Do you have any evidence that race is not a good enough proxy for the type of diversity they are looking for? Seeing all the metrics they use are a proxy for other, often unknowable or hard to measure things, I don’t see why using race is a bad method. Especially given the fact that race alone is often enough. I don’t think Obama has governed much differently from a similarly experienced White man, but the fact that he is Black means a lot to most people. Nobody was expecting the election of a Black president to mean he’d have radically different ideas or perspectives. It does mean however that many people will see him in that job, or a larger number of Hispanic students at MIT, or a group of women at CalTech, and start to internalize broader archetypes of the people traditionally in those positions, and be less likely to embrace parochial, inaccurate stereotypes.
Why do most people mean?
Quota systems are illegal in the vast majority of cases. So no, the vast majority of people who have a passing understanding of the subject don’t think that. More importantly, universities don’t just use just race to ensure diversity. They use geography, income, gender, extracurriculars, etc., etc. That’s why they use those things. It’s very very telling that diversity, in your mind, is somehow reduced to, “accept more Black people”. I have explained why that is actually not how this is done.
I am sure plenty of people don’t think it’s environmental (btw, there are more than two explanations). But your first contention that AA is the only thing people do to help Black people achieve parity is false.
CA passed a state constitutional amendment that says:
The only exception is when required for federal funding. Your latter link speaks of “federal laws that require Federal contractors and subcontractors to take affirmative action”. Nothing from the state.
Sure, quotas are illegal, that’s why they are disguised under the “holistic” approach. Do you think that if a law school class, for example, ran admissions based on merit and ended up with 133 whites, 1 black, and 1 other that they wouldn’t readjust to get something resembling the “correct” amount?
No, they don’t have a hard quota, but they tweak the standards until it becomes sufficiently diverse. It’s just a disguised quota system.
And as others have observed, it reinforces racial prejudices when the handful of minorities that are picked to fill up the quota end up being the dumbest students in the class. And why wouldn’t they be? They had scores on the admissions tests that were far lower than what any non-minority student would have been accepted with. (And yes, it’s far lower; not the situation typically described where two students are tied and the tie goes to a minority student. Minority students are admitted to law schools with sometimes up to a 20 point lower LSAT score)
So, they finish at the bottom of the class, don’t get a job because the criteria showed that they weren’t qualified to begin with. So they are saddled with debt, working at a construction site, and bitching about the system keeping them down.
There has been a holistic approach for a long time. Do you have any evidence that what are suggesting is actually happening?
No, I don’t, because I don’t think admissions works that way in the vast majority of places. Not only because everyone is not admitted at the same time, nor are they all evaluated by the same people, but also because the people doing the admitting would not want to expose their employer to liability.
Or its just a general goal they have which you choose to interpret in a negative light. Just as they have a goal to admit people with high test scores. It doesn’t mean they go back through the applications weeding out people who have slightly lower test scores in the interest of purity.
Okay. What proof do you have that makes be less capable or talented lawyers? Test scores are great and all, but why should anyone establish a hard cut off if it doesn’t predict how well people actually perform. The only reason you might see a high correlation in the legal field is because it’s particularly “brand conscious”, but I don’t think it holds true in general.
It’s a very good point that scores are not the only criterion for making a good lawyer (or other professional).
One problem, though, with taking students with lower LSAT scores is getting them to pass the bar exam in the first place. One can argue that students who go to law school but can’t make it through waste their time and money, and take the position away from someone who could have passed the bar.
In Texas, for example, the [pass rate in 2004 for blacks](Originally Posted by jtgain
Minority students are admitted to law schools with sometimes up to a 20 point lower LSAT score)) was 53% for first timers (85% for whites), and 45% overall for blacks (81% for whites).
There really isn’t any way around getting to as much diversity as possible, though, unless you leave SIRE group as a standalone criterion. If you don’t, you have to use SES, and this would cause a school to have to dip even further into the even weaker black applicant pool.
The authors are biased as hell in their interpretation and you’re bringing non-peer reviewed articles to the fore. Shame on you, but I’ll forgive you this once. In the future, if it ain’t on Pubmed, don’t bring it. Now, let’s talk about the non-peer reviewed data you’ve provided. The gem you’ve missed:** Figure 1**. The authors show that “differences in grades between black (GPA: 2.8) and white students (GPA: 3.3) during their first semester were almost half a grade.** However, this disparity was reduced by almost fifty percent by the last semester of college with black students**”. Now, if you look at the data the black students had a GPA average of 3.3 compared to whites with an average of 3.6. Big whoop. Do you really think that a black student graduating from Duke with a 3.3 GPA or was handed or is undeserving of their degree? Blacks had the most improvement, going from 2.8 to 3.3 while whites improved from 3.3 to 3.6. That’s an unsaid achievement and says a lot about the success of affirmative action programs.
