Here's the corollary of that: how does typical DEI actually help equality of opportunity? Put another way, do you think a black student from a wealthy family in San Jose or a poor white student from rural Alabama needs more help? Now show me a real-world DEI program that would help the white student instead of the black one.

My statement was in regard to the posters overall philosophy on equity and not any particular DEI program.

I would agree that most would probably fail that test, does they mean we need blanket bans on equity programs or more effective ones?

If the programs are based on race instead of eg. financial status, access to education, etc., then yeah, banning them would help little white Bobby from a trailer park, because he currently can't get that help because of his skin color.

I used to think this way too; until I recently noticed it was a false dichotomy! There is plenty of room to be spent on money for impoverished youngsters of any background and we should be petitioning our politicians to spend MORE OVERALL on youth, education, and nourishment programs. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum, but our politicians don't want us to realize this...

American in particular needs nourishment funding for all socioecon/demographic classes.

But if you do that, you don't have to separate kids by race anymore.

The argument there is that people from under-represented populations have to face discrimination regardless of their economic status. This is why DEI looks at the whole cross section of socio-economic status, and not just the economic part.

To put it simply, a poor white student from rural Alabama only needs a proper accent and a good suit to blend in with the upper-classes. However, a black student only needs to lose access to their parents money and they immediately have a longer harder uphill battle to fight against racism which will presume them to be uneducated, underperforming, and generationally poor unless they work 2x as hard to prove it wrong.

That said...

I do think there's a danger in supporting DEI programs simply because they have good outcomes (which other posters are doing). If a group achieves your end-results but doesn't have your philosophy, then my life experience (e.g. MAGA) has shown that they will become the enemy that you don't see until it's too late.

How about helping poor kids (no matter their race or gender) with their education, helping them come to the same starint level for the 'rest of their lives'?

And this is exactly what a DEI office would be necessary to make happen (you could call it a non DEI office, but that's what it would be).

Just because you disagree with a particular form of DEI (and to put my personal cards on the table, I am somewhere between indifferent to moderately against race based affirmative action) doesn't mean the concept of DEI is not important.

In fact, as we can see in this thread here, most people who say they are against DEI are in fact in favor because they do recognize that, at the very least, current higher educational practices are highly tilted towards those who are rich and those whose parents already have college degrees.

But that's not DEI, that's just a form of social security.

Maybe you guys need colleges looking only at grades and SAT scores, and no questions about race on any of the forms. This is how most of the world does it, and there is no need for DEI offices.

If the student loans were cut down a bit, prices would probably go down too for everyone. (or maybe even have a taxpayer paid education system, like most of the rest of the world).

No, people who say they are against DEI are actually against what DEI has become, which is NOT DEI. Nowhere in a true DEI system would they conspire to blame whites or men for all the ills of the world, put more emphasis on long-past crimes than current ones, make certain groups not responsible for their actions, or claim gender is a social construct and totally up to the individual while maintaining that race was not, after decades of maintaining that it actually was.

I am in support of this, which falls squarely under equality of opportunity.