Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Fisher v University of Texas (pdf link). Although a surprise decision is always possible, it appears likely that the conservative majority will use this case to ban race-based affirmative action in college admissions. (As you’d expect, ScotusBlog has an excellent summary “in plain English” of the case and of today’s oral arguments.)
[Fisher] also was denied admission to the summer program, which offered provisional admission to some applicants who were denied admission to the fall class, subject to completing certain academic requirements over the summer. … Although one African-American and four Hispanic applicants with lower combined AI/PAI scores than petitioner’s were offered admission to the 16 summer program, so were 42 Caucasian applicants with combined AI/PAI scores identical to or lower than petitioner’s. In addition, 168 African-American and Hispanic applicants in this pool who had combined AI/PAI scores identical to or higher than petitioner’s were denied admission to the summer program.
I doubt if Amy Fisher is worried about those 42 Caucasian applicants who got in because we are more likely to think they somehow deserved it. And what of the 168 students of color with scores identical or higher to hers who were denied admission? How is that explained?
No, it’s only an issue when a person of color is perceived to have gained something that rightfully should have gone to a white person. It is rooted in the belief that somewhere out there, there has to be a white person who is better qualified or more deserving or who “merits” more.
Since it seems very unlikely that Ms. Fisher was directly harmed by the University of Texas’ policies (since she wouldn’t have been admitted regardless), the conservative Justices seem to be leaning towards the idea that she suffered “expressive harm.” What is “expressive harm”? Joey Fishkin explains:
…Fisher’s injury is essentially that she had to suffer the indignity of participating in a state-sponsored admissions process that considered race at all. On this second view, even an entirely unqualified white candidate, miles short of the admissions standards, would be just as injured as Fisher even though there is no circumstance under which he would ever have been admitted to UT. […]
What if the admissions committee was impressed with a black student from a racially mixed school who wrote a compelling essay about personally experiencing a racist incident. Is it an expressive harm if an admissions officer finds that essay significantly more compelling than a couple of other essays, by white students—even though all the essays were written equally well—on the grounds that the particular racial context in which this black applicant lives presented some significant challenges, over and above the challenges that might be discernible from looking at the parent income figure on his application for financial aid? Or what about a promising Latino student from the Rio Grande Valley who won a scholarship to a private boarding school in Dallas, who writes a compelling essay about her desire to become a doctor and practice in the Valley, where she sees a lack of needed medical services that she attributes to structural racial discrimination? Is it an expressive harm to Fisher if an admissions counselor finds that one more compelling than the essay of another student who also wants to become a doctor?
At some point, if you push the needle far enough, it starts to sound as though the expressive harm to white applicants (taxpayers? voters?) might begin when admissions officers acknowledge in any way, while reading applications, that we do not live in a paradise of racial integration and equality, but in a society where race matters.
“Tom,” in comments at the New York Times, writes:
It’s always fascinating to me that when some white students get rejected from a school they immediately jump to the conclusion that a racial minority is responsible. They never file lawsuits claiming that they were denied admission because of a legacy applicant, or an athlete, or because of the financial ability of a wealthy student to pay, or because of the school’s desire to seek out geographical diversity. They never complain about wealthy families spending $30,000 a year on college admission consultants to boost their children’s application strength, or the higher test scores wealthy people receive because they can afford to spend thousands of dollars on SAT test preparation. No, when a white student doesn’t make the cut, she thinks it’s because of her race.
Doctor Cleveland provides a detailed description of how U of T’s admission system works, and writes:
If this is the best and clearest case that the anti-affirmative action people can come up with, why am I the one who’s exaggerating?
People always talk about affirmative action as if clearly qualified white kids were routinely being passed over for badly underqualified black kids. People talk about this as if it were an established fact. But somehow those unquestionably, no-doubt-about-it applicants never turn up in these lawsuits. It’s always a white applicant who would probably or definitely have been rejected even if things had been race blind.
Allen Bakke would not have gotten into UC Davis Med School on his qualifications. Barbara Grutter would not get into University of Michigan Law School on her qualifications. And Abigail Fisher would not have gotten into Texas at Austin on the merits.
Doctor C’s post is very harsh on Abigail Fisher, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. She’s very young – 22 now, but I presume she was a teenager when this lawsuit was initiated – and I think there’s good reason to have more patience with young people who exhibit poor judgement and are blind to their own privileges. On the other hand, maybe that sort of attitude is itself condescending; Fisher is an adult and chose to bring a case before the Supreme Court, after all.
And one final point, again from Joey Fishkin, about the likely effects if the Supreme Court rules against U of T:
At this point, it seems to me that there is no way this Court or any court can actually eliminate the use of race from college admissions. They can try. New anti-affirmative-action decisions may move the demarcation lines that tell colleges where and how to use race in admissions. But such decisions will not cause admissions officers to become truly blind to race, unless they require colleges to stop engaging in subjective efforts to build diverse and vibrant classes, and instead demand some mechanical metric of grades and test scores. There is no constitutional reason to require such an outcome, and at any rate, elite colleges would never accept it. Still, victories for anti-affirmative-action plaintiffs might have a number of important effects: reducing somewhat the overall level of racial diversity on campuses; encouraging holistic review processes that further submerge the use of race; encouraging the further use of facially race-neutral policies carefully calibrated to achieve racial diversity; and encouraging schools to shift more of the burden to applicants to think and write about race in the admissions process themselves (as in “tell us how you would contribute to the diversity of our school” or “tell us about obstacles you have overcome”).
A public college should be color-blind. My guess would be that if you used a preference system that targeted lower-income kids, kids whose families have a history of not having had previous generations in college, etc., you’d end up increasing the number of racial/ethnic minority students along the way.
It’s also worthwhile to take a look at not only the input but the output. Do the kids who are accepted on the basis of racial preference have a graduation rate similar to the kids who aren’t? The metric that matters with a university is whether or not the kids who enter graduate. If you take a kid’s money for 4 to 6 years (or even just 2 if the kid drops out) but the kid doesn’t graduate then you’ve wasted both their time and their money and set them up for failure. Better they get into another school that they’ll graduate from – and if there is no such school, better they go into an apprenticeship and learn a trade.
So I’d say, take UT’s system of “top 10% = 75% of incoming students” and see how effective it is. What are the relative graduation rates for kids with lower test scores and grades (and the other criteria used for the other 25% of kids) who got in on the “Top 10%” program? If the graduation rates for such students is lower, then it’s a bad system and needs to change – and, at a public school, should be illegal.
The argument about the test scores in this case is not absolute. Did the incoming students who had lower scores have scores that were so low that they indicated significant likelihood that they would not graduate? If so, then that’s a problem. If not, then not so much.
The fact that this is a mystery to the writer makes me wonder about their ability to reason. Of course they don’t sue. “No doubt about it” applicants get admitted. Why would they sue?
Well, perhaps. But in reading his analysis I think he only compares her to those trying to fit into the 25% of slots that are not reserved to the “top 10%” group. If she is compared to all students across the university she might fare better.
As a matter of psychology and politics, I find this fascinating.
I recently read an analysis of polling data comparing this sense of grievance to abortion rights. Popular wisdom says that abortion rights are a controversial issue politically, driving certain white working-class people from the Democratic Party. But polls regularly show that most Americans, most white working class Americans, most white Catholic working-class Americans, etc. … favor abortion rights. Rather, the data suggests that white working class people are driven away from the Democrats by the latent perception that government is intervening to help undeserving OTHERS – others at home, others abroad. This was the core of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and it remains the core of the Republican faith.
(Now, can I FIND that analysis I’m talking about? No, of course not….)
That said, as a matter of law, the quoted text is pretty weak. No, a white student who gets rejected from a school may not spend time dwelling on various LEGAL reasons for being rejected – no matter how inconsistent with meritocracy those legal grounds might be. The student might well focus on ILLEGAL reasons because those theories offer at least a hope for vindication – or, at least, self-justification within a legal context.
By the way, Paul Campos debunks Scalia’s views on affirmative action. Scalia argues that we should interpret legal texts consistent with the understandings of the people who adopted the texts. Demonstrating an ambiguous understanding of the concept of prejudging issues, Scalia announced –
Campos observes that when the 14th Amendment was adopted, and for roughly a century thereafter, legislators continued to adopt laws expressly discriminating on the basis of race. Ergo, by Scalia’s reasoning, the 14th Amendment cannot be understood to bar laws that grant racial preferences. That is, Scalia should find that the 14th Amendment is consistent with Affirmative Action.
Of course, no one thinks Scalia will reach this conclusion. But this merely illustrates the hypocrisy of Scalia (and, perhaps, the unavoidable hypocrisy of judging generally).
This case is before SCOTUS because the Supreme Court chose it. The only thing Ms. Fisher did was continue up the appeals chain and apply for a writ of certiorari.
So why is the Supreme Court hearing this case again? After reading the SCOTUS blog link above, it seems that UT is using race as a factor until the student body reaches a “critical mass.” This does go against previous Supreme Court reasoning, in which race could only be one factor, by singling it out until a quota is reached…an ill-defined quota at that.
The standing issue is more thorny. In order to bring a suit, a person must show that they (or their protected class) has suffered a harm that needs to be redressed. Usually, if someone would not have been affected by a law or procedure, they cannot bring the case. This is, IMHO, where this case will stand up or fall down – if the Conservative side of the court decides to use the “expressive harm” theory, it could open up a whole slew of lawsuits that I don’t think they’ll go for (after all, all the minority classes can start using the theory as well.)
The phrase “critical mass” comes from the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v Bollinger. That’s why UT used that phrase — it had been defined as a constitutional approach, and not a quota, by the Court itself just nine years ago.
Are you sure these are all smart people?
It’s an issue because
1) We have a constitution that is the overriding law of the land;
2) The constitution specifically provides for equal protection, which is held to include protection against discrimination based on race;
3) The university is a public institution that functions for legal purposes like a branch of the government; and
4) The university discriminates based on race.
Moreover,
5) The Supreme Court has acknowledged that there may be reasons to temporarily violate the Constitutional rules regarding equal protection, and that it is OK to selectively discriminate against whites, in very limited circumstances.
6) Basically, discrimination is only legal* if it’s narrowly tailored and necessary, which in lay terms means “there better be a damn good reason for it, and there shouldn’t be any reasonable alternatives OTHER than racial discrimination.”
7) Which makes a lot of sense. Racial discrimination is bad. Racial discrimination by the government is worse.
8) And which justifies the fuss in Fisher.
So when Joey Fishkin says:
This is correct. It’s similar to the reasons why gay people are affected by anti-gay laws even if they don’t happen to want to get married; it’s similar to the reasons why you can’t advertise discriminatory housing preferences even if nobody but ablebodied KKK members would want to rent from you.
Fisher also notes
Sure, race matters. So does gender. So does disability. So does veteran status, height, health, and so on. EVERYTHING matters, in reality.
But we have collectively decided to pass laws that prohibit taking account of those factors. This is largely because we don’t trust admissions officers, hiring managers, firm partners, real estate agents, HR departments, or anyone else to make accurate and rational decisions. And we CERTAINLY don’t trust the government to do a good job of it.
That’s why admissions officers at a public university are obliged to ignore race. It’s the same basic reason that a HR manager at a large company is obliged to ignore the fact that an applicant might need an ADA accommodation with a non-zero cost. The laws that protect against discrimination apply to everyone, because we said they did.
Basically, our government should not discriminate based on race. If it is forced to do so, the discrimination should be as avoided whenever possible and made as small as possible.
ANY government body that wants to discriminate has to show:
1) the discrimination can’t be avoided in general; and
2) the scope of discrimination can’t be made smaller
Government discrimination is always subject to legal challenge.