I didn’t miss anything. You must have missed the part where I said “all other things are held constant”.
The disparity was reduced (in part) because the blacks tended to switch away from demanding majors like science and engineering into the less demanding humanities.
I think the data say that blacks have lower GPAs (all other things being equal) as well as lower graduation rates.
Yes, it does - it says that blacks start off behind and never catch up, even comparing them to whites and Asians in harder majors.
The non-peer reviewed article stated that 68% of blacks change their majors while 55% of whites do. Are you telling me that 13% difference is the reason for the disparity? You’re parroting what’s said in the non-peer reviewed article. The author spent two pages of rhetorical gymnastics trying to explain it away with what amounts to shouldas, couldas, and wouldas. According to the data, ALL STUDENTS GPA WENT UP over 8 semesters. It’s plain as day on Figure 1. LOOK AT IT. All factors aren’t held constant. Did you notice that they did not control for high school quality (private college prep vs public high school)?
If you would take off your Imperial Grand Wizard goggles for just a second and take look at the damn data, please. This is your non-peer reviewed paper you’ve brought up, not mine: blacks have the most improvement of all the races with a nadir GPA of 2.8 and a high of 3.3; whites show the least improvement from a 3.3 to a 3.6. With a straight face, explain how a person A graduating with GPA 3.3 is inferior to a person B graduating with a 3.6? How is person A undeserving of their degree while person B is?
Bonus Question: If blacks are inherently dumb, why are they graduating from Duke with a solid B average? Does this punch a hole in the “LOL!!! blacks are dum and kant do kollege werk!!!11one” or is the entire faculty and staff at Duke conspiring prove untrue the racist hypothesis that blacks are encumbered by the sloth of their IQ?
We are not talking about bringing Community College dropouts to Yale. We are talking about taking bright, promising kids who otherwise go and thrive in flagship state schools and giving them a chance at the Ivys. We are taking kids who would attend second-tier state campuses and giving them a place in the first tiers. At the actual lowest level campuses…your community colleges, no name state schools, and the like…admissions is basically not competitive. These are the schools that do absorb students who actually are not prepared for university level work, but that’s not due to affirmative action, that’s due to an admissions process that is basically “Can you spell your name.”
And affirmative action candidates are not being pulled from the “no way, not Harvard material” file. They are being pulled from the vast “on the threshold” file, which at an Ivy League is full of 4.0s. The people they displace are not in the “clearly the next Nobel Prize…if only we didn’t have to admit black kids instead” pile." The people being displaced are also in that threshold, where they are waiting to see what the numbers look like before they decide who goes on the wait list.
And frankly, everyone involved is way more qualified than they were even a generation ago. College admissions have become vastly more competitive. If you are over 30, chances are you wouldn’t stand a chance of being admitted into the university you yourself graduated (and presumably went on to a productive life) from. How did anyone manage to keep up with Harvard back in the dark ages of 2002, when they admitted a whopping 10% of applicants, as opposed to the 5.9% acceptance rates today? How did Harvard survive so packed with mouth breathing idiots? Today’s affirmative action admit is as smart and qualified as yesterday’s top candidates.
I believe you should go back and read the Duke paper, Honesty.
The analysis of the authors is that virtually the entire grade gap “closure” was due to a relative change in coursework on the part of black students from more rigorous to less rigorous ones.
From the Abstract:
“At the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students’ freshmen and senior year. This outcome could suggest that affirmative action policies are playing a key role to reduce racial differences. However, this convergence masks two effects. First, the variance of grades given falls across time. Hence, shrinkage in the level of the gap may not imply shrinkage in the class rank gap. Second, grading standards differ across courses in different majors. We show that controlling for these two features virtually eliminates any convergence of black/white grades.”
The mathematics and methods are in the paper. If you have issue with their methods, please post where you think they went wrong. However it’s unpersuasive to simply discard their work as “biased as hell” without any supporting evidence.
As a past educator in medicine, (not to mention a past student), I’d say what this paper lays out is a fairly typical experience and fairly typical observation. It passes the sniff test and it goes to the heart of the problem: black students persistently underperform–on average–all other major SIRE groups in quantitative subjects. I’ve posted here MCAT and LSAT score differences, for example. These persist within any given institution. They persist again with medical and law licensing exams. At that point, the weakest black (and other) students are already weeded out, and those taking the exams have had 6 or more years of equivalent educational opportunity to learn the material. Yet the differences stubbornly persist, even though at present, on “highly selective campuses, 86 % of African American students are middle or upper class.”
