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

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Post by greedo » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:16 PM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #437

pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 el…

Oh the racism spread to the West very early in those states histories. Look up sundown towns, and Portland's history.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#615

Post by tourmalinetaco » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:16 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #460

spacephysics wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is fundamentally the only thing that bothers me about the entire post-modern left narrative. If the goal posts were “equality of opportunity” (as they historically have been) then I’d have no problem continuing to fight until opportunity is provably equal. But if you move the goal posts to “equality of outcome” (what people mean when they say “racial equity”) and say “look we’re still a racist society” I just ca…

I’d never pay that. Because the money would go into someone’s pockets, sure, but not the disadvantaged. Just some fat cats of the “right” color running the group collecting the money. I mean look at what happened with Black Lives Matter.

> Yes, there are still some poor and intensely disparaged communities of predominately minority populations.

And there are poor, intensely disparaged communities in majority populations. A great example is “American Hollow”, a 1999 documentary by Rory Kennedy about an Appalachian family, their life with poverty, and making ends meet in the mountains.

Generational wealth exists, and Blacks are certainly affected, but I’m not convinced that trying to “shift” wealth so unnaturally (and especially in such racist ways) really helps anything.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#616

Post by gmarx » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:17 PM UTC

mahdi7d1 wrote: post #419

pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This legacy system in likes of Harvard boggles me. If someones parents went to Harvard it might be actually logical to be harder for him to get into not easier. His educated parenting is already a huge plus for him and if he is unable to get into the same university it's on him.

You are making some assumptions about what Harvard is attempting to do when filling its classes. If its goal is to have a class full of people who did the most with what they had you have an argument. If their goal is to maximize alumni support (financial and otherwise) then maybe not

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

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Post by foofoo4u » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

Eumenes wrote: post #138

newacct3 wrote: post #110

Considering the failure and timing of prop 16 and overall makeup of the California electorate compared to rest of country, official discrimination on the basis of race likely won't return in higher ed. Also consider that prop 16 failed by double digits with the pro-discrimination crowd outspending the opposition 19x What I'm curious about is this: the Harvard decision is wrt a private entity, the court ruled that the…

> Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next? I'm no fan of regulation and government intervention in private business, but its gotten out of control in tech and the corporate world. I've flat out heard hiring managers say they'll only hire a woman, lgbtq, or [certain minority] for certain roles. I've sat in hiring committees where candidates preform horribly, esp compared to others being reviewed at the…

My employer has stated on company-wide broadcasts that they will use race as a factor for raises and promotions. This blatant racism has to come to an end.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#618

Post by belorn » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #255

pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Germany went through a similar phase after 1945 with a lot of guilt and reparations towards fixing all the problem cause during the war. It was very noticeable in behavior and attitude, through around 2000s it seems that the past is being put behind them.

We should not forget that world war 2 happens, but it also doesn't make much sense for Germans to continue self-flagellation forever. If anything, the lessons learned by the period between world war 1 and world war 2 is that lasting peace is not about trying to fix every past injustice by never ending reparations. It is not feasible to create a world as if world war 2 did not occur, and at some point people has to accept the past and work as a single group, like say a European union rather than Europe vs Germans.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#619

Post by Natsu » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

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've long thought that poverty is the best way to do this, because it's self-correcting. We'll probably never be truly and fully equal in every way, just because random stuff happens and there's only one perfectly equal state out there, but a whole lot of unequal possibilities.

So inasmuch as any group is disadvantaged, they'll get more help due to there being more of them that are poor and this strategy will work to self-correct the imbalance.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#620

Post by gmarx » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 7:21 PM UTC

Melchizedek wrote: post #589

NoRelToEmber wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So clearly non-Jewish whites are by far the most discriminated against considering their share of the population and SAT scores. Why is this fact never mentioned in the media?

You'd need to know the percentage and scores for ivy league applicants to say such a thing a clear. It's likely true but not from these numbers