4 ms·

Admission slots are not artificially scarce. You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school. You're

Admission slots are not artificially scarce. You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school. You're still avoiding the question. Is your position "I support inclusion, only when resources are not scarce?"

woodruffw 5y ago
> You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school. You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country. I support actions that make the world a more just place in the Rawlsian sense of the word. Affirmative action makes the world a more just place.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Okay, sure. In a perfect world we would have enough resources for everything. In the real world, affirmative action policies disadvantage asian people. > Affirmative action makes the world a more just place. The question you have been dancing around: why is it just to disadvantage Asians in favor of other minorities? What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    There is none, because there is no mainstream progressive position associated with discriminating against Asians. You can refer back to my original comment for why that is. Edit: To be clear: what I'm claiming is that the "progressive" position is better associated with improving education overall. It's only through a particularly warped partisan lens does it become this ridiculous squabble over artificially scarce resources.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >There is none, because there is no mainstream progressive position associated with discriminating against Asians. Right, just as there's no political party/government whose position is runaway inflation. Yet, runaway inflation still happens, usually as a result of some sort of government policy. The fact that no one advocates for it directly is irrelevant. If you advocate for a policy, you're advocating for all of its effects, good or bad.
- refurb 5y ago
  This is not true since it's the faculty and students that make a school "elite". Unless all 100 million students are brilliant and you have enough brilliant faculty to head those schools, you're going to end up with good and bad schools.
- gruez 5y ago
  >There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country. I'm under the impression that at least for undergraduate education, your average StateU is probably on par with the best name brand colleges. Most of the value of going to a selective school is the signaling/branding aspect, not necessarily the education itself (although it still might be above average). When considering that aspect, you really can't have "1 million excellent schools", because if every school is excellent, than no school is.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    It is also networking and exposure to a faculty and student body that ideally passes on the very rare, ineffable, and valuable quality where they have the sense that anything is possible and the world can be changed. State schools have less exposure to this. Whether it is actually valuable and transmissible I don't know.
- monklu 5y ago
  > Affirmative action makes the world a more just place. No it doesn't -- race-blind admission standards make the world more just, affirmative action make people like you feel as though they make the world more just. Big difference. There's obviously no evidence to suggest standardized evaluation of academic excellence favor any particular racial genetics. The fact that today in the US, race-blind admission causes over/under representation of certain racial demographics is thus entirely due to social-economical and cultural factors. We can therefore expect that once those factors are equalized, then the results of a standardized race-blind admission process should naturally reflect the racial demographics of the general populace. Unfortunately, just as those social-economical and cultural factors are the cumulation of damages done by racial oppression over many generations, so too its undoing will take generations to fully accomplish. And yes, that does mean you may likely not live to see that day. But the seemingly easy path of using affirmative action to force an outcome so that you can pretend to live in a just world is entirely the wrong way to tackle this problem, and will only serve to make the world worse for everyone involved.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country. That's the system we have now. But you end up running out of students who are capable of receiving an excellent education.

woodruffw 5y ago

> You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school. You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country. I support actions that make the world a more just place in the Rawlsian sense of the word. Affirmative action makes the world a more just place.

dahfizz 5y ago
Okay, sure. In a perfect world we would have enough resources for everything. In the real world, affirmative action policies disadvantage asian people. > Affirmative action makes the world a more just place. The question you have been dancing around: why is it just to disadvantage Asians in favor of other minorities? What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?
- woodruffw 5y ago
  There is none, because there is no mainstream progressive position associated with discriminating against Asians. You can refer back to my original comment for why that is. Edit: To be clear: what I'm claiming is that the "progressive" position is better associated with improving education overall. It's only through a particularly warped partisan lens does it become this ridiculous squabble over artificially scarce resources.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >There is none, because there is no mainstream progressive position associated with discriminating against Asians. Right, just as there's no political party/government whose position is runaway inflation. Yet, runaway inflation still happens, usually as a result of some sort of government policy. The fact that no one advocates for it directly is irrelevant. If you advocate for a policy, you're advocating for all of its effects, good or bad.
refurb 5y ago
This is not true since it's the faculty and students that make a school "elite". Unless all 100 million students are brilliant and you have enough brilliant faculty to head those schools, you're going to end up with good and bad schools.
gruez 5y ago
>There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country. I'm under the impression that at least for undergraduate education, your average StateU is probably on par with the best name brand colleges. Most of the value of going to a selective school is the signaling/branding aspect, not necessarily the education itself (although it still might be above average). When considering that aspect, you really can't have "1 million excellent schools", because if every school is excellent, than no school is.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  It is also networking and exposure to a faculty and student body that ideally passes on the very rare, ineffable, and valuable quality where they have the sense that anything is possible and the world can be changed. State schools have less exposure to this. Whether it is actually valuable and transmissible I don't know.
monklu 5y ago
> Affirmative action makes the world a more just place. No it doesn't -- race-blind admission standards make the world more just, affirmative action make people like you feel as though they make the world more just. Big difference. There's obviously no evidence to suggest standardized evaluation of academic excellence favor any particular racial genetics. The fact that today in the US, race-blind admission causes over/under representation of certain racial demographics is thus entirely due to social-economical and cultural factors. We can therefore expect that once those factors are equalized, then the results of a standardized race-blind admission process should naturally reflect the racial demographics of the general populace. Unfortunately, just as those social-economical and cultural factors are the cumulation of damages done by racial oppression over many generations, so too its undoing will take generations to fully accomplish. And yes, that does mean you may likely not live to see that day. But the seemingly easy path of using affirmative action to force an outcome so that you can pretend to live in a just world is entirely the wrong way to tackle this problem, and will only serve to make the world worse for everyone involved.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country. That's the system we have now. But you end up running out of students who are capable of receiving an excellent education.