71 ms·

Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

• mikece 3y ago
  The SCOTUS opinion here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
• lazyant 3y ago
  My take is, there's no completely "fair" and "merit-based" way to measure university applicants. But can we approximate by using a ranking based solely on grades and financials? leave out essays (that can be paid for), race, extra curriculars, legacy etc. Adding some randomness (lottery for people on the same band) is an extra idea.
• ChoGGi 3y ago
  You can't fix racism with more racism.
• Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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• Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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• Eumenes 3y ago
  Good - lets do the workplace next.
  • local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    Please God, please end the DEI Industrial Complex
• aliljet 3y ago
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• sbdaman 3y ago
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  • TheFreim 3y ago
    Could you explain why?
• stcroixx 3y ago
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  • zapataband1 3y ago
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    • stcroixx 3y ago
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    • coolhand2120 3y ago
      I think he might be talking about "Racism in US college admission has been banned" which sounds like a good thing. Do you argue that Asian and Indian students should be rejected because of their race in favor of less qualified black or Hispanic students? I would love to hear your case for why that is ok.
      • HDThoreaun 3y ago
        "Less qualified" opens a can of worms. If one student spent twice as long studying does that make them more likely to have a high income after they graduate? Because in the end that's what these schools are looking for, "How do we admit the people who will be the most successful in their career?" Just looking at grades and test scores can't figure that out. Academic success may be correlated with cultural values in a way that income isn't.
        • coolhand2120 3y ago
          > Just looking at grades and test scores can't figure that out. Do you have any citations to back up that assertion? I think we've reached the point of calling these metrics a bit more than correlations. I hear this all the time from pro affirmative action groups, but I don't think it's backed up by any science. People who practice more are going to be better at that thing. Same in sports, musics, medicine, literally everything. Hard work it turns out pays off. It's very unfortunate that some can't do the hard work required to make the grade. But that doesn't mean that they should be elevated _over others that did_ make the grade _based on the color of their skin_. I can't even believe I have to argue this. Looking at academic factors should be the strongest determining factor, economic factors is fine, but looking at race is racist, by definition. Advocacy groups trying to change the definitions of words as a way to sort of "legislate from the bench" is dishonest and an obvious attempt to avoid the debate on very controversial topics. It will always be racist to make determinations based on race. Attempts to change this definition is racist.
• Eumenes 3y ago
  A win for meritocracy - https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphically-racial-preferences-for-blacks-and-hispanics-being-admitted-to-us-medical-schools/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...
  • manuelabeledo 3y ago
    Then the headline should be: "Legacies are banned from top tier private schools". Around 25% of admissions in Ivy League schools are legacies. Unsurprisingly, this does not seem to outrage certain parts of society that much.
    • Eumenes 3y ago
      That's bad too.
  • throw0101c 3y ago
    Meritocracy may not be what you think it is, or achieve the results you assume. See recent books by Markovits and Sandel: * https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/meritocracy-book-daniel-markovits-inequality-rich https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/... * https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/21/20897021/meritocracy-economic-mobility-daniel-markovits https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/21/20897021/meritocra... * https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is... * https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/01/the-myth-of-meritocracy-according-to-michael-sandel/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/01/the-myth-of-m... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Criticism The word's modern popularity originated in a pejorative meaning which was then lost: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy Once people 'are in', they get more resources, and that allows for (e.g.) their children to have more opportunities, and so they then in turn win. If you have a person who does not 'get in' and 'win', then they have fewer resources / opportunities to show or develop what skills they may have: a doom-loop can become possible. As an example of what resources can get you: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/rick-singer-mastermind-of-college-admissions-bribery-scandal-set-to-be-sentenced https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/rick-singer-mastermin...
• DeathArrow 3y ago
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• deleted 3y ago
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• JustBreath 3y ago
  Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this has all underscored what has been true for a long time: Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them. (Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)
  • DeathArrow 3y ago
    But somehow, some people only feel the need to mention it when they don't like the result.
    • yanderekko 3y ago
      Yep. Roe vs. Wade was one of the most egregious examples of "legislating from the bench" in the latter 20th century? How many people who would hand-wring over recent SCOTUS decisions oppose Roe on these grounds? Or is this a convenient exception? Griswold? How about Lawrence vs. Texas?
      • mehlmao 3y ago
        Please explain how Henry Wade could enforce the overturned Texas Penal Code statutes without violating the constitutional right to privacy.
        • Aunche 3y ago
          In the right to privacy is so broad that it applies to abortion, it should also apply to self-medicating yourself with narcotics. I'm not saying that decriminalization of drugs is a bad thing, but it's something that obviously shouldn't be decided by the Supreme Court.
          • yanderekko 3y ago
            Yep, and if it applies to abortion, why not third-trimester abortion? Why is that relevant to a privacy interest? Where is the right to privacy in the Constitution, btw? Sounds like the whole thing is legislating from the bench! Maybe we should bring back Lochner-style scrutiny of minimum wage laws under a newly-discovered "right to earn a living"?
• pjc50 3y ago
  That won't stop people complaining about it.
• Flatcircle 3y ago
  What does this mean in practice?
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    more asians, less blacks and a bit less latinos at top schools, especially private ones. Will be interesting to see if they move toward an income based affirmative action.
    • zephyrus1985 3y ago
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    • breakingrules 3y ago
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    • pc86 3y ago
      When you say "income based affirmative action" do you mean an increase in need-base grants and scholarships, which already exists, or giving someone preferential admissions treatment because their parents make less money regardless of academic ability?
    • purpleblue 3y ago
      Asians are the poorest demographic in NYC, and yet score the highest in testing. So, activists will probably eschew this method as well because it will give Asians preferential treatment which they are loathe to do.
  • geraldwhen 3y ago
    Admissions departments will find proxies for race. The next year of Harvard freshmen will not be majority Asian. The admissions department won’t allow that to happen.
    • DeathArrow 3y ago
      > Admissions departments will find proxies for race. And that would be the same thing. If someone can prove it, it's illegal.
• endisneigh 3y ago
  I’ll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information)? Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with. In any case I doubt this will change the makeup of schools at all: > “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.
  • kenjackson 3y ago
    The court tends to rule narrowly. If no one takes the case to the Supreme Court then they won’t decide on it. I’m curious how this case would play out if some males applying to CalTech did this against female applicants. That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.
    • sowbug 3y ago
      Narrow rulings are central to the process. It's the difference between a "holding" and "dictum." A court can express an opinion about something, but if that opinion wasn't essential to resolve the case before the court, it's nothing more than an opinion, and later/lower courts can ignore that part. http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/legal-miscellaneous/difference-between-holding-and-dictum/ http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/legal-miscell...
    • gchallen 3y ago
      > That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today. Potentially quite a bit. Here's some recent data about admissions into the highly-competitive Illinois CS program: https://www.reddit.com/r/UIUC/comments/12kwc4a/uiuc_cs_admissions_demographics_data_since_2019/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UIUC/comments/12kwc4a/uiuc_cs_admis... Note that admissions rates for female applicants are higher across all categories—international, out-of-state, and in-state. Obviously you can't fully tell what's going on here without more of an understanding of the strengths of the different pools, but a 10–30% spread (for in-state) suggests that gender is being directly considered. IANAL, but I'm also concerned about the degree to which this decision affects the use of other factors during college admissions. Fundamentally admissions is a complex balance between prior performance and future potential, and only admitting based on prior performance means that we're stuck perpetuating existing societal inequities.
• tekla 3y ago
  "Racism in US college admission has been banned" I'm a huge fan of this.
• justrealist 3y ago
  > Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina, has been the boldest defender of what she prefers to call “race-sensitive” admission policies and has referred to herself as the “perfect affirmative action child.” That will probably not do a lot to convince those happy with this outcome.
  • Levitz 3y ago
    Im really not so sure. I've seen plenty of support for "affirmative action", just not based on race. Most people are more than ok with giving those in need an edge, given their situation, but many are against promoting a rich black person over a poor white one. And sure, race can serve as a proxy, the black population in the United States is impoverished compared to the mean, but in the same way that it's not acceptable to take race as proxy when it comes to crime, it's not acceptable to do it when it comes to livelihood, in my opinion.
  • remarkEon 3y ago
    Sotomayor revealed in oral argument for this very case that she does not understand the difference between "de facto" and "de jure". There's plenty of other things to dislike her for beyond one liners in interviews.
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • trogdor 3y ago
      Yeah. That was really weird. I don't know what to make of it, since it's hard to believe that she actually doesn't know the difference between the terms.
      • remarkEon 3y ago
        I just finished reading her dissent in this case, and I actually think she understands the legal difference, but because of her policy preferences (in this case, racism is actually okay but only for college admissions) she just forgot for a while.
• raincom 3y ago
  Harvard used "personality score" to sort out applicants. Now, they got rid of "personality score", SAT/ACT/LSAT/MCAT, etc., scores. They can tell their feeder schools even four years earlier, how to prepare admission packets for prospective students. Schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford can pick whatever students they want.
  • newacct3 3y ago
    At the risk of getting sued and having it go back up to the same court that gave us this decision
    • hotpotamus 3y ago
      I'd sort of imagine that if anyone has the legal minds to bend the system towards their will, it's Harvard.