Doctor Cleveland… well, he doesn’t sound like a good source. He says, for example,
This is false. Race is so important to the University that an applicant’s racial status is on the front cover of every application. It’s the only one of the “holistic factors” which is given that privilege, unlike oboe playing or anything else.
Commenter “Tom” says:
Tom is not well versed in the constitution or Tom would realize that those things are not illegal. They’re permitted under both state and federal law. A lawsuit would be frivolous. Protection against discrimination is, OTOH, rooted in the Constitution. Perhaps Tom should read it.
There’s nothing preventing us from passing laws against legacy admits. We just haven’t done it.
Tom’s wrong again. People complain about those things all the time. Hell, the Times writes articles on it. They don’t sue based on it because just like “being rich” is not illegal, “spending your money to help your child’s career” is not illegal.
*By which I mean “complies with confusing Supreme Court precedent.” Some folks, including me, think that the Court got it wrong in Grutter in the first place. But the Supremes win.
“This is false. Race is so important to the University that an applicant’s racial status is on the front cover of every application. It’s the only one of the “holistic factors” which is given that privilege, unlike oboe playing or anything else.”
———-
Yup. I have a vague memory of the “matrix” that was published by a whistleblower in the University of Michigan affirmative action case.
Being black substantially beat being smart back then. I have no idea what admissions departments of universities today are really doing, but probably something different than what they are saying in public.
Th thrust of Fisher is basically this:
1) The U admits a lot of folks through the “top 10%” program. This program is functionally similar to using some racial preferences, insofar as it does not have a racially balanced outcome, and vastly increases the # of minority attendees. It is (obviously) procedurally different, because it has shit-all to do with race.
2) From a Constitutional perspective and from the perspective of Grutter, this is a good thing. If there’s a way to get what you want without using race as a factor, then you should not use race as a factor.
3) But the U. doesn’t stop there. It also admits a number of students through an extra admissions process in which it considers race as a factor. This part is the part which is really under challenge here.
4) So, first question is basically: Does the U need the extra, race-based, admissions criteria? Why can’t it simply increase the Top 10% program to a “top 15%” program, or something like that? Why isn’t the non-racial selection method workable?
5) Second question is basically: If the U says that it needs that, how accurately must it define the reasons and methods behind the need? Should the U. just be able to “say that it’s necessary?” Should there be a requirement for an end goal (which might require some revision of Grutter?) What sort of proof of benefit is required here? To continue with the ADA analogy, it’s like asking “when an employer claims that an ADA accommodation isn’t warranted and/or they claim that ADA status was unrelated to a firing, what sort of proof do we need them to produce?”
There is an interesting moral issue, about whether government should be more or less subject to anti-discrimination laws than a private party. It has no bearing in Fisher w/r/t to the case, but: If I admit that I use race as a factor in hiring, I get in trouble. If I’m accused of racial discrimination in firing or hiring, I have a lot of proof on my table. When we know that the government is discriminating, what do we do? demand the same proof and justification? Less? More?
gin-and-whiskey: The fact that we haven’t made legacy admissions illegal – even though they were created to keep out Jews and Catholics – is one of the points being made. There are no lawsuits arguing that they have a disparate racial impact, no conservative advocacy groups bringing test cases to force a “non-merit” criterion to be banned, no push to pass laws forbidding legacies.
As noted, it’s hard to see any way to square that shrug-itude with clamoring for Fairness and Merit and Qualified Applicants.
It is if you ignore the Constitution; it’s not if you don’t. How hard can it be?
Besides, there are a lot of definitions of “fairness” which cross a VERY broad spectrum. One of them is “precisely equal,” which is the one some folks are talking about here when they complain that AA is “unfair.” Unfortunately, one of them is also “very far from precisely equal, because it’s fair to give people what they need” and folks are ALSO using that definition when they claim AA is “fair.”
regarding legacy admission:
If people don’t want to make legacy admissions illegal NOW even though they were created to do things which weren’t viewed as problematic THEN (BTW, are you sure that’s true?) is… unsurprising. Why would that be relevant? We don’t make driving BMW and Mercedes cars illegal, even though they made military stuff that killed plenty of Americans.
Why would there be any? They don’t have a disparate impact that very conservative folks care about. Surprise: AA doesn’t have a disparate impact that very liberal folks care about. If the state WAS illegally giving too many preferences to POC, the NAACP wouldn’t be first in line to get an injunction, right?
Newsflash: people are hypocrites. No surprise there.
It is if you ignore the Constitution; it’s not if you don’t. How hard can it be?
Sorry, what? You could certainly challenge legacy admissions on disparate impact (they don’t keep out Jews anymore, but likely keep out African-American and Asian students and, of course, discriminate on the basis of socioeconomic class, as intended) and, at worst, under a rational-basis analysis.
Indeed, there are a lot of definitions of ‘fair’. The one proferred against affirmative action is that admissions should be merit-based.
I don’t follow your BMW analogy. Legacy admissions are still doing bad things, just different bad things than they used to. It would be like saying that we shouldn’t hate BMW if they still make military equipment that only gets sold to small terrorist groups far away from American interests.
The NAACP isn’t pretending that “merit” is the only relevant consideration in college admissions and then handwaving about how some merit-based criteria are more meritful than others. People are hypocrites: well then, that makes it all OK and we shouldn’t bother pointing it out?
You could try. It’d be a hard case–much harder than this one. After all,nobody is disputing that AA involves the government discriminating on the basis of race, so it’s a different analysis.
This is is like “some people say.” It’s meaningless.
Lots of people say all sorts of things. The most cogent arguments against AA are not really based on a generic concept of “fairness” or “merit.” They’re based on a goals analysis.
It is pretty obvious that AA involves a short term sacrifice (governmental discrimination on basis of race) in exchange for a long term goal. As with all such things, the current sacrifice is visible and real and immediate; the long term goal is more amorphous and ill defined. Plenty of opponents think it’s TOO ill defined.
Then you do follow it: The fact that legacy admissions may or may not have been formed with certain goals some decades ago is largely irrelevant to the question of what they do now.
You could try. It’d be a hard case–much harder than this one.
Well sure. But nobody does, even though outfits like the ACLJ are happy to take all kinds of other long shots.
Whatever the “cogent” arguments are against AA, the principal argument is that it’s unfair. It discriminates on the basis of race, and that is bad because college admissions should be on the basis of merit. I don’t think anybody is seriously arguing “We think it would be fine for a college to discriminate on the basis of your yearly income, it’s just race that we find annoying.”
The fact that legacy admissions may or may not have been formed with certain goals some decades ago is largely irrelevant to the question of what they do now.
Of course it’s relevant. It addresses the question of the purpose and effect of those rules, and whether or not it still has that effect. They weren’t neutral rules when they were implemented; that’s evidence weighing on the question of whether they are neutral now. “But they don’t mind Jews anymore!” Maybe not, but the reason legacy admissions were used is that they weren’t a blatant NO PAPISTS ALLOWED sign; like certain voting laws, they merely had the effect of keeping out certain newly-burgeoning groups. Which they would continue to do to other groups (e.g., Asians) even if the original target groups (Jews, Catholics) have aged out of their effect. It’s not dispositive evidence that legacies are intended to or in effect are discriminatory, but I am baffled at the idea that they are irrelevant.
Dr Cleveland is being fundamentally dishonest when he implies that the race factor is small in admissions. The internal documents revealed in the University of Michigan case showed that the scoring effect of race needed to fill the diversity aim offered by the school was larger than the difference between the lowest and highest possible score on the SAT and about equal to an entire grade point.
Im pretty sure no one would argue that the composition of achievement has changed dramatically since. If we want to argue transparently about THAT level of racial discrimination, fine, but lets be honest about what we are talking about. And that was for an essentially good but mid tier school.
I had to use the way back machine to get a copy of it, but the admissions scoring policy is here.
The difference in scoring offered between the lowest possible and highest possible SAT score is 12. The difference offered on race is 20. The difference of a full grade point is 20. This is the level of “thumb on the scales” honest reviewers of affirmative action should be talking about
Sebastian, how can talking about the entirely different policy of an entirely different school be the honest way of judging the U of Texas admission system? Dr. Cleveland, by describing the system that actually applies in tbhnis case, is being far more accurate than you are.
The vast majority of racial diversity in the U of T system is achieved by Texas’ “top 10%” rule, in which those who graduate in the top 10% of their (Texas) high school are automatically admitted. There is no comparable system in the U of M case.
As far as I know, no conservatives are yet claiming that the top 10% system is unconstitutional, although I suspect that if we wait ten years that’s what conservatives will be saying.
Do i have another comment (or two) in mod?
Well, first of all it’s not “conservatives.” Lots of people are squicky about the BS state of AA as it now stands, who are far from being conservatives.
But you’re wrong either way: The top 10% is a facially neutral policy and it would have to be an impact challenge. Impact challenges are inherently more difficult and conservatives are unlikely to favor them–especially since there are a lot of impact challenges which are fairly problematic and conservatives will not want to support them through precedent.
IMO, facially neutral policies are ideal for multiple reasons:
1) They avoid government discrimination based on race;
2) They provide benefits that we want (I don’t disagree with the goal of raising minority admissions); and
3) They are inherently self limiting.
The benefits of #3 are huge though are rarely understood: If you use a facially neutral policy then it requires you to identify some trait which is unevenly distributed between races. When and if that trait becomes evenly distributed, the AA automatically stops; if it becomes uneven again then the AA recovers and restarts.
G&W:
I’m sorry, but I just checked the spam trap and the other places that new comments of yours might be hidden, and you do not currently have any unapproved comments. :-(
The five supreme court justices who are most likely about to wipe out AA are conservatives. That’s not a crazy random happenstance.
Fifteen years ago, one could have said pretty much the same thing about “expressive harm” – the conservatives on the Court would never support such a thing, since the precedent would not be good for them. (Liberals, in contrast, supported broad ideas of standing). But in some recent cases (including this one), the conservatives and liberals have conveniently switched positions.
Ilya Somin at Volkh writes:
Conservatives and liberals on higher courts, and especially on the Supreme Court, are clearly willing to apply concepts like standing, original intent, and impact challenges in an opportunistic fashion. Scalia’s concern for original intent somehow fades when it comes to Affirmative Action, for instance, and I’m sure that his newfound looseness on questions of standing will conveniently evaporate the next time standing is a useful way to dismiss a lawsuit against a wealthy corporation.
In short, I don’t think your argument about how the Supreme Court works is very well matched by reality.
No, they don’t. They just avoid facial government discrimination based on race. It would be trivially easy to make a case that facially neutral admission rules, was consciously and purposely written in order to achieve racial goals, or at least was applied in a way that increased the chances of black and Latin@ students attending an exclusive university. I predict that within the next twenty years, we will see the top ten percent rule or other facially neutral rules that in practice benefit some minority students sued on those grounds, and legal conservatives will be entirely willing to take that argument seriously.
(For an example of an argument clearly heading in that direction, see the final few paragraphs of this post by a conservative law professor.)
Yes, but they are cruder tools for that goal, than more honest and open rules would be.
In the case of the top 10% rule, what we’re winding up with is a system in which academically achieving Black and Latin@ students from some of the worse high schools in Texas are able to attend a top school like U of T. I think that’s a good thing. However, it also means that Black and Latin@ students from the wealthiest high schools in Texas are unlikely to be able to attend such a school at all, because they usually don’t make it to the top 10%. I don’t consider that a good thing. Being in a wealthy school system doesn’t mean that racism has no impact at all and shouldn’t be addressed at all.
I also think, as Fishkin argues, that there are cases where race should be relevant not just from the perspective of mitigating racism, but also from the perspective of universities legitimately wanting to recruit extraordinary people to be students, who are extraordinary in ways that a facially race-neutral approach is blind to.
