Say you’re on the college admissions board and you have the choice of two students, based on the information below.
One has an A-minus average, comes from a perfect upper-middle-class family, has not really faced any serious hardship, and has a similar cultural background as 90% of the students you have already.
The other comes from a broken, poor family where every day was a hardship (had to take care of multiple brothers & sisters while mom worked full-time and dad was MIA), but still managed to get a B+ average, and has a cultural background that only 1% of your existing student body shares (and has probably had to deal with some amount persecution because of that)
Based on no other information, which student do you think will succeed more once they get to college? Which do you think will contribute more to having a variety of different viewpoints on campus? The choice is obviously going to be for the second candidate.
Now sure, if you switch the scenario around and have to choose between a upper-class, minority student and a broken-family majority student, the decision becomes a lot tougher. But race still is a factor in this debate because it usually does confer some amount of hardship that needs to be overcome, and that is something that colleges are looking for.
Well, no. Would you feel better if other white students were accepted ahead of you?
I’m not sure where you are applying, but it has roughly the same acceptance rate as Harvard (but with a much smaller class). Keep in mind that with a school that competative, there are likely a significant number of people with perfect high school records (4.0 GPA, 1600 SAT) who will not be accepted. So when you have a situation where a significant number of people who meet the criteria for entry are still unable to qualify, your criteria, in a sense, becomes arbitrary. We like this candidate because he plays lacrosse, we like that candidate because she plays the oboe.
This recent attempt to brand America as colorblind and post-race in my opinion is detrimental to society overall. Instead of celebrating and exploring our different cultures, we are so worried about potential racial frenzies that we just feel it best to say we are all the same. People of different cultures, skin color, background, etc absolutely think differently from each other. We are products of our environment. The way you are treated in life absolutely affects the way you think and your approach to the world.
Affirmative action is a somewhat poorly planned method to bring these diverse life experiences together. Race just happens to be the most salient predictor of diverse life experiences; ergo, different ways of thinking. I would prefer an affirmative action program based on class and then race, but that is another discussion.
You are right. Your spot could be taken by a minority. Or a white guy that is smarter than you. Or a woman. Or the son of someone on the board. Or a great athlete. Or the daughter of a guy who built a new wing in the music conservatory. Or they could have accidentally dropped your application on the floor and didn’t see it. Or maybe you don’t really deserve to get in.
With that low of an acceptance rate, any idea of “your spot” is nothing more than self entitlement.
Nice MLK quote. Ever wonder if the content of someone’s character is shaped by their life experiences due to the color of their skin?
I bet I can guarantee who you blame when you don’t get in.
Can I run a company and after years of experience say " I aint hiring anyone with colored skin or no penis because years of experience have taught me these people are pain in the ass because they think differently"?
You can’t have your “we are different but different is ALWAYS good and NEVER bad” cake and eat it too.
Ooooookkk. I think you might be reading something I did not say.
There is a world of difference between a college wanting people of different life experiences together in order to engender a better learning environment and violating the Civil Rights Act by intentionally discriminating based on race or gender.
So to answer your question, no, you could not do that.
I disagree with Farron. He dosn’t even mention the fucking Executive Order that laid the foundation for Bakke. Affirmative Action is because of the Civil Rights Movement. Pure and Simple. Once the spokesperson for that movement died, America went back to business as usual. <shrug>
Yep, once you go to college, you’ll see what I mean. I’ve went to University of Michigan (undergrad), Wayne State University (grad), and Ohio State University (grad, again) and I can tell you that every single class I’ve taken has been over 80% white. (and that’s being very generous, I’d say it’s about 95% white). The only outlier is an African-American literature I took during my junior year. I don’t believe for a minute that 35% were minority. If they are minority, there sure as hell not 35% blacks at your University. College is a white institution with white people, white teachers, white police officers, white researchers, and black janitors.
The talk of AA is stupid because many States are criminalizing the practice. It won’t be around for much longer. By the way, what State is the OP from? I bet AA is illegal there (or will be soon) and that the discussion is moot.
I’m sorry, but Americans have thrown away everything MLK fought for with the exception of segregated water fountains. You have no right to mention him in his context.
I was more upset at Honesty for “guaranteeing a darkie wasn’t going to take my spot”
I don’t resent affirmative action if it’s looking for just as qualified if not more so, prospective students, in places that normally would not apply.
I resent affirmative action when the college just wants more minority students just to “be more diverse”.
@honesty I rather dislike how you tell me that the statistics on the school are false.
