AA under Fisher does not have a blank check. It must be limited and narrowly tailored. AA, as practiced by many universities like Harvard, may be illegal under current law.
Using numbers from the above link and https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf , bachelor’s degree attainment for age 25 and older:
Immigrants, by place of origin:
79.1% India
72.0% Taiwan
61.0% Russia
60.8% Nigeria
53.9% Venezuela
53.8% Korea
50.1% Philippines
48.9% China / Hong Kong
48.3% Canada
48.1% United Kingdom
42.1% Brazil
39.4% Argentina
37.0% Germany
33.9% Poland
26.1% Vietnam
24.8% Jamaica
22.6% Cuba
23.1% Italy
20.1% Haiti
15.8% Laos
15.2% Dominican Republic
15.2% Portugal
7.9% El Salvador
6.8% Mexico
General US population, by race/ethnicity:
53.9% Asian alone
36.2% White alone, not Hispanic
32.8% White alone (including Hispanic)
32.5% All
22.5% Black alone
15.5% Hispanic, any race
There are also population numbers in these linked documents. Immigrants from India, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Philippines, and Korea make up more than half of the Asian American population, so their educational attainment characteristics (rather than those of immigrants from Vietnam or Laos) set the stereotypes for Asian American educational attainment. In contrast, immigrants from Nigeria are slightly over 1% of the African American population, and immigrants from Caribbean places where most people are black appear to be around 10% of the African American population, so they do not set stereotypes for African American educational attainment.
Minorities aren’t all poor and the poor aren’t all minorities. Race isn’t analogous to legacy, athlete, or development status. Many legal scholars, including probably a majority of the current Supreme Court, believe the equal protection clause prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. Yet, no one, not Justice Ginsburg or Justice Sotomayor, have so much as hinted at the idea athlete, legacy, or development preferences would be constitutionally prohibited.
So people seem to agree that the forces that factor into the level of achievement or opportunity for different racial groups are much more complicated than pure discrimination. And that there is great diversity even within what the Census considers a single racial classification.
So why do people still support affirmative action, a solution that pretty much ignores all this and is happy to pigeonhole people by skin color? That’s what truly baffles me.
Because the value of Affirmative Action isn’t simply about conferring a benefit on the individual student who is given a spot or not.
The value is to the college, its faculty and student body as a whole, which benefit from having a diverse mix of students on campus.
And to our society as a whole, which benefits from providing an avenue for economic, social and educational mobility to groups that are at a competitive disadvantage.
Beyond the problematic assumption, the most important form of diversity is the lightness or darkness of someone’s skin tone, this argument is usually disingenuous. If racial/ethnicity diversity is defined as closely matching the racial/ethnicity balance of the US college age population, then HBCUs are incredibly non-diverse places. Yet no one ever worries about the lack of diversity at HBCUs.
My biggest problem with that statement is that it lumps ALL underrepresented minorities into that bag of having a competitive disadvantage and that is just not the case. As a society, we should have avenues to help those at the bottom of the societal hierarchy, but why does someone’s race need to be attached to it?
Because race is a part of the social hierarchy.
The obvious answer to this “but what about” claim, is that these schools were created specifically to educate a class of students who were NOT ALLOWED to be educated at other colleges. If American society and history were different they probably wouldn’t exist, everyone would have been educated together and this particular thread wouldn’t exist either . But white people were never excluded from HBCUs, as black people were excluded from all the others.
But also, HBCUs ARE very diverse places. Some are majority not-black.
https://diverseeducation.com/article/122807/
https://time.com/2907332/historically-black-colleges-increasingly-serve-white-students/
How is this relevant? It’s not the 1940s anymore and hasn’t been for sometime.
No, they are not even close to diverse, when diversity is defined as matching the US demographics. Your own link demonstrates this:** “Nationwide, an average of one in four HBCU students is a different race than the one the school was intended to serve.” **Non-Hispanic blacks are about 14% of the population, not 75%.
I don’t follow this thread much but wonder whether we have talked about this to death. Race does not really exist biologically, it is a social construction. Affirmative action based on race does not really help the majority poor blacks or Other underrepresented minorities, it helps tremendously the richer URMs. I don’t understand why it is so hard for people who support AA to agree that low SES students, regardless of their skin color, should be the beneficiaries of AA.
Affirmative action is not just about income. Those who conflate the two entirely miss the point.
I can name 3 groups (LGBTQIA community, immigrants who don’t speak English well [especially south of the US border], and being very poor/homeless), that have more problems than any I have had navigating being Black growing up and living in the Southeast. But those groups don’t get the same benefits that race does for African Americans in college admissions. You can tell Nigerian immigrants of great educational pedigree or African Americans like my family that we are at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but tell that to the white homeless veteran standing off my expressway exit on my way home from work most days, or the poor of any race who do not have enough food to eat.
I’m happy for you @ChangeTheGame that your life was not difficult. But I didn’t say race was the ONLY social hierarchy did I? I said “part of” and I meant that.
[quote=“roethlisburger, post:4689, topic:1770736”]
It’s relevant because you compared them to PWIs when the history of the two is totally different.
Proportionate to population and diverse are not the same thing are they?
Neither did I. But it is much more statistically significant than the social hierarchies that I listed. My real question is should it be? Why is race so much more important statistically than being poor regardless of race?
Statistically significant to what?
Statistically significant as to whether or not a student is accepted in college admissions at schools that practice Affirmative Action. It is why we see kids questioning their racial background on CC (or looking for someone to say it is okay to claim being an URM), because of that significant admissions boost in elite college admissions. Being Poor is not even close to giving the same tip as being an African American in college admissions. Why is being Black such a large boost than being poor from an admissions perspective?
Because the elite colleges have marketing reasons. The general public tends to look at race first and barely looks at SES to consider whether a college appears admission or otherwise friendly to people like themselves. Hence the colleges that have the ability to choose among a surplus of top end applicants have marketing reasons to craft a specific racial mix (“enough” of each, where “enough” differs by group) but not for more than token presence of low SES students. More low SES students also cost more in financial aid, and dilute an unstated attraction of elite colleges which is making connections with rich and powerful families’ scions.
Yes, they are, if diversity is viewed as being exposed to a representative sample of your age group’s population during your college experience. Using an alternative definition of diversity, in terms of equal representation, maximum diversity is achieved when you have equal numbers of non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, and Native Americans. The African American representation at a maximally diverse school under the latter definition wouldn’t exceed 20%. HBCUs aren’t diverse under either definition.
I don’t disagree with any of your statements, but it also makes me leery of elite colleges in general, because I have seen how those marketing reasons are more about themselves and do not have any altruistic motives attached (even as they market them as such). It has always been about the BRAND.