<p>“No, it’s not arbitrary. The definition of the age of majority is applied evenly to everyone when they turn 18 years old.”</p>
<p>Arbitrary, in the legal context, does not mean imprecise. It means that the rule is chosen more or less at random, not stemming from any principle. No one believes that 18-year-olds are more mature upon their birthdays than they were at age 17 years and 364 days. You can have an extremely well-defined rule, and it might still be arbitrary. The amount of income on which you must pay Social Security tax is precisely capped at $113,700, but that’s an arbitrary rule; it might just as easily be $113,690 or $113,720.42.</p>
<p>Our 300-year-old decision to define people of mixed white and African ancestry as black is arbitrary, too. It could easily have gone the other way. But the laws were very clear about it, and they still affect us today.</p>
In the previous Census counts you couldn’t do this. There were racial advocacy groups that fought against the Multi-racial box and the abiltiy to check more than one box, because they were concerned it would lower the numbers in their constituency and diminish their political clout.</p>
<p>Hanna, what is your point? Do you think people that look white like Elizabeth Warren should be able to check the URM box and get special consideration for it?</p>
<p>The FICA limits are indexed for inflation. Whatever the age of majority is, it is applied equally to everyone in that jurisdiction.</p>
<p>The US Census definition listed above indicates that the two terms are interchangeable and only include Spanish-speaking origins (i.e. not Brazil).</p>
<p>“There were racial advocacy groups that fought against the Multi-racial box and the abiltiy to check more than one box, because they were concerned it would lower the numbers in their constituency and diminish their political clout.”</p>
<p>This is true - but remember the context. For more than a century, Blackness was defined in many states as having “even one drop” of “Negro” blood - and services and education and employment were denied to millions of people as a result of having even that one drop. Now that equal protection was guaranteed, and services to make up for the past centuries of historical trauma were (sometimes) available, the white political folks wanted to have it both ways.</p>
<p>My point is that racial disadvantage was a matter of law in the United States for 300 years, it seeped into our culture and beliefs, and it hasn’t gone away. We may differ about how best to tackle it, but it’s sticking one’s head in the sand to deny that race still matters for URMs in America – even rich and well-educated ones.</p>
<p>All this speculation on the college admissions process spotlights a real concern. The college admissions process should be completely transparent, particularly for state supported universities and professional schools. We have taxpayer funded institutions making decisions about who is to get a tax-supported state benefit and the citizens of the state have little or no idea how those decisions are made. Fisher only got the specifics of her situation by filing a lawsuit and getting it through the discovery process. All candidates denied admissions to a state university should be told exactly why they were denied, not just sent a letter that ‘you didn’t qualify’ with no specific reasons given. </p>
<p>Are political favors being granted? There was a scandal a few years ago at the University of Illinois College of Law. Friends and relatives of politicians were admitted in a sort of quid pro quo for promises of increased state funding.</p>
<p>Are friends and relatives of the staff given favoritism? Are promises of big donations used in granting admissions? All of this is going on in the dark with little to no accountability. </p>
<p>Students are encouraged to apply and to send in application fees to colleges to which they have little to no chance of admission. The college gets the application fee and the applicant gets no explanation. </p>
<p>Transparency in government decision making is a very good thing and should apply to state run colleges as well.</p>
<p>Ridiculous. [REDACT: So MIT and Harvard] So huge state schools must send out 5,000-15,000 personally written letters per year explaining…what? That you should have slept an extra hour before the SAT? That you should have done track instead of baseball? It’s not that clear-cut even for the admissions officers. If a student doesn’t make the cut, it’s not because of one or two things that can be pinpointed.</p>
<p>Also, there would not be a SINGLE letter that would say someone was rejected for being white. It just would not happen. So that’s completely irrelevant IMO.</p>
<p>EDIT: My mistake - eyes glazed over the public part of that. My point still stands, though.</p>
<p>EDIT 2: Over 52,000 students were rejected from UC Berkeley this year.</p>
<p>I have some sympathy with this view but can also see drawbacks to total transparency. Suppose the three main criteria considered are test scores, grades, and teacher recommendations. It would be transparent for your decision letter to state whether your recommendations were good or bad, but doing so could discourage teachers from writing candid recommendations, knowing that students would find out about poor or mediocre ones.</p>
<p>Some universities, such as Brown, publish admissions rates conditional on test scores and class rank. I think all schools should be this transparent.</p>
<p>It’s not ridiculous. The admissions people assess all the applicants and give them a AI and PAI score. Just tell people how they scored. They already send people rejection letters. It’s no more work to write a macro that will cut-n-paste their admission score, too.</p>
<p>I’m over it that college admissions is largely based on subjective criteria, but just be transparent and tell people how the process ranks and rates different criterion. </p>
<p>Figure skating has subjective judging too, but at least you know how many points you are going to get for a well executed triple sow cow and for artistic impression. At every competition, the judges hold up the score in public. It’s transparent. </p>
<p>UT is a public institution, not a private club. The taxpayers & voters deserve transparency.</p>
<p>Here are state benefits being doled out by state employees and other than certain states with standards like Texas’ 10% rule, no one knows how the decisions were made. </p>
<p>According to what I have read, applications are usually summarized before a decision is made. Each candidate may be assigned academic, extracurricular, and personal scores, for example. Those scores could be reported in a decision letter in an automated way.</p>