I’ve always thought that the way we do affirmative action is stupid, that UC v Bakke was stupid, and that if colleges want to do affirmative action (which they always will for the forseeable future) they should have an explicit quota system and be transparent about it
I mean, the more transparent they are the easier it is to call them out for e.g. discriminating against Asians, and the less ~holistic~ their process for affirmative action is the less random noise gets introduced by admissions officers’ whims
but last night I talked to a girl who invoked her FERPA rights to read her admissions file and was so upset she almost didn’t come back to school this year, because the file made it clear that she was admitted on the basis of affirmative action
like, I always assumed she knew that already? she knows what her SAT scores are and what SAT scores are typically required to get in here, she knows that she’s a minority from a very disadvantaged background, she knows that our school practices affirmative action (and has always been vocally in favor of it)
but I guess she’s always genuinely believed, or at least told herself, that affirmative action played no role in her acceptance
polite fictions, man
From “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”:
I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
Like, ok, The Left, that one… that one’s kind of on you.
I had always taken your line, and generally am rather dubious of holistic admissions (though I admit a strict quota rather than a “within a 5% range of this value” is likely to cause pointless problems), but I don’t think that quotas would necessarily make it obvious which students from within a minority group wouldn’t have gotten in if they had competed with the general pool. There are going to be some 14 5s on their APs black students who ran nationally competitive track who get in on their own merit, and presumably people will be able to delude themselves perfectly well regardless of whether there is a quota or a “holistic process”. One downside I can imagine of this is that we’ll accelerate the problem of male under-education, as colleges will find it hard politically to openly discriminate in favor of male students and right now they are doing so anyways to try to keep gender remotely balanced (haven’t seen published research on this, just suggestive studies). Another issue might be how mixed-race students are treated under this system: if they count as multiple quotas they’ll be extremely heavily prized, which could cause issues down the line. Overall I agree with you that SCOTUS’ allergy to numbers is damaging, but my fence-senses are tingling.
The unavoidable problem with affirmative action policies seems to be that the more work you try to make them do, the more apparent it is that you are using them, which is self-undermining according to almost every theory of how affirmative action is supposed to work.
For example, if there are two applicants identical in every way except that one got dealt a bad hand, no one objects to favoring the disadvantaged candidate. In practice no two applicants are identical, so the policy will amount to some fudge factor, explicit or implicit, for the scheduled group. If the fudge factor is modest then its effects may go unnoticed (or at least ignored), but it also won’t shift the distribution very much.
On the other hand, a study using (somewhat dated) NSCE data calculated that being black was worth 230 [old-style!] SAT points relative to white candidates in elite university admissions. (Also being Asian cost you fifty points, but anyway moving on.) IIRC 230 points is more than two standard deviations. At that point I have to wonder, “how is that supposed to work out, even in theory?” Yes, every college has some variation in scores, but two sigmas is pretty unmistakable.
I’m not sure what either group of students is supposed to conclude under such conditions, but it’s probably not what the administrators had in mind.
And in addition to the issue of what either group of students is supposed to conclude, there’s the issue of what the two groups’ experiences are actually like.
I’ve never met a white person who doesn’t love my school and think coming here was the right decision. OTOH I have two good friends who are underrepresented minorities, both got composite SAT scores over 400 points below the school average, and both have struggled academically, dealt with mental health issues, and frequently expressed feelings that they don’t fit in and regrets that they came here.
Like … my school just admits these kids for the optics or some sense of fairness or whatever, and then is like “Welcome! We offer pretty much no classes you will be able to do well in! Also like it or not, you’ll be majoring in a humanities subject since you literally don’t have the background to take our most basic math class! Anyway have fun!”