There are two big problems though:
One is that it tries to correct by using race as a proxy. Middle class black americans and African immigrants get the advantages, poor asians get left out no matter how hard they work, and poor black americans get forgotten.
The second mistake is assuming that the tweaks are effective and don't have unintended consequences.
It's not the policy only in the State. Believe or not, there's a similar policy in China that if a student is ethnic minority then s/he can get extra scores on the university entry exam named GaoKao which is equivalent to SAT. To take advantage of the preferential treatment, there are quite some fake "minority" students who might have some blood of ethnic minorities. The favorable treatment is not limited to GaoKao.
Personally I'm not totally against the policy in general. It's true that weak groups need to be taken care of. But there are many problems:
1.It doesn't reflect the real academic capability for the students who got extra scores. Eventually some of them can not catch up the pace of normal courses.
2.It created another stereo type and bias towards those students. The are considered to be less competent but actually some of them are excellent.
3.There's no social problem like eastern Asia countries that the minorities are very small group. No body complain. In US it's a totally different situation that could cause tension.
I was amused, looking up the admission thresholds for 清华, to see that Uyghur applicants get their scores docked by an amount that I assume equals the boost they got for being Uyghur.
No such readjustment seems to be applied for Mongols, Tujia, or etc.
Affirmative action is messy because it's getting in the middle of zero sum games (e.g. college admissions and hiring). But diversity is a significant problem in many parts of American society, and just about every proposed solution is messy, ineffective, or both.
Elite status is the real zero-sum game, because it's exclusive by definition. Elite universities don't provide substantially better education than those dedicated to educating the masses. They are elite because they offer elite status and opportunities for networking with the future elite.
People can bring up "systemic discrimination", but using Affirmative Action as the cudgel to solve this isn't fixing the issue, it's a stopgap that will probably make it worse.
Based on current wtf pricing and demand, 2xing the number might do it.
Right now, megacorps are abusing colleges as a filter to weed out people who can't cope with high stress environments or keep deadlines and, even more egregious, load the cost for a lot of what used to be employer-paid on-the-job training onto the students via student loans. A "bullshit job" should not require a college degree.
It'll take time but it will fix itself.
I’m (mostly) white. The first 5 years of my life I grew up in a trailer house. My wife is also (mostly) white, and both sides of her family lost everything during the Great Depression. Is there any good reason a rich black kid should have been out ahead of us in admissions, just because of his skin color?
That shouldn't ever be a goal.
Unfortunately a lot of people don't realise that the real world isn't, and can't be, that way.
But my point is, you get an overrepresentation of "Asians" due to the increased focus. This leads to an increased flow of more qualified candidates due to the greater investment from the "Asian" population. The issue for African American underrepresentation is in my opinion, the pipeline, not the admission.
Is it income disparity? Single parent households? Lack of funding for schools in poor communities? Why can't we focus on addressing those and leveling the playing field rather than picking one way to group people (by race in this case) and artificially tipping the scale? Why not by gender, or family income, or height or beauty? Those all have impacts to life outcome too.
And the bottom half, most of those aren't the kind of shitty parents you're suggesting they are, either.
Well, the black bastardy rate at last count was 70%. They're not exactly model parents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...
"“Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?” Collins wrote, using asterisks in place of a racial slur. “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)r is still being a n(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)r. You’re still considered ‘the help.’”"
https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-school-boards-...
Of course the more likely reason is that this is nothing more than a power grab and any data point that suggests minorities can succeed in the current system is an arrow at the heart of their political theories.
I'm a progressive myself (albeit one that disagrees with the party line on this particular issue), and it's blatantly obvious that progressives that support anti-Asian discrimination like this are well aware of how messed up it is and how bad it looks, so they try to deflect, rather than engage directly.
Many progressives believe in affirmative action, which doesn't say anything about the particulars of the groups that aren't being explicitly included. Nobody at all is interested in exclusion; they are interested in more inclusion.
Seems like a cop-out to me, especially when dealing with scarce resources (ie. admission slots). The policy of "more inclusion" by giving preferential treatment to one group, ends up excluding everyone else.
edit: reworded "Your policy" to "The policy" to avoid making it about the parent.
I never agreed to artificial scarcity in the form of admission slots, and so I'm not interested in defending any particular consequence of that system.
You're still avoiding the question. Is your position "I support inclusion, only when resources are not scarce?"
You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country.
I support actions that make the world a more just place in the Rawlsian sense of the word. Affirmative action makes the world a more just place.