    • raincom 3y ago
      Adcoms (admission committees) have learned their hard lessons. Williams R. Fitzsimmons and Rakesh Khurana of Harvard might have told everyone to not put everything in writing, just as CEOs tell underlings to not put in writing in order to not be found in the discovery process. And these professors and deans we ordinary mortals should emulate for ethical exemplars. Maybe, they should follow what they preach to students.
• forinti 3y ago
  I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept. You could have 10% or 20% percent of candidates chosen by lottery, or have a lottery for all candidates who have the minimum pre-requisites, etc. Some sort of randomness whould guarantee a diversity of candidates and would even span across dimensions which are not even considered currently.
  • fzeroracer 3y ago
    A lottery doesn't guarantee randomness at all because the population is not evenly distributed. If you have 99 people apply who are white and 1 person apply who is black, the lottery is going to naturally favor white candidates by virtue of # of applicants.
  • UncleMeat 3y ago
    > I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept. Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist and the proponents "enemies of excellence" in precisely the same way that they did for the eventually implemented system. A similar response would happen if applied to universities. I think that merit lotteries are excellent and work much more effectively than the ordinary things people to do increase diversity (which often focuses on aesthetics rather than actually changing things). But we are kidding ourselves if we think that they won't face precisely the same resistance.
    • rahimnathwani 3y ago
      Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist This is an uncharitable interpretation. AIUI part of the motivation for overhauling the admissions system was precisely to reduce the proportion of Asian Americans admitted, in order to satisfy some diversity goal set at the state level. So, even if the new admissions system wasn't racist on its face, it was introduced for the purpose of racial balancing.
      • 3y ago
• AlexB138 3y ago
  Here's the opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
  • tekla 3y ago
    Its the first link in the article
• Spivak 3y ago
  > Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But this is affirmative action. What did they strike down? Also god damn I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions. Even the ones I would personally benefit from. This is going to ruin the court in the long run for partisan bullshit. If going to the court twice for the same issue can get you different decisions then the ruling of the court means absolutely fucking nothing. You might as well just continue your affirmative action program because the next time the court makeup might be different and they'll change their mind again. This was already decided forty years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_California_v._Bakke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...
  • rufus_foreman 3y ago
    >> I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions Which Supreme Court decision did they overrule here? They upheld the Equal Protection Clause. Should they have overruled that? "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens" They upheld that. Should they have overruled it? They had to overrule something. People are mad because they didn't overrule the Equal Protection Clause.
    • Spivak 3y ago
      That's not how this works. The supreme court interpreted the equal protection clause to mean A in the original case and decided that limited discrimination didn't violate the constitution. Disagree with it all you want, I'll join you, but that was the ruling. Today the supreme court interpreted the equal protection clause to mean B and struck down their previous decision. Also lol our constitution isn't anything blind and both acknowledges and establishes different classes of person in order to make rules about them.
      • parineum 3y ago
        After being presented with new information, they came to a different conclusion. As a result of their previous decisions, the data showed that the limited discrimination allowed has had a larger effect than anticipated and led to an outcome of less than limited discrimination.
• losvedir 3y ago
  As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor. But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my background on standardized tests and always checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity (which is how all the tests asked it in those days, not sure if it's still the case), without thinking much about it. I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs and I feel like I was a strong candidate, but then everyone who gets into MIT is strong. And since I did successfully graduate then I guess it was fine that I was accepted, but I was constantly blown away and overwhelmed by the accomplishments of my peers there, and always wondered a bit if I belonged. I've always had an identity crisis about what I am. I know in the current zeitgeist there's a big push for racial justice, of which being Hispanic and "brown" is a part. But it also feels totally irrelevant to me, personally, because of my upper class upbringing and elite education, and I feel like I've never really been discriminated against. Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it. So I don't know how I feel about this change. It's certainly a big one, but in the long run, maybe it's good? I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...
  • strikelaserclaw 3y ago
    Do "white" hispanics face the same issues as those of say Indian heritage?
    • peruvian 3y ago
      I’m a white Latino and no, we don’t. Maybe on paper if someone assumes I’m mixed or Afrolatino, but I get all the privilege of being white passing. Not only that, if I’m hanging with brown Latinos they feel safer with me. I’ve often seen my friends stopped by police or given looks when alone but not with me. The whole Hispanic thing is a mess in the US. Not only due to color of skin but culture and class. I have friends in my home country who are mixed and dark skinned but culturally fit with a suburban white American more.
• flowerlad 3y ago
  It is important to note that Harward’s admission policy that is the subject of this case was designed to favor White students over Jewish ones [1]. Today it is being used to discriminate against Asian Americans. Colleges are already prepared for this ruling. Many, such as the University of Washington have abandoned standardized tests because such tests compell universities to admit the kinds of students universities are trying to limit (Asian Americans). [1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit-reveals-how-peculiar-harvards-definition-of-merit-is https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
  • bouncing 3y ago
    America has long had most of the best universities in the world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.
    • omginternets 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • 93po 3y ago
        In terms of reputation, name recognition, notable people who come out of them, publishers of leading research, and advancers of technology? If you looked at a list of the top 20 I would bet more than half are in the US.
        • omginternets 3y ago
          Many of those people are imported from foreign universities. If the claim had been "American universities are better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality, it's questionable.
          • 93po 3y ago
• fzeroracer 3y ago
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• ricardoplouis 3y ago
  Worth noting that while affirmative action has been banned, we still have proxies for race (aka legacy admissions) which overwhelmingly favor rich and white students. And given the historical discrimination of elite universities, this ban on affirmative action without addressing legacy admissions or historical harm will only increase the number of white students at universities. We can't pretend that eliminating race based admissions will serve the greater interest without addressing past (and current) systems of white supremacy. Link to demographics on legacy admissions: https://www.culawreview.org/journal/legacy-admissions-an-insidious-form-of-racial-discrimination https://www.culawreview.org/journal/legacy-admissions-an-ins...
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • vorpalhex 3y ago
    From your source > In addition, 70 percent of Harvard’s legacy applicants are white. From US Census: > Race and Hispanic Origin > White alone, percent > 75.5%
    • jasonlotito 3y ago
      From the source of the source you quoted: > Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected absent their ALDC status. So, three-quarters of those individuals didn't earn their place academically. > Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students away from whites. So, the mechanisms in place for academics currently favor white people. Yes, 70% vs 75% is about the same, but it was helped that way in part because of legacies, and would be much lower otherwise. Which supports the original comment: > [legacy admissions] overwhelmingly favor rich and white students. Maybe the paper itself has more details. I'm only going by the abstract. But unless the abstract is lying, I think it makes sense.
  • Der_Einzige 3y ago
    This ruling will overwhelmingly help Asians and only marginally help white people
• arpyzo 3y ago
  If you agree with this decision on the grounds of supporting meritocracy, consider that the real travesty with regards to meritocracy in college admissions are legacy admissions.
  • xyzelement 3y ago
    How big a deal and how common is it in reality? "We have one fewer spots because we admitted the son of a donor" and "we won't accept you based on race" are different magnitude.
    • deilline 3y ago
      https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1060361 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1060361
      • JKCalhoun 3y ago
        43%, crazy.
        • s1artibartfast 3y ago
          For one specific private university. If you consider every state university and College, I expect far more people are impacted by affirmative action
    • arpyzo 3y ago
      Legacy admissions are not just a few spots. They constitute a high percentage of admissions. I've seen estimates ranging from 10% to 35%.
    • kemayo 3y ago
      It has a surprisingly strong effect as schools get more prestigious / exclusive. At schools like Harvard, which have in incredibly low admission rate (something like 5% of qualified applicants get an offer, I think?), legacies get a massive bump. https://admissionsight.com/harvard-legacy-acceptance-rate/ https://admissionsight.com/harvard-legacy-acceptance-rate/ says it's 25-35% of students who're legacies at Harvard. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w26316.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... is analyzing the admissions data that got released from an earlier lawsuit against Harvard about Asian American admissions bias, and says that although being a legacy isn't as good as being a recruited athlete, it still gets you admitted at about 5x the rate of non-legacies.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  Please unflag this.
• mucle6 3y ago
  I can see the social good of admitting disadvantaged groups, but how does it help the individual colleges? I can't come up with a clear path from increased diversity to increased profitability. I must be missing something because for profit entities don't do things out of the kindness of their heart.
  • ketchupdebugger 3y ago
    yes but Harvard is not a for profit entity.
    • mucle6 3y ago
      I still find it hard to believe Harvard, with a 50 Billion dollar endowment decided to do something good for society if they though it would hurt them. I feel like colleges must have data to show bottom line benefits for affirmative action
• rbrown 3y ago
  why was this flagged?
  • ldehaan 3y ago
    [dead]
• shmde 3y ago
  Wow flagged within 30 mins before people could even start having a discussion. HN audience is wild.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • commandlinefan 3y ago
    > HN audience is wild Predictable, too.
• sebow 3y ago
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• newacct3 3y ago
  Considering the failure and timing of prop 16 and overall makeup of the California electorate compared to rest of country, official discrimination on the basis of race likely won't return in higher ed. Also consider that prop 16 failed by double digits with the pro-discrimination crowd outspending the opposition 19x What I'm curious about is this: the Harvard decision is wrt a private entity, the court ruled that they discriminated against whites and asians Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next? Could this trigger a wave of litigation?
