Morat20 makes the following observation:
Are whites being discriminated against? Are they likely to be in the future?
It wasn’t skin color that led to affirmative action — it was a legacy of racism and flat-out denied oppurtunity.
Offhand, should income inequality not be settled, I suspect race might give way to class based considerations.
For all the supposed sins of affirmative action, the actual sins of privilege are far worse. Legacy admissions at colleges, for starters.
A friend of mine works for a company she jokingly refers to as “Nepotism, Incorporated”. Her horror stories about management there (mostly dead weight in the form of various relatives of the board) that make me cringe. Nothing I’ve ever experienced, not even the most clueless of Dilbert-style bosses in the tech industry, have come close to the legacy of idiocy her company is weighted with.
This is an oft-made point. One that is instructive in one sense: preferential admissions based on one’s heritage are not new and is beneficial to some whites. But the “some” in that statement is crucial. Therein lies a pretty significant distinction. Affirmative Action, where it is utilized, is designed to benefit minorities as a whole. Some may benefit and some may not benefit, but it looks specifically at race and as a program does not differentiate between this kind of African-American and that kind of African-American or this kind of Hispanic and that kind of Hispanic. The wealthy child of Cuban lineage from the suburb gets a boost just as the child of poor Mexican-American migrants.
Most whites are not going to receive any sort of legacy-based consideration. Or, if they do, it’s exceedingly likely to be very limited to only an institution or two. As it happens, I was offered a legacy benefit, in-state tuition to an out-of-state school. My wife, on the other hand, was not offered anything from her parents’ out-of-state alma mater (and, therefore, was not offered anything from anywhere on account of her heritage, excluding the benefits of her economic class). My friend Aron whose parents never went to college? Wasn’t offered squat. Meanwhile, my well-to-do 1/4 Cherokee classmate and my Cuban-American best friend were getting letters from out-of-state schools from across the country for grades that were similar to or worse than my own.
This isn’t a whine for me. I came from a substantive enough background that within the normal parameters (excluding the Ivy League or Podunk Highway State) I’m not sure how much it mattered where I went to college (I didn’t go to the “best” school that accepted me anyway). We can go ahead and say “That Will Truman guy was privileged.” Not as privileged as the next guy, but far more privileged than a lot of other white kids. Which gets to the greater point, which is that many (though not all) of the privileges we often associate with being white, such as legacy admits and nepotism, are not evenly distributed. Assigning privilege to one white due to privileges given to another is… problematic.
This is not, in and of itself, a reason why we shouldn’t have affirmative action. We can admit all of the above and say that affirmative action is still better than the alternatives. As I have said elsewhere, I ultimately come down against affirmative action (not solely, or even primarily, for the above reason), but only softly and with a level of indifference. And I think the whining about affirmative action – often though not always coming from those who definitely do count as privileged – can be rather unseemly. I do remember back in college that a lot of the vocal opposition to affirmative action was coming from… the wrong places. And it’s also the case that not all affirmative action programs are created equal and that there are definitely some cases (police departments come to mind as a most obvious example) where there is a collective benefit. But, at best, I think such programs should be pursued warily.
While we’re on the subject of flawed (or incomplete) arguments and affirmative action, in an otherwise insightful piece, League alum Jamelle Bouie recently wrote:
(Another note: just because the white student didn’t get in doesn’t mean that someone took “their” spot. Colleges don’t owe spots to students, and if you don’t get in to the school of your choice, the college took nothing away from you. With or without affirmative action, the odds of getting into a selective college are low).
I don’t think this is a road supporters of affirmative action want to go around. This is, in fact, why I am largely indifferent on the subject of affirmative action to begin with. I was softly for it until a few years ago, then became softly against it. My view is that the specific institution one attends doesn’t matter a great deal and therefore whites or minorities complaining that they were left out due to affirmative action or the absence thereof needed to just make the best of their situation. But as an issue of fairness, it’s not entirely for me to say whether it does or does not matter. And if it matters over here, it matters over there, too.
{Original Post modified to include Morat20’s entire comment.}
Having said all this: If someone wants to make the argument that legacy admissions should be banned where affirmative action is banned, I could get on board with that. I think a big part of my point is that banning legacy admissions would not have the same effect among “whites” as banning affirmative action has on minorities.
Having said all this: If someone wants to make the argument that legacy admissions should be banned where affirmative action is banned, I could get on board with that. I think a big part of my point is that banning legacy admissions would not have the same effect among “whites” as banning affirmative action has on minorities.
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My son is about to graduate from a pretty selective private high school, where most of the kids can safely be declined as “very privileged”. At the freshman orientation, its admissions director told this story:
I actually have a long post in mind about the affirmative action for boys. There’ve been some interesting articles on it, pro and con. It’s a significant and relevant issue. (Much better than the legacy admit angle.)
I’m against THIS type of AA but not THAT type of AA, because THAT type is good for ME.
Will-
I’d love to read that post. There is a ton about gender/sex and education that needs uncovering.
You are correct about Legacies and AA being different. People missing class as an element is pretty classic in American debate and Legacy admits are certainly a class issue more than anything.
I’m generally pro-AA but it depends how its set up and for what institutions. Moving towards income/class based AA would be a good move at this point. AA has been a major factor in the growth of the black middle class and for women to gain opportunities that had been closed out.
Income/class-based AA would be my aim, if I were king. I know that there are arguments that this should be “in addition to” rather than “instead of”, but I have not yet been swayed. (I do think the historical argument for its initial institution was strong. Though even there I am uncertain on the Constitutionality. But it’s good that it got through.)
I think even most middle class blacks want “means tested” AA. They recognize that the poor-as-shit Appalachian whites are just as poorly served as the SC blacks.
