SCOTUS rules States can ban race-based AA

Link to document here.

At least, I think that’s what this basically says.

The practical result will be a shift to merit-based selection processes for schooling and jobs, with filtering (likely) still available for socioeconomic opportunity, but not (self-assigned) race categories.

This is a disaster for higher education, where black candidates as a group substantially underscore whites and asians across all socioeconomic (SES) strata. In the job world, an employer who establishes any sort of screening examination for employment will run into the same issue: SES does not account for score differences, so without race-based considerations, job offers based on qualification exams will be lopsidedly extended to whites and asians.

I am not sure I have the answer, but I think this is a sad day for black americans and a sad day for those of us who think a society needs to have representation at all levels that bears some resemblance to the diversity we see in the public body.

I think Affirmative Action is a valid tool of social policy to redress disparities between different racial groups, especially since those disparities appear to be based overwhelmingly on historic societal discrimination.

Does the law in Michigan and the other States that have banned AA affect all colleges? Or just public ones. If it’s just public colleges, I have no issue with the law and feel the SCOTUS ruled correctly. Public institutions should only be allowed to implement independent policy decisions to the extent the legislature wishes them to do so, no different than any other State agency a State university should be able to receive direction from the State government on whether or not to give racial preference in admission.

If it affects private schools, I take some issue with it as I think they should be allowed to independently determine their admissions criteria.

But it’s already been established Affirmative Action isn’t constitutionally required, so it obviously makes sense that individual States could ban its practice if they chose to do so, I don’t actually see the argument under the Federal constitution prohibiting such a ban.

I disagree with you about SES, socioeconomic status certainly affects test scores. The rural South and Appalachia (the latter is almost entirely white) do horribly on standardized test scores and in fact I’d argue many white students in those areas have more disadvantages than urban minority populations.

For some reason the focus on poverty research is almost entirely on the urban minority poor, even though 85% of the poorest counties in the United States are rural. I think children from those counties, regardless of race, need just as much help as poor Hispanics or blacks and certainly more help than black, Hispanic, or Asian children of middle class or upper class backgrounds. Part of what’s goofy about the AA regime is it’s always benefited the minority children who need it less (those of means who have involved parents) without doing a lot to address the plight of those who need it the most. To even take advantage of AA programs requires guidance to even want to go to college, guidance in filling out forms and applications and etc–something that very poor children with half-literate single mothers raising them are ill equipped to handle.

Of course my point about college AA has always been it’s a symbolic band aid that was an easy thing to do for white liberal society to feel good about its self. The truth is it’s the primary school systems of poor minorities that need help, and since no one has any conception as to how to fix those systems we’ve just decided we’ll take the small number of children who can achieve some basic level of competency from those schools an admit them to colleges where they will drop out at much higher rates than the norm due to not being adequately prepared for the experience.

It might not produce the exact same result, but a switch to poverty* based Affirmative Action should mitigate this effect. To the extent that minorities are more represented in the higher income groups, then Affirmative Action should not be needed.

However, I have to agree with what Chief Justice Roberts said several yeas ago regarding this subject: The best way to stop discriminating by race is to stop discriminating by race.

*for lack of a better term

The Justices got this one right.

If the goal is to lift poor people out of poverty, then I think it’s fine to weight admissions by income level, given that well-off students of any race will have advantages over the less well-off.

The argument that has been presented to me for Affirmative Action tends to boil down to “Minorities were discriminated against in the past, so let’s discriminate against the majority to make up for it”. And I feel the response can always be “Two wrongs don’t make a right”.

Martin Hyde puts it well in his last paragraph. If you want more minorities to go to college, you need to improve their performance in K-12, not given them an artificial boost into college.

Universities are creative and will find a way around it, but they are going to continue to craft diverse classes who represent all populations of their state. A public university cannot leave swathes of a state unserved.

If they did go on full merit, I think a lot of white guys in California at least would eat their hat when they realized they had effectively set up the next generation of leaders in their state to be Asian women. Oops!

Vote was 6-2

Link to documents.

