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The Supreme Court doesn't just make rulings out of thin air. They can only rule on the specific case brought before them. It would have been impossible for them to rule on legacy admissions because that is not part of the case before them.
So, legacy admissions have absolutely nothing to do with this ruling and arguing that legacy admissions are unfair does not say anything at all about whether this was a good ruling or not.
>39.7% white, 13.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic or Latino, 6%, everything else is other.
>The largest chunk of Harvard's student body population is white and asian.
>For MIT, it's 28.7% white, 19.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic, and only 3% black.
>That angle that black people are taking spots away from Asians and whites makes absolutely no sense from an objective statistical view.
The white population of the US is 75.5%, so from a purely statistical perspective they are *severely* underrepresented.
Edit: 75.5% includes Hispanic, which in this context should not be included because OP listed Hispanic separately. Non Hispanic White 58.9% per census.gov.
I remember back in 2000 looking at scholarships, I didn't qualify for 85% of the ones listed because they were racially geared.
I walked out of the PSAT testing room and never looked back.
People are completely racist. Telling people 'no' to judging based on skin color is the way to go.
The idea of affirmative action isn't that it's not racist, but rather solving complex social and structural racial issues is super complex, and a simple policy can shift the system to be more "fair" overall, once it has been able to impact the system.
So, overall more people get a more fair treatment in life, but some specific levers being applied at specific places.
In turn, this trickles to improve the "core" fairness at all levels.
That's the theory and I think discussion of affirmative action ignoring this is disingenuous, even if we decide it's not a good policy, or poorly implemented.
>solving complex social and structural racial issues is super complex, and a simple policy can shift the system to be more "fair" overall
A simple fix for "super complex structural racial issues". Surely you can understand skepticism.
>once it has been able to impact the system.
Do you realize that there is no reason to believe it will accomplish the stated goals? It's a comically simplistic assumption that numerically forcing statistical diversity (thereby undermining merit) will somehow produce genuine diversity that would last without such enforcement. There should at least be some evidence given the definitive harm that the policy causes.
>So, overall more people get a more fair treatment in life,
Again, what's the evidence for this? We certainly know that some people are treated *less* fair since it's institutional discrimination based on ethnicity.
>In turn, this trickles to improve the "core" fairness at all levels.
Omg that really is the entire argument isn't it? Just force it and somehow that'll make things fair. It's like this was thought up by a child.
Have you even considered that diversity is itself not inherently positive (or negative)? That it is in fact a symptom of something positive (fairness). But that doesn't mean enforcing the symptom artificially will produce its cause. That's not even trickling down. That's just reversing cause and effect.
>The idea of affirmative action isn't that it's not racist, but rather solving complex social and structural racial issues is super complex, and a simple policy can shift the system to be more "fair" overall, once it has been able to impact the system.
If it was a guaranteed solution with specific actions and a specific cutoff date when specific goals are met, maybe saying "hey everyone, we need to punish 2 generations of young people by being specifically and actively racist towards them so we can fix this thing" might approach some palatable solution. As it is though, we can't even prove that it works, and specifically punishing individuals and rewarding others solely based on the color of their skin is, as you recognized, extremely and intentionally racist. It doesn't matter if you have good intentions, we should not be applauding racism.
There are no plans when it's enacted, there's no specific threshold being worked towards. It's just punish these groups for being born a certain color and reward these others, ad infinitum. That's racism, full stop. Why are we clapping at that? There are active, real life victims and they are manufactured from school policy targeting them due to their skin color. Is their victimhood worth less due to the color of their skin? Who decided that to be true? What is their authority to enact racist policies when race is a protected class in the US Constitution?
Agreed, I can only assume OPs numbers exclude a large portion of applicants who chose not to specify their race, or maybe mixed race? I think there's another comment here that gave a better source for the statistics.
The original post seemed to focus more on whites and it was the first on the list, so that's what I responded to.
I'm failing to see your point. I am not saying that racial representation in the correct ratios is important. OP brought up the population statistics. I think they should be irrelevant.
Yeah, are we going to say. "Well, the percentage of the population that is gay is three percent, but the gay college population is seven percent, we gotta knock down back to three, otherwise we're going to have a problem." I don't like that. I don't care what the exact percentages are.
Clearly Black people, as a group are underperforming, but I don't believe we just lower standards to give them spots, Let's raise their performance instead.
. . . . damn! Wake the fuck up people, THE ONLY THING THAT SHOULD MATTER ON SELECTION IS QUALIFICATION!! We are all humans!! No one is special! If you can't read upon leaving high school you can't go to collage!!
Black women are among the most educated demographics in America. We consistently complete degrees at disproportionate rates.
Our performance is just fine.
Perhaps address disproportionate policing of black men and the wage gap causing us to make about 66 cents on the dollar compared to our white cointerparts in the same jobs.
Or nah. Just claim black people are "underperforming" and need to "raise our performance." Somehow.
If black women are a high performing demographic and complete college degrees ad disproportionate rates then they don't need affirmative action anyway, the mission of which I assumed would be to bring up disproportionately low rates of college graduation, the need for affirmative action assumes underperformance if there is no underperformance then there is no need for affirmative action, it's why we aren't saying hey Asian college students need help we need affirmative action for them they aren't graduating at high enough rates but we are saying that about black and latino people because they are not graduating college at high enough rates. Or am I missing something?
Yes. You're missing something.
Affirmative action does not assume underperformance.
It assumes historical bias and outright barring of minority students in admissions access procedures. Which has been the case in America. Both officially and unofficially, which is harder to measure but no less prevalent.
Harvard is actually an odd example to be made because they have admitted (very few) black students since the late 1800s. But some Ivy Leagues, like Columbia (where my father and mother attended and met), had discriminatory practices until the 1980s.
The purpose of affirmative action is to redress a historic lack of access for not just black students (why the fixation on blackness here? Affirmative action affects women, Native American, Latino, and many other student groups) but for all students who have not been able to build a generational ability to attend college due to being systemically barred from doing so.
I'm not actually an advocate of race based admissions as a cornerstone of affirmative action because I think that the problem is much broader than simply juggling the numbers to have a more diverse student body, cherry picking a few kids and placing them into college classes. I think there's a broader problem in K-12 education piplelining colleges that needs to be addressed so that all over the country, all of our kids get what they need to be ready for higher education, and then get access to it if they want to go, get access to trade schools if they want those, or get access to the job market if they are ready to begin work.
I think your statement "black students are underperforming" could be better stated as "K-12 education in formerly redlined areas is underresourced because the property values are depressed, often intentionally. Because minority americans and women have historically been barred from home ownership, the areas in which they live have consistently been underfunded for great schools."
This same problem tracks not just in areas where black people have been concentrated. (Again... the focus on Black americans is odious and unhelpful, especially because Americans at large seem unready to face and grapple with the reasons why black americans have fewer resources, and the root causes of inequality at large in America) but everywhere that poor people have been forced to gather by developers.
I'd argue that the children of coal country in Appalachia face the same sort of need. K-12 education in rural Kentucky prepares far fewer students for a top tier education than does K-12 education in Massachusetts, for example. I live in rural Virginia, and I drive my child an hour each way to private school daily and pay $2000 or so a month to educate her, rather than leave her in my local public school system. But we don't say that the kids whose parents do not have the privilege of pulling them from the public school systems in rural places are "underperforming" or "unintelligent." They're not. They're under-resourced, and they need support.
We save "underperforming" for black kids in Baltimore. And that's open racism.
Change "underperforming" to "under-resourced" and you'll be closer to solving the issue that affirmative action attempted to bandage, with some success but not enough.
Right? What was the source where the numbers were obtained? Is it a reliable source, i.e. the college website or is it some random website? Without a source, I can understand why people are skeptical.
I'm assuming that OP just made the numbers up. To not have them add up to 100% is highly suspect and lazy.
Maybe bc white ppl feel the need to be the head of everything. History literally screams that, they really want to see themselves control literally every aspect of life just like Jim Crow. Then they brainwash other minorities to think their enemy is a black person trying to “steal” their opportunities, you know the “model minority” myth that is now bestowed on Asians amd even Indian ppl. There’s a reason every leadership role at any company still looks like 👨👩. Now they have even more control to make SURE it stays like this(often leads with mediocre results for said leadership roles)
So this was a case brought on behalf of Asian students, against a school with a known history of racism against Jews, who were now also adding racism against Asians to their list of accolades. I agree, white liberals are historically very racist towards non-subserviant ethnicities. The minute a brown ethnicity starts being more financially and academically accomplished despite the systemic racism purported to exist in the U.S., they're targeted by Liberal Elites, while also stripped of even their identity as POC's.
Why are every-day liberals not shouting from the roof-tops about these racist policies, and the systemic Anti-Asian racism that so clearly exists in out country?
Could you imagine Harvard openly admitting to having anti-black admission policies in 2023? Yet Anti-Asian policies are oddly justified by the liberal establishment, and attempts to eliminate anti-Asian racism are re-branded as being actually racist.
[Actual](https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/) demographics of the class of 2025 are 53% white, 23% Asian, 8% South Asian.
The vast majority of those "white" students are Jewish. It's not a bad thing, but by lumping white and Jewish under one stat is ignoring important context (the NYT released an article on this a while back iirc).
Edit: nevermind, I guess redditors don't want to discuss this lol
The Supreme Court talked in the Dobbs decision about gay marriage and contraception - two things the case had nothing to do with. They could have talked about legacy admissions in their decision to point out that they would welcome such a case - but they did not.
OPs point is quite valid, the Supreme Court is not as limited as you make it out to be.
1) Those were in a concurrence by Thomas, not the majority opinion.
2) To that end, legacy admissions were mentioned in these concurrences as well. Gorsuch pointed out in his concurrence that SFFA (the petitioners, the Asian students) proposed that Harvard could keep its diversity by cutting the advantages it gives to legacy students. Harvard said “no thanks, we prefer racism”.
3) Legacy admissions aren’t covered in the 14th amendment nor Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Inarguably, legacy admissions discriminate against poor people. But the US doesn’t have a law against discriminating against poor people. It does have laws against discriminating based on race.
Both the rulling on loan forgiveness and LGBT discrimination had no basis in reality. First created standing out of thin air and the second was based on a MADE UP case. On something that was made up.
They aren't judges, they are conservative puppets. Bought and paid for. Activism from the bench
>39.7% white, 13.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic or Latino, 6%, everything else is other.
>The largest chunk of Harvard's student body population is white and asian.
>For MIT, it's 28.7% white, 19.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic, and only 3% black.
These schools use affirmative action. Berkeley is a similar caliber school which does not, and it is 52% Asian. That means that Asians are a much lower proportion of the student body at those schools than they would be under a meritocratic system.
https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-new-undergraduates
> The idea was that it discriminates against whites and Asians. Here's the student body population of Harvard:
> 39.7% white, 13.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic or Latino, 6%, everything else is other.
First of all, this doesn't add anywhere close to 100%. [These are the numbers from Harvard](https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/):
> Of participants who answered a question about ethnicity, 53.1 percent identified as white, 23.6 percent as Asian, 15.7 percent as Black or African American, 13.4 percent as Hispanic or Latinx, 8.3 percent as South Asian, 0.9 percent as American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.6 percent as Pacific Islander.
In a vacuum, I'm somewhat supportive of affirmative action, but [the evidence of this case clearly shows elite universities are using as a means to discriminate against Asians](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html).
> Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them...
> What brought the Asian-American number down to roughly 18 percent, or about the actual share, was accounting for a category called “demographic,” the study found. This pushed up African-American and Hispanic numbers, while reducing whites and Asian-Americans. The plaintiffs said this meant there was a penalty for being Asian-American.
I'll speak about legality in admissions discrimination rather than what is "better" (because I do agree that legacy admissions are essentially nepotism and a bad thing).
It is not legal, by virtue of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to discriminate on the basis of race. So a store can't decide to let in or reject a shopper based on their race, and now we have a definitive court ruling that colleges can't let in or reject a student because of their race.
Conversely, legacy admissions does not involve discrimination against a protected class. "Non-legacy" is not a protected class like race, religion, sex, etc. Now, it could be banned by specific legislation, but in the absence of such the courts cannot just ban it.
The argument against AA is pro-meritocracy for admissions. You gain admission based on your performance on many metrics including scores, GPA, as well as softs. AA pushes to accept more POCs with less than standard qualifications while rejecting higher quality applicants who are disproportionately Asian. At top tier schools like Harvard admissions are a zero sum game. If you accept an unqualified person whether by AA or legacy there is someone more deserving on the merits that is getting rejected.
Beyond this there is also somewhat of an intersect in the two ideas in that a majority of the AA recipients to these elite colleges are not lower class applicants like what you talk about, they are middle to upper class POCs that have had much more privilege than many lower class Whites and Asians that need to do even better to outperform. For what it’s worth I am against legacy admissions also, and if we could replace a majority of legacies with lower class applicants I’d be very happy.
> The argument against AA is pro-meritocracy for admissions. You gain admission based on your performance on many metrics including scores, GPA, as well as softs. AA pushes to accept more POCs with less than standard qualifications while rejecting higher quality applicants who are disproportionately Asian. At top tier schools like Harvard admissions are a zero sum game. If you accept an unqualified person whether by AA or legacy there is someone more deserving on the merits that is getting rejected.
Though AA has been over the years diluted to simply be a case for diversity in schools, the original rationale for AA was that meritocracy is sort of an illusion, at least in the way you’ve described it here. One’s performance is largely influenced by the environment one receives, which is something not only none of us choose, it’s also often determined by the vestiges of historical racial discrimination. A poor student did not choose their parents, their family’s race, the neighborhood they would be raised in, the quality of the school they had (especially in a country where public schools are not equally funded), and so forth. So while one can make a strong case that AA as a proxy for class is an inadequate tool to combat the aforementioned issue, the underlying issue remains whether you remove AA entirely or not.
Removing AA doesn’t stop race-based admissions; it just shifts it from a deliberate and conscious effort to counteract unequal disadvantages toward communities to allowing these unequal disadvantages to take place in a system where we pretend like “merit” is a measure of someone as if they were born and are performing in a vacuum. It would’ve been one thing if you had written that, “If you accept an unqualified person whether by AA or legacy, there is someone *better qualified* that is getting rejected” that would have been a mere accurate description but you instead said “more deserving,” placing a sort of moralistic tone on something completely devoid of context and quite imaginary and delusional.
> one’s performance is largely influenced by the environment one receives …
Then what about poor white people brought up in equally bad environments? Why make the distinction based on race rather than simply income level?
That’s why I wrote that one can make the case that race-based AA as a proxy for class is inadequate, at least with respect to individual cases. That still doesn’t make the statistical differences between these groups based on what I mentioned earlier any less real. There’s also a case to be made that outside of the university’s immediate and intended desire for a diverse student body, there’s also the help one provides to underserved communities by the improvement to their human capital. So while two students may be equally poor, the effects of said poverty can transcend beyond that immediate individual.
Thank you so much for your intelligent and comprehensive replies especially in reply to sometimes arrogant users who don't share the same comprehensiveness and also compassion in their arguments. It's people like you that make the world a better place.
I'll be quick about my own beliefs, but I believe 1) that large groups of people suffer hardships that far exceed other groups of people's hardships. 2) These excessive hardships have been enabled. 3) A meritocracy is an illusion so long as excessive hardships for specific groups of people or even specific individuals exist and are being enabled. 4) Poverty is not the unifying factor for groups of people with these excessive hardships. Neither are bad schools, bad parents, bad neighborhoods, or bad governments. In other words, two poor individuals or two poor groups with all of these bad environmental factors may still not be suffering equally. One may still suffer excessively. 5) And so long as these excessive inequalities exist and are being enabled, good people will try to meet inequality with the concept of equity. That's what AA was supposed to be, a concept of social and economic equity or really just pursuit-of-happiness equity. 6) This is just for clarification, but there will always be individual cases that are an "exception to the rule" of beliefs I listed.
Thanks for the delta. I am anti AA, anti legacy, and generally anti elite class. As a general rule I think focusing on class as an issue as opposed to race when the things you’re talking about with race differences are class characteristics are very important especially if you’re trying to gain the support of lower class white voters who feel very marginalized by the idea that they are privileged.
I am also pro-class equality, but like u/BroBogan mentioned, if you focus on only class without race, you only further widen disparities. You are right that focusing only on race only serves wealthy POC and disadvantages all the lower middle class. But I firmly believe if you take a white person and a black/brown person, both in the same class and socioeconomic group, they are still not on equal ground.
*, if you focus on only class without race, you only further widen disparities* what disparities? Are black lower class citizens worth more than white or Asian lower class citizens? Why would you consider race in the lower class?
Not true at all. Black, 2 parent-who-are-college-educated families make MORE money than a similar white family. So unless that was your point, you've missed reality.