Your argument seems to imply that you’d prefer purely mechanical metrics to be all that determines admission to elite schools. Is that true, or am I misreading your argument?
If most of the racial diversity can be done through the actually academic top 10% policy I’m personally thrilled. But if that’s the case why do we still want discriminatory AA?
Amp, the UM case is one of the few times we got to see explictly spelled out what weight is REQUIRED by affirmative action for it to work. It had all of the elements of the supposedly less quota oriented ‘holistic’ processes: it had geographic diversity elements (up to 16 points but 10 for all Michigan residents), it had leadership elements (up to 5 points), it had personal hardship points (up to five points), it had legacy admission potential (4 points, mythago), it had test scores (up to 12 points). But 20 points for race. And that isn’t up to 20 points for race. You don’t have to show incredibly special achievement in race to get the full twenty points like you do to get the full 12 in test scores or the full 5 in leadership or the full 5 in personal achievement.
The interesting thing about the UM case is it revealed the enormous weight given to AA. Other schools are not stupid enough to assign numbers to it, but since UM is a pretty typical mid tier school, I’ve never seen anyone argue that its policies were functionally out of line with almost every other school in 2001. If you want to know how much AA counts you either have to argue that UM was dramatically atypical (which is the opposite of the case at the time–we were warned by the government that it would be dangerous for the court to strike it down because it was utterly typical) or that the AA beneficiaries don’t need much help nowadays. Are either of those your positions?
So it appears to me that if we talk honestly about magnitude of AA thumb on the scales we are *still* talking about the difference of a full grade point or more than the difference between a null score and the best possible score on the SAT. This is alluded to in your last quote in the OP where the author suggests that *additional* steps to hide the method of AA would be taken by schools.
Facially neutral policies (in anything by the government) made with clear racial discrimination intent are already unconstitutional. They are just harder to prove because you have to show that they were made with the racial intent rather than their facially neutral intent.
Plaintiffs don’t usually attack policies under that prong when they can attack explicitly racial policies because it is easier to prove. So on some level your prediction might be correct (that attacks will begin on facially neutral AA policies) but that won’t take any change in the law the way you suggest. In every other arena, facial neutral policy created with discriminatory intent is already a problem.
I really don’t understand your position. If (and this isn’t hypothetical) a lawmaker intended to restrict minority voting but did it through facially neutral literacy tests, we would all agree that wasn’t ok, especially if he designed it to tailor a racial outcome. This kind of cheating to get discrimination has been illegal for quite some time. So if the court rules that AA action is illegal or sharply limited, of course facially neutral admission policies designed with the purpose of racial sorting will be challenged. They would be just as illegal as any other facially neutral policy with discriminatory intent.
Sebastian, your argument implicitly assumes that “AA” as practiced at U of M is identical to AA as practiced at all other schools that have any sort of AA, nationwide. Is there any reason to believe that’s true?
In this case, we can say for a fact that dozens of Black students with GPAs and test scores superior to Ms. Fisher’s were not accepted into U of T. Yet your argument seems based on the idea that this case is justified because white students like Ms. Fisher allegedly would have gotten in were they Black. Where’s your evidence to support your claim?
Are you implying that the racially diverse effects of the top 10% program have nothing to do with discrimination? Because it seems pretty clear that school segregation is the result of discrimination in many ways, and without school segregation the top 10% program wouldn’t work to bring students of color in.
Anyway, to answer your question, I’ll quote from the Scotusblog post I linked:
To that, I’d add that (1) it’s not as if kids from Black but well-off families don’t have racist barriers to overcome.
And (2) part of the reason to want AA for elite schools is that we want our society’s elite — the folks who run the high levels of the government and of business — to not continue to be disproportionately white. The folks who graduate from elite schools generally become our society’s elites, because they have a useful combination of two big advantages: An elite family supporting them, and an elite education.
The top ten percent system tends to mean that minority students without a family advantage can get an elite education, but minority students with a family advantage cannot. This is a problem, because it gives the whites who attend elite schools a big advantage over non-whites when it comes to becoming society’s elite. This means that the top 10% system, while extremely useful, isn’t likely to do as much for integrating our country’s elite as a broader AA system would.
No, I don’t. For my immediate purposes, all I have to argue is that the UM policies you’re talking about are dramatically atypical of current elite college admission policies. And they are.
The Supreme Court made its ruling, and colleges like UT (and UM, for that matter) changed their policies to accord with the Court’s ruling. Now you’re saying, in effect, that it doesn’t matter that UT designed its policies to accord with the Court’s decision; they should be judged, according to you, as if they were UM in 2001, rather than looking at their actual 2012 policies. To say that your position lacks all coherence and fairness is an understatement.
“Much” help isn’t an objective measurement. I don’t think AA beneficiaries are getting much help nowadays, but what I don’t consider much help, you might consider to be enormous.
On the other hand, if (and this isn’t hypothetical) a lawmaker intended to restrict minority voting but did it through a voter ID law or through a biased voter roll purge, conservatives would argue that’s okay, as long as the lawmaker didn’t admit to his racial intent in public.
“at all” isn’t what we’re talking about here, right? I acknowledge that there’s a nonzero effect, so I’m not sure what you’re asking.
Agreed.
The question isn’t whether they make it easier, the question is whether they discriminate against whites.
Certainly they will drive some reactions. As you might expect, someone who is in the top 12% at Good School will make it into the top 10% at Bad School. They could move if they wanted to. But of course, the more that better students (and their parents) start attending Bad School, the more likely it is that Bad School will improve. And of course, they could also get into school WITHOUT being in the top 10%, if they happen to be at an unusually competitive school: top 25% at Harvard is better than top 10% at UMass.
Maybe. I suppose it depends on how ridiculous the “facially neutral” rule is.
“The top 10% of students at any public high school will be admitted” is a non-ridiculous, facially neutral, rule. “Students will be admitted if they can prove that their parents have suffered from discrimination; if they have spent at least two generations in [highly race-segregated living area]; if they are are illegal immigrants or have at least one family member that is an illegal immigrant; or if they were raised in a bilingual household” is a ridiculous facially neutral rule.
When I talk about this, I’m assuming a state of non-ridiculous, non-deceptive, works. That may be a bad assumption.
That’s a misread. I’ll clarify:
I don’t prefer purely mechanical metrics overall. I generally would prefer mechanical metrics with respect to race, since “how good are you at acting non-white” seems like a very difficult question to answer and generally an entirely inappropriate one to be evaluated by our government.
Yes, that’s a harm. Or more appropriately: that’s an exercise of AA, which has both harms and benefits (remember, I DO NOT dispute that AA has benefits which may outweigh the harm.) The student is getting points because s/he is black. That’s AA. Now, perhaps it’s an overall benefit to admit the student because s/he’s black; that would get credited to AA as well.
Of course, this whole problem comes from the need to “repair” admissions, because we don’t produce nearly enough black & Latino students who are actually capable of getting into elite schools on their own merits. The ideal solution would be to focus on producing college applicants who don’t need AA, i.e. fixing the underlying school issue. That could also be done in a neutral fashion, since the problem (“doesn’t produce good students” or “too much student stratification within a school”) need not be linked to race.
But anyway:
They surely do. But they may not have racist barriers that the government is obliged to cure. It’s already a difficult thing for the government to selectively address race; it is perfectly reasonable for them to set a boundary on it. Obama’s kids will do just fine, AA or not.
Impact challenges are inherently more difficult and conservatives are unlikely to favor them
Why not? If you mean because impact challenges are tough, I agree that might be a reason (many) conservatives would judge such a challenge difficult to make stick. If you mean that people who say disparate impact cannot support AA would never turn around argue disparate impact for a different position they favored…..c’mon, you’re a lawyer, you know better.
Also on the subject of being a lawyer, c’mon, you know that it’s trivial to make a “facially” neutral policy that is in fact not neutral. Make a rule that all employees must be at least 5’10” and you keep out the broads; make a rule that students must attend classes on Saturday to graduate and you cut out the Jews; make a rule that gives preference to students from rural districts over urban ones and, in many states, you’re slanting the admissions towards white students.
I don’t think ‘top 10%” is necessarily a horrible or badly-intentioned policy; but I think Amp is right that many of the some-merit-is-more-meritorious-than-other crowds may well challenge it, and very much on impact grounds. After all, if it’s the top 10% of all schools, that means that even if the top students at Metal Detector High in a depressed urban district have a C average and a mediocre SAT score, they will be admitted to college over students from Pastytown Prep who just missed being in the very competitive top 10% of their school, but who have excellent grades and higher SAT scores.
Sebastian, re the University of Michigan, did you take a close look at that document other than scanning for information about race? If you went to a “good” high school that is weighted in your favor, though you may get a bonus if your high school was SO bad they feel sorry for you; if you excelled in art or engineering, you don’t get that weighted in your favor the way the Honors History student does; if you live in an underrepresented rural county (which, in Michigan, skews white); if you’re a legacy; oh, and the Provost can apparently give you a free Power Up bonus for any goddamn reason at all. So, no, not so much merit-except-for-race.
Sure. I gave an example of one.
I suppose you could challenge that. But that sort of challenge would functionally be a wholesale rejection of AA and I for one don’t see that happening any time soon. What I think is more likely is that we recognize that AA is not quite so obvious as it seems, so that we back away from some of the less defined issues in AA, like “merit arising from race.”
I’m not sure that AA proponents will be so opposed, if you consider the alternatives. When we get the government involved in dealing with race, we start having to talk about all the stuff that AA supporters don’t want to discuss.
Have you had a conversation about appropriation lately? Have you noticed how the question “can you define it well, and can you tell me where the boundary is?” gets shot down in about a millisecond? Imagine that level of vagueness, if the govt. started giving out benefits for those who suffered from appropriation.
The reason that these facially neutral policies (or class-based policies, or location-based policies) are popular is because they let the AA proponents AVOID the tough questions like “how do you define diversity, and how do you measure it?” or “do you get more diversity from class or race?” or “are diversity benefits on a log scale, and at what point isn’t it worth discriminating on race in order to increase diversity?” or “why would we give the same AA benefits to a U.S. descendant of slaves (to whom we owe some direct and collective debt as a country) and an recent immigrant from, say, Chile (to whom we don’t?)” and all those other issues.
Thus the popularity of “proxy” measures for racism, like class and location and education and so on. If being black makes you poor, we can selectively help people who are poor and therefore give a higher %age of benefits to blacks. If being Hispanic makes you more likely to be in a school with a 45:1 student/teacher ratio, we can selectively help those students and therefore give a higher %age of benefits to Hispanics.
Both “helping poor people” or “helping students who go to shitty schools” are inherently good; neither are inherently race-based. In fact, as the country changes over time, the composition of people in those categories will change as well, which means that UNLIKE a “give blacks an extra 150 SAT points” solution, you DON’T need to constantly monitor it for concern that you’re violating the equality clauses.
I actually haven’t noticed supporters of AA curling into tiny balls when the issue of defining diversity comes up. It’s a tough question. I have noticed that question thrown out not only by people who really want to untangle the issue, but by concern trolls. There’s a difference between ‘how can we arrive at a meaningful definition of diversity, and balance all these competing issues in a way that is fair?’ and ‘well, if you can’t fit it on a bumper sticker, you’re a reverse-racist, QED’. (Please note I’m not accusing you of holding a bad-faith position; I’m talking generally.)
