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

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#181

Post by solardev » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

zmgsabst wrote: post #149

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…

Institutional racism is highly corrosive to society. All we’ve done is create new grievances among poor whites to justify the guilt of upper class whites about things their grandparents did. Those people are rightly upset that the government has been openly racist to them their entire lives. How did that help? — I mean, besides soothing the feelings of elites that they’re not bigots, even though they made 1950s style…

Yeah. There's nobody really fighting for poor white men, except maybe Bernie? But it's all too easy to capitalize on their grief and anger and redirect it into cultural wars instead. That anger is politically more potent left unchecked and weaponized than actually addressed.

Some of the most down to earth, hardworking people I knew were poor white men with a dream: teachers, farmers, builders, activists, lawyers. They weren't interested in going into tech or finance or getting rich and retiring early or whatever, just to pursue their dreams and some semblance of happiness. Reminds me of old homesteaders.

Same with the Black and Hispanic folks I knew at the same time, many of whom got support or scholarships of one kind or the other. On the ground, we were all just peers and friends and supported each other however we could. But officially the poor whites had no formal support network at all, while diversity programs had special buildings, funding, time, and labor devoted to the rest of us. My white peers never held that against me, as far as I know, but they did comment about how unfair it was to them to be punished for the sins of their (great grand) fathers. And I can't say they're wrong...

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#182

Post by bouncing » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #19

I’ll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information)? Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with. In any case I doubt this will c…

> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.

That's occurred to me too. Or put more bluntly, the admissions boards who strongly disagree with this ruling will find a way around it by simply putting their own personal bias into essay anecdotes about race.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#183

Post by psychphysic » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #166

psychphysic wrote: post #135

Good. I'd be sickened to hear I got a lucrative opportunity because of the colour of my skin (which incidentally is not white and I'm not oriental so I'd guess I'd have benefitted from affirmative action if it was present where I grew up).

If you read some of the comments here, you'd see that colleges have been discriminating against Asians. As a group asian Americans have had no trouble being over represented in colleges based on purely merit.

I think there is likely differences in how we use phrases like Asian and oriental.

Basically as far as I know AA was intended to give places to people like me.

But I would not have accepted if I had any idea I was not admitted on achievement alone.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#184

Post by malnourish » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

PM_me_your_math wrote: post #159

JustBreath wrote: post #8

Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this has all underscored what has been true for a long time: Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them. (Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)

SCOTUS rules on the constitutionality of laws. It doesn't write or institute any laws whatsoever. Now people need to get into college on merit instead of scoring high in the Victim Olympics. That's a great thing for our society.

Did all pre-Affirmative Action college applicants matriculate based on their merits?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#185

Post by ellisv » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

topposter32 wrote: post #67

JustBreath wrote: post #8

Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this has all underscored what has been true for a long time: Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them. (Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)

I only hear complaints from either side when the tables are turned against them. When its in their favor it's just the right thing to do.

Eh. I think we should be complaining about the court all the time. They're not doing a great job.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#186

Post by hotpotamus » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:37 PM UTC

newacct3 wrote: post #114

raincom wrote: post #26

Harvard used "personality score" to sort out applicants. Now, they got rid of "personality score", SAT/ACT/LSAT/MCAT, etc., scores. They can tell their feeder schools even four years earlier, how to prepare admission packets for prospective students. Schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford can pick whatever students they want.

At the risk of getting sued and having it go back up to the same court that gave us this decision

I'd sort of imagine that if anyone has the legal minds to bend the system towards their will, it's Harvard.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#187

Post by renewiltord » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:37 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #147

JustBreath wrote: post #8

Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this has all underscored what has been true for a long time: Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them. (Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)

The judicial branch does not make laws. You're implying that the judicial branch legislated in this case. They did no such thing. They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law. Indeed, legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea, and so it's a good thing that they do not and are not able to.

This is a legal fiction. Both abortion and affirmative action were legislated from the bench. That's how they came to be. It's a classic thing. Having come to the conclusion that some thing should be law, the composition of the bench determines whether sufficient justification can be found. Then these decisions have the weight of law.

It is a defacto Politburo - a long lived legislative body of ultimate authority that has a rolling composition not determined by direct electoral results.

We can point to the legal fiction that the judiciary is not the legislature all we want but it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#188

Post by JohnMakin » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #162

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…

> Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?

In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that doesn't exist in the way many people think. In many large states, such as california, they already for a long time do not consider race as a factor in admissions, as per law. And, IMO, california has done a pretty good job of having fairly diverse schools, and they do precisely what you say - they focus their efforts on lifting up those who come from poor socioeconomic situations, which tends to capture a lot of the same people affirmative action was trying to do.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#189

Post by hospitalJail » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #151

azinman2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.

Something else that isn't really factored into most of these conversations is the level of gatekeeping around professions and schools where a much larger group of people can succeed or even flourish, yet never get the opportunity due to limited class sizes. Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as w…

Yeah if Physicians didn't have a monopoly on medicine, OP probably would have lived in a middle-class school district and not had every advantage of a 1-5%er.

While AA is an issue, OP most benefited from the Physician cartel/AMA who lobbies/bribes their way to wealth for their members at the expense of the 99% of the population.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#190

Post by rtkwe » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

cpascal wrote: post #118

I think universities can probably come up with a different set of non-protected criteria to lift underrepresented communities out of social/financial oppression. This might even provide greater access to some equally needing students that are looked over by racially-based criteria. In a perfect world, everyone would have equal opportunity and support throughout their primary education, and college admission could be…

My read and view has been for a long while that to reverse the centuries of race based discrimination you have to do something to specifically funnel opportunities and resources to those affected groups. PoC were kept out of many of the big wealth building booms in the US like the post WW2 golden era for example so unless we're willing to wait for one of those to come around again or a couple centuries of diffusion to even the starting point discrepancies the pre Civil Rights Era built deep into our cities and economies, the race based issues of the past kind of demand addressing with race based solutions.