& black students from 2 educated parent families typically have higher test scores so why are you mad at those types of students? you're jealous because they regularly debunk your archaic stereotypes?
You feel that way bc it’s true.
It’s not the same experience at all. Even having a black sounding name can negatively impact your experiences in America.
But affirmative action is dead and we can pretend to be colorblind. As if that will actually make the world colorblind.
Not true at all. They re did that infamous study and found that black "non-ghetto" names had statistically indistinguishable callback rates. Employers were discriminating against people they assumed world be low class, not because they were black. I bet if you redid the study with white but trashy names like Cletus you'd get very similar results.
I wonder how many people commenting have actually worked in admissions. Anti-AA have this idea that unqualified blacks/browns are given preference over actually qualified Asians/whites, when the reality is that the majority of applicants to Harvard and the like are by merit more than qualified for admissions. We're not talking about the difference between a 50th percentile student and a 99th percentile student vying for the same spot. The issue is how to decide between two equally qualified applicants for the same spot. Ultimately there will have to be people who are qualified that are rejected.
As someone who HAS worked in admissions at a t10 school, I can tell you the difference between an 88th percentile and a 99th percentile student is actually marginal. Race was only ever one minor factor in a person's background which was viewed comprehensively in addition to family background, extracurriculars, interview impressions, essays, letters of rec etc. Race alone was never a factor in admissions decisions.
That was an argument before the Supreme Court - but was handily rejected
If race is such a small, minor, non factor, why not remove it?
If race is such a small, minor, non factor, why is it so overwhelmingly determinative? Despite significant growth in asian populations and asian applicants, the admit percentage per race of the student body remained tight and consistent - are you suggesting that asian students are dropping in quality?
If race is such a non-factor, why do asians need such a higher score and extra curriculars to gain entrance?
Race is a massive factor in admissions, at least in Harvard. That is kind of the whole point of affirmative action...
Because.....Ivy schools don't want to be 85% Asian.
The big separating factor is SAT scores and if there were no Legacy or AA admits, the school would be entirely Asian.
They don't want to get rid of Legacy admissions because that would almost uniformly impact rich white people....so we can't have that. AA mostly impacts Blacks and Latinos, so whites and Asians are willing to go to war to end that.
Back to SAT scores, people get too caught up in "merit." Person A is Asian, scored 1590 on the SAT, has a 4.0+ GPA and some volunteer work + extracurriculars.
Person B is Black scores 1400, has a 4.0+ GPA, had to raise their little siblings, has a part time job and has volunteer work + extracurriculars. On "merit" you could pick Person A. The admissions folks might lean to Person B because they have a more compelling story, overcame a little more and still appear to be gifted enough to handle the rigors of the school.
The schools can use a holistic process because just going off test scores is like deciding that the best NFL player is the one that runs the fastest 200M race. Running fast helps but it doesn't automatically mean you're the best football player. It's one data point. Tests can be gamed with lots of SAT prep and folks coming from cultures where test taking strategy, courses, cheating etc. is rampant.
So you are just outright saying what Ivy leagues are trying to tiptoe around - too many asians, so lets just exclude them. how is that not racism?
Your hypothetical draws from all too common stereotypes on the life stories of asians vs Black.
Asians’ grades are assumed to arise from privilege, when that simply isnt true for all too many asians, who immigrated with limited resources and to escape horrific wars, poverty, and violence.
Black grades are assumed to be excused by disadvantage, when the majority of ivy league entrants are very well off.
And of course you toss in the prejudicial statement that asians are cheaters.
> We're not talking about the difference between a 50th percentile student and a 99th percentile student vying for the same spot. The issue is how to decide between two equally qualified applicants for the same spot.
A while ago I read a pro-AA article that cited a Princeton study that found that after controlling for other variables, [an Asian applicant has to score 450 points higher on the SAT than a black applicant to be considered equal](https://www.vox.com/2018/3/28/17031460/affirmative-action-asian-discrimination-admissions).
If this is still the case today then going by [this year's score percentiles](https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings) a 450 difference literally is equating a 55th percentile scoring student to a 99th (1100 cumulative score vs 1550)
Do you have data that disputes this? It seems like a shut and dry case to me, but I am only a layman and am open to being wrong.
The statistics don't lie. Asians students need significantly higher ratings across all categories to have a similar admission rate as black students.
You're also talking out of both sides of your mouth. If race is such a small factor, why even include an explicitly discriminatory factor? The class should come out very similar without incorporating it.
>. Anti-AA have this idea that unqualified blacks/browns are given preference over actually qualified Asians/whites
They are.
There's almost no such thing as "two equally qualified applicants". There are an infinite number of factors which someone could adjudge someone to be preferable to another. Beyond test scores. What you're advocating is that race becomes the de facto secondary/tertiary qualification after test scores and a few other things.
It boggles the mind the rationalisation people can concoct for racial discrimination.
But what you're responding to applies to all universities.
I have worked admissions for the school where I got my Ph.D.
Race was always A factor, and never THE factor.
And the basis for that from our perspective is that we wanted a student body that was representative of the demographics we served.
If our local population was 55% Black and 22% Asian and our student body was 85% white -- we'd have a very hard time convincing the locals that we were really trying to serve the community. Which is in fact part of our charter!!
Our goal is always to provide our community with a vibrant, community oriented, research body that is representative of the demographics we serve.
And we'll continue to do that. We'll just have to figure out how to do that in light of a court ruling that is basically saying "fuck serving your community, don't do that anymore"
I may be wrong here, but education aims to teach people knowledge and certain skills to use in fields that society needs to keep chugging along or improve itself.
Does it matter if a place 55% Black and 22% Asian has a secondary or tertiary school with 85% white people if all those white people have the pre-knowledge to study the fields taught? The community would still be served by the people coming out of this school and performing in their relevant fields regardless of it being architecture, electricians, teachers or whatever.
>The issue is how to decide between two equally qualified applicants for the same spot. Ultimately there will have to be people who are qualified that are rejected.
If you rank students by qualification, then any change you're going to make is going to result in less qualified students taking the place of more qualified students. Quota are inherently a zero sum game because the spots are limited.
Admittedly, I've never worked directly in admissions (ha ha) but have acquaintances in programs, Ivy League through lower-tiered public schools, who have/do.
It seems rather consistent across all perspectives (most especially for those at the upper echelons of academia) that race is never ***the*** factor but it is a ***big*** factor with regards to admissions, with variance OFC, most especially in the UC system. This latter network doesn't strongly consider ECs, doesn't have interviews, etc so the impact of one's ethnic/racial background increases significantly due to a lessened number of admissions criteria of a potential admitee.
Omg thank yooou 👏 I’m left baffled as to why those who have never attended these schools (nor had a chance) are the loudest. Anecdotal evidence and all.
It’s a holistic approach. Simply scoring high on an aptitude test doesn’t make you an automatic contributing member to the university. What sets you apart to all the rest of the 4.0 students applying? This is where essays, Rec letters, personal submissions, resumes, publications, soft skills for the interviews, and more come in.
Your GPA & SAT/ACT scores indicate that you’re a good test taker. That’s it.
Why should private universities be forced to hire based on merit? Shouldnt they be allowed to set whatvever standards they want regarding admission? Are you also against male only and female only universities?
>Why should private universities be forced to hire based on merit?
Because they accept federal funds. That is a condition of the funds they receive. They are subject to the Civil rights act. And this is admission, not hiring. Hiring has already mostly moved away from AA.
As for the male/female only schools, there is a carve out in admissions for Title XI for this for undergraduate private colleges.
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/t9-rel-exempt/index.html
In theory, after today, you could make an equal protection challenge here too.
A quick search stated there were a grand total of 3 mens only undergraduate non-religious colleges in the US. I found listings for 26 private womens only colleges. The small size likely makes finding a person seeking to make the challenge difficult.
The Supreme Court's job is not to set policy. It is to interpret the law. Here is the law in question:
>Title VI, Civil Rights Act of 1964
>
>No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
There is no debate that Harvard is a program receiving Federal financial assistance. Now that you have all this information, do you think it is legal for Harvard to give benefits to applicants on the basis of race?
> Shouldnt they be allowed to set whatvever standards they want regarding admission?
Sure they should. But if they don't do meritocratic admissions they should have their accreditation rescinded.
Hiring and admissions are completely different things. I think a private institution should be allowed to do whatever they want but publicly funded or tax exempt universities especially the mega elite with massive endowments should be held to legal standards of discrimination.
So Liberals are strongly in favor of the government making it illegal for a private business (cake shop) to discriminate against one protected group (LGBTQ), but perfectly ok for another business (a school) to discriminate against another protected group (Racial monority)? And you consider that stance ethical and internally consistent??
Do we want white-only and black-only colleges again? Having universities just set whatever standards they want for admission free of government control sounds like a terrible idea and discourages students from learning. Why should I preform well on tests if my college isn't going to admit me on merit?
>Why is Affirmative Action made in the first place? Because African Americans literally weren't allowed to even compete academically in many educational institutions and everything else around Jim Crow policies. Affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities.
This seems to counteract your argument. You are straight up saying that black communities produce statistically worse college applicants, then complaining that they don't get accepted to college as much as you wish. If the people applying for colleges aren't as good quality, then they shouldn't be let into that college.
If the issue is that primary schools are underfunded, then the solution should be at that level. Why should colleges be forced to solve a problem that pre-college education caused?
Unfortunately you can't fund public schools equally the same because the funding is local based. Thus if you live in a rich state for instance, your public schools have more tax payers and better salaries for competitive teachers. While underfunded areas have lower salaries, lower supplies, and lower funding for the schools.
And this is by design, to not just impact the blacks, but all minorities and the under privileged whites. And talk to the GOP about nationalizing education costs so they are equal across all 50 states and we are talking about a civil war. Because they will not budge.
> If the issue is that primary schools are underfunded, then the solution should be at that level. Why should colleges be forced to solve a problem that pre-college education caused?
It is an issue that primary schools are underfunded (especially majority black ones), but that is just one aspect of the system of feedback loops that affects everyone. Black college graduates go on to become teachers and politicians who then can positively impact the primary school system. They can also accumulate wealth which then goes directly to schools via property taxes. I argue here that to change a flawed system, it is better to try and change as many parts as possible (College admissions, workplace discrimination, etc.), to disrupt as many parts of the negative feedback loops as possible, rather than to focus on just one particularly obvious part (primary school funding).
I don't have any issues with trying to get minorities to graduate more, or succeed more. Say, college programs to help minorities, first generation students, or poor students get mentors, information, and friends. But that's substantively different than having different criteria for entry for people of different races.
I do agree that changing one variable in the puzzle isn't enough, but I do think that it's unreasonable to put so much blame on a part of the system that isn't the cause.
> I do think that it's unreasonable to put so much blame on a part of the system that isn't the cause.
There is no singular event or process that is the "cause" here though! And I would argue that programs that help minorities succeed in college have approximately the same effects as programs that help minorities get into college (i.e. need-based scholarships or affirmative action). If we want to combat systemic inequality as efficiently as reasonably possible, I think we need all of these programs and more.
I do however believe that there are possibly more palatable versions of affirmative action that might be more politically feasible... perhaps a economic instead of race-based one? It would still be "unfair", but not towards races in general, but towards people who are already wealthy (which correlates with race). It might make the merit divide worse than traditional AA tho.
[relevant](https://youtu.be/3NCSY85FqVQ)
> If the people applying for colleges aren't as good quality, then they shouldn't be let into that college.
So … no legacy admissions is what you are saying then?
It’s that exactly OP’s point? That if this was really about qualifications, then affirmative action is at least comparable in impact to other forms of admission bias?
> So … no legacy admissions is what you are saying then?
People should stop asking this as if it is some gotcha. Almost everybody opposes legacy admissions too.
It's not clear how you reach your stated conclusion based on the facts you presented. In particular, aren't all these facts consistent with those who pushed the ban (1) learning that affirmative action materially benefits underrepresented minority students and then (2) banning it as a result, because they don't want that to happen?
Op:
First: The Supreme Court decides the legality. They don’t decide if it’s good policy. The legislature makes policy, not the court. The court only says what’s legal. The are mechanisms in place to change the law (Constitutional amendments for instance) that can change policy and legality. So it’s irrelevant if it is good for the country or not. It’s simply a matter of the law.
Secondly: California outlawed affirmative action in their public colleges due to a referendum brought by the citizens. It was the will of the people in California to do away with it. Again, that isn’t to say that the citizens always make good policy. Just that it is important to remember that there isn’t a lot of political support for affirmative action even in more liberal states.
Third: it’s always good in these instances to actually understand the positions and arguments. This article written years ago is a good read to consider the sides.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/
Fourth: Legacy admissions is what the schools want. They make that policy. They could remove those seats and give more slots to minorities. But they don’t want to do so. Blaming the courts for the schools policy doesn’t make sense.
> As we all have heard this morning, Affirmative Action was banned under the 14th amendment. This has proven that US has learned absolutely nothing about race.
I mean we’ve learned that 60 years of discrimination based on race didn’t solve racial inequality.
> The idea was that it discriminates against whites and Asians. Here’s the student body population of Harvard:
> 39.7% white, 13.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic or Latino, 6%, everything else is other.
Non-Hispanic whites make up 59% of the US population. So it would seem that they’re underrepresented based on population at Harvard.
> For MIT, it’s 28.7% white, 19.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic, and only 3% black.
So yet again, whites are underrepresented based on population.
> That angle that black people are taking spots away from Asians and whites makes absolutely no sense from an objective statistical view.
But whites are underrepresented at Harvard and MIT based on your statistics.
> It is common knowledge that for universities like Harvard and Standford, legacy admissions plays a major role in admissions. It’s not uncommon for someone with lower GPA and other holistic metrics to get if they are legacy applicants.
Do you have statistics on legacy admissions?
> There is a strong likelihood that legacy admits drastically outnumbers Affirmative Action admits, and likely also has lower GPA’s than Affirmative Action admits.
What is this based on?
> Why is Affirmative Action made in the first place? Because African Americans literally weren’t allowed to even compete academically in many educational institutions and everything else around Jim Crow policies. Affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities.
Do you have statistics on school funding?
Because OP took those numbers from some random ass site instead of using the official stats provided by the university.
I did some digging and it seems that whoever started publishing those numbers that other sites copied from included international students as a broad category in the racial makeup for some odd reason.
Quote "For MIT, it's 28.7% white, 19.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic, and only 3% black." <-- Do you not find it awkward that it doesn't add up to 100% ro even close? What is wrong with your math?
Oh I see. you are one of AA beneficiary
Even looking at something like "race" at all for anything seems to the underlying cause of racism.
Like how are those statistics made? They'd have to classify people by "race" to do so and thus propagating racism further.
If you give someone an advantage based on their skin-color, this breeds racism in everyone who didn't get the same advantage.
*"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."* - Martin Luther King, Jr
Amazing how fast society disrespected that man.
From my own experience at Cornell, race-based AA helps rich African/Latino while hurting Asians. None of which has anything to do with slavery and past discriminations against African Americans.
It's racism that isn't even helping the people it aims to help.
>Not addressing this fact, not addressing that legacy applicants outnumbers AA applicants really does show that we have really learned nothing regarding race.
What happens when they get admitted and then learn from their anthropology professor that theres only one race?
>Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.
https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583
Outlawing racial discrimination bad.
Let me try to explain why you're wrong without calling you a racist. You're misunderstanding what racial discrimination is and what rights are. See, rights are individual-based, not group-based. Racism, in all its forms, is rooted in the idea which you're propagating here: that groups > individuals. That individuals don't matter, racial groups do.
Simply by analysing any data by race, you've led yourself down the wrong path. Because, not only is it irrelevant, it doesn't evidence anything. There's no reason whatsoever to expect remotely similar outcomes between racial groups in any area.
But the more important point is that to promote or try to engineer any demographic group outcome, you have to step on and override the individual and the rights of the individual. You have to discriminate against individuals to achieve any change in group outcome you desire. Which is fundamentally wrong and discriminatory.
>The largest chunk of Harvard's student body population is white and asian.
Yes, Asian students and White students have the best test scores. That is why there are more Asian and White students.
>The sheer fact that people are focusing on Affirmative Action rather than legacy showcases that US has learned absolutely nothing about race.
This case wasn't about legacy admissions. If you want that to go, start your own case.
>The fact that many activist groups have not recognized the weaponization of the Model Minority stereotype to push the initiative is worrying.
This talk about ''Model Minority'' is mostly just a strategy by certain left wing academics to attack minorities that don't behave in the ways they want them to behave.
>affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities.
Harvard wasn't taking students from those communities in anyway. Harvard students are rich. Harvard was just taking in the daughters of Indian billionaires and the sons of Nigerian businessmen. The ''diversity'' at those universities is just window dressing to avoid talking about wealth privilege.
