Speaking of "informal racial preferences", I think the Australian civil service did a pilot study where they removed names and addresses from job applications to try to counter racism from HR personnel.
It turns out, fewer Aboriginal applicants were hired under the anonymous application system, suggesting that, far from being racist, HR personnel were *more likely* to hire minority applicants when they had the chance.
Every time affirmative action in universities comes up, the unaddressed stick in my craw is legacy admissions. After the civil war there were *race-neutral* exemptions to literacy tests for voting. We today, rightly recognize reconstruction era "grandfather clauses" as being extremely racist.
But legacy admissions is, amusingly, literally grandfathering.
In British equalities law there's a distinction drawn between Positive Action and Positive Discrimination. Positive Action is proportionate measure(s) that help ensure discrimination doesn't stop the best person getting the job/opportunity because of a personal characteristic such as race or gender. Positive Discrimination is when you take unproportionate steps to correct current or historic disadvantage. The former is legal and the latter is illegal. Maybe that approach is something that would be the compromise in America - admissions offices couldn't just reserve places for ethnic minority students but they could offer ethnic minority students targetted scholarships, access to outreach programmes completition of which secures lower entry requirements, commitment that if two candidates of equally ability are being considered for the last place the Admissions Office will go with the person from an ethnic minority background, etc. It's not as blunt as modern-day Affirmative Action but it'd still send the signal about wanting to recruit a diverse cohort, and address some of the inequalities in the educational system
The British equal opportunities framework is more akin to the informal process that Noah appears to advocate. It does largely avoid the problems and issues of formal positive discrimination, and, is much wider in coverage than race.
It is is only as good as applied, of course, and relies on systematic monitoring of outcomes, which is often neglected. And, in any case, wider societal developments and structural inequality factors where class, race, and gender intersect are the real drivers.
Things like legacy admissions would be subject to challenge as indirectly discriminatory (an effective concept).
If getting rid of racial preferences, then need to get rid of them all. Like legacy admissions, which are just type of backdoor racial preferencing for kids of rich white parents.
People might think that formal discrimination is stickier than informal discrimination but I rather expect it’s the opposite - the formal thing is a policy you can change, while the informal thing is training reviewers to think a certain way.
"At that point, there won’t be much the opponents of racial preferences can do, because proving bias in court is very hard to do. They will just have to live with the knowledge that admissions officers believe in the importance of historic, persistent racial disadvantage." Do you think this has the potential to have an effect on White and Asian applicants' behavior similar to the way systemic racism has an effect on Black and Hispanic applicants' behavior? I'm a college student from a wealthy community, and I don't imagine any policy or cultural shift will change our behavior (hence why my anti-racial-discrimination-in-admissions friends often propose class discrimination as an alternative, despite that also hurting our chances), but it doesn't seem crazy to suppose poor or middle-class Whites and Asians would have less reason to apply to elite schools if they believe there is a systemic, implicit bias against them that is not as identifiable or "easy" to combat in court as affirmative action.
Personally, what I would like to see is two things - elimination or curtailment of legacy admissions, and affirmative action on the basis of income.
I think everyone can agree that the poor face greater challenges in admissions, education, and I suspect it would still have a real effect on ameliorating racial disparities. And it would take out a lot of toxicity from the conversation, in my opinion.
Besides, poor non minority students could use help, and many rich and privileged minority students don't need it.
I’m not even convinced that people want “informal racial preferences” but rather they want everyone to have a fair shot. If that means that a kid from a crappy school with few extracurricular opportunities looks a little less well-rounded than a kid who had lots of such opportunities, then yes, consider the whole picture when deciding whom to admit.
But a lot of the current “diversity” (as others have described elsewhere), comes from the mad dash to fill their freshman class with as many “diverse” kids as possible, not necessarily the kid who needs a boost up. There’s stiff competition to get the black kids of doctors and lawyers, or the black kids of rich Kenyans, or the “Hispanic” kid from an elite boarding school whose great-grandmother was “from Argentina” by way of Germany — not the kids who haven’t had a fair shot, necessarily.
I think people are sick of these institutions trying to _look_ as diverse as possible without thinking about who’s getting a chance versus who needs a chance, and how we balance the pros and cons of various policies.