I am a little surprised at the notion that race is the one issue we can’t and shouldn’t directly address; it’s not automatically unconstitutional to make a race-based distinction, it’s just that you have to meet a very, very high standard to do so. Also, really, it’s not just descendants of slaves; it’s descendants of survivors of Jim Crow. I get what you’re saying about wrestling with these issues, but when we focus on just slavery, it buys into the narrative that all that was a long time ago and we’re sorry so WTF are we still giving preference to people whose great-grandfathers were mistreated. The legacy of slavery did not end in 1865. The Civil Rights era was my parents’ era.
Mythago, a couple of the things you mention have a very small magnitude compared to race. And the school quality thing is an attempt to be more merit based not less (doing well at harder schools is better than doing well at mediocre schools). The provost thing would have to be widely used to be a major concern. Otherwise it functions like a governors pardon. Also you couldn’t get more than 40 discretionary points, so race is more than half the non academic factors (half only if all other applicants can get 40 points in non academic factors). And race isn’t scaling like almost all the other factors. Race was a huge deal–not the small plus among otherwise highly qualified candidates that AA defenders like to pretend. I’m not sure if you understand the scale. Are you defending race being a bigger factor than the difference between all wrong answers and all right ones on the SAT? I rarely hear AA defenders admit: we want enormous plus factors for certain races. Is that because you don’t want to defend that kind of system, or because you don’t accept that it is in fact such a system?
Which brings us to Amps point. Yes the UT system is different in form. It is ‘holistic’. But it uses precisely the same factors as the UM case. So unless you are going to claim AA beneficiaries have dramatically changed, the magnitude of the thumb on the scales is still enormous. A tenured professor like Dr Clevland wants to attack Ms Fisher (from one of the safest most privileged jobs in the country) on her qualifications, but admit that some minorities with lower academic qualifications got in. If we were in a world where race actually functioned as a tiny plus, I could understand his point. But when in the very recent past it has been an enormous part of the potential non academic factors, it can be appropriate to look into whether or not the allegedly ‘holistic’ factors are really just racial discrimination under another name.
SebastianH: The larger point is the pretense that, in the absence of race-based affirmative action, colleges decide admission wholly on merit. Even at U of M that isn’t the case. But that aside, more than a couple of the things I mention are more than a ‘little’ important – and some of them have a racial impact, even if they don’t explicitly refer to race. (For example, the preference for students from “underrepresented” counties, which largely means rural counties with predominantly white applicants.) I am, frankly, gobsmacked that you don’t think the provost’s equal-to-race discretion is only bad if “widely used” – really, if the provost gives a special benefit to his stepdaughter or a fraternity brother’s child who would otherwise not quite make the cut, that’s OK as long as it doesn’t happen too often? Particularly as there is absolutely nothing whatsoever in those guidelines limiting the provost’s discretion or providing for any oversight whatsoever.
Questioning to what extent race should weigh in admissions? That’s a perfectly valid question. I’m just not interested in pretending that question is taking place in a merit-based vacuum, where there’s a problem if underqualified black kids are getting in, but if underqualified kids from Alpena or underqualified alumni kids are getting in or underqualified children of the provost’s buddies are getting, well, um, whatever, weren’t we talking about race?
Also, if you are a UM alumnus, you should be very much aware of why race as a factor is such a big honking deal, given the extremely problematic history at UM of minority admissions and the experience of black students on a predominantly-white campus, particularly in a state where there are severe and long-standing racial tensions.
OT- Is anybody else as fascinated with the photo for this post as I am? She’s a perfect example of “baby faced”. It looks like a six year old head on an adult body. The contrast between her and the old guy to the left is wonderful. It’s compelling and I keep coming back to look at the photo.
Could you spell out exactly what you mean by this?
For instance, if test “A” counted teeth for 10 points, fingernails for 10 points, and singing on pitch for 50 points, whereas test “B” was teeth 40, fingernails 40, and singing 10, would that be “precisely the same factors” in each test? Or would the points in each test for each factor have to be the same before they’d be “precisely the same factors”?
And as has been pointed out a few times, there were indeed some black and latin@ students who got in to UT with lower grades & scores than Ms. Fisher, but there were also a bunch of black and latin@ students with higher grades & scores who were rejected. Plus, the admissions office has said that regardless of race, Ms Fisher simply had nothing in her grades or life experiences to justify admitting her. To me, that creates a pretty plain case for thinking that Ms Fisher was not, in fact, discriminated against.
How are you defining discrimination? Is it discrimination any time a white student is unhappy that she didn’t get in but a black student did? Surely not. But how on earth do you distinguish Ms. Fisher’s case from that example?
Yes.
Grace
Oooooooh yeah.
I dunno, everybody under 30 looks like a kid to me :P
Both UM and UT use race, geographic factors, leadership, personal challenges, essay, and legacy. Saying that you use them ‘holistically’ (at UT) doesn’t mean that you weight each of them the same as every other one. It doesn’t mean that you do anything different from UM at all, it just means you don’t put numbers to each factor in a memo that has shown up in litigation. In fact, because of that, you can end up weighting it EVEN MORE than the full grade point of the UM case, because race isn’t just 20 points.
Regarding your hypothetical tests, the question is of magnitude. If you are looking for a singer you will rate under something like A plus or minus small amounts, if you are looking for (I’m not sure what….a showgirl in the chorus) you’ll get something more like B. For purposes of contrasting programs, they use the same factors if they use them in approximately the same proportions. And they do here: the apparent order of factors is race (hugely), geography (pretty big), leadership/personal factors (small), legacy (tiny).
I object to the discussion being framed around the idea that the plus factor is minimal. It isn’t. It is by far the very largest non academic factor (dramatically more important than leadership or overcoming personal challenges), and it is large enough to completely overshadow academic factors that are important for non favored races like Asians. The entire difference between the worst score and best score on the SAT is swallowed by the factor. If you are a Chinese you’ll see a big difference in admission standards between the top 15% and the top 10% of SAT scores. If you’re Hispanic it isn’t nearly as crucial because you’re making up that one or two admission score issue with 20 points purely for race–even when you came from a privileged family and the Chinese kid didn’t.
If AA defenders want to openly defend that level of difference, we can at least have a realistic discussion. But they don’t. They seem to want to always call it a slight or small or tiny difference between otherwise similar candidates. That just isn’t the real world of admissions.
The apparent difference at UT is that they didn’t use formal point scoring. But the legal question is “does it function as a quota”. That has been the test since at least Bakke. You can have allegedly holistic test that function like quotas. Those are illegal.
Maybe it’s because you are on their side….?
In my experience, the supporters of AA (like most folks, FWIW) tend to like to discuss diversity only with the choir. Things like “bingo” cards and labels like “concern troll” are simply means of avoiding discussion with the people who are most opposed to your position: writing them off means you (global you, not the mythago you) don’t have to engage with their arguments.
The problem is that what folks classify as “meaningful” is generally defined as “what we think is correct.” In that sense, the movement has a strong sense of viewpoint entitlement: they are right, because all reasonable people agree that they’re right, and those who disagree are generally racist trolls. The movement doesn’t concede that opponents can be correct; there’s a push that they don’t understand or haven’t read enough literature or haven’t experienced enough or haven’t engaged enough or have failed to grow up in the right area. It’s a “true scotsman” argument read in reverse.
Semantics, perhaps: It’s unconstitutional under the equal protection clause, but there is an exception to the unconstitutionality. Just like it’s unconstitutional to suppress speech, but there’s an exception for fighting words.
Sure. I was using the example of slavery as a means of making a distinction. It was just a convenient example; I don’t dispute the harm of Jim Crow or the high degree of government involvement in it. And FWIW, I don’t think that slavery is necessarily too old to get some form of compensation. I distinguished between “harm to slaves” and a recent immigrant as a means of flagging the dispute that we have any obligation as a country to attempt to compensate very indirect forms of racism through government action.
I agree that U.S. policies have had an indirect effect on a lot of the world, from our Mexican neighbors to far away countries in Africa. Not all of that effect has been good, to say the least. But the harm isn’t the type for which the burden of compensation should be assigned solely to the white (and Asian, depending on the program) portion of the US population.
I find the “Top 10%” rule problematical. It’s clear that it was established to increase the number of minority kids being admitted into UT without setting up an explicit racial-preference policy that would fail in the courts. But my objection is not based on the input; it’s based on the output. Given the disparity between high schools, you will – not can, but will – end up with a large cohort of kids being admitted into schools that are being set up for failure thereby. Here’s an example of that kind of thing.
This kid eventually graduated, but lots don’t. If a program to increase minority enrollment on a campus targets minority kids who can be expected to succeed at that school then great. But “Top 10%” doesn’t do that. You cannot assume that a kid graduating in the top 10% of “Metal Detector High” will be able to succeed at any school in the State of Texas. You’re doing him or her a severe disservice by pretending that’s true, and wasting taxpayer money to boot.
This is a hard one. So far the person who is making the best argument seems to me to be gin-and-whiskey. 13 years ago my son didn’t get into the Premier State University either and boy was I mad. He even got straight As his senior year and filed an appeal, which didn’t work. It never occurred to me until I read this article on this blog that the reason he wasn’t admitted could have been because a less qualified minority student “took his place.” I was mad, but I attributed it to giving too many slots to Out of State Students. I felt that as taxpayers in that State our kids should get in before out of state kids. Race never occurred to me until reading this article on this blog.
It cost us a boatload more money paying out of State tuition to an out of State University but whadda gonna do? Our son did terrific at the school he attended, really well both academically and in leadership and went on to an impressive career. So alls well that ends well.
I think this subject is just to difficult, and then the ones who don’t get accepted are making a Federal Case out of it. I took the attitude that life isn’t always fair and moved on, although when he graduated with honors I was really considering photocopying his diploma and sending it to the admissions office to rub their noses in turning down my son. I didn’t do it but I thought about it. :)
I don’t think this young lady has a case if higher qualified blacks and Hispanics didn’t get in either. If I were her mother once I saw that data I think I would have dropped the case (course I didn’t think of race to begin with). So far gin-and-tonics just move from Top 10% to Top 15% makes the most sense. That policy would have hurt my son though, it hurts the ones who go to the top high schools in the State. But what are you going to do? At least it is neutral and we accept that some kids in the highest performing high schools will be hurt, but all is not lost they can get in someplace else like my son did and if they were in the top 25% of their class in a competitive high school chances are they will succeed wherever they get accepted. We need to have diverse Universities and we need to have people of color attending these premier state schools. It is like gin-and-whiskey said about short term goals and long term goals. In the short term I don’t mind giving a hand up to a person of color or a small advantage. The advantage gap is the basis of the discussion, how much advantage? I am inclined to leave it to the professionals at our Universities.
I’ve seen plenty of white students at elite universities who struggled with the courseload and were working harder than they ever had in high school.
The “mismatch hypothesis” that you (Ron) refer to is, to put it lightly, extremely controversial. Furthermore, the controversy hinges on matters of statistical methodology, which is not something that it’s possible for me to form an opinion about without spending more time than I have available delving into the arguments.
But if anyone’s interested in reading some of the criticism, here’s a brief on the matter written by some experts on statistics for the Fisher case.
A couple of earlier critiques of mismatch (both are pdf files):
Does Affirmative Action Reduce the Number of Black Lawyers? , by Ian Ayres and Richard R.W. Brooks of Yale Law School.
The Real Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: An Empirical Critique of Richard Sander’s Standford Law Review Study.
Talk about not being able to take a rejection! I wish I had sued all the schools that rejected me lol! I would be at the supreme court at least 25 times by now. But it all worked out in the end since I got into at least 1. I didn’t get my top pick but so what? That’s life.
Personally, I think its better to take away opportunities from minority students (in a notoriously segregated state)…. so one over-privileged white girl with subpar grades can go to school and major in basketweaving? I heard on NPR that UT said that they wouldn’t have admitted her even WITHOUT the policy, which I find hilarious.
