Are you high right now? This isn’t just two state university systems. Read the article:
Notice how they quote Harvard and Stanford, two elite universities. Notice how the language is basically the same language that used with regard to pursuing racial diversity? Notice how the first sentence talks about colleges and universities without any qualifications? This is a common practice. So common that your insistence on arguing the point only highlights your ignorance, once again.
I would hope someone wouldn’t need to make explicit to you the fact that “pursuing geographic diversity” cannot be done without giving some people preference. I have explained to you WHY the typically kid from Applacahia is given preference. Why you cannot put 1 and 1 together is beyond me.
A cite was already provided. If you want more read any of the many amicus briefs on the Fisher case presently before the SC.
What the article actually says is about Harvard and Stanford is:
Web pages proudly trumpet that this year the college has students “from all 50 states and from over 80 countries” (Harvard) or that “ the students come from throughout the United States and the world” (Stanford).
Bragging on a webpage about how the fact that your students come from many states and countries is not the same thing as discriminating for and against certain students based on where they’re born. The article does not make any mention of Harvard or Stanford discriminating based on geography.
Actually it can, and is. There are many methods by which a university aim for geographic diversity (or racial diversity or any other type) without having the admissions office discriminate for or against anybody. For example, if a university wanted more students from a certain region of the country, they could do more advertising in that part of the country. No preferences, no discrimination, just a little more focus on where you mail flyers and send recruiters to college fairs.
Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
If students from Appalachia actually got any preference in college admissions, a similar study could document a similar discrepancy for them. But you haven’t linked to any similar study.
No cite has been provided, saying that “The mismatch theory has largely been debunked, and is not widely accepted in academia,” which is what you claimed. Anybody who reads the thread will easily see that no such cite has been provided. Claiming that you’ve provided a cite, when in fact you have not, seems to be a favorite tactic of yours, but nobody’s dumb enough to fall for it.
Rather, I’ve provided many cites showing that mismatch theory is backed by a mountain of research and widely accepted in academia. Anyone can read the thread and see them. But what the hey, I’ll post them again.
We examine differences in minority science graduation rates among University of California campuses when racial preferences were in place. Less-prepared minorities at higher-ranked campuses had lower persistence rates in science and took longer to graduate. We estimate a model of students’ college major choice where net returns of a science major differ across campuses and student preparation. We find less-prepared minority students at top ranked campuses would have higher science graduation rates had they attended lower-ranked campuses.
Suppose that Sally dreams of becoming a chemist, does very well in a standard high school chemistry course, and receives a preference into an elite school where most of her classmates have taken AP chemistry. Even if Sally does not experience “learning” mismatch, she is likely nonetheless to end up with a B- or a C in chemistry simply because of the strength of the competition.
A long line of studies (e.g., this excellent study by two psychologists) have shown that students receiving large preferences, facing these pressures, tend to abandon STEM fields in large numbers. Competition mismatch thus appears to have large and damaging effects on the number of blacks, in particular, graduating with science or engineering degrees.
The single biggest problem in this system – a problem documented by a vast and growing array of research – is the tendency of large preferences to boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively – even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.
And why not include some more:
Working with a large sample of high-achieving minority students from a variety of institutions, the authors conclude that minority students are no less likely than white students to aspire to academic careers. But because minorities are less likely to go to college and less likely to earn high grades within college, few end up going to graduate school. The shortage of minority academics is not a result of the failure of educational institutions to hire them; but of the very small pool of minority Ph.D. candidates. In examining why some minorities decide to become academics, the authors conclude that same-race role models are no more effective than white role models and that affirmative action contributes to the problem by steering minority students to schools where they perform relatively poorly.
If the mismatch theory has been debunked and is not widely accepted in academia, interested readers might wonder why some many researchers from academia keep writing papers saying that the mismatch theory is true. They might start wondering if one anonymous internet user who claims he provided a cite but didn’t should actually be trusted above a large body of recent, peer-reviewed research.