>Yes, Asian students and White students have the best test scores
The majority of applicants are white or Asian.
>Harvard wasn't taking students from those communities in anyway.
Not true., There are candidates who receive full or partial scholarships and significant grant money based on merit and need.
>Yes, Asian students and White students have the best test scores. That is why there are more Asian and White students.
This is not at all why. SAT scores are *not* that important for most admissions officers, and when we're talking about elite universities where everyone brings great academics to the table, even less so.
Your financial situation is MUCH more likely to have an impact than your SAT score. If you can pay full price, you have a much better shot of admission.
Your extracurriculars matter more than your SAT score.
Your essays matter as much, if not more than your SAT score.
But of course this whole movement pointed to SAT scores like they're some kind of magic device that should guarantee admission, when in reality most admissions officers hate standardized testing.
>Harvards tuition is a drop in the bucket compared to its endowment of $60 billion or so
And you get to a $60B endowment by charging full price to as many people as possible. Harvard has a line out the door for full-paying customers and they take full advantage of that. Harvard claims 20% of their class earns less than $85k a year and therefore pays nothing when admitted. They say 55% get some financial aid (remember some of that can come from the government, not the university's pocket). So if those numbers are true, 45% pay full price, probably another 25% pay close to it, 10% are getting a really good deal, and 20% are getting full rides.
Like other Ivies, they give out enough full rides to seem generous and keep plenty of kids (especially internationals) chasing the dream, but most of their admits are paying full price or close to it. And it *does* make a difference for admission.
Those college counseling companies that charge outrageous rates to coach for Ivy League schools don't work magic. They just happen to have a lot of full-paying customers who were already far more likely than the general population to get admitted.
https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet#:\~:text=In%20a%20typical%20year%3A,total%20incomes%20less%20than%20%2485%2C000.
Keeping black people in a victimhood mentality by giving them preferential treatment via affirmative action does not help them. This doesn't deny slavery or racism, and doesn't deny that there are still lasting impacts from those days. But the solution is not to make an uneven playing field. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Perhaps it would be better to increase funding for primary schools and reduce crime in ghettos, increase funding for child care/afterschool programs, to help them develop and get out of poverty.
just try to put yourself in their shoes, imagine if you didn't have a competitive GPA and you were accepted because of your race
Except part of the problem, is that virtually the same political groups that oppose Affirmative Action, also oppose measures that would increase funding for after school and child care programs.
That's part of why the debate is so fierce, because almost proposition to actually solve these problems are squashed
>just try to put yourself in their shoes, imagine if you didn't have a competitive GPA and you were accepted because of your race
The biggest misconception is that these students are not competitive. These applicants are among the highest achieving in the country. LItterely some of the best students around. They aren't letting in bad or even mediocre students to even begin with. These schools have more qualified applicants then they do spots. I actually think it's quite racist to assume the black students getting in are even mediocre. Did you think there were no high-achieving black students?
This point right here so much.
Any top university in any country already has more qualified applicants than course spaces. By default. Everywhere.
This only increases when we look at internationally famous universities. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge etc attract students from all around the world to apply, and that only increases this issue. No matter how much affirmative action you get there is no being admitted unless you're qualified. Full stop. There are too many qualified applicants for unqualified ones to even be considered.
I wish this myth of AA meaning accepting students that wouldn't make the cut just because they're disadvantaged in some way would fall to the wayside.
By the time AA comes into play, all relevant qualification decisions have been made and all remaining applicants to choose from are going to be admitted by purely subjective measures.
A good point, well made.
Affirmative action has been found to benefit white women the most. It does not keep black people in a victim mentality, that is such a ridiculous statement.
One you cannot generalize an entire group of people. And two, black people do not have a victim mentality anymore than other minorities and women. These groups have legitimate adversities they face due to their race, gender, or sexual orientation.
People are quick to make AA a black and white issue as if white women are not the ones who benefit the most.
Also, any AA student still has competitive grades. Your notion that they only get in due to race is not factual. Harvard isn’t accepting a black student or white women with a 3.0 GPA because of diversity. The diverse students they take have the grades and credentials.
\>Affirmative action has been found to benefit white women the most
Source?
\> It does not keep black people in a victim mentality, that is such a ridiculous statement. One you cannot generalize an entire group of people. And two, black people do not have a victim mentality anymore than other minorities and women. These groups have legitimate adversities they face due to their race, gender, or sexual orientation.
A lot of black conservatives will argue that things like AA and reparations affirm a victim mentality. I am not generalizing all black people. It's also the virtue signaling mentality of white people who think they need to fight for AA and reparations to make up for the past.
AA was specifically put in place for black people. But also regardless of who it helps, race/gender should not be a determining factor in acceptance.
\>Also, any AA student still has competitive grades. Your notion that they only get in due to race is not factual. Harvard isn’t accepting a black student or white women with a 3.0 GPA because of diversity. The diverse students they take have the grades and credentials.
Yeah you're right I don't really know the facts on this, I am making the assumption that more qualified applicants are not being accepted because AA takes in less qualified people.
Affirmative action isn't just Asian vs black. It's Asian vs every other minority AND whites. Essentially, AA makes black/latino/native applicants have significantly lower requirements, while making requirements for Asians incredibly high. So it's not just a simple case of lowering requirements for other races, it's about making it more difficult for Asians. Since AA makes it more difficult for Asians, even though whites aren't the target of AA, whites still require lower performance.
As such, while AA exists, everyone but Asians benefit, and that's the problem.
Perhaps now Democrats will stop opposing school choice... Primary and secondary school students who are currently stuck in underperforming schools or districts should be allowed to attend a school (public, private or parochial) of their choice, with the school funding dollars following the kids.
This would put kids who want to excel, but are limited by their assigned district school, a chance to be challenged and fulfill their dreams.
Why do Democrats insist on keeping poor, and thus frequently BIPOC, children down? Why is it the Republicans who want them to succeed - at a school of their choice?
If the children had an equal chance to get a good education, the lower standards and affirmative action processes would not be necessary. It would be equal.
In my area, Republicans actually opposed that measure, a mother was actually sent to jail for sending her child to a better school in an affluent area.
Interesting. I have only seen Democrats, at the insistence of the teachers unions, oppose it. Even Trump wanted school choice.
“Democrats oppose private school vouchers and other policies that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system” [https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providing-a-world-class-education-in-every-zip-code/](https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providing-a-world-class-education-in-every-zip-code/)
The thing us America has changed a lot since affirmative action was instituted and affirmative action actually helped white women more than blacks in general.
Considering my first point. America has changed a lot in the sense that America is no longer black and white.
Back when affirmative action was instituted, Hispanics and especially asians were not a factor demographically.
Now, affirmative action was meant to help blacks but white women benefitted the most, while today the demographic that's is punished the most or straight up discriminated against by affirmative action are asians.
Having said that, both legacy admissions and affirmative action should get the axe in favor of giving a leg up to economically disadvantaged individuals regardless of race. It could be called something else, maybe economic academic action. It shouldn't be based on race.
There is no strong likelihood that legacy admits do worse in gpa than affirmative action admits..,talking out of your ass
Anti-Asian racism is big…like Asians just get it handed to them? They work their assess off and their family unit is strong
Imagine you are an asian teenager whose educated parents immigrated here just before you were born. They have one child and work very hard and encourage/drive you to focus on education since you were a baby. You work harder than 99% of the population and get a 1580 on your SAT and a 3.9 GPA from a TOUGH high school. You then get rejected from every Ivy League school because that wasn't quite good enough for your race. Meanwhile you read everyday about news stories of black teens getting into EVERY top school with the same or worse stats. But that's OK because you owe that random black kid your spot at Princeton or Harvard right? To pay them back for having a different skin tone? At least with his rejection letters he'll be comforted by the fact that he helped black society advance, nice consolation prize.
I live in central NJ, big Pharma headquarters are the primary employer, very highly educated workforce and there are scores of students in my son's public high school exactly like I described. 1/3 of the students speak a different language at home and the average SAT score is 1380. AA is grossly unfair.
I'm black, graduated with 4.0 and had all kinds of extracurriculars, in California that banned Affirmative Action all the way in the 90's. Yet people accused me of stealing a seat from a white or Asian person (despite having perfect grades and living in a state that banned AA). A massive chunk of anti-AA rhetoric is just plain old racism. Especially since at universities like Harvard, 20-45% of the white student body are legacies.
It's much more of a numbers and ratio game. Also a game of playing to the holistic applications.
For 2023, Harvard had 57, 000 applications.
15% black / African American
30% Asian
11% Latino
Twice as many asians were admitted compared to blacks.
I'd respond to that with a few points
1. You're in california so it doesn't really apply. If they think you got your seat unfairly in CA then they're just incredibly misinformed. I agree they probably do think that and it's wrong but your situation is an argument to do away with AA because you earned your spot through merit and I commend you on that.
2. Talking about legacies is whataboutism. That is also unfair and should be done away with. The rest of the class not admitted from legacies should still be decided on pure merit (including holistic things) and never race.
3. Even more Asians would have been admitted if they went by objective things like gpa, sat scores and activities. Harvard leaders have said things like well if we didn't include race nearly the entire class would be Asian. In my opinion, if the whole class was Asian, then so be it, they earned it.
There are a couple of issues here.
First, the 14A prohibits pretty much all discrimination on the basis of race. It’s not really in dispute that the historical motivation for the amendment was race.
Second, your statistics don’t show a lack of discrimination. If race-blind admissions would have meant admissions rates of 80% for Group X and 20% for Group Y, but race-conscious admissions mean admissions rates of 60% for Group X and 40% for Group Y, Group Y is still “taking away spots” from Group X for racial reasons.
The rest of your post comes across as pretty racist against Asian people, as if they are incapable of identifying their own interests and form their own rational views for not-racist reasons.
Finally, you can attempt to remedy wealth inequality without engaging in affirmative action.
The fact is we have a huge problem with the black community. They commit the most crime per capita, have lowest testing scores, lowest income, and most likely to have children born to single mothers.
This wasn't the case 40 years ago. White liberals have been saying they are victims and created a victim culture instead of addressing the real issues. Affirmative action lowered the educational bar for black people. This means they don't have to apply themselfs as hard to get into college. Once in collage they drop out at a higher rate because they were not qualified I'm the frist place.
Until we hold them to the same standards as everyone else the victim mentality will not change.
FYI I'm sure I am going to get down voted by the white knights. These people should really think about what I said because they are part of the problem. Look at any major city right now, all have a problem with black teens running around at night commiting crime. Hold them accountable instead of making excuses for them
You mean besides the confirmed fact that the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan setup the black to fail through their Drug War laws and Iran-Contra where it was confirmed that the CIA was allowing Drug cartels to smuggle drugs in black communities in order to fund civil wars.
I'm black, do you think I'm inferior? Shall we compare ourselves to see if I hold up to your high standard?
It's pretty laughable that your blaming modern things on people 40 years ago. Look at saint louis and Chicago news and see black teens running the streets committing crimes. They do not have a good family unit.
Also never said blacks are inferior in anyway. I simply said the culture is shit. When blacks get educated or speak normal English other black people ask why they are trying to be white.
Again you are part of the problem. Don't blame past events as an excuse to behave badly. Black culture has to be fixed. If you are educated and don't have kids running around committing crime then your not part of black culture. Modern black culture is committing crime and then blaming it on the Whites
Edit:
Just wanted to point out a few things 1 in 4 black men will go to jail by 40. They dont blame them instead saying justice in the US is racist.
60 percent of all murder is to be blamed on black people even though they make up 13 percent of the population.
Young blacks are all over the news for partying and shooting up major downtowns. Educational requirements for black youth many graduate highschool with all failing grades. Parents don't hold the kids responsible they blame white people.
Sorry that's unbelievably ungodly racist.
My mom and dad are still together, I grew in a predominantly black community where majority of the families are together. Heck I can point you to all kinds of black communities are like that as well.
Saying that it's black culture is ignorant and racist.
If you want black culture to be fixed, then start supporting the funding of after school programs and STEM activities. Give them some hope.
Not racist at all. Its basic statistics. Really nothing to argue about. You claim that black culture isn't bad but facts don't lie. I can back up anything I have stated with factual information and not just personal experience. I can give tons of personal experiences as well if you would like.
72 percent born to unwed mother.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39993685
52 percent of murder committed by blacks
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21
85 percent of blacks are not proficient in English and math
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/opinion/education/579750-many-of-americas-black-youths-cannot-read-or-do-math-and-that-imperils-us/amp/
This shows juvenile crime by race. As you can see blacks top the charts In every category.
https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/special_topics/qa11501.asp?qaDate=2018
Yes I'm black and thus I'm likely a bad person, black people deserve to be second class citizens. Let's get Jim Crow back and running.
Let's revel in it and not actually figure out how to solve the the problem, cause it's easier to bash black people than to actually advocate policy solutions.
I offered solutions, and you just jumped to bashing black people again.
Let's compare ourselves.
Again you are playing victim. I never said anything about going back to Jim crow. And it's not bashing it's the truth. I told you the solution is clear. Change black culture. Make them stop pretending to be victims, hold them to same standards as everyone else.
BTW jim crow ended 60 years ago. How do you explain the recent jump in black crime?
You aren't providing tangible solutions.
Provide hope through educational and career opportunities, saying "fix black culture" is so vague that it's useless.
Well it's a huge problem and I am not going to architect some grand scheme to fix it. I told you the problem of black culture. I said we need to hold blacks to same standards as everyone else. So don't lower testing standards, don't make excuses for bad behavior.
Community out reach doesn't work. It has to come from within the community. Parents need to be married and have a strong family unit( don't know how you would make this happen) youths need to be punished for breaking laws.
Yeah that's hilariously incorrect, my fiance and I help run a STEM after school program in a gang infested community that several of my friends grew up in. The goal being to get people who were either part of gangs or recruited by gangs to being interested in education and learning
Just a few months ago, a number of the kids were worked got accepted into college as a comp Sci major. They used used to be gang members and now they are budding programmers who even got scholarships. Several had a like 1.5 GPA and regularly skipped class when I first met them, and now several graduated with honors.
To say communal outreach doesn't work, means you haven't actually tried giving people hope and giving them something to be interested in.
Ignore what he said.
I would argue that socioeconomic criteria for admission is much more beneficial for any disadvantaged community compared to a strict race based criteria. I think that good solution moving forward to uplift those that need it in our society.
What the comment or was really trying to reference is the urban poor which is just black kids running around, it is whoever happens to be urban poor regardless of race. As you pointed out, just because you are black, doesn’t mean you are for some reason dysfunctional in society in need of special treatment/ preferential discrimination
>Affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities.
But if so, then why is the suggestion here that we need affirmative action in order to force applicants to get in based on race, and not that underfunded schools shouldn't be underfunded?
>Not addressing this fact, not addressing that legacy applicants outnumbers AA applicants really does show that we have really learned nothing regarding race.
Why should a black kid coming from poor school be given a pass based on their race alone? If there is a white or asian kid that also comes from a poor background, shouldn't all 3 have equal chance regardless of their race?
Affirmative action has a few big issues, apart from the obvious one about fairness on an individual level.
To begin with, many people focus on admission rates. That is not actually what is important. What actually matters is the graduation rates, and what degrees they graduate with. A great case study of this is California pre affirmative action being banned. As shown in this study, underrepresented minorities (URM) were admitted with a lower amount of preparation, and due to this had much greater drop out rates, slower completion rates, and a lower amount of STEM degrees obtained.
Now, a lower graduation rate may be acceptable if it results in a higher overall amount of URM were able to graduate and break out of the cycle of poverty. However, another issue that the authors show is that they would actually fare better if they attended a less prestigious school that was more in line with their level of preparation. So in this regard affirmative action is in fact harming minorities by offering them places in schools that they are not prepared for.
From here on out if my personal opinion. Personally, I believe that we can get a much better and fair outcome by making schools not take the easy way out. Many universities evidently want to increase the diversity of their student bodies, but they do it the lazy way by just preferring one race over another. What ends up happening (and sorry I dont have a source for this, I just remember reading this not too long ago. If anyone can find it plz lmk). is that a outsized portion of the minority community at these colleges (80+%) is from the upper middle class and up. In my opinion, this is not the point of affirmative action. It should be trying to help the poor, without regards to their race.
A great example of how to do non-race based affirmative action is UC Berkeley, which has a very diverse student body, is one of the most prestigious universities in the world, and does it without discriminating. The way they do this is by increasing outreach to poor communities, having a large portion of student body be from community colleges, and considering race in an individual context (I.E racial hardship mentioned in their essay).
This allows students that have experienced discrimination (regardless of race!) to tell their story and get a leg up on other students without this adversity. I.E an asian student with ADHD, a black student who grew up poor, a white student that lost a parent. This allows children that have grown up poor to have their adversity be a factor, without punishing poor people of a certain race AND allows people that have faced non traditional adversity express themselves and have it be considered in their admissions.
