The Harvard admissions lawsuit

DaveSchmidt said:

Runner_Guy said:
FYI... here is a NYTimes article about what would happen if Harvard substituted SES-affirmative action for race-based affirmative action.

 And, just as a historical side note, here is Brennan in his Bakke dissent:

We disagree with the lower courts' conclusion that the Davis program's use of race was unreasonable in light of its objectives. First, as petitioner argues, there are no practical means by which it could achieve its ends in the foreseeable future [ED. NOTE: CUE RICHARD KAHLENBERG 40 YEARS LATER] without the use of race-conscious measures. With respect to any factor (such as poverty or family educational background) that may be used as a substitute for race as an indicator of past discrimination, whites greatly outnumber racial minorities simply because whites make up a far larger percentage of the total population, and therefore far outnumber minorities in absolute terms at every socioeconomic level.

For example, of a class of recent medical school applicants from families with less than $10,000 income, at least 71% were white. Of all 1970 families headed by a person not a high school graduate which included related children under 18, 80% were white and 20% were racial minorities. Moreover, while race is positively correlated with differences in GPA and MCAT scores, economic disadvantage is not. Thus, it appears that economically disadvantaged whites do not score less well than economically advantaged whites, while economically advantaged blacks score less well than do disadvantaged whites.

These statistics graphically illustrate that the University's purpose to integrate its classes by compensating for past discrimination could not be achieved by a general preference for the economically disadvantaged or the children of parents of limited education unless such groups were to make up the entire class.

Brennan is basically writing off any help for low-income whites? isn't he?  

Assuming that Brennan's numbers were correct for the 1970s, I think a difference between med school admissions then and elite undergraduate admissions now is that elite undergraduate colleges -- particularly Harvard -- have several special preferences for the children of the rich and powerful, who are disproportionately white.  Richard Kahlenberg's assertion that black and Latino enrollment would not fall that greatly (or at all) is predicated on Harvard also ending legacy preferences, Z-list preferences, and Dean's list preferences.  If Harvard ended its preferences for the privileged, it would expand the percentage of each class that is admitted based on merit and that would increase legacy enrollment.  

Also, even if Brennan's statement that there isn't a correlation between income and GPA and MCAT scores among whites was correct back in the 1970s, that isn't correct today, with the rise of tutoring as a way of life for any family that can afford it.  Additionally, despite tutoring, test scores are less correlated with income than anything else that goes into a strong application to an elite college, such as taking AP classes, community service, cultivated talents, letters of recommendation from well-placed people, unpaid scientific research, and unpaid internships.  Elite colleges themselves are frank that they want to admit students who come from "good" high schools too, which would mean private schools and high schools in affluent towns.  

Further, white America has sociologically split in two since the 1970s, as Richard Murray demonstrated in "Coming Apart" and Robert Putnam demonstrated in "Our Kids."  There are far more white children being raised by single parents than there were then and there has been a hollowing out of our manufacturing economy.  To deny any help to a white child from a former industrial town whose mom lives paycheck to paycheck and whose father is "out of the picture," while giving a preference to a black child of lawyers who attends an elite Quaker high school is very unjust to me.  

Brennan also doesn't consider if affirmative action is good in the long run for its beneficiaries because it creates an academic mismatch.  

Although at Harvard black students and white students have equal graduation rates, at other selective colleges there is a graduation gap.  One defense of Prop 209 in California is that even though matriculation rates for minority students dropped, their graduation rates increased, and the number of minority graduates was constant.  It is plausible that academic mismatch may be responsible for the effect of blacks being more likely to want to major in science & engineering than whites, but less likely to complete one of those majors.  It is also plausible that affirmative action may have something to do with black law grads being less likely to pass the bar exam.

So, in other words, in terms of long-term career trajectory, is it better to be a college student where you are a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond?  I would say that it is better to be a big-fish in a small-pond, but best to be a right-sized fish in a right-sized pond.  (meaning a relative high-achiever or a relative median achiever.)

@DaveSchmit

I will close with two questions for you or anyone else:

1.  Do you feel the same way about affirmative action for Latinos as you do blacks?

2.  Do you think that affirmative action should be considered a civil rights triumph like the right to vote, the end to de jure segregation in schools, and open housing or should it be in a different category?

