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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

#711

Post by ProllyInfamous »

ekam wrote: post #294
hospitalJail wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

I just saw the stats from a medical school— I believe it was UCSF but correct me if I’m wrong— where the average Asian reject had higher scores than the average Black/Hispanic accepted applicant

An asian applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 6% acceptance rate.

A black applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 56% acceptance rate.

As a medical school dropout, scoring 33S... I had a hard time accepting this.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#712

Post by glonq »

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…

> I often wished universities ... would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression"

Be careful what you wish for. Like most well-intentioned ideas, this would become terribly exploited/gamified.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#713

Post by suresk »

dcow wrote: post #460
spacephysics wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying important question is what do you define as equality? Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? This is a very slippery slope when some definitions are not equal, or stated, as we’ve come into a recent crisis of definitions being rewritten unnaturally (I understand the meaning of words change over time, but there have been recent inorganic changes, I’d argue) The classic opportunity of outcome…

This is fundamentally the only thing that bothers me about the entire post-modern left narrative. If the goal posts were “equality of opportunity” (as they historically have been) then I’d have no problem continuing to fight until opportunity is provably equal. But if you move the goal posts to “equality of outcome” (what people mean when they say “racial equity”) and say “look we’re still a racist society” I just ca…

I agree that the goals and means to get to them are fuzzy and it feels frustrating at times, and things like affirmative action felt like trying to make two wrongs equal a right. But it also feels shitty and callous to say "Sorry about the whole segregation thing, hopefully everything evens out in a few hundred years or so.."

I think the hard part is that "Equality of Opportunity" is either so strictly defined that it is pointless, or it very quickly becomes really squishy and feels like "Equality of Outcome".

Most college applicants today are going to be something like 2 - 4 generations removed from official, legally sanctioned segregation (a situation I think most people would agree doesn't count as equality of opportunity). Would you argue that the average white student and average black student have equality of opportunity today?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#714

Post by calf »

aylmao wrote: post #436
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…

It's worth thinking about this beyond the money— what values does the USA and its people want to stand for? Affirmative action can be viewed as an obstacle to individualism and self-determination, but as a boost to multiculturalism and tolerance. Specifically in the context of education, do we want to think of universities as institutions that help people earn more money and affirmative action as the university decid…

Norm Finkelstein recently said the careerist trajectory of college education (in America, but probably everywhere really) has been steadily going on for over half a century, and it really is a loss for cultivating an freethinking public commons.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#715

Post by FireBeyond »

mcv wrote: post #255
pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier 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,…

> not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that

High schools in Georgia have had segregated proms as recently as 2019 (and possibly since then too), either formally, up to 2012, or informally (one county had schools that had a prom that was open and then a "white prom" which didn't specify attendance requirements, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to who was welcome where.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#716

Post by f154hfds »

djur wrote: post #387
spacephysics wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying important question is what do you define as equality? Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? This is a very slippery slope when some definitions are not equal, or stated, as we’ve come into a recent crisis of definitions being rewritten unnaturally (I understand the meaning of words change over time, but there have been recent inorganic changes, I’d argue) The classic opportunity of outcome…

How exactly has equality of outcome been "proven to be doomed"? At the aggregate level, at least?

One issue is there's infinite metrics to measure outcome, and any measurement you choose will have certain groups excel in compared to others. Once we achieve equality in a certain metric we will always have new ones to work on essentially forever. This may be a good goal for people/institutions but it can't contribute to discrimination being indefinite in scope.

Another issue is we're talking about group level outcomes here - which means we're already accepting that there will be biases in measurements, otherwise the group wouldn't be a 'group' (unless it's literally just skin color which is - a pretty arbitrary/racist way to group people all else being equal).

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#717

Post by ProllyInfamous »

b8 wrote: post #468

Thomas Sowell successfully convinced me that affirmative action is a disservice with his cogent affirmative action book.

Justice Thomas's concurrence cited Dr. Thomas Sowell TWICE in support of the disservice affirmative action can have on preferentially-admitted students of color. Justice Sotomayer's dissent dispelled Dr. Sowell's sage publications.

I found it particularly offensive the pettiness embedded within the footnotes, to an obviously-divided court [and on such a simple topic, too].

From majority ruling:

"ELIMINATING RACIAL DISCRIMINATION MEANS ELIMINATING ALL OF IT."

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#718

Post by UncleMeat »

treis wrote: post #313
crooked-v wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They never run these experiments right and this one looks to be no different. What they choose as "Black" names are those associated with lower class blacks but they do not do the same with "White" names. In this case, they use names like Latonya for blacks and Heather for whites. You never see them use names like Cletus or Billy Bob or other names associated with lower class whites.

The Emily and Jamal paper explicitly accounts for this by controlling for parent's education level. There's a whole section on this.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#719

Post by etchalon »

az226 wrote: post #674
JKCalhoun wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" Is that true? I have heard that white males benefit most from admission rules to colleges (perhaps primarily in California?). But maybe that's "quota rules" and not affirmative action. Regardless, it appears as though the while male is probably going to take a hit if all admissions become strictly academically b…

Patently false

Not "patently false", but, complicated:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-benefits-from-af...

The central argument, and what Zimmerman backs with data, is that affirmative action benefited white men because it disadvantaged Asians and women, both of whom, statistically, will be more-likely to have higher academic scores.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#720

Post by bcatanzaro »

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 have wondered this myself and I think the answer is that American universities want to discriminate based on wealth. They actually want the richest kids possible going to their schools. Their business model depends on it.
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