# No, getting a job or school admission through AA does not show one is unqualified for it **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 22, 2015, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560 "2015-05-22T01:14:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Some\_Call\_Me.Tim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Some\_Call\_Me.Tim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Some_Call_Me.Tim)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2015, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/61 "2015-05-23T14:07:02Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > Duke basketball gets 13 total scholarships for each team. 5 current players are white. That leaves 8 players, 3 freshman, 2 sophomore, 2 juniors and 1 senior. Football has 85 scholarship and about 50 of those are black players. Red shirting is very popular so each class has about 10 football players. That would leave an average of around 15 black athletes on scholarship per class. Does not seem enough to swing the median that much. The majority of athletes at Duke are white, just not in the money sports. Wait, so you believe that every single football scholarship student who enters Duke receives a football scholarship fora full 5 years? In the real world most incoming scholarship athletes do not go on to receive 5 full years of support, so your method of dividing the total recipients by 5 vastly under-counts the number of incoming freshman in question. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2015, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/62 "2015-05-24T12:40:02Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Do you really think that a majority student who is mediocre but whose parents can afford to send him to get coached on the SATs is more deserving than a smarter minority student without these advantages? SAT prep does not have much effect on scores. The best study on this matter found that SAT prep with a private tutor increased the score around 37 points. That is not even close to the advantage AA gives to black applicants. If every white applicant had a private tutor and no black applicant did it would still be unfair since the AA advantage is so much higher. However, contrary to your assertion it is in fact black applicants who [disproportionately use SAT prep](http://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/salon/files/2011/11/Racial_differences_SFJ_89_2_Alon-final.pdf). So if you are going to use SAT prep as a negative you will end up admitting fewer black applicants not white applicants. Personally I would not discount any applicant who uses SAT prep because the effect is so small and it show a level of ambition that is admirable. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2015, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/63 "2015-05-24T13:24:07Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > I don’t think “lazy and uncaring” explains all the gap. Nor do I think it’s all about the parents, or all about poverty. As one of the few people on this board willing to call themselves an “AA beneficiary”, I should also be honest and admit that I did not grow up in an impoverish home. I was raised by two college-educated parents. I attended the best public schools in the city. I didn’t have to dodge either KKK rallies or drug dealers on the way to school. I grew up watching 3-2-1 Contact and reading science text books, and at any early age I identified with everything scientific and analytical. I excelled in my studies (despite attempts to put me in remedial classes…but I digress). By all intents and purposes, I should have knocked the SAT out of the park–especially since I took not one, but TWO prep courses. But my SAT score was just average. It was below-average for my undergraduate institution. When I got that score, I knew there was no way I was going to get accepted at any “good” school. I was so demoralized about my future that my father found me in the fetal position on the living room floor with the crumpled piece of paper in my hand, barely able to speak. I was so ashamed of myself. It seemed like all that hard work was all for naught. That’s the thought that reverberated in my sad little head. > > Fast forward five years, when I took the GRE for graduate school. The first time I took the test, I was so anxious that I got lost on the way to the testing center and ended up doing horribly. The second time I took the test–at the urging of my mother and after my twin sis had done so well on it–percentile-wise I scored in the 90s for all three sections. My subject test score was off the chain too. I was so proud of myself no one could tell me nuthin’! > > So according to the SAT, I had only fair-to-middling aptitude. Not shameful if you are aiming for a community college, but horrible if you are aspiring for a Research I institution. But on the GRE, I was at the head of the class. The score was good enough to make me eligible for Mensa. > > I don’t think my IQ changed over the span of five years. Someone doesn’t go from “average aptitude” to “gifted” just by going to college. But I do think my confidence level increased a whole lot. That is the only variable that changed for me. > > In high school, there’s a clear hierarchy of “smart” kids, “kinda smart” kids, “average” kids, and “remedial” kids. Every semester, I’d hurry to look at my class schedule to make sure I hadn’t been accidentally placed with the “remedial” kids AGAIN. I was self-conscious about my math ability, since all the “smart” kids were in calculus, but I was in trigonometry like the “average” kids. Peek into the remedial and average English and social studies classes, and you’d see a sea of brown faces. Peek into the honors and AP classes, and it was always a sea of white–except for my face and a couple of others. It would have been a special black kid who wouldn’t have internalized anything negative seeing this scene playing over and over again since the sixth grade. > > But when I got to college, every classroom was a sea of white. There weren’t any remedial classrooms dominated by black kids. I wasn’t under any threat of being “accidentally” placed in a class for dumb kids. I didn’t have classmates teasing me about not being in the “smart” classes in college. I had a couple of really cool professors in college that made me