I am from Ohio but the school I am applying is out of state. And I would prefer not to disclose. We may have one thing in common, Ohio State honors college (to which I’ve already been accepted and invited) is my backup if I am not accepted to the aforementioned.
I have no right to use my first amendment rights to quote one of the most brilliant men in all of American History?
I also rather dislike how you state college is run by white people and cleaned up by black people. Well I’m not in college yet but at my high school there are plenty of black kids (I can’t give you statistics because I don’t know) and every single janitor is white. Also I’ve seen plenty of black professors and students on the campus when I went to visit. So to claim it is a “white institution” doesn’t seem to hold much water to me.
@YamatoTwinkie One of the short answer responses we (applicants) had to write was to describe any hardships faced. The assumption you’re making is that hardship of life is directly correlated to race. Just because a person is black doesn’t mean they fought hardship and just because a person is white doesn’t mean they didn’t have any.
@kingbighair I really liked your rhetorical question “Ever wonder if the content of someone’s character is shaped by their life experiences due to the color of their skin?” Maybe it is and in that case justifiable. If they came from poorer households you mean and had to face more hardship? Sure but the same thing with YomatoTwinkie, how do you know that race means more or less hardship?
I rather dislike how you made the accusation that I would blame a black person for me not getting in. If I don’t get in then I wasn’t good enough. I have no one to blame but myself for not being more competitive.
@bannerrefugee I’m sorry if I came across as I didn’t like the university or the way it handles admissions. I actually had an alumni, working for the outreach program come to my house and interview me last August before my other Interview (the one everyone receives). I said their outreach program was controversial, I never stated my opinion on it.
estimates for heritability of IQ are between 0.2 and 0.8
that means that between 20% and 80% of the variation in IQ is due to variation in genes
selection can act if reproductive rates are impacted by these genes (i.e., by intelligence)
simple estimates suggest that 50,000 could have been enough time to produce .5 SD (genetic) group differences
See here for some elaboration on (3) and (4) using Greg Clark’s (economist at UC Davis) data on English inheritances and family size:
The simplest model would be that time since development of agriculture varies between groups, and this variation leads to different levels of selection for traits which might be more useful for agriculturalists than for hunter gatherers. There is a lot of evidence for group differences; the question is only how much is due to genetic factors.
The book ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution’ discusses this.
For instance, you see with the Ashkenazi Jews an example of how local selective pressures exerted even over several hundred years can cause changes.
Bear in mind that the relevance of IQ to, well, anything is far from established. It does measure something, some stable personal psychological characteristic, in the sense that if you take two well-designed IQ tests several years apart you probably will get roughly the same score on each; but there is no consensus among psychologists as to what it is measuring, or even as to whether there is such thing as g, a general intelligence factor. E.g., see Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.
How many of those are Asian-Americans, by the way? Not a single one of the 15-if-I’m-not-miscounting people in my graduate program who would be counted as “Asian-American” were American. I’m reasonably sure that the Standard Taiwanese, the Standard Korean and the Standard Seventh-Generation-Chinese-American don’t exactly have the same cultural background, but they all get counted together for the purpose of diversity stats. The Standard Costa-Rican of Chinese Ancestry would get to choose between three options, yay (multicultural, Hispanic and Asian-American).
Thank you for recognizing this. These posters bring it up to essentially say “Those niggers don’t need Affirmative Action because they’re too stupid to contribute to society, anyway.” It’s two parts ethnocentrism and one part threadshitting.
“Data from more than 8000 parent-offspring pairs, 25,000 sibling pairs, 10,000 twin pairs and adoption studies provide evidence that genetic factors play a substantial role in the variation of general intelligence, with heritability estimates ranging from 40 to 80%” –
Burdick et al, Cognitive variation in DTNBP1 influence general cognitive ability. Human Molecular Genetics, 2006, Vol 15, No. 10.
“Multivariate genetic analyses indicate that general intelligence is highly heritable, and that the overlap in the cognitive processes is twice as great as the overall phenotypic overlap, with genetic correlations averaging around .80.”
Plomin et al (2004) “A functional polymorphism in the succinate-semialdehyde dehydrogenase genes is associated with cognitive ability,” Molecular Psychology 9, 582-586.
Actually, a tremendous amount of research has been conducted on its relevance to real world outcomes. For a nice summary, see Why g matters: the complexity of ordinary life by psychologist Linda Gottfredson.
Whatever it is measuring it appears to be something real in the brain that is reflected in different reaction time, greater processing efficiency (less glucose uptake), and different brain characteristics.