> Seems like a cop-out to me, especially when dealing with scarce resources (ie. admission slots). Your policy of "more inclusion" by giving preferential treatment to one group, ends up excluding everyone else.

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.

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

You're still avoiding the question. Is your position "I support inclusion, only when resources are not scarce?"

> You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school.

You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country.

I support actions that make the world a more just place in the Rawlsian sense of the word. Affirmative action makes the world a more just place.

> 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.

Okay, sure. In a perfect world we would have enough resources for everything. In the real world, affirmative action policies disadvantage asian people.

> Affirmative action makes the world a more just place.

The question you have been dancing around: why is it just to disadvantage Asians in favor of other minorities? What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?

There is none, because there is no mainstream progressive position associated with discriminating against Asians. You can refer back to my original comment for why that is.

Edit: To be clear: what I'm claiming is that the "progressive" position is better associated with improving education overall. It's only through a particularly warped partisan lens does it become this ridiculous squabble over artificially scarce resources.

>There is none, because there is no mainstream progressive position associated with discriminating against Asians.

Right, just as there's no political party/government whose position is runaway inflation. Yet, runaway inflation still happens, usually as a result of some sort of government policy. The fact that no one advocates for it directly is irrelevant. If you advocate for a policy, you're advocating for all of its effects, good or bad.

>There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country.

I'm under the impression that at least for undergraduate education, your average StateU is probably on par with the best name brand colleges. Most of the value of going to a selective school is the signaling/branding aspect, not necessarily the education itself (although it still might be above average). When considering that aspect, you really can't have "1 million excellent schools", because if every school is excellent, than no school is.

It is also networking and exposure to a faculty and student body that ideally passes on the very rare, ineffable, and valuable quality where they have the sense that anything is possible and the world can be changed. State schools have less exposure to this. Whether it is actually valuable and transmissible I don't know.

This is not true since it's the faculty and students that make a school "elite". Unless all 100 million students are brilliant and you have enough brilliant faculty to head those schools, you're going to end up with good and bad schools.

> You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country.

That's the system we have now. But you end up running out of students who are capable of receiving an excellent education.

>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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

I don't think there's anything particularly dreamy or fanciful about a more equal educational system.

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.

>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.

I assume you either have little experience with the US school system or other countries school systems.

There is most definitely similar inequality in other countries.

Do they also have a permanent underclass with a high crime rate and result in mass incarceration?

Permanent underclass? Yes.

Mass incarceration? Depending on your definition

Every other country has a similar system. Even the Soviet communists, at the height of their power, had more or less the same system.

Sorry for being unclear, the "cop-out" was a criticism with that position (ie. that we can do stuff because they're "inclusive" but ignore the consequences), not with you specifically.

Yep, this demonstrates (IMO) the actual problem: we want to have our cake (an artificially elite educational system) and eat it too.

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.