When I was finishing my undergraduate studies, I was confused about why African American students I knew (social circle, roommates, class projects) were all performing so poorly academically. It took a few years to realize that the African American students who would have fit in perfectly in my classes all went to a higher ranked school, and my school had to reach down to "meet their numbers".

The students who get bumped up to a better school (and graduate) end up getting better paying jobs, but it must cause a lot of people to form negative stereotypes along the way.

Maybe a better solution would be to provide extra help to disadvantaged groups before students are academically segregated.

>Maybe a better solution would be to provide extra help to disadvantaged groups before students are academically segregated.

Yes, the better approach is to help this kids as early as possible. However the problem is that kids are academically segregated from the very start by the quality of their school district. I am all for fixing that.

I might be more willing to believe this academic segregation is a genuine concern from this administration if they actually made any effort at improving these poor districts instead of seemingly ignoring the problem and giving parents the choice to simply abandon these school districts.

If your goal is to make everyone think that black people are less intelligent then there are few better ways than to accept less capable black people into basically every college in the entire USA. Even die hard liberals will have unconscious bias from knowing that the black people were mostly the worst in every class they took.

Thomas Sowell argues something along the lines of:

"Admitting people into college when they do not have the academic merit to be accepted harms them because they end up failing out of their class, even if they could have been wildly successful at a less rigorous university."

Perhaps they're referring to this line of argument?

Maybe this is true at schools further down the competitiveness hierarchy, but this isn't going to be true at Yale. The number of people who can do the work at a school like Yale is going be drastically outpace the number of people admitted. They aren't reaching to accept candidates who can't do the work.

Being the worst in class greatly harms your confidence though while being the best in class greatly boosts it. The effects of being the worst and seeing others like you also being the worst for 4 years throughout college will create a stigma lasting a lifetime. The current system ensures that most black college students will be among the worst in their class. If instead we did race blind admissions then black students would get into less prestigious universities but they would perform just as well as everyone else at those universities, which would let us start working away the stigma against black students.

I don't know. Sowell is a controversial figure, of course, but highly respected and educated. He served as a professor at Cornell, where he said this dynamic was extremely apparent, and it saddened him because there were many such students in his class who would've been top of their grade at a "Tier 2" university.

I'll try to find the source, from one of his books.

Directly from Yale:[1]

>We estimate that over three quarters of the students who apply for admission to Yale are qualified to do the work here. The great majority of students who are admitted stand out from the rest because a lot of little things, when added up, tip the scale in their favor.

Their applicant pool is so deep that they have their pick of qualified students of every type. They aren't admitting people who can't do the work just to meet some quota.

[1] - https://admissions.yale.edu/what-yale-looks-for

Ok, but it's not so much about being able to do the work as where you fall in the class. It seems unavoidable that a policy like this will cluster black students lower in their class, which is demoralizing and probably has the opposite of its intended effect.

Your first comment was about people "failing out" and now it isn't "about being able to do the work" but instead the problem is these students are "lower in their class". Those goalposts moved quickly.

But let's say your theory is true and that the lower ranks of Yale's graduating classes are full of Black students, why is that a problem? Is getting bad grades at Yale going to damage your life? Are people graduating low in their class from elite universities worse off than people graduating higher in their class from worst universities? Plenty of successful people weren't highly ranked in their graduating class. Getting bad grades at an elite university like Yale seems to almost be a requirement to run for president nowadays. And regardless of the admission policies, some people have to end up being the worst ranked in their graduating class. Why does it matter if it is a Black students or anyone else?

Being the worst in the class a) makes you more likely to fail university b) threatens to make you feel like a fraudulent idiot, undermining your self-confidence in the long run.

Would I personally pick worst in class at a top uni over middle or best a level lower? Eh, probably.

No, I'm not moving the goalposts! Sowell's point is exactly that - being the worst in your class, and sharing that with all your peers of the same race, is tantamount to constant demoralization and disenfranchisement. This dynamic leads to higher drop out rates.

Either way, it's really not my theory. It's something Thomas Sowell documented in one of his books. Here he is talking about it: "Thomas Sowell: affirmative action creates academic failure & resentment" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvnTByzTmA.

Sowell is black, if it matters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell.

> The Justice Department is claiming that those African Americans accepted into Yale are actually hurt by being accepted because their acceptance is reinforcing stereotypes that they needed extra assistance to get accepted.

It is perpetuating the racial stereotype of black people as stupid and likely creates strong unconscious bias in everyone at that college that black people are dumber, since among the students accepted to the school the black students will have the worst track record. It doesn't hurt the black people individually, but it hurts black people as a group. I wouldn't be surprised if we include the group effect that even the individuals are hurt more than helped long term.