Runner_Guy said:

Despite the 1973 federal guidelines that you quoted earlier, I think the original justification for race-based affirmative action was to remedy the effects of past discrimination, hence the Bakke decision outlawing that justification for affirmative action.

You might want to read Richmond v. J.A. Croson before you continue to opine on what is and what is not permissible.

Runner_Guy said:

Brennan is basically writing off any help for low-income whites? isn't he? 

No, I don’t think so. He’s basically writing off low-income preferences as a means of promoting racial diversity. (I realize his suppositions are outdated; hence, my description of it as a historical side note and my editor’s note.) As sprout suggested, it’s possible to question SES’s usefulness as a racial diversity measure without throwing it out of the admissions tool box. Makes me wonder — well, not really — why some SES supporters are so insistent on ridding the tool box of racial preferences.

I will close with two questions for you or anyone else:
1.  Do you feel the same way about affirmative action for Latinos as you do blacks?
2.  Do you think that affirmative action should be considered a civil rights triumph like the right to vote, the end to de jure segregation in schools, and open housing or should it be in a different category?

1. Yes. Diversity, societal discrimination and all that.

2. Triumph? I wouldn’t apply that word to any of those examples. But insofar that affirmative action is a step in the right direction, yes.

DaveSchmidt said:

1. Yes. Diversity, societal discrimination and all that.

 After I posted this, little voices in my head started asking me: Where will I ever stop? (Native Americans? Inuit? Hmong?) When will it ever end? (Which century, exactly, will render Du Bois’s prediction moot?) Those are indeed toughies.

Steve said:

You might want to read Richmond v. J.A. Croson before you continue to opine on what is and what is not permissible.

 Thanks. I’m going to look it up. Unless you want to do my homework for me and elaborate.   

Basically, one has to point to past discriminatory acts that the contractor engaged in or in the specific industry and narrowly tailor a program to address those acts.  Generalized discrimination is insufficient to support a finding that an affirmative action program is constitutional.

Runner_Guy said:

Also, even if Brennan's statement that there isn't a correlation between income and GPA and MCAT scores among whites was correct back in the 1970s, that isn't correct today, with the rise of tutoring as a way of life for any family that can afford it.  Additionally, despite tutoring, test scores are less correlated with income than anything else that goes into a strong application to an elite college, such as taking AP classes, community service, cultivated talents, letters of recommendation from well-placed people, unpaid scientific research, and unpaid internships.  

I'm not exactly sure what you are getting at, but even if test scores are not highly correlated with individual income, it does appear that SAT scores have around a .85 correlation with the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at a school:

https://schoolbonuspoints.org/Methods.html

Another graph on that website shows the systemic racism within New Jersey's education system, as the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in a school is highly correlated (.89) with race of the students:

https://schoolbonuspoints.org/index.html

So, while income is one component of disadvantage, systemic racism in education adds another layer on top of that. So, why not account for both?

Steve said:
Basically, one has to point to past discriminatory acts that the contractor engaged in or in the specific industry and narrowly tailor a program to address those acts.  Generalized discrimination is insufficient to support a finding that an affirmative action program is constitutional.

Interesting. Could one argue that a segregated K-12 education system is a "specific industry"? And that college admissions could be part of the program to address that until the K-12 system is remedied?

sprout said:

Runner_Guy said:

Also, even if Brennan's statement that there isn't a correlation between income and GPA and MCAT scores among whites was correct back in the 1970s, that isn't correct today, with the rise of tutoring as a way of life for any family that can afford it.  Additionally, despite tutoring, test scores are less correlated with income than anything else that goes into a strong application to an elite college, such as taking AP classes, community service, cultivated talents, letters of recommendation from well-placed people, unpaid scientific research, and unpaid internships.  

I'm not exactly sure what you are getting at, but even if test scores are not highly correlated with individual income, it does appear that SAT scores have around a .85 correlation with the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at a school:
https://schoolbonuspoints.org/Methods.html

Another graph on that website shows the systemic racism within New Jersey's education system, as the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in a school is highly correlated (.89) with race of the students:
https://schoolbonuspoints.org/index.html

So, while income is one component of disadvantage, systemic racism in education adds another layer on top of that. So, why not account for both?

