<p>You all are being quite shortsighted on the issue of race.</p>
<p>African Americans are not given a boost because their skin is a certain color. They are also not underrepresented because of their skin color. They are given a boost, and are underrepresented, because African Americans are, on average, disadvantaged.</p>
<p>The average AA and Hispanic SAT scores are far below the national average. This is not because AAs and Hispanics are innately less intelligent or less skilled; it’s because AAs and Hispanics in the United States tend to be quite disadvantaged in the US college system compared to your average Caucasian, certainly to the average Asian, and to the OP.</p>
<p>The question is, should disadvantaged applicants be given a little help in admission or simply made to suffer because of their situation? If you believe AA’s and Hispanics should remain underrepresented as a consequence of being disadvantaged, that’s your opinion. However, consensus is that the playing field should be leveled for these applicants. You may think it’s fair to compare the average Hispanic/AA student to the average Asian/Caucasian student, but statistically and ethically, it really isn’t. Simple as that. </p>
<p>Are there Hispanics and AAs who are NOT disadvantaged but get the URM boost anyway? Of course. Ultimately it would be better to find some other way to categorize disadvantaged students to avoid this issue, but qualifying by race is the next best solution, as race apparently tends to correlate with socioeconomic status (sad).</p>
I used the “sky is blue” example to show how “not everything needs to be supported by a reasoned argument.” Which was in response to you criticizing me for not providing a reasoned argument for my viewpoint. I think one could make a reasoned argument that skin color does matter, although not providing such an argument in no way invalidates the claim. If you asked me for a reasoned argument I would have given you one and you could have critiqued it from there. Instead, you attempted to debunk my argument by referencing the fact that I never provided a reasoned argument in support of it. In retrospect I should have been more forthright with my disappointment in your argumentative methods. For wasting your time I thus apologize. </p>
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If you evaluate the current affirmative action policy under the original position, then Asians would amount to a homogeneous group that is on average better off in the college admissions process (sans affirmative action) than other races. Generalizations (in the form of extrapolations from statistics) must be made in the original position. Equating Asians to wealthy people was meant to imply that if one desires to be successful at college admissions without affirmative action in place, one would prefer to be Asian over most (if not all) other races. </p>
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As do I. The original position would likely not lead to an affirmative action policy similar to the one in place today. Rather, more direct indicators of academic success (socioeconomic status, parental focus on education, etc.) would likely be used. That said, if given a choice in the original position of the current affirmative action policy versus no affirmative action policy at all, the affirmative action policy would be favored. That makes a process with affirmative action more just than a process lacking affirmative action, which was my original claim. I never claimed that affirmative action makes for the most just admissions process. Indeed it doesn’t.</p>
<p>Might it be time, then, to make affirmative action a function of socioeconomic status entirely, rather than a function of race/ethnicity? I think colleges are already giving a boost to some applicants of limited economic means even if they are Caucasian or Asian, but maybe it’s time for that to become the primary criterion. It would improve social mobility, perhaps be fairer, and also help to remove the stigma faced by URMs that they weren’t admitted on their own competitive merits, even when they were.</p>
<p>^ I agree, but equal representation of socioeconomic status groups would likely mean less income for colleges, and we all know that’s not going to happen.</p>
<p>I tend to share your cynicism about that to an extent, but then again, colleges are going to have to move to a less-costly model to remain viable in the long term anyway, since a shrinking number of people can afford to pay full tuition, and even some who are able to afford it aren’t willing to pay it. Colleges seem to be moving toward a hybrid of web-based and live instruction right now, and as it evolves it may become less capital-intensive, at least after most of the transition has occured. If that happens, maybe colleges will be willing to adopt a more race-neutral affirmative action policy. Time will tell.</p>
<p>No. Take an example of a poor Asian kid. Say this guy’s parents are immigrants from China or something. They value education, they might have in fact been educated at a Chinese University. But they just moved to America where the cost of living is higher, they paid money for an apartment and car, and they do not know enough English or have the connections in place for a high paying job. I bet this scenario is pretty common among lower class Asian immigrants (if the parents were that poor/uneducated in China they would likely been unable to afford the move to America, for instance). </p>
<p>Why should this kid be advantaged over, say, a middle class rural white guy who has had no one in his family pursue a college degree? If we were only to take socioeconomic status into account, then the Asian kid would receive an advantage. An unfair advantage. </p>
