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What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

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Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#111

Post by yummyfajitas »

anigbrowl wrote: post #108
yummyfajitas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never claimed merit = math ability, except of course perhaps for the job of math professor. The fact that our predictor is imperfect doesn't mean that it magically becomes better when we attach racial weights to it. Between one person who is better at calculus and another that's better at chess, which is more meritorious? Depends on whether he's applying to a chess or physics program, no?

Perhaps you didn't intend this, but using nuclear physics as your threshold example certainly prioritizes a particular kind of academic merit over other kinds. Between one person who is better at calculus and another that's better at chess, which is more meritorious? Depends on whether he's applying to a chess or physics program, no? After I tell you that merit isn't a scalar and invite you to consider measures of me…

If your only claim is that different fields require a different sort of merit, I agree. Obviously merit for medical school differs from merit for chess camp.

I fail to see how this supports the claim that an admission system is non-meritocratic simply because some people are unable to pass it due to bad life circumstances.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#112

Post by yummyfajitas »

rmxt wrote: post #97
yummyfajitas wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, some people are better than others due to luck. For example, some people were strangled by their umbilical cord and born retarded, others weren't. This sad fact of life doesn't mean that choosing non-retards as nuclear physicists contradicts meritocracy.

It's even sadder that you need to draw an absurd comparison to the imaginary instance of retarded people attempting break into nuclear physics in order to frame a discussion about the very real implications of race, socioeconomic status, affirmative action and educational achievement. Is it your implication that society shouldn't care about performance gaps between segments of the population because those other segme…

My sole implication is that a system can fail to solve all your pet problems, but still be meritocratic.

Similarly, a meritocratic college admission system doesn't cure cancer.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#113

Post by yummyfajitas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #106
yummyfajitas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true - black people tend to underperform relative to their SAT. http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/09/the_underperformance... Your source agrees with this if you scroll down to the data tables. Note the sign on the black and hispanic coefficients. So your real critique seems to be that SAT is unfair because it gives a non-predictive boost to blacks and hispanics. Consequently, if we wanted to have the most acc…

> It's true - black people tend to underperform relative to their SAT. Its actually a lot more complicated than that; the degree to which each objective factor predicts grades (and the degree of difference in expected college grades each unit change in the factor represents) differs by race, income, and other factors. (In the case of SAT scores, higher SAT scores mean more in terms of better college grades than they…

...that is less true (and eventually the opposite of the case) for blacks with higher SAT scores.

From the cited article: "Blacks with the highest SAT scores and high school GPAs...are those underperforming the most.

Do you have have data showing the opposite? Note that your source on the other thread did linear regression, so it can't possibly capture this effect.

No, my real critique is that the assertion that without AA, existing admissions would be meritocratic is unsubstantiated...

Your sole evidence for this is a source stating that SAT and GPA are good predictors of college performance, but SAT and GPA plus a penalty for black people is even better.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#114

Post by anigbrowl »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #111
anigbrowl wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you didn't intend this, but using nuclear physics as your threshold example certainly prioritizes a particular kind of academic merit over other kinds. Between one person who is better at calculus and another that's better at chess, which is more meritorious? Depends on whether he's applying to a chess or physics program, no? After I tell you that merit isn't a scalar and invite you to consider measures of me…

If your only claim is that different fields require a different sort of merit, I agree. Obviously merit for medical school differs from merit for chess camp. I fail to see how this supports the claim that an admission system is non-meritocratic simply because some people are unable to pass it due to bad life circumstances.

Then I am sorry for the bad life circumstances that have given rise to your cognitive deficiency. I'd explain further but by your own logic, you won't understand it anyway so there's no point.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#115

Post by SamReidHughes »

dghf wrote: post #77
yummyfajitas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, "meritocracy" and "no one has a hard life" are different concepts. A person having bad parents and therefore having bad grades has less merit than a person with good parents and good grades. It sucks that some people have bad parents (or whatever the specific issue is), but that's a different problem than lack of meritocracy.

Well, that kind of depends on how you define merit. One could argue that someone who gets reasonable but not stellar grades in spite of bad parents, a deprived background, etc. displays more merit than someone from a privileged background with every advantage who attains perfect grades.

If you have that information, you can factor that into your admissions criteria using feedback from previous students. For example, you could rank incoming students and tweak a racial parameter to equalize the 6-year graduation rate of the bottom decile in each race. Doing so will (by construction) improve the outcome of your 6-year graduation rate. Pick whatever is a good proxy for whatever your goals are.

That's more meritocratic than ignoring that information.