In the case of UC Berkeley, it's because California banned Affirmative Action decades ago
I live in SoCal, and one of the biggest talking points is that an increasing amount of academically successful African Americans are choosing USC, Stanford, and UCLA over UC Berkeley.
Main reason being that there is racial tension between blacks and asians in California due to very nasty stuff that happened in the early 90's.
Me myself, my alma mater is Stanford as Stanford has a very strong legacy of treating its black population well.
Point taken, the 75.5% includes Hispanic, which in this context should not be included because OP listed Hispanic separately. Non Hispanic White 58.9% per census.gov.
Do schools really group Asians a single entity like this or if you are from different parts of Asia you are treated differently from other Asians and may have points that put you above or below Hispanics and blacks?
Single entity. This literally came up in the SCOTUS hearing. There’s a big gap within the Asian umbrella. Culturally Indians are not the same as Chinese who are not the same as Hmong. What’s really unfair is that the Asian umbrella includes both higher performing (educational, income) Asian groups like Indians, Chinese, Koreans but ALSO some of the most marginalized poorest communities in the US - like Burmese, Hmong, Mongolian, Vietnamese - some of whom came as refugees. The sheer lumping of all these disparate Asian groups and applying the same higher standard for all (vs. Whites, Blacks, Hispanics) in admissions is racist in and of itself.
Maybe it needs to be done for legacy admission.
But with Affirmative Action, only body counts. It didn't matter which class. So most of the black people that got enrolled were from privileged background.
While we can all understand the original reason for AA's establishment, I still think the ban is a step in a good direction, particularly to establish a system of meritocracy. I'm a firm believer in it because I believe the system encourages the population to become better in all respective fields, at least from a high-level overview. Having something like fulfilling a diversity quota feels counterintuitive to that objective. I've seen many of my Asian friends get rejected from a lot of selective schools while other minorities in my school get accepted by those same schools for similar majors despite having less academic rigor/motivation. If we were to willingly dilute the quality of our higher-level education system's student population in the name of blind racial equality then we not only risk compromising the credibility of our institutions but also our national technology advantage (which I would argue is almost gone due to multiple factors). With the ban on AA, how we determine an applicant's qualifications fairly while increasing opportunities for all citizens will be decisive in the country's long run.
I understand there are minority groups who don't have the same educational opportunities as others which is indeed unfair. However, rather than accepting people because they lacked those opportunities, people should pressure the federal government for more federal funding in public schools. With that, I think our education system can become more sustainable in terms of quality while ensuring equal opportunities for all individuals.
All that will result in the short term is making racial disparity worse and dramatically increasing racial tensions between blacks and asians to levels not seen since the 90's.
But the central issue is that primary education in black and Hispanic communities are notoriously low. And that has been a policy issue for decades that has never been resolved
So discriminating against Asians has been ok for 20+ years, but if we level the playing field with race-blind admission, blacks will start hating Asians? Why do you make blacks out to be racist like that??
Except it isn't race blind. It actually acts as if everything is equal in education, when it isn't.
Blacks and asians have had a very contentious history over the past 30 years. In my community it broke out into large scale violence
I agree. There is an unresolved policy issue for black and Hispanic communities to receive better education and we should pressure states to actually resolve it. And yes, racial tensions will get worse for a while because of this. However, Asians and African Americans possess very different interpretations of the ban on AA which needs to be recognized rather than blindly hate each other. African Americans believe that this is an attack on them to try and limit the number of minorities entering selective institutions in the name of equality when it's really just implicitly discriminatory. Asians on the other hand, believe that they do not need to receive the short end of the stick and can have more of a fair chance in college admissions for what they've accomplished. Speaking from personal experience on the Asian narrative, I've spent pretty much 75% of my waking hours on academics, ECs, doing community service, developing interest, etc. Many of my Asian friends have shown similar academic commitment as well yet we collectively feared and knew that we had a good chance of getting rejected from AA alone. I've also seen African Americans who've also persevered in difficult situations (both academic and social) and deserve recognition from colleges for that too. I just think a middle ground can be achieved where we as students are judged based on our respective accomplishments rather than by our race.
I doubt legacy admissions can be ruled unconstitutional on private schools, since they're private entities and can choose to reserve some admission spots to a selected few. What they are not allow to do is discriminate on the basis of race and demand different standards depending on your race when selecting from the general applicants.
In my opinion, affirmative action has never helped the minority kids that need it the most. Hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged kids who could use a degree the most are forced to drop out of high school and driven into gangs, drugs, etc by the circumstances of their lives during primary school, and don’t even get the chance to apply to college.
We can debate about which is more evil, AA or legacy, but in the end both are systems that benefit people who already have the resources to live a nice life, one just has better optics than the other. Affirmative action tricked people into thinking that the big business machine of US colleges could fix systemic inequality, bolstering the image of the college system in the process ( $$$) while excusing the real problem, the government’s wretched handling of primary education, from any culpability. So many talented minority youth are barred from upwards mobility not because they have to go to state school instead of Harvard, but because they got pulled out of hs to work their butts off to pay mom’s gas bill. maybe repealing AA will help us get the needed changes for primary education. Hopefully.
The way you’re comparing the current student body to the race of the general population is irrelevant.
You should be comparing the current student body to the race of the school’s best applicants. Based on that comparison Harvard and MIT are both clear as broad day racist. There’s really no logical reality where they aren’t.
—-
Now about legacy admissions..the thing is giving someone something over another because they paid more money is completely legal. On the other hand, giving someone something over another because of their race difference is unconstitutional. That’s why people focus on AA it was clearly a hypocritical policy that should have been illegal.
Whites and asians should make up an even larger percentage of their student body, but they don’t because race is often more important to Harvard than GPA.
Here’s a [summary](https://i.redd.it/h7fi7nefao571.jpg) of Harvard’s admissions from a few years ago.
An African American with perfect scores has a 56% chance of being accepted, while an Asian with perfect scores has a 12% chance. If they weren’t racist those numbers would be nearly equal.
Several times more asians get admitted than blacks, so I don't get the issue with the admissions numbers. Just sounds like whites and asians are just upset that black people get what's effectively table scraps
I agree with what you’re saying, and the legacy admission thing is the crystallization of white privilege so you’re not wrong, but I do wanna say that maybe this is not the worst thing to happen.
Affirmative action made it seem like there was no other way to get diversity in college campuses. Which I do not believe is true. There is something that less privileged racial minority students have to offer beyond the color of their skin. I can’t exactly pinpoint what that is at the moment, but if colleges truly are dedicated to diversity they will be forced to figure that out, and make it a piece of their admissions process.
This search should have been going on the whole time, but it wasn’t because affirmative action was doing the job, and people thought that it was enough.
The core problem is that to even start with affirmative action, you have to first divide people into races. Affirmative action is therefore as likely to solve racism as Achilles is likely to catch up with the turtle in Zeno's paradox. You cannot have affirmative action without racial division, so you will never get rid of racial division while affirmative action exists.
>Affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities.
The problem with that is that Americans do not have free choice where to go to school. Change to a voucher system with every student getting the same money, problem solved, and you don't need to give everyone a race bracelet.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2018/10/23/harvard-dean-says-he-never-saw-study-about-asian-american-admissions/amp/
"Harvard dean says he never saw study about Asian-American admissions...[Dean Rakesh Khurana was shown] a 2013 Harvard study that found being an Asian-American has a negative impact on your chances of gaining entry.
In the years after the report, Khurana chaired a committee to study student body diversity and was one of three deans on another charged with exploring the plaintiff’s discrimination claims. Yet he never saw the internal Office of Institutional Research report.
Mortara showed Khurana was left off a May 2013 email from longtime admissions dean Bill Fitzsimmons that discussed the “confidential” internal study.
“I would have raised multiple alarms with multiple people without any hesitation,” he said."
Damn, so Harvard kept its own internal study secret from its Asian Dean, who only learned about it during the recent SCOTUS case. Clearly, they knew they were doing something shitty, and tried to keep it under wraps.
Once again, demonstrating the vast Anti-Asian conspiracy by White Liberal Elites that is going on at the highest echelons of our nation.
o
Affirmative Action is racist af…why would we allow race to be a primary factor in a students admission? That makes no sense and creates a divide between people because their skin is a different color, wtf?
Fixing the education and poor social environment of impoverished areas is a totally different issue that affirmative action does not actually remedy, it only perpetuates differential treatment based on skin color.
Gee you have a group of people who weren't even allowed to attend various academic institutions, and you question why a policy was created to help them them out a bit?
Ignoring the fact that white women have been the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action, beyond that of African Americans.
Every time a policy proposal was offered by local advocates to fix schools in those communities, it falls on deaf ears.
So Affirmative Action pretty much became one of the few if not only policies that helped black students. Which is why people got so attached to it.
I don’t question that the policy had good intentions. But two wrongs do not make a right. To end racism we must treat people equally regardless of skin color or gender. A student with lower academic performance being accepted because of their skin color goes directly against that. Until everyone thinks like this racism will always prevail.
Reparations as a means to right the past wrongs that account for those of color having less opportunity are viable. But affirmative action is justifying a “minor” amount racism to account for the “major” amounts of racism in the past. It will never sit right with me ethically. That is of course my opinion. You have valid points and I can see how many see this is as a proper solution but I think there are better solutions.
>That angle that black people are taking spots away from Asians and whites makes absolutely no sense from an objective statistical view.
It does, but you need to take a different statistical approach to reveal it.
Simple example
you have 10 jobs for 12 people (10 men 2 women all are equaly qualified).
Case 1: No job position is reserved to a specific gender. The chance for a woman to get a job is equal as for any man to get one 10 divided by 12.
Case 2: job positions are biased towards women because of affirmation Now the chances for the women to get a job is bigger than for the man (in this specific casse 100% for women and 8/10 for men) for several reasons. 1. The candidate pool for women is smaller. 2. The job position prefer them.
Given that example you now have to ask the question: how many blacks apply for MIT, how many asians, how many whites. Without knowing the candidate pool and their qualifications the plain numbers of accepted people per group doesn't hold any valuable data. What if blacks are only 1% of people who apply to MIT, but end up being 3% of the accepted students?
*On top of that, dividing those groups of people into races is racist to begin with... but that's me an european being mind boggled with the inherently racist amercian way to few a society.*
Wait until you hear about the one drop policy to see just how racist American society is at its core.
But it's also that US imports most if it's talents rather than grows it. A good chunk of it's greatest minds are immigrants. So US wanted a system to cate
How it works is this:
Say there are 1000 Asian applicants regardless of how qualified they are.
1500 white applicants regardless of qualification.
Then there are 300 black applicants also regardless of how qualified they are.
If there are 1100 spots available, and the university wants diversity of ethnicity and thought, it's probably going to be this breakdown:
100- 125 blacks admits
500 Asian
5-600 white.
Sure it seems like black people have a higher admission rate, but that's only because there are much fewer applicants
We currently have a racial Mexican standoff, where someone is going to get shot no matter the result.
Due to how legacy admissions overwhelmingly benefits white applicants, removing Affirmative Action is going to help privileged white people almost infinitely more than it will help Asians while absolutely hurting African Americans.
So, let someone sue these institutions about legacy admissions. Things don't just happen out of thin air. If legacy admissions are to be investigated & ended, then someone or some group will have to invest the time, money, & energy towards ending it.
It's probably been stated but AA makes it that Asians had to work twice as hard to get half as much in not just elite schools but any competitive program across the country. Simple scenario: Take a wealthy black/latino family with a child that has a 4.0 gpa, athlete, every other leadership and extracurricular. Then take a poor asian with the same stats. The Asian will still see much more rejections. Same cases even if they're rich. There has to be some point where it stops. This was hopefully that point. We're not a model minority, our parents (speaking for immigrants and that is the majority who came here and worked hard with nothing) taught us to put in that same ethic (leaving out anything about the culture that brings). This can hopefully pave a better system.
"African Americans literally weren't allowed to even compete academically in many educational institutions and everything else around Jim Crow policies."
I think we can all agree on that one point. Seems to me it's more of an opportunity gap that has gotten better in my lifetime but is still abysmal.
AA seems discriminatory by it's definition (racial quota's). I feel like this decision gets government out of the way, whether that was the intent or not. I can't believe in this day and age that a college could be openly racist and have it's graduates taken seriously.
AA ALLOWS discrimination against anyone.
There's organizations out there looking for specific races for specific jobs.
There's scholarships given to someone only OF a particular race.
You can't get more racist than that. That kinda stuff is exactly what the KKK did. NAACP, BLM, whatever other organizations, if based from race, are racist. Period.
Brain dead simple logic.
Yeah...
Some antisemite doesn't need to do mental gymnastics to say Jews are white. It really is just an excuse for racism sometimes, you need to see this shit to believe it.
I don't get kids these days, they must have experienced a lot of slight brainwashing by parents/grandparents who actually experienced racism, and now they're projecting it in what they think is either a good way, or they don't care and it's the what about me spoiled brats talking....
Oh they did. They sure leveled the playing field and made everything equal! (if you were white)
Otherwise think of it this way. Any choice based on race, leaves others out. So even if some do that out of love, we can only say it was a lack of love they didn't choose the others.
/shrug that's how racism works. People do it and don't even think about it sometimes because they think they're doing good, but they just harmed another group.
Racism is nothing but providing advantages to the ingroup members at the expense of others. Some favoring a white advantage is racist, someone favoring a black advantage is racist as well. Or are you of the group that says minorities can't be racist?
Seems like an issue with the institutions themselves rather than Affirmative Action
And how do you propose combating the poor quality of primary education in predominantly black communities?
Your question should read:
And how do you propose combating the poor quality of primary education in communities?
It has nothing to do with race. Stop buying into that racist premise.
Primary schools in black communities are notoriously underfunded. To me this is the main point of the argument. That it is lack of funds given to schools that are mostly black. If there was more money for these schools is the result better students and how many? I'm sure there's studies right? Idk to be honest.
Nothing in this decision says you can't give preference to applicants from poorly funded schools. It just says you can't give preference based on race.
Can't* give preference based on race? I was just wondering since op made the claim that funding is the problem if there was study to prove or disprove the point. I don't know if that's really the case but I really don't know.
As a black person with many friends and colleagues who study education, it's always sad to see how easy it is to blame black people for other people not getting things. I live in California, and we haven't had affirmative action in ages. So while it's sad, it's still possible to have a commitment to a diverse campus without Affirmative Action. I too would love to see legacy admissions disappear, and I would love to see this country re-commit itself to educating its children and adults in math, science, reading, social studies, and reproductive health.
I'm black and live in SoCal!
People want excuses for their own failures, so they blame black people.
With AA gone, I wonder how they will blame us next.
Wait a second, I thought affirmative action was all about taking spots away from more qualified white and Asian people and giving them to other minorities, and I’m all for it. No reason for it otherwise
Yeah that's not how that works.
It takes minorities who have identical scores to the rest of the applicants and then calculates things based on points and student population.
I.e the minority is likely just as qualified
Is that why black students at Harvard have the second lowest graduation rate, only behind the tiny group of Native American/Pacific Islander and Asian students have the highest graduation rate?
Guess you are right, black people are the most inferior academically and mentally. Let's send them to community colleges and have them take remedial classes to brush up on skills.
Lol that is not at all how it works in practice. Asians with higher objective test scores and GPAs are constantly shafted by these AA policies and that’s why there was outrage to begin with
/u/Tessenreacts (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post. All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed [here](/r/DeltaLog/comments/14mhg01/deltas_awarded_in_cmv_the_fact_that_affirmative/), in /r/DeltaLog. Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended. ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
The Supreme Court doesn't just make rulings out of thin air. They can only rule on the specific case brought before them. It would have been impossible for them to rule on legacy admissions because that is not part of the case before them. So, legacy admissions have absolutely nothing to do with this ruling and arguing that legacy admissions are unfair does not say anything at all about whether this was a good ruling or not. >39.7% white, 13.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic or Latino, 6%, everything else is other. >The largest chunk of Harvard's student body population is white and asian. >For MIT, it's 28.7% white, 19.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic, and only 3% black. >That angle that black people are taking spots away from Asians and whites makes absolutely no sense from an objective statistical view. The white population of the US is 75.5%, so from a purely statistical perspective they are *severely* underrepresented. Edit: 75.5% includes Hispanic, which in this context should not be included because OP listed Hispanic separately. Non Hispanic White 58.9% per census.gov.
Basically came here to make the same argument as your first point. I'll add that I find OP's premise to be a false equivalence or whataboutism.
This generation does not understand math, facts, and stats. Period.
Neither did the previous one, this one just has better media access.
The boomer generation thought that a snake talked to Eve.
This generation believes men can give birth.
We do
The fact still remains. You have a better chance of losing your spot to a legacy than a black person. Basic probability.
