Here's a free link to the extensive article, elaborately festooned with interactive graphics.
March 9, 2024
How to try to achieve racial diversity without trying to achieve racial diversity.
The NYT tried to find out.
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80 comments:
Thanks, Ann. Here is an amazing NY Times reader comment:
“The bottom line is can the students admitted under these various scenarios do the work? Otherwise, we are fooling ourselves and will turn out ill-prepared citizens for a very complex society.”
How about we start with the underlying assumption that racial diversity is a positive good.
The Japanese have a process called The Five Whys. I worked for a Japanese company for awhile and used the the process effectively in an American company for many years after that.
Here’s a good description of the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
I’ll start it off.
Why?
Let's oversimplify: Black and Hispanics are poor and therefore dumb, so we can't just select on educational merit.
Stay classy NYT.
Shorter NYT: there are too many poor white people and we really just care about race.
BTW a typical lefty answer to the first why is:
“Of course it’s a good thing”
No good. It doesn’t answer the question. In fact it avoids it.
You’ve got to try harder.
So it seems to be IQ that matters. There are lots of smart blacks, but they're rarer than smart whites, so when you get them you don't notice that you've got diversity.
Latinos lie between blacks and whites.
In a color-blind society, a black with an IQ or 86 does as well as a white with an IQ of 86, and he will achieve that equality by acting white. Lacking that, he does worse.
Which points to the way forward - teach good character.
I see spittoon whenever I see festoon
Go the school everyday
learn to read and cypher
Graduate highschool
Go to college or learn a trade.
Dont create a baby until you marry.
Diversity follows is a generation or two.
Race, a social construct based on skin color, is a meaningless diversity factor compared to culture, religion, political ideology, economic status, and I'd guess many other differentiators of environment for college applicants. But it sure is easy to see compared to these more important forms of diversity. I suggest intermarriage to reduce racial differentiation to a beige spectrum rather than identifiable colors. Just to stymie school admins if for no other reason, like hapa hybrid vigor. Until then, start firing all DEI racists.
I tried to access the propaganda thru NYT but hit the paywall. Is Ann helping to distribute the pamphlets again?
So a white student works hard to get all A’s and a high test score, only for the college to redistribute 31% of that students A’s to only the black students… Try explaining that to you children. A perfect example “Equity” and looks like a lot of work to redistribute those A’s. Not sure why the NYT thinks this not really trying.
Blogger rehajm said...
"I tried to access the propaganda thru NYT but hit the paywall."
You need to get up early in the morning to get the worm around here.
serious question: is Harvard so easy a school, that you DON'T HAVE TO BE smart to go there?
As long as "black culture" exists in its current form where "acting white," meaning appreciating and accepting bourgeois values (see e.g., iowan2's comment), remains verboten among blacks, there'll never be racial parity. And blacks will continue to predominate/populate the left side of the Bell Curve and lose out on available opportunities.
There are some constructive suggestions in the NYT comments on how to improve the competitiveness of students elite colleges might otherwise have admitted via affirmative action. SAT prep classes at low-income schools is an example. Many people who support the Supreme Court decision would welcome initiatives that broadly benefit these students. Contrast that constructive discussion with the NYT articles’s focus on how to continue obtaining preferred racial outcomes in admissions to elite colleges without explicitly relying on race in admission decisions.
if you couldn't get good grades in high school; and can't get good scores on aptitude tests..
Please explain WHY you should spend money (your money? MY money?) to go to college?
Maybe (just MAYBE), if you couldn't hack high school; you won't cope with college?
Of the low scoring people admitted to Harvard.. How many graduate? What did those graduate in?
would YOU Want to fly in an airplane designed by someone that was bad at math and science?
“Festoon”.
Anne’s new “Garner”.
The college degree is going the way of the high school diploma from my youth. A debased certification that increasingly more employers ignore as any kind of signal. Idiocracy is our future and not 500 years into the future but closer to next week.
We need to have a conversation about diversity.
If a prestigious university admits 500 freshman, they have 500 individuals. They are diverse, but can be sorted by race, heritage, ethnicity, SAT scores or political affiliation.