  • Eumenes 3y ago
    > Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next? I'm no fan of regulation and government intervention in private business, but its gotten out of control in tech and the corporate world. I've flat out heard hiring managers say they'll only hire a woman, lgbtq, or [certain minority] for certain roles. I've sat in hiring committees where candidates preform horribly, esp compared to others being reviewed at the same time, and get pushed through to offer stage just because of their inalienable characteristics. If these meetings were recorded and leaked to the press, there'd be outrage. These managers talk of human beings like people collect coins or action figures. And HR/Recruiting/C-suite is super complicit in all this, if not actively encouraging it.
    • TheCaptain4815 3y ago
      So stop being a coward and record and leak those conversations.
      • Eumenes 3y ago
        Maybe in 10 years once I've gotten enough to retire. Dont wanna get James Damore'd.
        • newacct3 3y ago
          Blowing the whistle with internal comms as evidence != Writing an opinionated blog post
• dmix 3y ago
  Why is this flagged? Previous discussions were at the top of HN.
• cpascal 3y ago
  I think universities can probably come up with a different set of non-protected criteria to lift underrepresented communities out of social/financial oppression. This might even provide greater access to some equally needing students that are looked over by racially-based criteria. In a perfect world, everyone would have equal opportunity and support throughout their primary education, and college admission could be much more merit-based. Unfortunately, that is not the country we live in and there is little appetite to invest in ensuring all Americans have access to high-quality primary education.
  • Lendal 3y ago
    Yeah, and I think it will be pretty simple to do. Just switch over to looking at what district the applicants graduated (or what neighborhood they grew up in) from and try to equally represent all school districts over time. For instance, if you have a poor high school that's never had anyone admitted to your university, then try to choose the next outstanding applicant coming out of that high school. That promotes diversity without involving race. Poor families can't easily change school districts just because they find themselves with a gifted child on their hands. I know because I've been there.
    • TMWNN 3y ago
      >Just switch over to looking at what district the applicants graduated (or what neighborhood they grew up in) from and try to equally represent all school districts over time. This is basically what the University of Texas does; the top x% of applicants from each Texas high school is admitted, with other applicants competing against each other. I think it's a good way for a state school with the duty to educate its citizens to do so without using race as the determinant.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • rtkwe 3y ago
    My read and view has been for a long while that to reverse the centuries of race based discrimination you have to do something to specifically funnel opportunities and resources to those affected groups. PoC were kept out of many of the big wealth building booms in the US like the post WW2 golden era for example so unless we're willing to wait for one of those to come around again or a couple centuries of diffusion to even the starting point discrepancies the pre Civil Rights Era built deep into our cities and economies, the race based issues of the past kind of demand addressing with race based solutions.
• solardev 3y ago
  I often wished universities (and other organizations) would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" to determine someone's background difficulties. Like okay, you get X points if you're this race, Y points for that. Z points if your parents were poor. Or if you grew up in these bad zip codes. Or if your dad was gone and mom was an addict. Whatever. As an Asian American of relatively privileged (middle class) upbringing who went to a state college, I often found it unfair that many of my desperately poor white peers worked their asses off their whole lives, despite minimal support from their parents, to get into college on merit alone. Meanwhile for me, my admissions counselor handwaved away all the entrance requirements (my GPA was low, I didn't have the pre reqs done, etc.) and admitted me on the spot. Years later I'd find out that I was part of their zip code based recruiting program designed to get non whites into the school for the benefit of their diversity quotas. In California they already weren't allowed to use affirmative action due to Prop 209, so they just used a geographical proxy for race (finding zip codes with high non white ratios to recruit from). I didn't deserve that spot at all. I never worked for it, I never suffered for it, my parents didn't much either. I just happened to benefit from policies meant to protect Black and Hispanic people, at their expense, while simultaneously throwing white people under the bus. It was pretty unfair all around. I get that as a society we want to help give people a chance to escape the circumstances of their birth. But skin color alone is an awfully broad brush that paints only a vague picture of who that person is and what kind of adversity they may or may not have overcome. I wish we looked at it with more nuance is all I'm saying.
  • zmgsabst 3y ago
    Institutional racism is highly corrosive to society. All we’ve done is create new grievances among poor whites to justify the guilt of upper class whites about things their grandparents did. Those people are rightly upset that the government has been openly racist to them their entire lives. How did that help? — I mean, besides soothing the feelings of elites that they’re not bigots, even though they made 1950s style racist policies about “too many” Jews and Asians in their universities. (Which is what triggered this lawsuit…)
    • solardev 3y ago
• SaintSeiya 3y ago
  Good: race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc should not be used as an advantage, or disadvantage in totally unrelated matters (education, work, etc)
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• psychphysic 3y ago
  Good. I'd be sickened to hear I got a lucrative opportunity because of the colour of my skin (which incidentally is not white and I'm not oriental so I'd guess I'd have benefitted from affirmative action if it was present where I grew up).
  • xyzelement 3y ago
    If you read some of the comments here, you'd see that colleges have been discriminating against Asians. As a group asian Americans have had no trouble being over represented in colleges based on purely merit.
    • psychphysic 3y ago
      I think there is likely differences in how we use phrases like Asian and oriental. Basically as far as I know AA was intended to give places to people like me. But I would not have accepted if I had any idea I was not admitted on achievement alone.
    • dahwolf 3y ago
      Which weakens the systemic racism thesis, hence we don't talk about it.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  << Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. Yep.
  • local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    You cannot solve racism through racism.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
      But if affirmative action is racism, then you can't solve racism at all.
      • goatlover 3y ago
        What kind of reasoning is that? To the extent racism is solvable, that's done on the cultural level. My own view is that continuing to focus on race instead of moving past racial categories keeps it going. Ethnicities are real, but racial categories are social constructs (of varying ethnicities or ancestries over time) that only have cultural currency because we continue to allow them to.
        • A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
          << What kind of reasoning is that? It is not my intention to sound confrontational, but it is merely logical reasoning. The moment the decision is made based on race, the policy is racist. Just because it may benefit some groups over others based on race makes it racist. In other words, using logic of the parent, you cannot solve racism with more racism. << To the extent racism is solvable, that's done on the cultural level. I am willing to agree. Personally, I did not think racism really existed until I came to US. I was aware of ethnic prejudices though. << My own view is that continuing to focus on race instead of moving past racial categories keeps it going. Zero disagreement. << Ethnicities are real, but racial categories are social constructs (of varying ethnicities or ancestries over time) that only have cultural currency because we continue to allow them to. Eh. Good luck having that conversation on most public fora or even with an average person. Merely suggesting along something the lines puts into question years of programming and to many it is a very uncomfortable conversation. And this does not even touch recent attempts to rewrite language to further confuse the matters ( 'race is a social construct', 'race isn't real, but racism is' ). And just to confuse the matters further, allow me to throw another wrench into the mix. Ethnicity is real, but ethnicity itself is a spectrum. At best, it is a common range of genetic variables and there well may be uncommon ones. Still, my original point is that it is all rather unnecessary distraction. Most people want effectively the same things. If you spend more than a 15 minutes reflecting on this, actual racism is a silly proposition. Problem is: everything is racism these days. It makes things complicated as it is merely a social construct.
• pe0x40 3y ago
  There are different opinions on affirmative action, and I have to admit assessing people based on what group they are member of, even if your intentions are good, really doesn't sound that good to me. I can recommend Thomas Sowell book on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_Action_Around_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_Action_Around_the_...
• Osiris 3y ago
  I think public college admission should just be a random lottery.
• duped 3y ago
  I admittedly skimmed the opinion, but is this the first case that establishes a private entity like Harvard University is bound by the Equal Protections Clause? I thought existing law and precedent only had it applied to state/state actors (and a few cases where private businesses acted like governments, eg company towns).
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    The private nature of Harvard is debatable. The value of the subsidy represented by the tax exemption of their endowment is $50k per student per year.
    • duped 3y ago
      It's not debatable, Harvard is a private entity. The fact they receive tax preference or federal funding and whether they should if the government considers their acceptance policy to be racist is a very different question than the one in the opinion, as far as I can tell. And whatever debate could be held seems to be absent in the opinion, which is why I asked.
  • adolph 3y ago
    The Equal Protection Clause operates on States. It does not purport to regulate the conduct of private parties. By contrast, Title VI applies to recipients of federal funds—covering not just many state actors, but many private actors too. In this way, Title VI reaches entities and organizations that the Equal Protection Clause does not. p 129 of https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
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  • mindslight 3y ago
    Yeah, I do not understand this claimed basis of Equal Protection either. Taking into account only equal protection, it would still be acceptable for a private institution to say "We want to limit our association with $RACE". Such a policy does not rise to the level of being law (notwithstanding that private institution being considered a de facto arm of the government, which is an argument I'm open to but doesn't seem to have been explored here). If the reasoning of this decision hinged upon interpretation of the Civil Rights Act as banning "positive discrimination", that would make sense independently (I think a concurring opinion might be based on this?). If Harvard College maintained that it didn't want to be discriminating based on race but was being forced to by Title VI, I would see the link to Equal Protection. But as presented the majority opinion seems like a mismatch trying to somehow tie the issue directly to constitutionality. edit: I think they're getting there by this chain: Title VI has provisions mandating equality. Due to the Equal Protection clause, Title VI's provisions that prohibit discrimination must also be construed to prohibit "positive" discrimination. Therefore Harvard is bound by this new interpretation of Title VI which prohibits it from engaging in "positive" discrimination. (contrast with simply ruling parts of Title VI unconstitutional and therefore null and void) Ultimately this feels in line with the continued erosion of separation of powers as every activity gradually comes under the purview of the federal government.