I agree in principle that class based AA is what you want. However, its really hard to do, isn’t it? If you go by income, that’s not very accurate. People with very substantial assets can quite easily reduce their income to poverty levels for a few years so their kids qualify. You could go by assets, but its really easy to hide assets. How far do you dig into the family’s financial history to check? Its not an academic point – the UK used to have a system where if your income was below a certain level, the government would pay your college tuition and board. Several families at the fee-paying private school I attended, some of whom owned hundreds of acres of land (this is in Scotland – you don’t have to be rich to do that, but you’re certainly not poor), who more tellingly owned horses, managed to qualify.
And then there are radicals like me who propose returning to a system whereby the State pays all of the costs of college, and offers free admission to anyone who qualifies.
“A bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma, kid. It doesn’t set you apart from anybody out there, doubly so for the whole “Philosophy” thing. If you want to get hired, we’ll need a Master’s Degree.”
Yeah, Jay, this is the stuff that makes me wake up in a cold sweat (okay, not really, but I’m deeply uncomfortable with it). Free college plus the social meme that everybody should go to college equals trouble.
Free Master’s Degrees!
What makes you think it spells “trouble”?
Free college was exactly the policy after WWII, and yet our Republic seems to have survived.
“free admission to anyone who qualifies.”
Ah, but there’s the rub, isn’t it?
Lib60, there wasn’t the expectation that everybody should go to college back then. My formula wasn’t that free college was bad. It was that free college is bad when combined with the expectation that everybody should go.
Under the original GI Bill and its subsequent revisions, about 10 million veterans attended college; by any yardstick, that was a massive wave of new college students, most of whom were the first in their families to attend.
I don’t know why the expectation that everyone should attend holds such peril; The important takeaway for me is that the massive enlargement of college in the 1950s and 60s gave a huge boost to the overall economy and helped create the middle class as we know it.
College is great! For some people. We want people to go to college! We should help people pay to go to college! We should not pretend that college is for everybody. That investing in college education is always a good idea. That you can avoid getting a job if only you go to college and here let us pay for it. That the only difference between people who go to college and people who do not go to college is whether or not they actually went to college (in some cases it’s true, but in many more it is not).
If we had a regime where we made a better effort at determining for whom the college investment is worthwhile, I’d actually be very supportive of making it free. But we do not even attempt such a thing. We have colleges that all but exist on the basis of open enrollment.
Even without bad-faith, you’d be looking at different things with class-based affirmative action (CBAA) than with need-based financial aid (NBFA). With NBFA, you’re be primarily interested in the financial circumstances at the time that someone enters college. With CBAA, you’d want to look at the financial situation growing up. If Household A was wealthy right up until their kid was going to college and then suddenly lost everything in investments, they might be eligible for NBFA, but not CBAA. Inversely, someone who grew up poor but whose parents won the lottery when he was 16 might be eligible for CBAA but not NBFA. Yes, they’re rich now, but did not grow up with the advantages of being right.
Ideally, you’d be looking back 18 years. Seven years might be enough (financial circumstances from middle school onward) We might need to do something to make it easier to turn IRS returns over to colleges or some CBAA agency. Income isn’t all that should be looked at. Did the applicants parents go to college? What kind of school did they attend? What is the income in the area where they were raised? That sort of thing. The child of a schoolteacher might have had benefits that the child of a plumber might not have, even if they made the same amount of money.
WillT-
I agree with all that, but doesn’t that require the type of nuance and indivudialization that you said is impossible? Is giving +10 to all plumbers’ kids really any different than +10 to all blacks?
I view it more like this: It’s +10 for hardship, and hardship measured in multiple ways. So (this is completely off the top of my head) +5 for family income, +3 for schooling, and +2 for parental education.
Of course, this brings up the obvious question: What if it was +12 for hardship and you threw in a couple points for race independent of those other factors? Truthfully, I could easily be on board with that. This is partly why I keep wanting to carve out an exception for institutions that look at the Complete Package (especially with interviews and such – though to be honest I am a little more comfortable with point systems, in a way, because there can be more transparency in the process).
When this discussion last came up, some people pointed out that some states do have a podunk variant of affirmative action for coal miner town whites. That makes AA go down a little easier, but it still makes me think “What about poor whites in Louisville or poor Asians in Lexington?” I don’t like looking at specific things and saying “we need more of that!” and making qualification allowances for such. But a process that looks at a number of things and gives extra credit for them… that would likely be enough to push me back in the supportive camp.
One other thing, while I am airing my (admittedly tentative) thoughts: When it comes to hardship qualifiers, it might be a good idea to, instead of simply admitting them, telling them that they need to go to community college for a semester or a year and hit certain routine benchmarks. But that if they do, they are automatically accepted. Some schools have 2+2 programs and easier transfer requirements (which is great!), though I’d like to get these kids in their destination college before two years is up. One year seems reasonable.
I could be convinced that some of these ideas are actually bad. They’re partly a product of mental exploration for what would keep me more comfortable with the process as a whole. The hardship bonus (with racial considerations) would give Aron a leg up on my Cuban-American classmates, which seems fair. And I can’t say it’s too unfair if my Cuban-American classmates were to have a small leg up on me.
(So if it’s not clear, my thoughts on all this are fluid. It’s why I keep using the word “soft”.)
Is race in and of itslf a hardship? Would you subtract points for extreme privilege?
On the last point, my mom teaches junior high at an elite independent school. Some of her students who are bright to begin with spend $500+/hour on private tutoring. She has an unwrittenn policy of not giving a straight A to a any of these kids’ papers that show evidence of heavy tutoring (she assesses this by comparing work done in class to work done out of class plus she pretty much always knows who is being tutored and by whom). Again, these are ot struggling studens who need tutoring but kids whose parents are involved in a bit of an arms race, where the cost of a tutor is a badge of honor. Any problem with that “policy”?
