I quoted the story because even though it argues that affirmative action is a good thing it admits that affirmative action creates a seperate standard for minorities. It also argues that Affirmative Action has created an atmosphere amoung white students that they are being discriminated against. This belief is widely held even amoung white students that have not bee discriminated against.
So the story, even though it supports AA, supports my claims that AA creates seperate standards for minorities and hurts race relations.
Once again Izzy you are over estimating how much information the individual students would have. Person B, residing in one town, going to one high school, applies to the University, gets rejected. he can look all day long at the other kids in his school who did or did not get in and still have insufficient information in order to make the giant leap that you propose.
Consider: my high school had 700 students in each class. roughly half applied (or so they said) to Michigan State, roughly half applied to U of M (or so they said), while I knew who were the validictorian etc, the only info I had about other student’s grades, came from them, ditto test scores etc. I did know if they belonged to clubs etc, sometimes, but again, even if I knew and had proof of all of this information about each and every single solitary student from my school that applied to Michigan State, that would still only have been 350 applicants out of the several thousand that applied to MSU and the lesser number that got in.
But, as some so nicely prove here, people will continue to believe what they wish, despite evidence to the contrary.
So, while the link you provided shows demonstatable evidence that AA does **good **things, you still maintain that it hurts race relations because 'some white students feel they have been discriminated against, even when it isn’t true? Wow. WOuldn’t a more appropriate response be, to educate those with the erroneous information, instead of saying 'gee, it’s a bad thing ‘cause they think it is’ ??
Sorry, but you’ve read something into the story that’s not there. The authors suggest no such thing, and in fact examine only the probabilities of admission for the average four-year student. They point out that blacks and Hispanics have a higher probability of admission, all academic qualifications being equal.
Again, you seem to have read quite selectively. The authors conclude with the following comments:
“…too many students are likely to believe that they are the ones who would have been admitted if racial preferences were ended. Rather than respond to such misperceptions, policymakers and voters should take a sober look at the actual benefits and costs before they take the step of ending racial preference in college admissions.”
This would seem to indicate an argument that the “atmosphere” among white students, while a reaction to AA, is a false reaction which should not be taken seriously by policymakers and voters.
What the story says is that at highly selective universities, where a significant percentage of applicants are refused, the right skin color is the equivalent of hundreds of SAT points or one letter grade higher GPA. It goes on to say that at universities where almost everyone who applies gets in it is not much of a factor.
The highly selective universities are the one we are talking about. What that means is at a highly selective university a minority with a 2.8 GPA has the same chance as a white one with a 3.8 GPA all else being equal. That is a different standard for minorities. To say otherwise is to deny the obvious.
The white students who have been denied admission can not know if they would have gotten in if the playing field was level. All they know is that because of AA someone less qualified than they were got in. A big education campaign telling them “You probably were not one of the ones discriminated against, but we can’t be sure” is not going to placate them.
The rest of the article tries to get around these facts with the standard liberal claptrap of “It doesn’t matter what damage we cause now because we are building a brave new world”.
Let’s try to get out of the “the student wouldn’t know” argument. If the high school was at all competitive, like mine was, you know exactly where you place in the rankings and you know exactly where your friends place. You also know what clubs and organizations your friends have joined. Finally, senior year is just one long conversation about what colleges you applied to and where you are going and where you got rejected from, etc.
Maybe some high schools aren’t like that, but some definitely are, and the students can often measure themselves against each other quite well.
The bad feelings come out of students who often know with a good deal of certainty that they had better test scores, a higher GPA, and were more active in activities than someone who got admitted to the same school that they were rejected from. I’m sure you can argue that both candidates were borderline and that in any given year, either could have been rejected or accepted, but the fact is that the student doesn’t believe that schools choose randomly from borderline cases. And if that is true, then there must be some other reason that his friends are being accepted while he is not.
Whatever the intentions of AA were, the way it is being implemented is to sometimes accept minorities over majorities with better qualifications. I can’t imagine that some people don’t see this happens at least some of the time, unless they were not brought up in a racially diverse environment.
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Did you read the rest of my comments?? whatever you know, think you know etc. about your particular classmates, you have ** less thank zero** knowledge about the thousands of other applicants. So unless your entire high school comprised the entire freshman class at some university, your observations and assumptions about your classmates and their aspirations are worthless in extrapolating to any particular school.
wring, I don’t get it. Maybe I did miss something you said. Why would you need to know anything about the rest of the college’s freshman class? As long as you can tell that in your school, there was no person in the majority that got accepted to a particular school with less qualifications than any one minority, and at the same time there were numerous cases of minorities that got accepted over majorities with less qualifications, you have a good working basis to determine certain things about the admission policy of that particular college. Sure it’s not the full picture, but there is definitely something going on.
Sorry about the run-on sentence.
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I’m pretty sure the difference between 2.8 and 3.8 is more than one letter grade. I gather you’re basing your assertion on this quote from the article:
Note that this does not, repeat not mean that there is an automatic lower standard for minorities, nor does it mean there are “awards” of higher GPA’s adjusted onto minority applications, only that the probabilities are the same for a B- white male student as for a C- minority student.