• paulvnickerson 3y ago
  Relevant summary from the decision: > Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack suffi- ciently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereo- typing, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from consid- ering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the uni- versity. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
  • NoRelToEmber 3y ago
    > Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This conflates whether racial discrimination is legal, with how much people base their identity on race. Because on the latter question, the universities have concluded correctly - 74% of Blacks, 59% of Hispanics, and 56% of Asians (but only 15% of Whites) say their race is extremely or very important to their identity: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in...
• skrebbel 3y ago
  The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? Who loses in this case? I don't mean this as a hihi actually sneaky anti-affirmative-action post, I don't understand the subject matter well enough (nor America in general). I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?
  • acjohnson55 3y ago
    We do have policies to benefit the economically disadvantaged. The amount we spend on this front is vastly, vastly more than any race-based interventions. I would argue we should do much more on that front. But, people can and do suffer from racism without being poor. Controlling socioeconomic status, Black people (I'm going to focus here) statistically have worse opportunities and outcomes. This is why race-based policy is important in addition to purely financial considerations. There is no perfect implementation of affirmative action to address the root of the problem, but on the whole, I think it's extremely important that institutions are able to try. The older people in my parents' generation were often prevented from having a full education, often even up to the high school level. My mom was born in the North, instead of the South as her older siblings were, because her family fled the Klan. These are just a couple examples of how the history of de jure and de facto racial oppression are still very much with us. If not for reforms and affirmative action, I probably would not have had the opportunity to be raised in a financially stable household in an area of bountiful opportunity. It's heartbreaking to me that the policies that allowed my family to go from oppressed sharecropping to earning our way into the middle class are being revoked. The truth is, affirmative action was never enough, and it is unlikely to be replaced with anything any more sufficient.
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• imtemplain 3y ago
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• TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  So, legally, does this apply to corporate quotas by extension?
  • stjohnswarts 3y ago
    I don't think so, I believe this strictly for college admissions. However, there is no reason it couldn't be cited in future cases along those lines because they're in the same realm of judicial logic.
• PKop 3y ago
  Good thread summarizing and highlighting key points of the majority opinion: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1674427087514636290 https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/167442708751463629...
• kneebonian 3y ago
  A very interesting quote from the ruling: 'These classifications rest on incoherent stereotypes. Take the “Asian” category. It sweeps into one pile East Asians (e.g., Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and South Asians (e.g., Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi), even though together they constitute about 60% of the world’s population. Bernstein Amicus Brief 2, 5. This agglomeration of so many peoples paves over countless differences in “language,” “culture,” and historical experience. Id., at 5–6. It does so even though few would suggest that all such persons share “similar backgrounds and similar ideas and experiences.” Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin, 579 U. S. 365, 414 (2016) (ALITO, J., dissenting). Consider, as well, the development of a separate category for “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” It seems federal officials disaggregated these groups from the “Asian” category only in the 1990s and only “in response to political lobbying.” Bernstein Amicus Brief 9–10. And even that category contains its curiosities. It appears, for example, that Filipino Americans remain classified as “Asian” rather than “Other Pacific Islander.” See 4 App. in No. 21–707, at 1732. The remaining classifications depend just as much on irrational stereotypes. The “Hispanic” category covers those whose ancestral language is Spanish, Basque, or Catalan— but it also covers individuals of Mayan, Mixtec, or Zapotec descent who do not speak any of those languages and whose ancestry does not trace to the Iberian Peninsula but bears deep ties to the Americas. See Bernstein Amicus Brief 10– The “White” category sweeps in anyone from “Europe, Asia west of India, and North Africa.” Id., at 14. That includes those of Welsh, Norwegian, Greek, Italian, Moroccan, Lebanese, Turkish, or Iranian descent. It embraces an Iraqi or Ukrainian refugee as much as a member of the British royal family. Meanwhile, “Black or African American” covers everyone from a descendant of enslaved persons who grew up poor in the rural South, to a first-generation child of wealthy Nigerian immigrants, to a Black-identifying applicant with multiracial ancestry whose family lives in a typical American suburb. See id., at 15–16. If anything, attempts to divide us all up into a handful of groups have become only more incoherent with time. American families have become increasingly multicultural, a fact that has led to unseemly disputes about whether someone is really a member of a certain racial or ethnic group. There are decisions denying Hispanic status to someone of ItalianArgentine descent, Marinelli Constr. Corp. v. New York, 200 App. Div. 2d 294, 296–297, 613 N. Y. S. 2d 1000, 1002 (1994), as well as someone with one Mexican grandparent, Major Concrete Constr., Inc. v. Erie County, 134 App. Div. 2d 872, 873, 521 N. Y. S. 2d 959, 960 (1987). Yet there are also decisions granting Hispanic status to a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors fled Spain centuries ago, In re RothschildLynn Legal & Fin. Servs., SBA No. 499, 1995 WL 542398, 2–4 (Apr. 12, 1995), and bestowing a “sort of Hispanic” status on a person with one Cuban grandparent, Bernstein, 94 S. Cal. L. Rev., at 232 (discussing In re Kist Corp., 99 F. C. C. 2d 173, 193 (1984)).'
• mcpackieh 3y ago
  A good development but I think this won't stop the practice. Harvard lawyers are now hard at work finding new way to achieve the same effect.
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• Footnote7341 3y ago
  The most elite colleges already pre-empted this ruling by rapidly moving towards non-merit based admissions they will just make it so you can't really tell if they are using affirmative action or not instead of having it be explicit.
  • raincom 3y ago
    Yes, they can do that. However, they have to be very, very careful, because of this: '[U]niversities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. ...“[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name' (pp39-40 of https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf)
  • stjohnswarts 3y ago
    Won't people be able to prove statistically that they are obviously still using affirmative action policies via GPAs/SAT scores/racial mix? I'm not that great at statistics but that doesn't seem like a very hard task even using basic figures of merit like ratio of applicants to population of accepted students. Seems like something easy to bring a class action suit against a University after a few years of data is available.
    • peanuty1 3y ago
      They can use personality scores and rate Asians lower.
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    There will be many lawsuits, especially if these can be litigated via 'section 1983', which appears to be applicable for state schools. [1] In these cases, attorney's fees are granted for plaintiffs that prevail, which significantly incentivizes lawyers to take on cases that have a decent chance of winning. A plaintiff doesn't have to be able to prove its case in its initial filing: if the initial complaint isn't thrown out (which a good lawyer could likely avoid), then the plaintiff gets to go through 'discovery', where it can compel the defendant to produce relevant documents and data. In the case of affirmative action, this would include potentially damning evidence like notes from admissions meetings (if the school is foolish enough to put illegal considerations in writing), as well as detailed statistical information regarding the makeup of the applicants and admitted students. 1: https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/what-are-the-elements-of-a-section-1983-claim/ https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/what-are-the-elements-...
• kadomony 3y ago
  Interesting to see if companies will be slapped back to reality away from their DEI bullshit that hires lesser qualified individuals simply because of their levels of melanin.
• TradingPlaces 3y ago
  1. The largest beneficiaries of admissions policies at elite institutions are legacy admissions of wealth alumni’s kids. If SCOTUS wants to interfere with the admissions policies of private institutions based on the equal protections clause, maybe that’s a better place to start. 2. The vast majority of students attend colleges that accept almost everyone.
  • az226 3y ago
    Patently incorrect. Minority preference is ~20x times larger than legacy preference at Harvard. A typical class at Harvard has 2,500 student admits. Of those, 700 are black or Hispanic. If Harvard did away with legacy admissions, 25 additional Hispanic or black applicants would be admitted, so 725. However, if they did away with affirmative action, 450 would not be admitted, so you would be down to 275. Most of these 425 spots would go to Asian applicants and a chunk would go to white applicants. http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf
    • TradingPlaces 3y ago
      That’s a strange reading of that study, and at odds with the abstract. >The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an un- precedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, lega- cies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as typical white applicants. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.
      • cuteboy19 3y ago
        This is entirely compatible with their analysis
• mattmg 3y ago
  In Brazil, public universities were dominated by the rich, mainly whites, since the entrance exams required high grades that only those who could pay for expensive exam prep courses would have. Since 2012, with the Law of Social Quotas, that reality has changed, since 50% of the new admission spots are destined for students coming from public high schools, with further subdivisions for racial minorities based on the demographic makeup of each Brazilian state. Those racial minorities quotas are as high as 30% at some universities. I could personally see that change, since I did undergrad in engineering 10 years ago, and my colleagues were mainly white. I'm doing another undergrad and my new colleagues come from truly different backgrounds, some are black, poor, from indigenous origin... and that matters because if we don't share the same spaces as universities students, we probably won't share latter on, when occupying spaces of power
  • cuteboy19 3y ago
    In the US both you and your indigenous/mixed peers would be declared Latino and receive equal benefits of affirmative action. In fact, a blue eyes, blonde hair white European from Argentina would be given preference over an Indian or Thai individual.
