Hmm. What’s the evidence on selection vs signalling vs added value for education? My recollection is that people who are accepted to Harvard do about as well regardless of where they go, unless they’re poor, in which case Harvard does help.
I don’t know … It’s possible the benefit of the degree could outweigh the suffering they experience in college. I don’t know how valuable a nice-sounding degree with a terrible GPA is. I also think they’re not usually looking for jobs at like McKinsey where the name of your school really matters; the people I’m thinking of want to be a park ranger and an elementary school teacher.
The lack of even the most basic math class is sad. Do you not have mandatory general education classes? I thought you got a liberal arts education at your school? Or at least a pretense of it.
Also, in their defense, some schools are taking baby steps towards supporting students who didn’t get in on academic or sports merit. Assuming everyone has a working knowledge of (I’m guessing Algebra 2? That seems like a plausible thing some schools might not teach.) is terrible.
If you want to major in a technical subject you need calculus, and we don’t offer precalculus. To fulfill their math requirement humanities students often take the lowest level stats class, which only requires algebra 2, or something like that.
Also, there’s the even darker theory that affirmative action is good because it increases intellectual diversity, and as such might be good even if the poor saps who are accepted lose out from it. I admit, I’d be willing to trade “future presidents have actually known non-white non-asian people” for “some college students suffer and don’t learn as much but still have a fantastic (bad) signal of value.” Thinking of minority humans at top schools as ritual sacrifices on the altar of future leaders having some instinctive understanding of diversity sounds bad, I grant you, but politics really matters.
… yeah that’s just evil.
In all seriousness, I’m skeptical of supporting policies that have a lot of tangible identifiable victims in the name of some wishy-washy benefits we have no evidence they actually have. I mean, it seems just as plausible that affirmative action causes future presidents to become more racist because they spend four years in an environment where the average minority student is so noticeably different from the average white student.