No it doesn't -- race-blind admission standards make the world more just, affirmative action make people like you feel as though they make the world more just. Big difference.
There's obviously no evidence to suggest standardized evaluation of academic excellence favor any particular racial genetics. The fact that today in the US, race-blind admission causes over/under representation of certain racial demographics is thus entirely due to social-economical and cultural factors. We can therefore expect that once those factors are equalized, then the results of a standardized race-blind admission process should naturally reflect the racial demographics of the general populace.
Unfortunately, just as those social-economical and cultural factors are the cumulation of damages done by racial oppression over many generations, so too its undoing will take generations to fully accomplish. And yes, that does mean you may likely not live to see that day. But the seemingly easy path of using affirmative action to force an outcome so that you can pretend to live in a just world is entirely the wrong way to tackle this problem, and will only serve to make the world worse for everyone involved.
> Affirmative action makes the world a more just place.
The question you have been dancing around: why is it just to disadvantage Asians in favor of other minorities? What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?
Edit: To be clear: what I'm claiming is that the "progressive" position is better associated with improving education overall. It's only through a particularly warped partisan lens does it become this ridiculous squabble over artificially scarce resources.
Right, just as there's no political party/government whose position is runaway inflation. Yet, runaway inflation still happens, usually as a result of some sort of government policy. The fact that no one advocates for it directly is irrelevant. If you advocate for a policy, you're advocating for all of its effects, good or bad.
I'm under the impression that at least for undergraduate education, your average StateU is probably on par with the best name brand colleges. Most of the value of going to a selective school is the signaling/branding aspect, not necessarily the education itself (although it still might be above average). When considering that aspect, you really can't have "1 million excellent schools", because if every school is excellent, than no school is.
That's the system we have now. But you end up running out of students who are capable of receiving an excellent education.
My understanding is that the US, with its uniquely devolved set of educational authorities and standards is alone in the developed world in terms of the inequality of education offered to its children.
In terms of primary and secondary education, absolutely. In higher education, inequality is common across countries, but higher education has a much smaller average effect on actual life outcomes than childhood education. Yet somehow reforming the school system (and the avaricious correlation between property taxes and outcomes) gets a lot less political oxygen.
There is most definitely similar inequality in other countries.
Mass incarceration? Depending on your definition
I want to an artificially elite high school (one of the best in the country), and I would much rather see everyone and not just the presumed elite treated the way I was.
The change to subjective admissions criteria that led to a drop from 73% Asians to under 50% at Thomas Jefferson could be said to be more inclusive of the races that saw increased representation. It's also correct to say that it's more exclusive of Asians.
The overall quality of America's educational system is not fixed-sum. We should be creating a dozen more TJs for every one that currently exists.
To narrow down more surgically on the issue here:
> Many progressives believe in affirmative action, which doesn't say anything about the particulars of the groups that aren't being explicitly included. Nobody at all is interested in exclusion; they are interested in more inclusion.
This is incorrect. Affirmative action is absolutely just as much about exclusion as inclusion. Advantaging one group is the same thing as disadvantaging all other groups. And yes, the mainstream progressive platform is to advantage minorities other than Asians - which is the same thing as disadvantaging Asians.
My company tried to pull this argument when proposing a larger bonus to recruiters for hiring diverse candidates. "Oh it's not disadvantaging any group, it's just being more inclusive towards diverse groups". But it's not. The company phrased is as an extra $250 to ($500 vs $250) to inspire recruiters to be more inclusive towards women and URM. But you could say the normal bonus is $500, but there's a $250 penalty for non-diverse candidates. Advantaging vs disadvantaging, and inclusion vs exclusion. They're all two ends of the same lever.
The reason for disadvantaging Asians (and Jews) is that it has always been fashionable to do so. This was true long before the Chinese Exclusion Act and, in the US, it seems it may always be true.
There is no "mainstream Progressive (sic) justification" for discriminating against Asians, because there is no progressive political platform built on discriminating against Asians.
Here's Eugene Volokh writing about it in 1998: https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/asian.htm
https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board...
If you have limited open positions and you use race to determine who gets them then you are excluding 1 person for every 1 person you are including.
In a contingency, the inclusion of a group will result in exclusion in other groups.
*obligatory disclaimer that I'm not equating the groups of people or their mistreatment, nor condoning any of their mistreatment.
[1] taken from wikipedia
That one threw me for a loop.
Perhaps there should just be a word for descendants of people with lower socioeconomic status/power/opportunities.