In her dissenting opinion, Sotomayor argued that the ban was an ad hoc device that infringes on individual rights because it excludes race and sex as criteria for admissions. Not sure how to make sense of that, except for the fact that the State excluding something takes the decision out of the hands of individuals?

Then use the democratic process to address the issue.

In this instance, Michigan voters have disagreed with your belief that the way to cure whatever ill may exist is to favor one race over another.

That’s already happened. Have you been to Berkeley lately?

The law says that public universities and other state government institutions cannot use affirmative action. The people of Michigan voted for this law by a large margin. Leftist groups sued to have the law overturned. If they won, it would mean, more or less, that affirmative action is now required, even when the people don’t want it. And they won at the state level, with all the Democratic appointees on the Michigan Supreme Court voting to overturn the will of the people. Fortunately the US Supreme Court reversed that decision and allowed democracy to prevail.

This was the right decision for several reasons. First, the USA is a democracy. When the people make a law, judges should not arbitrarily overrule it unless it clearly violates the Constitution.

Second, affirmative action is a type of racial discrimination. Racial discrimination is against the law in the United States. So there’s certainly no reason why any state should be required to have it.

Third, the reasoning used by Sotomayor seems utterly crazy. I can’t find the text of her dissenting opinion online, but the press quotes her as saying “a majority of the Michigan electorate changed the basic rules of the political process in that State in a manner that uniquely disadvantaged racial minorities”. Obviously this did not happen. The people of Michigan changed the law in a way that removed all unique advantages and disadvantages for any racial groups, and made the government treat all racial groups equally. What Sotomayor said is the exact opposite of the truth.

In fact, it’s fairly frightening that all the liberal justices in Michigan and two of those on the Supreme Court would vote in favor of overturning the people’s will in this case.

The SCOTUS didn’t decide that colleges/universities in the State of Michigan couldn’t use affirmative action for their student selection process. The court ruled that the voters in the State of Michigan can vote to decide whether colleges/universities in the State of Michigan can use affirmative action in their student selection process.

It seems to me that the voters in the state of Michigan had decided that student selection shouldn’t be made based on the color of someone’s skin or gender. The SCOTUS ruled that that decision was up to the voters in Michigan.

No, it wouldn’t mean that. Why do you think it would?

Would you allow that this, at least, was not always true? You agree with the Chief Justice that as of 2009 or whenever that decision was, it’s true. I wonder if we agree that when, for instance, poll taxes, aggressive vagrancy laws and so on were standard, the elegance of the statement notwithstanding, it would have kinda missed the reality of the situation.

Even further back, in 1883 the Supreme Court said it’s high time that the black man “ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.” Same idea as Roberts, but was that right in 1883?

True.

And if we define merit by grades- a common approach - state u classes nationwide will skew 60/40 female. Brave new world and all that. Hope everyone’s ready.

No. This decision is good for higher education and good for black Americans. It’s an established fact that affirmative action hurts black Americans:

The Painful Truth about Affirmative Action

The single biggest problem in this system – a problem documented by a vast and growing array of research – is the tendency of large preferences to boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively – even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.

We refer to this problem as “mismatch,” a word that largely explains why, even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out. Because of mismatch, racial preference policies often stigmatize minorities, reinforce pernicious stereotypes, and undermine the self-confidence of beneficiaries, rather than creating the diverse racial utopias so often advertised in college campus brochures.

The mismatch effect happens when a school extends to a student such a large admissions preference – sometimes because of a student’s athletic prowess or legacy connection to the school, but usually because of the student’s race – that the student finds himself in a class where he has weaker academic preparation than nearly all of his classmates. The student who would flourish at, say, Wake Forest or the University of Richmond, instead finds himself at Duke, where the professors are not teaching at a pace designed for him – they are teaching to the “middle” of the class, introducing terms and concepts at a speed that is unnerving even to the best-prepared student.

The student who is underprepared relative to others in that class falls behind from the start and becomes increasingly lost as the professor and his classmates race ahead. His grades on his first exams or papers put him at the bottom of the class. Worse, the experience may well induce panic and self-doubt, making learning even harder.

