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

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#981

Post by zephrx1111 » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

roody15 wrote: post #677

The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative action was used to help people who had been systematically discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an attempt to make up for some of these wrongs. Although a difficult process I believe most people genuinely believed in the concept. Fast forward to today and we have a much different framework. Equity. There is a belief that any group,…

Yeah, this is conflicting with their another topic: diversity. Diversity and Equity are contradictory. If you accept diversity, you accept people of different groups should and could behave differently. Then you should accept that with these different behavior, the outcome should be different.

If you accept Equity, then you accept whatever group you are in, the outcome should be the same. Then this defeats the diversity.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#982

Post by chris_wot » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 11:18 PM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #884

chris_wot wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, according to my reading of SCOTUS, that you can have affirmative action on anything but race. It occurs to me that it would have been far more effective if Harvard based their selection criteria on socio-economic considerations rather than race. It seems like a well-intentioned but badly thought through process designed to ensure disadvantaged groups gain access they might not have gotten to their sys…

The uncomfortable fact is that we're actually very bad at predicting who will thrive at college and who won't. It's like hiring in that way, and I'm not joking when I say a lottery would probably work just as well as what we do.

Very true. But I think that it’s more important to give as broad a cross section of society the chance to succeed, whether they do I guess is not something we can predetermine.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#983

Post by Slava_Propanei » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 12:12 AM UTC

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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#984

Post by slt2021 » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 12:17 AM UTC

glonq wrote: post #712

solardev wrote: post #120

I often wished universities (and other organizations) would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" to determine someone's background difficulties. Like okay, you get X points if you're this race, Y points for that. Z points if your parents were poor. Or if you grew up in these bad zip codes. Or if your dad was gone and mom was an addict. Whatever. As an Asian American of relatively privileged (middle class) upb…

> I often wished universities ... would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" Be careful what you wish for. Like most well-intentioned ideas, this would become terribly exploited/gamified.

it will end up being similar to Chinese "social credit" system and that score will dictate everything in your life.

no, thanks

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#985

Post by soundnote » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 12:22 AM UTC

least wrote: post #919

willio58 wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A teacher friend's school was sued because they disciplined black students more often. No consideration for the fact that the disruptive students were indeed disruptive. Now they're just not allowed to keep discipline, full stop. You can imagine the results for everyone else in class, the well-behaved blacks included (who are statistically most likely in need of a good learning environment at school)

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#986

Post by peanuty1 » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 12:54 AM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #663

Footnote7341 wrote: post #221

The most elite colleges already pre-empted this ruling by rapidly moving towards non-merit based admissions they will just make it so you can't really tell if they are using affirmative action or not instead of having it be explicit.

Won't people be able to prove statistically that they are obviously still using affirmative action policies via GPAs/SAT scores/racial mix? I'm not that great at statistics but that doesn't seem like a very hard task even using basic figures of merit like ratio of applicants to population of accepted students. Seems like something easy to bring a class action suit against a University after a few years of data is ava…

They can use personality scores and rate Asians lower.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#987

Post by Groxx » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 4:22 AM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #872

Groxx wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tl;dr is: because there exists systemic disadvantage-ous-ness clearly caused by, and maintained along lines of race. It's not just The Past™ that was racist to damaging degrees, Now™ is too. All people in bad circumstances beyond their control deserve ways out. There are tons and tons and tons of subsidies and whatnot targeting individual reasons, like poverty (people think you're poor? you're less likely to get…

But with affirmative action it's about race and not being poor. It's not a measure that looks at household income, but a measure that looks at skin color. Poor white Bobby from a trailer park in alabama is financially fucked, and noone cares about him, because he's white.

Yes, because by being of race X they will continue to be affected by racists.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#988

Post by least » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 4:36 AM UTC

willio58 wrote: post #980

least wrote: post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Elementary and Secondary education is what desperately needs attention, not college. Certainly not with public funding. 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 adulth…

> College provides a way for young people to transition in a structured way into adulthood.

Given that the majority of people in the United States do not have even an associate's degree and still transition into adulthood, even if your assumption that it gives people a structured way into adulthood was correct, it's serving less than half the population. The majority of people do complete high school, or an equivalent, though. It's pretty plainly clear that preparing children to transition into adulthood needs to start earlier. That goes hand in hand with the failure of the elementary and secondary education systems in the United States.

Also, just philosophically, I am morally opposed to the idea that people who don't or start complete college for one reason or another should be subsidizing those who can and do. College degree holders earn dramatically more money in their lifetime over non college graduates.

I understand that the goal is to expand the number of people that can attend college. I think that you would expand that number more by improving the K-12 system and you'd leave everyone better off by doing so. If you want to increase the number of disadvantaged people in university (i.e. the people that would go to college if it were free but can't afford it so they don't) you should look at expanding the Pell grant, not subsidize college for everyone.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#989

Post by least » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 4:39 AM UTC

soundnote wrote: post #985

least wrote: post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A teacher friend's school was sued because they disciplined black students more often. No consideration for the fact that the disruptive students were indeed disruptive. Now they're just not allowed to keep discipline, full stop. You can imagine the results for everyone else in class, the well-behaved blacks included (who are statistically most likely in need of a good learning environment at school)

There are definitely many facets to the problem, and education is only one part of the equation in many poor (black, hispanic) neighborhoods. One can only change the variables that they have access to, however. I think it will take some time but ultimately I think elementary education in particular is super critical.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#990

Post by least » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 5:46 AM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #950

least wrote: post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Why do people always place so much emphasis on college when it’s clear that the entire system before that point is failing kids? Because the hot topic this past decade or 2 has been about the college bubble. And we conflate college with university. I think Community college is cheap enough that no one is worried about paying off debts for 20 years in CC, but there is certainly that problem with university. With almo…

> but there is certainly that problem with university. With almost zero alternatives.

The alternative is mostly that a lot of people shouldn't be going to college. We shouldn't be guaranteeing loans and the government shouldn't be in the business of handing out student loans. That is a large contributor to the massive inflation in student fees. When you improve elementary education, the negative effects of less people attending college are offset by the general working knowledge of the populace being higher, of better quality, and with a mindset that allows people to really think and learn.

Without that, all we're doing is basically setting people up for failure and a whole lot of school debt. There is a large percentage of Americans who have absolutely nothing to show for their time and money spent on college because they never completed their degree.

> And as is any policy would probably benefit schools that need that support less.

The entire public school system is one that favors the privileged. They are funded largely by property taxes and so obviously the wealthier your area is, the more funding and thus better education children have access to.

So yes, there is extreme deficiencies in equity when it comes to educational opportunities in the United States. Providing subsidized college doesn't fix that issue and it doesn't target the right people, either.

I wouldn't necessarily oppose actual public (completely government funded) universities that compete with the private schools, but that's serving such a small population of people for it to really see much benefit.