Okay, I’ll do that. Here are some quotes from one of those amicus briefs.
It is now generally conceded that large admissions preferences — regardless of whether these are based on race, “legacy” considerations, or other factors — cause students to receive lower grades. The median black receiving a large admissions preference to an elite law school, for example, ends up with grades that put her at the 6th percentile of the white grade distribution — an effect that is almost entirely due to the preference itself.6 (Data made available to researchers after the Grutter decision revealed that 60% of blacks admitted to the University of Michigan Law School had GPAs in the bottom tenth of their class.)7
Dartmouth psychologist Rogers Elliott and several colleagues published a study in 1996 that found very high attrition rates from the sciences in four Ivy League schools for students admitted with large preferences.8 Students who had weaker academic preparation than their peers were particularly vulnerable in science and engineering classes, where grading is on a rigid curve, professors often teach at a challenging pace and material builds sequentially from one course to the next. Students with significantly weaker preparation than the median student can become overwhelmed, and consequently transfer to less rigorous majors at a high rate. This phenomenon came to be known as “science mismatch,” because similar students attending less elite colleges appeared to have higher persistence rates in science. The cumulative effect is that even though black entering freshmen have levels of interest and aspiration in science comparable to (or higher than) whites, they make up only a small proportion of those with degrees in science and engineering.9
So you told me that if I read any of the amicus briefs, I would find evidence that the mismatch theory has been debunked and rejected. I read one, and instead it says that mismatch theory is widely accepted. Maybe you should have read some of those amicus briefs before recommending that I do so.
It boggles the mind that the mismatch theory is even controversial. Of course thrusting somebody into an environment he or she isn’t ready for will tend to have a negative outcome. That’s just common sense. But the discussion of race in the US is so laden with dogma that something that is blindingly obvious will be dismissed out of hand.
At the heart of U Texas’s concern in Fisher is preserving the need to get the best black students in order to minimize the “mismatch” effect which results from the 10% guideline.
In higher education, we need to preserve race-based diversity. University education is such a critical stepping stone to success in our society that closing those doors to an entire self-identified race group would be (has been) catastrophic for blacks.
At the same time, when admissions are limited to the 10% mechanism, the black students who would be admitted under this policy–while enough to fulfill a race diversity need–fall into the lower edges of academic performance and are therefore de facto marginalized into the group of students who are very weak. Worse, when the student body is otherwise composed of high-performing students, the perception that blacks as a group are inferior students is compounded. This kind of mismatch results in a disproportionately high representation of blacks within the academically poor cohort, and surely promotes whatever racism exists.
To remedy this, U Texas wants to ameliorate mismatch by assigning to privileged blacks a race-based priority for admission instead of being confined to a 10% rule. This policy allows about 25% of their black students to be matriculated outside of the 10% rule, but not have to compete directly with their socioeconomic peers.
I think this is the right approach, but U Texas v Fisher is a reasonably clear example that academic mismatch is real.
Addressing the MRI issue, which is the only one related to my post:
No, MRIs don’t allow mind-reading. It does allow one to quantify the physical processes of the brain, and try to correlate them with stimuli. In other words, exactly what the article you linked to says:
One of fMRI’s most celebrated advantages is its ability to quantify psychological processes that people are either unwilling or unable to report honestly. For example, people might not be aware that they respond emotionally to photos of loved ones, but fMRI can show emotion centers in the brain demanding higher blood flow. Another more controversial example is lie-detection. Deception activates the prefrontal cortex; with this knowledge, fMRI can be used to indicate whether or not an individual is lying. However, that does not that mean scientists can divine someone’s exact thoughts from what lights up in an fMRI brain scan. An increasing number of cautionary voices have started to emphasize the limitations of fMRI.
I was in no way claiming that MRIs allowed one to divine someone’s exact thoughts.
It’s because people think the mismatch theory is a reference to race, e.g. that it’s saying blacks just aren’t ready for a rigorous environment because they are black. Nobody stops to think or understand what’s actually being said, they just react.