As to your roader idea, I am fully on board with looking at the entire package, inclusive of race, and having a more personalized interview process. I am sympathetic to standardizing it via something like a points system since I think you are right that not doing so leaves the door open for subjective bias (such as what I see in primary school admissions). My hunch is that you and I are not that far apart and if we were to design an admissions system, we would be quibling over details.
Also, to an earlier point you made comparing SAT scores that I couldn’t quite articulate my response to at the time…
Which candidate would you consider more impressive? The black kid from a violence ridden score with no AP offerings who scores an 1100 on the SATs versus the white kid from an affluent school with multiple AP offerings and an extensive tutoring program who scores 1200 on the SATs? Would you be opposed to the former getting in over the latter if the school believed that a minimum score of 1000 was sufficient to achieve success? Would your answer change if the school felt that a minimum score of 1200 was sufficient?
I would argue the former student was more impressive (based just on what we have there) and overall a better candidate. I would make no bones accepting him in the first scenario but would not accept him in the latter, unless there was other evidence that he could meet the academic demands. I would take the second student in the latter scenario (as opposed to leaving the spot open in hopes of a qualified minority presenting himself, as you have pointed out the obvious problems with that), unless, again, there was other evidence that the student was not prepared to succeed at the school (such as if his 1200 was only achieved after multiple attempts with extensive tutoring, the likes of which would not be available at the school). I have a hunch your answers would be the same, but I could be wrong…
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you, Kazzy. I’ve been mulling over the whole subject. I’m not sure I’ve come to any conclusions.
Regarding your mom’s policy, I am a bit discomforted by it. Mostly because of the unwritten nature of it and the extent to which tutoring can mean anything from pointers to writing the paper “with” someone. But in theory, I don’t mind recognizing that some kids have an unfair advantage and acting on that.
I am undecided on how far up you should stop awarding points (keep awarding them high enough, and you are effectively “docking” points above that threshold). I’ve been thinking about it for over a day now and still have no conclusions.
Should race absent any other consideration be considered a hardship? I was actually figuring that you thought so and was conceding the point it might be. My own thoughts? It is likely indicative of an increased hardship in terms of social expectations even compared to their peers of the same class. It’s not necessarily a hardship, but neither is being working class.
I don’t think that all SAT scores are created equal and yes, I am willing to say that one kid’s 1100 matters more than the next kid’s 1350. But I do believe that the discrepancy has to be explained, or explainable. I would expect, if my CBAA plan were ever implemented, there would be discrepancies. But we’d be able to say “This is what we’re looking at, and no, race is not at the root of it as it plays only this much of a factor (or no factor at all) compared to these other circumstances.”
I don’t consider ethnic diversity to be in itself an adequate explanation, especially if it’s not a part of a larger search for diversity (geographic, economic, etc.) You asked previously how people who are critical of AA feel about geographic diversity and I didn’t answer. My thought is… if you’re looking at one, you ought to look at the other. If you’re looking at geographic diversity, you ought to be at least be looking at economic diversity or maybe even racial/ethnic.
I’ll admit that one of the chips on my shoulder about Harvard’s affirmative action program is how, when the numbers were crunched, being a member of the FFA or 4H club actually reduced your likelihood of acceptance. Harvard is one of those schools where I think diversity of various sorts could very well be a benefit because it’s such a leadership incubator. The brochure diversity in combination with what I believe to be cultural discrimination really, really rubs me the wrong way.
“This is an oft-made point. One that is instructive in one sense: preferential admissions based on one’s heritage are not new and is beneficial to some whites. But the “some” in that statement is crucial. Therein lies a pretty significant distinction. Affirmative Action, where it is utilized, is designed to benefit minorities as a whole. Some may benefit and some may not benefit, but it looks specifically at race and as a program does not differentiate between this kind of African-American and that kind of African-American or this kind of Hispanic and that kind of Hispanic. The wealthy child of Cuban lineage from the suburb gets a boost just as the child of poor Mexican-American migrants.”
Isn’t this based on the exact same type of generalization? There are many different types of AA.
This is true, but the debate is generally over giving favorable admissions to some groups over other groups by virtue primarily of their membership in their group. This is a concept that is defended by affirmative action supporters and criticized by its opponents. If the popular conception of affirmative action were such that it were as much or more class-based than race-based, then we would be defending and criticizing that. But I’m sort of sticking to the discussion that we have (and the affirmative action I saw).
The AA debate is over that. And they posit that many opponents of AA don’t similarly oppose legacy admissions, when both are the same in the sense that they provide advantage by sheerly being a member of a particular group.
I think it’s often the case that they posit that AA opponents must support Legacy Admissions. This is sometimes true, but very often not true. But it is assumed to be true all the same, much of the time.
As I said, there is value in bringing up Legacy Admissions, but not in the sense that it is something that benefits whites the same way that AA benefits certain minority groups.
If I understand you correctly, you are making two points:
1.) Not everyone who opposed AA supports LA
– and, separately, –
2.) LA benefits only certain whites, and tends to have at least some component of classism at play, while AA, at least theoretically, can stand to benefit all members of the group in question.
For (1), I can’t really quibble. Overgeneralizing is sloppy and there is certainly room to support or oppose both.
For (2), I think it generally comes down to both the ideology and methodology of AA, which I think most people (not necessarily you) are woefully ignorant of.
In my work, I’ve come across a few overarching approaches.
The first is aimed at righting the wrongs of the past. People shat on blacks for years. Now we’ll boost them up. This is the most problematic for me because there is little nuance to it and it seems a facile way to truly address the ugliness of our past. This is also most ripe for the criticism levied here.
