The Supreme Court is releasing key decisions on issues such as affirmative action, student loan payments and LGBTQ rights. Follow here for the latest live news updates.
This is honestly great to hear. I have heard calls for this for years, and have repeatedly seen stats that show how Affirmative Action can end up hurting lots of people’s chances at acceptance to universities. See: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/med1.jpg?x91208
I just wish that, based on their recent track record, I knew that the Supreme Court had passed this ruling with good intentions.
I worked in admissions, and believe me,igt is atrocious for equitable access to education.
I’ll give an example:
Applicant 1: Manhattan, Elite HS, Leader Of 2 clubs, traveled the world, received SAT training for 4 year, GPA 3.5. No hurdles in live whatsoever
Applicant 2: Rural Alabama, works 20h in McD since 12, 1 Club membership, takes care of 2 siblings because parents are addicts. SAT average, 3.5 GPA
Now thanks to affirmative action,you can contextualize what each student attained and overcame to achieve their test results and GPA. Applicant 2 has had to work much harder to get that GPA, with barely any freetime, and affirmative action will recognize that. In the end, admission should not be about the best HS grade, but about who will be performing best at university, so its about potential. And SAT and GPA doesn’t tell much about potential if not contextualized.
To repeat the point I just made above, it whatever adjustment made for equitable access should be down to how well-off one’s background is, not anchored on a persons’ genetics coinciding partly with other people who are mainly from poorer backgrounds.
It makes no sense to go by genetics which have a less than 1 correlation to being poor (hence treats as deserving of help many who are not deserving and as not-deserving many who are) when it’s not really harder to go with the actual being poor, were correlation is perfect.
The only reason I see for choosing the very imperfect metric rather than the perfect one which is almost as easilly measured is that those choosing are not in fact doing it to help people who have to face far higher barriers in present day society, but in fact are either serving different objectives or have hidden priorities which are more important and which for them make boosting the chances of those from poorer backgrounds undesireable.
It’s such a small weight in the overall judgement (according to the selection metrics published by universities) that I’m doubtful much will change. And another dog whistle becomes obsolete for the right wing.
If it was so irrelevant, the colleges would not have fought tooth and nail to maintain it. Anyway, the prior experience of individual states that have banned affirmative action indicates that the effects are not negligible – it’s responsible for double digit shifts in racial compositions of student bodies.
Things will depend on how the universities respond; one can imagine Harvard doubling down on ever-subtler ways to tag Asians as personality-free robots undeserving of consideration.
Questionable. In Northern Ireland, the police used to be something like 7% Catholic, policing a population that was over 40% Catholic. It was controversial at the time, but a 50:50 recruitment policy was put in place in the mid to late 90s, until the balance of the police force matched the wider community.
This is now very broadly accepted as a necessary and beneficial move. The current police force is generally seen as impartial (in terms of this one issue) while the old one was generally not trusted by the minority, to put it mildly.
That’s a good example, maybe I need to look more into this. I saw this story at some point last year and just flipped, especially having been a teacher myself at some point. I couldn’t stomach it… it felt like it would breed segregation rather than diversity and rob children of their teachers. It felt weird to me that a teacher and student would need to be of the same color to understand each other. Isn’t it enough that a teacher is part of the community and the area?
Anyway, that being said, it’s rash for me to draw conclusions on this, but it felt like a lot of what happened in the US with these policies caused harm more than good.
I think it’s important to look at the broader scope of affirmative action policies on a case by case basis. One the one hand sometimes it’s just random chance. In theory any given workplace should represent the local demographics, but if you get too granular(workplace, department, specific job title, etc.) then it can become impossible to represent everybody, or just one or two employees can skew the whole demographic.
Where they are a good idea is when you have a group that’s been marginalized over generations that often leads to standards with inherent bias. We could say that college admissions based solely on grades are fair, but that assumes that the process of achieving those grades was fair. In reality, you get situations where people of generational wealth have better access to educational resources, and people from communities that aren’t marginalized find it easier to get higher paying jobs which lets them live in higher income areas with more well funded schools.
