Supreme Court poised to strike down affirmative action in Harvard and UNC cases - let's talk about the ramifications (now struck down, June 29, 2023)

Great Debates
241

After reading that great book you suggested (The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students), I am thinking that most of this is because the super-elite universities are disproportionately admitting from super-elite high schools. Here’s a bit of evidence:

The Supreme Court Justices Are All Ivy Law Grads, But What About High School?

The evidence in that book is that students at elite schools, who went to non-elite high schools, tend to be socially isolated from the kind of fellow-students and professors who could help launch them to leadership. While the book has some ideas on how to overcome this (ask professors to better explain the purpose and value of office hours), I think that, while a good idea, is unlikely to do much. The leaders are already leader-types before they get to Stanford.

242

This is good background on the stakes here:

Harvard will never be an engine of social mobility

I think the treatment effect of a few hundred more talented young minority students going to Harvard or Princeton instead of UNC or SUNY, as an undergraduate, is minor compared to the societal effect of preferential policies, which is to boost populist politics.

243

I don’t think it’s true that using socioeconomic status as a substitute for race-based AA will achieve similar diversity, at least among selective colleges and universities. Within every economic tier, the general rank-order of academic accomplishment is always the same, with asians on top and blacks at the bottom. See, for example, this article in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:
"But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board’s 2005 data on the SAT:

• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.

• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.

• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000."

So if you try to substitute SES for race-based AA, you get more diverse SES but you get far fewer blacks because at each tier there will be far more asians and whites with similar backgrounds but better scores. Note in the JBHE article that this difference is so profound that children from relatively wealthy black families underperform poverty-stricken whites on standardized tests.

When I was on an admission committee (med school; not university, but same idea), we saw this dilemma every day. I came to the conclusion that race-based AA absolutely must be preserved if we want reasonable representation for black students in selective colleges and universities. I was deeply disappointed with the decision of SCOTUS, and I suspect few individuals not intimately familiar with what selection committees face understand how difficult it is to get proportionate race-based representation using anything but race as a criterion.

It’s easy to say standardized scores don’t mean much, but nobody in academia really believes that. For any given student? Sure. For the broad average, it’s simply not true, especially for any quantified pursuit such as STEMs.

244

Hmmmm, I see one obvious glaring problem with that (twenty-year-old) data: namely, high school students taking the SAT are a highly self-selected group.

It seems likely to me that white students from extremely poor families are probably not taking the SAT at all unless they are quite motivated and high-achieving. Black students from middle-class families, on the other hand, like white middle-class students, are probably more likely to take the SAT just because college attendance is expected in their families, irrespective of their achievement or motivation levels.

So no, not seeing anything in those findings which definitively contradicts the hypothesis that race-linked average score differentials on the SAT are due to the effects of various aspects of historical and persistent societal racism in the US.

Given how stubbornly various aspects of societal racism in the US persist, though, I agree with you that we’re unlikely to attain perfect racial parity in standardized testing scores any time soon.

245

Posted because this total-news-to-me article is relevant to the thread. It admittedly brings into question clams I made about AA surely causing mismatch harm. Of course, it also brings into question whether Yale is any kind of a rigorous school. Should a school like that even be accredited?

246

The typical Yale student got an A in more than 80% of their high school courses. Is it shocking that they would continue to succeed academically after going to Yale?

247

Correct, the Yale student body is not a random sample of the population, their average admit is, by design of the process, not the kind of person who’ll just fail. Sure there will be a sample who were of smart-for-high-school but not ready for the big league, but the curve will be very skewed to the success side.

248

Yes, this doesn’t seem surprising or nefarious to me.

249

What in the article even brings this into question?

250

True, but all of the runners in the 100m final at the Olympics are going to be very fast. There’s still a difference between them.

For the sake of argument, Yale fancies themselves as an elite university. A degree from there carries more clout than most. If Yale really does provide a superior education to other schools, then the classes there would have to be more difficult than at other schools. So, yes, the students there are very smart and driven, but the curriculum should still be at a level that challenges them. Put another way, if 80% of your students are getting 'A’s, then your classes are too easy.