It basically means EVERYONE except white people - I think that does more harm that good
That'd be getting too close to the actual problem in society, we can't have that!
Citation needed for that one.
AFAIK, that's the progressive justification. They think if schools don't have similar demographics to the country as a whole, or the area they are located in, then some form of racism (using the critical theory definition here) is occurring.
Have you ever worked at a place where you were doing (objectively) well, perhaps by introducing new tech, or optimizing existing processes, or even just because you were working your ass off, but your coworkers were angry because they weren’t doing so well and you were causing problems for them?
If so, was that healthy? Did it serve the companies (or long term groups) interests?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52993306
>On 28 May, Ms Mitchum emailed Merriam-Webster to point out that racism is "both prejudice combined with social and institutional power. It is a system of advantage based on skin colour".
What would you call treating a 17 year old different based on their skin color? If we can't use the word racism anymore, then I'll call it bigoted.
I live in a town that's associated with progressivism, and know a lot of people who would not object to being called progressives. Honestly I haven't heard anybody endorsing discrimination against Asians, much less justifying it.
i.e. the idea that if a high number of Asians are making it in despite low prevalence in the total population, then it is because we have created a system that serves them disproportionately (and therefore unfairly).
That's mostly an attempt to get around this:
Average US Asian IQ: 105.
Average US White IQ: 99.
Average US Black IQ: 85-90.
Most comments focus on the black-white gap, but the Asian/non-Asian is substantial.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor...
By definition, the white average is 100 on these components. Blacks have a lower average, but (compared to the white profile) they look "flat"; their reasoning scores are similar to their verbal scores are similar to their spatial scores. Ashkenazi Jews also look flat, but with elevated averages.
East Asians aren't like that. The average figure represents a verbal score that is depressed relative to whites, but an elevated reasoning score and an extremely elevated spatial score. The difference in profile has been widely noted in popular culture. (For example: https://ifunny.co/picture/asians-because-your-calculus-sure-... .) But it doesn't seem to come up much in IQ discussions.
(Native Americans have a profile similar to East Asians, but with low scores.)
This isn't well understood, but starting with a tonal language has a major influence on how speech processing in the brain works.[1]
[1] https://theconversation.com/if-you-speak-mandarin-your-brain...
I can provide some low-effort citations:
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The Bell Curve has this to say:
> East Asians living overseas score about the same or slightly lower than whites on verbal IQ and substantially higher on visuospatial IQ. Even in the rare studies that have found overall Japanese or Chinese IQs no higher than white IQs [...], the discrepancy between verbal and visuospatial IQ persists. For Japanese living in asia, a 1987 review of the literature demonstrated without much question that the verbal-visuospatial difference persists even in examinations that have been thoroughly adapted to the Japanese language and, indeed, in tests developed by the Japanese themselves.
> This finding has an echo in the United States, where Asian-American students abound in engineering, in medical schools, and in graduate programs in the sciences, but are scarce in law schools and graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences.
> [Philip] Vernon's overall appraisal was that the mean Asian-American IQ is about 97 on verbal tests and about 110 on visuospatial tests.
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Richard Lynn discusses the pattern in Race Differences in Intelligence:
> [Row 16] shows an exaggerated version of the typical East Asian pattern of high reasoning IQ (108), higher spatial IQ (114), and weaker verbal IQ (92).
> Two conclusions can be drawn from the studies summarized in table 10.1.
> The first is that all the East Asian IQs are a little higher than those of Europeans, except for the Chen et al. (1996) studies of general information in Japan and Taiwan, and the Georgas et al. (2003) result for South Korea, all of which give East Asians an IQ of 100. [...] The median IQ of the studies is 105 and should be taken as the best estimate of the IQs of indigenous East Asians.
> Second, eleven of the studies contain measures of verbal and visualization abilities and in ten of these the visualization IQ is greater than the verbal IQ (the study in row 36 [finding a verbal IQ of 121 [!?] and visual of 109 in 454 Japanese children in Nagoya aged 5-7 years] is the exception). The mean and median differences between the two abilities are both 12 IQ points. This difference appears in a variety of tests. The finding of the stronger visualization abilities and weaker verbal abilities is so consistently present and so large that it appears to be a real phenomenon.
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I'll editorialize here to note that an average 12-point difference between Asian verbal ability and Asian visuospatial ability dwarfs the average 5-point difference between Asian ability overall and white ability overall. This is a case where the point estimate for IQ has lost significant, valuable information.