That said, there are some inherent biases that are more difficult to overcome. Women are generally less physically capable than men, native English speakers will always have an advantage in some fields over people who have English as a second language. There’s a fine line between unreasonably lowering standards to support minority groups, and taking steps to overcome unfair biases present in those standards.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that. Affirmative action was never meant to “solve discrimination”, it was meant as a step towards correcting systematic bias. Even if discrimination disappeared today, the socioeconomic situation certain minority groups face makes it impossible for them as a collective to get out of the hole they’re in without additional opportunity.
Problem with affirmative action is that it treats people’s livelihoods as data points in a metric. These groups should get more opportunities, but in this case they’re directly taking opportunities away from others and, like you said, that’s discrimination. Can selective racial discrimination solve for systematic bias? Maybe. Should it? Probably not.
Problem with affirmative action is that it treats people’s livelihoods as data points in a metric. These groups should get more opportunities, but in this case they’re directly taking opportunities away from others and, like you said, that’s discrimination.
Agreed, seems like the intentions were good but the desired effects were not realised.
You can’t correct discrimination with discrimination since that just maintains the whole foundation of categorising people and seeing them as inherently different from others, purelly because they were worn born with differences in a handful of genes with highly visible expression and which are totally irrelevant for who they are as persons.
In this I always go back to what I learned when it came to the treatment of homosexuals in The Netherlands: when people treat something as normal there is no descrimination - when homosexuality is “just another sexuality”, homophobia is as senseless as discriminating against people for having blue eyes or thicker eyebrows.
You know how many people on a certain other social media site have issues with the idea of equality? How is equality bad? Isn’t the ultimate goal of a society not to discriminate based on things such as race? So if an admission process is blind to race, how is that bad?
Equal doesn’t mean equitable. For example, I hear people say everyone should pay a flat tax. Everyone pays 10% so that is equal. Yes. it is an equal percentage, and yes, the billionaires will pay vastly more than the poor. Suppose you make $1000 a month and you pay $100. That leaves you $900 to pay your bills and eat. Now a billionaire, let’s say he makes $10,000,000 a month. He pays out $1 mil but he still have $9 million to pay his bills…for that month. That is not equitable. Equitable would be to leave everyone with an equal burden on their income. Even if you taxed the billionaire 90%, he would still be able to live in luxury.
I do not feel there would be a need for racial quotas if there was instead a quota for xx% students from this income bracket must be accepted. Each applicant would be measured by both their skill and their ability to meet and overcome obstacles. There should be two piles: those that meet the standards, and those who do not. Out of all the potentials, shuffle the names and select at random.
The idea that racism is the way out of racism is simply crazy.
See, I find this statement to perfectly summarize the situation, and I do plan on using it myself. I could totally agree with you on your entire post actually except for that last statement which is woefully out of line.
I guess considering the last part out of line depends on what your (or my) understanding of the progressive way of thinking and what it’s based on and what it’s goals are.
They’ve done a great job marketing it as ‘just be a nice person’ but that’s not at all what it really is.
I’m sure there are hundreds of millions of well-meaning progressives who believe that. And I’m not trying to insult them.
But people get sold on one thing and end up getting something entirely different all of the time. It’s sad, but that’s the way things are, unfortunately.
I’m not saying the opposite of progressivism is the answer here either, what I would advocate is common sense.
If you need a PhD and peer reviewed sociology papers to try to convince someone that something as egregious as race-based college admissions is a good thing, you’re pretty obviously the baddie and common sense should tell us that you’re trying to convince us of something for a different reason.
Of course, you have to realize that the definition of racism can change from an outlook of superiority to power + privilege on a whim too
I’m in my 50s, I don’t recall the definition of racism changing at all, much less “on a whim”. What are some of the other definitions you have seen arbitrarily assigned to the term racism?
When you were taught the definition of racism, or when it’s spoken about today (sometimes) it’s a hateful word and a hateful way of thinking about a group of people.
: a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
Progressives have since changed that definition to sometimes mean power + privilege = racism. Which is a wildly different thing and is not based on hate at all, but on socio-issues
Prejudice plus power, also known as R = P + P, is a stipulative definition of racism used in the United States, often by white anti-racism activists.
