@gallentjill I do agree that the Fisher vs UT case will not be revisited in the short term, but I believe that much like the work Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall did with separate but equal educational standards over a 20 year period that cumulated with the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision, their seems to be an organized method already underway to eventually upend “settled law” piece by piece. The real question in my mind is not if, but when will those policies change as inequalities eventually get rooted out in the American judiciary. Holistic policies in higher education can work, but they must be more transparent to combat misuse of those policies (we mainly talk about race but legacy and athletes are also affected). We are over 50 years past the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and I am just thinking about the endgame when it comes to AA because there has to be one at some point.
@satchelSF Thank you for that very thoughtful post. If all this is true, and I am not doubting you, why the continued push for this type of affirmative action? Who does it benefit? If the students admitted under this plan have a low probability of success, why continue to advocate for it?
Is it possible that despite lower grades, the mere fact of graduating with a degree from such prestigious universities is enough to place these students on a trajectory for success? Perhaps for a URM, or First Generation college graduate, the degree itself opens doors sufficient to jump tracks from poverty to middle class? Once one member of the family is lifted out of poverty, that might be sufficient to change the narrative for generations to come.
So, my next question would be whether anyone has done any follow up studies of the kids admitted through these types of outreach programs. How do they fair during college? How many graduate? What kind of careers do they have and what happens to their children? If those results or positive then it might make sense to continue despite the GPA differential.
However as @ChangeTheGame has said, this really shouldn’t go on indefinitely.
@gallentjill - Affirmative action is the status quo, so if we want to see why it is championed, we need only look to see who benefits from the status quo. Sure, a few URM benefit, but many more pay a huge price in terms of stigma, and the mismatch issue can be very real in areas like finance and law (I’m sure other areas as well, but I am only very familiar with those). I do think that the “stereotype threat” people have a real point here; there is no question that people assume URM are less qualified, and really how could they not since in fact the essence of a preference system is to effectively lower qualification standards? This burden of being stereotyped could plausibly lead to poorer performance than warranted by those URM who have to bear it. As noted many times on here, this is fundamentally unfair to the URM who would be admitted without race preference, but it is hard to dispel this assumption of lower qualification because it is in fact based on reality (at least on average). Facts are stubborn things that don’t go away because we wish them to.
My sincere belief is that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action and its coordinate deemphasis on quantifiable achievement metrics - all things considered - are the privileged legacies, athletes, and various other status quo “desirables” for whom a more relaxed admissions system is appealing for obvious reasons. There are also reputational benefits for the elites who run the system - never underestimate the good will generated by wealthy white people through virtue signalling! Is the system actually working? Who knows, I guess is the real answer. It’s been around for 50+ years in earnest and we still seem to see the same sorts of gaps in income, achievement and status (for the most part), and we constantly hear that they are worse than ever.
About first generation preference, I do think that it is an important consideration for mobility issues, but in my gut I don’t really think that the preference is large at all, nowhere near the preference for race. (It is frustrating because we can never get good data from the colleges from which to draw inferences. If anyone has good data, please post!)
There is certainly no real first generation boost at least at the law school level. Take a look at Table 10 on p.44 here (standard deviations are given in Table 8, p.42): http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawReview-72-1-Wightman.pdf. GPA for whites with parents who *didn’t necessarily finish high school/i was higher than for white students with both parents having a postgraduate degree, and their LSAT scores were within 0.4 standard deviation. In both LSAT and UGPA, the poorest white students with uneducated parents were greater than a whole standard deviation above blacks with postgraduate degree professional parents. Race preference is often sold as a “first generation” sort of thing, but as long ago as 1999, Bok and Bowen in their Shape of the River admitted that the very large proportion of URM admits were from professional and generally upper SES backgrounds (going from memory here, but I believe they said 80%+ were at least middle SES). I’m open to changing my mind based on data, but at least at the professional school level I am convinced first generation is just a smokescreen to obscure various other, more invidious and objectionable preferences.