But in all seriousness. The policy UT has is compliant with the law. Its amazing how actively racism has taken center stage suddenly. The violations of the voting rights act….now attacks on affirmative action? Um where is the Black community? The Latino community? The Asian community? Guys? Helloooo. Shouldn’t you be out fighting this so the media doesn’t demonize a program that has benefited students? This is about desegregating and promoting diversity in one of the whitest schools in Texas. I guess no one in those communities gives a shit anymore.
This isn’t just going to apply to UT -Texas. This type of precedent applies to MANY different types of programs beyond education. This isn’t about ONE girl or UT. This is about a public policy which society has had a consensus on now for over 4 decades. I don’t understand what needs to be re-assessed here. We acknowledge as a society that race can be a factor which can cause disadvantage in education. The secondary “soft” factors like poverty, language barriers, and racism all come into play here. So we decided as nation that some people need a little more help than the “struggling white man.” There are a million schools for white people with money. There are only a few for black kids with no money. Most of them are state institutions. I see nothing wrong with what UT did. Since the black community now has over 25-30% unemployment. Among black men its the highest its been since the depression. Clearly there is something wrong here when we are worried about one white girl’s desire to go to her “dream school.”
On the other hand there is a question of fundamental fairness. Many people ask – why should anyone get extra help? Not everyone is college material right? Well less than a few decades ago it was women who couldn’t get into any schools. Correction -white women. Policies were put in place to help them? I am of the mind that everyone deserves at least a fair opportunity to succeed. Not everyone gets that intrinsically. So sometimes we have to make a choice to step in and level the playing field a bit. I’m sure Ms. Thing feels like she was wronged and it just speaks to her total lack of understanding (not to mention self-centeredness) she displays regarding the larger issues at stake here.
In that sense, the movement has a strong sense of viewpoint entitlement: they are right, because all reasonable people agree that they’re right, and those who disagree are generally racist trolls.
Oh, goodness, g&w, can I play too? “In that sense, the anti-affirmative action movement has a sense of viewpoint entitlement: they are right, because all reasonable people agree they’re right, and those who agree are bullies who use false accusations of ‘racism’ in place of reason. Things like ‘historical disadvantage’ and ‘legacy of racism’ are simply means of avoiding discussion.”
No, in my experience, just like people who are skeptical of affirmative action, people who are in favor of it come in flavors other than caricature, and are sincere about solving a problem. And while it certainly isn’t true that all opponents of race-based AA are bigots, the reverse is pretty much true.
As for ‘semantics’, you might as well say that discrimination based on being left-handed is unconstitutional, though there is a(n enormous) exception to the unconstitutionality.
It never occurred to me until I read this article on this blog that the reason he wasn’t admitted could have been because a less qualified minority student “took his place.”
Or a less-qualified student whose grandpa went to that school “took his place”, while in the state where your son ended up going to college, he was the less-qualified student who “took the place” of somebody with better academics, but less ability to pay inflated tuition. Who knows?
Yes! As I said, this is pretty much universal: it’s always easier to demonize or suppress one’s opponents than engage with them.
It’s pretty much SOP for humans, and we normally deal with it just fine. It really becomes a problem when there’s a particular viewpoint which begins to dominate a particular area–in my view, that’s happening in the area of higher education.
kbeb:
Which leaves out the considerations of black kids with money and white kids without money. Take me, for example. I am certainly nowhere near wealthy, but I have an income that places me well above the national median. Part of that is offset by the fact that I live in an area that has relatively high cost of living. I have two kids, and I ended up spending about $160,000 on tuition and fees alone for 9 years of schooling for them (engineering students often don’t finish in 4 years). That’s a lot of money, far more than my annual income. And that’s just the checks I wrote during those years, it doesn’t count loans that I’ve been helping them pay back. There’s plenty of white people who can’t pay that kind of money and don’t get it made up on scholarships or grants – which is why so many kids end up with $100K+ of loans when they get out.
So that’s one reason why you see people bringing these suits. It makes a big difference.
In so far as what UT does significantly increases the number of young black people getting degrees that are meaningful from the viewpoint of helping them get jobs you have a point. But, again, is it actually doing this?
It’s also the highest it’s been since the depression for white men as well – and white women and pretty much every other group.
If the intent of this policy is to increase the number of young black people who get a college degree – and, presumably, thereby get more and better employment – they need to do a better job. It turns out that there’s a report from a Task Force on Undergraduate Graduation Rates at UT. On page 55 there’s a table breaking down such rates by ethnicity/race, sex, parents’ education level and eligibility for Pell grants (which essentially is “how much money your parents make”, I imagine). I believe you’ll find it interesting. In the racial/ethnicity breakdown, blacks are the worst at 39% – only 2 out of every 5 black kids entering UT graduate in 6 years (apparently graduation after 6 years is pretty much negligible). It’s essentially the same for Hispanics and American Indians at a point or so above 40%. Then you have a jump to Asians and whites at ~55% and ~57%, respectively. Still lousy, in my opinion, but obviously significantly better.
So I repeat the question – does UT’s “Top 10%” rule actually improve the number of blacks getting college degrees in Texas? If the rule was dropped and the rule became “only kids with test scores/other predictors above threshold get considered for admission and every underrepresented minority meeting those criteria gets admitted automatically”, would that a) pass court muster and b) result in more black kids who actually get degrees?
I have to say that I’m continually shocked at the poor graduation rates from American universities and colleges. Numbers vary, but they seem to be between 50% to 60%. That’s horrible! And given that places like the Institute graduate about 93% of their students, there are some very poor schools out there. Someone’s not doing their job in American universities and colleges these days – a lot of somebodies. And given that tuition/fee rates have been increasing at 2x the rate of inflation and the number of non-teaching positions have exploded at schools, I’m thinking it’s a lot of somebodies.
The ridiculously high cost of attending college, and affirmative action programs, seem to me to be separate issues. I agree that it’s awfully expensive for your kids to attend college, RonF, but I don’t think that’s a good reason not to have AA.
The intent is to increase the number of young Black and Latin@ people who get a college degree from an upper-tier university (and also to wind up with a more diverse campus). (Lower-tier universities pretty much don’t practice racial AA at all.)
There’s lots of evidence that even if no AA were practiced at all, Black and Latin@ kids would still have lower average grades and test scores, and higher drop out rates. So it’s simply not true that the mere existence of the gap is proof that AA isn’t having positive effects.
To answer your final question, it would past Court muster, and it would certainly result in
manyfewer Black and Latin@ kids attending better colleges like UT. The rest is a matter of disputing over what the statistics show.Some 15% of white students admitted to top colleges fail to meet minimum requirements. Abigail Fisher would likely fall into that percentage had she been admitted to UT (I haven’t checked LSU’s stats), & for too many AA opponents that outcome is perfectly acceptable. Mind you, if we’re talking about who truly benefits the most from affirmative action policies, the answer isn’t POC. It’s white women like Abigail Fisher. She’s working against her own interests & doesn’t even know it. Personally I’ll buy all of the “Affirmative Action is unfair” rhetoric when I see people pushing to make sure every child in America has access to a quality education in the best possible environment for learning from birth. Somehow that hasn’t happened yet.
Amp, I’m not saying get rid of AA. I’m saying “Let’s make sure the program does it’s job.” Putting kids into a school that they’re not going to succeed at is a bad idea regardless of what kids they are or why we do it. If AA is used to grab up black kids who have a good chance of succeeding in a school but would not otherwise get into it, fine. But if (and, I think, where) it grabs up black kids who it can be reasonably predicted do NOT have a good chance of succeeding in a school and puts them in it anyway, then it’s doing those kids harm and that needs to change.
The fact that plenty of white kids are managing to get into this school and then flunk out is not a reason to sit here and say “black kids deserve a chance to flunk out as well”. It’s time to say “let’s fix that problem, too”. Consider that the “Top 10%” is very likely contributing to that as well. It’s not a dichotomy between rich, well qualified white kids and poor, less qualified black kids. What odds do you figure that there’s plenty of lousy mostly-white schools out there sending their top 10% that is made up of mostly ill-prepared white kids who are then flunking out? The program does them a disservice as well.
DEVIL ON AMP’s RIGHT SHOULDER: You know what you should do today? You should spend several hours reading the scholarly literature on Affirmative Action outcomes, so you could get some understanding of the controversy and talk about the statistical questions with more confidence.
ANGEL ON AMP’s LEFT SHOULDER: No! No, Amp, you should spend the day working on Hereville!
DOARS: Screw Hereville! Read RonF’s comment again… he’s trying to tempt you….
AOALF: Please, Amp, come back to the drawing board. Mirka NEEDS you.
DOARS: I think the public library has a new academic journal database! I bet you won’t lost more than a few hours if you get into it there….
AOALF: Really? A new database?
DOARS: Oh yeah!
AOALF: NO! WE ARE NOT TEMPTED!
Etc, etc.
Does the top 10% rule discriminate against home schoolers? If so, does it matter?
Good question. I think if it does, it matters less than demographics discrimination because homeschooling is totally optional. Not that it’s not worth trying to make sure ther isn’t an unintended or unfair hurdle for home schooled kids, but if you *had* to be unfair to either black kids or homeschooled kids, better the latter.
How about black homeschooled kids? Concern from one hand, and ‘fuck you’ from the other?
I think it’s problematic that anyone be treated unfairly, which is why strong AA is inherently problematic. Moving discrimination around doesn’t improve the total net moral outcome.
Home schooling is completely optional for the parents, not quite so much for the kids.
It’s not always completely optional for the parents, either.
Of course, the result of not having AA policies that effectively puts some Black and Latin@ kids into elite schools isn’t “and then everything is fair,” so much as it’s “and then our elite educational institutions maintain white supremacy continues with next to no mitigation at all.”
(I’m not sure what is and isn’t “strong” AA, so I didn’t comment on that bit.)
Yes, because “fuck you” is totally what I said.
Amp, shoot that devil on your right shoulder. Not that I’m looking to take you out of the argument, but I value Hereville. Besides, I again am not saying “Dump AA”. I’m saying “Fix AA”. For example, my guess would be that a policy that was based on family income rather than race would end up favoring minorities anyway, and could then place kids in various State universities – or, heaven forfend, an in-state university whether public or private of the child or their parents’ choice – that would be academically suited for them, rather than blindly placing the kids into one particular university without any consideration of whether they belong there or not.
Nancy – it probably does and it definitely does. I know home schooled kids. The most notable one to me was a kid who is somewhat autistic and whose needs were NOT going to be met in the local public schools. The kid was homeschooled and did well enough to be accepted to Hope College (where, purely coincidentally, one of my wife’s cousins got his Ph.D.). He’s also one of our Eagle Scouts. I doubt this kid would have turned out well if he’d have had to go through public school out here.
The fact that parents exercise their rights to educate their children other than in a public school should not disadvantage them against kids who did go to those schools when it comes time to be admitted to a public school such as UT, a school those parents pay taxes to support.
And now that I think of it – does UT’s “Top 10%” rule only apply to graduates of public schools? Does it discriminate against kids going to private schools as well as home schooled kids? If so, this is becoming more and more problematical. I was initially looking at this from an output side, but it seems it has problems with input as well.
Can someone help me with a bit of genuine confusion on my behalf – what is discriminatory about the “top 10%” rule? I mean, I assume we all agree that setting an absolute grade criterion for acceptance is not discriminatory. Why is setting a relative grade criterion discriminatory? It’s a different system, sure, but why is it discriminatory to say that someone who can do better than 90% of her peers in a bad school is just as good as someone who can do better than 90% of her peers in a better school?
