Admissions discrimination - now straight people get screwed over too!

The BBQ Pit
41

[QUOTE=What Exit?]
Could this be a case of location, location, location. Is it easier for Gay students to come out in the NY Metro area then Minnesota maybe?
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Minnesota? Where we have more interracial marriages per capita? A vibrant GLBT community? More interracial adoptions per capita? (At least all that was true until the early 1980s when other places started catching up). Maybe off in the farmland (similar to what I imagine upstate NY to be) but the Twin Cities is fairly socially progressive (we’ve gotten far more conservative in the past ten years though - along with the rest of the country). We’ve had programs for gay teens since the 1980s.

I helped run a GLBT film festival in 1986 or 1987 (can’t remember the year we started that - I think its still running). And I’m not even gay.

When I went to college at the University of Iowa in 1984, they supposedly had the largest GLBT student population per capita in the country.

The heartland is not always what people think it is.

I think being a gay teen is probably hard anywhere you do it. Granted, it may be more difficult to come out in Orem, Utah - but I don’t think its easy if you grow up in San Francisco.

42

[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
Minnesota? Where we have more interracial marriages per capita? A vibrant GLBT community? More interracial adoptions per capita? (At least all that was true until the early 1980s when other places started catching up). Maybe off in the farmland (similar to what I imagine upstate NY to be) but the Twin Cities is fairly socially progressive (we’ve gotten far more conservative in the past ten years though - along with the rest of the country). We’ve had programs for gay teens since the 1980s.

The heartland is not always what people think it is…
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Just for the record, my post was not sarcasm, it was an honest inquiry. I did not know enough and so I asked. In fact, I would not have considered Minnesota the heartland. I think of Iowa, Kansas and etc. when someone says heartland.

Jim

43

[QUOTE=What Exit?]
Could this be a case of location, location, location. Is it easier for Gay students to come out in the NY Metro area then Minnesota maybe?
[/QUOTE]
Well, I doubt it. From what I have seen, it is more dependent on the attitudes of family & friends than that of the general population of the area.

Also, the NYC Public Schools have seen the need to create a special high school (Harvey Milk School) for GLBT kids who are unable to continue attending their previous high school because of harassment. So I wouldn’t say the NY Metro area schools are quite as accepting as you seem to think.

44

First, we had “Gay-for-pay”, as created by the porn industry.

Now, it will be “Gay-for-A’s”.

45

I came out during my last couple of years in college. It was not an easy time for me, and my studies were certainly impacted. I was basically living three lives, and it certainly took a toll. I was often mentally exhausted.

In one direction, I was expending a significant effort to continuously maintain my grip on my internal denial and supression. In another direction, I was laboring to present and project the expected facade, basically trying to mimick the behavior of my straight friends. And in the third direction, arguably the most draining, I was doing everything I could to convince myself that I wouldn’t have to surpress anything, or labor at the facade, if I just tried hard enough to be straight until I got it right.

Somewhere in there I was supposed to focus on Biochemistry and other Pre-Vet requirements.

That being said, in my opinion college admissions is not the situation in which to attempt to level the proverbial playing field. I appreciate the gesture, but it is an ill-concieved bandaid that will do little if anything to help solve the underlying issues.

46

[QUOTE=t-bonham@scc.net]
Well, I doubt it. From what I have seen, it is more dependent on the attitudes of family & friends than that of the general population of the area.

Also, the NYC Public Schools have seen the need to create a special high school (Harvey Milk School) for GLBT kids who are unable to continue attending their previous high school because of harassment. So I wouldn’t say the NY Metro area schools are quite as accepting as you seem to think.
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Thank you, it was just a question, it sounds my limited experiences have varied heavily from the normal. Maybe I never gave my High School enough credit. We also managed to have a student body that was around 30% black without ever having racial issues. By dumb luck, maybe I was sheltered from the realities of normal High School existence. I never understood all the complaints about how bad High School was by so many people.
I guess while my school was sub-par academically, it was well above the curve in “Live and let live” and “Can’t we all just get along.”

