Well, I think it would be an easier sell if you told the opponents of AA that race based AA would be phased out over the next 20 years because we’ve leveled the playing field sufficiently that we can focus on socioeconomic AA.
Without fixing the pipeline, we will never be able to get rid of AA.
You’re right. That’s exactly like being black!!! :rolleyes:
We have a beneficiary of AA on this board.
Monstro doesn’t seem to have this problem.
AFAICT, there are many more Monstros of the world than Clarence Thomases.
I don’t think the huge AA advantage is fully justified but some preference would be Ok if it wasn’t going to mostly black immigrants.
Yeah, he’s already shown he can’t get votes.
The idea that people just want to be left alone and not helped at all is generally an opinion of those who already have enough to accomplish what they want to accomplish. It is not true of those who don’t. If someone actually is insulted by help, they will just not take the help when offered. But they do.
Being able to get by on your own hard work is a luxury for a lot of people. They can’t. And so we try to fix that. AA is an attempt at that. It may not be the right one, but it’s at least an attempt.
I can definitely agree that money seems to correlate with the disadvantaged. I’d go so far as to say that the imbalance we are actually trying to fix is a monetary one. The reason we say that black people aren’t doing as well is that they have less money. They make less money in the jobs they are qualified for due to their education. So we want to improve their education. The goal is to make them better off financially.
I think it might also go a long way in getting the white lower class on board, making this less of a Republican/Democrat divide. If we can say and prove that Affirmative action is about poor people and giving them a chance to become richer, then I think we could get a lot more support.
Actually, the real problem we have is, that no one in any position of significant authority is proposing the only CORRECT answer, which is to change the goal of education itself entirely.
Right now, the unstated but very firm goal of the proponents of “merit based” decisions, is to maintain the existing hierarchy of cultural norms, and of class structure. The goal of the people who want to decide things based on statistics, aren’t concerned about why anyone at all gets an education either.
What I would like to see, is to have the goal of education be to see to it that EVERYONE GETS EDUCATED.
I liken my attitude to my profession: I fix machines for a living. We who fix machines, don’t run diagnostic tests in order to designate which machines we like, and which ones we disapprove of. We run tests to find out what we need to do to make the machine work correctly. Tests in educational systems should have the same goal.
I’m not sure I follow you.
In the current system, some people become surgeons and some become janitors, and they receive different educations. In the system you envision – what?
I agree that there needs to be a greater emphasis on socioeconomic-based affirmative action than one based purely on race. The African-American student who grew up in Greenwich the son of two corporate lawyers has a similar upbringing and experience as many of the white students at a typical Ivy League school. But a white kid from rural Kentucky who is the first in his family to attend college offers a perspective that is really different from others at school and that can be useful to all.
One problem is that the college-educated parents of applicants are more familiar with the process and better able to assist their kid than are the non-college educated parents. So these kids might need more mentoring earlier if they want to get to and succeed in college.
Some of the charities that attempt to help students get into college start quite early with mentoring, social support and other early intervention.
Is this before or after you pass a constitutional amendment to authorize the federal government to manage the education system of the states and elect a Congress willing to do so?
To help the unqualified students, they should admit the otherwise unqualified students into universities based on any criteria? No, sounds like setting them up for failure. When a baseball player is struggling at the plate, let him practice with Nolan Ryan. Race-based or socioeconomics-based policies will not help anyone. Too often, AA cases are unprepared and end up discouraged.
Diversity is so hip right now. All the rich whites want to be surrounded by the most exotic specimens when they go away to college. Well-endowed schools have the resources to comb through the mountains of applications and pick the ripest of fruit, those that will most greatly enhance the “experience” of the elite whites, who will settle for nothing less than the best. Today’s admission policies are all about catering to the whims and insecurities of rich white kids and their socially walled-off parents. No matter how diverse the skin color or income, they will be sure to keep diversity of thought and culture well-extinguished. The diverse applicants will all be expected to conform to the rich-white-liberal-NPR culture, or they will be shamed just as quickly as a poor redneck.
This totally misunderstands the purpose of a college education. For most people college is not about training, since most people don’t use what they learn in college at their jobs. College is about signalling that you are a smart enough person to get into college and conscientious enough to work at it until graduation.
One of the big problems with AA is that it disrupts the intelligence signal and not just for the people who benefit from it, from everyone who is a part of the group. Legacy students get some help in admissions, but it is easy for them to hide that fact. Black and hispanic students have the opposite problem in that even if they were admitted because they were qualified, there is no way to prove that and thus their degree means less than other people’s. A study showed that black graduates of prestigious schools receive fewer job offers and lower salary offers than white graduates.