Affirmative Action Doesn’t Work. It Never Did.

A Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools

There is a simple answer to this problem that has the desired results with few negative effects. We live by the myth that we are able to predict future behaviour easily from past behaviours. This is not always true when the measures used are narrow. For instance in the UK you need very good secondary school exams to get into the most prestigious courses; yet it is simply shown that performance in these exams is not predictive of the class of university degree received on graduation- many of the top people at degree level will have performed only moderately at secondary school. Same would go I am sure for US tests.

So the answer is that rather than setting high thresholds for University entrance, ‘good enough’ thresholds should be set. Rather than automatically propelling the top 1% into Medicine and the top 5% into popular courses and the top 10% into slightly less popular courses and so on, one might be just as well served by taking the entire top 20% and awarding by lot the courses they have requested.

Given the ability of white middle class males to dominate exam based selection procedures in the UK, this would immediately ensure that those who had been discriminated against could not be held back by a class of people with privilege.

I think it’s true in general that there is a point where the Federal government shouldn’t step in and specially favor blacks (I say blacks as in the 19th century it was very specifically the Freedmen we were talking about.) Like I said about AA, it’s valid social policy for historic reasons, but policy decisions are supposed to be made by the legislature–not the courts.

I disagree with the timing in the 19th century, primarily due to the knowledge of knowing what came next, that the South had not reformed its views whatsoever and immediately instituted draconian racist laws the moment they escaped from the oversight of the Feds.

But I do posit that in the year 2014 it should be up to the States to decide whether or not minorities should receive special advantages in admission to public institutions. I’m a bit more leery of the States deciding what advantages private institutions can confer (and I’m still unsure if the Michigan law affects all colleges or only public ones.) I’d only favor the Federal government telling Michigan in what manner it can regulate its public universities when clear civil rights were at stake, for example if the legislature required universities not to admit blacks or women, or to exclude women from STEM majors or something ridiculous like that.

Private schools I wouldn’t want them too controlled by the State at all, I mean if AA is prohibited at all schools in Michigan is the concept of giving “legacies” preferential treatment still allowed? Or does the law only affect public schools–in which case it’s a pretty valid area for the legislature to make a policy decision.

I’m less a fan of any policy decision being enacted by referendum (as this one was) and in fact I think as a matter of good government no State constitution should allow for any referendum process. But I recognize it is valid for States to decide to allow referendums, even if it is unwise.

One of the southern states (Florida or Texas, maybe) had a policy that the top 10% (or some figure) from each high school was automatically admitted to the state university system. This also seems like a workable plan mitigate the effects of income on scholastic achievement. I think people are being short sighted if they think the only way to help poor and/or minority students is to profile them by race and the accord them some advantage in the process. After all, it’s economic disadvantages we are trying to address anyway, so why not attack that attribute dead on.

The obvious problem with this approach is that colleges and universities do not have unlimited facilities to handle an influx of more students. If State U can only accept 5,000 new freshman a year, it doesn’t matter if 10,000 applicants were qualified or 50,000 applicants were ‘good enough’, only 5,000 should get it.

If you want to argue that we should instead have a lottery system among the ‘good enough’, that is more defensible but I still think it has problems.

That is exactly what I mean. Decide the number of places, assess the number of applicants who are ‘good enough’ to benefit from a university education. draw lots.

It will annoy committed meritocrats, but would be much fairer in general.

That’s Texas, the top 10% of students in a High School graduating class must be accepted to any public university in Texas to which they apply. This actually has a race-preference effect, as it means there are guaranteed spots even at the prestigious UT-Austin for graduates of say, inner city black schools in Houston and such. But the % I believe can be modified as needed; the current cut off for UT-Austin is top 7%…I think schools were allowed to modify it based on their capacity to handle the inflow of applicants while still maintaining room for out of state and international students (which all public schools love because they pay much higher tuition.)

A white girl actually sued Texas over the % rule as she had very good grades but at a school where it wasn’t good enough to get in the top 10%; I can’t remember how it turned out.