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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
991–1000 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#992As 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…
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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#993One thing I never understood is why colleges themselves fight so hard for affirmative action? Wouldn't admitting the most qualified students, regardless of race, be in their own interest? If they are afraid of the political pushback for having too few Black and Hispanics, doesn't this decision give them cover?
Elite schools want to protect the quota of ALDC (athletes, legacies, dean's interest list--kids of potential mega donors--, children of faculty). Also, they want to appear diverse, by having favored minorities. They don't really care about descendants of slavery; if they were, they would have admitted descendants of slavery (a narrow subset of black people).
Elites schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford want to keep their exclusiveness. Only one way to achieve that is to recruit the kids of the elite class (uber wealthy, powerful politicians, dictators, Cervant class of the elite); also have elite companies recruit people from such schools.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#994The 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.
Yes, they can do that. However, they have to be very, very careful, because of this: '[U]niversities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. ...“[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name' (pp39-40 of https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf)
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#995I'd rather live in a society that made it an imperative to have more students from more ethnicities be eligible for the best universities every year. That requires addressing inequality earlier, and more thoroughly, and across more axes, than an approach that is, in the final analysis, about setting quotas based on ethnicity. Affirmative action can do everything it was designed to do while having essentially zero imp…
That's probably not going to happen in the USA given current status of public schools barely hanging on.
public schools are very well funded. at the low performing ones the kids just arent doing the work.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#996Earlier 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,…
I don’t see how any of that morally justifies discriminating against Asians though.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#997The 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 it's similar to the system of "minorities quotas" for admission into Romanian universities in Transylvania. The region has a significant number of Hungarian ethnics and used to have Germans too but now they're rather vanished. Anyhow, from the total number of seats per year, a larger number is allocated to Hungarians and a smaller one to Germans. The caveat being you don't have to be ethically German, only t…
> radical version of affirmative action where you don't have to be black as long as you identify as one
Look up Rachel Dolezal.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#998The 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…
As an immigrant to the US I also see things that way on the basis that you can't fix the wrongs of a race based problem by using a race based solution. Especially left leaning folks around here like to deride that notion by calling it "color blind policies" but I think seeing everything in the frame of race is THE problem and it just entrenches the views of people on both sides of this debate. I think it's much saner…
As an immigrant in US, I feel that this whole American exceptionalism thing has been sort of internalized and reflected by much of the American liberal left into some kind of "we're exceptionally bad" deal. I often hear claims that US is horrible because such-and-such is common practice here unlike "all other civilized countries" or some such, while the speaker is oblivious to the fact that many American laws regarding something are actually very liberal by that standard (voter identification is probably the single most common example, but it also comes up sometimes wrt abortion term limits in some states).
To be clear, being better at something than somebody else who is even worse than you is not a valid excuse for being bad either way. I just hate that this kind of rhetoric 1) discredits the points being made, and 2) spreads misinformation.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#999Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the US uses race as a trigger to keep the poor fighting amongst themselves. That's why.
Or, more parsimoniously (no pun intended), because poverty isn't as strong of a unifying factor as you think.
Are Irish people of a different race than British and German people? You may think they aren't, but it used to be so. Absurd, eh? Except that it was the case, because of a deliberate strategy to make poor people fight among themselves.
Latinos are just the foreign "du jour".Tomorrow it's going to be someone else. And it is deliberate.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#1000The 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,…
> 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.
The people who believe either of these ideas aren't a monolith. Some people subscribe to affirmative action for the original reasons you describe without wanting or subscribing to this "equity" concept.