971–980 of 1001 posts
if I were a non-white adversarial nation with plenty of high-achieving youth, I would take maximal advantage of this decision and the US's student visa programs by doing everything I could to send as many students from my country to US colleges as absolutely possible, so as to deprive American youth of college education as much as possible.
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 think it's much saner to completely throw away the framework and look at the issue: what you're trying to fix here is economic inequality, so do that. The side effect is you can avoid resentment from people unjustly disadvantaged by race based policies and avoid further radicalization of a discourse that has no basis in anything measurable.
To be clear: race is made up BS, and how americans view race is absolutely idiotic for anyone that hasn't been raised here. Whenever I need to check a box I have to choose between being white, or latino, or black etc...
Right there you see the problem: that list has two skin colors of uncertain definition, and a category that's cultural and not based on skin color or other physical attributes.
I was born in a mediterranean country (Italy) and according to current categorization I'm white but I went to school with other Italians that are darker skinned than people I know that call themselves "of color" in the US. So which box do they check? Can I check "latino" since well, we're the original ones? Or do I have to ask to add a "cisalpine gaul" since I'm partially from the north of the country and have a red beard?
It's complete nonsense. You're not missing anything, it's just an entrenched cultural view that people raised in this country can't seem to be able to escape.
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This ends up moving the burden onto individuals. If you have an Asian Medical Doctor, they are AAA. If you have a multiple minority Medical Doctor, they are not necessarily AAA, they could be As. Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you? Without Affirmative action, you'd trust a multiple minority doctor equally to an Asian doctor. I wonder what the cost is on the healthcare system/US citizens when we have wor…
I just saw the stats from a medical school— I believe it was UCSF but correct me if I’m wrong— where the average Asian reject had higher scores than the average Black/Hispanic accepted applicant
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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…
Caltech itself famously had more black students in the 1970s than it did in the following three decades
However, it's clear to the outside observer that your single-digit hispanic or black prospective classmates at Caltech are generally more miserable than your prospective classmates at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etcetera. They are usually the only person like you in their dorm, or in their year, or in their major. So you don't go to Caltech.
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…
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The who is more privileged game is not a fun one to play. Watched a white male friend and a white passing Hispanic female friend get into this argument before. He grew up poor in a rural area, only one parent worked a low paying job and the other was the care giver. She grew up middle class in a city, parents were college professors. There are a ton of other factors but even at those basics it got complicated. Is a m…
For me, the goal wouldn't be to rank the oppressed against each other, but to provide resources for all those who need it. I think of it less like a tournament and more like food stamps: below a certain income, food becomes difficult to afford, and aid is helpful (I was on food stamps for a short bit and really appreciated it). It doesn't really matter WHY their income is low, just that society can help them with foo…
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…
But, people can and do suffer from racism without being poor. Controlling socioeconomic status, Black people (I'm going to focus here) statistically have worse opportunities and outcomes. This is why race-based policy is important in addition to purely financial considerations. There is no perfect implementation of affirmative action to address the root of the problem, but on the whole, I think it's extremely important that institutions are able to try.
The older people in my parents' generation were often prevented from having a full education, often even up to the high school level. My mom was born in the North, instead of the South as her older siblings were, because her family fled the Klan. These are just a couple examples of how the history of de jure and de facto racial oppression are still very much with us.
If not for reforms and affirmative action, I probably would not have had the opportunity to be raised in a financially stable household in an area of bountiful opportunity. It's heartbreaking to me that the policies that allowed my family to go from oppressed sharecropping to earning our way into the middle class are being revoked.
The truth is, affirmative action was never enough, and it is unlikely to be replaced with anything any more sufficient.
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> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? I recently listened to an NPR piece on this and it seems like you're right here. Even with affirmative action you're really only affecting those that are going to elite colleges, and a large amount of people who benefited from it actually didn't come from low-income households. Essentially affirmative action benefited a tiny (like We would probably find that this doe…
No, we don’t need to be making community college free. Why do people always place so much emphasis on college when it’s clear that the entire system before that point is failing kids? All you’re doing is making it marginally easier for the people already sufficiently motivated to succeed in college to have a little easier time. Elementary and Secondary education is what desperately needs attention, not college. Certa…
I just don't get this. Yes we need to improve primary and secondary education, but we can't just pretend like tertiary education doesn't matter to people. College isn't just about learning material in classrooms. College provides a way for young people to transition in a structured way into adulthood. It provides job opportunities and social interaction that you just can't get as easily or consistently if you immediately go into the workforce as a high school grad.
I'll leave you with this, a list of 39 other countries that provide free or very cheap college for their citizens - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...