If NYT means racial or ethnic diversity, they should say so. Viewpoint diversity is not something they seek.
What is the target percentage of Black and Hispanic students?
Who counts as Black? Some people have faked it. Everyone agrees that President Obama was Black, with a White mom and Black dad. A lot is riding can ride on being in a protected class, so should there be DNA verification? I hope not, that seems too close to the One Drop Rule.
Racial affirmative action is incoherent. We should drop the whole thing.
The SAT correlates with family income because family income correlates with intelligence, the willingness to delay gratification, and conscientiousness. SAT scores are also the best predictor of successful completion of college degrees. Granting applicants additional points for “disadvantages” does not eliminate those disadvantages, which are negatively correlated with degree completion. The NYT’s scenarios will “increase diversity,” but the cost paid will be a higher rate of failure for the “diverse” students. If family income, race, etc. are simply ignored, the SAT will perform its intended function of identifying the students most able to benefit from a college education. They will overwhelmingly—but not exclusively—be Asian and white. You can have affirmative action, or you can have colleges that actually do what they’re supposed to do, but you can’t have both.
Well..their premise might be wrong from the start.
This starts with 10,000 dots arranged by their parents income. Instead of starting with the premise that income is the decider I'd like to see this arranged by single vs two-parent families. Do this by race as well, so you would have single parent Black families, single parent Hispanic, Asian, and White families, vs two parent Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White families.
Next, measure parent's involvement with their kids education. Not just paying attention to what is taught in school, or which school they are going to, or have to go to, but how many parents actively make sure their kids to homework, do the assignments, and work with their kids on things like reading with them at a young age, walking through their assignments with them, until you see they get the routine.
Is it resources that make the difference? The NYT seems to indicate that resources are what makes it. But we spend more dollars per pupil in Washington DC than most other industrialized nations do on any of their kids education. Yet, our kids cannot read, write, or add while theirs are taking calculus.
Also- in the graph, it does not show the number of kids who are in private, or charter schools, vs those stuck in bad public schools. A HUGE difference maker.
It is not just skin color. It is not just money. It always comes down to parent involvement, a two-parent vs a single parent family, school choice. A kid born into the ghetto of Chicago to a single mom, who has to work two jobs just to keep a roof over their heads, who has to walk through a maze of crime and pressure from neighborhood gangs to join up or be victimized, who sees no reason and is given no reason to study and work through it, who's schools are filled with teachers just trying to make it through the day/week, has zero chance of competing with other kids in a different environment. Giving that kid a slot into college isn't fixing anything and it's not setting him up for success. FIXING the cities, allowing for school choice, speaking out loud about the seriousness of two-parent families, is a key. We've made heroes out of single moms...and they are heroes, many of them. But we need to pound into young men what it means to be a man. That if you have a kid, you have work to do. And it's work for life.
The solution does not just lie in admitting kids with 1150 sats to Harvard. You want to graduate kids with 1150 sats from Harvard. One way is to create diversity majors that are easy, this is not helpful as it just reinforces that some of the cohort are not able. The other kids see this, just like they see that some legacy kids are not smart.
Under the hypothesis that the kid who got a 1150 sat is just as smart but only poorly prepared, you have to better utilize public high school years to educate them like the other kids, but this is not going to happen. The second way is to have a 1 or 2 year post high school intensive mentoring program to remediate for bad high schools. Get some billionaires to pay for it. This is actually done in the military academy prep schools.
But the problem is that it is too insulting to admit that the kids need more help, so we will just flounder along. And get no improvement. Harvard must have a large enough group of Asians, Jews, whites, and the well prepared minorities to keep up the Nobel Prize count, and also maintain a sub class for visible diversity. This can be solved by recruiting African immigrants from Nigeria, who have high sats. And you can get European Hispanics.
