C’mon! You are telling me a process which uses race-alone as a standard can be color blind?!
There is a standard for asians: cross this academic threshold and you can matriculate if you have good enough other.
There is a different standard for blacks: cross this much lower academic threshold and you can matriculate if you have good enough other.
It matters not if the asian had less opportunity than the black. It matters not if his “other” is as good as a black candidate’s other. The asian competes against asians to fill the asian quota, and once that’s filled, no more asians, even if they outqualify blacks who are matriculated.
Look. If we are going to protect race-based AA, we have to stop the bullshitting and come clean. Get over the fact that groups are not similarly enabled, and that if we want proportionate cosmetic representation by race, we need race-alone AA. We don’t diddle around pretending men and women are similarly enabled for firefighting. We find ways to be inclusive, and to create measurement standards which reflect their average genetic differences.
Upthread, but see here: “Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000.”
Similar SAT analyses find similar patterns wrt to [parental education.](Standardized Tests: The Interpretation of Racial and Ethnic Gaps 5) " Figures 5 and 6, show that at every level of income and social advantage the gap exists. In fact, it remains remarkably constant when economic and cultural levels are controlled."
Opportunity disadvantage does not explain the score gap.
I see…you think the most reasonable explanation for blacks overcoming the 10-15 fold advantage asians have at the highest academic level is that black students probably have vastly superior “other” which catapaults them past simple academic qualifications.
Yep. That’s prolly it.
You are right that none of share the same “culture.” We all live in our own microculture, which is formed mostly by our class, once you make it out of the lower tiers. And the idea that middle/upper class blacks have such a special cultural disadvantage that they should get in front of better-qualified asians (or whites) is just not very convincing.
Now you are intentionally playing the idiot. No I am not saying that, it is clear I am not saying that, nothing at all like that, and I am done repeating the same points over again.
I don’t know anything about this guy.
In general, an applicant who successfully self-identifies as a given race group would be lumped in with that race group for the purposes of deciding which applicants are accepted.
WRT med school, black matriculants have an average MCAT Physical Science score of 9, and an average Science GPA of 3.33. Average asian scores for those two areas are 11.4 and 3.68.
In this highly competitive sphere, a standardized test score that needs to be 25% higher on average to gain admission is a substantial barrier to cross. But there are so many more asians with stratospheric MCAT scores that this double standard needs to be retained in order to get black physicians. Despite the overall population numbers, by the time kids get through the rigors of pre-med, there are nearly three times as many asians who apply to med school as blacks. One of the things that happens in college is that only the best students are able to stay in the most rigorous course tracks. So even if you get a less-qualified kid into college, it’s still harder to get him into and through grad schools.
As referenced in an earlier JBHE cite, if med schools did not keep this double standard, there would be no black physicians attending elite universities (where the admission standards are even higher). “If these institutions were to choose their students solely on test scores and college grades, it is clear that in the intense competition for places at medical schools in the United States, African Americans would be at a severe disadvantage in relation to the highest scoring whites. Under these circumstances no blacks would be admitted to the nation’s most selective schools of medicine.”
By CP: “C’mon! You are telling me a process which uses race-alone as a standard can be color blind?! …”
By DSeid: “It merely requires a college to not weight SAT scores over that which demonstrates the level of academic skill needed to succeed there very highly and more heavily weight the value of diversity of cultural backgrounds and skill sets.”
In the admissions world, “cultural background” is code for “race.”
“Skill sets” is code for “other,” and when driving acceptance for race-based cosmetic diversity standards, is wiggle-ese for “we need more kids in this group, so we will arbitrarily assign a higher weight for what he did versus the kid in the other group doing the exact same thing.”
“Other” items like “leadership,” “volunteerism,” “well-roundedness,” and the like are non-academic skill sets for which there is no mechanism to quantify absolutely across experiences. By introducing them into the admissions process, you create a “wholistic” evaluation which lets you avoid a charge of defacto race-based decision-making for any one student.