It occurs to me that when we talk about socioeconomic affirmative action we are not talking about affirmative action at all.
AIUI, AA is in fact a form of reparation to rectify the harm caused to the descendants of slaves and Indians by slavery/Jim Crow and genocide.
When you make it socioeconomic or based on modern day racism you are giving preferences to groups that are disadvantaged by racism or poverty, it sounds more like a typical war on poverty social program. I think it is much better policy to try and reduce the disparity caused by this disadvantage than use preferences for this sort of thing at the back end.
No amendment necessary to give states money with strings attached, see medicaid.
This is probably also true of graduates from mediocre schools, crappy schools, high school graduates and high school dropouts.
I am having trouble thinking of any group of blacks that don’t get fewer job offers and lower salary offers than similarly situated whites.
When I went to college it certainly didn’t seem like there was a lack of Asian students. I guess they have their statistics and whatnot, but is this really as big a problem as they are saying? Why should I care that some kid didn’t get into Harvard and ends up going to Rutgers instead? Aside from schmoozing, undergrad education is what you make of it; and non-ivies can schmooze with the best of them.
I didn’t care when it was white kids complaining about AA keeping them out of whatever school they felt they ‘deserved’ to go to, and I don’t care that Asians are complaining about the same. Everyone can’t go to Harvard. I think there is far too much emphasis on where someone went to school in this country rather than focusing on what that person can do. If you’re really hot shit, then prove it somewhere else.
The corollary is “Oh, you went to Harvard? That’s nice, pass the dip.”
Frankly, the complaint isn’t of a lack of Asian-American students at the elite schools, but too many of them. So the Asian-American students feel that their admission is held to a higher standard to reduce their representation at these schools.
Well, I cared about the former, and so I care about the latter.
I don’t think one has much to do with the other.
The complaint by whites is largely that the preference given to others is indirectly hurting them. Asians also bear some of the burden of AA but the rationale for AA is not lost on us the way it is to some white folks.
I suspect that if some schools didn’t feel the need to accept 15% black and 15% hispanic students, they would be comfortable with higher concentrations of Asians but Asians are more concerned with the “there’s too many Asians” attitude than the “there aren’t enough blacks and american Indians” attitude that might indirectly encroach the available seats in each class. I am not really sure why we have AA for Hispanics.
The complaint by Asians is that they are being targeted because people don’t want there to be anywhere near as many Asians as whites.
If people want to be thought of as having the AA degree and the AA admission then I suppose that’s fine. Because what happens in the real world is that when you devalue standards people think you did something because of the devalued standard not your own ability.
That’s not an easy answer at all, because there’s a fixed number of seats in colleges. If you want to increase the number of seats for under-represented groups (African Americans and Native Americans, and probably also Latinos) then you need to reduce the number of seats of over-represented groups (of which Asians are one).
For the record I think the whole way we categorize race and ethnicity in this country is really dumb, but if you want a society in which admission to high ranking universities is at least somewhat proportional to the ethnic makeup of society, that’s going to mean more African-Americans and more Native Americans, somewhat more Mexican-Americans, and fewer Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, Jewish Americans, etc… The goal here isn’t to punish any of those groups, it’s to bring the makeup of universities somewhat more representative of the makeup of society.
Sure there is an effect when the size of the pie is smaller because there are effectively carveouts for blacks and American Indians but as I said previously, I think a lot of Asians are OK with carveouts and set asides for blacks and American Indians (within reason… dropping admission standards so that black admits have scores that are two standard deviations below the median admit in order to achieve relative parity with the population at large seems like too much to me but YMMV). What is offensive is the de facto cap that has been set on Asian population at top schools to avoid having too many Asians on campus. The Asian percentage of the student body at top schools has held steady over the last several decades despite their population more than doubling in that period. That’s not because of AA, that’s because they don’t want to give up white seats to better qualified Asian candidates.
Why is that a goal of representative parity a goal worth violating principles of fairness and non-discrimination?
I can make an argument in the case of the descendants of American slaves and American Indians but why do we need the college campuses to look like the population at large? In what way are poor Asian immigrants worse off than poor Hispanic immigrants?
Right now Asians are the largest immigrant group (more Asians immigrate each year than any other group including Hispanics) but while Hispanic admissions at top schools seem to increase as their population grows Asian admissions do not because there is a perception that there are already too many Asians at top schools.