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> 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 t

• yummyfajitas 11y ago
  Yes, that's because building systems like this is pretty easy. Just use a point system based entirely on grades/extracurriculars/SAT/etc. For example, google the old U-Mich point system - it was entirely meritocratic except for the +1.0 boost to GPA given to non-Asian minorities, a much smaller alumni preference and some "women in engineering" boost.
  • taco_emoji 11y ago
    Is that what meritocracy looks like to you? Kids whose circumstances are highly negatively correlated with grades and test scores get shafted?
    • yummyfajitas 11y ago
      Yes, "meritocracy" and "no one has a hard life" are different concepts. A person having bad parents and therefore having bad grades has less merit than a person with good parents and good grades. It sucks that some people have bad parents (or whatever the specific issue is), but that's a different problem than lack of meritocracy.
      • dghf 11y ago
        Well, that kind of depends on how you define merit. One could argue that someone who gets reasonable but not stellar grades in spite of bad parents, a deprived background, etc. displays more merit than someone from a privileged background with every advantage who attains perfect grades.
        • SamReidHughes 11y ago
          If you have that information, you can factor that into your admissions criteria using feedback from previous students. For example, you could rank incoming students and tweak a racial parameter to equalize the 6-year graduation rate of the bottom decile in each race. Doing so will (by construction) improve the outcome of your 6-year graduation rate. Pick whatever is a good proxy for whatever your goals are. That's more meritocratic than ignoring that information. There is a different sense of meritocracy though, in which the goals themselves are unmeritocratic. For example, "educating lots of left-handed people" (to the exclusion of right-handers) is a rather unmeritocratic goal. The real argument being had is in this respect -- for one, whether educating should be done for students' benefit or for the sum of others' benefit. And also, in the subcategory of "for others' benefit," whether making maximally good scientists, historians, and the like, should be the goal, or whether and to what extent there's benefit in trying to infiltrate minority communities with a more education-valuing culture.
      • anigbrowl 11y ago
        A person having bad parents and therefore having bad grades has less merit than a person with good parents and good grades. So your basic position is that lucky people are better than unlucky people (since nobody gets to select their parents) so that social outcomes are largely a matter of predestination. Well, at least this saves me the bother of even temporarily taking you seriously in any topic in the future. No doubt this will mean missing out on some correct insights, but I figure that on any important topic I'll hear about it from someone else sooner or later, meanwhile saving myself the effort of seeking good-faith interpretations of what turns out to be self-serving bullshit from your end.
        • yummyfajitas 11y ago
          Yes, some people are better than others due to luck. For example, some people were strangled by their umbilical cord and born retarded, others weren't. This sad fact of life doesn't mean that choosing non-retards as nuclear physicists contradicts meritocracy.
          • rmxt 11y ago
            It's even sadder that you need to draw an absurd comparison to the imaginary instance of retarded people attempting break into nuclear physics in order to frame a discussion about the very real implications of race, socioeconomic status, affirmative action and educational achievement. Is it your implication that society shouldn't care about performance gaps between segments of the population because those other segments are incorrigible? Much like retards trying to perform nuclear physics, right?
            • yummyfajitas 11y ago
              My sole implication is that a system can fail to solve all your pet problems, but still be meritocratic. Similarly, a meritocratic college admission system doesn't cure cancer.
          • anigbrowl 11y ago
            Perhaps in future technology will advance tot he point that we can give you an empathy transplant, and you'll realize how glaringly obvious your rhetorical fallacies are to others. Most people would agree that 'merit' is not a scalar quality best measured by mathematical ability, notwithstanding your enjoyable position at the extreme right of that distribution. Even in quantitative endeavors, we do not magically have access to inherently reliable objective measures. The example I use to remind myself of this is a childhood friend whom I consistently outscored over a period of several years in language, math and other subjects - but who could consistently beat me in a wide variety of pure-strategy board games. Unfortunately the standardized testing regime we grew up with was no good at measuring things like strategic ability, and so he ended up being relegated to a 'lower' academic stream and discouraged from pursuing a university education. Had we grown up in a country where chess ability is more highly valued (as a competitive endeavor as in the US, or as a proxy for strategic ability as it is in Russia), then his academic and/or career prospects might have been very different. but in a system where strategic ability is not selected for, he was classified as below average and no doubt enjoyed fewer opportunities as a result. Between one person who is better at calculus and another that's better at chess, which is more meritorious?
  • tomp 11y ago
    The problem is that colleges don't rely only on SAT/grades (at least the elite colleges). Extracurriculars are, obviously, very non-meritocratic - doing extracurricular activities is not really correlated with how good you are at them (or at anything else), but rather with how much time you have and how much your parents can afford to pay for your activities.