Just a last note about "holistic: criteria versus “stats” like test scores and GPA. Many will make the unexamined argument that schools are looking for “more than just test scores and grades.” Well, of course. It would be very strange if that was all they cared about - they could fire all those admissions officers for a start if they did! But if scores and grades are at least two important metrics (and if they weren’t, why are schools asking for them), then if one group or other has significantly lower or higher stats than another, then the implication must be that all the other holistic criteria must vary systematically with the group characteristic. For instance, if Asians have higher “stats,” on average, than they must have lower evaluations for all the other criteria. A similar argument could be made for groups with lower stats and higher unobservables (for instance, essays and leadership by black admits are better on average than for higher scoring groups). This systematic variance is very unlikely given the sheer numbers of applicants. If there is some systematic bias like this in the admission criteria, than the criteria are simply proxying for race. This should not be tolerated in a society in which it is often illegal for even private parties to discriminate on the basis of race (e.g., private employers, apartment building owners, restaurants, etc.).
^Just rereading my comment above, I should correct myself that the data from the law school admissions world does not mean that first generation “bumps” are not real, and perhaps significant, especially at the college admissions level. For instance, a first generation non-URM candidate with a 3.9 HSGPA and SAT >1550 will certainly face better odds of admission than a high SES non-URM candidate with equivalent or even somewhat better stats. So, in that sense, the “bump” is real and I suspect is much closer in size and spirit to what Bakke and the succeeding line of SCOTUS cases envisioned for racial preferences: a “gentle hand” on the scale favoring candidates who succeeded despite difficult starting conditions.
But not to beat the point to death, I am also certain that the average strength of non-URM first generation admits under holistic evaluative criteria is very much higher than that of the highest- and most privileged-SES URM. Race preferences in college admissions are clearly of a different character than other preferences; either entirely different holistic criteria by race are being applied to the candidate pool uniformly, or the same criteria are being applied to separate pools whose rough sizes have already been predetermined by race.
I have not been following this thread, but I am moved to write on it out of concern about what is happening on other threads.
Many posters complain about a perceived disadvantage for white and Asian students under holistic admissions.
But then there is a thread about ‘California parents’ complaining that, because their SAT scores are often high, there are proportionately too many children of Asian immigrants being admitted, when the children of families who have lived in the state for generations, and invested in the system through generations of paying taxes, are not.
So, in other words, any policy, whether holistic or based on scores/grades, that leads to anything other than a marked advantage for white Christians, will not be satisfactory.
It is unfortunate that it has become acceptable to scapegoat minorities when things do not go quite one’s way.
The college admissions process is very stressful, and it is sad when you or your child does not get admitted to a desired college.
But this does not mean that you/your child’s spot was “stolen” by a less worthy candidate. It just means that there are many more worthy candidates than there are available spots.
So help your child/yourself to become excited about a college to which you/they were admitted. Do not blame others, just acknowledge that certain schools are experiencing a very high level of demand and that many worthy candidates get turned away, not because they cannot do the work, but because there are not enough spots.
You can acknowledge that colleges are aiming to meet a variety of institutional needs, from football players to diversity, without implying that some candidates are less capable or desirable than others.
Then move on, and celebrate where you/your child will be attending college. A wonderful four years await you!
@TheGreyKing very well said and I completely agree!! There are so many great schools out there and if so many qualified students are being “slighted” and not getting spots at the top universities or their fist choice schools, then the colleges they are ending up at will be that much stronger because there will likely be many other strong students that were also denied admission to the more selective schools.
And “not enough spots” is exactly right. Gaining admission in some cases might be like winning the lottery…so many qualified students are turned down by the top schools. They can’t take everyone and as parents and advisors we have to adjust expectations accordingly.
I really don’t find much scapegoating of minorities along these lines, at least on this thread, although perhaps I missed it? Perhaps some posters are projecting what they would like to argue against?