Jim

47

While I understand the concept that it is, on average, likely more difficult for gay teenagers to succeed in high school than their straight counterparts, couldn’t this be said of a lot of groups? I mean the overweight, those with acne, unattractive kids. All of these groups have a difficult time in high school to some extent (and not that I’m comparing it to being gay).

Is it half as hard to be overweight as to be gay, and a quarter as hard as to be unattractive? Do we give half a point to the overweight kid?

At the risk of fsounding cruel, at some point, there has to be a “life isn’t always fair” answer when attempts to level the playing field are impossible.

48

[QUOTE=Fiveyearlurker]
…snip…
Is it half as hard to be overweight as to be gay, and a quarter as hard as to be unattractive? Do we give half a point to the overweight kid?

At the risk of fsounding cruel, at some point, there has to be a “life isn’t always fair” answer when attempts to level the playing field are impossible.
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Someone is going to be tempted to post, “but the fat kid could lose weight”.
This is mostly bullshit and if it was so easy, the fat kid being teased would lose the weight. I am guilty of teasing one of the fat kids in High School. It was a dumb, stupid, shitty thing to do, (known as being a Teen). It was also Ironic as I ended up being fat and I am now struggling to correct this problem and I now understand that it is very hard to just lose the weight. I cannot imagine trying to do it as a 16 year old.
Maybe we should make allowances for braces? Girls that wear braces go through trauma. What about eyeglass wearers?
Not one of these is valid comparison. Gays have been beaten, jailed, and harassed, disowned by their families and otherwise put upon in ways that other disadvantaged kids and college kids have not. I do not like the policy described in the Op, but as several people pointed out, it may have some validity.

Jim

49

We’re worried about abuse? Right, because the average 17-year old feels NO stigma about being labelled gay, and so they’ll just line up to say they are homeosexual.

I would not cry too hard about discrimination of the poor straight kids, either. The ultimate effect of this advantage may make a difference for the small group of capable, ambitious gay students who need this boost, but it will have almost no effect on the likelihood of admission of anyone else. Unless, of course, sociologists and psychologists have vastly underrated the number of homosexuals in the college-bound population, or if this policy makes a staggering number of gays suddenly apply. If Middlebury has 20 or 50 more gay students a year, how much tougher will it really make it for the other 5100 students who have applied for a spot in the class?

I’m not sure I agree with this policy–I would need to hear more about why they think there is a need for it–but I think some of the fears expressed here aren’t really that well-grounded.

50

[QUOTE=CrankyAsAnOldMan]
I’m not sure I agree with this policy–I would need to hear more about why they think there is a need for it–but I think some of the fears expressed here aren’t really that well-grounded.
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Agreed. The big issue for me is whether gay students are underrepresented at this specific school. If so, I don’t much care about anything else: the desire to have a diverse campus is sufficient to justify this policy, IMO> If not, there needs to be a really strong alternate reason for the policy, one that I’m not currently seeing.

Daniel

51

[QUOTE=CrankyAsAnOldMan]
If Middlebury has 20 or 50 more gay students a year, how much tougher will it really make it for the other 5100 students who have applied for a spot in the class?

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You may be right statistically (or maybe not, I haven’t actually checked the math) but ethically, I think even just a little discrimination is wrong.

And as to the fear that straight students would check the “gay” box, I’d say that speaking as a straight college freshman at a competitive school, I would have been sorely tempted to do just that to get an edge last spring. Come to that, I’d be more afraid of being labelled as someone who had no moral qualms about lying to get into college than being labelled gay. But no one, not even my parents, would have known if I’d checked that box on my application, and I suspect that a lot of pressured teens would succumb to that temptation.

52

[QUOTE=CrankyAsAnOldMan]
We’re worried about abuse? Right, because the average 17-year old feels NO stigma about being labelled gay, and so they’ll just line up to say they are homeosexual.

I would not cry too hard about discrimination of the poor straight kids, either. The ultimate effect of this advantage may make a difference for the small group of capable, ambitious gay students who need this boost, but it will have almost no effect on the likelihood of admission of anyone else. Unless, of course, sociologists and psychologists have vastly underrated the number of homosexuals in the college-bound population, or if this policy makes a staggering number of gays suddenly apply. If Middlebury has 20 or 50 more gay students a year, how much tougher will it really make it for the other 5100 students who have applied for a spot in the class?

