> whatever objectives
They're very clear about their objectives too - they want more of their student body to come from a background of lower socioeconomic status.
The fact is if they're in a public school in an underserved area, they are most likely going to a disadvantaged public school, and face strong headwinds trying to achieve the kinds of scores kids in affluent neighborhoods get.
Note also that multiple factors are being looked at.
Generally when such systems are implemented the levels are not binary, e.g. housing project vs affluent suburb. My point was that for some bimodal neighborhoods using the neighborhood income average is not effective. Is there a national, annually updated list of neighborhood underserved-ness list?
This came up in Boston Public Schools. Admission to Boston Latin took into account the portion of a student body eligible for free lunch. It became mathematically impossible to be admitted to Latin if you weren't coming from a low income school.
I don't believe this is true, but if you have citations I'd be happy to hear them.
For instance, their accountability data [1] shows that, in 2023, out of 409 kids taking their ELA MCAS test, 92 were categorized as "low income."
I find this hard to square with your statement (all students came from low-income schools but 88% are not low income?).
1. https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/district...
A student attending a school without bonus points would need to score 97 points. Class rank is a factor which effectively imposes quotas on schools regardless of students grades and or test scores. Back around 2016 there were a handful of schools where students needed to score in excess of 100 points to get into Latin.
Last year 408 high income students received bonus points while 29 low income students did not. The admission rates for these groups were 85% and 55% respectively. [1]
[0] https://archive.is/20220203094548/https://www.bostonglobe.co... [1] https://archive.is/20231107020144/https://www.bostonglobe.co...
They're explicitly tying academic performance in relation to one's socioeconomic background. I find their claim of "doing more with less being more impressive than doing more with more" reasonable.
The only way to avoid any sort of judgmental/arbitrary calls is to blindly apply academic standards (the way UT Austin does top 4% of your HS class) and that comes with its own problems.
If you have two families that are equally poor, but where one family cares a lot about education and sends their kid to the harder school (perhaps by living in the cheapest apartment in the neighborhood that is eligible for that school), they will be disadvantaged compared to the other family, who send their kids to the less rigorous school.
To the extent that there are racial/cultural correlations that result in poor Asian kids going to schools that have higher average SATs than poor kids of other races, an ostensibly race-neutral policy like this will mean Asian students could (as a group) continue to face disadvantages in the admissions process.
In a post-SFFA vs Harvard world, anecdotes and thought experiments carry very little water. We all know - and the universities are very explicit about this - that socio-economic indicators are the new affirmative action. It's clearly the only practical way to effect the sort of diversity missions that many Universities seek to establish (since by their own published work, it correlates with strong community-wide academic and scholarly outcomes0. At this point, since we all know what's going on, the only question to ask is, "Why didn't you try to game the system since you know how it works?"
I'm not passing judgment on whether this is a good or a bad thing, whether it's honest or dishonest, or whether it's fair or not. It's just reality. SFFA v Harvard is a _horrible_ decision based on absurd jurisprudence and a total divorce from the truths of the world we live in. I commend everyone from admissions boards to clever families who learn how to play the new rules of the game better than those who backed the jurisprudence in the first place.
Yes, I think they would use this as a facially-neutral way to achieve a race-motivated goal.
> We all know - and the universities are very explicit about this - that socio-economic indicators are the new affirmative action. It's clearly the only practical way to effect the sort of diversity missions that many Universities seek to establish
Are you saying they want to have racial diversity or SES diversity?
> SFFA v Harvard is a _horrible_ decision based on absurd jurisprudence and a total divorce from the truths of the world we live in. I commend everyone from admissions boards to clever families who learn how to play the new rules of the game better than those who backed the jurisprudence in the first place.
Can I ask what you found so objectionable? I understand that many people disagree with the outcome, but from a legal perspective (IAAL), I haven't heard much criticism.
Because of structural racism and similar phenomena, they're not fully separable. It's not obvious to me they're even separable in a meaningful way (meaning that if you optimize for one, you simply won't get the same result as if you were to optimize for the other).
> Can I ask what you found so objectionable? I understand that many people disagree with the outcome, but from a legal perspective (IAAL), I haven't heard much criticism.
(IANAL, and it's been quite a while since I spent cycles on this so my recollection may be fuzzy) Fundamentally, I'm very uncomfortable with the dissonance in the concurring/dissenting opinions of Thomas/Sotomayor, respectively. My understanding was that they basically argue that the proposed standards by SFFA's lawyers are effectively unworkable, yet at the same time, there's very little to indicate that many - if any - universities were actually already out-of-compliance. In fact, in the aftermath of the case it seems as if most universities simply publicly doubled down on their existing diversity policies and missions.
So what's the point here? Why did SCOTUS accept to hear this? It seems like it was just taken up so that Roberts could fire up culture wars with the commentary he made in the majority opinion he authored.
It's hard to find virtue in something that claims to do a lot but in practice seems to do virtually nothing. So maybe it's incorrect to state that this is based on "absurd jurisprudence," but I can't find anything redeeming or positive to state about the opinion or the process that took us here.
They accepted the case because they wanted to end race-based affirmative action.
In terms of the dissents, they were completely out of step with the Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence. Going all the way back to Bakke (1978), the Court has never approved of any rationale for race-based affirmative action other than the ‘diversity rationale’. This states that colleges may use affirmative action in order to improve the educational experience by admitting more students of different racial backgrounds. The dissents employed fiery rhetoric but were not shooting for the diversity rationale. As a result, their arguments were destined to fail.
They typically go out-of-state, but the competition for the next 4% is insane.
This would be far more disastrous if spots at colleges were scarce, but they overwhelmingly are not. There are over 15 million undergraduate students in the United States, and we are undergoing a demographic collapse (https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...). In 2 years, the children of the baby bust (2008-2009) will start applying and enrolling in college, and because there are fewer of them, they will have an easier time getting into the college of their choice.
>95% of us do not attend Ivy League schools. Removing any and all affirmative action would help, at best, five thousand students? This is a manufactured issue. No one is denied a college education because of affirmative action. Any time spent arguing against it is wasted.
No they aren’t. They’re selling a product to the highest bidder but happen to work in an industry where social and cultural expectations don’t allow them to sell exclusively to highest bidders. Adjusting to those expectations is ever changing as we’re seeing here.
It’s an unfortunate fact that high bidder’s children roughly correlate with high potential (somewhat impolite to point out), so colleges these days can still point to success stories and pretend they did something.
And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is completely arbitrary and tuned to achieve whatever objectives they have.