I am most interested in the effects of race preference - that is, the lowering of standards coupled with a need to deny it is actually occurring - on the institution of education generally. I personally could not care less which groups are represented in what proportions, and am on record supporting a quota system if necessary for political reasons, with explicitly different standards. Fighting by different groups over admissions “spoils” is just childish - but alleging bad faith remains the most convenient way for supporters of the affirmative action status quo to deflect from substantive discussion.
Along the lines of substance, Amy Wax (of the latest Penn Law imbroglio fame) just gave a short speech on some of the implications of the “unequal outcomes equals racism” argument for education and for society generally, available here and well worth watching in my opinion: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/04/amy-wax-speaks.php
I couldn’t agree more. But I would point out that the same argument could be - but never is - made with respect to affirmative action preference admits.
I’ll confine myself to law school admissions, as noted and discussed in my posts 1623 and 1626 above (with sources cited). Clearly, although there will always be a few exceptions, the vast majority of black law students are systematically mismatched into schools in which they will reliably be at the very bottom of their respective classes. (The data are irrefutable, persistent, and painfully obvious to everyone, including the students themselves.)
Two questions. First, why couldn’t these law students simply take a step or three down in prestige or selectivity, as often advocated here for non-URM? At the very least, they would no longer be at the bottom of their law school classes, and instead of perpetuating the stereotype of the unprepared URM at every level of the legal education hierarchy they would in fact be demonstrating that they could compete equally, at least at most schools.
Second, why are we tolerating a law school admissions system that reliably stratifies the average ability of certain groups of students by skin color, a characteristic that cannot be unobservable (as legacy or development in theory could be, at least in some cases)? Take a close look at the data in Tables 5 in the first two links provided in post 1623 above; as measured by the standard deviation of white students’ GPA, the average GPA of black law students is about ten standard deviations below the all races mean GPA.
These questions seem at least to me much more important than whether any particular student was “cheated” out of a “rightful” spot by some preference or other, which is always going to be unanswerable anyway, and they constitute part of the reason why I am so interested in race and admissions (my children are URM anyway, so I am arguing against potential advantage here).
I suspect that the employment prospects of the T14 law schools vs. the rest have a lot to do with this.
@satchelsf You make some very provocative and well reasoned arguments and have given me a lot to think about. Lets say that we accept your conclusion that URM students have an appreciably lower undergraduate GPA compared to the all race average. What follows from that conclusion? Don’t we need to look at the trajectory of these students following graduation? What happens to Harvard URM graduates with low GPA’s? Are their employment prospects still significantly improved from where they would have been without this college experience and credential? If they do go on to lucrative and successful careers regardless of the GPA and thereby gain the ability to raise their own children in an educated middle or upper class environment with good schools and all the enrichment that follows, hasn’t affirmative action done its job.
Agree, @hebegebe, but if you read that article by Sander on law firms (and I sense you have some familiarity with these dynamics), I think you’ll agree that the modern employment picture is more nuanced than even 20 or 30 years ago, with firms especially paying much closer attention to GPA than to prestige. Race preferences in hiring are also extraordinarily large, both at the private and governmental levels, so I do not think employment prospects would be harmed much by lower perceived school prestige, especially if combined with higher grades. I expect that bar passage rates and technical proficiency would be improved dramatically (the T14 schools do not really prepare their students in this way, relying on their innate ability to “self-teach” and “wing it”).
If anything, employment prospects might well be improved by better matching of students with schools, as grades should improve on a relative basis at least. If you read the Sander piece, you will see that one of the most common complaints of minority hires in law firms is that they are consistently assigned less visible, “grunt” work, a complaint that has the ring of truth. However, the equally unpleasant truth is that most will not fare well in most visible roles, at least as compared with the nonpreference hires. At $300+ an hour for a 25-year old attorney, this is simply not a risk that firms are willing to take. Perhaps a better matching of law school with academic ability could ameliorate this observed phenomenon?