If I had to choose the best of flawed options, I would prefer the place-based (which ends up being social-class based) system because it ensures chances for kids who really need them, regardless of what ethnic boxes they can tick.
"If and when racial disparities diminish, so does the need for affirmative action; it was always intended to be a temporary boost to counteract a history of exclusion."
Noah, you really should know better. What part of the history of affirmative action in India or Malaysia suggests that it'll be temporary? Nothing, it's a political patronage trick there as it is in the US. AA is nothing more that Democrats using racial patronage at the expense of Asians to pander. If SCOTUS strikes it down, then I'll count it as the one good thing to come out of this court. The fact that it got blown out in CA despite being outspent 16-1 and having all "respectable" elite opinion and media for it should be telling.
Hypocrisy is a much better explainer than the "another hypothesis". It is almost obvious that a surface level morality of racial equity can no way compete with the much deeper desire of giving one's kids better education. The evidence for an informal racial preference favoring disadvantaged minorities among admission officers is much much thinner. After all, affirmative action is necessary exactly due to the opposite of that! The "another hypothesis" feels more like coping with the fact that affirmative action is morally correct in a utilitarian sense but against both the nature of human and the nature of the system.
I'm bothered by the gross lumping of people into categories and the focus on higher education. There's obviously big differences in the Asian -American category (Hmong, Bhutanese, Chinese....), and you don't tackle the possibility that affirmative action for some means penalizing others. I'm sure there are also differences in the Hispanic/Latino category--some are indigenous, many are not. On the other hand there's differences in the African-American category--a significant minority have an immigrant background, whether from the Caribbean, Nigeria, or Somalia.
On the whole I'd rather that colleges be able to favor admissions from families with no history of college, and perhaps from geographic areas with lower income.
John Ogbu wrote that a useful lens for analyzing the economic prospects of American minorities is to separate immigrant minorities (whose families or ancestors immigrated intentionally to the USA), from non-immigrant minorities (descendants of slaves or colonized indigenous peoples, none of whom have descendants that ever chose to be in this country). It's an oversimplification of course, but the upshot is that, for example, Black immigrants descendants of immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean have a much brighter economic outlook those that are descendants of slaves. It matters a great deal whether your family ultimately chose to be in the USA versus having it forced upon you.
This matters for affirmative action because (oversimplification alert!) it is the largely the descendants of slaves who are mired in inter-generational poverty, but it is overwhelmingly Black immigrants and their families who end up benefitting from affirmative action. I'm not sure how schools could address this in practice, though making affirmative action entirely class-based might be a good start.
When Americans say they want affirmative action, they mean that if their are two people who score the same on the SAT and have the same GPA and one is disadvantaged and one isn't, then the disadvantaged person would get the nod.
That's what they have in their head. Of course we all know it's complicated.
As far as elite colleges (Harvard, etc...) we all know it for show. Many of the black or Hispanic entrants aren't disadvantaged. They are children of well off or immigrants. Then again, the same could largely be said of the white entrants.
The people that really get screwed at elite colleges are Asians... but Asians are the new Jews when it comes to that.
I think there is more of a issue with access to the big name State Universities. UCLA, UTA, etc... these schools hold many more slots, and are the schools that are really accessible to the middle class average Americans. Losing out to a slot at UCLA and ending up at UCR or a CalState school might not seem like the end of the world, but the perception of fairness is something people care about.
Personally, I would rather ban legacy admissions first. Then mandate income based preferences. (the higher the income, the more you would receive a penalty). Basically Bezos kid would need to have a 5.0 GPA and a perfect SAT to get into community college. But I do hate rich people.
You used the word "elite" five times. That gives me the impression the stakes here are only about the Ivy League or its equivalents. I don't think that's the case but I'm not sure if I'm interpretation it correctly. There are an awful lot more kids in non-elite schools, so I'd argue the stakes outside of the the elite are much more significant for society.
Anyways - with respect to your final hypothesis would you also argue that Americans want "informal and quiet" discrimination against Asians in college admissions? It feels like if your hypothesis is true than the same would apply to Asians, but in reverse.
