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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

latimes.com

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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#321

Post by NoRelToEmber »

zapataband1 wrote: post #89
kenjackson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t love the decision, but I actually like the process. And I don’t think it is legislating. It is interpreting the law. I’d like term limits on Supreme Court justices. But I think the arguments on both sides of this debate are well thought out. Again I don’t love the decision, but Im OK with it. That said I’d love to see universities stop giving weight to legacies. But the money is just too strong.

When a neoconservative spends his life petitioning courts for this exact result instead of petitioning anyone in congress... it feels like dirty legislating. Part of it is because our congress is dreadfully inept.

He didn't petition congress because congress already legislated on this issue: neither the 14th amendment nor the civil rights act contain exceptions allowing racial discrimination, as long as it's for the right cause (and the courts get to pick which causes are right).

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#322

Post by crackercrews »

ahtihn wrote: post #298
BobbyJo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intent is to factor in some unknown "racism" value. Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average, so if you naively stratified by income, you'd still wind up with a mostly white and Asian student population. There are a lot of reasons Black and Hispanic kids underperform, and it's just easier for the school to short circuit all that and choose based on race rather…

> Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average Why is that the case? For Asians, I don't see what systemic privilege they could have that would need to be compensated away?

Asians spend much more time than others on homework. [1]

1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07311214221101...

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#323

Post by JKCalhoun »

ecshafer wrote: post #291

The best method of college entrance is whats done in east asia. China does the Gaokao (hard SAT), and students list their university preferences and filters students into colleges based on their score and their preferences. Japan takes entrance exams for a university. These seem like infinitely fairer methods than the US where they try and correct for disadvantage in a variety ways.

In the U.S.: go to shitty school, get shitty SAT score, disallowed from college. Repeat.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#324

Post by naveen99 »

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…

math needs to work out. if you have a 100 people and 50 defined to be poor, but can only admit 5 people. How do you decide which of the 50 poor come first ? The top 5, and you are back to square 1. The bottom 5, and you have the devil's problems. Remember the poorest people, the people with billions in negative wealth, are in jail or worse. You do not want to bring them back to the top !

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#325

Post by AlwaysRock »

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…

The who is more privileged game is not a fun one to play.

Watched a white male friend and a white passing Hispanic female friend get into this argument before. He grew up poor in a rural area, only one parent worked a low paying job and the other was the care giver. She grew up middle class in a city, parents were college professors.

There are a ton of other factors but even at those basics it got complicated. Is a male always more privileged than a non male? How do you weight one point of privilege vs another? It all started to feel very subjective. I wonder if a matrix like that would even be legal.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#326

Post by solardev »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #292
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…

You're worried about skin color being used as a determining factor, but you were admitted based on zip code. That's trying to admit disadvantaged people, but not doing so based on skin color. So maybe in this specific case, they're already looking at it with more nuance? Or at least a different axis than skin color?

While a charitable view, my impression is that was unlikely. The school itself was already located in an impoverished area. They didn't need to recruit from the other side of the state to find disadvantaged students. And their materials said nothing public about special admissions for disadvantaged people.

It wasn't until I met face to face with a counselor that they let me in. My guess -- it's only a guess, I can't prove this -- is that the counselor had some leeway to determine whether to admit me, and that there was an unwritten mandate to prioritize candidates of color. I don't know if whites from those same zip codes would've gotten the same treatment. It seemed to me like the face time was a possible way for the university to hide race quotas behind judgment calls. I don't have the numbers for this though, just a hunch.

And to their credit, we did have poor white applicants who did get in, obviously, or I wouldn't have gotten to know them. It wasn't an especially selective school to begin with. But it did seem like zip code recruiting was a proxy for race based recruiting. If they wanted income based recruiting they could've done that from anywhere without geography as a constraint.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#327

Post by seanmcdirmid »

pjc50 wrote: post #222
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…

> 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…

> 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.

Harvard also gets lots of Asians (well, Chinese) who are obviously not legacy admits, and there is/was active discrimination against them at Harvard (they don't want the student body to be too white and asian?). The decision specifically calls this out:

> The high court found that Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated against white and Asian American applicants by using race-conscious admissions policies.

Also see:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

Using merit alone, it is totally possible that Harvard would be mostly Asian very quickly. However, it doesn't fit the narrative that the system is biased towards white legacy admits.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#328

Post by londons_explore »

solardev wrote: post #53
londons_explore wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. Perhaps, if there is no 75% majority of opinions at the supreme court, then the case is just put on hold indefinitely until new clarifying laws are passed?

Even if 100% of the court agreed, 9 people can't possibly represent 300 million in any representative way. Even Congress with 535 representatives isn't many. One representative for each 600,000 citizens? When was the last time a thousand Americans agreed on anything, much less half a million? We have one of the worst ratios in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legislatures_by_number... Edit: And the SC…

> 9 people can't possibly represent 300 million in any representative way.

If they were 9 randomly selected citizens, then the majority vote of the 9 matches the result of a majority vote of the 300 million nearly always, particularly for decisive issues.

For example, if 90% of the population think something, then there is a 0.089% chance that a majority of the 9 citizens disagree.

Obviously judge selection isn't random, and thats probably your main concern.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#329

Post by JKCalhoun »

deilline wrote: post #253
xyzelement wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big a deal and how common is it in reality? "We have one fewer spots because we admitted the son of a donor" and "we won't accept you based on race" are different magnitude.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1060361

43%, crazy.
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