Yale can set their grading policies however they want. I wouldn’t ever suggest taking away their accreditation, but I do think it will catch up with them. As word spreads that 80% of their students get 'A’s, then an A from Yale will become less impressive than it used to be.

It’s still (from what I’ve heard) a great university, and just graduating is something to be very proud of. An average student at Yale would be exceptional almost anyplace else.

I’m not sure what, if anything, this has to do with affirmative action at Harvard and UNC.

251

fwiw, I think a degree from Yale is impressive, but an A in a class at Yale isn’t. And I think Yale would be completely fine with that.

The point of grades isn’t to differentiate students, it’s to mark how well they mastered the material in the class. Grading classes isn’t meant to be like ranking athletes. I don’t think the classes at Yale ought to be designed to be so hard that fewer than 20% of their students can master them. The reason a lot of students don’t master the material in high school is partly raw ability, and mostly “do the students care enough to do the work”. At a selective school like Yale, all of the students have demonstrated both in the past. Obviously, stuff changes, some students lose interest in academics, others may have chosen a course in physics that is actually too hard for them. But is it weird that most of them get good marks? Not really.

252

True, but I think the material in a class should be challenging enough that most students will learn it well, and some will absolutely master it. Especially so at a unversity that styles itself as one of the best in the world.

253

I mean, you can argue whether “learn it well” should deserve a B or an A, and there’s been some grade inflation, (which is hard to differentiate from the increasing competency of the students as the most selective schools get ever more selective) but I don’t think it really matters very much whether a university gives those students As or Bs.

254

The content in an intro organic chemistry class is pretty standard. How it’s taught varies. The kiddos learn it or they don’t. I wasn’t wowed by the ones I taught at Yale. They probably weren’t wowed by my teaching. But it was pretty much the same class I took at not-Yale, and I expect most people who can get into Yale to do very well in it, which most did. Where I saw any struggle was in organizational skills or difficulty adjusting to a lack of structure.

They do offer a more advanced intro organic chemistry class that you have to test into.

255

We may be thinking about different subjects.

Essay-writing ability ideally improves over the college years, with social science and humanities grades reflecting that. But it would be hard to wind up with 80 percent A’s after freshman and sophomore B’s and C’s.

While I could hypothesize a relationship between grade inflation and AA/legacy/wholistic admissions, it’s a stretch that I don’t want to push.

256

I always assumed that the Ivy Leagues were really difficult to get into because they were really hard and only the best students could hack it. If they just teach what everyone else teaches, what’s the point? I mean, other than the connections to power and money?

If your students are all the best of the best, you should b e teaching at a different level than some state college that accepts nearly everyone. Otherwise, you’re wasting resources.

Of course, it might be that the ‘elite’ nature of the Ivies is an illusion. Between affirmative action and diversity enrollees, there are the legacies. They have to pass too, I guess. The ‘best of hte best’ may be just as bored at Harvard and Yale as they would be at State U.

I would also have assumed that you would set the difficulty of a course so that the grades fall on a bell curve, and if everyone is getting A’s that should be a sign that your material isn’t hard enough. You should probably be striving for a class that averages a B or B-, given some grade inflation.

257

That’s how it works at most law schools. (As it happens, one of the more prominent exceptions is…Yale.)

258

Where have you read otherwise?

259

Sure. There are enough best-of-the-best freshman math students at Harvard, for example, to populate the legendary Math 55 every year.

Now, I don’t know what the grade distribution of Math 55 looks like, but it wouldn’t be too upsetting to me if most of the people who actually finished the class (the wiki link talks about how there’s a pretty large drop rate) came out with A’s. Basically, the people who are mastering the material in the class are (presumably) the ones who will keep taking it, while the ones who are struggling will be much more likely to drop down to a less rarified math class.

260

That’s how most degrees work. The name brand carries significant influence and one of the biggest benefits is the recruiting from employers and the connections you make. It’s not about what you learn there - if Harvard and No-Name University used the same textbooks, you’d learn much the same content. It’s about what you can do with the degree.

Even if a Stanford MBA and No-Name University’s MBA both taught the same books and slideshows, there will be a lot more recruiters hiring at Stanford and offering higher salaries, better internship opportunities, and you’d make more lucrative friends/networkers at Stanford.