<p>Yes this is just a hypothetical scenario, but I bet similar situations would play out a dozen times over if we were to follow your advice. No just admissions process would rely on just one factor. To assemble a just system for practical implementation, second best approximations would need to be used. Socioeconomic status alone though is insufficient (not to mention many families would game the system). Race added onto socioeconomic status would be better.</p>
Your example also includes numerous other factors besides simply socio-economic and race such as region, first-generation or not. The thing about the socioeconomic factor also implies something about the school’s education. A poor school, but achieving success is still impressive as it reveals a great degree of self-study and avoidance of negative peer pressure. The school’s environment is often thought to have just as much impact as the home once one is essentially surrounded by themselves (peers) to shape their views and social psychologies. If we were to rely on socio-economic only, I do agree that it ignores the disadvantages of the white applicant. However, applying race can lead to a URM in an upper class society to have an advantage over the white applicant. Just posing hypotheticals and responses, not my views.</p>
<p>Not so fast! “Blue” is defined by certain wavelengths on the visible spectrum; therefore, it can be quantitatively proven that something is blue. The word “blue,” like all words, is a socially constructed symbol that represents a shared meaning; if you were to say that the sky is green you would be incorrect because the usage of “green” in Standard English represents a different set of wavelengths.</p>
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<p>Your opinion isn’t gospel. Your original statement that “skin color matters” in modern US society is unfalsifiable and vague. Claiming “we all know [it]” is disingenuous-- I’m not even sure in how you are claiming skin color “matters,” much less to what degree.</p>
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<p>You can’t “level the playing field” without taking someone down a few notches, and doing that is punishment. I’m reminded of the saying, “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” (or something like that). In other words, there is a decreased incentive to improve, because regardless of how well-- or poorly-- one performs, the outcome will be the same. That’s not social justice-- it’s social stagnation.</p>
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<p>This isn’t a good analogy. As freezingbeast said, being Asian doesn’t imply any any privilege or increased resources. Implementing progressive taxes on rich people is akin to Robin Hood: “taking from the rich and giving to the poor.” Conversely, using affirmative action to reduce the number or Asian students admitted is going to disproportionately hurt the chances of low and middle-income Asian students who are expected to outperform rich URMs while having none of the same resources.
This is why AA fails to achieve socioeconomic diversity; in fact, only 3% of students on Ivy campuses have families in the bottom quartile of income. We are underrepresented by a factor of 8! Meanwhile, Ivies skim over poor URMs from “No Child Left Behind Schools” in favor of rich international students (50% of black students at Ivies are internationals, as compared to about 10% of the general campus population). These statistics fly in the face of the rhetoric about creating a diverse student body. No university can claim to be diverse when the vast majority of its students represented the richest people in America.</p>
<p>Obviously the Asian guy is advantaged because his parents are university-educated and because the other guy lives in a rural town. Race never factors into the equation of advantages and disadvantages.
Attempting to imagine someone’s life story based on race is demeaning and inaccurate because it assumes that there is a single story for the Other. This comparison between White and Asian is telling of the stereotypes that are used to justify AA. In reality, knowing that someone is Asian doesn’t give the adcoms any information about who their parents are, where they’re from, what kind of “hookups” they’ve had in the admissions process, etc. The middle-class white guy could have just as easily been from an Eastern European “helicopter parent” family that attended universities and value education.</p>
<p>Sonambulant I wrote a long reply to the blue argument but my internet crashed and I’m not going to rewrite it because it’s not really relevant to this thread anymore. </p>
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In what way? I also don’t think my original statement was that vague, although I guess for whatever reason it was. </p>
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Social justice as I and many others see it does not advocate this society. My conception of social justice allows for inequalities to exist (which they inevitably will) as long as it is in the framework of a just society. It basically comes down to a scheme of insurance against the worst possible outcomes. It allows for much social mobility, as long as the worst off groups in society are not made worse off by such actions. And my phrase “leveling the playing field” was never meant to be taken to the extreme of advocating a level playing field (notice how you in subsequent discussion yo removed the “ing” from my phrase, which is essential to the meaning). “Leveling the playing field,” however, to be viewed as a more process-oriented term that indicates improvement over current disparities. </p>
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In the original position, though, it does. </p>
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I never argued affirmative action is a good solution, just that it is a better solution than nothing at all. You are taking my arguments to an extreme that I never suggested, and I do not appreciate it. </p>