The second is aimed at accounting for ongoing injustices and inequities. This takes into account the history of racism in our country but with an eye towards the ongoing impact and its legacy today. Ideally, these look at the individual characteristics of the applicant, so that a poor black kid from Hampton Roads whose family has been here for 400 years is not treated the same way as the wealthy son of a Nigerian immigrant. What I like about these systems is they can be easily tweaked to not be solely raced based and can account for class, such that a white kid growing up poor in Appalachia might also have this taken into account in much the same way the kid for HR would.
The third is aimed at building a more diverse population, under the notion that diversity itself is a value. I know many will debate this notion and I think there is plenty of room to debate it. I think the value of this system largely comes down to the specific institution. For instance, when hiring faculty for schools, there is a demonstrable effect borne out in the research on the impact of black male teachers on black boys’ educational outcomes. While not a skill per se, there is a strength that (most) black men bring to the table that white men simply do not. I see no problem taking this into account, in much the same way you’d take into account a candidate’s ability to coach or teach afterschool chess or whatever else is in his “toolbox”. While a white candidate might have a higher GPA, the black male’s strengths might overwhelm this and thus make him the superior candidate. In many ways, this is not true “affirmative action”, but is to the extent that you are factoring in race based criteria. Of course, this doesn’t work for all institutions. I know of no research that black fire fighters hold any advantage of white fire fighters by virtue of their race; as such, it should not be taken into account.
So, yea, it comes down to how it’s done. I see no problem with the third approach presuming it is done in an institution that can demonstrably benefit from “diversity” (I increasingly hate that word but am sort of stuck with it for now). I also see no problem, and would actually prefer it to any other system I’ve seen, with the second approach. As far as I am concerned, all you are doing is looking at the totality of the candidate, including the context in which they came to be. I am generally bothered by the first one.
I don’t know which one is most commonly used. It does seem that the first approach is the one most people think of (“Ten bonus points just for being black?!?!”) which may be indicative of its prevalence or may simply show folks going for the low hanging fruit.
Kazzy, I appreciate the thoughtful response. Forgive me for not responding point-by-point, but there are three of four separate discussions here and I haven’t the time at the moment to go down each avenue (particularly on a subject where my views are not that strong).
On #1, I would probably go a step further and say that most people who oppose affirmative action haven’t really *thought* about legacy admissions. And if they did, wouldn’t be a fan of it. One is a higher profile than the other, and not just because Republicans make it so. My university had an “affirmative action” building and a section in orientation about AA and nothing about legacy admits (I truly don’t know if my university had a legacy program – maybe I’ll find out 17 years hence).
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of admissions: soft and hard. When it comes to soft admissions, when you’re looking at the totality of the student, I am willing to give more leeway. Save for the fact that I don’t really *trust* these institutions. I think there is a lot more interest in finding the sort of student body that benefits the university by looking good on a brochure or increasing alumni giving rates than necessarily finding the best students.
To be honest, outside of the Ivy League and maybe Stanford, I don’t care all that much what private schools do. I didn’t attend one, my children likely won’t attend one, I don’t live in the northeast, and they are really outside my orbit of care. If they want to achieve gender balance by giving boys a free ride or they are concerned about the fact that they are 95% white and want to change that or want to foster intergenerational loyalty with legacies… I can’t really muster up much objection.
My experience, not just with the college I attended but also with all of the colleges I looked at, tended to focus on large universities with more metric admissions policies. No personal interviews. Maybe an essay, at most (I had to have one to get into the Honors College, but that’s it). It’s these places I am thinking, where I think +10 for black is harder to avoid, and where I think things have the potential to be skewed. It’s these schools, and perhaps public schools more generally, where I tend towards skepticism.
(I also carved out an exception for the Ivy Leagues, which I have a separate set of reasons for. I wish they didn’t have the influence that they did. Since they do, I have to care about them and have a harder time with live-and-let-live.)
Oh, and to clarify something. I’m not complaining about the existence of an AA building, per se (it’s a little more complicated, but I can’t get into it without revealing the school in question – I’ll share details in email if you’re interested). In a way, it suggests to me that the program my school had was actually making an effort at outreach rather than simple bean-counting. My point was that it was loudly advertised while the scholars society and honors college “buildings” – neither of which ever got the sort of attention it should have – were literally put in basements (I think that has since changed).
(Gah. I’m not sure there is a way for articulating this without sounding like I was or am resentful. I wasn’t and I’m not. I have a bigger chip on my shoulder about the fact that my school is knocked for its diversity than the diversity it has.)
I get what you’re saying. And I appreciate the convo as well.
You said something about “Legacy Admissions policies”… generally speaking, are these stated policies? Or unwritten rules followed with a wink and a nod? I always assumed the latter, but realize I might be dead wrong.
At least one university I applied to had a checkbox for it in the application (Dad’s alma mater). I suspect that’s because it is meant to factor in. It might not anymore. I suspect it’s not a policy that is well-publicized, though.
Where I might be confusing the issue is conflating established Legacy Policies and more broad favoritism to “VIP” students. This is probably wrong to do. Just as with AA, there are various justifications for explicit Legacy Policies, some better than others. Broad favoritism for VIP students, who are likely but not exclusively overwhelmingly white and upper-class, is harder for me to justify with anything other than an economic angle (which in and of itself can be a very strong angle, of course). Having the CEO of IBM’s campus, whether or not she attended that particular university, might help get a new wing on the library. This is obviously good for the university and its students. But it is a further entrenchment of unearned privilege and, to me, is more problematic than either AA or LA. Of course, I am probably alone in thinking of those as falling under the same broad umbrella of LA, so the extent to which I did that here and thus misrepresented the other side of the argument, I apologize.
Before I take the position that we can end affirmative action on grounds that it discriminates against white kids, I need someone to show me a white kid who would go to college in the counterfactual world where AA doesn’t exist but is excluded in the real world where it does. I can probably find you a fair number of black kids for whom the opposite is true.