• purpleblue 3y ago
  I'm happy this happened because Asians are the only ethnicity that suffers true systemic racism when it comes to education. However, my fear is that the universities are working hard to figure out ways to continue this practice against Asian Americans by skirting around the rules.
• ecshafer 3y ago
  The best method of college entrance is whats done in east asia. China does the Gaokao (hard SAT), and students list their university preferences and filters students into colleges based on their score and their preferences. Japan takes entrance exams for a university. These seem like infinitely fairer methods than the US where they try and correct for disadvantage in a variety ways.
  • JKCalhoun 3y ago
    In the U.S.: go to shitty school, get shitty SAT score, disallowed from college. Repeat.
    • w10-1 3y ago
      In California: 10% of each shitty school gets in to the top-tier UC system
  • alsaaro 3y ago
    China uses an ethnic quota system for underrepresented minorities for university admissions, just like India and the United States (until today).
  • AlanYx 3y ago
    China practices affirmative action by giving certain ethnic minorities additional points on the gao kao. There's a good 2017 paper by Ding et. al. that explores the effect this has.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    American schools are not looking to maximize academic success. They want to maximize career success because that's how prestige is measured. They're certainly not trying to be fair either, they're trying to maximize donations.
• imperio59 3y ago
  Harvard and UNC are well intentioned but they are trying to fix inequities which start much earlier. They sit at the end of 12 years of schooling for applicants, where the quality of that schooling and the level of funding for extra curricular activities will have been vastly different based on where that student lived and which school they attended. Trying to fix this problem at the college admissions level creates the unintended effect and consequence that Asians and whites who are objectively better academic candidates get rejected in favor of non white/Asian candidates with lower academic scores. That is wrong and it's discrimination on the sole basis of the color of your skin. The real fight needs to be about fixing our education system so every kid of every race and everywhere gets the same high quality education. It means giving parents school choice to take their kids to private school instead of the poorly run public schools that may be near them. It means raising the standards for training teachers so they can have real workable educational tools to make sure their students succeed. You can't fix this broken system with more racism, and it was wrong to try to do so.
  • raincom 3y ago
    Equality of opportunity at the n-th step totally depends on Equality of outcome at the n-1 th step. It id better to focus on earlier steps where it doesn’t appear to be a zero-sun game.
• kaitai 3y ago
  A white legacy applicant at Harvard is 5 times as likely to be admitted as a non-legacy white applicant. "Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as typical white applicants." All of you writing that if a Black kid gets admitted then some white or Asian kid gets bumped off are scrapping for the little bits the rich have left to you, while misunderstanding the fundamental mathematics at work. You're pawns. This is the genius of racism -- sow manufactured division among the "little people" so that those on top (of whatever color) can continue comfortably while no one else can rise. http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf
  • verteu 3y ago
    And "over 43%" of white admits are legacy ("ADLC"). I had no idea the proportion was so high!
  • Georgelemental 3y ago
    Preferences for wealthy legacy elites are bad. Preferences for people of certain skin colors are also bad.
• adamrezich 3y ago
  if I were a non-white adversarial nation with plenty of high-achieving youth, I would take maximal advantage of this decision and the US's student visa programs by doing everything I could to send as many students from my country to US colleges as absolutely possible, so as to deprive American youth of college education as much as possible.
  • filoleg 3y ago
    You better make sure your plan won't backfire and won't lead to a large number of those highly educated youths staying in the US afterwards and contributing to the US economy. And that's after you, as an adversarial nation, had already spent tons of resources on growing and educating those kids to the quality level high enough to be accepted into those top US colleges, as well as (presumably) paid for the tuition (which for international students can easily become x4 of in-state tuition and x2 of out-of-state). Heavily investing into a highly efficient brain-drain program might not be as smart of an idea as you believe it is, if you are funding the side of it that drains those brains away from you.
  • cuteboy19 3y ago
    The decision has no effect on foreign students
• Aeolun 3y ago
  This may be the only time ever I’ve ever felt like I agreed with the conservative side of SCOTUS. I just do not know how to politely say any form of affirmative action is bizarre. If your schools suck at teaching worthwhile things to minorities or poor people, the problem is that your school system sucks. Not that some people don’t get into a few highly prestigious universities. You could argue it’s a kind of bandaid, but at the cost of introducing discrimination yet again and hiding the true problem. Which is that your system sucks at creating opportunity for everyone.
  • Capricorn2481 3y ago
    Because we can't raise taxes on the very people getting legacy admissions into these universities.
  • systemvoltage 3y ago
    If you study things beyond the media garbage level / midwit level and if you're a rationalist, you'll find conservative jurisprudence and constitutionalism more appealing. It did for me, start with Scalia.
• max_ 3y ago
  Why don't they Just ban people from divulging what college thet went to during Job applications? Not everyone can go to an Ivy League College. Employers should only be focusing on GPA or other performance metrics. If its really about meritocracy.
• wnc3141 3y ago
  I think it's worth considering how much economic mobility is tied to economic status prior to college. I find a purely race based admission system fails to identify that, and in place gives an easier solution to building diversity compared to giving discounted education to those who can not afford it. Of course there remains issues of opportunity for students of color, who are more likely than white students from disadvantaged backgrounds. However economic status, or rural/urban based admissions would capture many of these inequalities. Of course this all comes from a conversation that supposes college should be as scarce as it is, and that the earnings benefit from college should be as large as it is.
• anthk 3y ago
  This is good. The criteria should be based on income, not the race.
• TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  The only way affirmative action makes 'logical' sense to me is if people believe in biological differences of intelligence between races. Not saying I believe this, but it's the only way I could think of to logically allow for AA. Because now you have "Race A" paying the same tax rates for public university as "Race B", yet their children could be biologically limited (on average) in comparison.
  • peterfirefly 3y ago
    In which case the Race B children would be paying disproportionately -- one might even surmise that the Race A children (and their parents) would be net beneficiaries of the taxes paid by the Race B children (and their parents).
  • dahwolf 3y ago
    We'll never know because it's a taboo topic. So we'll just pretend that almost every aspect of our body has racial differences due to populations being exposed to different environments/conditions and evolving to adapt, yet magically this one organ, the brain, is perfectly steady across time and location. Regardless, it's probably a "close enough" call and culture might be a larger factor. Which one can also only selectively talk about. For example, everybody knows why Asians outperform whites: performance culture and work ethic.
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• alberth 3y ago
  DEI? Does this impact internal corporate DEI programs?
• HeavenFox 3y ago
  One thing I never understood is why colleges themselves fight so hard for affirmative action? Wouldn't admitting the most qualified students, regardless of race, be in their own interest? If they are afraid of the political pushback for having too few Black and Hispanics, doesn't this decision give them cover?
  • raincom 3y ago
    Elite schools want to protect the quota of ALDC (athletes, legacies, dean's interest list--kids of potential mega donors--, children of faculty). Also, they want to appear diverse, by having favored minorities. They don't really care about descendants of slavery; if they were, they would have admitted descendants of slavery (a narrow subset of black people). Elites schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford want to keep their exclusiveness. Only one way to achieve that is to recruit the kids of the elite class (uber wealthy, powerful politicians, dictators, Cervant class of the elite); also have elite companies recruit people from such schools.
  • rendang 3y ago
    One explanation is that the officials involved are "true believers", not acting out of fear of pushback but out of their own values.
  • dahwolf 3y ago
    Thousands of very well paid administrators depend on this problem persisting, hence it's not supposed to be ever solved.
• jl6 3y ago
  One question I have is: did it work? These types of policies have been in place for decades. We have data on inequality between different demographics over time. So can we detect a measurable improvement attributable to the policy?
  • peterfirefly 3y ago
    More recent immigrants from Africa with an Ivy League degree, yes. That looks superficially like an improvement to many.
  • w10-1 3y ago
    The improvement was clear and obvious in many aspects of society, but the question is whether the cost was worth it, and whether it's really a long-term solution, since it may exacerbate some aspects. Further, it left open the question of the goal: is it to assimilate cultures? To ensure equal resources? participation? representation? respect? understanding? freedom to be different? Which means different affirmative-action programs had different cost/benefit and no one really knows the path. In logic, not-not-A is A, but it's anything but in reality.
• seanw444 3y ago
  This comment section is a frightening wake-up call to how peoples' mindsets are nowadays. I choose to believe that it's over-represented on HN because most people that exercise interest in the topics HN is made for, are the stereotypical liberal types.
  • alephnerd 3y ago
    A lot of us are Asian American as well, just saying...
