# College Campus Diversity **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 11, 2010, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472 "2010-01-11T03:31:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![vivalostwages](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/d07c76/32.png) [@vivalostwages](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vivalostwages)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/21 "2010-01-11T18:50:11Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > Colleges also favor children of alumni, especially if they’re big donors. I’ve never heard anyone ever complaining about this. Why are they letting these people in? > > But colleges never let in unqualified students. There’s no point – they’ll probably fail, anyway. > snip. Heck, the colleges and universities where I’ve been working for the past 20 years have let in anyone who could find a way to pay, qualifications be damned, illiteracy be damned, etc. ---
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2010, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/22 "2010-01-11T23:59:55Z")
nm ---
**Author:** ![Honesty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f04885/32.png) [@Honesty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Honesty)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/23 "2010-01-12T00:30:34Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > Curiously, at the root of affirmative action is the desire to create a talented, leadership-oriented cohort of students who not only excel academically but also somehow partake in the intangibles desired by the university. Actually, the root of Affirmative Action is the Civil Rights Movement: a fact that whites seem to forget over and over again ad nauseum. Think about this. Ever since MLK was shot, whites have been rolling back those programs and, in some states, they are presently illegal. As an African-American, I don’t “want” to be equal with whites or go to your schools, I just want to go about by business and not get beat and bludgeoned by your law enforcement during my brief passage on this planet. I’d also like for you guys to stop asking what my ethnicity is when I apply for a job, go to the hospital, or the Census. The question you guys need to be asking is \*\*“Are you a U.S citizen?” \*\*as its infinitely more important than prying on what ethnicity I am (and besides, we’re all “equal” right? So why ask?). To the OP, 90-100% of your classmates will be white depending on what public university you’re going to. No darkie is going to take your spot. I guarantee it. ---
**Author:** ![athelas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5e9695/32.png) [@athelas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/athelas)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/24 "2010-01-12T01:21:44Z")
How big is the preference given to non-Asian minorities? From [here](http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118690216/HTMLSTART): > [@](#): > > African-American applicants receive the equivalent of 230 extra SAT points (on a 1600-point scale), and being Hispanic is worth an additional 185 SAT points. Other things equal, recruited athletes gain an admission bonus worth 200 points, while the preference for legacy candidates is worth 160 points. Asian-American applicants face a loss equivalent to 50 SAT points. I don’t know what you mean by universities “not admitting underqualified students,” but they sure do admit students who would have been disqualified if they’d checked a different racial box on their applications. ---
**Author:** ![athelas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5e9695/32.png) [@athelas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/athelas)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/25 "2010-01-12T01:28:08Z")
And the gaps only [widen](http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/table19-mcatpgaraceeth09-web.pdf)for professional schools. (The MCAT is graded out of 45, with a standard deviation of 2-2.5, so these preferences are between 1 and 2 SD. In other words, the average black matriculant would be in the 12th percentile if he were white.) ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/26 "2010-01-12T02:34:04Z")
> [@athelas](#): > > And the gaps only [widen](http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/table19-mcatpgaraceeth09-web.pdf)for professional schools. (The MCAT is graded out of 45, with a standard deviation of 2-2.5, so these preferences are between 1 and 2 SD. In other words, the average black matriculant would be in the 12th percentile if he were white.) However, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in one of his essays, the “affirmative action” students in law school do end up passing the bar exam, hence they are qualified. At the top level, it makes no difference that some are supposedly better than others. As long as the students are qualified, extra smarts doesn’t really do that much. ---