Well, @gallentjill, those are all good questions, but I do want to reaffirm that the GPA data I was talking about was law school data. I have also seen equivalent data for medical school. At the college level, I strongly suspect that URM GPA will be disproportionately towards the bottom on the class as well, but for sure this will be ameliorated by choice of major. Again if anyone knows specific studies, please post them.
I haven’t seen specific data following URM Harvard graduates’ income going forward. We do have that old data from Dale and Krueger, who make a decent argument that the returns to “prestige” are not significant generally, but perhaps in the context of URM they are? I have a tough time believing that, as employers are well aware that admissions standards (and sometimes even grading) were lowered - URM graduates plausibly complain that they feel “stereotyped” (there is a large literature out there on this). At least in the world of law practice, URM representation in the highest and most lucrative positions is very small, and considering that black college students in particular are disproportionately interested in law school (relative to all other racial groups), law schools disproportionately sweep up the best black students at the HYPS+ level.
You bring up a good point that affirmative action will be doing its job if it is ensuring that URM will bring up the next generation in a mid- or upper-SES environment, but as the data show the actual results have not been encouraging. As measured by scores and GPA at least, the URM children of high-SES parents still require massive preference at least in law school admissions (see the reference to the Wightman article I cited above).
As a general societal matter, it does not appear that preference at the elite college level has had any appreciable effect in narrowing the gaps in income and achievement that we seem most worried about. I think Walter Williams (or maybe Thomas Sowell?) has pointed out that in relative economic terms, blacks in the US made remarkable progress in the period 1940-1970, which completely stalled out thereafter. Correlation is not causation of course, but perhaps preference programs, especially in employment, have had a negative effect? I do know - although few will admit it - that many employers are reluctant to hire minority workers precisely because of the largely unquantifiable risk of future discrimination claims. Few people really understand how Title VII and the Uniform Guidelines have impacted all aspects of employment, even in the college placement office! (See the outline here for an overview: http://uniformguidelines.com/questionandanswers.html).
Many posters talk about the benefits for the school environment from the presence of preference admits, but few acknowledge the detriments. Again in the world of law schools, the Amy Wax lecture linked above is useful here, as is this article that I have linked to many times (it’s a truly great article): https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-scandal-of-diversity/
Just as an aside, this debate over affirmative action has been going on for ages in law schools. Even Barack Obama addressed it, way back in the early 1990s, in a long letter as the newly-elected President of the Harvard Law Review (the webarchived version is best because it contains all the errors of the original): https://web.archive.org/web/20160318221131/http://hlrecord.org/2008/10/record-retrospective-obama-on-affirmative-action/.
@collegmom and @GrayKing, are you guys suggesting, respectively, that preferring a system that does not judge applicants, even in part, on the basis of race, is a form of scapegoating people of color?
No question there’s simply far too few slots for far too many qualified applicants. I can at least speak for myself in that I’ve never questioned that. Can either of you please direct me to the posts/posters who blamed this (very real) situation on URM’s? I’m not saying such posts haven’t been written; only that I’ve not read them myself…
If we are talking about Harvard undergrad (much of the recent discussion has centered around law school), then all races have fairly high average GPAs due to grade inflation. If you define “low GPA” as less than the standard 3.0 resume cutoff, then only ~2% of Harvard grads have a “low GPA”.
In the most recent senior survey that asked about race, the average surveyed GPA for Black and Hispanic students was ~3.55, and the average GPA for White students was ~3.63. Both would be significantly higher today. The graduation rate was also high for all races. In the past 8 years, the average graduation rate was ~96% for Black and Hispanic students, and 97-98% for White students.
The senior survey narrative says. “Of those who are working, 35 percent of white respondents, 33 percent of black respondents, and 32 percent of Hispanic or Latino respondents said they will make more than $70,000 after graduation, compared to 60 percent of respondents who said they were of East Asian descent.” However, a high starting salary is largely dependent on going in to specific industries, rather than a measure of success during college. For example, women averaged a higher GPA than men, yet had substantially lower average starting salaries due to a lower rate of entering high starting salary fields (tech, investment banking, management consulting, …).