Speaking of "informal racial preferences", I think the Australian civil service did a pilot study where they removed names and addresses from job applications to try to counter racism from HR personnel.
It turns out, fewer Aboriginal applicants were hired under the anonymous application system, suggesting that, far from being racist, HR personnel were *more likely* to hire minority applicants when they had the chance.
Every time affirmative action in universities comes up, the unaddressed stick in my craw is legacy admissions. After the civil war there were *race-neutral* exemptions to literacy tests for voting. We today, rightly recognize reconstruction era "grandfather clauses" as being extremely racist.
But legacy admissions is, amusingly, literally grandfathering.
In British equalities law there's a distinction drawn between Positive Action and Positive Discrimination. Positive Action is proportionate measure(s) that help ensure discrimination doesn't stop the best person getting the job/opportunity because of a personal characteristic such as race or gender. Positive Discrimination is when you take unproportionate steps to correct current or historic disadvantage. The former is legal and the latter is illegal. Maybe that approach is something that would be the compromise in America - admissions offices couldn't just reserve places for ethnic minority students but they could offer ethnic minority students targetted scholarships, access to outreach programmes completition of which secures lower entry requirements, commitment that if two candidates of equally ability are being considered for the last place the Admissions Office will go with the person from an ethnic minority background, etc. It's not as blunt as modern-day Affirmative Action but it'd still send the signal about wanting to recruit a diverse cohort, and address some of the inequalities in the educational system
The British equal opportunities framework is more akin to the informal process that Noah appears to advocate. It does largely avoid the problems and issues of formal positive discrimination, and, is much wider in coverage than race.
It is is only as good as applied, of course, and relies on systematic monitoring of outcomes, which is often neglected. And, in any case, wider societal developments and structural inequality factors where class, race, and gender intersect are the real drivers.
Things like legacy admissions would be subject to challenge as indirectly discriminatory (an effective concept).
SCOTUS adjudicated this topic more recently than 2003! https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/14-981_4g15.PDF
If getting rid of racial preferences, then need to get rid of them all. Like legacy admissions, which are just type of backdoor racial preferencing for kids of rich white parents.
People might think that formal discrimination is stickier than informal discrimination but I rather expect it’s the opposite - the formal thing is a policy you can change, while the informal thing is training reviewers to think a certain way.
"At that point, there won’t be much the opponents of racial preferences can do, because proving bias in court is very hard to do. They will just have to live with the knowledge that admissions officers believe in the importance of historic, persistent racial disadvantage." Do you think this has the potential to have an effect on White and Asian applicants' behavior similar to the way systemic racism has an effect on Black and Hispanic applicants' behavior? I'm a college student from a wealthy community, and I don't imagine any policy or cultural shift will change our behavior (hence why my anti-racial-discrimination-in-admissions friends often propose class discrimination as an alternative, despite that also hurting our chances), but it doesn't seem crazy to suppose poor or middle-class Whites and Asians would have less reason to apply to elite schools if they believe there is a systemic, implicit bias against them that is not as identifiable or "easy" to combat in court as affirmative action.
Personally, what I would like to see is two things - elimination or curtailment of legacy admissions, and affirmative action on the basis of income.
I think everyone can agree that the poor face greater challenges in admissions, education, and I suspect it would still have a real effect on ameliorating racial disparities. And it would take out a lot of toxicity from the conversation, in my opinion.
Besides, poor non minority students could use help, and many rich and privileged minority students don't need it.
I’m not even convinced that people want “informal racial preferences” but rather they want everyone to have a fair shot. If that means that a kid from a crappy school with few extracurricular opportunities looks a little less well-rounded than a kid who had lots of such opportunities, then yes, consider the whole picture when deciding whom to admit.
But a lot of the current “diversity” (as others have described elsewhere), comes from the mad dash to fill their freshman class with as many “diverse” kids as possible, not necessarily the kid who needs a boost up. There’s stiff competition to get the black kids of doctors and lawyers, or the black kids of rich Kenyans, or the “Hispanic” kid from an elite boarding school whose great-grandmother was “from Argentina” by way of Germany — not the kids who haven’t had a fair shot, necessarily.