The slopes they want to use for cutoffs in score vs income, S(I) vs I, are not going to let in nearly as many hidden intellectual gems as their fevered brains seem to believe. I grew up in an impoverished area in eastern Kentucky that is filled to brim with poor white people. I can tell you authoritatively that there are practically no kids who lived in a shack on welfare that would have scored even above 1200 on the SAT if only they had been raised by adoptive parents who had million dollar per year incomes. The theoretical boost that income gives to student test scores isn't as high as progressives want to believe. People range from poor to rich mostly because those same people range from dumb to smart.
The smart way to admit the most reasonable diverse group of actually capable students is to set a floor- for Harvard or Yale (at least as those schools might have been let's say 30 years ago) would be to set an SAT floor of 1450 and then do a blind lottery until the class numbers are reached- no exceptions. For MIT or Cal Tech, that floor needs to be 1500 and higher. For a state school like the University of Michigan, that floor probably needs to be around 1300. And if you can't score above 1200 on today's SAT, you probably shouldn't be in college at all.
So just HOW did Ben Carson and his brother do it?? Their mother couldn't read, yet BOTH of her sons were very successful.
It's criminal to set kids up to fail to make you feel good about diversity.
Blacks do not populate the left side of the curve because of "black culture". It's the other way around.
Thank you for the free article. It seems to be trying to solve a problem that does not exist. Just admit the best qualified applicants. SAT scores are the best method we have for determining who will succeed. Rich families typically don't get there by accident, so it correlates well with intelligence. Even the corrupt Biden family must have a good bit of low cunning to have achieved such prominence and wealth through government corruption.
I wanted to festoon, but a not elaborate enough.
Meritocracy is the only way to go.
Color blind.
the corrupt insane left hate colorblindness.
The problem with Harvard is they see hierarchies everywhere and they consider themselves to be at the top of every one, And they think that they are brilliant enough to manage them all.
The first step in the solution is to stop seeing hierarchies everywhere you look. Seeing hierarchies is a construct that’s a choice. But even if you want to see hierarchies, of all the things to choose to make a hierarchy you choose color of skin and still consider yourselves to be the most intelligent people in America.
The second step is to not think so highly of yourself, Harvard and Harvard people. In the history of the world, Harvard ain’t that big of a deal. I don’t know that Harvard people are any happier than anybody else in the world. In fact, I would make an argument that they might be less happy. Professor Clayton Christiansen from Harvard Business School talked about his other classmates when he was at HBS didn’t all end up happy in their family lives.
The third step is choose to forgo the arrogance from which you think you can manage the hierarchies. You’re not smart enough to tell every person where they sit or should sit in a hierarchy. What’s more, Start treating people like individuals instead of members of groups you decide exist.
SAT scores correlate highly with IQ as well as conscientiousness.
Success in life depends a lot on intelligence, but also on conscientiousness (and other lesser factors).
If you want to make intelligence and conscientiousness less important for your Marxist dreams, you do what the universities are doing.
Especially revealing is the way the graphs assign the same color range to white and asian students (blue and blue-green). So visually, Asians don't count as racial diversity, but somehow the (literally non-racial category) Hispanics do. This also has the tendentious effect of masking which group (i.e., the hated whites) is disproportionately harmed by the admission of lower-scoring Blacks/Hispanics in the 300 point boosting of SAT scores.
Of course, as others here have remarked, none of this will work unless grading in the college curriculum is also gamed, e.g., by awarding everyone a "gentleman B" for showing up or creating majors such as grievance studies which require no academic skill.
Racial diversity is a euphemism for racism. Think Zulu and Mandela's Xhosa, Tutsi and Hutu, respectively.
That said, diversity of individuals, minority of one.
It's an interesting exercise, but it still does not address the problem of anticipated performance. If the test standards are lowered, what is the expectation that those students admitted with low scores will perform to standard, or fail and drop out?
comments on how to improve the competitiveness of students elite colleges might otherwise have admitted via affirmative action. SAT prep classes at low-income schools is an example.
Do you just ignore the reporting of all the places (Baltimore) where a high number of their high schools have ZERO students performing at grade level? ZERO!
Your solution is SAT test cramming? As our genius level VP advised, figure out "core causes".
SAT scores aren't even in the top hundred.