The SAT bit wasn't a central part to what I was saying, but the correlation between parental income and an individual's SAT score is only 0.25, which is rather low.   To be sure, there is a positive correlation between income and SAT score, but the low correlation coefficient means that there are a lot of low-scoring affluent kids and a lot of high-schooling poor kids.

Also, to the extent that there is an income, SAT score correlation, I suspect that the correlation between income and non-quantifiable facets of a college application is even stronger.  (eg, volunteer work, internships, recommendations from well-placed people, impressive foreign travel, prep school attendance)

I assume you are correct there is a strong correlation between a school's average income and its average SAT score, but that is just another argument in support of SES-based affirmative action, which could be based on both parental characteristics and school characteristics.  

Another graph on that website shows the systemic racism within New Jersey's education system, as the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in a school is highly correlated (.89) with race of the students:
https://schoolbonuspoints.org/index.html

Yes, because that correlation exists, this is an argument for how SES-based affirmative action would still produce racial diversity, and yet not penalize low-income non-Latinos/non-blacks and not give an admissions edge to an applicant who might have been raised in the middle-class or "bourgeoisie."

.  

sprout said:

1. What about the use of gender as a category in considerations for acceptance in some majors?

2. Why not have SES and race as independent categories in consideration for acceptance to build a student body that is diverse in both of these aspects?

@Runner_Guy

I am rekindling these two questions for you or anyone else.

DaveSchmidt said:

Runner_Guy said:

Brennan is basically writing off any help for low-income whites? isn't he? 

No, I don’t think so. He’s basically writing off low-income preferences as a means of promoting racial diversity. (I realize his suppositions are outdated; hence, my description of it as a historical side note and my editor’s note.) As sprout suggested, it’s possible to question SES’s usefulness as a racial diversity measure without throwing it out of the admissions tool box. Makes me wonder — well, not really — why some SES supporters are so insistent on ridding the tool box of racial preferences.

The SFFA lawsuit clearly opposes legacy preferences, faculty children preferences, and donor children preferences too.  If they didn't oppose these non-racial preferences they would not have had Richard Kahlenberg and Peter Arcidiacono testify on their behalfs.  

If they aren't suing over those forms of preference, it may be due to how those preferences lack the legal infirmity that the use of racial preferences has.

Although legally speaking, legacy preferences may be solid, politically speaking though, legacy preferences would come under intense pressure if racial preferences are eliminated.  

[Harvard University's] Office of Institutional Research found in 2013 that alumni parentage bestows an admissions boost equivalent to that for African Americans, and larger than those for Hispanics, Native Americans, and low-income students. Among applicants given the two highest academic rankings, Harvard accepted 55 percent of legacies, compared with 15 percent of non-legacies. Overall, across six years, Harvard accepted 33.6 percent of legacy applicants, versus 5.9 percent of non-legacies, according to Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff challenging Harvard’s affirmative action policies.

Also, SES-affirmative action barely exists.  If it did, more than 20% of Harvard's students would come from the bottom 60% of the income distribution, itself a percentage that is better than most other elite colleges.  

https://www.propublica.org/article/affirmative-action-how-the-fight-against-at-harvard-could-threaten-rich-whites

sprout said:

Steve said:
Basically, one has to point to past discriminatory acts that the contractor engaged in or in the specific industry and narrowly tailor a program to address those acts.  Generalized discrimination is insufficient to support a finding that an affirmative action program is constitutional.

Interesting. Could one argue that a segregated K-12 education system is a "specific industry"? And that college admissions could be part of the program to address that until the K-12 system is remedied?

 I don't think so as, I believe, that one would have to demonstrate the systemic discrimination in all of the K-12 schools (there is not discrimination in all systems as some are all - or virtually all - one race) and then only apply the program to those schools.

Runner_Guy said:

If they aren't suing over those forms of preference, it may be due to how those preferences lack the legal infirmity that the use of racial preferences has.

 Or it may be because Blum and other allies don't care so much about setting a precedent for a nationwide ban on legacy, faculty and donor preferences. I hope none of us are losing sight of that in all this talk about Harvard.