**Author:** ![athelas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5e9695/32.png) [@athelas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/athelas)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/27 "2010-01-12T03:35:19Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > However, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in one of his essays, the “affirmative action” students in law school do end up passing the bar exam, hence they are qualified. At the top level, it makes no difference that some are supposedly better than others. As long as the students are qualified, extra smarts doesn’t really do that much. Unfortunately your claim does [not](http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/08/local/me-barstudy8)happen to be [true](http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2006/09/sander_2_black_.html) (not surprising considering it’s Malcolm Gladwell). > [@](#): > > The dismal statistics documented by the BPS and explored in Systemic Analysis are fairly familiar now: only 45% of blacks starting law school graduated and passed the bar on the first attempt; only 57% became lawyers after multiple bar attempts (compared to 79% and 83% for whites). 61% of blacks actually taking the bar in the BPS passed on their first attempt, compared to 91% of whites. So not only do they flunk out at much higher rates, even those who pass often fail to pass the bar. Which shows that they are not only displacing more qualified candidates, they are also themselves hurt by affirmative action sending them a false signal and wasting their time and money on law school. ---
**Author:** ![Telur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/59ef9b/32.png) [@Telur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telur)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/28 "2010-01-12T03:55:48Z")
> [@Honesty](#): > > To the OP, 90-100% of your classmates will be white depending on what public university you’re going to. No darkie is going to take your spot. I guarantee it. Going to guess that OP means original poster. Well when you apply to a school that receives over 15,000 applicants and only accepts 1,230. My spot could be ousted by someone of African American descent very easily. Especially where the school’s outreach program is very controversial. Also, based on last year’s stats 435 out of the 1230 (35%) were minority students. Can you still make that guarantee? “[Man] should not be judged on the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” -Martin Luther King Jr. ---
**Author:** ![bannerrefugee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c68b51/32.png) [@bannerrefugee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bannerrefugee)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/29 "2010-01-12T05:31:39Z")
> [@Telur](#): > > Going to guess that OP means original poster. > > Well when you apply to a school that receives over 15,000 applicants and only accepts 1,230. My spot could be ousted by someone of African American descent very easily. Especially where the school’s outreach program is very controversial. > Also, based on last year’s stats 435 out of the 1230 (35%) were minority students. > > Can you still make that guarantee? > “[Man] should not be judged on the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” -Martin Luther King Jr. If you already don’t like the schools policies-maybe you ought to look someplace else. I am not say this to be nasty-I see college students with bad attitudes about there university all the time. It doesn’t enhance their studies. ---
**Author:** ![athelas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5e9695/32.png) [@athelas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/athelas)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/30 "2010-01-12T05:34:07Z")
The market for schools is not exactly competitive. There are few schools that do not practice affirmative action. ---
**Author:** ![bannerrefugee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c68b51/32.png) [@bannerrefugee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bannerrefugee)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/31 "2010-01-12T05:45:39Z")
> [@athelas](#): > > The market for schools is not exactly competitive. There are few schools that do not practice affirmative action. There are **many, many** schools to choose from. Some have aggressive affirmative action policies and some don’t. The OP perceives that this schools student population has been affected by affirmative action and he seems to resent it. If it’s that important to him he should go someplace else. ---
**Author:** ![anu-la1979](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/47e85d/32.png) [@anu-la1979](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/anu-la1979)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/32 "2010-01-12T07:37:31Z")
I can’t speak to undergrad because my attendance in classes was sporadic and I tested out of my freshman year and wasn’t there very long-but at least in law school, I really appreciated the (minimal) diversity. You have to hear the crazy stuff come out of people’s mouths before you believe it-I’m not going to name race/sex here, but I’ve listened to classmates expound upon why they’re a) confused about why minorities don’t want to be profiled given how much better it would make the majority feel, in fact, it’s almost like a privilege b) much like that troll in Great Debates, feel that anyone that looks even remotely “Muslimey” should go out of their way to convince “non-terroristey” Americans that they’re patriots and justify their presence in this country, whether they’re naturalised, born American or legally here c) sure that the reason the “black IQ” is lower is because black people feed their babies alcohol during teething d) very seriously lecture a female professor who was on law review at Georgetown why women can’t be litigators. It was awfully nice to have a few people of ethnicity basically tell them to STFU as nicely as possible. Really spiced up the classroom discussion and took it beyond a million heads nodding in assent, you know? But I’ll say that I appreciated the crazy surrendered-wife/domestic-discipline not-exactly-sure-about-women-getting-the-vote conservatives too. Outrage pumping through your veins can really make crim pro go a little faster. Besides, without “diversity consideration” (ps, isn’t that the new term?), I’m pretty sure most engineering schools would consist almost entirely of South Asian, East Asian and Eastern European men. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 8:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/33 "2010-01-12T08:40:49Z")
