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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Your use of the past tense is peculiar. Do you imagine that blacks don’t still get discriminated against simply because of their race?
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) 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.
This study (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.
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).
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.