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.
Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
221–230 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#222The 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 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 people who had been legally discriminated against all their lives should be compensated, as if they had been wronged in a tort sense. This would obviously be extremely expensive, and anyway impossible to quantify, so it never happened.
Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status. Since black people were under-represented in this category, people came up with the idea of putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission. Can it balance exactly against the disadvantages of discrimination? No.
> I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?
America is not in the least social-democratic, but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead.
(It could be worse: Haitians who had freed themselves from slavery by the mass murder of their oppressors were made to pay a huge amount of compensation to them!)
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#223It is important to note that Harward’s admission policy that is the subject of this case was designed to favor White students over Jewish ones [1]. Today it is being used to discriminate against Asian Americans. Colleges are already prepared for this ruling. Many, such as the University of Washington have abandoned standardized tests because such tests compell universities to admit the kinds of students universities…
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 worse performers in critical positions.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#224Earlier 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.
Using parental income as well as parental education level in admissions would have helped GP's father just fine without any need for race-based affirmative action.
Indeed, but the goal of affirmative action as actually practiced is not to help people who are unlucky in terms of where they are born and are growing up, but to literally just achieve desired racial balance. It is pure racism, it’s all about skin color.
This is why, for example, children of African immigrants are something like half of black Harvard students, despite being a minuscule fraction of population: they want to meet their 13% black quota, but there are too few American descendants of slaves who will not be utterly out of place, so they make up the shortage with Africans.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#225I admittedly skimmed the opinion, but is this the first case that establishes a private entity like Harvard University is bound by the Equal Protections Clause? I thought existing law and precedent only had it applied to state/state actors (and a few cases where private businesses acted like governments, eg company towns).
The private nature of Harvard is debatable. The value of the subsidy represented by the tax exemption of their endowment is $50k per student per year.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think you didn’t belong? I know a lot of white and Asian MIT grads and only one had perfect SAT scores. And several were valedictorian, but I’m not sure it was the majority. Curious how often you wonder if the white people you work with had an advantage by not being historically discriminated against? Probably never. And rightfully so. If people do wonder then that’s on them. There’s a lot of dumb stuff pe…
He wonders because there’s been systemic sustained racial discrimination for the benefit of people of his race. It’s one of the insidious and corrosive ways affirmative action undermines the accomplishments of its potential beneficiaries.
Hispanic isn't a race.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions Yeah. Based off the various deep dives I heard about a year ago, the court is supposed to strongly favor leaving prior court rulings in place, but the current justices decided that they were fine changing prior rulings since it's a convention, not a rule. The current SC really dislikes all the prior rulings that were based off the 14th amendment, so I ful…
The problem goes further - a number of justices previously declared they'd honor the previous decisions. They should have lost the publics trust over that alone.
> They should have lost the publics trust over that alone.
Public opinion - let alone public trust - does not matter to a Supreme Court justice; they're appointed by the government for life. There's literally nothing the public can do (short of revolution) that impacts their jobs.
Only the opinions of the house/senate members even remotely matters to them, and so long as congress can't get enough votes to impeach them (a majority in the House, and 2/3 of the Senate), they can do pretty much whatever they want.
Historically, no Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. It's been around 200 years (1805) since the last attempt was even made.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#228Whatever 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.
They kind of do. Federal judges have a great deal of latitude in what they are allowed to accomplish with a ruling. They have the power to effectively change the text of a law to mean what the judge says it should mean (granted, it must also pass appeal).
It has been a problem for decades now that Congress will pass laws that aren't well thought out, then leave it to the judiciary to iron out the specifics. It's only recently that members of the judiciary began pushing back and ruling on the text of the law and saying the legislators should "fix" the obvious problems with the law.
The term for this is colloquially, "legislating from the bench."
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#229As 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…
Here's a crazy idea, how about universities lower costs? They're spending insane amounts of student Tuition on Administrators that were never necessary in the 80's or 90's or even most of the 00's. Why are colleges hiring so many administrators, some even approaching 1 administrator per 1 student, how is that sustainable?
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#230The 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…
Racial discrimination in the US significant enough that, for example, merely having a "Black" name leads to worse results from job applications, regardless of other factors [1]. Merely focusing on wealth levels won't counteract that kind of effect.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/distincti...