I think someone inferred that there was scapegoating going on…I think the important point that at least I was trying ot make was that if you don’t get into one of your top choices (whether if be because you perceive you lost a spot to an AA candidate or not) there are still so many other great schools out there with students just like you. Rather than dwell on this as a negative embrace it and make the best of it.
Just realized that a few posts from last night were deleted; I guess the moderator found them too objectionable. But also to answer the question “What happens to Harvard URM graduates with low GPA’s? Are their employment prospects still significantly improved from where they would have been without this college experience and credential?” I think its helpful to read a NYTimes book review on often cited book here on this thread “The shape of the river”:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/reviews/981025.25wolfet.html?scp=18&sq=kennedy%2520school&st=cse
Though its written twenty years ago it read as if it was talking about AA landscape today. It just shows how little the debate and reality of AA in college admission have moved despite twenty years of social change.
The Princeton and Harvard presidents undoubtedly answered “yes” to the questions but in doing so it only fueled more debate as the review’s author presciently pointed out.
Self interest is the driving force behind a college’s admissions practices. They want the best students, and they want them distributed well among all of the academic departments. They also want a wide geographic distribution of those great students in every freshman class. Thus, students congregating heavily, by accident, within particular regions of the country are at a disadvantage, statistically, whatever their personal origins. Combine that with clustering of majors, and the effect is the semblance of “discrimination,” when it’s really about duplication of region + majors when those also coincide with particular ethnic/racial/national groups. This actually did occur with Whites back in the '90’s.
If the most capable students in every State (measured by much more than test scores and grades, but including test scores and grades) were only Asians, then the elite universities would be close to 100% Asian.
In this case, the courts should find no evidence of discrimination. My argument about the invalidity of limiting Asian enrollment for the benefit of White students assumed a finding of actual discrimination based solely on race and not on any of the perfectly legitimate factors that you described.
Colleges’ self interest with respect to marketability to future students, parents of future students, and future donors means that they are unlikely to want all of their students to be of the same race/ethnicity, because then those of other races/ethnicities will mostly avoid the school. A college would prefer that there be “enough” of each race/ethnicity that it can market itself to those of all races/ethnicities and therefore have a potential applicant (and donor) pool that is as large as possible (“enough” may vary by race/ethnicity, and it is probably a higher percentage for white people, many of whom may be uncomfortable being in the minority, than for non-white people).
And something that is generally overlooked is that Colleges want a diverse student body in all ways not just race/culture as it leads to better and more critical thinking and people/students are more challenged when faced with a diverse perspective from others as opposed to ‘group think’ that can happen with homogeneous groups.
Of course. (That, too.) I’m just saying that if there were really a markedly superior difference in potential between Asians and all other groups, there is no way that a college is going to commit academic and economic suicide by admitting half-qualified students. The college cares way too much about its reputation in the marketplace of ideas and way too much about how successful its graduates are. Therefore, the fact that many groups are included is actually evidence that the college considers individuals from many groups to be in a position to contribute substantially to the intellectual legacy of that college. Any other conclusion is reducing the institution to a mere social one, devoid of intellectual merit and intellectual goals. The social aspects of college are, in this country, very important, and not only for marketing reasons. But they are not going to override the attempt by the college to select fine minds that are competitive with the minds in peer institutions.
[/quote]
= just another one of your politically correct prejudices whereby you assume that only bad white people are uncomfortable, or could be ever be uncomfortable being a minority. You don’t get out enough. In certain areas of the country, in certain high schools, etc., formerly minority groups which are now majority groups are currently extremely attached to that role and totally love that role. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just don’t misrepresent the situation and mischaracterize minority groups as being supposedly more willing, permanently, to be a minority, because objectively speaking those are not the facts. They now, in certain regions, have no interest in letting go of that majority position, which is their right, by the way, but that preference, when it comes to today’s college admissions realities, is a preference with consequences.