feel extra smart and competent. I experienced that kind of encouragement in high school, too. But it’s different being compared against an assortment of students versus super-duper intelligent ones. I always thought the HS teachers were just being sweet. But I actually believed my college professors, because why would they lie? My HS teachers knew I was insecure. My college professors didn’t. > > So to be honest, I think the gap for me was purely psychological. As a young teenager, I had internalized a lot of the negative messages about blackness, and I think it ended up manifesting itself in poor test performance. But by the time I was 21 years old, I’d shrugged a lot of that baggage off. (My confidence would wane once I was in grad school. But it didn’t have anything to do with race and everything to do with grad school being a soul-sucking obstacle course of failed experiments, rejected manuscripts, and blowhard dissertation committee members). > > I think my case is a perfect example of [stereotype threat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat). But for someone else, maybe it’s something else. Stereotype threat is probably a myth. The studies that have found a stereotype threat have not replicated, and the larger meta studies have found no evidence for the stereotype threat. What is more likely in your case is test anxiety. That definitely exists and can lower scores. However, I know of no data that blacks suffer from it disproportionately, in fact given the realities of AA one would expect whites and asians to suffer from it more than black students. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2015, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/64 "2015-05-24T14:12:46Z")
I’m not seeing the logic. There is no meritocracy.- ok let’s take this as given Therefore the govt should enforce preference of one group over another. - not seeing how this follows. The existence of AA does not move society towards a meritocracy. In fact it deepens society’s lack of meritocracy if anything. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2015, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/65 "2015-05-25T02:50:17Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > The existence of AA does not move society towards a meritocracy. In fact it deepens society’s lack of meritocracy if anything. Agreed. But surely meritocracy is a myth. Did I merit my parents? Did I merit my circumstances? Did I merit the chance happenings in my life? My gender? We need AA because we tend to self-identify into broad groups, and we need those broad groups broadly represented. This is a greater value than is “meritocracy.” ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2015, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/66 "2015-05-26T20:18:20Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > Agreed. > > But surely meritocracy is a myth. > > Did I merit my parents? Did I merit my circumstances? Did I merit the chance happenings in my life? My gender? > > We need AA because we tend to self-identify into broad groups, and we need those broad groups broadly represented. This is a greater value than is “meritocracy.” That is a disgusting sentiment. Reducing people to nothing more than a member of a group and them manipulating the numbers so the proper groups are helped and hurt. This country had a problem for hundreds of years reducing people to no more than their race or nationality instead of treating people as individuals. Now some would not only condone the idea that people are to be judged by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character, but call that a greater value. Just awful. ---
**Author:** ![Haberdash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Haberdash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Haberdash)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2015, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/67 "2015-05-26T20:33:12Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > [Here](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118792252575507571)is an article about a study that shows only 45% Black graduates of law school pass the bar exam on their first try as opposed to 78% of white. Only 57% of Black law school graduates ever pass the Bar exam. > [Here](http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2007/R3481.pdf)is an old article examining affirmative action in medical school that says that 50% of black doctors become board certified while 80% of white doctors become board certified. I’d much rather see the rates for groups coming out of particular schools – black v. white graduates of School X. 80% of law schools shouldn’t exist in the first place and admit people who have little hope of passing the bar every year. Your data may show nothing more than “a disproportionate number of people who go to law school when they shouldn’t are black.” ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2015, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/68 "2015-05-26T21:06:55Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > Agreed. > > But surely meritocracy is a myth. > > Did I merit my parents? Did I merit my circumstances? Did I merit the chance happenings in my life? My gender? > > We need AA because we tend to self-identify into broad groups, and we need those broad groups broadly represented. This is a greater value than is “meritocracy.” I’d say meritocracy is an ideal, not a myth. A myth is something that doesn’t exist, but that people think exists already. An ideal is something that doesn’t exist (at least not in perfect form), but that people think we should aspire to nonetheless. Things like “objectivity in judging” and, for that matter, “justice”. Just because something doesn’t exist, or is imperfect, doesn’t mean we should therefore not strive to achive it; just because some people have advantages based on (say) the family, class and (yes) “racial” group they were born into, does not mean that we should not attempt, insofar as is possible, to aspire to let people compete on a level playing field. I am much more sympathetic to the (admittedly more common) argument that AA is needed to level out the playing field before, as it were, the game begins, than I am to the notion that we should discard the ideal of level playing fields in favour of “broad representation” as an ideal. The real debate, in my mind, is whether attempts to “level the playing fields” through AA suffer from unintended consequences that end up doing more harm than good, or not. ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2015, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/69 "2015-05-26T21:59:13Z")
> [@](#): > > No, getting a job or school admission through AA does not show one is unqualified for it While this is true, it does not mean that one is qualified for it either. For that matter in a very real sense neither does the degree the school issues. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2015, 7:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/70 "2015-05-27T07:15:33Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > This country had a problem for hundreds of years reducing people to no more than their race or nationality instead of treating people as individuals. Your use of the past tense is peculiar. Do you imagine that blacks don’t [still get discriminated against simply because of their race](http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html)? > [@](#): > > A job applicant with a name that sounds like it might belong to an African-American - say, Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones - can find it harder to get a job. […] > > Now a “field experiment” by NBER Faculty Research Fellows Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan measures this discrimination in a novel way. In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. […] > > The results indicate large racial differences in callback rates to a phone line with a voice mailbox attached and a message recorded by someone of the appropriate race and gender. Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. […] > > Race, the authors add, also affects the reward to having a better resume. Whites with higher quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks than whites with lower quality resumes. But the positive impact of a better resume for those with Africa-American names was much smaller. […] > > If the fictitious resume indicates that the applicant lives in a wealthier, or more educated, or more-white neighborhood, the callback rate rises. Interestingly, this effect does not differ by race. Indeed, if ghettos and bad neighborhoods are particularly stigmatizing for African-Americans, one might have expected them to be helped more than whites by having a “good” address. In other words, the study authors found that identical resumes showing identical levels of qualification and achievement and identical social background in terms of good neighborhood and so forth were still treated differently by employers based solely on the perceived race of the applicant. Our society’s problems with racially discriminatory treatment of blacks have definitely improved from what they were hundreds of years ago, but it’s not like the problems simply don’t exist anymore. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2015, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/71 "2015-05-27T19:56:06Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > Your use of the past tense is peculiar. Do you imagine that blacks don’t [still get discriminated against simply because of their race](http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html)? > In other words, the study authors found that identical resumes showing identical levels of qualification and achievement and identical social background in terms of good neighborhood and so forth were still treated differently by employers based solely on the perceived race of the applicant. > > Our society’s problems with racially discriminatory treatment of blacks have definitely improved from what they were hundreds of years ago, but it’s not like the problems simply don’t exist anymore. That particular study is flawed in that names are not just markers of race, they are also markers of class. People with distinctive black names are more likely to have grown up in segregated neighborhoods and have poor single mothers. ([pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w9938.pdf)) So the study is not actually comparing apples to apples. Even if it was and that proves there is still discrimination going on, is it a good thing or a bad thing? If it bad, why is it bad? My answer is because whenever you treat someone as a group member and not as an individual you are taking away their humanity, and hurting them as a person. You are also hurting society by taking us further away from the meritocratic ideal. That is true no matter the race of the person being discriminated against. Thus it is as bad to discriminate against a black person as it is to discriminate against a white person, an asian person, a hispanic person, or an indian. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2015, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/72 "2015-05-27T20:20:00Z")
> [@Haberdash](#): > > I’d much rather see the rates for groups coming out of particular schools – black v. white graduates of School X. 80% of law schools shouldn’t exist in the first place and admit people who have little hope of passing the bar every year. Your data may show nothing more than “a disproportionate number of people who go to law school when they shouldn’t are black.” [This study (pdf)](http://www.unc.edu/edp/pdf/NLBPS.pdf) grouped law schools according to average LSAT score and undergrad GPA into six different groups and found that blacks failed to pass the bar the first time at significantly lower rates than whites in every grouping of law schools. For example black students at the top schools failed the bar exam at a similar rate as white who were in the 5th grouping of schools. ---