I’m not sure I agree with this policy–I would need to hear more about why they think there is a need for it–but I think some of the fears expressed here aren’t really that well-grounded.
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It’s only a stigma if other people know how you answered. Face it. Most admissions applications don’t leave the admissions office. I find it hard to believe that straight kids (or their parents) wouldn’t rationalize checking that box if it meant getting into Middlebury instead of State U.

Robin

53

I must say, despite all this glowing praise for the “Small Ivies” (to use a term I always found insufferably pretentious), I find it simply incredible that fraud, of all things, should be a fear worthy of serious consideration when weighing the merits of such a program of affirmative action. I myself am far from sold on the idea that this is the best way to assist kids with the iniquities society heaps on them unjustly because of their orientation. But really, the thought that thousands of kids are going to check off the “gay” box just to get in just strikes me as ludicrous on the face of it. I’m sorry, but I think high school kids generally are sufficiently insecure to forgo that option. And how could they seriously go into their interviews and lie their way through their “gay experience” and expect such claims to hold up to scrutiny if an independent account of their lives shows such claims to be false? Surely the schools thinking of implementing this program must have thought about the potential, however remote, for abuse, as with any other qualifier, and devised reasonable ways to counteract it. Of all the things to worry about, this just strikes me as absurd, ranking up there with the current obsession over the virtually nonexistent problem of “voter fraud”.

54

[QUOTE=Li’l Pluck]
I just don’t trust most white folks (who still control much of what goes in America) to get out of my way,* so affirmative action, in some form, it has to be.*And any white person out there who really knows other white people and how many of the seemingly “normal” ones really think WRT race can’t convince me that my feelings aren’t grounded in reality.
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I’m Asian, I’ve been in more than a few situations where for some reason, white clients and colleagues have felt comfortable expressing racist attitudes (stereotyping blacks and hispanics mostly) around me without realizing that it just makes me think that they make Asian jokes when I am not around. I don’t think these guys go around looking for ways to keep the black man down but I am going to use an anlogy to show the sort of dynamic that CAN occur.

I used to work in a firm where most of the lawyers had ivy league law degrees but several came from second tier law school but generally kicked butt there. When the Harvard grad fucks up, the sentiment is that “everyone is human and while we strive for perfection, we all make mistakes.” When the guy from Brooklyn law school fucks up, the sentiment is “why the fuck do we even hire these guys from Brooklyn.” While the contrast in attitudes is not as big for race, it is there.

55

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Not anymore, and especially not in educational institutions. Read the court’s opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger.
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There are governemnt set asides in appropriations bills for minority business owners.

I think that we are still allowing non-quota preferences to minorities even if diversity is not the reason for the preference.

That particular case was made by a girl who could not have gotten into U Mich even is there were no preferences, her LSATs were just too low. It would be like getting a 1200 on the SATs and suing because a minority student with lower scores got in. There were about 1000 white applicants better qualified for admission.

56

[QUOTE=appleciders]
You may be right statistically (or maybe not, I haven’t actually checked the math) but ethically, I think even just a little discrimination is wrong.

[/QUOTE]

The math is easy to check.

Middlebury had 5254 Apps for Fall 2005, and 1241 of them were offered admission.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that gay students made up 10% of the applicant pool (525 of them) and were accepted at the same rate (124 of them admitted). Both straight and gay students are accepted at about 24%.

Consider the effect of the policy if they’d used it on this pool. Let’s assume they favor gay students to an extreme degree–so that they have double the chance of admission. That is, Middlebury takes 48% of the gay apps, instead of 24%. That means that 248 get acceptances. That leaves fewer acceptances for straights–instead of accepting 1117 of them (1241-124 gays) Middlebury can accept just 993 of them (1241-248 gays). That drops the acceptance rate for straights down to 21%. So to sum up, in this examples straight applicants would see their likelihood of admission drop by 3 percentage points when you double the acceptance rate for gays.