Also, and I know this is a larger debate, and that this is a flip approach, but if you read the 14th Amendment in such a way that it leads you to take things away from black people, you’re Doing It Wrong.
Affirmative action doesn’t just discriminate against whites*. But regardless of who it discriminates against, the fact that it is government institutions discriminating on the basis of race does make it suspect, in my mind. I thought this was true even when I was softly supportive of rather than softly against it.
College admissions are not zero sum, but there is a limited number of slots. I don’t think it requires a counterfactual to say that if there is a 400-point difference in SAT scores between the average Asian or Asian-American** admission and the average African-American admission that a more performance-based evaluation system would probably lead to not only less of the latter being admitted, but more of the former, and that some kids were indeed left out.
* – I’m not even convinced that it does, in the aggregate. I think it depends on the demographic beancount of the school’s footprint. But a shift away from “what have you achieved” to “who you are” is something that does discriminate against some whites and in favor of others even if there is no difference in the aggregate. In the aggregate, if I recall, the elimination of affirmative action has been a push for whites and mostly a boon for Asian-Americans. I don’t care as much about the results as I do how much I can defend the process by which the results are achieved.
** – One can argue that my concern for Asian-Americans amounts to crocodile tears, but it was an Indian-American who made the arguments that shifted my position away from the soft support for AA that I had for a very long time.
I think “discriminate” is a word that over-sells its case. Government discriminates – in a neutral sense – on the basis of race all the time. The Census, for instance, clearly indicates race. The government can tell the difference between people of different races. If we move from there to the morally loaded sense of “discriminate”, in which one group is getting “preferential treatment”, I return to the last part of my comment: that’s simply an incorrect reading of what the 14th Amendment is there to do.
On the latter point, I’m just not sure. College admission slots are finite, for sure, but they’re not rigidly bound. Colleges can select more students if they like them. I’d have to believe that college admissions are saturated to the point that letting in some black kids with lower test scores will drop someone off the bottom of the list. I’m not sure I do believe that.
When it comes to defending the process itself, in an affirmative (hyuk) sense, I’d actually stand by both legacy and affirmative action. Legacy admissions are important for the operations of universities – it’s a way to build a community, form the ties that Burt talks about in his comment, and (of course) raise money. To the extent that going to a specific college matters at all, it seems like legacy is the way to go. For everyone else, it really doesn’t make any difference at all, as long as you go to a school that’s in the same general footprint.
In this case, I refer to “discrimination” as “preferential treatment.” The question here is the degree to which it can be constitutionally justified when there is a loftier aim where everyone benefits. It’s an argument that could go either way, as I see it.
I can agree that there is some elasticity in admissions. I come at this, though, from the perspective of someone that thinks that a lot of colleges should be as selective as they actually have the capacity for. If it’s the case that an AA slot wouldn’t be filled but for its current occupant, my first question is why exactly it wouldn’t be filled otherwise. I’ve actually discussed this without regard to the AA discussion. I don’t like that the UC campuses are as selective as they are, for instance, and the only justifiable reason for it, in my view, is a lack of capacity. (Go down the ladder somewhat to the Cal States and I am more understanding when the slots would likely be filled with people who aren’t ready for college or won’t graduate, but I don’t know how much of the AA objection is really to Fresno State.)
I have the same discomfort with Legacy Admissions that I do with AA. Not outright hostility in either case, but not comfort.
Roughly zero, I would say, because many colleges don’t have competitive admissions. You meet the criteria and you get in. So if you’re qualified for a college with competitive admissions, you can definitely get into some college. But by the same token, absence of AA doesn’t keep NAMs out of college either. It just gets them into more selective colleges than their academic records alone would allow.
I disagree that the school you get into is irrelevant. Highly selective, or at least highly exclusive, schools matter. Alumni of certain schools feel a kinship and affinity for one another that is not rationally related to anything; the fact of two people holding a degree from, say, University of Southern California or Yale means that their dealings with one another will be more lubricated and congenial than they would be otherwise.
There are other signals built in to college identification. Schools also signal economic class; one tends to think that a graduate of Stanford University comes from a family background of more economic means than a graduate of, say, UTEP. Particularly with schools that have strong religious identifications (e.g., Notre Dame) the possession of a degree from that school can be a sub rosa indicator of religious preference. (And not all that much ‘sub’ to the sub rosa, at that.) A degree from a Traditionally Black College is an indicator of race. None of these signals are necessarily true in practice, of course. We all know that non-Catholics attend Notre Dame; that the kid from UTEP might come from oil money while the kid from Stanford could have had a scholarship; that the Traditionally Black Colleges can and do admit people of all races. But the signals are there nevertheless, and can influence things like how well an HR department responds to one’s resume. Particularly when one is still young and there is less professional history to put on that resume.
To what extent do people get crowded out of Stanford and have to go to UTEP because of affirmative action? If you are a reasonable candidate at Stanford and you don’t get in, you might have to go to Brown. This is true with or without affirmative action.
We all have to endure setbacks in life, but that’s just cruel.
That’s why I said “excluding the normal parameters.” The University of Texas at Austin is a better school than UTEP, but I don’t know how much benefit is actually conferred on attending the former instead of the latter.
…UT Austin is a whole different league of school from UTEP.
No doubt. What I am less sure about, however, is how much one benefits by attending UT instead of UTEP. It depends, to some extent, on the individual and what they want to accomplish. I am a believer that, by and large, you get out of college what you put into it. The main difference being networking opportunities. That’s why I put the Ivy Leagues in a class all their own (to be honest, I might cast some of the Ivy League schools out of this class). It’s not that the education at Harvard is all that much better, but that you are surrounded by the elite. As good a college as Texas is, I don’t think the same is true there. You’re there with a lot of smart people, but not with the same sort of connections. A different sort of environment.
