Sure. I’m interested in what he said. If he said something else that contradicted it, so what? I disagree with him.
For another example, Thomas Jefferson said “all men are created equal,” yet he owned slaves. Does that mean we should believe slavery is an acceptable exception to the ideal that all men are created equal? I don’t think so - do you?
And I agree with the ideal, and disagree with the second part, because I think it violates the ideal. And even if you accept it, as I said, there’s the matter of history. I’m sure King wouldn’t think AA should be permanent, or used everywhere. Making sure blatant racists hire some black garbage men in 1965 is far different from what we’re talking about today.
No I’m not. I’m debating fairly and logically. I’m happy to continue discussion. You’re the one who said you were done. If you are, fine. If not, fine.
Well, there’s evidence and evidence. The article that you linked to is not actually an investigation of affirmative action. It summarizes research investigating the effects of “mismatch” in one particular case, not related to affirmative action. What does that tell us about mismatch in the affirmative action case? Nothing definite–recall from the OP that because of affirmative action, blacks attend schools with white students whose SAT scores are more than 300 points higher, and with Asians whose scores are even higher than that. And at UT, blacks admitted because of affirmative action were at the 52nd percentile on average, compared to the 89th percentile for white classmates. So affirmative action created a huge mismatch for many black undergraduates. If the research by Gordsky and Kurlaender was investigating a more modest case of mismatch, it wouldn’t tell us anything about the results of such a severe mismatch.
The analysis produces a result that will strike many people as intuitively implausible: the number of black lawyers produced by American law schools each year and subsequently passing the bar would probably increase if those schools collectively stopped using racial preferences. Indeed, the absolute number of black law graduates passing the bar on their first attempt—an achievement important both for a lawyer’s self-esteem and for success in the legal market—would be much larger under a race-blind regime than under the current system of preferences. There are two simple reasons for this surprising result. First, the main effect of contemporary racial preferences by law schools is to reshuffle blacks along the distribution of schools; six out of every seven blacks currently in law school would have qualified for admission at an ABA-accredited school under a race-blind system. Second, the elimination of racial preferences would put blacks into schools where they were perfectly competitive with all other students—and that would lead to dramatically higher performance in law school and on the bar. Black students’ grades, graduation rates, and bar passage rates would all converge toward white students’ rates. The overall rate of blacks graduating from law school and passing the bar on their first attempt would rise from the 45% measured by the LSAC-BPS to somewhere between 64% and 70%.
Which means nothing. The cause of the mismatch is irrelevant as it pertains to the effects directly related to mismatching.
So do other Whites and Asians. You keep acting as if every Black student has those scores and every White student has higher scores.
Why do you think that means that means they will necessarily be worse students, and why do you think that mismatch is more substantial than the one studied that found the opposite results?
IF? Are you alleging it did or didn’t? Also, why do you think a “severe” mismatch is both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrable, and relatively common? Also, why would the result of this severe mismatch completely reverse the results of the study, AND cancel out any positive gains made with slight or moderate mismatches? Because that is what would have to happen for your general proposition to be true.
Even if I agree with the cite about law students, how would Blacks be better off if more of us passed the bar on the first try, but there are far fewer Black lawyers in general?
This is one of these issues were we can probably play dueling cites all day. Here is what I would say as to whether this makes even intuitive sense. Why is first-time bar passage a more useful metric for lawyer quality or educational success than getting through 3 years of law school?
No, actually I don’t. I simply assume that everyone on this message board is familiar with the concept of an average. While I could throw the words “on average” into every single sentence about comparisons of SAT scores, I view it as unnecessary because of that assumption. Surely quibbling about that serves no purpose other than to distract from the main points under discussion.
I’d think the answer is pretty straightforward: no one becomes a lawyer without passing the bar. Dr. Sanders’ data shows that if racial preferences were eliminated, the total number of blacks passing the bar and thus becoming lawyers would increase. The great majority of those who pass the bar do so on their first try, but it doesn’t matter if we’re focusing on those who pass on their first try or ever; the result remains the same.
The point is that your pervasiveness and severity of that mismatch is not known by just using the average. Furthermore, if a study wanted to delineate the effects of mismatching, then race is not relevant at all.