DaveSchmidt said:

sprout said:

1. What about the use of gender as a category in considerations for acceptance in some majors?

2. Why not have SES and race as independent categories in consideration for acceptance to build a student body that is diverse in both of these aspects?

@Runner_Guy
I am rekindling these two questions for you or anyone else.

1.  I do not think gender based affirmative action is appropriate either, since it create an academic mismatch and then a stereotype shadow for graduates.  

2.  I will ask you a question first: look at the chart below and tell me if you see any evidence that Harvard is indeed practicing any SES-affirmative action(except when it does so accidentally due to the correlation between income and race)?

And remember, Harvard's skew towards the affluent and rich is not as strong as the skews at Princeton, Yale, and other elite schools.

While that graph does not appear to show SES-affirmative action, Harvard's stated 'tip' for students who overcome adversity indicates that to at least some small extent, it does.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/24/why-harvard-hits-pause/

But stories of successful applicants prove a common truth: Harvard admissions officers are looking for academic superstars who have overcome adversity in their personal lives and can offer a clear vision of what they would accomplish in Cambridge.

The premise of the website I linked to before advocates for selective colleges to add a more formalized bonus for economic disadvantage. But I'm not sure why you think that would require race-conscious admissions to simultaneously be taken away?

Runner_Guy said:
2.  I will ask you a question first: look at the chart below and tell me if you see any evidence that Harvard is indeed practicing any SES-affirmative action(except when it does so accidentally due to the correlation between income and race)?

 No, I don't. Your turn. Is it that barring racial preferences will leave Harvard and all other American universities with no choice but to weight SES more heavily?

DaveSchmidt said:

Runner_Guy said:
2.  I will ask you a question first: look at the chart below and tell me if you see any evidence that Harvard is indeed practicing any SES-affirmative action(except when it does so accidentally due to the correlation between income and race)?

 No, I don't. Your turn. Is it that barring racial preferences will leave Harvard and all other American universities with no choice but to weight SES more heavily?

I don't know how barring racial preferences wouldn't force Harvard and other elite schools to weigh SES more heavily and probably scale back legacy preferences.  

 Or it may be because Blum and other allies don't care so much about setting a precedent for a nationwide ban on legacy, faculty and donor preferences. I hope none of us are losing sight of that in all this talk about Harvard.

Blum and his allies seem very sincere in their opposition to legacy preferences, although since some of them are conservative, you can question their sincerity in wanting to help low-income people.

2. Why not have SES and race as independent categories in consideration for acceptance to build a student body that is diverse in both of these aspects?

If SES and race were balanced equally, and there was an additional consideration made for a student attending a high-poverty school, then I would support the use of race for black and Native American applicants.  Yes, I would support such a policy even though it would mean that, all else being equal, a black or Native American applicant would receive an edge over a white or Asian applicant.

However, since "all else being equal" is a rare scenario and you are allowing for a personal and school SES function, it would allow a low-income white student to have an advantage over a high-income white student and sometimes a low-income white applicant to have an advantage over a middle-income or high-income black applicant.

However, elite colleges have additional biases against certain marks of low-income whiteness.  Studies have shown that belonging to Future Farmers of America, 4H, church groups etc makes acceptance at an elite college less likely.  

However, SES-race hybrid doesn't seem to be a viable option politically, since the courts could not impose it, Congress is dysfunctional and bribed by elite schools anyway, and the elite colleges (with the possible exception of Amherst), don't want it.  

If the US was going to adopt SES-race-hybrid affirmative action it would have done so under Barack Obama, who in 2008 as a candidate validated the legitimacy of white opposition to affirmative action and acknowledged that his own daughters were "pretty damn privileged."  

However, as president, Obama was an unconditional supporter of race-based affirmative action.  

For whatever reasons, Harvard and its peers seem to barely consider SES.  If they did consider SES, they would not allow the grotesque economic disproportionalities that exist in their student bodies.  It seems necessary to me to restrict the use of racial preferences in order to get elite colleges to drop their privilege preferences and use SES.  