You'd think colleges would jump at the opportunity to stop admitting unqualified or barely qualified applicants (whatever their color or gender) and stop dumbing down class content and graduation standards. Nope. They can't quit being racist pricks.
The Supreme Court needs to give more attention to how a university can be held liable for money damages for violating the constitution's ban on affirmative action. (How do you get around the 11th Amendment for state schools?) Money damages are about the only thing that will quickly bring the schools into compliance.
From the article: "On average, students from families with more resources tend to do better on measures like the SAT."
Sure, but the causation is the other way around: Parents who produce high-IQ children tend to be higher earners than parents who produce low-IQ children. Or more simply, high-IQ people tend to make more money and have smarter kids than low-IQ parents -- because intelligence is a big factor in life outcomes and it's highly inheritable.
College admission statistics should relate to the state in question. Wisconsin is 4% black and that's the number it should be judged on when asking how it's doing on achieving equity in education.
But wait. You can't get into college without a high school degree. In Wisconsin 86% of blacks now get a high school degree so 3.5% of college students is the "equity number" Wisconsin should be judged on.
But wait. There are public schools in Wisconsin's largest city, Milwaukee, in which 0 third grade students are proficient in math or English at grade level. And the same is true when these students are later tested in eighth grade. They are passed on to the next grade through social promotions and they get high school degrees but is it imaginable that they are ready for college? These are students in public schools but about half the black students in Milwaukee are in charter schools, private schools, or suburban schools. Are some high school degrees more equal than others?
What is the real "equity number" of black students which Wisconsin should be aiming at?
But wait. Why is it that we never discuss equity till the students are 18. Is the poor schooling in Milwaukee K-12 public schools equitable? Does it become equitable if we reduce SAT cut off scores till those students have a shot at U Wisconsin Madison?
I think we have to figure out why Milwaukee public schools educate so poorly when students from the same zip code who go to charter or private schools do well? Then the issue of equity at U Wisconsin Madison would naturally sort itself out. But the teacher's union supports the Dem establishment and the teacher's union isn't interested in real equity in K-12 education. As a result there's no political will for real change. And there the matter rests till the black community stops accepting Dem excuses and either forces intra-party Dem change or votes Republican.
I'll go with what Nancy said. Yancey added an interesting wrinkle.
I believe the best outcomes result from parental interest and involvement. It's a rare kid who will thrive without that. Some get to the top of the mountain with a surrogate of sorts; a special teacher, a hero figure, a BFF with a nurturing family.
Diversity has no intrinsic value. Just teach kids to respect everyone (except a-holes). Not everyone can be a rocket scientist, brain surgeon, fireman, teacher or caring hospice worker.
If you want to compete on the PGA Tour, you can't bring your handicap with you.
A comment about the "Five Whys". Having worked in Japan for years, I have to say that asking "Why?" is likely to get you shunned, shamed and cast-out UNLESS the company gives you explicit permission or instructs you to ask "Why?".
Consider also:
Why are you unhappy? Because I'm fat.
Why are you fat? Because I eat too much.
Why do you eat too much? Because it gives me pleasure.
Why does it give you pleasure? Because my life sucks.
Why does your life suck? Because I'm fat.
The scenario where they basically weigh a kid's SAT scores according to how much better or worse it is compared to other kids in the same high school seems like it would be very bad for the kind of black families that schools like Harvard were able to get under the old system. Specifically, the daughters and sons of high-IQ blacks (doctors, lawyers, etc.), many of whom attended HS in affluent suburbs or in private schools, were in a great position to get admitted to elite colleges where AA was solely based on racial bean-counting. However, if, instead of race, schools look at how well as student's test scores stack up against other students from the same HS, those affluent black kids who attended majority white suburban or private schools completely lose their edge over their white classmates. The net effect seemingly would be fewer "Huxtable" kids and more kids from poor white communities in flyover states. I don't think that's at all the direction these want to go in.
Keep looking and you might eventually find the right proxy to use to circumvent the law.