(Homeschooling is a different issue, but not that difficult to resolve – just pool all the homeschooled kids together, and accept the top 10% of them).
I’m sure I’m missing something, perhaps because I don’t understand the American education system, I’m just not sure what.
Nothing. It’s a facially neutral process.
However, there’s a rule regarding facially neutral processes, that allows the outcomes of those processes to be a basis for a claim of challenge.
Even though the top 10% process is entirely colorblind, the outcomes of the top 10% rule are not racially distributed: they favor the admission of minorities. Therefore it’s possible that they could be challenged on that basis.
That doesn’t make numerical sense – the only way the 10% rule would devour minorities is if either:
1. There are more minorities than majorities (false by definition)
2. It is generally true that minorities do better than majorities when in the same schools.
An I to understand you believe one of these two conditions? Or am I missing something?
Top 10% based on what? Homeschooled kids generally don’t get grades.
Well, there must be some sort of criterion used to decide whether a homeschooled student gets accepted to university now, right? Whether the SATs, or some test administered by the university, or something. Just accept the top 10% among homeschooled students.
For homeschooled kids, they do look at the SATs, but they also look at the essays and recommendations a whole lot, and do interviews, plus whatever sort of formal schooling the kid has had — a lot of homeschooled teenagers take a few courses at local colleges, and the colleges they apply to will look at those to see how they can handle the structure of classes. There’s not really any one thing that decides it.
The top 10% rule leads to greater minority representation because of segregation. There are many individual school districts in which there are few white students; those districts also tend to be poorer and to not have the best schools. Students can be in the top 10% of their class in such a school while still having test scores that are not as strong as (say) someone in the 20th percentile at a school in a wealthy area that has hardly any non-white students.
Amp – that still won’t lead to greater minority representation than the percentage of the minorities in the populace, unless there’s a positive correlation between being in the top 10% and being a minority in mixed schools. In fact, the more segregation at the school level, the more the outcome will end up resembling the overall populace in its ethnic distribution.
Your second sentence commits the fallacy of comparing the relative value to the absolute value. Obviously, those would give different results. But if the universities decide that people should be judged by their relative position within their school rather than their absolute position, then you can’t compare people across schools anymore.
If the relative system produces a distribution that is more like the overall population, then it does not discriminate. The only way to read this as discrimination is if one believes that the correct state of affairs is that minorities are under-represented.
Note this is all independent of whether the relative system is better, or fairer, from an academic point of view. I’m not saying that it’s either, and as Ruchama pointed out, my solution for home schooling doesn’t work. I’m just puzzled how it can be viewed as discriminatory when it is both colour blind (as G&W points out), and not likely to lead to a higher representation of minorities than their proportion in the overall populace.
Eytan, you’re quite right. All I mean was that more Latin@ and Black kids attend elite Texas colleges with the top 10% rule, than would if there was no top 10% rule.
I’m fine with that. But my expectation is that sooner or later Conservatives will try to get the Supreme Court to strike down the top 10% rule.
Some of this depends on how we use the word “minorities”. In Texas (according to the 2011 Census), non-Latino whites are 45% of the population, Latinos are 38%, blacks are 12% and Asians are 4%. There is no one racial group that is a true majority, even though nationally whites are a majority and the percentage of Latinos is much lower. But cases of this nature are not necessarily decided on the basis of local demographics.
It seems to me that the “Top 10%” rule is discriminatory in that someone who is in the 85th percentile at More Science High will have a much harder time getting into a taxpayer-supported school than someone who is in the 90th percentile at Metal Detector Academy, even though the More Science High student is academically much better qualified. Whether that brand of discrimination is Constitutional or not is a more open question.
It’s still an issue, though, that if the desired outcome is to have more minorities and/or poor kids get a useful college education and economic advantages thereby, automatically admitting a group of minority/poor kids to UT is not automatically the way to achieve it. “The percentage of minority students admitted into our best school isn’t as high as their percentage in the population, therefore we need to admit more of them” is not truly logical – nor useful to all of those kids.
If you want a cookie, you have to identify not only the group but the album, BTW. “Coming, mother!”
That really depends on how you’re defining academically better qualified, too.
RonF – Every school has to have a selection method, as it’s unfeasible to accept everyone. Every selection method will work better for some people or other. Whether or not the 10% rule is discriminatory or not has nothing to do with the fact that some people who would be accepted by other selection methods fare worse in it, unless you can show that this method somehow benefits particular groups over others.
Saying that the “top 10%” rule is discriminatory because it discriminates in favour of the top 10% of each school is like saying the US presidential election is discriminatory because it favours the candidate with the most electoral college votes.
Now, there are two other issues here:
– Is it a good system? Will the students who end up in university be the students most qualified to be in universities? Well, as Ruchama points out, “most qualified” is not an obvious objective criteria. I work in higher education, and I teach undergraduates. I can tell you that while the amount of knowledge a student comes to university with is a factor in their success, it is a far less significant factor than their personality, and how much work they are willing to put in. I could easily see an argument made that being in the top 10% of a school requires more maturity and dedication requires more dedication than being in the 11-20% bracket does, and while the person who got into the 85th percentile of a good school might know more than the person who got into the 95th percentile of a worse school, it is still the case that the latter is more primed for success. I could also easily see someone say that’s bullshit. I don’t know who’s right – that’s an empirical question that needs to be studied, not one we can determine by debating it.
– What is the motivation for choosing systems. That’s where, I think, the problem lies. It may be the fact that the 10% system has been implemented for no reason *except* that it results in a different ethnic distribution. If you could show that – if you could show that there’s no actual academic motivation for it, but that it’s chosen purely for reasons of making the ethnic makeup of universities match the general populace, then there may well be an issue here. But that’s not discrimination so much as it is political interference with what’s (arguably) a non-political process.
Texas is absolutely still segregated. This top 10% program is critical to getting underrepresented populations into college. I don’t think you can understand the dynamics of segregation until you’ve lived in a place like this, where ALL the black people live on one side of town and ALL the rich white people live in smaller suburb cities with their own school districts.
There’s a reason for the 1A and 2A divisions and 6-man teams – its because there are literally schools where there are graduating classes numbering less than 50. These are generally rural areas (traditionally poor whites) or wealthy white areas with a small district (such as Midway ISD) Look at the breakdown ethnically on that school – 64.8% white and supposedly serves close to the same area as University High School (my alma mater) in Waco ISD which had 7.67% white population and is mostly Hispanic. Southwestern Waco vs. South Waco is NOT a big enough area to make that big of a difference…unless Midway is districted such that it caters to the white, rich areas leaving Waco to cover the poorer areas.
Without this program, I can say with absolute certainty, there wouldn’t have even been a chance for most of the people at my school to go to college. The scholarship is invaluable to getting kids from poorer schools and families in college.
As to RonF’s question about setting the kids up to fail in college – that’s not something easily predicted. Sometimes the smart ones peter out in college; sometimes the dedicated ones are the kids who graduate.
I qualified for this scholarship, BTW – I graduated #7 in the class ahead of me, and would have been valedictorian in my own class. However, the resources weren’t there for me to live in a dorm (there are no state schools in Waco), and I had no one to guide me about student loans, so I didn’t go. There are still obstacles to college even if your tuition is paid.
Amp:
Of course, the result of not having AA policies that effectively puts some Black and Latin@ kids into elite schools isn’t “and then everything is fair,” so much as it’s “and then our elite educational institutions maintain white supremacy continues with next to no mitigation at all.”
Is unfair discrimination the only way to put those kids into elite schools?
I don’t claim that it’s possible to make everything fair; I do think we can refrain from engaging in unfair discrimination.
Our elite institutions, back in the day, had to engage in what amounted to collusion and conspiracy to keep minority groups out even in the face of a biased admissions system that explicitly took race as a negative factor. In the absence of collusion and conspiracy, in a system where race was a non-factor, is it genuinely the case that brilliant black and Latino students would be hard-barriered from attending elite institutions? I agree that non-discriminatory means of encouraging high achievers will be helpful in ensuring these students get to the places where they ought to go.
Like RonF, I am not particularly invested in ending strong AA, but in fixing it. (Strong AA is AA which endorses discrimination, rather than just making people aware of options.) Why not make it class-based? Anyone who thinks Malika Obama needs preferential points to get into Harvard is a moron. So why should she get them? But I knew and know plenty of economically-poor students, of all ethnicities, whose academic abilities should have directed them to a higher arc of schools, but didn’t. Why not? In part, because black children of doctors and Latino children of millionaire businessmen were getting those discretionary spots.
Simple Truth
Is this true that you were a top student but didn’t go to college because you didn’t have anyone to turn to who would be able to show you how you could go? I am not questioning your truthfulness, not at all, I am just double checking that I am reading this right.
I went to college, but it was at the local community college on a Pell Grant. And yes, you’re correct that no one sat down with me and explained about applications, how student loans worked, or how to apply for scholarships, including my parents. All I knew was that I didn’t have the money to pay for application fees, or money to pay to live in a dorm, that I would have to quit my job, and that getting into debt was bad. I suppose that if I had been really motivated, I should have been able to figure it out, but that’s pretty daunting at just-turned-17.
Also, it was pretty much expected at our high school that we would all be attending community college (if we went to college at all) so there wasn’t a culture of support there to get to those higher institutions.
I just tried to look up the program to see how long it had been in effect, and apparently it began the year I graduated high school and only guaranteed admission (link here) It was changed to be an actual scholarship in 2007 (link here) That does put a different spin on things, I think, but the fact was I did not have a mentor or guide to help me into college.
The question you have to ask before you ask that question is, is a system where race is a non-factor actually possible? I think racism is too deeply ingrained for a colorblind system to actually exist. (See for example this study where white job applicants were called back for interviews more than twice as often as black applicants with similar resumes, and even white applicants who said they had a criminal record were called back more often than the black applicants with no record: http://www.epi.org/publication/webfeatures_snapshots_archive_09172003/)
You could set up a system where race isn’t supposed to be a factor, but the only way to ensure that it isn’t is to make sure evaluators don’t know the student’s race. Not only do names often make race obvious, but that would prevent minorities from writing essays about their own experiences.
Okay, wait a minute. I actually agree with you (partially), but I note that you and Robert are using an awfully liberal definition of “choice” and “optional” in this particular discussion when you say homeschooling isn’t optional in all cases. (I’ll agree with Nancy’s comment that it may not be for the child.) No parent is legally mandated to homeschool their child, and a public education is available to every child. A parent may choose homeschooling instead, but because they technically had the choice available to them, it is optional. Whatever happened to personal responsibility and accepting the consequences of your decisions? If you live in a crappy school district and choose to homeschool, you may be forgoing an advantage in admissions. “The options available to me were crap,” doesn’t carry any weight in conservative discussions of birth control or abortion, but suddenly in education it does?
(I’m not actually being critical of parents who homeschool. I just find it really interesting how the talk about what’s actually optional and what isn’t changes depending on whether people are making choices you support or not.)
That said, it should be really easy to use a similar 10% rule for homeschooled kids, using either the SATs or their state’s standardized test that schools are judged by.
Also, the top 10% is designed in part to give a hand up to kids who went to crappy schools. A student who had a 1-1 student/teacher ratio, all the individual attention they could want, and a curriculum tailored specifically to them by someone who knows them well doesn’t *need* that advantage because they probably *didn’t* have a crappy education.
I see no particular reason why the admissions process could not be largely, if not completely race-blind. (I can see how some race-conscious admissions people might be able to make reasonable assumptions about race given otherwise objective data about high schools, particularly geographical data – maybe that data should be purged as well. The student’s high school is in the 37th percentile nationally for academic attainment; the student performed at the 84th percentile at the school.)