But in practice, universities have long relied heavily on race and given short shrift to considerations of economic disadvantage. Harvard’s own analysis found that its preferences for African American students, for example, are about twice as large as their preferences for students from families making less than $60,000 a year. Unsurprisingly, at Harvard, 71% of the black and Latino students come from wealthy backgrounds.  

https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/09/04/affirmative-action-should-be-based-on-class-not-race

(I would not support category-wide affirmative action for Latinos though because, as a group, they have not experienced the persecution equivalent to what blacks and Native Americans have gone through.  There has been discrimination from time to time, but not outright atrocities.  Also, Latinos can be white and the experience of white Latinos seems not dissimilar to me from the experience of other white Catholics.)

------

Anyway, I have made many arguments in favor of SES-based affirmative action and against race-based affirmative action, but one I haven't made before is that unconditional support for race-based affirmative action (and related policies) is very costly to the Democratic Party.  

There were lots of warnings.  So many many many warnings.  

Here's a Bayard Rustin quote from 1987, given at a speech at Harvard, in fact.

Here's one from Ross Douhat in 2010.

 The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.

Do you know where I am going with this?  

I question if affirmative action is even effective in public policy.  Even Barack Obama said "It hasn’t been as potent a force for racial progress as advocates will claim." But politically?  it is a disaster.  

Runner_Guy said

"For whatever reasons, Harvard and its peers seem to barely consider SES.  If they did consider SES, they would not allow the grotesque economic disproportionalities that exist in their student bodies."   

Perhaps Harvard doesn't consider SES but Harvard's financial aid programs allows more students from lower income families to consider Harvard. 

"All measures of economic diversity rose for students applying for early admission to the Class of 2022. First-generation college students make up nearly 10.6 percent of students admitted early, compared with 8.7 percent last year. Nearly 58 percent have applied for financial aid so far, up from 57 percent last year, and nearly 13 percent have requested an application fee waiver, well over last year’s 10.7 percent.

“Harvard’s revolutionary financial aid program played a major role in attracting so many outstanding students to apply early this year,” said Sarah C. Donahue, Griffin Director of Financial Aid. “Thanks to our generous need-based aid and no loan requirement, Harvard costs the same or less than most public universities for 90 percent of American families.”

Harvard’s leading financial aid program continues to send a strong message of access to outstanding students from all economic backgrounds. Since launching the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative in 2005, Harvard has awarded nearly $1.8 billion in grant aid to undergraduates. The undergraduate financial aid award budget has increased more than 131 percent, from $80 million in 2005 to more than $185 million in 2017. Further, Harvard’s net-price calculator makes it easy for families to get a sense of the College’s affordability."

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/12/964-gain-early-admission-to-harvard-college-class-of-2022/

20% of Harvard students pay nothing.This is offered to students whose family income is less than $65,000. For family income between $65,000 and $150,000, the cost (tuition, room and board) is between 0 and 10% of income. 60% of Harvard students are in these two categories. The average cost is $12,000. 

Harvard admissions case reflects the myth of the interchangeable Asian

Written byLisa Ko, Contributor  

My high school guidance counselor gave me a college recommendation for a girl named Christina Chin. I'd been meeting with him for four years. There were fewer than 20 Asian-Americans in my New Jersey public high school of about 700 students, and our teachers frequently mistook us for one another. One of my teachers, who lived near me and had known me since I was a child, received a call during class one day and said I was wanted in the principal's office. When I arrived, the principal said he'd called for a student named Jane Tawara.

"I'm Lisa, not Christina," I told my counselor, though later I joked that I should have passed for Christina. She had better grades.

On Oct. 15, in Federal District Court in Boston, plaintiffs argued that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants. This lawsuit contends that the school gives these applicants lower scores for personality traits like "humor" and "grit" and that it rejects qualified Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans and Latinos. The case, which has been supported by the Justice Department and led by an anti-affirmative action group called Students for Fair Admissions and a group of Asian-American applicants who were rejected by Harvard, has the potential to threaten all colleges that consider an applicant's race in the admissions process. Eliminating race as a consideration in admissions would cause egregious harm to people of color, including Asian-Americans.

As I read about this lawsuit, I am reminded of my own college application experience, in the mid-1990s. At the heart of my anger at being seen as interchangeable with other Asian-American students — and later, at being mistaken for other female Asian-American co-workers in every job I've had — was that we were seen as lacking individuality, and by extension, humanity.