• Georgelemental 3y ago
  Clarence Thomas's concurrence does not mince words: > This, [Justice Jackson] claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood. [...] What it cannot do is use the applicant’s skin color as a heuristic, assuming that because the applicant checks the box for “black” he therefore conforms to the university’s monolithic and reductionist view of an abstract, average black person. > Accordingly, JUSTICE JACKSON’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step. Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism. > JUSTICE JACKSON then builds from her faulty premise to call for action, arguing that courts should defer to “experts” and allow institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. Make no mistake: Her dissent is not a vanguard of the innocent and helpless. It is instead a call to empower privileged elites, who will “tell us [what] is required to level the playing field” among castes and classifications that they alone can divine. Post, at 26; see also post, at 5–7 (GORSUCH , J., concurring) (explaining the arbitrariness of these classifications). Then, after siloing us all into racial castes and pitting those castes against each other, the dissent somehow believes that we will be able—at some undefined point—to “march forward together” into some utopian vision. Post, at 26 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). Social movements that invoke these sorts of rallying cries, historically, have ended disastrously. > Unsurprisingly, this tried-and-failed system defies both law and reason. Start with the obvious: If social reorganization in the name of equality may be justified by the mere fact of statistical disparities among racial groups, then that reorganization must continue until these disparities are fully eliminated, regardless of the reasons for the disparities and the cost of their elimination. [...] If those measures were to result in blacks failing at yet higher rates, the only solution would be to double down. In fact, there would seem to be no logical limit to what the government may do to level the racial playing field—outright wealth transfers, quota systems, and racial preferences would all seem permissible. In such a system, it would not matter how many innocents suffer race-based injuries; all that would matter is reaching the race-based goal. [...] > The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution. > The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U. S., at 298 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”). > While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.
• mahdi7d1 3y ago
  I never understood why are people against standardized testing. I would rather fail test than be judged by someone then deemed not worthy.
  • accra4rx 3y ago
    exactly. I have a kid in 4th grade . He got bad grades all year in his internal assessments. All the teacher would do is circle out the mistakes for silly mistakes. My kid scored a 96 percentile , toping all the 4th grader in his school My kid knows how to solve and understand the concepts just lack in describing it. I completely favor standardize test as there was no person involved to judge (who can also be biased).
  • fullshark 3y ago
    I'm against building an entire education system around having children excel at standardized tests. Which is basically what will happen if it's the sole determinant of ability for universities.
    • xdennis 3y ago
      But it's more fair and you are in control of your own fate: you can always study harder, but you can't improve the degree to which a random stranger likes you.
  • lost_tourist 3y ago
    I'm confused, isn't that what SAT and ACT are?
  • sneed_chucker 3y ago
    Because average performance in standardized testing (SAT, ACT, and so on) is highly variable between racial/ethnic groups. People with all different kinds of motivations and agendas have various explanations for why that is, but ignoring all that the fact of the matter is that a strict "meritocracy" of that sort ends up with certain groups overrepresented and others underrepresented.
• LargeTomato 3y ago
  I applied to university as African American/Black because I'm 1/4 Egyptian. I am very white. Some people may guess I'm Jewish (I'm not) but no one guesses African American. I got into a nice school and I was enrolled in the "minority engineering excellence program". The program was like 25% white kids with "1/16 native American" or "1/8 Spanish". We got free tutoring and we all took an exclusive class just for the program and 100% of us got an A. It was definitely unfair. Half of the minority engineers just left the program. They were clearly capable of passing engineering school and the minority program was culty and a bit weird. The kids who stayed were dragged through the system with copious free tutoring and paid staff helping them stay on top of their course work. These kids dropped out at Juniors when they would have probably otherwise dropped out as Freshman.
  • az226 3y ago
    In America middle eastern counts as white, not black. But nobody is enforcing these things and now they won’t matter because racially discriminating on admissions is illegal.
    • ProllyInfamous 3y ago
      As today's ruling "proves" (both concurring and dissenting opinions brought this up): these racial background questions are "self-identified" / self-selected.
    • freeAgent 3y ago
      Egypt is in Africa, though. It’s literally African.
      • az226 3y ago
        Elon Musk is African American.
        • s1artibartfast 3y ago
          And he would qualify for reparations under a number of proposals in California. This highlights the confusion between treating Africans as a uniform group suffering discrimination and treating people as individuals who may have drastically different backgrounds
• orblivion 3y ago
  I could understand how this applies to state universities, but how does the US Constitution have this kind of jurisdiction over Harvard?
  • COGlory 3y ago
    If this can't apply to Harvard, then presumably it's legal to have private schools that only allow white people?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • orblivion 3y ago
      I don't see how it would be unconstitutional, but it would probably be illegal per the civil rights act. Though now that you mention it, I looked at the article a bit more closely. It says that conservatives "...argued that the Constitution and the civil rights law prohibited discrimination based on race...". The civil rights law part makes more sense than the constitution part. But, the article says that the SCOTUS based this on the 14th amendment. It's probably more complicated than this article makes it out to be.
  • ru552 3y ago
    Harvard receives public funds from the government. Assumingly, if Harvard chose to no longer receive those funds, they wouldn't have to comply.
  • stjohnswarts 3y ago
    Private college status doesn't override basic rights elucidated by the Constitution which are further spelled out by various civil rights laws.
    • orblivion 3y ago
      Civil rights laws sure, but the constitution generally defines the role of and restrictions on the government. I think the answer must be that Harvard has government contracts or something (as others responded to me).
• dmvdoug 3y ago
  Regardless of what your take is on the substance, as a former lawyer, I was really struck at the language in the various concurrences and dissents. They are very clearly pissed and/or disgusted with each other in a way that is very not-normal, even for hot button cases.
  • Georgelemental 3y ago
    This issue is personal for justices Thomas, Jackson, and Sotomayor especially. I think that is reflected in their opinions.
    • dmvdoug 3y ago
      Sotomayor as well. What fascinates me about Thomas’s dissent is towards the end he talks about HBCUs and how effective they are. You’ll find language of his in a lot of places suggesting black separatist—type sympathies. He was a genuine radical in his college years in that respect, and he’s still clearly sympathetic to sone extent. Cards on the table: I think Justice Thomas has a genuinely nutty jurisprudence. Like way out there nutty. And I disagree with him about virtually everything. But he’s much more complex than the standard caricatures allow for (even when they come from fellow-travelers, like the people who thought Thomas was just Scalia’s lapdog; wrong; Scalia was nakedly unprincipled when compared to Thomas).
      • ekam 3y ago
        Yeah he does seem to have a somewhat cohesive and distinct philosophy of his own that undergirds his decisions and that's been underappreciated given his influence over the Court and American jurisprudence
        • dmvdoug 3y ago
          Because he doesn’t really have any influence. He is locked inside a jurisprudence of one. I suppose I prefer that sort of honest integrity—even though batshit crazy-to the kind of unprincipled, inconsistent but always screechy Scalia.
• b8 3y ago
  Thomas Sowell successfully convinced me that affirmative action is a disservice with his cogent affirmative action book.
  • ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    Justice Thomas's concurrence cited Dr. Thomas Sowell TWICE in support of the disservice affirmative action can have on preferentially-admitted students of color. Justice Sotomayer's dissent dispelled Dr. Sowell's sage publications. I found it particularly offensive the pettiness embedded within the footnotes, to an obviously-divided court [and on such a simple topic, too]. From majority ruling: "ELIMINATING RACIAL DISCRIMINATION MEANS ELIMINATING ALL OF IT."
• hnburnsy 3y ago
  Can't Harvad et al just stop taking Pell Grants and all other Federal funding and mostly admit who ever they want? If so would they do this or do they value that funding too much?
• Jun8 3y ago
  Excellent analysis from Matthew Yglesias: https://www.slowboring.com/p/19-thoughts-on-affirmative-action https://www.slowboring.com/p/19-thoughts-on-affirmative-acti...
• ldehaan 3y ago
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• throwawayXX1X 3y ago
  India had a caste system for a long time. The lower castes were relegated to menial jobs while upper classes enjoyed ruling. After India got independence in 1947, a new legislation was passed with 20% seats given to the lower castes. Soon, people demanding more and more seats, A classic case of vocal minority. Now, In 2022, almost 70% of all seats reserved for the "lower" castes with a small population. The rest population competes for 30% of seats. If someone tries to reduce the amount of quota: Riots happens, ministers are dethroned, shot etc. Nobody even touches this issue anymore. The result is that the top brass of the skilled population have built up a deep resentment. The moment they start earning well, they leave the country and surrender their citizenship without hesitation. This leads to a feedback loop where the general population is taxed more and more to cover the revenue gap of HNI (High Networth Individuals) leaving. And then more population with the ability to leave , leaves. 1. https://www.shiksha.com/engineering/articles/jee-main-reservation-criteria-understanding-quotas-reservations-and-categories-blogId-7760 https://www.shiksha.com/engineering/articles/jee-main-reserv... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India 3. https://www.forbesindia.com/media/images/2023/Jun/img_210405_privatewealthmigration.jpg https://www.forbesindia.com/media/images/2023/Jun/img_210405...
  • govg 3y ago
    The Mandal Commission in 1980 determined the fraction of OBCs to be 50%, a later sample survey in 2006 showed it to be around 40%, [0] current reservation policies for this category are around 30%. The Indian Census of 2011 shows that SC/ST category accounts for roughly 25% of the population. [1] I agree with people making the point that these designations have now been used as a political tool, and that sometimes cases arise where people fake credentials. But to claim that they are a lower population is absurd, given that SC/ST/OBC would account for more than 50% of the population. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduled_Castes_and_Scheduled_Tribes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduled_Castes_and_Schedul...