Obviously the numbers may differ–they may attract many more gay apps, for example. On the other hand, they may not favor them so heavily. But the point remains–any time a group makes up a relatively small part of the applicant pool, advantages offered to that group have a much greater effect on them than on those in the majority.

I understand people’s sense of fair play being bothered by this. There’s a lot about admissions that is not fair, and the level playing field is a pretty elusive goal at any school with any selectivity. I would hope that if the smallest bit of “discrimination” feels ethically wrong to you, you would also save some of your ire for policies that provide advantages to legacies, athletes, people from North Dakota, and so on.

57

[QUOTE=col_10022]
I’m Asian, I’ve been in more than a few situations where for some reason, white clients and colleagues have felt comfortable expressing racist attitudes (stereotyping blacks and hispanics mostly) around me without realizing that it just makes me think that they make Asian jokes when I am not around. I don’t think these guys go around looking for ways to keep the black man down but I am going to use an anlogy to show the sort of dynamic that CAN occur.

I used to work in a firm where most of the lawyers had ivy league law degrees but several came from second tier law school but generally kicked butt there. When the Harvard grad fucks up, the sentiment is that “everyone is human and while we strive for perfection, we all make mistakes.” When the guy from Brooklyn law school fucks up, the sentiment is “why the fuck do we even hire these guys from Brooklyn.” While the contrast in attitudes is not as big for race, it is there.
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Ah, yes, I remember you sharing this anecdote some time back in another thread.

About the fact that these people have been comfortable expressing racist attitudes in your presence: I’m sure you’re familiar with the whole “model minority” thing, so I won’t rehash it here, but I do have a couple of ideas as to what might be going in the kinds of situations you describe. (Actually, you probably know where I’m about to go with this, but I’ll share it, nonetheless, for the sake of the uninitiated.)

The late Richard Pryor used to tell a “joke” wherein (and I’m paraphrasing here, so any Doper who knows it better is welcome to correct me) he stated that the only criterion for people emigrating from other countries to America was the ability to say the word “nigger.” And this is what I think is going on here.

You see, these folks know (or, rather, believe) that immigrants’ desire to fit in equals a desire to be just like white people, and all that comes with that, including, in “x” amount of cases, racism towards people who aren’t white. Now, I won’t deny that this is, in fact, true of “x” number of immigrants, but I certainly don’t think it’s true across the board. Also, people do bring their own homegrown ideas with them when they come here, and not all of those ideas are good ones with regard to race, irrespective of any cues they might pick up from American society. So, it seems to me, then, that it’s not a stretch for the people you mention to imagine that you’re just like them (within certain limits, of course) and, therefore, harbor as much animosity towards blacks and Hispanics as they do.

The other thing is that these folks are likely aware of the very real tensions that exist between communities of color in this country. I don’t think, for instance, that one has to be from the ghetto to be aware of the tensions that exist between the black residents and the Asians who set up shop in those areas. Furthermore, these people could very well have come into contact with Asians who, unfortunately, seeking to curry favor with whites, has related tales of woe or expressed a shared disdain for blacks and Hispanics. And, of course, these folks extrapolate from that that you, as an Asian, despise blacks and Hispanics as much as they do.

At any rate, I know that it has to be an extremely uncomfortable position for you. Since I exist within several communities, I get to hear all kinds of uncool shit from time to time. Of course, since I am identifiably black to the naked eye, no one says anything racist towards blacks in my presence, but I’ve had people say shit about Jews and gays in cases where the offenders have just met me and weren’t aware that I belong also to those communities. Yep, never bored.

And though I’m not in these people’s heads (the ones that you mention), I can pretty much assure you that, for the most part, if they’re saying uncool shit about blacks and Hispanics in your presence, then they’re saying uncool shit about Asians when you’re not around.

While I might not believe that people like the ones in your anecdote wake up every day and consciously say to themselves, “Let’s see, how can I keep the black man down today?” I do think that, if they harbor a disdain for people of color, then that disdain will manifest itself wherever it can. Hell, I wouldn’t want any of these people to have the power to hire or fire me.