This narrative is a familiar one in our Asian-American lexicon. My parents, Chinese immigrants from the Philippines, came to the United States on student visas in the 1960s. The first in their families to attend college, they met in New York City and sponsored their siblings' migration to North America. They moved from the city to a middle-class white commuter suburb and raised me there. For many children of immigrants who came to the United States as beneficiaries of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, our origin stories have centered on our relationships to whiteness and class assimilation. We're too American, or not American enough.

In high school, I internalized anti-Asian stereotypes by rejecting them. I was bad at math and science. I liked art and film. We didn't all look the same, and I was Not Like Them — not like the Asians who would go to Ivy League schools and be pre-med. But as Mark Tseng-Putterman has written, this fervent insistence at being the "right" kind of Asian is still invested in a preoccupation with how others see us.

The 1965 law gave preference to highly educated Asian immigrants, which then gave rise to stereotypes of Asians as more economically successful than other people of color in the United States because we supposedly work harder and have stronger educational values: the model-minority myth leveraged by both whites and Asians to justify racism against blacks and Latinos.

While Asian-Americans have benefited from affirmative action, we continue to be used as a strategic tool by white conservatives who are opposed to it. The anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard is a result of a campaign by the conservative strategist Edward Blum, who was also responsible for Fisher vs. University of Texas.

My family's story is far from the only kind of Asian-American story, though it's the one that has largely been told, particularly in mainstream media. That's partly because of who has access to that media and partly because it's a story white Americans feel more comfortable with, because it still puts them at the center

There are pitfalls to hearing — or investing in — only one type of story. Though the Asian-American population increased by 72 percent from 2000 to 2015 and is continuing to rise, on track to become the largest immigrant group in the United States by 2055, we've been here since the 18th century. We have been driven from towns, banned and interned; and we continue to be incarcerated, profiled, murdered and deported at alarming rates. The touted success of the model minority has not resulted in true political or cultural power. Asian-Americans remain scapegoats for economic anxieties, from the immigrants blamed for taking away good-paying jobs from white Americans to the Asian students blamed for taking college acceptance spots away from white students.

Asian America is changing. While new immigrants continue to expand our communities, so do the grandchildren of post-1965 immigrants, born to parents who were also born in the United States. Will these third-generation Asian-Americans be less concerned with the white gaze — with the guidance counselors and college admissions officers who refuse to see them fully — than previous generations have been?

Lisa Ko is the author of the novel "The Leavers." This column was first published in The New York Times.

DaveSchmidt said:

Runner_Guy said:

  Meaning the counterargument in favor of race-based affirmative action?

 The counterargument to this summary: Race, unlike other categories, is immutable and just an ordinary fact of life — until college admissions, when it’s given outsize importance at the expense of more economic diversity.
I feel like I've gained some understanding of your side of the discussion. I'm asking what you've grasped from the other side.

 The upshot of this little exercise, I guess, is that someone has done a better job explaining his side than I’ve done explaining mine.

...

"Civil rights triumph." "Discrimination from time to time." "And other elite schools." It's been clear that you and I, Runner_Guy, have a fundamental disagreement about the lasting and continuing impact of racism (including prejudice against ethnic groups) in the United States and what's at stake if this Harvard case reaches the Supreme Court.

You draw a line from affirmative action to Trump. I draw a line from any gains by black Americans to Trump. If class-based preferences, in place of race-conscious policies, lifted African-American and Hispanic admission rates you’d still get white backlash. Here I must part, too, with the great Mr. Rustin (born and raised 16 miles from my hometown), who had seen 50 years of the civil rights struggle when he gave that speech, just months before his death. Who knows what he may have concluded had he seen the struggle continue for another 30.

To some people (including Democrats), the claim of "white privilege" is just as "mythic" as the notion that all Asian-Americans excel in school.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703724104575379630952309408

Can you provide that Salon link again? I was reading it just now, and it crashed on me.

ETA: Never mind. Found it.

DaveSchmidt said:
Can you provide that Salon link again? I was reading it just now, and it crashed on me.
ETA: Never mind. Found it.

 That post appears to have been deleted by MOL.