The problems in discussing these things or calling someone ‘racist’ is that these definitions (amongst others) can be used interchangeably, because they are both wildly different definitions of the same word
This is honestly great to hear. I have heard calls for this for years, and have repeatedly seen stats that show how Affirmative Action can end up hurting lots of people’s chances at acceptance to universities. See: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/med1.jpg?x91208
I just wish that, based on their recent track record, I knew that the Supreme Court had passed this ruling with good intentions.
I worked in admissions, and believe me,igt is atrocious for equitable access to education. I’ll give an example:
Applicant 1: Manhattan, Elite HS, Leader Of 2 clubs, traveled the world, received SAT training for 4 year, GPA 3.5. No hurdles in live whatsoever
Applicant 2: Rural Alabama, works 20h in McD since 12, 1 Club membership, takes care of 2 siblings because parents are addicts. SAT average, 3.5 GPA
Now thanks to affirmative action,you can contextualize what each student attained and overcame to achieve their test results and GPA. Applicant 2 has had to work much harder to get that GPA, with barely any freetime, and affirmative action will recognize that. In the end, admission should not be about the best HS grade, but about who will be performing best at university, so its about potential. And SAT and GPA doesn’t tell much about potential if not contextualized.
To repeat the point I just made above, it whatever adjustment made for equitable access should be down to how well-off one’s background is, not anchored on a persons’ genetics coinciding partly with other people who are mainly from poorer backgrounds.
It makes no sense to go by genetics which have a less than 1 correlation to being poor (hence treats as deserving of help many who are not deserving and as not-deserving many who are) when it’s not really harder to go with the actual being poor, were correlation is perfect.
The only reason I see for choosing the very imperfect metric rather than the perfect one which is almost as easilly measured is that those choosing are not in fact doing it to help people who have to face far higher barriers in present day society, but in fact are either serving different objectives or have hidden priorities which are more important and which for them make boosting the chances of those from poorer backgrounds undesireable.
It’s such a small weight in the overall judgement (according to the selection metrics published by universities) that I’m doubtful much will change. And another dog whistle becomes obsolete for the right wing.
If it was so irrelevant, the colleges would not have fought tooth and nail to maintain it. Anyway, the prior experience of individual states that have banned affirmative action indicates that the effects are not negligible – it’s responsible for double digit shifts in racial compositions of student bodies.
Things will depend on how the universities respond; one can imagine Harvard doubling down on ever-subtler ways to tag Asians as personality-free robots undeserving of consideration.
Exactly, can’t solve discrimination with more discrimination.
Questionable. In Northern Ireland, the police used to be something like 7% Catholic, policing a population that was over 40% Catholic. It was controversial at the time, but a 50:50 recruitment policy was put in place in the mid to late 90s, until the balance of the police force matched the wider community.
This is now very broadly accepted as a necessary and beneficial move. The current police force is generally seen as impartial (in terms of this one issue) while the old one was generally not trusted by the minority, to put it mildly.
That’s a good example, maybe I need to look more into this. I saw this story at some point last year and just flipped, especially having been a teacher myself at some point. I couldn’t stomach it… it felt like it would breed segregation rather than diversity and rob children of their teachers. It felt weird to me that a teacher and student would need to be of the same color to understand each other. Isn’t it enough that a teacher is part of the community and the area?
Anyway, that being said, it’s rash for me to draw conclusions on this, but it felt like a lot of what happened in the US with these policies caused harm more than good.
I think it’s important to look at the broader scope of affirmative action policies on a case by case basis. One the one hand sometimes it’s just random chance. In theory any given workplace should represent the local demographics, but if you get too granular(workplace, department, specific job title, etc.) then it can become impossible to represent everybody, or just one or two employees can skew the whole demographic.
Where they are a good idea is when you have a group that’s been marginalized over generations that often leads to standards with inherent bias. We could say that college admissions based solely on grades are fair, but that assumes that the process of achieving those grades was fair. In reality, you get situations where people of generational wealth have better access to educational resources, and people from communities that aren’t marginalized find it easier to get higher paying jobs which lets them live in higher income areas with more well funded schools.