> [@](#): > > e root of Affirmative Action is the Civil Rights Movement: a fact that whites seem to forget over and over again ad nauseum. According to Steven Farron, in ‘The Affirmative Action Hoax’ it effectively began in the 1920’s. This is discussed in a book review on HBDbooks: > [@](#): > > Affirmative action didn’t begin with the civil rights movement. It started a time in American history almost incomprehensible to our minds; when college administration and other elites were willing to twist facts, change the rules and lie to discriminate in favor of Americans of European descent. > > In the old days college admission was very simple. People took the view that the best way to determine qualifications wasn’t through trying to measure subjective qualities like “leadership” but through looking at more objective criteria like grades and especially standardized tests. Grades depend on factors like difficulty of classes taken and teacher judgement so standardized tests, administered and graded uniformly, became the favored way for colleges to select students. This common sense observation has been proven through empirical research in modern times; thousands of studies show that standardized tests like the SAT and LSAT are the best predictors of academic success. > > The problem started when too many members of the wrong group started qualifying. Poor, immigrant Jews with Yiddish accents were beating rich WASPs by and measure of academic ability. While Jews have never been more than 2 or 3 percent of the American population, by 1919 they made up 20 percent of Harvard and Brown, 25 percent of the University of Pennsylvania and 40 percent of Columbia. > > To solve this problem the modern college administrative bureaucracy was born. Columbia opened the first Office of Undergraduate Admissions. These kinds of jobs proliferated and by the early 1990s we had gotten to the point where Stanford had an admissions staff of close to 7,000, more than the number of students enrolled. In 1919, Columbia put together the first ever college application, becoming the first institute of higher learning to inquire about things like athletic participation and musical ability. Other elite universities followed their lead. They met their goals. By 1932 the proportion of Jews admitted to Columbia had more than halved to 17 percent. As direct quotas were hard to justify more subjective criteria for admission was used in order to mask discrimination. > > Many college presidents and university staff were honest enough, at least in private conversation, to say that the goals were to reduce the proportion of their student bodies that came from the wrong ethnic stock. Up to the present day the goals would stay the same but the beneficiaries and victims would change. The justifications would too depending on political feasibility. The 1978 Supreme Court case of Bakke Vs. Regents banned explicit quotas but allowed things such as the desire to create a diverse student body into account. The decision was reaffirmed in 2003. > > Affirmative Action Admissions > > Colleges claim not to have quotas. They just take other factors into account when it comes to admissions. Since whites and Asians admitted to every college looked at have better grades and test scores than Hispanics and blacks we’re supposed to believe that by coincidence Hispanics and blacks are always better able to meet non-academic criteria in a game that wasn’t rigged from the start. > > The extent to which Non-Asian minorities need affirmative action is quite striking. In 2002 the average SAT score of whites whose parents had no more than a high school diploma was 985. The score of a black who had a parent with a post-baccalaureate degree was 954. The average math scores for whites and Asians whose parents earned less than $10,000 a year were 497 and 518 respectively. For blacks living in homes earning over $100,000 a year it was 490… > > … if law schools simply went by undergraduate GPA and LSAT scores statistics from one year show that almost 4/5 of blacks, 2/3 of Puerto Ricans and 1/2 of Mexicans and Native Americans admitted to law school wouldn’t have been accepted. Even Asians get a slight edge. Of those blacks who ended up going to law school only 8.9 percent belonged there. At the top sixth of law schools 17.5 times more blacks were admitted than would’ve been based on UGPA and SAT. [http://hbdbooks.com/2009/05/affirmative-action-in-modern-america/](http://hbdbooks.com/2009/05/affirmative-action-in-modern-america/) ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 8:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/34 "2010-01-12T08:59:37Z")
> [@](#): > > What do you guys think? I tend to go along with Carl Cohen. > [@](#): > > What we may not do, constitutionally or morally, is announce in effect: “No matter that you, X, were innocent and gained no advantage; you are white and therefore lose points. No matter whether you, Z, were damaged or not; you are black and therefore gain points.” If the moral ground for compensatory affirmative action is the redress of injury, the uninjured have no claim to it, and all those individuals of whatever ethnic group who have suffered the injury in question have an equal claim to it. > > Racially based numerical instruments have this grave and unavoidable defect: they cannot make the morally crucial distinctions between the blameworthy and the blameless, between the deserving and the undeserving. As compensatory devices they are underinclusive in failing to remedy the same damage when it has been done to persons of the nonfavored races; they are overinclusive in benefiting some in the favored categories who are without claims, often at substantial cost to innocent persons. [http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/cohen.disc.html](http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/cohen.disc.html) ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 11:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/35 "2010-01-12T11:58:21Z")