• twobitshifter 3y ago
  The elite schools are cartels of opportunity that feed themselves a self-affirming diet of the smartest people to maintain their place. It’s a diversion to look at your race versus somebody else’s race. That’s only a small fraction of the admission. A fraction of the best and brightest across races will gain admission, but the rest are usually the elites. These people pay for college out-of-pocket but the colleges themselves don’t actually need tuition to function, their endowments are well-funded by the same families ahead of time to maintain the business talent conduit. So what does the elite institution actually do? It largely feeds the smartest to lower business ranks to allow elites to better their portfolios. You are smart when you get out to Harvard and you’ll still be smart when you leave. A great school would change low performers into high performers, but that’s not what Harvard does, it looks for those who will already do well after Harvard. Note that with the business focus on DEI, elites need DEI in their portfolio, but nepotism comes first. DEI is a worthy cause to address structural inequities, but it’s now also a business scorecard. A meritocracy would eliminate the legacy admissions and make admissions not only need-blind but also PII blind. Some elite universities have done need-blind, but this is only sustained by their endowment which is predicated on admitting the less qualified legacies. A meritocracy like this is only possible if the endowment is self sustaining or the college is a public institution. But is meritocracy what we want? Should we focus the most energy on advantaging the already gifted? It’s notable that in other areas of the world, public institutions provide the best education. Here society is less stratified and college is for learning more than networking. What is needed for the same in the US is a change in perception about our elite schools.
  • thegjp210 3y ago
    These are good points. I think a compelling argument can be made towards the admixture of the best and brightest with the daughters and sons of the rich and famous. Net net, I think that the opportunities provided to the best and brightest from exposure to, and friendship with the offspring of the spectacularly rich is why schools and network spun out of Harvard have generated such an effective flywheel effect over the generations. Granting access and pedigree to society's elite by a school isn't purely a vocational exercise - and the social element is why the Ivies and Oxbridge have thrived so spectacularly.
• kernal 3y ago
  Racial discrimination is racial discrimination no matter how you try to sugar coat it.
• subpixel 3y ago
  I'd rather live in a society that made it an imperative to have more students from more ethnicities be eligible for the best universities every year. That requires addressing inequality earlier, and more thoroughly, and across more axes, than an approach that is, in the final analysis, about setting quotas based on ethnicity. Affirmative action can do everything it was designed to do while having essentially zero impact on inequality in society at large - it's always seemed like a cop out to me.
  • stjohnswarts 3y ago
    That's probably not going to happen in the USA given current status of public schools barely hanging on.
    • ryan93 3y ago
      public schools are very well funded. at the low performing ones the kids just arent doing the work.
  • dahwolf 3y ago
    Even more so because all these discussions evolve around elite institutes only. Which doesn't help 99.999999% of people.
• bluepod4 3y ago
  Can someone explain why the military academies were explicitly exempt from this ruling when their policies are similar to those of UNC and Harvard?
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    There are unique considerations related to military academies, which I believe were raised at oral arguments. The concern is that if the military academies do not enroll enough non-white students, then the officer population would be mostly white, and that could cause friction with a plurality/majority(?) group of enlisted soldiers. The majority wanted to make clear that they are not opining on the analysis that would apply to the military academies. EDIT: here's a discussion of such special considerations, from a prior affirmative action case: https://volokh.com/2012/10/11/the-military-rationale-for-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions/ https://volokh.com/2012/10/11/the-military-rationale-for-aff...
    • bluepod4 3y ago
      They might as well get rid of that too then. It doesn’t sound fair.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  > In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race. You... can't. Even if you want to only consider the individual experience, race is deeply tied up with the individual experience. If you only considered race, that would be even more crazy. But you cannot just ignore race, as much as you want to.
  • tkenjoyer 3y ago
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• cod1r 3y ago
  High quality education and resources being gate-kept makes less sense moving forward. Easiest solution is to let a LOT more people in regardless of background. Letting more people in means you get more money anyways. Who cares if letting in more people makes things less "elite". Elitism is cringe.
• isykt 3y ago
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• poorbutdebtfree 3y ago
  This is good. When life and death is on the line I don't want some guy/girl/thing with a lower SAT/IQ score than me doing the differential diagnosis.
• syngrog66 3y ago
  I wrote my thoughts on this news (and how it relates to MLK) here: "I Have A Dream" Today https://synystron.substack.com/p/i-have-a-dream-today https://synystron.substack.com/p/i-have-a-dream-today
• chmod600 3y ago
  “ 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.” —- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-spee...
  • foogazi 3y ago
    Beautiful quote - hope we get to see it in our lifetime
• onetimeusename 3y ago
  I got an email about this from my university president expressing his disappointment with the ruling. He assured everyone the campus will continue to strive for more racial diversity and that this ruling is a hindrance to that goal because race based discrimination is a good thing for achieving diversity. The school is already about 25% white in a country that is ~60% white. Is that sufficiently diverse? What is the optimal amount of diversity and why? There are a lot of questions I could ask. But I think it's interesting that schools have announced so strong a commitment to diversity without really explaining what diversity is or how having certain racial demographics results in the best possible outcome. How would you prove that? I don't think this ruling will have any effect. The schools are pretty clearly committed to diversity, whatever that means and for whatever their reasons may be.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • subpixel 3y ago
    I think you’re pulling your punches. It sounds like you already know that college diversity is a red herring. College populations are a window into the staggering inequality of our society. Shallow as we Americans are, many of us will be content if we can just apply a little window dressing and create some stories to make ourselves feel better. (Be warned, this strategy has now entered many workplaces.) People with jobs like university president and CEO are stuck in a bind - most can’t stick their neck out. Unfortunately there’s no reasoning with a person whose job depends on not conceding their argument.
  • flippinburgers 3y ago
    The reasons? Racism.
• pknomad 3y ago
  FWIW, I always thought using ethnicity as a factor was a misguided approach. 1. It lumps all ethnic groups into one without any regard for culture or sub-ethnicity, which matters. I think Nigerian immigrants tend to do really really well compared to say their black American counterparts. There's also different measured outcome for different groups of Asians (say Vietnamese vs Chinese). 2. I understand the desire to correct the past wrong... but going about that via reverse-racism seems also wrong. I think Gandhi said it best when he said "eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." 3. It feels more egalitarian and less discriminatory to fix the past wrong by providing programs/support for disadvantaged Americans, regardless of race.
• exabrial 3y ago
  The LA Times I feel like is 0 for 2 recently on accurately reporting on the Supreme Court: > In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race. I don't understand why people are freaking out about this?
• roody15 3y ago
  The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative action was used to help people who had been systematically discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an attempt to make up for some of these wrongs. Although a difficult process I believe most people genuinely believed in the concept. Fast forward to today and we have a much different framework. Equity. There is a belief that any group, race, subset of people should have the same outcomes everywhere. This premise is much more controversial and not universally supported. Should women have the exact same percentage acceptance into computer scientist or welding programs? Or should it be a 50/50 split and anything short of that screams discrimination. It boils down to equal opportunity vs equalized outcomes. They are not same … one has almost universal support the other seems to be taken directly out of a dystopian novel.
  • zephrx1111 3y ago
    Yeah, this is conflicting with their another topic: diversity. Diversity and Equity are contradictory. If you accept diversity, you accept people of different groups should and could behave differently. Then you should accept that with these different behavior, the outcome should be different. If you accept Equity, then you accept whatever group you are in, the outcome should be the same. Then this defeats the diversity.
  • hackerlight 3y ago
    > The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative action was used to help people who had been systematically discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an attempt to make up for some of these wrongs. Although a difficult process I believe most people genuinely believed in the concept. Fast forward to today and we have a much different framework. Equity. The people who believe either of these ideas aren't a monolith. Some people subscribe to affirmative action for the original reasons you describe without wanting or subscribing to this "equity" concept.
  • crackercrews 3y ago
    > There is a belief that any group, race, subset of people should have the same outcomes everywhere. Of course we need to be more specific than just "percent of population". For example, the average age of whites is older than for minorities. So we shouldn't expect the total population percentage for whites college students to line up with their percent enrollment in college, not in the total adult population. But considering age is just one factor. Of course we need to consider others in order to be equitable. If Harvard admits students with 1500+ SATs, then shouldn't we be looking at that population? It turns out that population is 43% Asian and 45% white. [1] Interestingly this lines up with Caltech's percentages almost exactly. UC Berkeley, where affirmative action is banned, has roughly the same percentage of Asian students, but many fewer white students. 1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-and-maintain-racial-inequity/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-an...
• caditinpiscinam 3y ago
  For people who are against affirmative action, what is your preferred course of action, given the racial disparities that exist in academia? I see three options: 1) say that these disparities are inevitable 2) wait for the disparities disappear on their own 3) address the disparities through some other policy or initiative
  • Izikiel43 3y ago
    4) which race you are doesn’t matter, it’s your skills that matter and what should be judged on
    • caditinpiscinam 3y ago
      How do you measure skill? And if your measure of skill over/under-represents races, does that mean that your metrics are flawed, or that skill is distributed unevenly across races?
      • Izikiel43 3y ago
        From a non US perspective, your questions don't make sense and are flawed, and the whole race discussion is racist (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racist https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racist definition a). Why is race important at all when discussing academia? The merits are what matter, not your race.
  • ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    3) e.g. See how Texas uses "Top 7% Rule" as a color-blind method of increasing diversity through meritocracy. When I was applying, it was a "Top 10% Rule."