There is a different sense of meritocracy though, in which the goals themselves are unmeritocratic. For example, "educating lots of left-handed people" (to the exclusion of right-handers) is a rather unmeritocratic goal. The real argument being had is in this respect -- for one, whether educating should be done for students' benefit or for the sum of others' benefit. And also, in the subcategory of "for others' benefit," whether making maximally good scientists, historians, and the like, should be the goal, or whether and to what extent there's benefit in trying to infiltrate minority communities with a more education-valuing culture.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#116

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Someone1234 wrote: post #72
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider looking in, it seems that the one thing the US hates more than affirmative action is exactly the kind of "socialist" interventions you describe. I'm also wondering what would stop a structurally racist society from simply choosing poor people from their preferred race? You're begging the question if you assume that people will be chosen fairly with no regard to race under this system.

> I'm also wondering what would stop a structurally racist society from simply choosing poor people from their preferred race? It is illegal in the US. Also colleges could simply stop asking about race on applications.

Is it illegal for Asian Americans to be discriminated against when applying to top colleges, because it seems to be widely accepted that it happens all the time? And even if the form didn't explicitly say "Chinese-American" on it, I'm guessing the people who scrutinize every detail of their academic and personal development for admissions purposes can find some clues, like their name, to give them a chance to continue with their discrimination.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#117

Post by kefka »

Steko wrote: post #83
kefka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. How long does it take for us to rid the sins against blacks by our ancestors? 3 generations? 5 generations? Never?

It has nothing to do with getting rid of sins, it's about counteracting systemic racism, you stop doing it when the need is gone.

At least regarding higher education (where SCOTUS is reviewing), how is it systemic?

It seems to be much more of an economic issue, where family income, local society income, and students' school budgets should be controlled and watched for rather than "black".

It seems to me that saying, "hey you, who live in the ghetto, your school budgets are linked to your poverty. Hope you get the education you deserve" is so much more wrong, as education should be granted to everyone, equally in our public system.

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#118

Post by sharpplanar »

T2_t2 wrote: post #88
dragonwriter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. As an American, your comment confuses me for one very specific reason: it doesn't at all reflect the actual dialogue about race I've experienced in this country (from all sides of the dialogue), in which very much is about achievement. > It is weird to me that the US has ma…

> Attending formal education at a higher level is, itself, an outcome. See, there it is again - SHOWING UP. You didn't say "getting a degree" or "graduating to a high paying job" or even "putting themselves in a position to succeed in life" - simply "attending". That's the problem - merely attending isn't enough to address any historical disadvantage other than "spent at least a day on a college campus as a student".…

Consider these are bureaucratic metrics used to show the effectiveness of policy changes. It is difficult and after a certain time perhaps even inaccurate to measure outcomes, it is really easy to measure college admissions by race and ethnicity.

I think for the government the goal is get students from low socio-economic background to college because it shows their policies at lower levels of education are working. You are thinking in the wrong slice of time. You are thinking birth to job, when really the focus for these metrics is on birth to college because for that group of people they will be the first in their family to ever go past high school, some might be the first in their family to even finish high school and as dragonwriter said that metric is a huge indicator of positive future outcomes.

You said you aren't from the US and I am not sure how familiar you are with our geography or culture but Education in the US is tough, the population is diverse and spread out over a huge area, I mean freaking huge. If you took the population(1) of students in the US K-12th grades it would be the 27th largest country in the world(2), ahead of Canada, Spain, and Switzerland. Think about that for a moment in terms of just the number of human beings being managed on a daily basis the US education system is more complicated than those three countries. This is part of why finding metrics that effectively measure quality is so hard and number and composition of students going to college is an easy one.

Another thing to consider which you pointed out in 3 and 4 is degree choice and jobs. First, degree choice, US universities offer degrees that don't directly connect to careers, if a student chooses a bad degree their outcome (job prospects, pay, lifetime earnings potential) will stink. So measuring the outcome gets very complicated at that level. Second, post graduate success, how do we measure success? If someone is happy making 25k a year living in a tiny beach community for the rest of their life are they less successful than someone who goes into finance and is making a 7 figure salary before they are 30?

In a perfect would everyone would get the best outcome for them, that makes them truly happy and makes their life and the world a better place. Measuring it wouldn't even matter because it would be happening for everyone. But, until we make it to a post scarcity society measuring the incremental change in a metric that is a good indicator we are moving in the right direction is the best option.

(1)http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 (2)http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-...

Re: What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

#119

Post by MisterBastahrd »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #58
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no moral question here. We have a disadvantaged group of people who are being actively discriminated against by a majority group. The easiest way as a society to make sure that we treat the group fairly is by creating a system that ensures that they are being represented in the university population. It's good for them, it's good for their classmates, it's good for the university, and it serves long-term goal…

Why does the majority discriminate against themselves and in favor of other minorities (Asians, Jews)?

Because innovation happens faster when there are more perspectives in the mix, and communities improve faster when there are more successful people in them.
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