Names are irrelevant data and can easily be redacted, and with spectacularly few exceptions, no 17 year old has had life experiences that *meaningfully* distinguish them from other 17 year olds in terms of who should get to go to Harvard. It was AWESOME that as a young boy I got to go to Iran and had some fairly immersive experiences in the culture (which would have been far more in-depth if they hadn’t gone and had a revolution, darn their inconsiderate selves). Why should that mean I get to go to Amherst while Frank (whose dad had a boring job as a gas station manager) spent the fifth through seventh grades in Seattle, wishing that his town had a real sports franchise?
It doesn’t. Those essays are just excuses for admissions people to find their own personal little crop of diversity admits and say “look how race-progressive we are!!!!” but provide little or no information about people who really do have something remarkable about them that should give them a preference in admission. Although every human being has value, and many human beings are much more interesting than some of their peers and can write (if they happen to be blessed with the gift of articulation) interesting stories about their interestingness, at the age of 17 there are only a few prodigies, Olympeans, who genuinely are more worthy than their peers. And such titans stand out regardless of the system or the metric being used for admission. Kids are a bunch of unmolded clay, for the most part. “This clay happened to get closer to the Oven of Relevance” – not really a qualification for anything, in my book.
“A public education is available to every child”.
True.
“A public education that is worth two shits is available to every child”.
Not true. (Although true for many/most.)
My oldest son was diagnosed with bipolar and autism spectrum disorders. It was an exhausting, multi-year, incredibly expensive process. Throughout it, his public school teachers and counselors were champions. Not a whit of sarcasm – they were fucking outstanding. They helped, they provided good data, they worked with counselors, they did everything that the best teachers in the world could do and quite often more.
And he was getting a shitty education, because what he NEEDED was an adult’s full-time attention (or at least, full-time when he was being schooled) and the public system simply cannot provide that. No gripe on them; it’d be like complaining that Salma Hayek can’t be everybody’s girlfriend. Um, physics. Time. Limitations on causality, and all that. If the public system gives him a full-time teacher (and who wouldn’t benefit from that, really?) then they are robbing twenty other kids of their 1/20th time teacher. If the public system sticks him in with 20 other kids, he (and they) suffer, sometimes tremendously, in the quality of their education because eldest son is still taking up 80% of the oxygen in the room. If the public system tries to split the difference, he ends up with five other kids in a “special needs” or IEP classroom, inexorably falling behind year after year as his unique needs are sacrificed periodically for the other four kids’ unique needs.
Again, public school doing yeoman work. Superman would blink and say “damn, you people have it going on”. But – terrible outcomes. He would have ended up “graduating” quasi-literate, behaviorally confused beyond reason because he had no consistent framework or structure, and surrounded by 19 (or maybe 4) surly peers pissed off that he fucked up THEIR free public education.
Because he would have.
Instead, his mom and I chose – o, plaintive choice – to devote a couple of years to his education in the hopes that we could repolarize the neutron flow and get him to a place where he could successfully adapt to a public school setting. It worked. He’s not going to be a Rhodes Scholar, but he’s graduating high school this year and shows fantastically improved performance on behavioral criteria. He can be a regular student. There is no fucking way he would have made that adjustment without mom and I deciding to homeschool.
So was it optional? Sure, in the same sense that giving your choking child CPR is optional. You don’t HAVE to do it, but no parent who conceivably CAN do it (and who thinks it will work) is going to NOT do it. I personally (hero dad of the year) ended up foregoing graduate school in order to do it. Most people would have done the same thing.
Yeah, it’s choice – and yeah, if I start going on about how I was forced to do X, Y, Z, it’s legitimate to call me on that, because there was no force. A simple “my intervention wouldn’t help him” would have gotten me off the hook; who’s gonna argue? But I’m not saying oh I was forced, poor me, get me a sloe gin fizz for my suffering….I’m saying “hey, this was the only good option available, so blowing off injustice to my son because ‘it was a choice’ is kind of a dick move.” If you want to show him injustice because he has appalling taste in music, oppress away; fuck him over because of mom and my schooling choices, and you’re penalizing him for us not fucking him over earlier.
And this is why “race-blind admissions” don’t work. Because there is a very strong correlation in the US between your race and your SES, and therefore between the amount of money available to your school district, and the particular school you get assigned to. Poor kids of color have, overall, crappier schools. So suddenly “blinding” the process at admission and going only on SAT scores or whatever fails to address the fact that the playing field leading up to that moment was far from level.
And the minute you introduce any non-quantitative data into the mix, the notion of race-blindness or gender-blindness for that matter becomes a farce. The president of the African-American studies club who wrestled in the state championships and whose personal essay writes about drawing inspiration from being the great-grandchild of a slave can pretty safely be guessed to be an African-American male. An applicant who lists on their achievements that they won the state vocal competition in the soprano category, competed at Girl’s State, and represented Mitchell County, Iowa in the Miss Iowa pageant is almost certainly a white female. An applicant whose “turning point” essay talks about experiencing racism from a white shop owner probably isn’t white, and “I chose to keep my baby and graduated with honors” probably isn’t male.
First: Make every single person identical in SES and send them all to equally wonderful and developmentally sound schools. You still have a profoundly unlevel playing field; familial involvement and support of academic work (which is but one good among many competing for the limited time and resources of our next generation) and individual aptitude for mental work are hugely variable. Put everyone in a kibbutz, and you still have genetics. Clone us all, and you still have random environmental fluctuations; clone 12377sA stumbles across a book of Vonnegut short stories and is entranced, clone 12377sB stumbles into an auto shop and Shakespeare is permanently dethroned by the metal poetry of slamming cylinders and clicking valves.
NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, there will be a hugely unequal playing field leading up to the admission decision. It might be possible to make the inequalities in that playing field less racially-deterministic; it’s probably worth doing that. But it is irrational to be concerned, overmuch, about inequalities qua inequalities in the pre-game playing field as it applies to the admission decision for proceeding on with advanced work. They will exist no matter what our actions, no matter what our behavior, no matter what our choices; they therefore seem to be permanent features, not temporary and to-be-reviled blemishes, of the process.
It is very rational to be concerned with fixing those inequalities which reflect inequities, but that is fixing the process, not the current batch. One does not revise a faulty recipe by ex-post-facto adding raisins to some of the cookies and then making the next batch according to the exact same rules; if the recipe is faulty, by all means fix the recipe. But realize that post-production raisin-adding is a stopgap at very best, not a genuine fix. Fix the unfair secondary school system; don’t jigger its outcomes to play let’s-pretend-everything-is-coming-out-the-same in the tertiary system.
Second: The inequalities generated by SES are artifacts. The level of resources, both material and human, available to the very poorest school in the very worst community in the very crappiest city in the United States, dwarf the resources that were available to reasonably successful schools a generation or a century past. Plato ignited an intellectual movement that spanned millennia with a stone pavement and some chalk scratchboards. The notion that a school with a crappy computer lab instead of an awesome one, with sullen unsupportive parents instead of movie-of-the-week parents, in a community that’s only at the 80th percentile of world wealth instead of the 99th percentile, cannot educate – is an obvious farce. Yes, it’s harder than it is when conditions are better. Harder and impossible are not identities. Yes, the SES can certainly explain why MORE students from an easier environment do well; differentials are real. But when the “low”-SES school has resources that are greater than the resource bases that historically produced tremendous success, one must look for explanations in areas beyond SES – and one cannot hold the SES differential as a serious permanent source of inequitable outcomes.
Shakespeare scans whether your dad is a dentist or a drug dealer; algebra works because it’s true, not because your school has a nifty iMac in every math class showing cool graphical transforms. The greatest genius English letters has ever produced came out of a one-room schoolhouse in a one-horse town that a Chicago slum teacher would sneer at.
Third: the essays you mention do not contain any information that, barring intrinsic racial animus or preference, have any bearing on differential college admissions. Drawing inspiration from one’s grandfather and competing in state tournaments and experiencing a banal, if oppressive, racial discrimination in one’s daily life are trivia. If the grandfather kid has an analytical IQ of 180 and independently invented calculus at age 3 (“it just made sense, to add up the curves that way”) and state-pep-tourney kid can write an essay that makes grown men weep and the-shopkeeper-didnt-believe-I-was-returning-that-iPad kid was slamming out professional-grade symphonic compositions at age 11, then that’s relevant. Biographical detail is filler that should carry no weight. (If inspired-by-slave-grandpa is instead inspired-by-turnaround-executive-Mitt-Romney, is s/he more worthy, less worthy, or equally worthy of admission? Answer seems obvious.)
So we can throw out those garbage essays and forestall the admissions people getting those racial hints, and we won’t lose a blessed thing.
Robert – am I correct that you have never had first hand experience teaching at a higher education level?
So, a demonstration of your ability to write coherently isn’t meaningful to college admissions?
Why not do both? I totally agree that affirmative action by itself is a stopgap measure, but it’s unfair to tell a graduating crop of high schoolers, “Sorry we screwed you over and you can’t get into college despite your abilities. We’ll do better with the next batch.” Cookies, you can pitch and start over. People, not so much.
Eytan – Practically nobody involved in the admissions process has experience teaching higher education. Our dean of students/admissions director/records honcho at UC (a solid but not elite school) was rather a standout because he actually taught a class once a year or so to keep current. People thought it very odd. Nobody else in admissions had any teaching background.
I do, however, have multiple years of experience working in the records and admission office of the same school. We did not practice strong AA, but did practice outreach-type AA (which, I stress, is a good and important set of programs).
I have known a number of admissions people at schools considerably more elite than UC; none of them were professors. Admissions is a rather dry and ministerial function. It has very little appeal (other than perhaps as a place to do deliberate outreach, which again, is OK with me) to someone with a desire to personally teach, and would not use that person’s pedagogical skills in any way shape or form.
Kelly – Yes, writing essays is a valuable way of determining whether a person can write. So create ten racially-as-neutral-as-possible essay topics and assign them randomly, and let students know “hey, if you allude discernibly to your race in your essay, it will be tossed as a factor (positive or negative) in your admission. we’re serious about just looking at scholasticism.”
Writing does not require racial revelation and Personal Discovery Time to inform the reader of the author’s ability to articulate ideas. Probably the converse; anybody who can make How The American Patent System Interacts With Overseas Patent Systems scintillate, is a *writer*. Any hack can make “my grandma was in the underground railroad and my uncle killed six KKKers in a gun battle” into an interesting piece.
but it’s unfair to tell a graduating crop of high schoolers, “Sorry we screwed you over and you can’t get into college despite your abilities.
Uh, I agree. That’s why I’m quite comfortable with a system that doles out admission to elite schools (a limited commodity) to the students with the greatest abilities. The raisinless students aren’t coming out with just oodles of untapped scholastic firepower they were never trained to use; they’re coming out without much of anything in the way of academic attainment, and edging aside – to a degree and extent that I recognize are controversial, and may be relatively small – people who DO have that attainment. Peppering raisins on a lump of dough might make it look good enough to get into the bakery counter and even to sell, but whoever buys it will take one bite and chuck the rest into the garbage.
If minority students are graduating from high school without the necessary academic skills, aptitudes, and attainments to successfully complete the next arc of education (and I gather that some are, though many more are not) then those people are not well-served by putting a raisin on their head and admitting them to Harvard. Amp is under the impression (or at least, is trying to maintain the impression) that the ratchet effect is some hotly controversial topic akin to the nature of dark energy. It isn’t. The exact interactions with educational policy and who exactly gets ratcheted where are areas of lively investigation, but the ratchet effect as a concept has been solidfying rapidly. People are getting Nobel prizes for their work on it.
