20 ms·
What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago>are you obliged to help out those around you or not? How is either side helping out more than the other? Either way of doing admission, someone is getting cut. This isn't like deciding to donate to charity or not, where one side is clearly not helping others out.
- gadders 11y agoYour post assumes that affirmative action helps people. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't but it shouldn't be assumed. People may also believe there are better ways to help people than affirmative action.
- jordigh 11y ago> I fear for where the discussion will go on HN with this one. I kind of expect something like this satire of how the Canadian cabinet was deliberately made to contain 50% women: http://www.thebeaverton.com/national/item/2204-50-female-cabinet-appointments-lead-to-5000-increase-in-guys-who-suddenly-care-about-merit-in-cabinet http://www.thebeaverton.com/national/item/2204-50-female-cab...
- JumpCrisscross 11y ago> are you obliged to help out those around you or not? It might also boil down to a disagreement around who we are obligated to help. Some say dis-advantaged ethnicities. Others say dis-advantaged socioeconomic groups. Et cetera.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zer00 11y agoI don't think academic results are the (sole) metric of what enhances society most. I'd argue that getting more folks from underrepresented groups into schools and the pipelines that ultimately follow is a better society enhancement than a school having a slightly higher average GPA.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoGPA might not be quite as important, but actually graduating is. Especially given the loans one takes on and how hard it is to repay them if they don't graduate. Something that lowers graduation rates could cause more harm because it means a general reduction in ability to repay loans taken to attempt college.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- omonra 11y agoSeems like a pretty ludicrous analysis. Can be summed up as 'If you ban quotas, the people who get in because of quotas will not be as represented'. Uhh - duh? Will they have another post 'What happens when heavy objects are thrown up in the air - do they fall to the ground or float away?' There is actually a much more interesting analysis of effects of AA on its recipients I read recently here: http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine-campus-unrest-racial-admissions-preferences http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine...
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoI think the argument was 'if you ban quotas based on race in favor of other measure which should still help increase diversity, you don't get as good an effect as just quotas'. That it is lower shouldn't be surprising, but how much lower or higher than the expected lower might be surprising.
- gareim 11y ago>which should still help increase diversity I think quotas by income would be a much more interesting experience for college students than quotas by race.
- bduerst 11y agoYou would still have people complaining that it's not entirely merit based. The point is that socioeconomic status (correlated with race and family income) has already impacted someone by the time they reach college application age. The idea behind quotas in public institutions is that it gives opportunity to those who did not have them previously. A better analysis would be based on graduate performance, rather than admission rates, for demonstrating success.
- yequalsx 11y agoA quote from the article of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: "The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." The salient part being, "further the interest approved today". The U.S. has a long history of dealing with nonwhite in pernicious ways. Part of the remedy has been affirmative action. The claim that affirmative action is no longer necessary because we are all equal is being called into question. If the outcomes of banning affirmative action are worse, in terms of racial disparity, then the aforementioned claim can be called into question. The analysis is not ludicrous.
- bitwize 11y ago"A society which has for hundreds of years done something special against the Negro must now do something special for the Negro." --Martin Luther King, Jr.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoWhomever you are, you have had ancestors that enslaved and ancestors that were enslaved.
- MisterBastahrd 11y agoThat has nothing to do with this issue.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoIt has as much to do as bitwize's comment.
- MisterBastahrd 11y agoNo, it really doesn't. Even if someone had an ancestor who was enslaved, they probably couldn't so much as identify the group that enslaved them, and for the vast majority white people making this asinine statement, their ancestors CERTAINLY weren't being enslaved by the government they live under, nor were they being denied the right to be represented until a few generations ago.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago>their ancestors CERTAINLY weren't being enslaved by the government they live under Does they refer to the ancestors, in which case they often were, or does it refer to the present day people, which also describes slavery in the US. >they probably couldn't so much as identify the group that enslaved them Could the present day individuals of more recent slavery given an accurate identification of the group that enslaved their recent ancestors? One which wasn't stereotyping, and which neither excluded slave owners or excluded non-slave owners? >nor were they being denied the right to be represented until a few generations ago. They probably were. Voting was highly restricted in the past.
- ThrustVectoring 11y agoIMO, the real problem with differences in educational opportunity is the knock-on effects in hiring decisions. If there were many more jobs that could not discriminate on college degree, then Affirmative Action doesn't matter (since the net present value of a college degree goes down). As a nice side-effect, a college education is often a positional good in hiring decisions, so we're often better off as a whole if we stop consuming it. (That is, instead of looking at 5 college graduates for a firefighting job, we look at 5 non-graduates, and we get to save 20 person-years of education costs)
- cygnus_a 11y agoIn other words, not using racial preferences in admissions decisions lets the black college enrollment trends continue; though, as the article doesn't point out, 'not using mandated racial preferences (banning aff. action)' is not the cause of disproportionate representation. I think the argument against affirmative action is more, morally speaking, addressing the question, "should we use racial preference to fight racial preference?".
- MisterBastahrd 11y agoThere's no moral question here. We have a disadvantaged group of people who are being actively discriminated against by a majority group. The easiest way as a society to make sure that we treat the group fairly is by creating a system that ensures that they are being represented in the university population. It's good for them, it's good for their classmates, it's good for the university, and it serves long-term goals by putting more educated people in their demographic.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoWhy does the majority discriminate against themselves and in favor of other minorities (Asians, Jews)?
- MisterBastahrd 11y agoBecause innovation happens faster when there are more perspectives in the mix, and communities improve faster when there are more successful people in them.
