And, hopefully a few years later, they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires.
Of course the issues you raise are real, and there is a whole constellation of systemic racism issues that specifically affect black people in a unique way. But when it comes to affirmative action there's a fundamental issue that goes beyond privilege narratives:
> Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now, and maybe, I don’t know, treat each one as an individual and judge them based on the content of their character
That's a nice sentiment, but it overlooks the fact that AA introduces this doubt, the doubt is in fact real, and can't be papered over with good intentions and turning a blind eye to cause and effect. The question is whether the net good in counter-balancing other systemic racism is worth the cost. That's not an easy question to answer. Some individuals would be more than happy to take any advantage they can get, and others want to be judged purely on their individual character.
Maybe. Every once in a while we have someone I consider an AA-only hire, but they don't stick around. OK, I'll be honest, the most recent one I was wrong - even though they lacked experience, they were clearly better than the (white male) person they replaced... and they're still here so I'm happy.
I'm going to imagine a world without "AA hires". I think people still get judged based on their skin color. That's the way rascism works.
So, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Anyway, when an incompetent colleague sticks around for years... I wish I could blame affirmative action and feel good, but nope - instead I'm going to blame management.
Hey, I'm well aware of the doubt. As an Asian male who went to an elite university, I had doubts about everybody. Black kids, Native Americans, Latinos, women... definitely AA, it goes without saying. The jocks of course got in on their ability to hit balls rather than books. And the private school lifers who've been groomed like show horses since kindergarten are merely highly polished legacy turds. But wait, I think that one white kid from Alaska only got in so the school can say they have students from all 50 states. And the guys from rural Ohio and Nebraska? You know they're the token farmers of the class. The kids whose parents were professors? Nepotism of the intelligentsia. Really, the only legitimate admits beyond suspicion were the other Asian males. Well, except the ones who were the first generation to go to college in their families. You know they got in on some sob story. And the fresh off the boat Asians? They barely speak English, so don't tell me they got 760 on the SAT verbal. Immigrants getting special treatment again. And forget all those Asians who only got in because their parents had an Ivy League fetish. They're just grinders with zero intellectual spark. Perfect for a life as some kind of joyless doctor, just as their parents always wanted.
All these elite schools should not only get rid of AA, but they should only accept Asian guys who have perfect grades and SAT test scores, hails from one of the major coastal cities, have parents who went to non-elite universities, are not athletes, play no instruments, attended public schools, are not first generation immigrants, have no bullshit "altruistic" extracurriculars, and have no disabilities. They would be the only ones who are truly academically qualified without any doubt.
If you remove that discrimination, you'll let more of them in, and regression towards the mean will kick in.
For comparison, if you have a 'rich people' club, and they let blue people in when they own more than a million dollars, and green people only when they own more than a billion dollars, the green people in the club will be richer on average.
If you change the requirement to let anyone in who owns at least two million dollars, the gap in average wealth of admitted people from either group will narrow.
It won't necessarily disappear, because the underlying distributions of wealth might be weird. For all we know, after the change the average admitted blue one might be richer than the average admitted green.
You can build some real world example using data from https://www.statista.com/statistics/201426/the-richest-peopl...
Fun fact: a club that only admits Americans owning more than 150 billion USD would be 50% African American.
Just like when you see the the son of the CEO working at the company, there's a certain probability that he didn't get in based on his performance alone.
Of course, as you suggest, there are sons of the CEO who really are the most qualified candidate for whatever job they are holding. But there's also nepotism.
The titular point of the article was that class is really where the discrimination happens nowadays. Race and gender prejudices still exist but have taken a back seat to class inequality. The article also suggests the primary driver for this--deterioration of public primary schooling. It's very easy to see how wealth can allow some families to leap over this problem.
edit: sorry it sounded like you were being sarcastic? Now I can't tell after your other comment
> Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites. [1]
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
The expected consequence of eliminating race-based affirmative action is that URM students will instead attend less selective universities where they're more likely to persist. Sure, the university they graduate from may not be as prestigious. But on the flipside, they'll be more likely to graduate in the field they actually wanted to study. They'll also probably save a lot of money, since changing majors partway through usually means that these students take 5 or 6 years to graduate.
1. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14885/w148...
2. "Persistence rate" means the rate at which students complete their declared major. It's rare for students to drop out of university entirely, much more common is that they change to a less demanding major - that is, they don't persist in their initial major.
They would also graduate with a STEM major, which would likely enable more lucrative career options.