It’s time to lay aside the canard that black students are somehow hugely underperforming because of SES disadvantage, but can readily catch up once they are provided similar opportunity. This does not happen.
That is why we cannot let the debate shift to SES as a way to get black proportionate representation. At every SES level, black students will be outperformed by other SIRE groups from even lower SES levels, and we won’t have any black students left.
My statement was that blacks have lower GPAs than non-blacks. Which is the larger number - 3.3 or 3.6?
Why would I want to explain something that I haven’t said?
Blacks who are admitted to elite colleges under affirmative action have lower graduation levels, take longer to get their degrees if they do graduate, and have lower GPAs even though they are significantly more likely to switch to easier majors than non-blacks. That’s what the data show.
ALL first-generation college students (and the majority of African American college students are considered first generation) face these issues. These statistics are true for all first generation students.
Family support is huge. First generation college students often have families who do not understand the importance of a university education, and first generation families often place family pressures on students that are counterproductive, rather than helpful, to university success. They may not, for example, understand why Junior can’t come home every weekend to pitch in running the household like he used to. They may not really get the long hours, the need for private study space, etc. From their perspective, you can usually skip a lot of high school classes without any real consequences, so why wouldn’t you be able to do that in college?
First generation students don’t have a well of family experiences to draw on. A student from a college going family is going to have ample feedback when it comes to choosing majors, taking advantage of student resources, managing finances, budgeting time, etc. First generation students, on the other hand, are often picking majors out of the void, with no reference point for how much work they are actually getting into. They may not know about how to use career centers, the financial aid office, mental health counselors, the health center, various student organizations, etc. These services do not exist in poor high schools, and are often not fully explained to incoming students. When a student form a college going family needs an extra class, their family will probably tell them to stop by the financial aid office to adjust their loans to cover it. A first generation student, however, may assume that their only options are to take a job and pay for it or not take that class.
Sven,
I appreciate your gentle paradigm where the struggling black student from a low SES labors to overcome his history.
None of the data I’ve reviewed support this canard, and the fact that it’s unsupported is exactly the problem.
In fact, children from black families where the parents have high educational (graduate-level) achievement underperform children from white families where the parents have high school or less educational achievement on the SAT.
In fact, most black students (86% in my cite above) in highly selective universities are from middle or upper black classes (white students are from even higher SES backgrounds).
I know you want to present this notion that we need race-based AA to bring along the low SES, disadvantaged black student, but that’s not why we need it. We need race-based AA because all the data shows that, whatever the SES background, black students markedly underperform other SIRE groups from the same or lower backgrounds.
May I ask again for any data to support your contentions?
Universities are vigorously supporting UT Austin because they do NOT want the government looking over their shoulder to find out they actively promote the advantaged black student over the disadvantaged non-black student in order to have any chance at all of getting the best qualified black candidates. By far the majority of high-performing students come from privileged backgrounds because, in general, high SES status correlates with high scholastic performance (or vice versa) in all SIRE groups.
That seems to be an indictment on the whole admissions system. If LSAT scores and GPAs mean as little as you say, law schools might as well be holding “duck duck goose” competitions for admission. Someone, somewhere, at sometime decided that the traditional metrics meant something large enough that the whole nation of law school rely on them to predict success in law school and in a law career.
If that is wrong, the schools have larger issues than diversity.
It doesn’t make them better lawyers. It does, however, go a long way to predicting which students are capable of passing the bar exam. Since that’s a predicate for practicing law, it’s a pretty big deal.
It’s also kind of self-reinforcing. Schools which accept applicants with lower LSAT scores produce fewer graduates and thus fewer successful lawyers. That means fewer employment opportunities for future graduates.
Hardly. Even the people who make those test don’t claim they tell you what you are assuming they do. The admissions process is not used to determine who is the “best” student with any kind of precision or accuracy. It’s just a means for a school to determine competent students they find desirable for any number of reasons.
They certainly could at most elite schools given the makeup of the applicants. Generally, the vast vast majority of people who apply to Yale or Harvard are smart and capable. If they randomized entry, there would not be much lost in the end. They only reasons they don’t is because it seems lazy, and that it would hurt their brand in the eyes of people like you who over-rely on testing.
They just use testing as a more impartial means for rationing. It’s not meant to be interpreted the way you seem to be interpreting it.
And? Is it any surprise that doing well on one test indicates you might do well on another?
I doubt this is true. There is basically no correlation between the number of graduates and LSAT scores of the students. Did you mean the percentage of those admitted who graduate? And even if you did mean that, I doubt the correlation is that strong.
It probably does, but not for any of the reasons you alluded to. Especially in the legal field.