UTEP is more different still. It may actually be a bad example because it’s not a particularly large school and a really smart person might have problems finding peers there. It’s also kind of remote. But I believe there to be a number of “lesser schools” in Texas where you can make your way to the point that not getting into UT doesn’t derail you too far.
(It’s sort of along these lines that I want to ask Cheryl Hopwood “Would it really kill you to go to SMU or UH rather than UT?” But, of course, the same could be asked of the minority that affirmative action might have put there in her stead. And in the case of law school, it matters more than undergrad anyway.)
UT’s alumni network is probably more powerful in Texas than any equivalent group is elsewhere. Being a Texas Ex is a huge benefit for people who want to go into either major business or politics in Texas.
Speaking for my own little sub-group of UT, the LBJ School, like other presidential policy schools has a cachet of its own that only the Ivies can really match.
There’s advantages to being a state flagship, especially if you have a presidential library to go with it.
Does UT even have the best alumni network in Texas? I’m a Memphis Tiger, but if I were choosing alumni networks here in Texas, I’d probably go with A&M. UT may be a badass school, but nobody takes care of their own like Aggies.
FYI, you cut out the bit where I stated that I suspected in the future that class-based issues, rather than race would be an issue, and mentioned legacy admissions.
However, in general I find the whining about AA to be based on logic that, on it’s face, should disqualify legacy admissions. If you’re going to complain about blacks/indians/women/whatever taking spots they are “unqualified for”, you should feel equally as outraged by Bob’s kid taking a spot he’s unqualified for.
I rarely see people get equally upset about the two. Being generous, I’ll chalk that up to people in general not realizing how many people get into a school based on who their parents are (or how much their parents just donated), as opposed to their grades.
No slight intended, I think I just have an allergy to quoting complete text. I added that second paragraph back at the last minute and should have added the first. I’ll go ahead and add it.
I agree that complaining about AA should confer a similar position on legacy admissions. And if people see a difference, they need to have a good articulation as to why. It could lead to an interesting discussions. I am 90% sure, however, if I asked Aron what he thought of legacy admissions, he’d feel the same way. I don’t have to wonder with my Indian-American friend Bob, as he already broached the subject.
Eh, it was just a bit of a whine. I should have clarified more — I see AA being of slowly diminishing importance over the next few decades as, bluntly, the white racists die off and minorities end up getting to the point where they can casually push back on the old boys club.
I’m not naive enough to think a black President demolished barriers, but frankly AA was designed to address a thorny problem that accrued over generations, and is even — to a large degree — an unconcious bias. (People are, myself included, far more comfortable with people like themselves. Liberals congrgate to liberals, gamers to gamers — and when it comes to hiring and firing and admissions when you know so very little about a person, tiny things add up. Give me a choice between two perfectly qualified candidates, one a gamer and one not — I’d probably choose the gamer even if I tried to be impartial. Because I know his/her type, and how to motivate them).
In terms of traditional AA, well — even unconcious bias filters out qualified black applicants from advancing upward. It’s especially a problem given the fact that solid chunk of the country still hasn’t given up fighting the CRA.
I probably should have transitioned from that — AA being a necessary evil for a particularly egregious problem — to what I consider an up-and-coming concern (class based bias as racial and gender bias slowly get wiped away — not through people becoming better, but because the power brokers are diverse enough to shed concious and unconcious bias. Or at least horse trade and fight over fiefs and let biases wash out).
Legacy admissions being a perfect example of the sort of class-based bias that’s already deeply prevasive. Another example of recent note would be Mitt Romney’s kid’s investment firm. For all I know he’s the next Warren Buffet — but he is where he is NOW because his parents and their friends were loaded enough to risk a serious chunk of change on him.
I could ALSO be the next Warren Buffet. (I’m not, but let’s play pretend). But I don’t have any multi-million dollar friends or relatives. I can’t start my own fund because, heck, if my relatives were as generous compared to their net worth as Romney’s were, well…I’d have about 500 bucks, probably. If I was lucky.
And investors aren’t really gonna flock to my 500 dollar fund, no matter what ROI I had.
No, equal skill or even superior — and I’d have to take the longer, harder road.
Children of wealth and privilage? They have a leg up.
Ah, well — the old sayings are best. Born on third, thinking he hit a triple? It’s true regardless of the guy is good at baseball or not.
And with income inequality worsening, with it goes the liklihood of those skilled but unprivilaged from ever making it into that world, because it’s going to be clogged with the children of the connected. (And anyone who has watched them knows that money insulates you from failure so very nicely.)
Not much to disagree with here, Morat, even if I don’t quite come to the same conclusion on AA itself. I’ve been increasingly interested in talking about class. The problem I’ve had is that it’s not something the right is interested in talking about (except in narrow cases) and my conversations with the left hit a dead end when it comes to the disadvantages of people they don’t care much for.
watch the wealth. b/h have around10% of the wealth of the average white person. which ties dramatically into social mobility, and remaining in the middle class after a job loss, or other issue.
One of the problems with Legacy Admissions is that it’s something completely voluntary on the part of the school that offers them. No laws required.
For most institutions, I don’t think laws would be required for AA. Whenever it comes up, the schools themselves tend to come out in favor. I have some cynical suspicions about why this is the case, but it is the case.
The only extent it would be mandatory is if a larger public university decided on it as a blanket policy and required all member schools to use it. So, if the UC system decides to use it, UC-Berkley “has to” use it. But it is still voluntary on the school system as a whole.
I do imagine AA might be quasi-“mandatory” in the sense that pursuing a systematic AA program would help the university respond to discrimination lawsuits. Someone claims they were discriminated because of their race, religion, etc., the university can say “hey, we have an AA program where we try to include people from as many different backgrounds as possible.”