Eventually. Passing on the first time means something, but is less important than the study makes it seem. They also don’t seem to take into account the varying difficulties of the exam in different places, the use of prep courses, etc.
Please show where they follow all these people to see whether they eventually pass the bar? Also, please expound upon why you think mismatching doesn’t prevent people from graduating, but prevents them from doing well on the bar? Surely 3 years of study is a much better gauge of ability than one test.
There is a compounding effect between white privilege and wealth but white privilege exists without wealth. White males can still fall on hard times or be subjected to injustice and poor fortune but on average, society is built with them in mind. If you google Scalzi and white privilege there is a somewhat comical analogy with video games that sometimes get through to people.
Being born a rich white male might mean you were born on third base. Being a white male means you are probably going to get a turn at bat. Being a black male doesn’t mean you get a wiffle ball bat but the pitcher doesn’t really mind beaning you.
No I’m saying that YOUR opinion is ignorant and uninformed.
I agree we should try to get at the problem earlier but we’ve been trying to do that for at least as long as we have been trying affirmative action. And affirmative action seems to be the final step that actually changes the concentration of black in colleges and the middle class.
I’m not the one that is redefining racism contrary to every definition.
In any event, we are talking about racism in the sociological sense ane in the sociological sense racism=bigotry+power.
I’m judging you by your words. You seem ignorant and blinded by you inability to see beyond the fact that someone is getting an advantage over you and you’re really not used to it.
I don’t think you’re a racist (or at least no more racist than anyone else). When I bring up white privilege and point out that you might not see it because of your gender and race, I’m not calling you racist, I’m saying that you have social biases (we all do) and one of your social biases (and we are all blind to our own social biases, almost by definition).
So this thing we call white privilege has been very poorly explained by people and they just say “listen, if you’re white in America, you have advantages that you can’t even see” and it is actually a confluence (or syndrome) of biases combined with the current white male dominated society that makes for white privilege.
This makes you reject AA and look for some other way to address the problem that will be less effective than some fomr of preference (or other advantage) at the college level because you think that this would be racist.
For example, a lot of people have an in group bias that they are not even aware of, so when all the people at the top are white males, they exhibit a subconscious preference for white males so to the extent that the subjective opinions of people at the top are relevant to success, white males tend to succeed with more frequency or to a greater extent than others.
A lot of people have a belief that the world is somehow just and this combined with a self serving bias convinces us that anything we achieve is solely the result fo our efforts and not the result of any intrinsic social advantages we may have. Combine this with the self serving bias that attributes your successes to your innate ability while your failures are due to extrinsic (frequently unjust) factors, you end up not only feeling that your successes are your own but also that your failures (or lack of even MORE success) are the result of extrinsic factors like AA.
Its not just white males that are subject to cognitive biases, its just that the collective cognitive biases of white males have an aeffect on how a lot of white males think.
Cognitive biases of others also reinforce this effect. Before Obama, if you asked people to give you an example of a leader, they were overwhelmingly likely to name a white male. Now they are overwhelmingly likely to pick a male 9not just white males and Obama, males across the spectrum). When Hillary gets elected I predict that a lot more people will start naming females (not just Hillary Clinton but other female leaders as well.
The fact that you find the notion that your positions are being affected by your perspective uncomfortable doesn’t make it low or racist, it should be an opportunity for you to engage in some self reflection.
Why do you think everything is a game? When I say YES pile, the YES pile is always smaller than the avaialble spots. For example, lets say that Hogwarts has 1000 spots and 10,000 applications and hogwarts has an AA program for muggleborn wizards. Their YES pile will have 500 applicants, their MAYBE pile will have 1000 applicants. Based on their AA policy, they admit 40 muggleborns of which 19 would have gotten in without the AA preference. So there are 21 muggleborns who were admitted that would not have been admitted absent the AA preference. And a pile of 1000 MAYBEs, of which 519 were more qualified than 21 of the muggleborns that got in but no single one of them have any guarantee (or even likelihood, a 1 in 25 chance) of getting in.