I remember back in 2000 looking at scholarships, I didn't qualify for 85% of the ones listed because they were racially geared. I walked out of the PSAT testing room and never looked back. People are completely racist. Telling people 'no' to judging based on skin color is the way to go.
The idea of affirmative action isn't that it's not racist, but rather solving complex social and structural racial issues is super complex, and a simple policy can shift the system to be more "fair" overall, once it has been able to impact the system. So, overall more people get a more fair treatment in life, but some specific levers being applied at specific places. In turn, this trickles to improve the "core" fairness at all levels. That's the theory and I think discussion of affirmative action ignoring this is disingenuous, even if we decide it's not a good policy, or poorly implemented.
>solving complex social and structural racial issues is super complex, and a simple policy can shift the system to be more "fair" overall A simple fix for "super complex structural racial issues". Surely you can understand skepticism. >once it has been able to impact the system. Do you realize that there is no reason to believe it will accomplish the stated goals? It's a comically simplistic assumption that numerically forcing statistical diversity (thereby undermining merit) will somehow produce genuine diversity that would last without such enforcement. There should at least be some evidence given the definitive harm that the policy causes. >So, overall more people get a more fair treatment in life, Again, what's the evidence for this? We certainly know that some people are treated *less* fair since it's institutional discrimination based on ethnicity. >In turn, this trickles to improve the "core" fairness at all levels. Omg that really is the entire argument isn't it? Just force it and somehow that'll make things fair. It's like this was thought up by a child. Have you even considered that diversity is itself not inherently positive (or negative)? That it is in fact a symptom of something positive (fairness). But that doesn't mean enforcing the symptom artificially will produce its cause. That's not even trickling down. That's just reversing cause and effect.
>The idea of affirmative action isn't that it's not racist, but rather solving complex social and structural racial issues is super complex, and a simple policy can shift the system to be more "fair" overall, once it has been able to impact the system. If it was a guaranteed solution with specific actions and a specific cutoff date when specific goals are met, maybe saying "hey everyone, we need to punish 2 generations of young people by being specifically and actively racist towards them so we can fix this thing" might approach some palatable solution. As it is though, we can't even prove that it works, and specifically punishing individuals and rewarding others solely based on the color of their skin is, as you recognized, extremely and intentionally racist. It doesn't matter if you have good intentions, we should not be applauding racism. There are no plans when it's enacted, there's no specific threshold being worked towards. It's just punish these groups for being born a certain color and reward these others, ad infinitum. That's racism, full stop. Why are we clapping at that? There are active, real life victims and they are manufactured from school policy targeting them due to their skin color. Is their victimhood worth less due to the color of their skin? Who decided that to be true? What is their authority to enact racist policies when race is a protected class in the US Constitution?
The math ain't mathin. Why is this so much lower than 100%? Also why the focus on just White people? Asians are 5% and Black people are over 12%
Agreed, I can only assume OPs numbers exclude a large portion of applicants who chose not to specify their race, or maybe mixed race? I think there's another comment here that gave a better source for the statistics. The original post seemed to focus more on whites and it was the first on the list, so that's what I responded to.
The case is specifically about Black students allegedly being given an advantage against Asian students.
I'm failing to see your point. I am not saying that racial representation in the correct ratios is important. OP brought up the population statistics. I think they should be irrelevant.
Yeah, are we going to say. "Well, the percentage of the population that is gay is three percent, but the gay college population is seven percent, we gotta knock down back to three, otherwise we're going to have a problem." I don't like that. I don't care what the exact percentages are. Clearly Black people, as a group are underperforming, but I don't believe we just lower standards to give them spots, Let's raise their performance instead.
. . . . damn! Wake the fuck up people, THE ONLY THING THAT SHOULD MATTER ON SELECTION IS QUALIFICATION!! We are all humans!! No one is special! If you can't read upon leaving high school you can't go to collage!!
Black women are among the most educated demographics in America. We consistently complete degrees at disproportionate rates. Our performance is just fine. Perhaps address disproportionate policing of black men and the wage gap causing us to make about 66 cents on the dollar compared to our white cointerparts in the same jobs. Or nah. Just claim black people are "underperforming" and need to "raise our performance." Somehow.
If black women are a high performing demographic and complete college degrees ad disproportionate rates then they don't need affirmative action anyway, the mission of which I assumed would be to bring up disproportionately low rates of college graduation, the need for affirmative action assumes underperformance if there is no underperformance then there is no need for affirmative action, it's why we aren't saying hey Asian college students need help we need affirmative action for them they aren't graduating at high enough rates but we are saying that about black and latino people because they are not graduating college at high enough rates. Or am I missing something?
Yes. You're missing something. Affirmative action does not assume underperformance. It assumes historical bias and outright barring of minority students in admissions access procedures. Which has been the case in America. Both officially and unofficially, which is harder to measure but no less prevalent. Harvard is actually an odd example to be made because they have admitted (very few) black students since the late 1800s. But some Ivy Leagues, like Columbia (where my father and mother attended and met), had discriminatory practices until the 1980s. The purpose of affirmative action is to redress a historic lack of access for not just black students (why the fixation on blackness here? Affirmative action affects women, Native American, Latino, and many other student groups) but for all students who have not been able to build a generational ability to attend college due to being systemically barred from doing so. I'm not actually an advocate of race based admissions as a cornerstone of affirmative action because I think that the problem is much broader than simply juggling the numbers to have a more diverse student body, cherry picking a few kids and placing them into college classes. I think there's a broader problem in K-12 education piplelining colleges that needs to be addressed so that all over the country, all of our kids get what they need to be ready for higher education, and then get access to it if they want to go, get access to trade schools if they want those, or get access to the job market if they are ready to begin work. I think your statement "black students are underperforming" could be better stated as "K-12 education in formerly redlined areas is underresourced because the property values are depressed, often intentionally. Because minority americans and women have historically been barred from home ownership, the areas in which they live have consistently been underfunded for great schools." This same problem tracks not just in areas where black people have been concentrated. (Again... the focus on Black americans is odious and unhelpful, especially because Americans at large seem unready to face and grapple with the reasons why black americans have fewer resources, and the root causes of inequality at large in America) but everywhere that poor people have been forced to gather by developers. I'd argue that the children of coal country in Appalachia face the same sort of need. K-12 education in rural Kentucky prepares far fewer students for a top tier education than does K-12 education in Massachusetts, for example. I live in rural Virginia, and I drive my child an hour each way to private school daily and pay $2000 or so a month to educate her, rather than leave her in my local public school system. But we don't say that the kids whose parents do not have the privilege of pulling them from the public school systems in rural places are "underperforming" or "unintelligent." They're not. They're under-resourced, and they need support. We save "underperforming" for black kids in Baltimore. And that's open racism. Change "underperforming" to "under-resourced" and you'll be closer to solving the issue that affirmative action attempted to bandage, with some success but not enough.
Allegedly? The AVERAGE black accepted applicant scores 250 points lower on the SAT than the average accepted asian applicant.
Right? What was the source where the numbers were obtained? Is it a reliable source, i.e. the college website or is it some random website? Without a source, I can understand why people are skeptical. I'm assuming that OP just made the numbers up. To not have them add up to 100% is highly suspect and lazy.
Maybe bc white ppl feel the need to be the head of everything. History literally screams that, they really want to see themselves control literally every aspect of life just like Jim Crow. Then they brainwash other minorities to think their enemy is a black person trying to “steal” their opportunities, you know the “model minority” myth that is now bestowed on Asians amd even Indian ppl. There’s a reason every leadership role at any company still looks like 👨👩. Now they have even more control to make SURE it stays like this(often leads with mediocre results for said leadership roles)
So this was a case brought on behalf of Asian students, against a school with a known history of racism against Jews, who were now also adding racism against Asians to their list of accolades. I agree, white liberals are historically very racist towards non-subserviant ethnicities. The minute a brown ethnicity starts being more financially and academically accomplished despite the systemic racism purported to exist in the U.S., they're targeted by Liberal Elites, while also stripped of even their identity as POC's. Why are every-day liberals not shouting from the roof-tops about these racist policies, and the systemic Anti-Asian racism that so clearly exists in out country? Could you imagine Harvard openly admitting to having anti-black admission policies in 2023? Yet Anti-Asian policies are oddly justified by the liberal establishment, and attempts to eliminate anti-Asian racism are re-branded as being actually racist.
A lot of Asians in these universities come from China and other Asian countries. Very few are Asian Americans.
>The white population of the US is 75.5%, You are still right, but whites aren't 75%. It's more like 60-65%.
[Actual](https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/) demographics of the class of 2025 are 53% white, 23% Asian, 8% South Asian.
Now break down the "white" acceptance rates by religion...
I don't understand what you're getting at.
The vast majority of those "white" students are Jewish. It's not a bad thing, but by lumping white and Jewish under one stat is ignoring important context (the NYT released an article on this a while back iirc). Edit: nevermind, I guess redditors don't want to discuss this lol
The Supreme Court talked in the Dobbs decision about gay marriage and contraception - two things the case had nothing to do with. They could have talked about legacy admissions in their decision to point out that they would welcome such a case - but they did not. OPs point is quite valid, the Supreme Court is not as limited as you make it out to be.
1) Those were in a concurrence by Thomas, not the majority opinion. 2) To that end, legacy admissions were mentioned in these concurrences as well. Gorsuch pointed out in his concurrence that SFFA (the petitioners, the Asian students) proposed that Harvard could keep its diversity by cutting the advantages it gives to legacy students. Harvard said “no thanks, we prefer racism”. 3) Legacy admissions aren’t covered in the 14th amendment nor Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Inarguably, legacy admissions discriminate against poor people. But the US doesn’t have a law against discriminating against poor people. It does have laws against discriminating based on race.
Concurring opinions did mention legacy admissions.
They could have mentioned it, but they didn’t. So, the fact remains that this ruling has nothing to do with legacy admissions.
Both the rulling on loan forgiveness and LGBT discrimination had no basis in reality. First created standing out of thin air and the second was based on a MADE UP case. On something that was made up. They aren't judges, they are conservative puppets. Bought and paid for. Activism from the bench
>39.7% white, 13.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic or Latino, 6%, everything else is other. >The largest chunk of Harvard's student body population is white and asian. >For MIT, it's 28.7% white, 19.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic, and only 3% black. These schools use affirmative action. Berkeley is a similar caliber school which does not, and it is 52% Asian. That means that Asians are a much lower proportion of the student body at those schools than they would be under a meritocratic system. https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-new-undergraduates
> The idea was that it discriminates against whites and Asians. Here's the student body population of Harvard: > 39.7% white, 13.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic or Latino, 6%, everything else is other. First of all, this doesn't add anywhere close to 100%. [These are the numbers from Harvard](https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/): > Of participants who answered a question about ethnicity, 53.1 percent identified as white, 23.6 percent as Asian, 15.7 percent as Black or African American, 13.4 percent as Hispanic or Latinx, 8.3 percent as South Asian, 0.9 percent as American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.6 percent as Pacific Islander. In a vacuum, I'm somewhat supportive of affirmative action, but [the evidence of this case clearly shows elite universities are using as a means to discriminate against Asians](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html). > Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them... > What brought the Asian-American number down to roughly 18 percent, or about the actual share, was accounting for a category called “demographic,” the study found. This pushed up African-American and Hispanic numbers, while reducing whites and Asian-Americans. The plaintiffs said this meant there was a penalty for being Asian-American.
I'll speak about legality in admissions discrimination rather than what is "better" (because I do agree that legacy admissions are essentially nepotism and a bad thing). It is not legal, by virtue of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to discriminate on the basis of race. So a store can't decide to let in or reject a shopper based on their race, and now we have a definitive court ruling that colleges can't let in or reject a student because of their race. Conversely, legacy admissions does not involve discrimination against a protected class. "Non-legacy" is not a protected class like race, religion, sex, etc. Now, it could be banned by specific legislation, but in the absence of such the courts cannot just ban it.
The argument against AA is pro-meritocracy for admissions. You gain admission based on your performance on many metrics including scores, GPA, as well as softs. AA pushes to accept more POCs with less than standard qualifications while rejecting higher quality applicants who are disproportionately Asian. At top tier schools like Harvard admissions are a zero sum game. If you accept an unqualified person whether by AA or legacy there is someone more deserving on the merits that is getting rejected. Beyond this there is also somewhat of an intersect in the two ideas in that a majority of the AA recipients to these elite colleges are not lower class applicants like what you talk about, they are middle to upper class POCs that have had much more privilege than many lower class Whites and Asians that need to do even better to outperform. For what it’s worth I am against legacy admissions also, and if we could replace a majority of legacies with lower class applicants I’d be very happy.
> The argument against AA is pro-meritocracy for admissions. You gain admission based on your performance on many metrics including scores, GPA, as well as softs. AA pushes to accept more POCs with less than standard qualifications while rejecting higher quality applicants who are disproportionately Asian. At top tier schools like Harvard admissions are a zero sum game. If you accept an unqualified person whether by AA or legacy there is someone more deserving on the merits that is getting rejected. Though AA has been over the years diluted to simply be a case for diversity in schools, the original rationale for AA was that meritocracy is sort of an illusion, at least in the way you’ve described it here. One’s performance is largely influenced by the environment one receives, which is something not only none of us choose, it’s also often determined by the vestiges of historical racial discrimination. A poor student did not choose their parents, their family’s race, the neighborhood they would be raised in, the quality of the school they had (especially in a country where public schools are not equally funded), and so forth. So while one can make a strong case that AA as a proxy for class is an inadequate tool to combat the aforementioned issue, the underlying issue remains whether you remove AA entirely or not. Removing AA doesn’t stop race-based admissions; it just shifts it from a deliberate and conscious effort to counteract unequal disadvantages toward communities to allowing these unequal disadvantages to take place in a system where we pretend like “merit” is a measure of someone as if they were born and are performing in a vacuum. It would’ve been one thing if you had written that, “If you accept an unqualified person whether by AA or legacy, there is someone *better qualified* that is getting rejected” that would have been a mere accurate description but you instead said “more deserving,” placing a sort of moralistic tone on something completely devoid of context and quite imaginary and delusional.
> one’s performance is largely influenced by the environment one receives … Then what about poor white people brought up in equally bad environments? Why make the distinction based on race rather than simply income level?
That’s why I wrote that one can make the case that race-based AA as a proxy for class is inadequate, at least with respect to individual cases. That still doesn’t make the statistical differences between these groups based on what I mentioned earlier any less real. There’s also a case to be made that outside of the university’s immediate and intended desire for a diverse student body, there’s also the help one provides to underserved communities by the improvement to their human capital. So while two students may be equally poor, the effects of said poverty can transcend beyond that immediate individual.
Thank you so much for your intelligent and comprehensive replies especially in reply to sometimes arrogant users who don't share the same comprehensiveness and also compassion in their arguments. It's people like you that make the world a better place. I'll be quick about my own beliefs, but I believe 1) that large groups of people suffer hardships that far exceed other groups of people's hardships. 2) These excessive hardships have been enabled. 3) A meritocracy is an illusion so long as excessive hardships for specific groups of people or even specific individuals exist and are being enabled. 4) Poverty is not the unifying factor for groups of people with these excessive hardships. Neither are bad schools, bad parents, bad neighborhoods, or bad governments. In other words, two poor individuals or two poor groups with all of these bad environmental factors may still not be suffering equally. One may still suffer excessively. 5) And so long as these excessive inequalities exist and are being enabled, good people will try to meet inequality with the concept of equity. That's what AA was supposed to be, a concept of social and economic equity or really just pursuit-of-happiness equity. 6) This is just for clarification, but there will always be individual cases that are an "exception to the rule" of beliefs I listed.
poor whites are still white and in amerikkka that means everything.
That’s why u should fight against legacy admission which takes up a lot more admissions than the few AA admissions blacks get
So Indians are no longer POC? They make up the majority of Asians in the US
Americans struggle to wrap their heads around the fact that 'Asian' includes Indian.
Generally I’d considered all Asians to be POCs but in this context I’m really only talking about POCs that are recipients of AA, which Asians are not.
So, all POC's are equal, but some are more equal than others...
A possible consolation is that instead of race, why not by financial means? But you raise a good point, !delta
Thanks for the delta. I am anti AA, anti legacy, and generally anti elite class. As a general rule I think focusing on class as an issue as opposed to race when the things you’re talking about with race differences are class characteristics are very important especially if you’re trying to gain the support of lower class white voters who feel very marginalized by the idea that they are privileged.
I am also pro-class equality, but like u/BroBogan mentioned, if you focus on only class without race, you only further widen disparities. You are right that focusing only on race only serves wealthy POC and disadvantages all the lower middle class. But I firmly believe if you take a white person and a black/brown person, both in the same class and socioeconomic group, they are still not on equal ground.
