@Ohiomomof2 I wish the public courts were more like CC. It would seem less hypocritical IMO. 
I think it’s mainly two sports, which attract big donations, football and basketball.
To all the people saying “MINORITIES HAVE LOWER TEST SCORES THIS PROVES AA IS UNFAIR”
Let me explain to yall why that’s wrong: You’re forgetting to account for other factors.
A higher proportion of recruited athletes have lower scores. And a higher proportion of minorities are recruited athletes than whites.
URMs a lot of times tend to be lower income. Test scores decrease with income.Not because lower income ppl are somehow dumber, but because the SAT is a rich man’s game. Many people purchase tutors and expensive study materials for the SAT, and take it on multiple sittings. That’s not something poorer people can often do, hence lower scores as you go down in income. Colleges understand this. Don’t believe me? Look at QuestBridge. Their middle 50% of SAT scores for finalists are between 1280 and 1410. More than half of QB people are white or Asian. For a normal student, that would be considered almost disqualifying for any ivy league school. Yet, 60% of questbridge finalistsget into at least one partner school. Low income affects SAT scores, thats not really deniable/
There are more factors than I said contributing to this, however the thing isn’t that “URMs have lower test scores”, but rather, “Athletes and Low income students have lower test scores”.
Affirmative action doesn’t mean they’re accepting minorites who aren’t just as qualified as an Asian or white student. If that was the case, enrollment for Asians in top schools wouldn’t more than quadruple their national population percentage. All it really means is if a black and a white have the same qualifications, they’ll lean towards the black more. MIT’s black population in the entire class of 2020 is only 62 people. They’re not letting in blacks and hispanics who aren’t just as qualified as whites. The discrepancy between the black acceptance rate and the asian acceptance rate at most schools (bar Harvard, which is about 6% to 12%) isn’t really significant.
And as many people said, why is there no court action about legacy admissions, which have 30% and 42% at Harvard and Yale, when there is about affirmative action? Black people aren’t “taking your spots.” (People salty about rejection and believe its because of their race 9/10 wouldn’t have gotten in if they were a different race). No one is taking your spot, but if anything, RICH people are taking your spots. Consider that 50% of people who attend Harvard pay full price. If you people knew what a slight boost AA was compared to other boosts, maybe then there would be more nationwide discussion about other factors. But people only want to talk about AA, and there’s probably a deeper reason for that to be honest.
You’re mixing up race and class. Even if you assume, for the sake of argument, the SAT is a rich man’s game, that still begs the question of why poor whites or poor Asians or poor Hispanics shouldn’t be given the same advantage as poor blacks or African Americans. People have done research on this, although it’s very dated at this point, trying to control for some of those other variables you mention(impact of race, controlling for class and athlete status).
I’ve been a CC member for a little while and I’ve noticed a preponderance of comments about how much colleges weight race in their admissions. The typical answers are:
[ul]
[]To help represent, so to speak, under-represented minorities.
[]To increase diversity on their campuses.
[li]Similar responses.[/li][/ul]
But wouldn’t it be more prudent to give kids a little more preferential admission based on income? Under the current system, an African-American kid with affluent parents and who is comfortable paying in full would get an edge over a white kid with parents who both went to college, but who is lower middle-class and only has one parent in employment. Not to mention that the African-American kid has more resources to spend to up his GPA/standardized test scores while the poorer kid doesn’t.
Shouldn’t kids with less money but still perform excellently be on the same level, hook-wise (for lack of a better description), as kids with more money that are URM?
If the true goal is to increase diversity, this laudable goal should be achieved not by cherry-picking students based on their race. I’m sure there are better ways of creating a vibrant, intelligent, and varied student body.
I am aware of the availability of organizations such as QuestBridge and other scholarships to help low-income kids. I am referring, however, to the admissions practices of the colleges themselves, and not the existence of commendable third party organizations.
Some colleges do indeed give low income students a “hook”. Amherst College is one.
https://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/issues/2011summer/nationalinterest
There is some tension, of course, between wanting to educate more low income students (often expressed in articles about colleges as the percentage of Pell grant recipients - higher=better) and the reality of paying for lots of low-income students with adequate financial aid.
I meant to respond to this before it got moved. At many schools today, whites are underrepresented given their share of the overall population. For reference, whites make up between 50 to 55 percent of the college age population in the US. Here are the percentage of white students at various top 25 “national” private colleges:
Chicago: 49.9%
Penn: 49.5%
Brown: 48.8%
Emory: 48.7%
Harvard: 47.5%
USC: 46.2%
Cornell: 45.3%
Johns Hopkins: 44.4%
Rice: 42.2%
NYU: 42.1%
Stanford: 40.9%
MIT: 40.3%
Columbia: 39.4%
CalTech: 29.8%
It is clear from the above that whites are underrepresented at these types of schools, and if there is AA given to black and Hispanic students, it is not clear to many white parents that their kids should be the one racial group to suffer for the success of Asian-Americans.
All data is from www.collegedata.com BTW.
@Zinhead But then aren’t we getting into the gray area of quotas? Are we saying that all schools need to match their ethnic admissions based on the percent of the college age population in the US?
I would say it is clear from your list those schools under Cornell would be able to use that argument. But is there really that much of one if the percentage falls within 5 (especially the top 5 on your list that are within 3)?
@crimsonmom2019 - First, I could not find a good source for the demographic distribution of college age kids in the US. The best source I found put the 0 to 18 age group as being 54% white:
https://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-health-topics/americas-adolescents/changing-face.html
Given that the 0-5 age group is minority white, one would expect the current college age group to be more than 54% white. If the number is indeed 54%, then most of the schools would fall within your 500 basis point confidence range.