That said, there are some inherent biases that are more difficult to overcome. Women are generally less physically capable than men, native English speakers will always have an advantage in some fields over people who have English as a second language. There’s a fine line between unreasonably lowering standards to support minority groups, and taking steps to overcome unfair biases present in those standards.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that. Affirmative action was never meant to “solve discrimination”, it was meant as a step towards correcting systematic bias. Even if discrimination disappeared today, the socioeconomic situation certain minority groups face makes it impossible for them as a collective to get out of the hole they’re in without additional opportunity.
Problem with affirmative action is that it treats people’s livelihoods as data points in a metric. These groups should get more opportunities, but in this case they’re directly taking opportunities away from others and, like you said, that’s discrimination. Can selective racial discrimination solve for systematic bias? Maybe. Should it? Probably not.
Agreed, seems like the intentions were good but the desired effects were not realised.
You can’t correct discrimination with discrimination since that just maintains the whole foundation of categorising people and seeing them as inherently different from others, purelly because they were worn born with differences in a handful of genes with highly visible expression and which are totally irrelevant for who they are as persons.
In this I always go back to what I learned when it came to the treatment of homosexuals in The Netherlands: when people treat something as normal there is no descrimination - when homosexuality is “just another sexuality”, homophobia is as senseless as discriminating against people for having blue eyes or thicker eyebrows.
This is really great to hear. College admissions should be a fair process.
You know how many people on a certain other social media site have issues with the idea of equality? How is equality bad? Isn’t the ultimate goal of a society not to discriminate based on things such as race? So if an admission process is blind to race, how is that bad?
Equal doesn’t mean equitable. For example, I hear people say everyone should pay a flat tax. Everyone pays 10% so that is equal. Yes. it is an equal percentage, and yes, the billionaires will pay vastly more than the poor. Suppose you make $1000 a month and you pay $100. That leaves you $900 to pay your bills and eat. Now a billionaire, let’s say he makes $10,000,000 a month. He pays out $1 mil but he still have $9 million to pay his bills…for that month. That is not equitable. Equitable would be to leave everyone with an equal burden on their income. Even if you taxed the billionaire 90%, he would still be able to live in luxury.
I do not feel there would be a need for racial quotas if there was instead a quota for xx% students from this income bracket must be accepted. Each applicant would be measured by both their skill and their ability to meet and overcome obstacles. There should be two piles: those that meet the standards, and those who do not. Out of all the potentials, shuffle the names and select at random.
People in favor of affirmative action in college admissions see things very specifically.
They see that an identifiable group is under represented and they want to ‘fix’ it. Without any idea what the ramifications of their ‘fix’ is.
All they care about is the demographics of whatever it is they are looking at. All they think about is race.
The idea that racism is the way out of racism is simply crazy.
Of course, you have to realize that the definition of racism can change from an outlook of superiority to power + privilege on a whim too
The whole progressive mindset is just fucking evil
See, I find this statement to perfectly summarize the situation, and I do plan on using it myself. I could totally agree with you on your entire post actually except for that last statement which is woefully out of line.
I guess considering the last part out of line depends on what your (or my) understanding of the progressive way of thinking and what it’s based on and what it’s goals are.
They’ve done a great job marketing it as ‘just be a nice person’ but that’s not at all what it really is.
I’m sure there are hundreds of millions of well-meaning progressives who believe that. And I’m not trying to insult them.
But people get sold on one thing and end up getting something entirely different all of the time. It’s sad, but that’s the way things are, unfortunately.
I’m not saying the opposite of progressivism is the answer here either, what I would advocate is common sense.
If you need a PhD and peer reviewed sociology papers to try to convince someone that something as egregious as race-based college admissions is a good thing, you’re pretty obviously the baddie and common sense should tell us that you’re trying to convince us of something for a different reason.
I’m in my 50s, I don’t recall the definition of racism changing at all, much less “on a whim”. What are some of the other definitions you have seen arbitrarily assigned to the term racism?
When you were taught the definition of racism, or when it’s spoken about today (sometimes) it’s a hateful word and a hateful way of thinking about a group of people.
Progressives have since changed that definition to sometimes mean power + privilege = racism. Which is a wildly different thing and is not based on hate at all, but on socio-issues
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power
The problems in discussing these things or calling someone ‘racist’ is that these definitions (amongst others) can be used interchangeably, because they are both wildly different definitions of the same word