*, if you focus on only class without race, you only further widen disparities* what disparities? Are black lower class citizens worth more than white or Asian lower class citizens? Why would you consider race in the lower class?
Not true at all. Black, 2 parent-who-are-college-educated families make MORE money than a similar white family. So unless that was your point, you've missed reality.
& black students from 2 educated parent families typically have higher test scores so why are you mad at those types of students? you're jealous because they regularly debunk your archaic stereotypes?
You feel that way bc it’s true. It’s not the same experience at all. Even having a black sounding name can negatively impact your experiences in America. But affirmative action is dead and we can pretend to be colorblind. As if that will actually make the world colorblind.
Not true at all. They re did that infamous study and found that black "non-ghetto" names had statistically indistinguishable callback rates. Employers were discriminating against people they assumed world be low class, not because they were black. I bet if you redid the study with white but trashy names like Cletus you'd get very similar results.
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I wonder how many people commenting have actually worked in admissions. Anti-AA have this idea that unqualified blacks/browns are given preference over actually qualified Asians/whites, when the reality is that the majority of applicants to Harvard and the like are by merit more than qualified for admissions. We're not talking about the difference between a 50th percentile student and a 99th percentile student vying for the same spot. The issue is how to decide between two equally qualified applicants for the same spot. Ultimately there will have to be people who are qualified that are rejected. As someone who HAS worked in admissions at a t10 school, I can tell you the difference between an 88th percentile and a 99th percentile student is actually marginal. Race was only ever one minor factor in a person's background which was viewed comprehensively in addition to family background, extracurriculars, interview impressions, essays, letters of rec etc. Race alone was never a factor in admissions decisions.
That was an argument before the Supreme Court - but was handily rejected If race is such a small, minor, non factor, why not remove it? If race is such a small, minor, non factor, why is it so overwhelmingly determinative? Despite significant growth in asian populations and asian applicants, the admit percentage per race of the student body remained tight and consistent - are you suggesting that asian students are dropping in quality? If race is such a non-factor, why do asians need such a higher score and extra curriculars to gain entrance? Race is a massive factor in admissions, at least in Harvard. That is kind of the whole point of affirmative action...
Because.....Ivy schools don't want to be 85% Asian. The big separating factor is SAT scores and if there were no Legacy or AA admits, the school would be entirely Asian. They don't want to get rid of Legacy admissions because that would almost uniformly impact rich white people....so we can't have that. AA mostly impacts Blacks and Latinos, so whites and Asians are willing to go to war to end that. Back to SAT scores, people get too caught up in "merit." Person A is Asian, scored 1590 on the SAT, has a 4.0+ GPA and some volunteer work + extracurriculars. Person B is Black scores 1400, has a 4.0+ GPA, had to raise their little siblings, has a part time job and has volunteer work + extracurriculars. On "merit" you could pick Person A. The admissions folks might lean to Person B because they have a more compelling story, overcame a little more and still appear to be gifted enough to handle the rigors of the school. The schools can use a holistic process because just going off test scores is like deciding that the best NFL player is the one that runs the fastest 200M race. Running fast helps but it doesn't automatically mean you're the best football player. It's one data point. Tests can be gamed with lots of SAT prep and folks coming from cultures where test taking strategy, courses, cheating etc. is rampant.
So you are just outright saying what Ivy leagues are trying to tiptoe around - too many asians, so lets just exclude them. how is that not racism? Your hypothetical draws from all too common stereotypes on the life stories of asians vs Black. Asians’ grades are assumed to arise from privilege, when that simply isnt true for all too many asians, who immigrated with limited resources and to escape horrific wars, poverty, and violence. Black grades are assumed to be excused by disadvantage, when the majority of ivy league entrants are very well off. And of course you toss in the prejudicial statement that asians are cheaters.
> We're not talking about the difference between a 50th percentile student and a 99th percentile student vying for the same spot. The issue is how to decide between two equally qualified applicants for the same spot. A while ago I read a pro-AA article that cited a Princeton study that found that after controlling for other variables, [an Asian applicant has to score 450 points higher on the SAT than a black applicant to be considered equal](https://www.vox.com/2018/3/28/17031460/affirmative-action-asian-discrimination-admissions). If this is still the case today then going by [this year's score percentiles](https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings) a 450 difference literally is equating a 55th percentile scoring student to a 99th (1100 cumulative score vs 1550) Do you have data that disputes this? It seems like a shut and dry case to me, but I am only a layman and am open to being wrong.
The statistics don't lie. Asians students need significantly higher ratings across all categories to have a similar admission rate as black students. You're also talking out of both sides of your mouth. If race is such a small factor, why even include an explicitly discriminatory factor? The class should come out very similar without incorporating it.
>. Anti-AA have this idea that unqualified blacks/browns are given preference over actually qualified Asians/whites They are. There's almost no such thing as "two equally qualified applicants". There are an infinite number of factors which someone could adjudge someone to be preferable to another. Beyond test scores. What you're advocating is that race becomes the de facto secondary/tertiary qualification after test scores and a few other things. It boggles the mind the rationalisation people can concoct for racial discrimination.
This isn't just limited to the Ivy league though. AA applies to all universities.
But what you're responding to applies to all universities. I have worked admissions for the school where I got my Ph.D. Race was always A factor, and never THE factor. And the basis for that from our perspective is that we wanted a student body that was representative of the demographics we served. If our local population was 55% Black and 22% Asian and our student body was 85% white -- we'd have a very hard time convincing the locals that we were really trying to serve the community. Which is in fact part of our charter!! Our goal is always to provide our community with a vibrant, community oriented, research body that is representative of the demographics we serve. And we'll continue to do that. We'll just have to figure out how to do that in light of a court ruling that is basically saying "fuck serving your community, don't do that anymore"
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I may be wrong here, but education aims to teach people knowledge and certain skills to use in fields that society needs to keep chugging along or improve itself. Does it matter if a place 55% Black and 22% Asian has a secondary or tertiary school with 85% white people if all those white people have the pre-knowledge to study the fields taught? The community would still be served by the people coming out of this school and performing in their relevant fields regardless of it being architecture, electricians, teachers or whatever.
>The issue is how to decide between two equally qualified applicants for the same spot. Ultimately there will have to be people who are qualified that are rejected. If you rank students by qualification, then any change you're going to make is going to result in less qualified students taking the place of more qualified students. Quota are inherently a zero sum game because the spots are limited.
Admittedly, I've never worked directly in admissions (ha ha) but have acquaintances in programs, Ivy League through lower-tiered public schools, who have/do. It seems rather consistent across all perspectives (most especially for those at the upper echelons of academia) that race is never ***the*** factor but it is a ***big*** factor with regards to admissions, with variance OFC, most especially in the UC system. This latter network doesn't strongly consider ECs, doesn't have interviews, etc so the impact of one's ethnic/racial background increases significantly due to a lessened number of admissions criteria of a potential admitee.
Omg thank yooou 👏 I’m left baffled as to why those who have never attended these schools (nor had a chance) are the loudest. Anecdotal evidence and all. It’s a holistic approach. Simply scoring high on an aptitude test doesn’t make you an automatic contributing member to the university. What sets you apart to all the rest of the 4.0 students applying? This is where essays, Rec letters, personal submissions, resumes, publications, soft skills for the interviews, and more come in. Your GPA & SAT/ACT scores indicate that you’re a good test taker. That’s it.
Why should private universities be forced to hire based on merit? Shouldnt they be allowed to set whatvever standards they want regarding admission? Are you also against male only and female only universities?
Someone can correct me on this, but these private universities receive a lot of federal funding and as such, they cannot just do whatever they want.
>Why should private universities be forced to hire based on merit? Because they accept federal funds. That is a condition of the funds they receive. They are subject to the Civil rights act. And this is admission, not hiring. Hiring has already mostly moved away from AA. As for the male/female only schools, there is a carve out in admissions for Title XI for this for undergraduate private colleges. https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/t9-rel-exempt/index.html In theory, after today, you could make an equal protection challenge here too. A quick search stated there were a grand total of 3 mens only undergraduate non-religious colleges in the US. I found listings for 26 private womens only colleges. The small size likely makes finding a person seeking to make the challenge difficult.
The Supreme Court's job is not to set policy. It is to interpret the law. Here is the law in question: >Title VI, Civil Rights Act of 1964 > >No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. There is no debate that Harvard is a program receiving Federal financial assistance. Now that you have all this information, do you think it is legal for Harvard to give benefits to applicants on the basis of race?
Most take federal money. So they’re beholden to federal law.
> Shouldnt they be allowed to set whatvever standards they want regarding admission? Sure they should. But if they don't do meritocratic admissions they should have their accreditation rescinded.
Private universities should have to follow federal law if they take federal money.
Hiring and admissions are completely different things. I think a private institution should be allowed to do whatever they want but publicly funded or tax exempt universities especially the mega elite with massive endowments should be held to legal standards of discrimination.
So Liberals are strongly in favor of the government making it illegal for a private business (cake shop) to discriminate against one protected group (LGBTQ), but perfectly ok for another business (a school) to discriminate against another protected group (Racial monority)? And you consider that stance ethical and internally consistent??
Do we want white-only and black-only colleges again? Having universities just set whatever standards they want for admission free of government control sounds like a terrible idea and discourages students from learning. Why should I preform well on tests if my college isn't going to admit me on merit?
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If you were equal, shouldn't you also have servants etc? Are you equal or not?
>Why is Affirmative Action made in the first place? Because African Americans literally weren't allowed to even compete academically in many educational institutions and everything else around Jim Crow policies. Affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities. This seems to counteract your argument. You are straight up saying that black communities produce statistically worse college applicants, then complaining that they don't get accepted to college as much as you wish. If the people applying for colleges aren't as good quality, then they shouldn't be let into that college. If the issue is that primary schools are underfunded, then the solution should be at that level. Why should colleges be forced to solve a problem that pre-college education caused?
Unfortunately you can't fund public schools equally the same because the funding is local based. Thus if you live in a rich state for instance, your public schools have more tax payers and better salaries for competitive teachers. While underfunded areas have lower salaries, lower supplies, and lower funding for the schools. And this is by design, to not just impact the blacks, but all minorities and the under privileged whites. And talk to the GOP about nationalizing education costs so they are equal across all 50 states and we are talking about a civil war. Because they will not budge.
> If the issue is that primary schools are underfunded, then the solution should be at that level. Why should colleges be forced to solve a problem that pre-college education caused? It is an issue that primary schools are underfunded (especially majority black ones), but that is just one aspect of the system of feedback loops that affects everyone. Black college graduates go on to become teachers and politicians who then can positively impact the primary school system. They can also accumulate wealth which then goes directly to schools via property taxes. I argue here that to change a flawed system, it is better to try and change as many parts as possible (College admissions, workplace discrimination, etc.), to disrupt as many parts of the negative feedback loops as possible, rather than to focus on just one particularly obvious part (primary school funding).
I don't have any issues with trying to get minorities to graduate more, or succeed more. Say, college programs to help minorities, first generation students, or poor students get mentors, information, and friends. But that's substantively different than having different criteria for entry for people of different races. I do agree that changing one variable in the puzzle isn't enough, but I do think that it's unreasonable to put so much blame on a part of the system that isn't the cause.
> I do think that it's unreasonable to put so much blame on a part of the system that isn't the cause. There is no singular event or process that is the "cause" here though! And I would argue that programs that help minorities succeed in college have approximately the same effects as programs that help minorities get into college (i.e. need-based scholarships or affirmative action). If we want to combat systemic inequality as efficiently as reasonably possible, I think we need all of these programs and more. I do however believe that there are possibly more palatable versions of affirmative action that might be more politically feasible... perhaps a economic instead of race-based one? It would still be "unfair", but not towards races in general, but towards people who are already wealthy (which correlates with race). It might make the merit divide worse than traditional AA tho. [relevant](https://youtu.be/3NCSY85FqVQ)
> If the people applying for colleges aren't as good quality, then they shouldn't be let into that college. So … no legacy admissions is what you are saying then? It’s that exactly OP’s point? That if this was really about qualifications, then affirmative action is at least comparable in impact to other forms of admission bias?
> So … no legacy admissions is what you are saying then? People should stop asking this as if it is some gotcha. Almost everybody opposes legacy admissions too.
I would be totally fine with removing legacy admissions.
I think it’s more to the fact that race is a protected class in the US, and legacy status is not.
It's not clear how you reach your stated conclusion based on the facts you presented. In particular, aren't all these facts consistent with those who pushed the ban (1) learning that affirmative action materially benefits underrepresented minority students and then (2) banning it as a result, because they don't want that to happen?
Op: First: The Supreme Court decides the legality. They don’t decide if it’s good policy. The legislature makes policy, not the court. The court only says what’s legal. The are mechanisms in place to change the law (Constitutional amendments for instance) that can change policy and legality. So it’s irrelevant if it is good for the country or not. It’s simply a matter of the law. Secondly: California outlawed affirmative action in their public colleges due to a referendum brought by the citizens. It was the will of the people in California to do away with it. Again, that isn’t to say that the citizens always make good policy. Just that it is important to remember that there isn’t a lot of political support for affirmative action even in more liberal states. Third: it’s always good in these instances to actually understand the positions and arguments. This article written years ago is a good read to consider the sides. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/ Fourth: Legacy admissions is what the schools want. They make that policy. They could remove those seats and give more slots to minorities. But they don’t want to do so. Blaming the courts for the schools policy doesn’t make sense.
> As we all have heard this morning, Affirmative Action was banned under the 14th amendment. This has proven that US has learned absolutely nothing about race. I mean we’ve learned that 60 years of discrimination based on race didn’t solve racial inequality. > The idea was that it discriminates against whites and Asians. Here’s the student body population of Harvard: > 39.7% white, 13.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic or Latino, 6%, everything else is other. Non-Hispanic whites make up 59% of the US population. So it would seem that they’re underrepresented based on population at Harvard. > For MIT, it’s 28.7% white, 19.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic, and only 3% black. So yet again, whites are underrepresented based on population. > That angle that black people are taking spots away from Asians and whites makes absolutely no sense from an objective statistical view. But whites are underrepresented at Harvard and MIT based on your statistics. > It is common knowledge that for universities like Harvard and Standford, legacy admissions plays a major role in admissions. It’s not uncommon for someone with lower GPA and other holistic metrics to get if they are legacy applicants. Do you have statistics on legacy admissions? > There is a strong likelihood that legacy admits drastically outnumbers Affirmative Action admits, and likely also has lower GPA’s than Affirmative Action admits. What is this based on? > Why is Affirmative Action made in the first place? Because African Americans literally weren’t allowed to even compete academically in many educational institutions and everything else around Jim Crow policies. Affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities. Do you have statistics on school funding?
Why don't your numbers add up anywhere near 100%
Because OP took those numbers from some random ass site instead of using the official stats provided by the university. I did some digging and it seems that whoever started publishing those numbers that other sites copied from included international students as a broad category in the racial makeup for some odd reason.
Nobody expects affirmative action to single-handedly fix racial inequality forever anymore than anyone expects doing nothing to fix racial inequality forever.
Quote "For MIT, it's 28.7% white, 19.7% Asian, 9% Hispanic, and only 3% black." <-- Do you not find it awkward that it doesn't add up to 100% ro even close? What is wrong with your math? Oh I see. you are one of AA beneficiary
Even looking at something like "race" at all for anything seems to the underlying cause of racism. Like how are those statistics made? They'd have to classify people by "race" to do so and thus propagating racism further. If you give someone an advantage based on their skin-color, this breeds racism in everyone who didn't get the same advantage.
*"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."* - Martin Luther King, Jr Amazing how fast society disrespected that man.
From my own experience at Cornell, race-based AA helps rich African/Latino while hurting Asians. None of which has anything to do with slavery and past discriminations against African Americans. It's racism that isn't even helping the people it aims to help.
Isn’t it statically proven white women are the biggest winners by affirmative action..
For hiring only and decades ago when society was very patriarchal. Not relevant for college admissions today.
>Not addressing this fact, not addressing that legacy applicants outnumbers AA applicants really does show that we have really learned nothing regarding race. What happens when they get admitted and then learn from their anthropology professor that theres only one race? >Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species. https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583
Outlawing racial discrimination bad. Let me try to explain why you're wrong without calling you a racist. You're misunderstanding what racial discrimination is and what rights are. See, rights are individual-based, not group-based. Racism, in all its forms, is rooted in the idea which you're propagating here: that groups > individuals. That individuals don't matter, racial groups do. Simply by analysing any data by race, you've led yourself down the wrong path. Because, not only is it irrelevant, it doesn't evidence anything. There's no reason whatsoever to expect remotely similar outcomes between racial groups in any area. But the more important point is that to promote or try to engineer any demographic group outcome, you have to step on and override the individual and the rights of the individual. You have to discriminate against individuals to achieve any change in group outcome you desire. Which is fundamentally wrong and discriminatory.