For anyone else following along, the Salon article referenced is a history of affirmative action and a liberal argument against it.

https://www.salon.com/2010/08/24/affirmative_action_6/

So that was Michael Lind’s understanding of the other side of the debate. 

Fascinating.

Runner_Guy said:
To some people (including Democrats), the claim of "white privilege" is just as "mythic" as the notion that all Asian-Americans excel in school.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703724104575379630952309408

 To some people (including writers who are “comfortable with moving to a more class-based system of affirmative action in college admissions” and “think a more aggressive class-based system might actually work better at creating diversity”), Webb missed the larger truth:

[Lyndon] Johnson's decision hints at affirmative action's real purpose, one that has been muddied by the legal arguments that have been necessary to keep it alive. The purpose is not merely the "compelling state interest in diversity," it is to help correct the societal biases, conscious and unconscious, that continue to curtail opportunity for certain groups of Americans. The fact that affirmative action, which is a relatively mild form of government action compared to the Democratic Party's deliberate creation of a modern whites-only welfare state [he’s referring mostly to New Deal programs], arouses so much anger is evidence of how powerful such biases continue to be.

http://prospect.org/article/webb-and-white-privilege

If you don't like long posts, please don't read his one!  I am borrowing from my post in the other thread here but I would like to nudge people to reconsider a few common assumptions.

Assumption #1: The purpose of affirmative action in university admissions is  strictly to help "minority" students...that colleges are admitting otherwise unqualified students as a social justice endeavor.  [That isn't necessarily the case.  In fact, most institutions really do believe that having a student body that is significantly mixed benefits all students - including whites - because the college wants to prepare students for today's global society, not the society of the 1950s.  Ostensibly, colleges are producing the leaders of tomorrow's society.  Having a campus in which students have a meaningful opportunity to interact with, and learn from, those who are different from themselves is a key part of the educational process. It contributes to academic and social learning.  So, the purpose of considering race and other characteristics is not all about helping students of color.  Rather, it's about creating an optimal learning environment for all students.  And the Supreme Court has determined that educational institutions have the right to do this...and doing so doesn't violate Title VI or the 14th amendment.]

Assumption #2: The ideal admissions process should be an objective one in which a college effectively ranks applicants by their qualifications  (e.g. grades, test scores, or other criteria) and then goes down the list admitting applicants until all spots are filled.  Thus, the "top" students should be admitted.  [Sounds plausible....however, a college cannot do it that way because in addition to trying to create a mixed student body for educational reasons, it also has to fill every academic department.  If the top 250 applicants all want to major in engineering, a college cannot admit all of them.  The institution has to fill the other programs as well.  So, after the 50 spots for new students in the engineering department have been filled, 200 academically excellent students remain...however, a college cannot over-enroll one department and leave another empty.  For practical reasons, the college may have to pass by those applicants with a higher SAT score or HS GPA to get to the top history, music, or business applicants.  Okay, there also are undeclared majors and other considerations but you get the point.]

Assumption #3: SES is a reasonable proxy for admission criteria that would result in a sufficiently mixed student body that would meet the college's goal of creating a diverse student body.  [Ahh..this one has some basis in truth because of the link between income and race. The least affluent in our society tend to be people of color so admitting applicants from lower SES groups might yield a somewhat racially diverse student body. However, there also are plenty of poor whites who would qualify for special consideration were SES exclusively used, so SES might not prove to be a totally sufficient proxy in creating the sort of racial mix colleges believe to be necessary.  Plus, the research shows that, for a variety of reasons, many students of color - including those who are absolutely academically qualified  - don't consider applying to the most selective schools. Finally, the fact is that both race and class are factors in the American experience...not to mention the global experience. And it's the intersectionality of race and class that seems to matter most.  Being White, Black, Latino or Asian matters...but being Black and poor really, really matters in our society.  If the more privileged white students don't have an opportunity to mix with and learn from students who are different, they may never attain the understanding that is necessary if we are truly going to make our society better. So, while it's important for wealthy students to meet poor ones, it's also even more critical for wealthy white students to interact with less affluent students of all colors...not just Asian, Black, Latino and Native Americans but also with bi and multi-racial people.

