<p>"The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Fisher v. Texas, a major case involving affirmative action in higher education. The decision in this case could end racial preferences in admissions moving up the timetable from the justices 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which said, The court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.</p>
<p>Is it time for colleges and universities to move past race? How can we tell when race-based preferences are no longer necessary?"</p>
<p>I think this will end in a whimper rather than a bang. Most private colleges and universities are already moving on in terms of programs like Questbridge and the Posse program which have similar goals to affirmative action but just don’t frame them in terms of race. And, with Charles Murray’s new book, “Coming Apart: the State of White America”, there’s a greater recognition that you can no longer use race as the proxy for all of society’s ills that it once was; ironically, traditional ways of approaching affirmative action may fall victim to their own success as the gaps between black and white achievement have narrowed while the gaps between upper middle-class whites and working class whites appear to have grown over the same period. </p>
<p>The question is will we ever have the same consensus to eliminate the effects of class in this country that we had at one time with respect to eliminating the effects of racism? The present political stalemate (with which Murray’s career seems aligned, btw) doesn’t provide much grounds for hope</p>
<p>And Murray has been accused of intellectual dishonesty in the past. For example, I understand that his friendship with conservative Black professor Glen Loury soured over the methodology of Murray’s book, ‘The Bell Curve.’</p>
<p>Defining by race is becoming obsolete.
Being under represented does not always mean disadvantaged.
Classifying applicants into groups and assuming that they are all similar is important ways is just not a valid technique.</p>
<p>I have said it here on CC many times on other threads.</p>
<p>Yes, there are PLENTY who are disadvantaged by poverty, weak families, poor infrastructure, but they come in every color, from every corner of the earth. </p>
<p>What is race, now, but a category that is gradually disappearing due to inter-marriage and globalization.</p>
<p>Truly holistic admissions should be able to tell if the INDIVIDUAL candidate has an unusual ancestry BECAUSE it is relevant to that applicant’s story, and to figure out which INDIVIDUAL applicants have had to overcome difficulties, again, because it will be part of what the applicant says about his/her life.</p>
<p>As to avoiding discrimination, well, let us stop thinking about people as being part of and similar based on certain characteristics. That is stereotyping and a form of prejudice. It can end up being discrimination against the individual who does not fit the stereotype.</p>
<p>By the way, the mods shouldn’t move this thread until people have had a chance to discuss it. It doesn’t make sense to bury it in Tokenadult’s AA thread right away.</p>
<p>FYI. I believe its against the terms of service to comment on how threads should be moderated. At least I know I has an innicuous post removed for that reason. At least that is what I was told.</p>
<p>Kagen was the Solicitor General and worked on this very case, arguing for a continuation of race-based factors in college admissions.</p>
<p>This will pose bigger challenges to public universities than private ones (even if they take federal money) Private schools are pretty much free to admit whomever they want - in the future thay may want to frame their policy in terms of diversity of experiences and ideas and not race.</p>
<p>Some data which contradict the above assertion, as reported today in the NYT:</p>
<p> significant gains in all demographic groups, but blacks and Latinos not only continue to trail far behind whites, the gap has also widened in the last decade.</p>
<p>What bugs me about these cases is that a large chunk of the time, those who have been denied admission claim to know why they were denied. In holistic admissions, you really have no idea. If there’s a straight point system or something that gives a boost to URMs or something, that’s different.</p>
<p>If they do away with AA, they’ll use proxy methods like high schools or area codes. I actually don’t see a problem with this as I think socioeconomic factors have a larger impact than race, but that’s just me.</p>
<p>Why on Earth did they pick a school where the state has auto admit? This “white student” that is claiming she was qualified over a URM was still not “qualified” enough to get in based on the state’s basic standards. </p>
<p>That said, I don’t think we are, as a country, are ready to ignore race. I think class should also be considered as an additional factor, but that makes admissions need-aware, and by acknowledging class, we are putting public schools at a disadvantage to enroll people who cannot afford to go to the school without aid. </p>
<p>Private schools continue to have more freedom to craft a class, which makes no sense to me. After all, in a state with high unemployment of URMs, eliminating race as a factor is hurting the state’s economic future. Shouldn’t the state have the freedom to outline the mission of imposing race as a mission in order to meet emplyment goals?</p>
<p>Of course, a very opaque holistic admissions process causes people to speculate more (not just about race, but about legacies, developmental admits, athletes, and other real or imagined “unfair advantages”).</p>
<p>Ms. ladybug, I saw that article and had the same reaction, that maybe the media is overplaying this idea that blacks have “narrowed the achievement gap with whites.” One modest interpretation of those statistics, the ones offered in the article, could be how even modest increments in educational achievement have ripple effects. Possibly. It’s a question that certainly deserves revisiting.</p>
<p>That’s not really accurate. The auto admit has been highly criticized. You may live in a very weak district and get into UT automatically because you were in the top 10% with a 3.5 GPA and SAT scores of 500. Someone in a really strong district could have a 3.6 unweighted GPA with SAT scores at 700 (or more) and you will be denied admission because you were not in the top 10% of your class. The second student is certainly “qualified,” and is likely more qualified than a large percentage of accepted students, but due to the law (which was put in place to increase diversity, by the way), she is rejected.</p>
<p>Yes, the top ten percent has been criticized. The young lady who brought the suit had an 1180 SAT (two parts) and a 3.59 GPA, which is on the weak side for someone to be admitted outside of the top ten percent.</p>