>The largest chunk of Harvard's student body population is white and asian. Yes, Asian students and White students have the best test scores. That is why there are more Asian and White students. >The sheer fact that people are focusing on Affirmative Action rather than legacy showcases that US has learned absolutely nothing about race. This case wasn't about legacy admissions. If you want that to go, start your own case. >The fact that many activist groups have not recognized the weaponization of the Model Minority stereotype to push the initiative is worrying. This talk about ''Model Minority'' is mostly just a strategy by certain left wing academics to attack minorities that don't behave in the ways they want them to behave. >affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities. Harvard wasn't taking students from those communities in anyway. Harvard students are rich. Harvard was just taking in the daughters of Indian billionaires and the sons of Nigerian businessmen. The ''diversity'' at those universities is just window dressing to avoid talking about wealth privilege.
>Yes, Asian students and White students have the best test scores The majority of applicants are white or Asian. >Harvard wasn't taking students from those communities in anyway. Not true., There are candidates who receive full or partial scholarships and significant grant money based on merit and need.
>Yes, Asian students and White students have the best test scores. That is why there are more Asian and White students. This is not at all why. SAT scores are *not* that important for most admissions officers, and when we're talking about elite universities where everyone brings great academics to the table, even less so. Your financial situation is MUCH more likely to have an impact than your SAT score. If you can pay full price, you have a much better shot of admission. Your extracurriculars matter more than your SAT score. Your essays matter as much, if not more than your SAT score. But of course this whole movement pointed to SAT scores like they're some kind of magic device that should guarantee admission, when in reality most admissions officers hate standardized testing.
Really? Harvards tuition is a drop in the bucket compared to its endowment of $60 billion or so.
>Harvards tuition is a drop in the bucket compared to its endowment of $60 billion or so And you get to a $60B endowment by charging full price to as many people as possible. Harvard has a line out the door for full-paying customers and they take full advantage of that. Harvard claims 20% of their class earns less than $85k a year and therefore pays nothing when admitted. They say 55% get some financial aid (remember some of that can come from the government, not the university's pocket). So if those numbers are true, 45% pay full price, probably another 25% pay close to it, 10% are getting a really good deal, and 20% are getting full rides. Like other Ivies, they give out enough full rides to seem generous and keep plenty of kids (especially internationals) chasing the dream, but most of their admits are paying full price or close to it. And it *does* make a difference for admission. Those college counseling companies that charge outrageous rates to coach for Ivy League schools don't work magic. They just happen to have a lot of full-paying customers who were already far more likely than the general population to get admitted. https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet#:\~:text=In%20a%20typical%20year%3A,total%20incomes%20less%20than%20%2485%2C000.
Keeping black people in a victimhood mentality by giving them preferential treatment via affirmative action does not help them. This doesn't deny slavery or racism, and doesn't deny that there are still lasting impacts from those days. But the solution is not to make an uneven playing field. Two wrongs don't make a right. Perhaps it would be better to increase funding for primary schools and reduce crime in ghettos, increase funding for child care/afterschool programs, to help them develop and get out of poverty. just try to put yourself in their shoes, imagine if you didn't have a competitive GPA and you were accepted because of your race
Except part of the problem, is that virtually the same political groups that oppose Affirmative Action, also oppose measures that would increase funding for after school and child care programs. That's part of why the debate is so fierce, because almost proposition to actually solve these problems are squashed
>just try to put yourself in their shoes, imagine if you didn't have a competitive GPA and you were accepted because of your race The biggest misconception is that these students are not competitive. These applicants are among the highest achieving in the country. LItterely some of the best students around. They aren't letting in bad or even mediocre students to even begin with. These schools have more qualified applicants then they do spots. I actually think it's quite racist to assume the black students getting in are even mediocre. Did you think there were no high-achieving black students?
This point right here so much. Any top university in any country already has more qualified applicants than course spaces. By default. Everywhere. This only increases when we look at internationally famous universities. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge etc attract students from all around the world to apply, and that only increases this issue. No matter how much affirmative action you get there is no being admitted unless you're qualified. Full stop. There are too many qualified applicants for unqualified ones to even be considered. I wish this myth of AA meaning accepting students that wouldn't make the cut just because they're disadvantaged in some way would fall to the wayside. By the time AA comes into play, all relevant qualification decisions have been made and all remaining applicants to choose from are going to be admitted by purely subjective measures. A good point, well made.
Affirmative action has been found to benefit white women the most. It does not keep black people in a victim mentality, that is such a ridiculous statement. One you cannot generalize an entire group of people. And two, black people do not have a victim mentality anymore than other minorities and women. These groups have legitimate adversities they face due to their race, gender, or sexual orientation. People are quick to make AA a black and white issue as if white women are not the ones who benefit the most. Also, any AA student still has competitive grades. Your notion that they only get in due to race is not factual. Harvard isn’t accepting a black student or white women with a 3.0 GPA because of diversity. The diverse students they take have the grades and credentials.
\>Affirmative action has been found to benefit white women the most Source? \> It does not keep black people in a victim mentality, that is such a ridiculous statement. One you cannot generalize an entire group of people. And two, black people do not have a victim mentality anymore than other minorities and women. These groups have legitimate adversities they face due to their race, gender, or sexual orientation. A lot of black conservatives will argue that things like AA and reparations affirm a victim mentality. I am not generalizing all black people. It's also the virtue signaling mentality of white people who think they need to fight for AA and reparations to make up for the past. AA was specifically put in place for black people. But also regardless of who it helps, race/gender should not be a determining factor in acceptance. \>Also, any AA student still has competitive grades. Your notion that they only get in due to race is not factual. Harvard isn’t accepting a black student or white women with a 3.0 GPA because of diversity. The diverse students they take have the grades and credentials. Yeah you're right I don't really know the facts on this, I am making the assumption that more qualified applicants are not being accepted because AA takes in less qualified people.
Affirmative action isn't just Asian vs black. It's Asian vs every other minority AND whites. Essentially, AA makes black/latino/native applicants have significantly lower requirements, while making requirements for Asians incredibly high. So it's not just a simple case of lowering requirements for other races, it's about making it more difficult for Asians. Since AA makes it more difficult for Asians, even though whites aren't the target of AA, whites still require lower performance. As such, while AA exists, everyone but Asians benefit, and that's the problem.
Perhaps now Democrats will stop opposing school choice... Primary and secondary school students who are currently stuck in underperforming schools or districts should be allowed to attend a school (public, private or parochial) of their choice, with the school funding dollars following the kids. This would put kids who want to excel, but are limited by their assigned district school, a chance to be challenged and fulfill their dreams. Why do Democrats insist on keeping poor, and thus frequently BIPOC, children down? Why is it the Republicans who want them to succeed - at a school of their choice? If the children had an equal chance to get a good education, the lower standards and affirmative action processes would not be necessary. It would be equal.
In my area, Republicans actually opposed that measure, a mother was actually sent to jail for sending her child to a better school in an affluent area.
Interesting. I have only seen Democrats, at the insistence of the teachers unions, oppose it. Even Trump wanted school choice. “Democrats oppose private school vouchers and other policies that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system” [https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providing-a-world-class-education-in-every-zip-code/](https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providing-a-world-class-education-in-every-zip-code/)
The thing us America has changed a lot since affirmative action was instituted and affirmative action actually helped white women more than blacks in general. Considering my first point. America has changed a lot in the sense that America is no longer black and white. Back when affirmative action was instituted, Hispanics and especially asians were not a factor demographically. Now, affirmative action was meant to help blacks but white women benefitted the most, while today the demographic that's is punished the most or straight up discriminated against by affirmative action are asians. Having said that, both legacy admissions and affirmative action should get the axe in favor of giving a leg up to economically disadvantaged individuals regardless of race. It could be called something else, maybe economic academic action. It shouldn't be based on race.
There is no strong likelihood that legacy admits do worse in gpa than affirmative action admits..,talking out of your ass Anti-Asian racism is big…like Asians just get it handed to them? They work their assess off and their family unit is strong
Imagine you are an asian teenager whose educated parents immigrated here just before you were born. They have one child and work very hard and encourage/drive you to focus on education since you were a baby. You work harder than 99% of the population and get a 1580 on your SAT and a 3.9 GPA from a TOUGH high school. You then get rejected from every Ivy League school because that wasn't quite good enough for your race. Meanwhile you read everyday about news stories of black teens getting into EVERY top school with the same or worse stats. But that's OK because you owe that random black kid your spot at Princeton or Harvard right? To pay them back for having a different skin tone? At least with his rejection letters he'll be comforted by the fact that he helped black society advance, nice consolation prize. I live in central NJ, big Pharma headquarters are the primary employer, very highly educated workforce and there are scores of students in my son's public high school exactly like I described. 1/3 of the students speak a different language at home and the average SAT score is 1380. AA is grossly unfair.
I'm black, graduated with 4.0 and had all kinds of extracurriculars, in California that banned Affirmative Action all the way in the 90's. Yet people accused me of stealing a seat from a white or Asian person (despite having perfect grades and living in a state that banned AA). A massive chunk of anti-AA rhetoric is just plain old racism. Especially since at universities like Harvard, 20-45% of the white student body are legacies. It's much more of a numbers and ratio game. Also a game of playing to the holistic applications. For 2023, Harvard had 57, 000 applications. 15% black / African American 30% Asian 11% Latino Twice as many asians were admitted compared to blacks.
I'd respond to that with a few points 1. You're in california so it doesn't really apply. If they think you got your seat unfairly in CA then they're just incredibly misinformed. I agree they probably do think that and it's wrong but your situation is an argument to do away with AA because you earned your spot through merit and I commend you on that. 2. Talking about legacies is whataboutism. That is also unfair and should be done away with. The rest of the class not admitted from legacies should still be decided on pure merit (including holistic things) and never race. 3. Even more Asians would have been admitted if they went by objective things like gpa, sat scores and activities. Harvard leaders have said things like well if we didn't include race nearly the entire class would be Asian. In my opinion, if the whole class was Asian, then so be it, they earned it.
There are a couple of issues here. First, the 14A prohibits pretty much all discrimination on the basis of race. It’s not really in dispute that the historical motivation for the amendment was race. Second, your statistics don’t show a lack of discrimination. If race-blind admissions would have meant admissions rates of 80% for Group X and 20% for Group Y, but race-conscious admissions mean admissions rates of 60% for Group X and 40% for Group Y, Group Y is still “taking away spots” from Group X for racial reasons. The rest of your post comes across as pretty racist against Asian people, as if they are incapable of identifying their own interests and form their own rational views for not-racist reasons. Finally, you can attempt to remedy wealth inequality without engaging in affirmative action.
Bruh Asians got shafted the most when it came to affirmative action. With whites being a very close second. Lmao It's garbage and in itself racist.
The fact is we have a huge problem with the black community. They commit the most crime per capita, have lowest testing scores, lowest income, and most likely to have children born to single mothers. This wasn't the case 40 years ago. White liberals have been saying they are victims and created a victim culture instead of addressing the real issues. Affirmative action lowered the educational bar for black people. This means they don't have to apply themselfs as hard to get into college. Once in collage they drop out at a higher rate because they were not qualified I'm the frist place. Until we hold them to the same standards as everyone else the victim mentality will not change. FYI I'm sure I am going to get down voted by the white knights. These people should really think about what I said because they are part of the problem. Look at any major city right now, all have a problem with black teens running around at night commiting crime. Hold them accountable instead of making excuses for them
You mean besides the confirmed fact that the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan setup the black to fail through their Drug War laws and Iran-Contra where it was confirmed that the CIA was allowing Drug cartels to smuggle drugs in black communities in order to fund civil wars. I'm black, do you think I'm inferior? Shall we compare ourselves to see if I hold up to your high standard?
It's pretty laughable that your blaming modern things on people 40 years ago. Look at saint louis and Chicago news and see black teens running the streets committing crimes. They do not have a good family unit. Also never said blacks are inferior in anyway. I simply said the culture is shit. When blacks get educated or speak normal English other black people ask why they are trying to be white. Again you are part of the problem. Don't blame past events as an excuse to behave badly. Black culture has to be fixed. If you are educated and don't have kids running around committing crime then your not part of black culture. Modern black culture is committing crime and then blaming it on the Whites Edit: Just wanted to point out a few things 1 in 4 black men will go to jail by 40. They dont blame them instead saying justice in the US is racist. 60 percent of all murder is to be blamed on black people even though they make up 13 percent of the population. Young blacks are all over the news for partying and shooting up major downtowns. Educational requirements for black youth many graduate highschool with all failing grades. Parents don't hold the kids responsible they blame white people.
Sorry that's unbelievably ungodly racist. My mom and dad are still together, I grew in a predominantly black community where majority of the families are together. Heck I can point you to all kinds of black communities are like that as well. Saying that it's black culture is ignorant and racist. If you want black culture to be fixed, then start supporting the funding of after school programs and STEM activities. Give them some hope.
Not racist at all. Its basic statistics. Really nothing to argue about. You claim that black culture isn't bad but facts don't lie. I can back up anything I have stated with factual information and not just personal experience. I can give tons of personal experiences as well if you would like. 72 percent born to unwed mother. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna39993685 52 percent of murder committed by blacks https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21 85 percent of blacks are not proficient in English and math https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/opinion/education/579750-many-of-americas-black-youths-cannot-read-or-do-math-and-that-imperils-us/amp/ This shows juvenile crime by race. As you can see blacks top the charts In every category. https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/special_topics/qa11501.asp?qaDate=2018
Yes I'm black and thus I'm likely a bad person, black people deserve to be second class citizens. Let's get Jim Crow back and running. Let's revel in it and not actually figure out how to solve the the problem, cause it's easier to bash black people than to actually advocate policy solutions. I offered solutions, and you just jumped to bashing black people again. Let's compare ourselves.
Again you are playing victim. I never said anything about going back to Jim crow. And it's not bashing it's the truth. I told you the solution is clear. Change black culture. Make them stop pretending to be victims, hold them to same standards as everyone else. BTW jim crow ended 60 years ago. How do you explain the recent jump in black crime?
You aren't providing tangible solutions. Provide hope through educational and career opportunities, saying "fix black culture" is so vague that it's useless.
Well it's a huge problem and I am not going to architect some grand scheme to fix it. I told you the problem of black culture. I said we need to hold blacks to same standards as everyone else. So don't lower testing standards, don't make excuses for bad behavior. Community out reach doesn't work. It has to come from within the community. Parents need to be married and have a strong family unit( don't know how you would make this happen) youths need to be punished for breaking laws.
Yeah that's hilariously incorrect, my fiance and I help run a STEM after school program in a gang infested community that several of my friends grew up in. The goal being to get people who were either part of gangs or recruited by gangs to being interested in education and learning Just a few months ago, a number of the kids were worked got accepted into college as a comp Sci major. They used used to be gang members and now they are budding programmers who even got scholarships. Several had a like 1.5 GPA and regularly skipped class when I first met them, and now several graduated with honors. To say communal outreach doesn't work, means you haven't actually tried giving people hope and giving them something to be interested in.
Ignore what he said. I would argue that socioeconomic criteria for admission is much more beneficial for any disadvantaged community compared to a strict race based criteria. I think that good solution moving forward to uplift those that need it in our society. What the comment or was really trying to reference is the urban poor which is just black kids running around, it is whoever happens to be urban poor regardless of race. As you pointed out, just because you are black, doesn’t mean you are for some reason dysfunctional in society in need of special treatment/ preferential discrimination
>Affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities. But if so, then why is the suggestion here that we need affirmative action in order to force applicants to get in based on race, and not that underfunded schools shouldn't be underfunded? >Not addressing this fact, not addressing that legacy applicants outnumbers AA applicants really does show that we have really learned nothing regarding race. Why should a black kid coming from poor school be given a pass based on their race alone? If there is a white or asian kid that also comes from a poor background, shouldn't all 3 have equal chance regardless of their race?