I also find it revealing that the NYT models never mention the one admission category that already operates outside the SAT/merit-based system: legacies/donations. Those are by definition admits that are from wealthy families taking the place of otherwise qualified admits. Why not adopt a system that reduces that class of admits one for one for every low-income/poor school SAT-boosted admit? Could it be that that would hit too close to home for many NYT readers?
"I tried to access the propaganda thru NYT but hit the paywall."
Really? I used the gift link and was told I'd consumed one of my 10 monthly gift links. I've used these before and been told that they work.
In NYC's elite high schools, I don't think ethnic Catholics are proportionately represented. Speaking as an ethnic Catholic, I don't give a damn. I think elite schools should gather together bright people and, as young people do, let them compete with one another to demonstrate that they're brighter than their peers. That way lies the cure for cancer.... Anyway, these schools already have plenty of diversity: the Indian, Chinese, and Jewish kids learn to mix and mingle....Here's an experiment. Maybe the diversity fans can build a new elite high school. That high school can recruit bright kids from poor backgrounds or from racial groups that diversity fans want to favor. Then observe how the kids from these different schools turn out and follow the science.
The free link does work.
I've used these before and been told that they work.
it worked for me. Perhaps there is a limit to the number of times it can be used?
Agree with group: festoon is my 2nd favorite f-word.
So using their preferred method, you have students with SAT scores from 1000-1600 at the most highly selective schools. Lol
Good luck with that, professors.
I was able to get through with no problem, and there's a note saying that the article is has been gifted.
Now, I see this as a textbook example of how Progressive thinking is able to navigate around uncomfortable thoughts to arrive at the desired conclusion. Take this phrase, from the article: "Affirmative action policies helped colleges admit more Black and Hispanic students". Isn't that a lovely, uplifting statement that makes you feel good about Affirmative action? Could we also say, 'Affirmative action policies effectively lowered academic achievement standards in order to allow the admission of more Black and Hispanic students', and be more accurate? Of course, that would place the emotional burden of 'reason' on the speaker.
Or as one commenter said: "It appears the only point of this exercise is to find a method that gets the results as close as possible to the desired results....".
The premise is racist, and, therefore irreconcilable with justice. MLK taught us, and paid with his life to do so, that racism is immoral, that skin color is immaterial and that government must reject racism. Please don't let his death be in vain.
Thanks for the article. Thought provoking in any case. When I graduated from Middlebury -- indisputably a top-tier school -- in 1971, only 9 percent of Americans had college degrees. Part of that was lag from WWII. I went on from there to a total of four degrees in the hard sciences, so I've spent decades working with numbers and statistics. That affects my perception of the issue(s), and the article, which I'd rate at about a B-.
"Back in my day ..." [you'll have to imagine the old-guy cackle] ... elite schools admitted on four cornerstone criteria: SAT/ACT scores, rank in class, your ability to write well a coherent and meaningful essay of at least 750 words, and IQ scores (which high schools tested back then). Demonstrated leadership in things like Boy Scouts or 4H was a plus.
But let me focus for a moment on IQ, a measure of raw intellect rather than total intelligence. A +1 sigma score [one standard deviation, so 115] was considered the threshold for success in garnering [Hi, Ann !] a college degree. That is 16 percent of the population. These days, 38 percent have college degrees, but only 15 percent are working in a job where such a degree actually matters. Seems like the +1 sigma thing is pretty solid.
Here's where the NYT golfball goes into the rough.
They consistently confuse mere correlation with causality. Higher income is generally a MARKER of certain positive character and intelligence traits leading to success, or to a college degree. The *degree* does not drive the success. Would you like fries with that? Smarter people with solid character tend to be richer. Deal with it. How many athletes, paid millions, are broke by age 50?
Bush (43) made the same mistake regarding home ownership. It's a marker, not a cause, and lots of people came to great grief as a result. My little sister also went to Midd, but didn't deal well with the academic intensity and dropped out after two years. Just as smart as I am, and same family background, but she did not flourish there like I did. In contrast, she had a great career with AT&T, working her way up from file clerk to the very top of middle management. She has the intellect and the character to succeed, and financially better than I did.