Well, sure, but that is not exclusive to AA. It is not required by law and thus remains voluntary in any formal sense of the word.
True enough.
AA is a voluntary program that the owners of state colleges have voluntarily chosen to implement.
Liberty60:
Sure it is voluntary. If they didn’t within a week Jesse Jackson and Al Shaprton would be on campus claiming that the lack of AA was a plot on the part of Repubs to keep blacks down and ignorant, maybe even call it a war on blacks.
I have yet to hear from any liberal AA supporters when they think the books will balanced and we can actually try and be colorblind or that folks can earn entrance on their own merit alone. My guess is there will never be enough and that you will never hear it from Al or Jesse b/c they would be out of a job. Who ever wants to stop getting a gov’t benefit?
I don’t know if I really find this as big a problem with regard to undergraduate admission as I think most people do.
Look, there’s a lot of really good undergraduate institutions and for most people, the difference between a tier 1 Ivy and a tier 1 state school won’t, in the end be huge, at least for legacies or the white kids losing “their” (as if they had a right to it) spot at school A in exchange for school B.
I’m given an interesting thought about this…
There certainly exist individual white students who might be harmed by AA policies. They are probably few and far between, but I have no doubt they exist. However, the impact on whites as a whole is probably nil. But because there are either documented cases of harm or there is an easy-to-see cause-and-effect relationship between AA and harm to white students (assuming admissions is a zero sum game, every spot that is given to a black person that they otherwise would not have received had it not been for AA is one that did not go to a white person*).
This seems to be the inverse of many instances of institutional or broader societal anti-black or anti-brown racism which many folks deny the existence of precisely because there aren’t obvious examples of scores of victims. But the impact is pervasive and far more widespread on the community as a whole. For instance, with discriminatory lending practices, it is probably hard to find specific cases of black folks where they can precisely point to exactly how they got screwed and what could have been otherwise is hard. But the sum total of these micro-aggressions is obvious when you look at rates of black home ownership and all of the tangential impacts of this.
* Of course, this assumes one of the dominant memes opposed to AA, which is that unqualified black students are getting in over qualified white students. While I’m sure that has and does happen from time to time, my understanding is that when looking at a pool of X qualified students for Y spots, where Y < X, preference might go to the black students within that group, who might have been picked over the white students regardless of race. The impact of AA on white students exists solely at the margins. Which is not to say it doesn't exist. Just that it isn't the "war on whites" that some seem to think it is.
“Which gets to the greater point, which is that many (though not all) of the privileges we often associate with being white, such as legacy admits and nepotism, are not evenly distributed. Assigning privilege to one white due to privileges given to another is… problematic.”
The “(though not all)” is the principal reason I remain a soft supporter of AA. I would support a more class-based AA approach–one that focuses more on ability to pay, etc.–but I still believe that whiteness confers some privilege, even if it’s “only” the privilege of not having to worry that people will see your race, etc., before they see you as a person. Therefore, the wealthy child of Cuban lineage might presumably have to face assumptions about her that a similarly wealthy white child would not.
Still, my support of AA remains soft, probably similar to Will’s formerly “soft” support.
My official stance is that I’m okay with institutions accounting for the context of an individual applicant when making admissions and/or hiring decisions. Context includes but is not limited to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, geography*, class, etc. The extent to which different institutions will consider these factors, if at all, is unique to the mission of that institution. It is hard to squeeze this into being in favor of or opposed to, hardly or softly, AA, though it pretty obviously falls more on the “pro” side.
* Do people who object to AA also generally object to schools seeking geographic diversity? Why or why not?
Slightly OT, but might be of interest to folks on both sides of the aisle, is Ron Suskind’s “A Hope in the Unseen”. It follows an inner city black boy who works his way through high school to gain acceptance to Brown. Once there, he struggles, in large part because his high school didn’t prepare him academically, socially, or culturally for college. He ultimately succeeds, thankfully, but the book gives a bit of a human face to the myriad of impacts, positive and negative, that AA has on the people who interact most closely with the program. This is not necessarily intended to support the overly broad opposition that AA sends unqualified kids to school where they can fail and are worse of than having never gone, but, again, it simply offers a human story, which is often lacking in these conversations. AA did this one child well, ultimately, but it was not wholly beneficial to him without some negative consequences and shows that AA is about a lot more than just getting in. I recommend it highly (even though Suskind’s writing itself is problematic).
Kazzy, if Flagship U has the capacity for 600 incoming fish, has 900 applicants, but is only accepts 525 students, I think that demands an explanation in itself. “We’re worried the other 75 students are not ready” is a problematic one if you’re otherwise willing to accept 75 students of equal or lesser qualifications of one group and willing to let those slots go unfilled if people of equal or greater qualification are from another group.
Does that happen? I agree that would be problematic. I’m operating under the assumption that FU gets 6000 applicants for 600 spots, 25% (1500) of whom would be qualified. The admissions department might then use AA and other criteria to determine which of those 1500 they will choose. I will admit to having no idea which set of numbers is more realistic and how much variation there is from school to school.
When people say “Just because affirmative action helped person from Group A get in, that doesn’t mean that someone from Group B would have gotten in otherwise,” the operating assumption seems to me to be that if person from Group A didn’t get in, nobody would have. I’m not sure how it could be otherwise. If there are a fixed number of slots, then it is necessarily zero-sum, isn’t it? A Hispanic or black in means an Asian or white out.
I think AA on the whole would be less objectionable if it were the sort of “choosing between similarly qualified candidates.” Critics wouldn’t be able to point out to the qualification differentials between the races and how much higher the average Asian student has to score than the average Hispanic.