Admission #4:  Creating a diverse student body is enough...once that has been accomplished the job is done.  [The research is quite clear that having a diverse group in a common geographic location is an important, but insufficient, factor to facilitate social learning.  Colleges have to create opportunities for meaningful dialogue and other types of exchanges among students from different backgrounds.  Sitting at adjacent tables in the dining hall isn't enough.  Colleges have to find ways to get students talking and sharing perspectives - and faculty have to consider different contexts and points of view  - if they are to facilitate diverse academic and social learning]

If the Supreme Court rules that what Harvard and other private colleges are doing to create the sort of diverse student bodies they desire violates Title VI, I suspect they will look to SES as a means of doing this.  It may have some impact, but it may not change the fact that many Asian-Americans and other applicants whose academic qualifications surpass those of others will still be "passed by" as colleges use SES as a way to create a diverse student body. If that happens, I suspect it may spawn a disparate impact claim in the next case.

Of course, these are just my thoughts and I understand that other posters probably have different views.

Assumption #3(a): Supporters of race-conscious admissions need convincing that SES diversity gets too little attention. [What we’re hearing, though, is that the two preferences are mutually exclusive.]

DaveSchmidt said:
Assumption #3(a): Supporters of race-conscious admissions need convincing that SES diversity gets too little attention. [What we’re hearing, though, is that the two preferences are mutually exclusive.]

 It may also be assumed that selective colleges need convincing that SES diversity is important. 

1. There appear to be initiatives towards this end: e.g., https://americantalentinitiative.org/

2. Note that a counter-force to increasing preference for lower- and moderate- SES students is the college ranking system -- as it includes average SAT scores in the rankings, and SAT scores tend to decrease with decreases in wealth of the student body. Selective colleges want to stay at the top of the list. What can be done to influence the college rating systems to not skew the schools with the wealthiest students towards the top of the list? Their rating formulas do influence the priorities of the universities.

sprout said:

What can be done to influence the college rating systems to not skew the schools with the wealthiest students towards the top of the list? Their rating formulas do influence the priorities of the universities.

 U.S. News creates lists showing the percentage of students receiving Pell grants, but acknowledges that they’re an imperfect proxy and doesn’t appear to factor that percentage into its overall rankings. 

This study, using tax records, went into more detail, but I can’t even imagine the resources needed to keep it updated or how you’d incorporate findings into a ranking. But it provides interesting, relatively recent snapshots:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/

Norman_Bates said:

Assumption #1: The purpose of affirmative action in university admissions is  strictly to help "minority" students...that colleges are admitting otherwise unqualified students as a social justice endeavor.

 This reminded me of one of Lind’s assumptions in the Salon essay that Runner_Guy linked to. First, he quotes LBJ:

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “You are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Lind follows up with this:

Race-based preferences, however, are the equivalent of taking the bondage-crippled athlete and, without allotting sufficient time for rehabilitation and training, permitting him to start several laps ahead of the other competitors.

sprout said:

DaveSchmidt said:
Assumption #3(a): Supporters of race-conscious admissions need convincing that SES diversity gets too little attention. [What we’re hearing, though, is that the two preferences are mutually exclusive.]

 It may also be assumed that selective colleges need convincing that SES diversity is important. 
1. There appear to be initiatives towards this end: e.g., https://americantalentinitiative.org/
2. Note that a counter-force to increasing preference for lower- and moderate- SES students is the college ranking system -- as it includes average SAT scores in the rankings, and SAT scores tend to decrease with decreases in wealth of the student body. Selective colleges want to stay at the top of the list. What can be done to influence the college rating systems to not skew the schools with the wealthiest students towards the top of the list? Their rating formulas do influence the priorities of the universities.

 I wasn't aware of the "American Talent Initiative" and so explored their webpage and the links on it.

This is a laudable project, but I still question how committed the elite participating colleges are.  For instance, Princeton is now going to be accepting transfer students from community colleges, but only 12 per year in a college with 5200 students.  Also, there is no talk about scaling back admissions preferences for the children of the powerful and alumni.

Princeton is even worse than Harvard when it comes to SES diversity.  Median family income is $186,000 and 72% of students come from the top 20% of income, with 17% from the top 1% alone.

So I remain unconvinced that elite colleges care very much about income diversity at present.  Perhaps in five years this will look transformative, but I don't see it now.