Another key thing the article did not take into account is FOREIGN students. They add not only racial diversity, but cultural as well. My roommate was a Nigerian, and fellow Geology major. Last I heard from John, many years ago, he was very successful in the Nigerian oil industry and had dozens of employees, whom he paid quite well. I know that he funded one employee's daughter for four years in Geology at Midd, and that she thereafter joined his company.
For me, that's how it is *supposed* to work. If MERIT is good enough for sports, it should be good enough for academia and the corporate world.
Giving racial minorities a leg up at age 18 is 13 years too late. They are already behind the academic curve and will not be successful (this is in refence to the low scoring groups, not the high scoring.) If you help them achieve beginning at age 5, they will be competitive at age 18. Guess who it is that is behind not helping them at age 5, but trying to fix it at age 18?
Not one freaking word in this long informative article addresses the ultimate DESIRABILITY of admitting students with less impressive SATs to highly selective universities! IOW, is Juanita from a disadvantaged background, with her diploma from a crappy high school and her very good but not great 1320 SAT going to personally be more successful and more likely to graduate from Fordham (ranks #89) or from NYU (ranks #34)?
I’m rooting for Juanita, and I want her to hit it out of the park at Fordham, or Rutgers, instead of struggling to catch up with the better prepared students and faster-paced instruction at NYU or Columbia. Instead, admission officials seem determined to arrange a “diverse “ campus for the express purpose of exposing the students to folks of different races and backgrounds—-reducing Juanita to a Westworld android who exists not for her own benefit, but to provide a more interesting and exotic interactive experience for others.
The actual problem here is not admissions or race; it's the establishment obsession with highly selective universities. Let the capable student who hasn't had a chance to develop his potential go to a university where he is not always at the bottom of the class, a university where he can gain competence and not be shunted into less lucrative majors, a university where he isn't window dressing for moneyed progs.
The actual problem here is not admissions or race; it's the establishment obsession with highly selective universities. Let the capable student who hasn't had a chance to develop his potential go to a university where he is not always at the bottom of the class, a university where he can gain competence and not be shunted into less lucrative majors, a university where he isn't window dressing for moneyed progs.
The Japanese have a process called The Five Whys.
I use and teach this technique in my Effective Troubleshooting workshops. I am a believer.
But it is not Japanese in origin. It originated at Ford motor more than 100 years ago along with virtually all the others tools generally known as as lean manufacturing or Toyota Production System.
Henry Ford wrote about them in 1923 in what I think is still the absolute best book on the subject
Long out of print in e glisj, never out of pri t in Japanese.
John Henry
How to realize diversity without exercising liberal license to indulge color judgments and class bigotry.
No child left behind, then allow their labor, commitment, interest, and productivity to carry them forward. A novel tradition to mitigate progress: racism, sexism, classicism, etc. Oh, and mom and dad at home to raise "our Posterity".
"How to try to achieve racial diversity without trying to achieve racial diversity."
Easy. Let people identify as whatever race they prefer. The Left insists it works that way with gender, it's hard to see how they could have a problem with people choosing their own race unless they're just making up all the shit they claim to believe.
"Really? I used the gift link and was told I'd consumed one of my 10 monthly gift links. I've used these before and been told that they work."
It worked for me.
I would have appreciated it if the authors would have broken up blacks from hispanics in the analysis.
gilbar said..."serious question: is Harvard so easy a school, that you DON'T HAVE TO BE smart to go there?
It's a more nuanced question than it seems at first glance, I think. I have three degrees from Ivy League schools. At all of them, the conventional wisdom is something along the lines of, "It is very hard to get accepted, but once you're in, it is even harder to flunk out."
A positive interpretation is that it is a threshold phenomenon, e.g., the lowest ranked Harvard med student still ranks as one of the best med students in the country. A negative interpretation is that grade inflation makes performance meaningless.
