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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#761

Post by idopmstuff »

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,…

> 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.

I don't disagree with you, but I've always found it wrong that in a lot of cases of academic affirmative action, it's Asians who are absorbing the cost of making things right, when they are definitely not responsible for any of the wrongs done.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#762

Post by thegjp210 »

twobitshifter wrote: post #524

The elite schools are cartels of opportunity that feed themselves a self-affirming diet of the smartest people to maintain their place. It’s a diversion to look at your race versus somebody else’s race. That’s only a small fraction of the admission. A fraction of the best and brightest across races will gain admission, but the rest are usually the elites. These people pay for college out-of-pocket but the colleges th…

These are good points. I think a compelling argument can be made towards the admixture of the best and brightest with the daughters and sons of the rich and famous. Net net, I think that the opportunities provided to the best and brightest from exposure to, and friendship with the offspring of the spectacularly rich is why schools and network spun out of Harvard have generated such an effective flywheel effect over the generations. Granting access and pedigree to society's elite by a school isn't purely a vocational exercise - and the social element is why the Ivies and Oxbridge have thrived so spectacularly.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#763

Post by thworp »

Volundr wrote: post #375
treis wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suspi…

It would be quite illustrative to have had the same experiment run in the late 19th/early 20th century with southern Italian and Irish peasant names.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#764

Post by strstr »

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…

Is attending a prestigious college an outcome or an opportunity?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#765

Post by rawgabbit »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #724
rawgabbit wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a civil war to end racial discrimination. In his opinion, he argued that affirmative action which is a race based policy is logically incompatible with the Equal Protection clause. Affirmative Action was always about race. The US historically and systematically discriminated, disenfranchised, an…

> In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a civil war to end racial discrimination The US Civil War wasn't even fought to end slavery. That's a jingoistic talking point that "patriots" like to tell themselves that has absolutely no basis in reality. But "discrimination?" That's pure, unadulterated idiocy. The war was fought to put down a rebellion by Southern states who refused to modernize because…

How do you define modernize?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#766

Post by lolinder »

kylerush wrote: post #756
lolinder wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely simplistic take on a very complicated topic. While race may be a social construct, it has correlations with a number of other, less artificial factors. A random sample of people with the characteristics we associate with Asian race will tend to have more ancestry that traces back to Asia than would a random sample of people with Caucasian characteristics. This ancestry brings with it cultural and…

The point you’re making is that some cultures devalue educational achievement and success? So much so that we should expect to see members of those cultures disproportionately lacking access to opportunity because they “don’t want it?”

You're putting words in my mouth and, once again, oversimplifying. I'm saying that measurable economic outcomes are tightly wound up with personal identity, and personal identity is an extremely complicated mosaic of many different factors, and many of those factors are cultural. What we believe about the world, ourselves, and other people has a profound impact on the way we live our lives.

It's not simply "some cultures devalue educational achievement and success", because that implies that there is some discrete unit that can be measured called "success". My point is that what "success" means varies dramatically from person to person. When you claim that any variance in numeric results must stem from racism, you are attempting to distill humans down into numbers that can be sorted on a linear scale, and denying the amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#767

Post by blagie »

azinman2 wrote: post #725
blagie wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress. Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out: 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universitie…

I would disagree with your larger point. While I didn’t go to GATech (although I did get in), I did go to MIT and a UC as well as a state school and community college. I’ve also worked for a couple of FAANGS, startups, etc. So I’ve seen a diversity of environments and the people in them. MIT by far had the highest concentration of top talent of anywhere I’ve been. It also had _culturally_ the most ambition which push…

Culture matters.

I deliberately picked engineering/computer/mathy nerd schools for my list.

A typical UC, a Calstate, or a community college won't be a nerd school. A better point-of-comparison for UC computer science would be a Harvard, Penn, or Yale.

At this point, I would say Georgia Tech has better culture than MIT. MIT is brand-obsessed and increasingly sleazy. Georgia Tech is roughly where MIT was in 1990, which is a much better nerd culture.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#768

Post by mistersquid »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #520
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #327

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. Harvard also gets lots of Asians (well, Chinese) who are obviously not legacy admits, and there is/was active discrimination against them at Harvard (they don't want t…

This decision was a big win for Asians. Who right now are being discriminated against. Before race based admission was used “as a positive” for minorities, it was being used to keep ivy leagues from being “too Jewish”. It doesn’t take very long to see what this is, but the topic is always about removing the benefit, not preventing the abuse.

> This decision was a big win for Asians. Who right now are being discriminated against.

This is the hope but banning race-based Affirmative Action that favors ethnic minorities, blacks in particular, will not particularly benefit Asians in college admissions.

Harvard (as a proxy for elite colleges) admitted 1,942 students to the class of 2027, 15.3% of whom identify as African-American, or 297 students in total. [0] (Harvard fielded 56,937 applicants for the class of 2027)

Assuming every single entering African-American undergraduate at Harvard "displaced" a more qualified Asian due to Affirmative Action, 300 spots at what is arguably the most prestigious college in the United States is not likely to accommodate all the Asians who believe they may have been unfairly rejected because a "less qualified" African-American student matriculated to Harvard.

In other words, the number of matriculating African-Americans at US elite colleges and universities is dwarfed by the number of Asian applicants who will be rejected for reasons unrelated to Affirmative Action.

As a side note, the notion that college acceptance is a rigid formula determined by grades, test scores, and extracurriculars is misguided. Turning the elite college and university system in the United States into a reward for cram schoolers will not improve acceptance outcomes for the vast majority of all individuals, including Asians, who are rejected by elite academic institutions.

Affirmative Action is an issue that prevents people from seeing the larger problem which is: why do American elite universities fail to increase their enrollments for qualified individuals given the size of their endowments? (Harvard's endowment as of 2023 is 50.9 billion [1]) Were such well-endowed elite institutions to increase their enrollments in proportion to the meritorious student population, the controversy of Affirmative Action might become moot.

[0] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/college-makes...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#769

Post by PathOfEclipse »

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,…

> 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.

Who did the bad thing, and who is going to make it right, and how?

> Have things been made right by now? I have no idea.

How would anyone know? People assume we can establish a causal relationship between past discrimination and present disparity, which thing is impossible. Anti-racists claim that all disparity is evidence of discrimination, but this is as religious a belief as ancient Greeks claiming that all lightning comes from Zeus, God of thunder. And likely to be about as wrong in hindsight.

In books like "Discrimination and Disparities", "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics", the author Thomas Sowell gives many examples of minority groups that prospered far above and beyond their relative majorities despite real and systemic oppression against them. And, in "Affirmative Action Around the World", he details just how disastrous, ineffective, and harmful affirmative action programs consistently end up being.

If you as a doctor consistently diagnose symptoms incorrectly, conclude the wrong illness, and, worst of all, prescribe treatment that ends up harming your patient more than helping, you are a terrible doctor that should be barred from practicing. The political left have been such terrible doctors decades nigh on century. They misdiagnose all disparity as due to racism or oppression, and their prescriptions, whether it's the great society programs of the 60s, affirmative action of the 70s, or today's DEI bureaucracies, are highly counterproductive and devastating to society.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#770

Post by snovymgodym »

belorn wrote: post #618
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,…

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 learn…

That's a bit revisionist.

Germany was definitely punished through occupation, partition, forced resettlement of its people, forced ceding of territories to other countries, reparation payments, exportation of its industry, and forced labor by its POWs.

But in terms of feeling national guilt, that wasn't much of a thing immediately post war. The national reckoning for the Holocaust and dismantling of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht and such didn't happen until decades later, the 68 movement was a major catalyst in this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_German_student_movement.

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