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I was providing a hypothetical example to counter Zenkoan’s suggestion that it might be time to implement socioeconomic status as the only determinant of admissions advantages. In the perfect system race would be a minimal factor used to determine advantages and disadvantages (which I acknowledged earlier but will repeat here). There may be some inherent disadvantage with growing up with black or Asian skin-color in America, other things equal, but this likely isn’t that significant. That said, race represents a somewhat decent indicator of a lot of other factors, including socioeconomic status and academic culture in the household, for instance. Socioeconomic status and academic culture growing up, though, are very difficult to measure and interpret directly. 50,000 a year, for instance, gets a lot less in Manhattan than Arkansas. And how do you measure the academic environment in a household? Not to mention it would be easy for applicants to lie about either. That is why colleges would be wise to use tangible factors such as race, parental-education level, HS ratings, etc. to serve as an approximation for other factors that are likely more important to a child’s educational development. Factors that are easy to determine/interpret and that cannot be easily manipulated.</p>
<p>“Skin color matters” could mean a number of different things, and I don’t want to agree or disagree with that statement until I understand your intentions. In what ways is it important? To what extent is it important? </p>
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<p>This is the problem with Affirmative Action: it divides our society into strict “groupings” based on the ill-defined parameters of a social construct. Our society has only individuals, and we should be judged as such-- not based on stereotypes about people that have the same skin color as us, but on who we are, what advatages we’ve had, and what we’ve accomplished. There’s so much diversity within any given race that using it to guesstimate what a person is like is futile.</p>
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<p>It’s not an extreme, it’s the reality of the situation. </p>
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<p>No it doesn’t. The fact that Black Americans are, on average, poorer than Asian Americans doesn’t indicate anything about the applicants to Ivies or Stanford, because the applicant pool doesn’t reflect the general population. As I pointed out earlier, Black students admitted to Ivies tend to be overwhelmingly high-income, with as many as half being international students. Correlations between race and income that may be significant in most of the US are irrelevant in this case because the upper-class is so overrepresented. </p>
<p>Besides, why use race to approximate socioeconomic status and academic culture when you can find those things directly? Considering family income and family educational history while disregarding race would put an end to trying to guess someone’s background based on the color of their skin.</p>
<p>Just wanted to clarify: only 3% of the students at the* top 146 *colleges are from the bottom economic quartile; the Ivies recruit harder to bring in low-income students and each have 10-15% Pell Grantees.</p>
<p>(I agree, though, that race-based AA is wrong and doesn’t efficiently solve the real problem of socioeconomic barriers.)</p>
<p>Well, I guess thread has turned from a " what really happens in the AdComm meetings?" into “can a holistic, opaque process be fair?” into another AA thread…</p>
<p>Anyway, the NPR broadcast seems to have been a great segue-way to the OP’s original rant. I found it fascinating, and quite worrisome. Pretty much confirms what I have been feeling.</p>
<p>The thread ensuing is good: it goes into different people’s reactions to the randomness, the different ways admissions are handled in other countries and whether a pure stats approach would be better, the history of Ivy league admissions techniques… Worth having a look!</p>
<p>As you can see… top IVYs (HYP at 6.5, 8.9 and 9.9 respectively) all have students receiving pell grants under 10%. So much for social-economic diversity. </p>
<p>(put that in comparison with pure social-economic review from UCLA, yielding 30%+ pell grants)</p>
<p>Sorry OP, but anyone who’s PARENTS are that involved in the college process to make a post like that on CC, I do not hold in very high regard.</p>
<p>My parents did get me a college tutor but really that’s about it, I signed up for all my SAT’s on my own and if I missed a deadline then that was too bad, my parents weren’t there to nag me about it. I paid out of pocket to get my envelopes to my schools on time and delivered them myself. What I’m trying to say, is that I APPLIED TO COLLEGE, unlike half the kids one here who’s parents did it for them, and it makes my acceptances that much sweeter. And honestly all those EC’s and stuff, were probably your idea so she could go to Stanford (which I’m sure you dreamed about since she was born).</p>
<p>I feel sorry for your daughter, because after the process you put her through, she probably feels pathetic for not getting into Stanford after dedicating her life to it.</p>
<p>Remember, this is just the opinion of a skinny 18 year old with too much time to kill before ivy decisions come out tomorrow. But that being said, MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, your daughter not getting into Stanford will be a good thing for her because for once she will have the freedom of choosing what to do in life and not being pressured to be perfect.</p>
<p>Because Stanford and Ivy acceptances are all about Parents crafting the lives of their offspring to the smallest of details. Nothing left to choice or chance if the 20 Year Plan is to guarantee the Radiant Future.</p>
<p>But all the Ivies there have 10% or more. Perhaps the data from the Chronicle is based on one year, or measures low-income students differently.</p>