> [@Francis\_Vaughan](#): > > Affirmitive action is always going to cause argument. One might as well go in for the whole shebang and add perferential admission of women into courses as well. Many colleges do this as well. Women are overrepresented on college campuses and, if anything, the unstated affirmative action programs have been aimed at getting more men on campus. ---
**Author:** ![Sandwich](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/22d042/32.png) [@Sandwich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sandwich)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/36 "2010-01-12T13:41:04Z")
> [@Carl Cohen](#): > > Racially based numerical instruments have this grave and unavoidable defect: they cannot make the morally crucial distinctions between the blameworthy and the blameless, between the deserving and the undeserving. As compensatory devices they are underinclusive in failing to remedy the same damage when it has been done to persons of the nonfavored races; they are overinclusive in benefiting some in the favored categories who are without claims, often at substantial cost to innocent persons. Quite true. Equally, conceding that affirmative action is flawed does not imply that no affirmative action would be better. ---
**Author:** ![BrandonR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/779978/32.png) [@BrandonR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrandonR)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/37 "2010-01-12T14:23:15Z")
Colleges want diversity so they can have stock photos that look like [this](http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/diversity_conf.jpg) and [this](http://www.siskiyous.edu/class/guid1/Diversity.jpg). See? Racial harmony \*does \*exist at \_\_\_\_\_\_ University! Meh, personally I don’t see the point. While I obviously agree that no one should have their application affected by their race, when universities actively pursue minorities over other races and give them preference, I have a problem. I don’t know how many university-affiliated scholarships I’ve come across with the phrase “minorities and women encouraged to apply!” Gee thanks university, for believing in anyone and everyone (unless they’re a white male). Really, what is the goal in trying to boost how many different colors your school has? Sometimes I think it’s just a academic pissing contest. I also really don’t get the surveys that claim a more diverse campus gives a better education. How? Aside from the placebo effect planted by all these universities that diversity is good, how does the skin color or origin of my classmate change my professor’s teaching ability or my learning ability? It’s ridiculous. ---
**Author:** ![Stentor\_2.5](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bc8723/32.png) [@Stentor\_2.5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stentor_2.5)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/38 "2010-01-12T15:19:31Z")
Actually, what concerns me most these days is not so much my university’s recruiting practices as the ghettoization within the university. I don’t know exactly what causes this, but it seems like some majors attract a very high proportion of minorities while others attract hardly any. The journalism school? Almost exclusively white, with a couple of Latinos. Education? A much higher proportion of blacks. Obviously the African American studies and women’s studies curricula attract members of those groups. I worry that rather than racial integration we’re getting a new form of separate but equal. (Please forgive me if I miscapitalized. I don’t have my copy of the AP style book with me right now.) ---
**Author:** ![billfish678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@billfish678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billfish678)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/39 "2010-01-12T15:26:58Z")
Here’s what gets me. You want “cultural” diversity fine. Yeah, a Jew, a catholic. a bapist and an athiest probably bring different cultural views to the table. So do 1st generation americans who immigrant parents come from differing parts of the world. Same with somebody from rural Kansas vs the east coast vs the west coast vs the southeast vs the northwest vs the big city vs the small town. Kids with poor parents vs middle income vs rich vs uneducated vs highly educated. And so and so on for all sorts of stuff. Yeah, that brings all sorts of cultural “diversity” to the table. But why do they need to ask what your skin color is or if you have a penis or not? Is there some inherent link between those things and your culture and how you think? ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2010, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472/40 "2010-01-12T15:29:22Z")
> [@Telur](#): > > Well when you apply to a school that receives over 15,000 applicants and only accepts 1,230. My spot could be ousted by someone of African American descent very easily. Especially where the school’s outreach program is very controversial. > Also, based on last year’s stats 435 out of the 1230 (35%) were minority students. Depending on where you are, a sizeable portion of that 35% minority is going to be made up of Asian-American (or foreign Asian) students, who are discriminated against _more_ than whites because they are massively overrrepresented in secondary education. Don’t worry - I’m not bitter. You can have _my_ spot. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/college-campus-diversity/524472.md?page=3)