> this is the claim of some recent research
It looks like this working paper is over a decade old. Was it published recently?
Only racist losers assume I'm a diversity hire. And I'd actually rather they seethe at the "diversity hire" who just happens to somehow magically drive high-impact projects at every company he's ever worked at culminating in a career that's seen him work on everything from some of the most used apps in the world to self-driving cars.
For that particular brand of loser if it isn't affirmative action it'll be something else:
- Our CTO is from a West African nation, I'm from a West African nation, we bonded over that so actually its neopotism
- Affirmative action may be banned and we dropped D&I but actually the hiring manager has a personal secret agenda to hire blackies
- One of the people that interviewed him was black so obviously they gave me a pass.
But of course let's forget about the legacy admission that landed you in a school, let's forget how you bond with your interviewers over in-office beer kegs and inside jokes from your favorite shows in your shared culture, let's forget about that internship from a family friend, etc. etc.
If you think people who assume minorities are diversity hires only exist in movies I'm not sure if you're naïve, clueless, or both.
> They may look at you and wonder where you rank, so it forces you to prove yourself
I mean you want to tell yourself no one cares, but you also want to say that removing AA forces me to prove myself? (actually that's just a really vaguely written sentence, removing AA? or being black? what is "it"?)
Why do white people get so uncomfortable at the thought that other whites can be racist? I didn't say you think of me as a diversity hire, yet you immediately feel the need to start throwing yourself in front of the bullet with statements like "this isn't a movie".
Is this some sort of cognitive dissonance from the people who have this thoughts deep down or something?
I doubt white people are surprised by other white people can be racist. It is part of mainstream media. What may surprise you is many black people can be racist against other black people too.
Interesting... when race hadn't been specified, people wondering that about me was something that only happens in movies.
But the moment I specifically mention white people then "well black people are wondering it too!!!!!"
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It's almost like you don't care either way as long as you're running interference for the people I'm describing... but why are you doing that?
Again it's not all white people, not even most, assuming minority = diversity hire, and for that reason I initially didn't mention a specific race at all until the first reply I got was someone in full denial mode...
The only people who should feel the need to defend against what I'm saying are people who hold these thoughts. But I'm sure you don't, right?
> I doubt white people are surprised by other white people can be racist.
Yet, again, you felt confident enough to open a comment with patronizing levels of denial at the idea that there are people who think most minorities can't hack it outside of being a token hire... despite page full of comments essentially saying that!
> What may surprise you is many black people can be racist against other black people too.
Please don't project personal naivety and ignorance onto me. YOU are the one who thinks that someone assuming a minority is a diversity hire only happens in movies, not I.
The western world weaponized racism amongst blacks across the continent I'm from and we're still seeing the results today in places like Sudan. Maybe you should brush up on your social studies if you were not aware.
Do you believe everyone who visits here is white? I would guess half of the people on here have various shades of color.
Your views are white and black and that's not reality. The world is not a movie. Most people in the world are not even white or black. Why are you excluding them?
Why do you think it is fair to let in less qualified black students over more qualified asian and Indian students?
I am black and I didn't say I live in Sudan. Sudan is not in West Africa.
I knew you were white because you said people who think minorities are token hires is something that only happens in movies.
Minorities can be racist, but a white person would be the first to say something so naïve.
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> Your views are white and black and that's not reality. The world is not a movie. Most people in the world are not even white or black. Why are you excluding them?
Scraping the bottom of the barrel until your fingers bleed here... I didn't mention your race until you outed yourself with your ignorant remark.
You're white, I'm black, that's the only reason why white and black were mentioned. Which aspect of my original comment relies on a specific race to be true?
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> Why do you think it is fair to let in less qualified black students over more qualified asian and Indian students?
When you're out of things to say it's best to desperately shove words into your detractor's mouth.
You're clearly not convinced of anything you just wrote, but you felt the need to say something after being trounced. Unfortunately this wasn't the answer we were looking for.
Maybe just reflect on this conversation and grow as a person.
I don't think affirmative action affects "sleeping their way to the top".
I mean... this isn't what AA does at all.
No, it doesn’t.
"Despite this assertion, the development of the Griggs doctrine has proved anything but friendly to meritocratic objectives. Although the Supreme Court has never held that all workplaces must be racially balanced, lower courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which is charged with administering Title VII, have firmly embraced the presumption that the racial profiles of particular workplaces should reflect the racial composition of the broader population."