- gadders 11y agoI'd like to see research on whether banning affirmative action benefits Asian students, who are typically discriminated against.
- finance-geek 11y agoNot sure what sort of research you want to see, but the Michigan case opened up the books on who gets the raw deal. Summary here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/04/23/hidden-bystanders-in-michigans-affirmative-action-case-asian-americans/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/04/23/hidden-b...
- Steko 11y agoI'd be interested in seeing the underlying data because there's a lot of noise you introduce by just equally weighing all colleges as data pts and then teasing out a weak trend. You could boil down the entire ban and non-ban populations to a single number for each group which would probably tell you more than these graphs do. Better yet do it over time.
- Someone1234 11y agoOne issue with affirmative action which rarely gets addressed: What is the definition of a certain race anyway? If someone is from two black parents, fine, they're black. But what if one parent was black and one was white, are they black? Are their children black? What about their children's children? Are we going to spin out genetic testing, color cards, or start looking at people's family tree to decide eligibility? Honestly I think the US has the right idea, but has the wrong implementation. People who are from disadvantaged households SHOULD be given a leg up. They don't get the expensive tutors, and their parents might have to work longer hours, they cannot afford that trip to Europe the rich kid wrote their essay about, and their home life could be a lot more disruptive. And the nice "perk" of discriminating based on household income and or poverty is: A lot of minorities will benefit because they're already in that group. It also solves another issue we're seeing: Second generation kids of minorities whose parents are college educated and or professionals. The affirmative action program is designed to give kids with a disadvantage a more fair shake, but it is being used by minority kids who are by all definitions from middle class or from affluent households even more of an advantage, which is stealing spots from poor minority kids that actually need it! So I would like to see affirmative action based on race scrapped. Base it on income. It will still largely benefit minority applicants, but we won't have to answer awkward questions like "how white is too white to be a minority?"
- Steko 11y agoI see this topic discussed all the time, not rarely.
- kelukelugames 11y agoIt's literally in the link. "Opponents of affirmative action argue that aiming for diversity in areas other than race, such as socioeconomic class, can ensure sufficiently diverse student bodies. The most common race-neutral policy used as an alternative to affirmative action is a plan that the University of Texas already uses, in which a percentage of graduates from every high school get automatic admission. These policies have been shown to increase racial and ethnic diversity on campus, but research on whether they’re as effective as more explicit race-based affirmative action policies has been mixed, and critics say that it doesn’t make sense to use a proxy when so many colleges continue to struggle with racial diversity."
- T2_t2 11y agoAs a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. I wonder if this is a consequence of the "every kid gets a trophy" phenomenon, where merely showing up is seen as the key. Not once in that article were graduation rates from colleges, or post-college outcomes, mentioned. Surely, that is the most important factor in improving racial outcomes, getting people into education that improves their lifetime outcomes. It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes. Seems to me that more blacks and hispanics at college who don't graduate or, almost worse, choose easier subjects with worse career options, perpetuates the problem rather than solves it. http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine-campus-unrest-racial-admissions-preferences http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine... has a good summation of this argument. I don't think it is really enough to make every college have the right racial mix, if what comes out the other end is a graduate pool that divides along not racial lines, but course lines. If Asians and Whites dominate the degrees that pay well, and Blacks and Hispanics the lesser degrees, we'll be left with a population that is educated, sure, but likely in more debt without much improvement in earnings potential. That hardly seems like a great outcome to me, and seems the complete opposite of what the goal should be.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. As an American, your comment confuses me for one very specific reason: it doesn't at all reflect the actual dialogue about race I've experienced in this country (from all sides of the dialogue), in which very much is about achievement. > It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes. Attending formal education at a higher level is, itself, an outcome. Its also an outcome that is proven to improve other outcomes (both for the person experience it, and in future generations, since not only is education attainment measured in highest level attended shown to be a significant influence on income and other outcomes for the person receiving it, its also shown to be a strong factor in educational attainment of that person's children.) (And, of course, affirmative action and other diversity efforts in colleges aren't the only mechanism, nor is college attendance the only goal, in improving the condition of historically-disadvantaged groups in the US. So the whole criticism of this being the only goal -- which seems to be based on nothing other than the fact that its the focus of the article -- is entirely misplaced.)
- kelukelugames 11y agoI looked at the graphs earlier and couldn't understand them. Can a stats wizard please help me understand how significant the difference between ban and no-ban are?
- yummyfajitas 11y agoThe article presents an interesting fact. The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system. I was previously told it's racist to believe things like this. The article also begs another question: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” But that decision was only 12 years ago, and the data suggests that we’re still a long way from having proportional minority representation on large public college campuses. Supposedly AA and similar programs were supposed to solve this problem, and colleges have been engaging in them for many years. At what point can we conclude that perhaps goals like getting a critical mass of minority students will simply not be effective, and conclude that the real problem lies elsewhere (and out of the control of college)?
- venning 11y agoWhy is 538 selecting public research universities? Is that the full, technical name for typical US colleges, or is there a specific distinction here that would imply they are excluding whatever "non-research" universities are?
- rmxt 11y agoI imagine the distinction that they are trying to make is between research universities and liberal arts colleges (most of which are private, though there are some public). The term "research university" has connotations of a place with four-year undergraduate programs, with few or no two-year degree options, and likely the presence of graduate or PhD programs on campus, as well. In many ways, "research university" is the typical US college experience, though there are still many people who only attend "community colleges" or local public institutions where no research is performed and there may only be two-year degree programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_in_the_United_States#Liberal_arts_colleges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_in_the_United...