I think people are sick of these institutions trying to _look_ as diverse as possible without thinking about who’s getting a chance versus who needs a chance, and how we balance the pros and cons of various policies.
If I had to choose the best of flawed options, I would prefer the place-based (which ends up being social-class based) system because it ensures chances for kids who really need them, regardless of what ethnic boxes they can tick.
"If and when racial disparities diminish, so does the need for affirmative action; it was always intended to be a temporary boost to counteract a history of exclusion."
Noah, you really should know better. What part of the history of affirmative action in India or Malaysia suggests that it'll be temporary? Nothing, it's a political patronage trick there as it is in the US. AA is nothing more that Democrats using racial patronage at the expense of Asians to pander. If SCOTUS strikes it down, then I'll count it as the one good thing to come out of this court. The fact that it got blown out in CA despite being outspent 16-1 and having all "respectable" elite opinion and media for it should be telling.
Hypocrisy is a much better explainer than the "another hypothesis". It is almost obvious that a surface level morality of racial equity can no way compete with the much deeper desire of giving one's kids better education. The evidence for an informal racial preference favoring disadvantaged minorities among admission officers is much much thinner. After all, affirmative action is necessary exactly due to the opposite of that! The "another hypothesis" feels more like coping with the fact that affirmative action is morally correct in a utilitarian sense but against both the nature of human and the nature of the system.
I'm bothered by the gross lumping of people into categories and the focus on higher education. There's obviously big differences in the Asian -American category (Hmong, Bhutanese, Chinese....), and you don't tackle the possibility that affirmative action for some means penalizing others. I'm sure there are also differences in the Hispanic/Latino category--some are indigenous, many are not. On the other hand there's differences in the African-American category--a significant minority have an immigrant background, whether from the Caribbean, Nigeria, or Somalia.
On the whole I'd rather that colleges be able to favor admissions from families with no history of college, and perhaps from geographic areas with lower income.
John Ogbu wrote that a useful lens for analyzing the economic prospects of American minorities is to separate immigrant minorities (whose families or ancestors immigrated intentionally to the USA), from non-immigrant minorities (descendants of slaves or colonized indigenous peoples, none of whom have descendants that ever chose to be in this country). It's an oversimplification of course, but the upshot is that, for example, Black immigrants descendants of immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean have a much brighter economic outlook those that are descendants of slaves. It matters a great deal whether your family ultimately chose to be in the USA versus having it forced upon you.
This matters for affirmative action because (oversimplification alert!) it is the largely the descendants of slaves who are mired in inter-generational poverty, but it is overwhelmingly Black immigrants and their families who end up benefitting from affirmative action. I'm not sure how schools could address this in practice, though making affirmative action entirely class-based might be a good start.
When Americans say they want affirmative action, they mean that if their are two people who score the same on the SAT and have the same GPA and one is disadvantaged and one isn't, then the disadvantaged person would get the nod.
That's what they have in their head. Of course we all know it's complicated.
As far as elite colleges (Harvard, etc...) we all know it for show. Many of the black or Hispanic entrants aren't disadvantaged. They are children of well off or immigrants. Then again, the same could largely be said of the white entrants.
The people that really get screwed at elite colleges are Asians... but Asians are the new Jews when it comes to that.
I think there is more of a issue with access to the big name State Universities. UCLA, UTA, etc... these schools hold many more slots, and are the schools that are really accessible to the middle class average Americans. Losing out to a slot at UCLA and ending up at UCR or a CalState school might not seem like the end of the world, but the perception of fairness is something people care about.
Personally, I would rather ban legacy admissions first. Then mandate income based preferences. (the higher the income, the more you would receive a penalty). Basically Bezos kid would need to have a 5.0 GPA and a perfect SAT to get into community college. But I do hate rich people.
You used the word "elite" five times. That gives me the impression the stakes here are only about the Ivy League or its equivalents. I don't think that's the case but I'm not sure if I'm interpretation it correctly. There are an awful lot more kids in non-elite schools, so I'd argue the stakes outside of the the elite are much more significant for society.
Anyways - with respect to your final hypothesis would you also argue that Americans want "informal and quiet" discrimination against Asians in college admissions? It feels like if your hypothesis is true than the same would apply to Asians, but in reverse.