"Recently, prompted by the racially adverse impact of measures of verbal and abstract analysis — areas in which some minority groups underperform — experts have also developed alternative instruments that employ audio or video techniques, or that make use of so-called "assessment center" protocols based on job simulations, real-time problem solving, or actual work samples."
"Although few disparate-impact lawsuits are actually filed, and though defendants win most of those that are, the specter of disparate-impact lawsuits nonetheless dangles like a Sword of Damocles over employers' heads. The prospect of onerous, unpredictable, and protracted litigation provides employers with a strong incentive to find some way to avoid being sued. One temptation is to satisfy diversity targets by relaxing personnel-selection standards across the board. Firms can also switch to more haphazard staffing methods that tend to obscure informal affirmative action or other race-conscious practices. Some of these tactics pose the risk of yielding a less effective work force, while others (such as the use of race-based criteria) are legally suspect or even expressly forbidden under Title VII."
At least, that's with the typical meaning of "affirmative action". It's a nebulous term that some use to encompass things like blind orchestra auditions. In the tech world this could be equated with anonymous resumes and blind zoom interviews with modulated voices. But few tech companies seem to be interested in this type of affirmative action.
Certain people just refuse to accept certain groups of people are capable of accomplishment without outside help or uniquely uncommon circumstances.
But every generation finds some excuse that their prejudices are "rational".
Certain people just refuse to accept certain groups of people are capable of accomplishment without outside help or uniquely uncommon circumstances.
Those seem like quite distinct issues, like you might as well lump in 'good at office politics' into it
These days, when I hear discussion about inclusive hiring, regardless of whether people are for or against it, there is a common assumption that allowances will have to be made for employees of lesser ability.
My impression is that this change in attitude started in the mid-1990s.
In some ways, someone arbitrarily opening the door for you sheds a lot of load in the short-term. You still need all the grit that a chip on your shoulder gives you in order to succeed in the long run. When you do succeed you'll have to shed that load unless you want to sound like a bitter ass the rest of your life. My point here is, I didn't really need anyone to tell me that I was looked down on (by certain people) for a period of time to know it, and I'm not sure college admissions or jobs that are attracting diversity hires are attracting people who give a shit what you think in the short term.
Your opinion of me will be established long after the initial thought of, "Oh this guy is a diversity hire" has left the space between your ears.
Drop out rates for the disadvantaged can be high as well regardless of affirmative action getting them in. The difficulties are cultural and I agree that making this situation clearer is a net good.
Certainly in the workplace we've seen increased rates of job vacancies, yet employers will do everything in their power to try and avoid hiring you. This is especially apparent in tech (at least until recently) where companies couldn't hire fast enough, but also put the Leetcode screws to you to ensure that they couldn't find anyone to hire. This does suggest that we're becoming increasingly risk averse or that the stakes are higher.
Or change it so it is not race based. Instead make it geographical.
Say you want to admit 1000 students from the US. Partition the US into 1000 districts, with 1 student admitted per district.
Gerrymander the district boundaries to make sure that you get the racial demographics you want.
Have fun watching the Supreme Court try to explain why that is not OK but it is OK to gerrymander congressional districts to ensure Black people are underrepresented.
This is going to be a pain in the ass and you'll just lead to people gaming the system.
How about we just aim to make a high quality collage available to all who want it and extremely cheap and easy to finance so it's available to all?
or, wait. that's not good, is it. or is it?
The same is true of many minorities.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
A policy change that women are actually more likely to support than men. If it's a naked display of power, it's power of a group that's actually slightly overrepresented towards women.
1. https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p...
Multiple studies found White woman are the biggest benefactors of affirmative action.
But there's affirmative action for men in nursing, teaching, social studies, and similar female-dominated departments. There are active campaigns to recruit more male nurses - and male teachers are more likely to be promoted.
I also know first-hand that vocational ballet schools recruit equal numbers of boys and girls, so they can teach partnering - despite the fact they probably get 30 female applicants for every male applicant!
Of course, a male might find it unfair that the pro-male affirmative action is only applied in areas like ballet and nursing which they're not interested in - but that's the whole point of affirmative action.
And if you find it unfair that the pro-male affirmative action for female-dominated jobs only provides low-paid, low-status jobs - then feminists are very much in agreement with you about the unfairness of the situation :)
This is an interesting point, how much of the salary is determined by presumably impartial market forces, and how much of it is just status and social signalling.
We know status and social signalling play a significant role, otherwise behavioural economics and marketing wouldn't exist.