**Author:** ![Haberdash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Haberdash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Haberdash)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2015, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/73 "2015-05-27T20:28:45Z")
That’s a little more helpful. But I think the conclusions being drawn about the qualifications of those who practice may not be correct. Many law schools do not have the concept of “failing out,” We would expect that if less qualified students are admitted, they would be shepherded through. The bar exam is, in part, designed to catch those students before they reach practice. It seems that this is what’s going on, so there would be no basis for concluding that any given black attorney is unqualified. Other confounding factors: \*Black students may be more naive to the fact that law school does a poor job of preparing for the bar exam and not take the supplementary measures which students from other backgrounds know they need to pursue. \*Black exam sitters may be disproportionately clustered in states with a difficult exam and no practical limit on how many times you may attempt it (California). I think a lot of these attempts to make statistical conclusions about race fail to observe basic safeguards on screening the data for other factors like that. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2015, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/74 "2015-05-27T20:58:27Z")
> [@Haberdash](#): > > That’s a little more helpful. But I think the conclusions being drawn about the qualifications of those who practice may not be correct. > > Many law schools do not have the concept of “failing out,” We would expect that if less qualified students are admitted, they would be shepherded through. The bar exam is, in part, designed to catch those students before they reach practice. It seems that this is what’s going on, so there would be no basis for concluding that any given black attorney is unqualified. > > Other confounding factors: > \*Black students may be more naive to the fact that law school does a poor job of preparing for the bar exam and not take the supplementary measures which students from other backgrounds know they need to pursue. > \*Black exam sitters may be disproportionately clustered in states with a difficult exam and no practical limit on how many times you may attempt it (California). > > I think a lot of these attempts to make statistical conclusions about race fail to observe basic safeguards on screening the data for other factors like that. It seems to me the problem with AA is the following. Obtaining a degree is mostly useful to other people as a shorthand for some sort of valuable achievement - that is, is is the basis for some rational positive discrimination on the part of others in favour of degree-holders. Others can’t be expected to know all the details about the individual and their situation: they, in part, look to the reputation of the school and the type of degree as a sort of guarantee - that this person is capable of such-and-such level of achievement. The dirty little secret is that much of the actual value of such a stamp of approval comes from the fact that the top-ranking schools are, typically, very selective about who they allow in as students. It isn’t so much that getting through school without flunking is an “achievement” worthy of note, as ‘getting in at all’. This is particularly true of law schools (at least it was when I went to one). The best schools were very hard to get into. This meant that others could be reasonably sure that people who went to one were part of a select group. This obviously has career repercussions - as the degree opens doors to high paying careers (in Canada at least, passing the bar isn’t hard and almost everyone who tries does it). So why is allowing visible minorities with a history of persecution in on easier terms a bad idea (or at least one with costs)? Well, that simply flows logically from the premises - that ownership of a degree is, essentially, a sort of guarantee of quality on which others can base rational positive discrimination. If those relying on such a guarantee know that a meaningful number of individuals from a particular visible minority group got in on easier terms than otherwise required, the rational calculus changes in the case of all individuals from that same group holding that degree. A person who wants to choose a candidate would have a rational basis to choose a non-minority degree holder over a member of a visible minority (some of whom benefit from AA) holding exactly the same degree - even though, of course, only some of the members of that visible minority benefitted from AA. The reason? That person has no way of knowing which individuals benefitted from AA and which did not. In short, the ‘degree as shorthand for achievement’ no longer works (to the same extent) for members of minority groups holding that degree: an unfair (but inevitable) penalty for members of that same group who did not personally benefit from AA (and an unfair boost to members of groups who are not eligible for AA and who hold degrees). ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2015, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560/75 "2015-05-28T14:10:56Z")
> [@Haberdash](#): > > That’s a little more helpful. But I think the conclusions being drawn about the qualifications of those who practice may not be correct. > > Many law schools do not have the concept of “failing out,” We would expect that if less qualified students are admitted, they would be shepherded through. The bar exam is, in part, designed to catch those students before they reach practice. It seems that this is what’s going on, so there would be no basis for concluding that any given black attorney is unqualified. > > Other confounding factors: > \*Black students may be more naive to the fact that law school does a poor job of preparing for the bar exam and not take the supplementary measures which students from other backgrounds know they need to pursue. > \*Black exam sitters may be disproportionately clustered in states with a difficult exam and no practical limit on how many times you may attempt it (California). > > I think a lot of these attempts to make statistical conclusions about race fail to observe basic safeguards on screening the data for other factors like that. The good thing about the Bar exam is that because it is race neutral if a black person passes the exam we can know that their credential is as good as a white or asian person who passed the same exam. The unfortunate part is that my understanding of current civil rights law is that the Bar exam would be illegal today if someone tried to come up with it. So other fields that want to have similar exams would be barred from doing so. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-getting-a-job-or-school-admission-through-aa-does-not-show-one-is-unqualified-for-it/720560.md?page=3)