The overall acceptance pattern by race group exposes what the institution is actually doing. The idea that, as a group, asians have lower “skill sets” for non-academics is ridiculous.
The process you describe does, indeed, end up driving race-alone decision making to keep a cosmetic diversity. Its practical result (an intended one) is to balance a class by race; not to balance a class by “other.”
The worst part is that people buy into this stereotype and start to view all Asians as undifferentiated one dimensional commodities. People want us to look at black students as individuals with individual stories to tell… unless they are Asians, in which case people believe they already know everything there is to know about them.
I am the OP, I think I was pretty clear what I think about it.
As long as Harvard gets money from the government, they should not be able to discriminate on racial basis. If that results in fewer black doctors from Harvard, that’s how it is. I am sure those who have high MCATs etc. and don’t get into Harvard med school will still be able to get into good med schools.
But Harvard doesn’t choose for well-roundedness or diversity of interests and then say “that’s where the racial chips fell.” Harvard directly caps Asian enrollment, period. The people defending the Harvard system can’t defend what it actually does and have to spin these fairy tales about “music v. sports” instead of acknowledging the reality.
Here is the system that was developed for UC admissions after racial quotas and preferences were ended. This is what an actual attempt to create a freshman class with diverse interests that doesn’t just reward SAT scores looks like. I’ve noticed a huge amount of pretending that there is no middle ground between “racial quotas for Asians” and “take top SAT scores only,” that ignores the fact that the several prestigious universities in the UC system have been practicing that middle ground for 20 years.
You’ve convinced me that all affirmative action is bad all the time, since surely there are no doctors who got into med school without affirmative action that turned out to not be great doctors, and surely there are no doctors who got into med school with the help of affirmative action that turned out to be great doctors, based on this finding about a single bad doctor.
Sort of. You call him/her “Doctor,” but there are lots of layers of Doctors.
You don’t typically call the C average Doctor “Specialist.”
Physicians have a lot of training post med school, and as you go up the specialty chain, both the quality of training and specialty opportunity are progressively closed to those with lower academic ability. There is also a marked difference in areas such as disciplinary actions. And definitely a difference in how attractive the practice opportunities are.
For specialty training, one of the issues has been that post-med school licensing exams, medical school training scores, and so on, affect your post-med school opportunities. So you will see increasingly fewer black Doctors in all specialties across the board, and generally fewer passing specialty board examinations. At sub-specialty levels, the trend continues.
At my last ED re-cert review course (which almost every currently-certified ED physician takes), I saw 2 black physicians out of the 500 currently-certified ED physicians at the course. Purely anecdotal, but I can assure you: A marginally-qualified student has more trouble becoming an MD in the first place; passing licensing exams in the second place; passing residency boards in the third place; and finally making it into the highest spheres of medical practice.
In my world, “Doctor” is sort of the lowest tier…if you get an MD but don’t pass the basic licensing exam, you don’t get that great a job (and no clinical practice at all); if you pass the licensing exam but don’t get much further down the training tree/specialty boards, you are just sort of a grunt out in general practice at a strip mall…
Not gonna go back and forth repeating things any more but the doctor bit requires some response.
Sure you do, at least as often as you call them “primary care provider.” I’d ask for cite that specialists on average have higher medical school GPAs or even higher class rankings than do primary care providers but I know that your track record is consistent that you pull these claims out of the efflux of your colonoscopy prep. No, “smarter” students are not universally attracted to specialty medicine, far from it, and GPA has little to do with residency selection (especially since many if not most medical schools work on P/F systems and for many there is no such thing as “a C average”). Clinical rotation evaluations, letters of recommendation, USMLE scores, research or other outside of the curriculum experiences, which medical school you are graduating from … so on, all play the highly significant roles.