We also know that the diffrence between salaries of rank and file staff and C-suit executives have increased 15x in the past 20 years, without any corresponding increase in productivity
There is good reason to believe that if you could magically shove high-status men into nursing; nursing salaries would go up. But it's hard to see how it would happen unless we'd have equivalent of the draft for low status jobs.
Seems like evidence against the claim that status plays a significant role in setting salaries, unless their status has also increased massively in that time.
What is this inherent quality of high status for men?
Generally, status follows the possible utility one can provide for another, whether it be from being able to earn a lot of money, or having connections, having characteristics associated with positive stereotypes, or some other in demand quality.
Higher pay will increase status for whoever gets it, whether it be men or women or majority or minority. But the status follows the utility (or money in this case), not the other way around.
Drug dealing and Escort / prostitution provide significant income and poor status. Aristocracy had high status and sometimes little income.
They are not one and the same
All else equal, if you shoved high status men into nursing they would only serve to increase the supply of workers, thereby reducing bargaining power and thus incomes would be more likely to fall.
High status men become high status because they find places to go where supply is extremely constrained (naturally or artificially).
If we assume that:
Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance
and that men are admitted with lower performance on these metrics than some women
Then removing the affirmative action should result in the school graduating nurses who perform better, right? Why wouldn't we want that?
Because it's possible to have multiple goals at the same time. Reality is a co-optimization problem.
The points that you have made above are why there are still many more female nurses -- it's not like they will accept every single man, there's simply a lower threshold than there is for women.
I think a lot of the arguments about whether AA makes sense at all should really be reframed as discussions about how much AA makes sense. How do goals like diversity, inclusion, and minimizing inequality weigh against other objectives like rewarding merit and maximizing productivity outcomes? Surely the balance-point is not zero, but it's conceivably much closer to zero than today's policies would imply.
And one thing to consider is that people don't choose colleges just based on academics, they also choose them based on social environments, and as such universities have an incentive to try to create amicable social environments to attract the best students.
Case in point: I decided not to go to a good engineering school because it was more than 80% male and in a small town. The social environment was desperately bro-ish. I backpedaled and went to a liberal arts college primarily because of vastly superior social environment.
I dont think many people have such a privilege
My parents had only saved enough for me to go to a state school, which got me through one semester at a private college, and the rest were student loans, and working often multiple part-time jobs (and full-time in the summer).
I think those machines/tools are called "orderlies."[0]
[0] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/what-is-a...
> Whatever merit based metrics the school uses to determine admission are predictive of eventual performance
This seems a questionable assumption.
There may well be benefits to diversity that are not easily quantified at the individual level.
The classic example of the development team that created a computer vision system that didn't work well at all with certain skin tones but they were unaware of this until feeling it live at a conference comes to mind. They didn't have anyone on their dev teams or QA teams with that skin tone.
There are numerous studies showing that diverse teams come up with better solutions. Diversity pays dividends at the group level, and assessments that only consider things at the individual level may miss that
There are also numerous studies that show diversity has either no effect or even negative effects on various measures of group performance - the academic literature on this issue is a total mixed bag. Here's how the OECD's [1] summary of the literature on diversity and firm performance:
> "Contrary to the often assumed, direct positive impact of diversity on business performance, research shows that at the firm level, the business case for diversity is not particularly strong. However, while the impact of diversity might be small, there is a strong economic argument against discrimination and non-inclusion based on the sizeable cost associated with it. Finally, the chapter notes ethical reasons for fostering a just and equitable labour market alongside the economic argument for diversity."
The literature also suggests the effects of diversity on group performance, whether positive, neutral or negative, are situation specific, depend on your measure of 'performance', and your definition of 'diversity'. Again, from the OECD:
> "A number of studies make a difference between ‘highly job-related diversity’, such as educational background, job position or function in the company, and diversity aspects that are ‘less job-related’, e.g. gender, ethnicity or age. Measurement of team performance includes multiple indicators, such as efficiency, creativity, innovation and productivity. Findings are somewhat mixed, but impacts of gender, ethnicity or age diversity are found to be either very small or insignificant. Some meta-analyses find no significant impact of gender composition, ethnicity or age on team performance (Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007[19]; Schneid et al., 2016[20]), while others find negative, but very small impacts (Bell et al., 2011[21]; Joshi and Roh, 2009[22])3. Most studies do, however, find a positive relationship between team performance and having teams with different professional backgrounds and other task-related characteristics (Bell et al., 2011[21]; Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007[23]; Joshi and Roh, 2009[22]). Overall, these findings from meta-analyses seem to suggest that team diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity or age do not matter much for team performance. However, there is some evidence that demonstrates the importance of situational settings by examining under what specific conditions diversity dynamics may unfold and how."