All this is in the name of ancient history when wizards ruled then world and enslaved all the muggles for 4 centuries, then subjected made them second class citizens for another century which created biases, prejudices and dsitributions of welath and privilege that extend to the present.
So which of the 519 did not get in because of AA? Part of the point I am making is that you probably perceive AA to be making some huge difference in outcomes but in actuality makes relative miniscule differences in admission rates of non-AA applicants.
Yes, the whole world is wrong but you (and a bunch of other white males).
No, you can be objective about it. Find a toothless white male that was rejected from an institution that has an AA proggram and find a millionaire black kid with worse credentials that got in. It doesn’t happen. The inequity in AA that I see today is not wealthy blacks getting in instead of poor whites, the inequity I see is the children of African immigrants getting in instead of the descendants of slaves.
You’re going to have to explain that one to me.
I think we can have AA without quotas so I don’t sweat it. Do I think that harvard should admit the 100 best black applicants that apply? No. I don’t think that is doing anyone any favors. Do I think that harvard should be able to show a preference for black applicants? Yes.
Wait, I’m confused what we are arguing about. I thought you were arguing that any sort of prefefence given to blacks was racism. If you only meant that the thing that is already illegal is bad, then I agree we should stop doing it.
Because thats not giving them a preference, thats changing facts.
I think they are unnecessary so if it gets your panties in a twist then we don’t have to use them.
So you don’t see at all why an Asian’s perspective might be more objective than a white male’s perspective? Not on an individual basis but as a whole. As a whole asians support AA which doesn’t not benefit them in the least today. As a whole white males seem really bitter that someone other than them are getting preferences.
Yes
Other than American Indians, who are you talking about?
Yes, because Jim Crow and the discrimination of the past did.
Do you have some justification for preferring whites over Asians in college admissions? But for the whole 400 years of slavery and 100 years of segregation, I think I would probably agree with you that giving blacks large preferences in the admissions process would be unfair.
Okay, two things. First, in post #162, you linked to an article summarizing the research by Kurlaender and Grodsky. That was on a website with a clearly stated, pro-affirmative action agenda. That summary you linked implies that the researchers found that mismatched students were better all around. But I went to site for Sociology of Education and read the abstract. (The paper itself is not available.) Unsurprisingly, what they found was more of a mixed bag: “Consistent with the mismatch hypothesis, we find that students accumulate more credits when they attend less demanding institutions. However, students do not earn higher grades and are no more or less likely to drop out of schools where they are overmatched and are less likely to drop out than they would have been had they attended less demanding institutions.”
Second, and more importantly, you’re wrong in saying “the cause of the mismatch is unimportant”. There exists a large pile of research documenting the effects of affirmative action by studying, directly, what happens to students admitted to college because of their race. We’ve seen a small portion of that research in this thread, and the results are very clear: students get placed in colleges that aren’t a good match for their skill level and many drop out as a result. Since we have such a large amount of research documenting the effects of affirmative action, why on earth would we rely on a study that had nothing to do with affirmative action?
Let me offer an analogy. Suppose you wanted to know what happened to people who get brain damage from a head injuries. You have fifty good studies documenting what happens to people who get brain damage from head injuries. Someone points you to a study about the effects of brain lead poisoning. We don’t simply assume that since the new paper is about brain damage, its results carry over to the case of brain damage from head injuries. It’s best to use the studies that are specifically on the topic that we’re looking at, especially when we have a whole lot of them.
That’s not difficult. In the Sanders article, starting on page 442, there’s a section titled “Effects of Affirmative Action on Passing the Bar”. Read that section and you’ll get everything you could possibly want to know on the topic.
I don’t recall saying any such thing. I think, and the Sanders article confirms, that mismatching due to racial preferences has substantially lowered the graduation rate among blacks admitted to law school. Among those who graduate, it’s also lowered their GPAs. That’s what the data show. It would be nice if you stop trying to pin things on me that I never actually said.
Let me agree with Bill Clinton when he said, “Mend it, don’t end it.”
I fully support all the court decisions that have limited the scope of affirmative action programs to date. Anyone care to disagree and support quotas or giving extra points to minorities just for being minorities?