The truth is somewhere in between. If you want to major in Physics or Engineering at Harvard, typically you need to be both smart and well prepared, unless you are at the genius level, where preparedness might not be so critical. For example, if you are very bright but went to a high school that did not offer calculus, majoring in Physics at a place like Harvard would be extremely difficult. Most of your fellow Physics students would be so far ahead of you that you probably would need an additional year of preparatory classes before taking the major's core classes, creating time pressure and limiting your options for taking interesting/useful electives. (Perhaps it would make sense to create five-year programs based on preparation, but it is hard to imagine the equity activists supporting that.)
The challenge is compounded by many of your fellow Physics students being at the very far end of the performance curve, so even with good preparation, you may find yourself on the weaker extreme of Harvard Physics' performance curve. Many students from weaker high schools find that to be a daunting, deeply unfamiliar, and yes, demoralizing experience. It is not at all uncommon to see less well prepared students switch from STEM majors to other fields as a result. I've personally seen a few minority students switch from STEM to identity-based majors.
On the other hand, if you are reasonably smart, it is much easier to find a comfortable place in many non-STEM majors, where grades are much more qualitative and the average often ends up being an A-. You still may be far behind the best students in your major, but the difference is less visible.
Another point that often gets lost is that a very large number of students who apply but are not admitted almost certainly could perform the coursework and even do well at Harvard. I would wager that if they had the staff and facilities, Harvard easily could double (triple?) the size of its student body without meaningfully changing its graduation rates or long term career outcomes. In that case, it wouldn't be very different from a larger state school, perhaps reserving places in a special "honors program" for its best students. At that point, the prestige value of the Harvard brand would come under question. It's interesting to watch an institution whose entire purpose is fostering hierarchy go through these contortions.
I don’t have a problem with legacy admissions.
- It fosters school traditions and loyalty.
- Children’s aptitude is correlated with parents’ so they should do okay.
Robother noticed the same thing that I did—the graphs made the color of the dots virtually the same for white students and Asian. They just blend together into one blue wave. Why would they do that?? All they had to do was make one darker than the other.
Give every black kid a Harvard degree at birth. They earned it.
How much money and time to come up with that foolish study?
Last Monday I went to the athletic hall of fame banquet at Omaha's Creighton Prep. My classmate was inducted for cross country and track. He told the story about how he got into track. He played freshman basketball and our science teacher talked to him one day after the season was over. The teacher threatened to flunk him unless he went out for the track team. He went on to become a state champion (2x) in cross country and run track at UNL.
Lesson? Our teachers really took a personal interest in us and our lives and really cared about us. They were very good to us. But also strict when it was necessary.
I'm sure that goes on at some public schools, but the Jesuits put a special emphasis on it. It's called cura personalis; care for the individual.
Keep the name 'Affirmative Action' but base all programs on need.
A white son of a West Virginia Coal miner should not be denied a place at Harvard to make room for Obama's daughter.
'Do you just ignore the reporting of all the places (Baltimore) where a high number of their high schools have ZERO students performing at grade level? ZERO!'
Chicago too.
Neither well-known nor widely reported.
It would destroy public schools if it were were common knowledge...
Everyone is missing the obvious solution. Colleges just want a student body that looks diverse (“looks like America!”). Only diversity of looks matters, so just pay some white students to become black (I’m sure subtle forms of blackface makeup can be manufactured these days, or you could go the “Black Like Me” route.) Maybe have some affect a Spanish accent. Problem solved!
Why is 'racial diversity' the holy grail?
Why is that the best thing for society?
If I live in a neighborhood with no murderers, would it be a good thing if a murderer moved next door?
It would make our little slice of heaven more diverse, but why is that a good thing?
My advice to Asians, Jews, and regular white students- change your last name to something Hispanic or change the first name to DeQuandre. Lying worked for Liz Warren, and it can work for you. To bust up this pernicious system is going to require out of the box thinking and good dose of civil disobedience.
Howard said...
I see spittoon whenever I see festoon
But is your spittoon half full or half empty?
The article suggests that rich kids do better at the SAT because they are rich. Of course, the causation is likely the reverse - people who are intelligent do better financially, and kids of smart people tend to be smart themselves.
Which end of the SAT curve do NYT analysts come from?