It would suck to get out of high school and find out that your degree, which you might have worked very hard on, is in fact largely valueless because it is significantly inferior in what it signals or represents than the degrees of other students. That suckitude does not create knowledge, ability, preparation, or even motivation to go on to do real academic work. An extended game of let’s-pretend to inflate the value of those diplomas does not seem to serve anyone’s interests, except for the interests of the people responsible for allowing an inferior and dysfunctional parallel system to persist.
One standard, one bar, one rule, one measure. Anything else is the soft bigotry of differential expectations. I know perfectly well from personal experience and professional observation that people of every race are capable of first-rate analytical/mental work. Anyone not doing that kind of work, of any race, ought not to be credited with it.
On reflection I stand corrected – of our six admissions staffers, the guy who handled MBA and business school undergraduate admissions, a real neat fellow named Bill who sadly passed a couple years back, quite widely mourned in the university community) taught some statistics courses back in the 70s. So he had a smidgen.
But admission to the B-school was like admission to every other program; GPA plus standardized testing result equals X, is X above the bar or not? If it’s a close case, is there anything in the student’s file that indicates they’d shine despite marginal preparation? If not, thanks for the $65.
I wish the admissions people would talk to the teaching people more often and find out how these kids actually do in college classes. One thing I would want to eliminate entirely is that kids get a boost in admissions if they took a lot of AP classes. The kids who took AP classes and did well in them are great. The kids who took AP classes and didn’t do so well in them are mostly likely the kids who were pushed to take them because “You need AP classes to go to college,” and not only did they just sit through a year’s worth of a class and not learn much, they also missed an opportunity to take the lower-level high school course that would get them ready to learn the college-level material once they got to college. If you take calculus in high school and get a 2 on the AP exam, the most likely cause is that you don’t really know algebra or trigonometry. If you take calculus again in college without learning algebra and trig first, you’re still going to fail. But if the college tells you, “You need to take pre-calculus,” your reaction is going to be, “I took calculus already in high school. Why should I go backwards and take pre-calc?” I see this issue all the time — something like 25% of Calculus I students at my university fail — and by far, it’s mostly the kids from the “good” schools, who got good grades in high school.
Ruchama, you tacit ratchet-endorsing protoconservative, you.
That said, at least where I’ve worked, the bonus from AP classes is already figured into a student’s GPA and the class itself is just scored as another class. (IE, when you come into UC, if you took Calculus I and got a passing grade, we mark you as having completed the equivalent coursework. If you took AP Calculus…we mark you as having completed the same coursework. Some AP courses, where it really is a whole different class, do get credited differently on your transcript, but there’s no difference in your admit profile…you just get the bonus GPA points for the AP class. (And that bonus in fact happens at the high school – I think it’s a quarter-point, so a ‘B’ in AP Calculus scores as 3.25 for your GPA – so short of recalculating student GPAs and further penalizing the students that did try to do AP work, I don’t know what college admissions could do about it.)
It’s actually an odd dynamic. The kids who came from high schools that didn’t offer calculus generally took all the math classes that their schools did offer, which means that they REALLY know algebra, and so learning calculus is somewhat difficult but within reach. The kids who went to the good schools that pushed them to take calculus senior year of high school when they weren’t ready for it don’t know calculus, but they missed out on a year to learn algebra, too, so they have a much harder time learning calculus.
Personally I think they should just make you work on solving harder and harder problems using the pre-Newtonian, pre-Leibnitzian tools. I mean insoluble stuff, the kinds of things that led to the original breakthrough. The ones competent to really understand calculus will end up independently deriving it from first principles. We can cheat a little bit and have a “First Principles” seminar freshman year.
Those of us (my hand is up) who would fail to make that leap could then go peaceably back to the English department and write bitterly witty screeds about how analytical intelligence is overrated and the poetic muse is the seed of REAL truth.
Today is my “day off,” which means I’m spending the entire day grading papers, or avoiding grading papers by goofing off on the internet. I just encountered the sentence, “Therefore, x=2 for all values of x.” I have no hope for anything anymore.
I believe it should be a federal law that you are allowed to find that student, give them 30 seconds to realize the scope of their wrongness spontaneously and repent, and then remove them from the gene pool if they fail to take that opportunity.
Robert @82 – that must be a difference between US and UK schools, then. Admissions decisions here (as opposed to the processing of the paperwork) are handled entirely by academic staff and not by administrators.
Oh goodness yes. Europe is a whole ‘nother deal. It’s like they’re a different country over there.
In the UK, students go into university already knowing what they’re going to study, and so it’s that academic department that makes the decision, right? Here, lots of people do have some idea what they want to study when they start, but most schools encourage students to try out a few different things before making a decision. There are some that won’t even let you officially declare a major during your first year.
I’ve found that our distribution requirements tend to surprise people used to the UK system, too. There, you pretty much just take courses in your field, right? Here, each college has a different system, but a fairly typical one from the school where I went for undergrad is that every student, no matter what their major, must take at least one math course, one science course with a lab component, one additional math or science; one art or music, one social science, one humanities; three semesters (or testing equivalent) of a foreign language; one course dealing with Foundations of Western Culture; and one course dealing with Non-Western or Latin American Civilizations. (I went the easy way for the required art course. I actually do like art, but I never particularly enjoyed art classes. So I took Music Theory for my art requirement, which was pretty much just learning how to read music and how scales and chords work. I’ve been playing piano since I was five. I think I did a total of two hours of homework and studying for that course the entire semester.)
edit: I feel like I’m skipping something in the list of requirements. I think that maybe you needed one semester of American history? You also had to take at least one course that was officially “writing intensive.”
I’m familiar with the American system overall, as I did my PhD in the US and my father teaches at an American university. I just never realized how the undergraduate admissions system works in the US, which was rather stupid of me in retrospect, as during my five years as a grad student, not a single professor ever complained about having to do undergrad admissions.
@Robert at 76:
Robert, you’re a good man, but you are most emphatically wrong that no parent who CAN, won’t. There are a lot of bad parents out there, and abuse comes in more forms than CPS covers.
Robert, you totally ignored my point that even if you eliminate personal essays or declare “no race or gender mentioning” (which… I don’t even have time to go into the problems with, other than to say that it’s always people on the margins who are called out for “making ___ an issue” by virtue of failing to pass as part of the dominant norm), just students own resumes would provide plenty of outing.
And the content of essays is important to schools. “Why do you want to pursue a degree in Underwater Basket Weaving at West Dustbowl University and Aircondtioner Repair School?” is the kind of thing asked all the time, which may be relevant if the UBW department has a surfeit of qualified applicants and is trying to decide who should get the 400 slots in their freshman class based on whose goals are realistic and fit with their program’s mission and focus.
There is very little in “students own resumes” which is relevant in any way to an unbiased admission process. Did your high school have accreditation as being non-totally-failed? What was your GPA? What were your standardized test scores? Those don’t come color-coded, and they’re 95% of the information that even the elite schools ought to be looking at. (They’re 100% of the information that the non-elite schools look at.)
The content of essays is important to schools because admissions departments are staffed by human beings who want to be Important Agents of Change in a Racially Harmonious Progressive World, instead of being functionaries who examine the high school transcript for evidence of forgery, type “615/420” into the “SAT” field, and double-check the data entry before allowing the computer to make the admission decision. I’ve read a thousand of those essays (OK, a hundred) and I’ve written a dozen of them and 99.999% of them are a complete, abject, and total waste of time. VERY occasionally, you get some relevant data from them. VERY. That data could just as easily be incorporated in the cover letter with the application. (“I want to go to Dartmouth because it was Dartmouth-educated guerilla fighters who stormed the compound where my family was being held and freed us in a three-day gun battle. I am talking SCHOOL SPIRIT.”)
Individual programs at schools are generally size-flexible from year to year. If the underwater HVAC course is boomingly popular, then the school isn’t going to start rationing “slots” unless the school is being administered by a particularly obsolete and clueless brand of socialist. They’re going to hire five new adjuncts and open the floodgates wide. The critical information presented by some vapid 17-year old about why economics in the tone poems of Walt Whitman are going to like totally be her major focus in life can be sacrificed; the tone poem-econ conflux of student demand will show itself quickly enough even without the valuable heads up. (A heads up to people, in the American model, who have very little input into the planning process of the various schools anyway. Schools are run by deans. Deans on occasion will listen to the brilliant professors who actually know everything about their department; that they would listen to admissions people is, 99% of the time, the inspiration for peals of hysterical laughter. “Your office is on fire”, maybe; “you should hire more feminist theory professors, there’s a huge demand”, no.
(I really do like undergraduates, even the dim bulbs, I just have absolutely no illusions that they are competent to convey any important information about themselves at that age and that stage of mental development. Barring the occasional hypergenius, who will fix things to suit themselves anyway, there’s just no point in TALKING to them. The numbers have the information needed.)
SATs, to some extent, since everyone takes the same test. Though I’d want to see a solid study correlating SAT scores to college performance before letting every kid’s fate hinge on a single standardized test. (I had a very good SAT score in part because I practiced for it and developed specific skills related to bubble tests. A kid with the same crazy vocabulary and decent math skills who hadn’t had the time for obsessive SAT prep starting in seventh grade would probably have done just as well in college as I did, but less well on the test.)
But GPA, really? Just because it’s a number doesn’t mean it’s objective. You have the different grading scales of each school, differences in curriculum, and the subjective opinions of dozens of different teachers.
It also doesn’t even prevent screwing over kids who are homeschooled, because they don’t have a GPA.
Okay, take two students with a 3.5 and a 1400 SAT. One has never held a job, and does very little in the way of extracurriculars. The other works on weekends and during the summer, and plays a sport every season.
Not only do those same grades and scores probably represent different academic ability, but juggling conflicting priorities is a skill that comes in really handy in college.
They don’t really try to normalize GPA; if you had hard teachers, that sucks. If you think your 2.1 is going to be an issue, it’s perfectly legit to say “hey man, I was taking nineteen calculus classes every semester, please take that into account” and they will. (That’s the kind of fudging when people fall into the gray area I referred to.)
Yes, extracurriculars and jobs probably do tell us something meaningful about time management skills and/or motivation and/or underlying ability…but they don’t tell us that meaningful thing in any predictable or consistent way, so once again, it’s noise. If you had good grades and good tests, you get in. If you had bad grades and bad tests, you don’t, even if you went over to Mr. Miyagi’s house every day AND defeated the Cobra Kai at regionals.
There was massive documentation of the SAT’s quite strong correlation to academic performance. Then they totally redesigned the test, throwing fifty years of data collection into the toilet and starting the research over. Turns out that the new SAT has quite a strong correlation to academic performance.
Robert, that study controlled for race, gender, high school, and several other variables. It’s not a direct SAT:GPA comparison. It also found that high school GPA (the thing that’s used in the top 10% program) is a stronger predictor of college GPA than SAT scores are. The conclusion of the study notes that it may be the newness that makes the new SAT a good predictor — once it’s been around for a while and people figure out how to prep for it, a lot of that might change. (I know several people who increased their SAT scores by 200 points with Princeton Review or Kaplan. I seriously doubt that their expected success in college was any different before and after taking the Princeton Review course.)
There’s also this study, on race- and gender-based differences in predicting college success, which pretty much shows that, if you just look at SAT scores or high school GPA without controlling for race and gender, and use that to predict college GPA, then on average, the black students will actually earn a higher college GPA than the model suggested. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=sat%20gpa%20race%20gender&source=web&cd=18&ved=0CEsQFjAHOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.cluteonline.com%2Findex.php%2FJDM%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F4967%2F5059&ei=HKyKUIHHGu2J0QGyiYG4Bg&usg=AFQjCNEV16j-3PZKgPa8-kitgIS9LeWpbw