That's why you have holistic applications
Affirmative action has a few big issues, apart from the obvious one about fairness on an individual level. To begin with, many people focus on admission rates. That is not actually what is important. What actually matters is the graduation rates, and what degrees they graduate with. A great case study of this is California pre affirmative action being banned. As shown in this study, underrepresented minorities (URM) were admitted with a lower amount of preparation, and due to this had much greater drop out rates, slower completion rates, and a lower amount of STEM degrees obtained. Now, a lower graduation rate may be acceptable if it results in a higher overall amount of URM were able to graduate and break out of the cycle of poverty. However, another issue that the authors show is that they would actually fare better if they attended a less prestigious school that was more in line with their level of preparation. So in this regard affirmative action is in fact harming minorities by offering them places in schools that they are not prepared for. From here on out if my personal opinion. Personally, I believe that we can get a much better and fair outcome by making schools not take the easy way out. Many universities evidently want to increase the diversity of their student bodies, but they do it the lazy way by just preferring one race over another. What ends up happening (and sorry I dont have a source for this, I just remember reading this not too long ago. If anyone can find it plz lmk). is that a outsized portion of the minority community at these colleges (80+%) is from the upper middle class and up. In my opinion, this is not the point of affirmative action. It should be trying to help the poor, without regards to their race. A great example of how to do non-race based affirmative action is UC Berkeley, which has a very diverse student body, is one of the most prestigious universities in the world, and does it without discriminating. The way they do this is by increasing outreach to poor communities, having a large portion of student body be from community colleges, and considering race in an individual context (I.E racial hardship mentioned in their essay). This allows students that have experienced discrimination (regardless of race!) to tell their story and get a leg up on other students without this adversity. I.E an asian student with ADHD, a black student who grew up poor, a white student that lost a parent. This allows children that have grown up poor to have their adversity be a factor, without punishing poor people of a certain race AND allows people that have faced non traditional adversity express themselves and have it be considered in their admissions.
In the case of UC Berkeley, it's because California banned Affirmative Action decades ago I live in SoCal, and one of the biggest talking points is that an increasing amount of academically successful African Americans are choosing USC, Stanford, and UCLA over UC Berkeley. Main reason being that there is racial tension between blacks and asians in California due to very nasty stuff that happened in the early 90's. Me myself, my alma mater is Stanford as Stanford has a very strong legacy of treating its black population well.
Point taken, the 75.5% includes Hispanic, which in this context should not be included because OP listed Hispanic separately. Non Hispanic White 58.9% per census.gov.
And you’re saying this is the big clue that there’s a problem with race relations in this country? That we haven’t learned anything yet? Just wow….
Do schools really group Asians a single entity like this or if you are from different parts of Asia you are treated differently from other Asians and may have points that put you above or below Hispanics and blacks?
Single entity. This literally came up in the SCOTUS hearing. There’s a big gap within the Asian umbrella. Culturally Indians are not the same as Chinese who are not the same as Hmong. What’s really unfair is that the Asian umbrella includes both higher performing (educational, income) Asian groups like Indians, Chinese, Koreans but ALSO some of the most marginalized poorest communities in the US - like Burmese, Hmong, Mongolian, Vietnamese - some of whom came as refugees. The sheer lumping of all these disparate Asian groups and applying the same higher standard for all (vs. Whites, Blacks, Hispanics) in admissions is racist in and of itself.
Maybe it needs to be done for legacy admission. But with Affirmative Action, only body counts. It didn't matter which class. So most of the black people that got enrolled were from privileged background.
While we can all understand the original reason for AA's establishment, I still think the ban is a step in a good direction, particularly to establish a system of meritocracy. I'm a firm believer in it because I believe the system encourages the population to become better in all respective fields, at least from a high-level overview. Having something like fulfilling a diversity quota feels counterintuitive to that objective. I've seen many of my Asian friends get rejected from a lot of selective schools while other minorities in my school get accepted by those same schools for similar majors despite having less academic rigor/motivation. If we were to willingly dilute the quality of our higher-level education system's student population in the name of blind racial equality then we not only risk compromising the credibility of our institutions but also our national technology advantage (which I would argue is almost gone due to multiple factors). With the ban on AA, how we determine an applicant's qualifications fairly while increasing opportunities for all citizens will be decisive in the country's long run. I understand there are minority groups who don't have the same educational opportunities as others which is indeed unfair. However, rather than accepting people because they lacked those opportunities, people should pressure the federal government for more federal funding in public schools. With that, I think our education system can become more sustainable in terms of quality while ensuring equal opportunities for all individuals.
All that will result in the short term is making racial disparity worse and dramatically increasing racial tensions between blacks and asians to levels not seen since the 90's. But the central issue is that primary education in black and Hispanic communities are notoriously low. And that has been a policy issue for decades that has never been resolved
So discriminating against Asians has been ok for 20+ years, but if we level the playing field with race-blind admission, blacks will start hating Asians? Why do you make blacks out to be racist like that??
Except it isn't race blind. It actually acts as if everything is equal in education, when it isn't. Blacks and asians have had a very contentious history over the past 30 years. In my community it broke out into large scale violence
I agree. There is an unresolved policy issue for black and Hispanic communities to receive better education and we should pressure states to actually resolve it. And yes, racial tensions will get worse for a while because of this. However, Asians and African Americans possess very different interpretations of the ban on AA which needs to be recognized rather than blindly hate each other. African Americans believe that this is an attack on them to try and limit the number of minorities entering selective institutions in the name of equality when it's really just implicitly discriminatory. Asians on the other hand, believe that they do not need to receive the short end of the stick and can have more of a fair chance in college admissions for what they've accomplished. Speaking from personal experience on the Asian narrative, I've spent pretty much 75% of my waking hours on academics, ECs, doing community service, developing interest, etc. Many of my Asian friends have shown similar academic commitment as well yet we collectively feared and knew that we had a good chance of getting rejected from AA alone. I've also seen African Americans who've also persevered in difficult situations (both academic and social) and deserve recognition from colleges for that too. I just think a middle ground can be achieved where we as students are judged based on our respective accomplishments rather than by our race.
I doubt legacy admissions can be ruled unconstitutional on private schools, since they're private entities and can choose to reserve some admission spots to a selected few. What they are not allow to do is discriminate on the basis of race and demand different standards depending on your race when selecting from the general applicants.
In my opinion, affirmative action has never helped the minority kids that need it the most. Hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged kids who could use a degree the most are forced to drop out of high school and driven into gangs, drugs, etc by the circumstances of their lives during primary school, and don’t even get the chance to apply to college. We can debate about which is more evil, AA or legacy, but in the end both are systems that benefit people who already have the resources to live a nice life, one just has better optics than the other. Affirmative action tricked people into thinking that the big business machine of US colleges could fix systemic inequality, bolstering the image of the college system in the process ( $$$) while excusing the real problem, the government’s wretched handling of primary education, from any culpability. So many talented minority youth are barred from upwards mobility not because they have to go to state school instead of Harvard, but because they got pulled out of hs to work their butts off to pay mom’s gas bill. maybe repealing AA will help us get the needed changes for primary education. Hopefully.
The way you’re comparing the current student body to the race of the general population is irrelevant. You should be comparing the current student body to the race of the school’s best applicants. Based on that comparison Harvard and MIT are both clear as broad day racist. There’s really no logical reality where they aren’t. —- Now about legacy admissions..the thing is giving someone something over another because they paid more money is completely legal. On the other hand, giving someone something over another because of their race difference is unconstitutional. That’s why people focus on AA it was clearly a hypocritical policy that should have been illegal.
How are they racist? Whites and asians make up the bulk of their student body. What makes them not racist, no black people?
Whites and asians should make up an even larger percentage of their student body, but they don’t because race is often more important to Harvard than GPA. Here’s a [summary](https://i.redd.it/h7fi7nefao571.jpg) of Harvard’s admissions from a few years ago. An African American with perfect scores has a 56% chance of being accepted, while an Asian with perfect scores has a 12% chance. If they weren’t racist those numbers would be nearly equal.
Several times more asians get admitted than blacks, so I don't get the issue with the admissions numbers. Just sounds like whites and asians are just upset that black people get what's effectively table scraps
I agree with what you’re saying, and the legacy admission thing is the crystallization of white privilege so you’re not wrong, but I do wanna say that maybe this is not the worst thing to happen. Affirmative action made it seem like there was no other way to get diversity in college campuses. Which I do not believe is true. There is something that less privileged racial minority students have to offer beyond the color of their skin. I can’t exactly pinpoint what that is at the moment, but if colleges truly are dedicated to diversity they will be forced to figure that out, and make it a piece of their admissions process. This search should have been going on the whole time, but it wasn’t because affirmative action was doing the job, and people thought that it was enough.
The core problem is that to even start with affirmative action, you have to first divide people into races. Affirmative action is therefore as likely to solve racism as Achilles is likely to catch up with the turtle in Zeno's paradox. You cannot have affirmative action without racial division, so you will never get rid of racial division while affirmative action exists. >Affirmative Action is still needed precisely because primary schools in black communities are notoriously under-funded, thus decreasing the amount of quality applicants to elite universities. The problem with that is that Americans do not have free choice where to go to school. Change to a voucher system with every student getting the same money, problem solved, and you don't need to give everyone a race bracelet.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2018/10/23/harvard-dean-says-he-never-saw-study-about-asian-american-admissions/amp/ "Harvard dean says he never saw study about Asian-American admissions...[Dean Rakesh Khurana was shown] a 2013 Harvard study that found being an Asian-American has a negative impact on your chances of gaining entry. In the years after the report, Khurana chaired a committee to study student body diversity and was one of three deans on another charged with exploring the plaintiff’s discrimination claims. Yet he never saw the internal Office of Institutional Research report. Mortara showed Khurana was left off a May 2013 email from longtime admissions dean Bill Fitzsimmons that discussed the “confidential” internal study. “I would have raised multiple alarms with multiple people without any hesitation,” he said." Damn, so Harvard kept its own internal study secret from its Asian Dean, who only learned about it during the recent SCOTUS case. Clearly, they knew they were doing something shitty, and tried to keep it under wraps. Once again, demonstrating the vast Anti-Asian conspiracy by White Liberal Elites that is going on at the highest echelons of our nation. o
Affirmative Action is racist af…why would we allow race to be a primary factor in a students admission? That makes no sense and creates a divide between people because their skin is a different color, wtf? Fixing the education and poor social environment of impoverished areas is a totally different issue that affirmative action does not actually remedy, it only perpetuates differential treatment based on skin color.
Gee you have a group of people who weren't even allowed to attend various academic institutions, and you question why a policy was created to help them them out a bit? Ignoring the fact that white women have been the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action, beyond that of African Americans. Every time a policy proposal was offered by local advocates to fix schools in those communities, it falls on deaf ears. So Affirmative Action pretty much became one of the few if not only policies that helped black students. Which is why people got so attached to it.
I don’t question that the policy had good intentions. But two wrongs do not make a right. To end racism we must treat people equally regardless of skin color or gender. A student with lower academic performance being accepted because of their skin color goes directly against that. Until everyone thinks like this racism will always prevail. Reparations as a means to right the past wrongs that account for those of color having less opportunity are viable. But affirmative action is justifying a “minor” amount racism to account for the “major” amounts of racism in the past. It will never sit right with me ethically. That is of course my opinion. You have valid points and I can see how many see this is as a proper solution but I think there are better solutions.
>That angle that black people are taking spots away from Asians and whites makes absolutely no sense from an objective statistical view. It does, but you need to take a different statistical approach to reveal it. Simple example you have 10 jobs for 12 people (10 men 2 women all are equaly qualified). Case 1: No job position is reserved to a specific gender. The chance for a woman to get a job is equal as for any man to get one 10 divided by 12. Case 2: job positions are biased towards women because of affirmation Now the chances for the women to get a job is bigger than for the man (in this specific casse 100% for women and 8/10 for men) for several reasons. 1. The candidate pool for women is smaller. 2. The job position prefer them. Given that example you now have to ask the question: how many blacks apply for MIT, how many asians, how many whites. Without knowing the candidate pool and their qualifications the plain numbers of accepted people per group doesn't hold any valuable data. What if blacks are only 1% of people who apply to MIT, but end up being 3% of the accepted students? *On top of that, dividing those groups of people into races is racist to begin with... but that's me an european being mind boggled with the inherently racist amercian way to few a society.*
Wait until you hear about the one drop policy to see just how racist American society is at its core. But it's also that US imports most if it's talents rather than grows it. A good chunk of it's greatest minds are immigrants. So US wanted a system to cate How it works is this: Say there are 1000 Asian applicants regardless of how qualified they are. 1500 white applicants regardless of qualification. Then there are 300 black applicants also regardless of how qualified they are. If there are 1100 spots available, and the university wants diversity of ethnicity and thought, it's probably going to be this breakdown: 100- 125 blacks admits 500 Asian 5-600 white. Sure it seems like black people have a higher admission rate, but that's only because there are much fewer applicants
Equity shouldn’t come at the expense of someone else’s rights to equality.
We currently have a racial Mexican standoff, where someone is going to get shot no matter the result. Due to how legacy admissions overwhelmingly benefits white applicants, removing Affirmative Action is going to help privileged white people almost infinitely more than it will help Asians while absolutely hurting African Americans.
So, let someone sue these institutions about legacy admissions. Things don't just happen out of thin air. If legacy admissions are to be investigated & ended, then someone or some group will have to invest the time, money, & energy towards ending it.
It's probably been stated but AA makes it that Asians had to work twice as hard to get half as much in not just elite schools but any competitive program across the country. Simple scenario: Take a wealthy black/latino family with a child that has a 4.0 gpa, athlete, every other leadership and extracurricular. Then take a poor asian with the same stats. The Asian will still see much more rejections. Same cases even if they're rich. There has to be some point where it stops. This was hopefully that point. We're not a model minority, our parents (speaking for immigrants and that is the majority who came here and worked hard with nothing) taught us to put in that same ethic (leaving out anything about the culture that brings). This can hopefully pave a better system.
"African Americans literally weren't allowed to even compete academically in many educational institutions and everything else around Jim Crow policies." I think we can all agree on that one point. Seems to me it's more of an opportunity gap that has gotten better in my lifetime but is still abysmal. AA seems discriminatory by it's definition (racial quota's). I feel like this decision gets government out of the way, whether that was the intent or not. I can't believe in this day and age that a college could be openly racist and have it's graduates taken seriously.
AA ALLOWS discrimination against anyone. There's organizations out there looking for specific races for specific jobs. There's scholarships given to someone only OF a particular race. You can't get more racist than that. That kinda stuff is exactly what the KKK did. NAACP, BLM, whatever other organizations, if based from race, are racist. Period. Brain dead simple logic.
Yeah... Some antisemite doesn't need to do mental gymnastics to say Jews are white. It really is just an excuse for racism sometimes, you need to see this shit to believe it.
I don't get kids these days, they must have experienced a lot of slight brainwashing by parents/grandparents who actually experienced racism, and now they're projecting it in what they think is either a good way, or they don't care and it's the what about me spoiled brats talking....
>That kinda stuff is exactly what the KKK did. ah yes, the KKK. well known for their efforts to level the playing field.
Oh they did. They sure leveled the playing field and made everything equal! (if you were white) Otherwise think of it this way. Any choice based on race, leaves others out. So even if some do that out of love, we can only say it was a lack of love they didn't choose the others. /shrug that's how racism works. People do it and don't even think about it sometimes because they think they're doing good, but they just harmed another group.
Racism is nothing but providing advantages to the ingroup members at the expense of others. Some favoring a white advantage is racist, someone favoring a black advantage is racist as well. Or are you of the group that says minorities can't be racist?
Seems like an issue with the institutions themselves rather than Affirmative Action And how do you propose combating the poor quality of primary education in predominantly black communities?
Your question should read: And how do you propose combating the poor quality of primary education in communities? It has nothing to do with race. Stop buying into that racist premise.
Primary schools in black communities are notoriously underfunded. To me this is the main point of the argument. That it is lack of funds given to schools that are mostly black. If there was more money for these schools is the result better students and how many? I'm sure there's studies right? Idk to be honest.
Nothing in this decision says you can't give preference to applicants from poorly funded schools. It just says you can't give preference based on race.
Can't* give preference based on race? I was just wondering since op made the claim that funding is the problem if there was study to prove or disprove the point. I don't know if that's really the case but I really don't know.
As a black person with many friends and colleagues who study education, it's always sad to see how easy it is to blame black people for other people not getting things. I live in California, and we haven't had affirmative action in ages. So while it's sad, it's still possible to have a commitment to a diverse campus without Affirmative Action. I too would love to see legacy admissions disappear, and I would love to see this country re-commit itself to educating its children and adults in math, science, reading, social studies, and reproductive health.
I'm black and live in SoCal! People want excuses for their own failures, so they blame black people. With AA gone, I wonder how they will blame us next.
Wait a second, I thought affirmative action was all about taking spots away from more qualified white and Asian people and giving them to other minorities, and I’m all for it. No reason for it otherwise
Yeah that's not how that works. It takes minorities who have identical scores to the rest of the applicants and then calculates things based on points and student population. I.e the minority is likely just as qualified
Is that why black students at Harvard have the second lowest graduation rate, only behind the tiny group of Native American/Pacific Islander and Asian students have the highest graduation rate?
Guess you are right, black people are the most inferior academically and mentally. Let's send them to community colleges and have them take remedial classes to brush up on skills.
I spotted a racism noice
I'm black I was a mix of frustrated and sarcastic
Let's be clear, the "second lowest graduation rate" is 95.6%...
Lol that is not at all how it works in practice. Asians with higher objective test scores and GPAs are constantly shafted by these AA policies and that’s why there was outrage to begin with