I initially linked to the actual study itself. It’s not as if your studies are not reposted on biased sites.
How is that a mixed bag? It also completely invalidates the other studies you linked to in addition to explaining why the more popular ones erred.
Again, you are the one who is wrong. You are conflating two overlapping things. If mismatching, placing students at schools in which they can’t compete, is problematic in and of itself, you would see the results no mater what. It doesn’t matter if the cause of the mismatching is AA if you think the mismatch itself is the issue.
And we have seen studies that directly contradict that result.
Because you are not questioning AA, but rather the supposed unintended consequence (mismatching) of it.
What an atrocious analogy. This is very simple. You say A is bad because A causes B, and B has been demonstrated to be bad. First let’s just assume that the causal link is actually there. The problem is that this new study says B is not bad, thus your logic that A is bad for that reason is flawed. A could be bad for other reasons, but that is not what is at issue.
If you contend that mismatching is only or particularly bad for Black kids, please explain why you think that would be the case.
Again, even if I accept this as true, why do you think the net result is bad? Think of it like this. Navy seal training has a roughly 20% pass rate. Is that in and of itself a problem? Do you think they should have higher minimum standards, and that the people with lower scores are hurting themselves by training to be seals?
Bad comparison. There’s only one way to become a SEAL. Seal training in the US Navy. Colleges and law schools, on the other hand, are of varying toughness. Sticking a student with 1100 SATs into Princeton next to kids with 1400 SATs isn’t going to go well for him.
But hey, I guess that’s why grade inflation happened.
I don’t see much support for quotas, but I have no problem with goals. If I ran a school or a business, I would like a diverse student body/faculty/staff/employees.
I don’t want the government forcing me to hit a target, but if I have 1000 employees and they’re all white men, then perhaps there is some improper racial discrimination going on. Trying harder to diversify, (“giving extra points to minorities just for being minorities”) doesn’t offend my sense of justice one bit.
And there is only one way to become a Harvard grad. Matriculating at Harvard. Harvard just one of many colleges just as being a seal is one of many branches/units of the armed forces.
As are the various military training programs.
Why is it not going to go well for him? Are you suggesting the two people are in direct competition?
Liar. You said it’s because I’m white. Not my opinions, and not just me - because I’m white. It’s as racist as you can get.
That’s stunning. You do something because racists did it! What a startling admission. Wha’ts next, lynching white people because Jim Crow lynched black people?
No - I just said I don’t prefer that.
I skipped the rest because I can’t keep up and because I’m not going to get into a stupid debate over labels with you. You are exhibiting racial prejudice - not only in your policies, but personally, against me, and you’re justifying racism by pointing to the very racism you claim you want to remedy. That’s pathetic, but revealing.
Distill both your opponents position and your response to its essence. I have never seen so many words wasted. I haven’t read all your posts because I don’t care enough, no one here does either. Responding to you sentence by sentence is nonsense.
You keep hearing whatever makes you feel like a victim, don’t you? You are obviously afflicted by the blind spot that many white males have to white privilege. You go back and forth from being against any sort of racial preference as racist and then you say that you are OK with AA just not quotas. I don’t think you know what you believe, you just have a visceral objection to AA because you think it discriminates against you and you’re just not used the the world working in a way where your bread always falls butter side up.
I don’t know if you have really have trouble conprehending what you are reading or if you are trying to draw a foul but you asked if I would follow the one drop rule in conferring racial preferences and I said that Jim Crow used the one drop rule so it would be appropriate to use the same rule when determining who should be a beneficiary of that racial preference.
Or are you so blinded by your perspective that read what I said as “lets do onto others as they have done unto us?”
Which do you think we should do first? Eliminate the racial advantage that whites enjoy over Asians or eliminate the racial preference that AA afford to blacks?
IOW, you’re running away and dodging questions. Go ahead run away. I hope you find solace in the world that you have constructed for yourself where you are right about thing you don’t even understand.
Wait, I’m confused what we are arguing about. I thought you were arguing that any sort of prefefence given to blacks was racism. If you only meant that the thing that is already illegal is bad, then I agree we should stop doing it.