The rest of the article, on the contrary, evenhandedly addresses the costs and benefits of “group-based preferences” and concludes that[list=a][]“We might wish to pursue affirmative action in higher education to compensate for labor market discrimination.”[]“Although there has been surprisingly little systematic effort to assess their impact, there is some evidence that racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions benefit the groups they are intended to help.”"…it still remains to be seen whether the benefits of preferences are worth the costs being imposed on the youth in nonpreferred groups. As we argued above, the public choice may be distorted by the fact that whatever costs are being born by nonminority youth, the perceived costs are probably larger…"[/list=a]If such lukewarm, noncommital comments pass for you as “standard liberal claptrap”, I begin to understand how skewed your perspective really is.
Ok, let’s assume that you know all of each other’s grade point averages, club affiliations, test scores etc. and that it’s accurate information. You’re assuming 'cause Fred who had a 3.2 and is white didn’t get in, but Frank who’s got a 3.1 and is black DID get in, that it was due specifically to AA preferential treatment, and that Frank, in essense, displaced Fred.
Two problems with that (both have been illustrated in this thread).
- As I pointed out on the first page, the assumption that a test score fo 1300 is always to be preferred/selected over the test score of 1298 (or GPA of 3.3 to be preferred over 3.2) is false. Generally speaking, the two are considered to be the same. They seperate the candidates into bands of students - for example one group of ‘yes, we definately want this person’ one set of ‘no, we definately don’t want this person’ and a large group of ‘maybes’. So, the group may include both Fred and Frank, even tho’ Fred’s GPA/test scores may be higher, they may not be significantly higher. In the “maybe” category, other criteria (see below) may come into play.
2 College admissions are based on more than simple grade point/test score analysis. Often there is a request for a written statement from the student, and letters of reference. In addition, school officials themselves have been known to write letters on behalf of certain students. In addition, while both may have belonged to two sports and three clubs, there may be something about the clubs/sports themselves that tipped the balance (one may have belonged to a volunteer club vs. the other being in the ‘we like Brittney Spears’ Club for example). All of this info would not be available to you, but would be used to determine who would be accepted.
The fact that the only difference your friends are able to observe is that one is black, the other white, does not mean that it was the only difference.
To follow wring’s point:
There really are no set standards for college admission. When I was at Duke, my friends had tons of stories about how, for example, they got accepted at Harvard and Duke but rejected at Penn, while a similarly qualified friend was accepted at Penn and Duke but rejected at Harvard, another was accepted at Harvard and Penn but rejected at Duke, and still another was accepted at all three but rejected at, say, Berkeley.
When you have people with similar qualifications competing for the same spots, it comes down to a lot of intangibles and subjective evaluation on the part of each school’s admissions committee. To say that students would generally be able to pinpoint the cause of their rejection as being affirmative action, even assuming a large high school and the rest of it, seems pretty silly.
Affirmative Action People:
I remember once seeing an Abbot and Costello skit (or maybe I heard it on the radio) where Costello is in a verbal altercation with a cameraman. It went like this:
Cameraman: “I’ll fight you.”
Costello: “And I’ll fight you.”
CM: “And I’ll fight you!!!”
CS: “And I’ll fight you!!!”
CM: ”And I’ll fight you!!!”
CS: ”And I’ll fight you!!!. (I guess it’s a tie).”
I may return however, if any new points are brought up that have not already been responded to.
Well, you’ve convinced me that maybe it’s possible that the schools are taking something into account that the students don’t know about. Which is why you often hear statements like, “He must have written one hell of an essay” all the time. Of course, in the back of many minds is the feeling that he didn’t write one hell of an essay, which is the problem that the OP is talking about.
So maybe it would be good to talk to someone who actually works in the admissions office of a college to find out what they actually do. Official statements about their methodology would always phrase everything just right, so it won’t be that good of an indicator.
I guess beyond that, or an in-depth investigation, this argument is moot. I will leave saying that my opinion is that many colleges do have different standards for different people, but I realize that I can not be completely sure of that.
One last thing I just thought of: would looking at the average GPA, SATs, accomplishments of different groups that were admitted to a college add any insight?
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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by pldennison *
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Duh, yourself. The fact still remains that there are more poor whites than poor blacks. But then, liberals pretty much hate lower class whites, so it’s not to be expected that a liberal would care anything about white poverty.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by pldennison *
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Your token attempt at fairness is appreciated, but the fact remains that liberals hate poor and working class whites.
I conclude that he’s probably a good deal less prejudiced than you are. Lefties are such a hoot. They pride themselves on their open-mindedness, tolerance and insight, and yet they’re as bigoted, stupid and as full of self-righteous hatred as any Bible-thumping moron in the Religious Right.
Hahahahahah! Are you implying that my mother’s boyfriend is a “leftie”? Oh man, oh man, oh man–you could not possibly, in a thousand years, be farther off-base.
Wow, I think you actually managed, in around 100 words, to contribute an entirely fact-free post. Congratulations, I guess. :rolleyes:
Aw, c’mon Phil; admit you’re a bleeding heart liberal! --Hey, wanna join me and Gadarene over at wring’s house for a hate party? Last time we had so much fun planning the next big liberal effort to oppress the poor and the working class whites!
Ya shoulda been there, man…
Damn - the meetings’ at my house this time? I simply don’t have enough straw for the burning effigies. Shrug. Guess I’ll have to stop at the Farm & Fleet store…