[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5f8c1531-en/index.html?i...
Which is something I have heard of from quite a lot of people who may have benefitted from AA. And it's somewhat frequently paired with a huge amount of self doubt.
ISTM these "special" circumstances very rarely contribute the bulk of any incoming class. Any "regular" student who really deserved admissions got it, and only marginal strivers with few must-have qualities complain about getting denied in favor of applicants with special circumstances. It's fine for these people to suggest larger class sizes (certainly in the case of Harvard they are correct; I don't know about the Australian system). Their self-interest is showing, however, when they start making lists of people whose test scores they beat by a few points. There's no reason to trust their judgments over those of professional admissions staff.
That is doubly the case for those of us who may have been admitted for these reasons and then went on to collegiate success. Why the hell would we worry about the opinions of those marginal strivers? They should do their best at their safety schools.
Unlike, say, when there was a box to tick if you had enough aboriginal blood in your veins. So many people ticked that box for an unfair advantage, completely disconnected and even scornful of the culture but able to claim enough percentage of the race. But lots of students took the money from Abstudy even if it muddied their ethics.
I doubt that if they haven't figured out it's a nuanced thing by now that they will figure that out after the second order effects come into play.
In any case, the gymnastics needed to explain why one was totally wrong and the other is absolutely necessary will bring about an era of US dominance in the sport.
Harvard has a really straightforward contingency plan if it loses this case. SEAS will have undergraduates, it will have one kind of admissions, and FAS will have another. Students in both colleges will have some kind of pro-forma differences. The total size of FAS and SEAS-as-undergraduate will be about 50 more students than the current Harvard College alone.
That's it, now you can admit into SEAS all the students who felt they were wronged by the current criteria. The racial composition of the admits across both colleges will be very similar.
I don't know, it's definitely some fairy thinking on behalf of the plaintiffs. Nothing will change. You'd have to be colossally fucking stupid, as an Asian kid, to think that these Republican motherfuckers are doing this for the benefit of Asians.
I cannot really blame an angry 18 year old for being so easily co-opted by such a stupid and nakedly obvious anti-Black agenda.
https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-ne...
They aren't doing it for the benefit of Asians. They aren;t doing it at all. The Supreme Court would be doing it to enforce laws against racism.
You missed GP's point
The Supreme court decides which cases it will hear.
It does not decide what cases should be filed in Federal courts that may or may not end up on their docket.
Whether or not GPs assertion is true (I don't know the facts of the case or the hearts/minds of those who brought it, so I make no judgement there) doesn't make their point moot, or your ignoring of their point less relevant.
Also, if/when the question comes up, there is a different standard for sex-based discrimination than race-based. The former is subject to intermediate scrutiny, whereas the latter is subject (in general) to strict scrutiny.
So it is plausible that the Court would determine that some sex-based discrimination is acceptable, and simultaneously determine that no race-based discrimination is acceptable.
Another consequence of having the looser "intermediate scrutiny" for sex discrimination is that the FBI can have different fitness requirement for male and female recruits. Ditto for armed forces, and for laws relating to pregnancy.
It's honestly astounding that anyone finds this racism either moral or legal. It's precisely the same thing that the civil rights act forbids and for good reason.
See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2891107
If we want to fix that then we need to help boys in elementary school, not dumbing down the admissions process.
Sometimes reality is exactly what society needs to confront.
I have the same view with censorship. I’d rather let the dummies embarrass themselves in public than hiding them in the shadows and pretend they wont all still believe that crap and never having the opportunity to have their ideas challenged.
Taping over problems often hides the root causes while doing nothing to deal with it.
You'll notice that when comparing Harvard and UT's student bodies to the US and Texas' demographics, respectively, Harvard's system was closer to the mark in terms of black and white representation. https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
Most interesting is UT's 40/60 M/F gender ratio. Remember, that 40% of males is almost certainly being boosted by the 25% of admits UT has any real control over. Once AA is overturned, that's it—hands off the scale. I think half the population suddenly realizing they were beneficiaries of affirmative action this whole time—and subsequently understanding the nuances of discrimination in this country—will ultimately be a good thing.