But if you look at a very selective school, it’s probably true that 1500 might be qualified and might be able to do well at the school. And there is a case to be made to try to use the large-and-qualified pool to create a balance of some sort (this is partly my thinking when I mention supportiveness of class-based AA). But with race-based and class-based AA, that does indeed make it zero-sum, by my reckoning.
Actually it’s not. Zero-sum, that is. Not exactly.
College applications are an exercise in trying to guess how many of your acceptance letters are going to result in a student enrolling. Depending upon your target population, you can be wildly off, any given year.
But typically college admissions boards break students down into how likely they are to accept as part of their 11-dimensional chess attempt to not be off too badly. If you are getting admissions requests from a block of students who are valedictorians and on student senate and play in the band and star in the school musical and also won the state science fair and made all-state in their sport, you’re assuming that a goodly percentage of those students are not, in fact, going to wind up enrolling – they’re going to take the full ride to an Ivy instead. Well, unless you’re the Ivy, of course.
So you might offer 100 “yeses” to people in that pool and expect N% of them to actually enroll.
Meanwhile, you offer 100 “yeses” to this group, and 5000 yeses to the average applicant, and etc., etc.
Odds are pretty good if you’re a very expensive college, you can make a whole slew of “affirmative action” “yeses” in your pool and still expect very few of those students to actually enroll, because minority students trend to be less able to afford the school. So a “yes” offered to someone in that pool isn’t necessarily a “yes” that you took out of another pool.
The “likely to come, if accepted” pool is based upon a lot of factors. Now, kids in *that* pool – if they’re affirmative action – may draw away a “yes” from another kids, but…
Yeah. Not exactly zero-sum.
I wouldn’t expect exact zero-sum because that would assume exact efficiency and due to the fact that you don’t know who is going to say yes, that doesn’t exist. However, the metrics should give you an idea of who is likely to say yes. Sent out 100 likely non-accepters and expect 11 to say okay. One year 14, the next four. But when trying to align slots with acceptences, you’re still “reserving” 11 slots. Slots that, if you weren’t pursuing that type of student, you would open up for others. My alma mater’s Honors College did this with National Merit types from out-of-state. Pursued a lot of them vigorously, but assumed a few would show up. I’d be surprised if people weren’t rejected from the HC under the assumption that a few NMTs would say yes and factored that into the targets.
Thanks to both of you for illuminating this. As stated above, I’m more on board with the idea of AA than with any particular application of it. Fwiw, every school I’ve worked in has never been at max capacity and even if a given class were at max, we’d push beyond that if circumstances exist. We never had a formal AA policy but “diversity” was considered. If we ever did accept an applicant of color with qualifications that would have dictated a rejection had he been white, it was not at the expense of another student. Interestingly enough, my experience tells me black students tend to need to be overqualified to gain acceptance, because their “flaws” tend to rub people more than those of their white counterparts. A loud black kid is a nuisance, while a loud white kid is spirited and rambunctious. This is somewhat borne out by the fact that a greater percentage of our students of color are full-pay than are our white students. This tells me we are less likely to take poor black and brown kids because… Well… You know about THOSE kids. Anecdotes and sample sizes, of cours. But not nothing.
By “your schools” are you referring to PK-12? I do consider that different as you’re still knee-deep in the molding process. I also consider it different if a school is going to the trouble of getting to know the applicants well enough to see the “flaws” that rub them the wrong way. If you’re already leaning heavily on the human element for admissions, then it makes sense to keep an eye on that sort of thing.
If it’s true that black applicants need to be overqualified to get in, that can indeed represent a problem. One of the things that makes me uncomfortable about AA is that the opposite is true… SAT scores for incoming whites and Asians tend to need to be higher than for other groups. This is not in and of itself damning as I would expect the same to be true if we had class-based affirmative action, but it is cause for concern especially if race itself (and race alone) is a factor for admissions.
The last thing I would add is that the situation you describe wherein not all slots are filled is the sort of situation I mention above where the slots either go to desired subgroups or nobody at all. If we’re talking about PK-12 or a small, private college, I do take a different view. But if we’re talking about a big state university or particularly influential sort of place, my question goes to why those slots aren’t being filled.
Will-
Yes, K-12 (specifically, PK-9, but one in the same).
In my particular school, my hunch is that the slots are unfilled because we can’t fill them. Even if we accepted EVERY applicant, we still would probably be under capacity. I do agree that the situation you described is troubling. I don’t believe that AA ought to mean “different standards for different races”, which I believe is what you’re getting at and I think it is fair to describe some systems of AA as doing just that.
It seems fair enough to say that there is enough of a difference between K-12 and college as to make the situations not really comparable.
One of the things to remember though is that legacy admissions are part of how a college pays it’s bills. Those alumni associations hit up alums for donations. This provides grants, scholarships, facilities, etc. However they also require a certain amount of charity towards the school. It’s hard to stay charitable to your alma mater when they say your kid’s not good enough to go there. Solution? Give those students who have parents that are also part of a “legacy” a leg up to get them over the hump and into the school.
I do believe there is a certain zero-sum game to admissions as well. A while back some students at University of Michigan sued the school because they were denied admission on the grounds that they were not minorities. In short, they had their seats “taken” by students with otherwise lower scores but who were placed ahead due to minority status. When the court ruled (IIRC) they did not argue if the seats where “Taken” only that the desire for diversity was a worthy enough goal to allow for “other factors” to come into the process.
And this is where it sucks to run a college admission department. First you have to know you’ve got a limited number of seats. You’ve got dorm room capacity, you’ve got intro class capacity, you’ve got teaching staff to manage, at the end you only can take “So many” kids. At some point there are going to be kids who would be in the “Would have gotten in except they were behind this other kid for reason X”.
Ideally that reason is not “born the wrong color” and is only ever “just not as likely to succeed at our school”.
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