"Lying worked for Liz Warren, and it can work for you."
My kids are grown now, but if they were applying for college or jobs these days, I would tell them to check the 'Hispanic' box every single time.
I'm not Hispanic and neither was my wife, but my last name cold be taken as such.
It is a distinct benefit in the U.S. today to be a woman, minority, or black.
White folks are being actively discriminated against.
Anyone who says otherwise is a fool.
Quayle said...
"The problem with Harvard is they see hierarchies everywhere and they consider themselves to be at the top of every one, And they think that they are brilliant enough to manage them all."
Jethro Bodine went to Harvard. So did David Hogg for that matter. I think Jethro got the better education of the two.
Randomizer said...
"Who counts as Black? Some people have faked it. Everyone agrees that President Obama was Black, with a White mom and Black dad."
Not all of us agree; even Obama himself didn't present himself that way until he was well into his 40s. I remember twenty years ago when he first started making a name for himself at the DNC, I knew several working class Blacks who were suspicious of the half-White guy who had no connection to the African American community. Barack quickly realized that having an African American wife wasn't enough to get the working class Black vote of people like that, so he chucked the Bi-Racial identity.
Yancey Ward said..."My advice to Asians, Jews, and regular white students- change your last name to something Hispanic or change the first name to DeQuandre. Lying worked for Liz Warren, and it can work for you. To bust up this pernicious system is going to require out of the box thinking and good dose of civil disobedience."
I'm blue-eyed and fair-skinned, but I'm half-Italian, and my last name is often mistaken for Hispanic. When I applied to college in the 80s, I was deluged with unsolicited invitations to apply for scholarships for Hispanic kids or to apply for programs with the obvious implication that being Hispanic was a clear advantage. Even back then, it was clear that the "Hispanic" checkbox on the college applications was not there merely for statistical purposes.
At the time, I thought it would be the height of unethical behavior to check those boxes or take advantage of those scholarship opportunities. Today, I'm no longer so certain.
Correlation is not causation. Smart people are often smart about how they manage money too.
Now let's look the political orientation and voting habits of who they'll keep out of the top schools using the income-scale versus SAT criteria: Parents of better-than-average White, Jewish, and Asian students in blue cities and blue states. See California's many failed efforts to end race-blind admissions over the last 25 years (as often harming mediocre Asians who still outperform the majority of Black and Hispanic students). Also see Louden County Virginia (D.C. suburb deep in the culture war) habit of wandering off topic.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1185226895/heres-what-happened-when-affirmative-action-ended-at-california-public-colleges
https://www.loudoun.gov/5913/Equity-Resolution
I do hope for equal outcomes...if linked to equal effort and equal lifestyles. This means evenings and weekends in schools at the expense of time devoted to sports. This means very high parental expectations. This means choosing math courses over ethnic studies courses.
"Blogger Michael said...
Give every black kid a Harvard degree at birth. They earned it."
That's where this is heading...a cargo cult education.
Hand out the degrees, and it will make the recipient a productive, high earning taxpayer.
Right?
The way that you eliminate racial discrimination is to stop discriminating based on race. It's as simple as that.
I recall reading an RAF memoir of WW II. Another pilot was referred to as "a grand Englishman"
As opposed to...? Some Romano-Briton blood? Norman?
Breton returned to England after the Wars of Religion didn't go the Protestants' way?
How distinct do groups have to be in order to need diversity?
Thing about "the trades" is to conflate blue collar with grey collar. The former is either highly paid in large manufacturing enterprises in his specialty, or he's an independent businessman, contractor large or small. In the latter case, he needs to be a good businessman and a people person. This does not automatically follow being schooled in one of "the trades".
For example, years ago before a family Christmas function, we had a plumbing (toilet) problem. The ordered replacement was not available so our plumber got us a loaner, just in time. He has been praised to practically everyone we meet.
The grey collar is usually an hourly guy in a factory with or without a smallish specialty he's gotten through his employer. Usually decent pay, good (sometimes union) benefits, not much chance of advancement. Pretty much tied to his employer's success.
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