Indeed there has been an increase in the numbers of under-represented minorities entering medical schools. Between the 1987 and 1995 cohorts, for example the numbers of Black medical students increased from 5.9% to 7.8% of all matriculating medical students, no doubt impacted by accepting some with lower MCATs and GPA than the mean in pursuit of increasing minority representation in the profession and in each class. At baseline more Black matriculants left for academic reasons than did Whites or Asians. Did it get worse by increasing the numbers of Black matriculants? During that time of increased Black matriculation rate
I’ll grant that the Black cohort is not scoring as high on the USMLE on average as are Whites and Asians, and as that is often used to screen for residency interviews are not getting into as competitive of residencies as are White and Asian medical school graduates.
A single person receiving or being denied benefits will not make up for hundreds of years of discrimination, but that’s why its Harvard doing it and not some random guy on the street. They have the power to effect a lot more change than one person, and they were part of the institution that perpetrated the offense in the first place, it makes sense that they need to be part of the reparations.
You may scoff at this, but allow me to admit that its impossible to have a completely fair system of addressing these injustices. It happened for too long, many of the records have been lost or is non-existent, and there are overlapping claims to entitlement, and yes, despicable people will try to game the system by demanding undeserved compensation. All that is fact, and impossible to fully balance out to the satisfaction of everyone.
But just because we can’t do a perfect job doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything. Race was the overriding factor in discrimination, so let that be the standard in which we base deferred justice on. Maybe you want to nitpick that blacks who can trace their descendants to, lets say California in 1860, do not deserve an equal amount of AA consideration as someone like Alex Haley who can trace his lineage back to the first slaves brought over to the New World. But there are tens of millions of people like that. I say let’s do the simple, efficient, and empathetic thing by acknowledging that race-based discrimination had far-ranging and long-lasting effects, and we shouldn’t nitpick over individuals. If you’re black, then give them the AA consideration. I don’t care if your dad came over from Nigeria in 1980, you get it too. I’m fine with that.
And, I suspect, a lot of nitpickers do so with the intention of derailing any form of compensation.
Is your solution to simply ignore things that have been done in the past? Because that sounds like what it would be. If we cannot look to correct past actions by giving benefits to the descendants, then we ignore the injustice. We must do something, and something meaning more than simply promising we won’t do it again. I think if you were injured in the past, or in this case your ancestors, you’d be equally offended if someone told you to suck it up because we can’t change the past.
We don’t agree with the validity of the complaint but you seem to agree that we need to make sure that even cosmetically, we should make the attempt to balance races. So what are we arguing about?
That’s right, specifically those groups.
AA doesn’t mention any specific race, so they can count themselves lucky that unrestricted enrollment numbers are being boosted by the desire for diversity.
I disagree. Its so obvious that diversity is part of it and cannot be uncoupled from simply indirect reparations for the slavery of blacks. If it was not meant to create diversity, then we can simply hand out money to minorities that don’t get admitted to Harvard and other schools.
I don’t really see those as being significantly different than a desire for diversity. However, being so blunt about it may be harmful to the program, so some PR management is necessary to accomplish the goal of diversity.
Well that’s annoying. I was asked to explain myself and I did. We all know that unless you’re one of the 9, its pointless to really argue. I’m not sure why you had to say that other than as a way to take a shot as my opinion. :rolleyes:
Well unfortunately my opinion on this doesn’t matter so I’m not going to bother answering that.
…is what I would say in response if I were a dick. But I’m not a dick, I just have one. So in answer to your question, there may be many other industries that can benefit from such a forced shift in demographics. None of my answers should be construed as being exclusive. The reason why I didn’t bring up the entertainment industry is because we’re not talking about that industry. Make a separate topic on entertainment if you want me to further debate it
I am the OP, I think I was pretty clear what I think about it.
So in answer to your question, there may be many other industries that can benefit from such a forced shift in demographics. None of my answers should be construed as being exclusive. The reason why I didn’t bring up the entertainment industry is because we’re not talking about that industry. Make a separate topic on entertainment if you want me to further debate it