• Georgelemental 3y ago
  An important nuance from the majority opinion: > At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. See, e.g., 4 App. in No. 21–707, at 1725–1726, 1741; Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 20–1199, at 10. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.” Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 325 (1867). A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.
• dreday 3y ago
  Ok. Did they propose a different way to combat systemic racism?
  • mythrwy 3y ago
    They did issue this ruling, which in my estimation does exactly that.
• tomohawk 3y ago
  Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion begins on page 49. He pulls no punches, and its worth a read. His concluding 3 paragraphs: > The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution. > The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U. S., at 298 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”). > While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.
• deleted 3y ago
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• tkenjoyer 3y ago
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• tkenjoyer 3y ago
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• jxramos 3y ago
  6/23/2003 --> 6/29/2023 Looks like the justices' expected illegality in 25 years was actually prophetic, 5 years from now in 2028 this has now all become illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger
• analog31 3y ago
  There's a lot of discussion about switching to wealth or income as a criterion for diversifying the student body, rather than race or ethnicity. Adding to the blizzard of proposals, here's mine: The "elite" colleges can take care of themselves. They will figure out how to curate their student body to maintain whatever image they want to project. And they're swimming in money, so let them spend it. Instead, let's focus our attention and support on the public universities, community colleges, and tech schools. I'd never say that low income students "belong" there, but it's where they have the best chance of success. And every dollar spent at those schools educates more people. My kids both attended public colleges, and I know plenty of people who have sent their kids to community colleges and trade schools. Those institutions are the true jewels in the crown of higher education.
• rkagerer 3y ago
  When I grew up one of the values instilled in me (moreso by society and personal interactions rather than passed on by my parents) was to see human beings as human beings, without cognitive overhead to their race. i.e. To me it was akin to hair color - neat, but not something by which I'd make judgements. Theoretically a world which doesn't distinguish, seems most equitable (and sane, at least to me). I'm genuinely trying to understand the impetus toward a different status quo. Is it because the reality of growing up a certain race is so far removed from that ideal that justice requires accommodations be made? Grateful for insight and experiences. I grew up in a diverse city in Canada so my reality may be a bit skewed from readers in other parts of the world.
  • twobitshifter 3y ago
    It’s really about handicaps starting out, or if you’re into maths, initial conditions.
    • zmgsabst 3y ago
      If you’re into maths, you’d know convergence behavior dominates initial conditions: A system which fails to converge because of purposeful injustice with lagging feedback is worse than a system that converges toward an equal outcome — no matter the initial conditions. That’s the problem with racial programs: you’re institutionalizing racism with no end, which causes the system to “ring” between modes of racism rather than converge on an equal outcome. So-called “systems thinking” consistently fails to account for control lag, convergence, and stability of the system — revealing that it’s a shallow pretense. But you’re not the first bigot to pretend science justifies their racism.
  • d2049 3y ago
    The world you propose sounds good in theory, but we are starting at a point where certain groups of people have been discriminated against (or enslaved) for the better part of two centuries. So some argue that we cannot simply treat everyone "equitably" when our society has been decidedly inequitable up to this point.
  • erenyeager 3y ago
• gsaines 3y ago
  I am not a lawyer, but I worked on a project at Facebook years ago that touches on the underlying case law here. I spent a full year of my life bashing my head against opaque legal precedents to understand how to build a product that met legal requirements and user needs. Maybe this comment will prove useful in distilling some of the nuance here so you don’t have to spend 12 months of your life doing what I did. This decision confirms a nearly-unanimous legal consensus that existed before this ruling about the legality of disparate treatment vs disparate impact. Disparate treatment is enshrined as illegal in other legislation like the fair credit and lending act. It basically states that the use of protected class data for most use cases is illegal. I know the most about how this is interpreted in the context of private companies, but my understanding is that the embargo on the data use is much broader. Disparate impact, by contrast, is a legal theory without much case law to support it, but it asserts that what is illegal is not the use of the protected class data, but unequal outcomes. This is super thorny territory. On the surface, disparate treatment (which again, is what the court upheld here) appears to only reinforce the racist, sexist, unequal status quo. And personally, I agree, but it at least prevents overt discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and other important human characteristics. The law right now makes it illegal to outright say that you are treating someone else differently on the basis of those traits. It doesn’t prevent all the other ways to still be racist and sexist and awful, though. So you might say, let’s go with disparate outcome, then! And this is indeed what I first thought. But there are huge problems here, too. First, the only way to ensure that outcomes are equal is … to measure and report on the very traits we think are sensitive. This wouldn’t just be invasive, it would entrench the collection and measurement of this information. I can think of a lot of ways that bad actors could misuse petabytes of accurate racial demographic information in ways that would make current ML-based inferences and regression correlations laughably indirect. Then there’s the issue of whether or important things in our society should be equal at all. Take the example of sex and employment. There are professions that are heavily male or female dominated. How would you feel if a colleague of the opposite sex with no training in your discipline was offered 2x as much compensation as you to perform the same task because society insisted that your profession have exactly equal representation? I think of myself a bit of a bleeding heart liberal, but I don’t think that’s a desirable outcome. And then there are the second and third order effects to consider. Is the fact that most commercial truck drivers are men a reflection of different preferences, social norms, or something altogether different? I have no idea and I’m not about to go all Charles Murray and act like I do. My goal in writing such a long post isn’t to make an apologist defense for what seem to me a clearly socially regressive finding from the Supreme Court, just that finding a better alternative is really, really hard. So let’s not get discouraged by this setback. Let’s find a better alternative and get that written into law.
• twilightzone 3y ago
  "In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people. Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder." Elsewhere: "Two of the nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices – Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – also have direct ancestors who enslaved people." https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-slavery-lawmakers/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-slav... This is only politicians, doesn't include former and present business leaders. Wealth may have disappeared at certain points, but the social networks remained and wealth was rebuilt. It's a fascinating read - Barack Obama's ancestors were part of that club! I understand that many think this was a good decision because logic, but let's hope the same enthusiasm goes into figuring out a way to deal with the disparities that were born back then, at both ends of the spectrum.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• uejfiweun 3y ago
  Y'know, I predict that this will change absolutely nothing. Racial preferences in admissions will simply go from official policy to unofficial policy..
• dbrowne 3y ago
  Amazed that the people who felt disadvantaged because of the one or two accepted Blacks who were possibly below the cut but had significant systemic societal and economic impediments have no problem with all of the incredibly sub par legacy students who are accepted because of their parent's wealth. I know of a very affluent person who funded two professorial chairs a year before his music school educated son was accepted at a top 3 business school. No one has a problem with that but they act as if the schools are overflowing with nothing but illiterate and unqualified minorities. Maybe 2% if not less are affirmative action acceptances and that is considered too much. I guess their ancestors intentionally became slaves to ensure their descendants could steal admission spots.
  • csa 3y ago
    > have no problem with all of the incredibly sub par legacy students who are accepted because of their parent's wealth. I know of a very affluent person who funded two professorial chairs a year before his music school educated son was accepted at a top 3 business school That’s not the typical legacy. That’s more “z-list” or equivalent.
• ayakang31415 3y ago
  If you read Harvard's response to the rule, you will quickly realize that they can still decide who gets the admission based on race without ADMITTING THAT because even if there is no checkbox for race on the application, they can still figure what kind of race each applicant is and they can still evaluate how the race impacted the applicant's life for the consideration of admission.
• netheril96 3y ago
  As an Asian, all I care about is that we should not atone for the crimes committed by someone else (e.g. the white slave owners). That AA disadvantages Asians the most is quite contrary to the whole "atonement" argument of AA.
  • sneed_chucker 3y ago
    You're not being punished for the crimes of white slaveowners. You're being punished for performing well compared to other demographic groups despite being a minority and experiencing discrimination.
• bluecalm 3y ago
  Sanity prevailed. The different reads like a political manifesto rather than a legal opinion. You need a mental gymnastics of the highest order to justify racist policies like the ones employed by Harvard. Sometimes people get so deep into ideology that they can't think straight anymore. Ask someone detaches from American political discourse to read the Constitution and then ask them how adding points for race plays with that. Coming from a former communist country where "social class points" where the thing we were so happy to get over I can't see how affirmative action isn't just a worse, more blatant and unjust version of that.
• sacnoradhq 3y ago
  I find the timing of this decision curious because it reverses an appeal by Asian students who were previously denied by SCOTUS.
• vuciv1 3y ago
  I don’t have anything formal to add. Both my parents were drug addicts, lived separately, beat me, and didn’t pay for my college. Dad was in jail. I am Hispanic and was lucky enough to go to the University of Chicago. I did do very well in school, nearly perfect scores with tons of extracurriculars, but I never knew if I belonged. By the end of my college experience, I did just as well as anyone else in my university, and I have a good job and met lovely and supportive people. I don’t know if I got in because of affirmative action, but if I did, it has forever changed my life
• systemvoltage 3y ago
  It's strange that no one is talking about that if it weren't for Trump and the conservative nominees, we'd still be stuck with AA. The dissent was apalling and completely ideological.
• nunyabid5655 3y ago
  Colleges in Boston in the last ten years have been inundated by international students, a majority of which are the wealthy elite from mainland China
• flippinburgers 3y ago
  Sounds good to me.