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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

#621

Post by jenenfnfnfnf »

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

Had?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#622

Post by zo1 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #275
azinman2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.

Do we need race based affirmative action though? Couldn't we have needs based discrimination? What makes a poor hispanic immigrant more deserving of a hand up than a poor ukranian immigrant?

Because the issue goes way further back than college, yet they sit here at the college-level with little-dictators breathing down their necks about why is their college "so white". So how far back does one need to go, and how patient are we to see generational results?

Honestly, I think this is 100% the responsibility of parents. They are the ones that need to break the generational cycle of whatever they're facing. Beyond that - as you say - needs based approaches to this.

I don't understand why we as a society can't simply have "Oh you got more than 95% on your standardized test scores? 100% full scholarship to any college and any degree you wish without paying it back." That is how you fix a society if you ask me, by rewarding hard work and merit.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#623

Post by 1024core »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #612
1024core wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Inner city schools are terrible, not for a lack of resources, but for a lack of familial support.

But we've known this for a long time, and still refuse to deal with it. With some resources you can deal with this issue.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#624

Post by blackle »

concordDance wrote: post #594
mcv wrote: 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,…

> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. Here's where your thinking goes askew, you can't simply draw a boundary around a subset of people and declare that an agentic thing. Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do. Thinking of very diverse groups of people as single entities is how you get…

9/11 was not a systemic injustice, it was perpetrated by a small group of extremists in a single act. Racial discrimination was a systemic injustice perpetrated by lawmakers, enabled by an unjust society, with country-wide effects lasting multiple decades (if not centuries). It's not a logical fallacy to think that a systemic injustice requires a systemic solution.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#625

Post by mistrial9 »

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…

> the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people

this is misinformation; State laws had complete jurisdiction over certain matters, by design. "The US" is calling Washington State the same as Alabama. So, no.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#626

Post by influx »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #538
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…

Imagine the same argument but swap race for gender. Why are you trying to get women into medicine? Just to help the historically disadvantaged? Why don't you just let poor people in and not care about their gender? Nowadays, you could probably get away with that because everyone has got over the whole "women's brains are too small and their wombs too big for logical thought to even be possible" idea. But when the (hi…

This is an interesting point, however: "As of spring 2021, women made up 59.5 percent of all U.S. college students", does that argue that we should have affirmative action for men's admissions to college?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#627

Post by bubblethink »

forinti wrote: post #28

I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept. You could have 10% or 20% percent of candidates chosen by lottery, or have a lottery for all candidates who have the minimum pre-requisites, etc. Some sort of randomness whould guarantee a diversity of candidates and would even span across dimensions which are not even considered currently.

The issue is that the lottery is never enough. Effectively, the lottery percentage is removed from discussions and the fight moves on to the non-lottery percentage where the same arguments of diversity come back to the non-lottery percentage. This is not hypothetical, this is how the US immigration system is currently. There is a diversity lottery, which is a mostly foregone conclusion right now. And yet, there is race/country based quota in the skill based categories and proponents want quotas despite it being a skill being category. Once you create a lottery, you can't say, "Go do your thing in the lottery, this lane is for merit". So the lottery is a waste. Several attempts to phase out caps/quotas from skill based categories through legislature have failed so far. In the most recent case, the congressional black caucus opposed it as it would disadvantage the currently advantaged immigrants from African countries.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#628

Post by givemeethekeys »

flowerlad wrote: post #47

It is important to note that Harward’s admission policy that is the subject of this case was designed to favor White students over Jewish ones [1]. Today it is being used to discriminate against Asian Americans. Colleges are already prepared for this ruling. Many, such as the University of Washington have abandoned standardized tests because such tests compell universities to admit the kinds of students universities…

[flagged]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#629

Post by azinman2 »

1024core wrote: post #540
azinman2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.

> If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. But that begs the question: should GP still get the benefit of AA if their parent took advantage of it and succeeded in life?

Did discrimination stop since then? Did the percentage of underrepresented minorities get balanced out since then?

My guess is not, in which case it would be justified under the principles behind it.

Having successful minorities that continue to produce success multi-generationally is a good thing. It brings people out of poverty, creates positive examples for people that look like someone who is struggling, creates more wealth in the targeted communities which can be spread around, etc.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#630

Post by gmarx »

whinenot wrote: post #554
dionidium wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black or brown neighborhood.[1] A lot these debates really come down to just how impressed one is by arguments like this. It so happens that an Interstate was built through the neighborhood my entire family occupied in St. Louis in the 1950s. Some of them were "displaced." I can't for the life of me figure out how this is supposed to be relevant to my life today.…

If that interstate was never routed through that neighborhood, would members of your family be financially better off today? A fully paid off house unlocks a lot of financial freedom for the current occupants and potentially generational wealth for future family members.

This is a new argument in the past few years and it doesn't make sense. You do not need a parent with a paid off house to go to college and be successful. I didn't have that and I don't know many people who did. My friends whose parents have paid off houses now did not have them back when the kids were going to college and how would that have helped anyway? Home equity loan instead of student loan? How often is that choice made? There are some rich families who manage to pass wealth on generation after generation but it's rare in my experience and not needed to succeed
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