Secondly, it is not my argument, but it is logic of many white parents who are seeing their kids harmed by the current trends. When affirmative action was started, there were few Asians in the system, and affirmative action effectively called for whites to give up spots to blacks and then Hispanics. At a time when whites were vastly over-represented in higher eduction, this was acceptable to many whites.
That is not the case today when Asians make up about 5 percent of the college age population, but can take up 15 to 20 percent or more of the spots at these elite schools. So we have a system that blacks and Hispanics get a boost, and the surplus number of high achieving Asians get taken out of the white student body to the point that whites are under-represented at the country’s best colleges.
It is little wonder that support for affirmative action is at a low point.
@Zinhead I understand the logic, just trying to get to what the solution would be and my question remains, would whites be okay saying let’s have a quota based on percentage numbers and isn’t that what those who are anti-AA been using as the basis of their argument? That there should be no quota?
Additionally, I go back to a previous question of why such heat around AA and not other categories who receive a boost? Could it be that those boosts are in categories that benefit whites in particular?
To be clear, not arguing/debating with you in particular but the general “you” of society.
The “other categories” that receive a boost generally directly benefit the University (financially)
Athletes and legacy particularly.
It is human nature to support friends/associates and winning teams.
It seems to me that race based affirmative action and other honors and awards based on race and national origin are a kind of patronizing racism themselves.
Policies based on economic opportunities, on the other hand, seem more enlightened.
@crimsonmom2019 - I don’t have a good solution, just pointing out that the current system has some logical incongruities that will make it increasingly unsupportable to the general population as time goes on.
BTW, you can flip your question by asking if the pro-AA group that relied on disparate impact theory and the equal protection clause to support AA for blacks or Hispanics will ignore those legal theories when whites are under-represented in colleges.
Current admissions practices to elite schools benefit some categories of whites more than others. For a more detailed breakdown, see the following article:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
There is a well written rebuttal piece by Andrew Gelman that I cannot post here because it links to a blog, but you can search for it rather easily under the phrase “After seeing the statistics, I don’t see it.”
@Zinhead I know it is not your argument so I am not calling you out on this. I hope you have been able to suggest to people saying
" …When affirmative action was started, there were few Asians in the system, and affirmative action effectively called for whites to give up spots to blacks and then Hispanics…"
that whites were “not giving up” spots to minorities. Minorities were being given access to spots previously denied them, either through outright segregation or lack of recognition that in large parts of the country minorities did not start from an even playing field.
Even now we see states that have poor funding for public schools and how that largely impacts the low income and minority populations. Historical trends continue.
The civil rights era of the 60’s seems so long ago but it really isn’t. I was born in a southern city that was hanging on to segregation and has had court orders to comply since then.
I remember as a kid in 1974 watching the evening news and seeing the school buses in Boston being pelted by protesters.
How is it that whites are being “harmed”?
There are plenty of colleges. Just like how on CC we tell the nice white girl from NJ to consider leaving the northeast for college, others too can look a little farther afield. The pie is big enough for everyone.
To my limited knowledge, socioeconomic status is considered at the top colleges. They ask about education level of parents and first generation status is on the checklist on the common data set… School counsellors can mention economic hardship.
URM status can coexist with socioeconomic status - a college does not choose one or the other. Most of the colleges in the US frankly don’t care about either, just test scores, GPA, and can you pay.
@Zinhead If you flip the question, I suspect the answer is no. I also don’t have a good solution as IMO there isn’t one. As @dragonmom, pointed out, it is human nature to support friends/associates, winning, family, etc. She put it much more nicely than I do. I believe humans are selfish. We have a very difficult time advocating for something that might end up hurting us individually even if it might be for the greater good. Which is why I think everyone should not dig their heels in pro/con on any of the categories. Thanks for the article and info about Andrew Gelman rebuttal. Will definitely read both.
I think the answer to this is a no. Most people view admissions through the lens of how it affects their kids and 99.99% of whites will never be in a position to make a multi-million dollar donation as a true development admit. However, if they understand accounting 101, they realize if a college gets fewer donations, it either has to cut spending or find some other way to raise revenue.
@Snowball City -
I fail to see what the difference is between “whites giving up spots” and “minorities were being given access to spots previously denied them.”
In all seriousness, I think that is the crux of the problem as we wrestle with this as a society. It is difficult on the internet. I am being sincere not snarky.
I don’t see access to college as a zero sum game. I don’t see how providing opportunities for everyone should mean that the people with current access feel disadvantaged without examining if this is coming from a position of entitlement.
There is a phrase I see in different iterations on the internet: When You’re Accustomed To Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression.
I know Privilege is a hot button word so I prefer to use Advantage but I am still not happy with that choice of word.
Perhaps a family based scenario would work better. If you are Dad’s favorite child and the other child starts getting attention, you can either throw a tantrum or be happy for your sibling.
Let’s support one another. Let’s not hog resources. There is enough to go around.
Signed,
An Idealist lol
@roethlisburger Fair. However, that line of reasoning does not work for the legacy category and we certainly don’t have the same public heat about it either.
I’ll stand by the notion of a AA being completely ridiculous. Now if we want to give a boost to people that have not had as many opportunities, people from lower income families, I am all for that.
@snowball city I find it odd that you support AA with the majority of what you have said. You talk about how the privileged feel disadvantaged by AA but there are many privileged URM’s out there and plenty of non-privileged non-URM’s. The majority of the nation is far from the days of severe racism where people are being held back for being African American.
agree with @IN4655
Or have a grandparent from SPAIN…
Is that such a handicap to overcome?