I definitely agree with this line of thinking as someone whose currently in high school seeing how people’s interests are developing.
I have a friend who came from an all-women’s middle school that loved to code. She did really well in the CS classes, but eventually dropped all of it, including her CS3 class, because the spaces were so male-dominated. She’s now interested in Psych or Nursing.
Representation matters.
CSpan3 replayed the arguments in the Harvard and UNC cases today. I listened to about an hour of it. THere was definitely a thorough explanation of the value of diversity to the student body and the workplace beyond.
One tantalizing bit–the atty representing Harvard said H was having trouble yielding enough humanities majors. So there’s a hook for somebody!
If I understood it correctly, the Solicitor General seemed to say that it would be an OK result if the Court banned not just considering race but legacy, athlete, etc as well.
But being (or not being) an athlete or a legacy is not a protected class like race is. If Harvard only wanted to admit ballerinas from New Mexico, it could do that without violating any laws. Admitting only white (or only black, or only green) ballerinas might violate several laws.
ICYMI and are curious why I deleted your post;
One question I have is on data surrounding the top liberal arts colleges and admissions for various groups. It is often suggested for Asian students to apply to humanities majors/have a humanities spike or apply to liberal arts colleges. Most attention is focused on the top national universities.
Lengthy article in today’s Sunday Times chronicling Wesleyan’s long commitment to affirmatice action:
I haven’t been following the case much for a variety of reasons. But I did read the article and the part below terrifies. There is absolutely no way that I would send my children to a college that only had 2.1% black students. My D24 hasn’t started her college search yet, but that prediction makes suspect that she will look harder at HBCUs than she might otherwise. That is probably a good choice for a variety of reasons, but I don’t want it feel like a necessary choice just to attend a college with other black students.
It may also make the financial aid piece harder for her than her older sister who had a lot of success with meets-need, no-loan colleges. I may have to start reading the merit aid threads more seriously because going to a school with the predicted demographics would be a non-starter for us. It doesn’t matter that my daughter has the grades and test scores to be competitive at those 200 schools. I think it would be a miserable experience for her to attend one.
The institutions most likely to be dramatically affected are the 200 colleges and universities regarded as “selective” — meaning they admit 50 percent or fewer of their applicants. And for smaller, highly selective liberal arts colleges, like Wesleyan, the impact on college culture could be particularly noticeable, as professors on these tightly knit campuses say their small classes thrive on interactions by a diverse group of students.
A group of 33 of these schools submitted a in August to the Supreme Court. Some of them had graduated Black students even before the Civil War.
“The probability of Black applicants receiving offers of admission would drop to half that of white students, and the percentage of Black students matriculating would drop from roughly 7.1 percent of the student body to 2.1 percent,” the brief said, predicting a return to “1960s levels.”
I think the following reader comment to the article summarized the issue well:
I have no love for the so-called conservative majority (I think radical and reactionary are better descriptions) on the current Supreme Court. But in this particular case, if they do as expected and decisively end race-based Affirmative Action, they will be doing their job rightly, returning us to the clear, obvious intent of the 14th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which together require that access to education race, sex, and national origin-neutral. The law does not say college admissions should strive for diversity, but that college admissions, and other educational opportunities, be provided without respect to race. To say again for emphasis: the law does not require diversity, it requires non-discrimination on the basis of race Period.
ETA: I meant to reply to the thread, not specifically you @Alqbamine32
Well, it’s a “be careful what you wish for” situation IMO because none of those things prevent colleges from becoming permanently test-optional, permanently need-aware (which the college would probably have to be in order to target FGLI applicants) and getting rid of ED in order to achieve diversity - so long as they thread the right needles.
Many of these colleges may be reluctant to target more FG/LI students, because that would cost more (financial aid, support services), unlike higher SES URMs who give them the biggest increase in visible (i.e. marketable) diversity without adding costs here.
Likewise, they may be reluctant to drop ED because ED is significantly helpful in enrollment management while also keeping the SES levels high (to keep financial aid expense down).
For many highly selective private colleges, a result similar to post-Proposition-209 UC (adjusted for different applicant pool demographics) where a much greater percentage of students come from lower SES backgrounds, but where URMs are still URMs (i.e. still underrepresented), would be more costly (financial aid, support services) but less marketable (to URM potential students and anyone else who prefers visible diversity). The UC result may be favored or praised by those who look at diversity and opportunity more from an economic class standpoint, but most people tend to look more at immediately visible diversity, which means race and ethnicity, compared to less obviously visible economic class background.
Stop right there. The difference in applicant pools between the UCs and a wealthy New England college is pretty vast. The UCs have to take whomever is qualified regardless of income. The NESCACs have to go out of their way in order to hunt down needy students. Apples and oranges big time.
Most UCs are significantly more competitive / selective than the baseline of UC eligibility.
Of course, actually getting students from lower income families to apply and enroll at UCs means having decent (in-state) financial aid. Would NESCACs be willing to increase their financial aid budget?
They are not only willing to raise their financial aid budgets, but they are also frantically trying to do so. Wesleyan (which is not even the richest NESCAC per capita) has raised its FA budget by 58% over the last ten years.
Isn’t this type of “diversity” in name only and among the most indefensible parts of the current practice?
I’m not so sure the court will completely ban affirmative action, especially in the UNC case. I found the arguments of the schools very different. UNC has a goal of serving all the people of North Carolina, and to do that they have ‘quotas’ (for lack of a better word) to recruit in all the small towns and far corners of the state. Some of those might be entirely minority. They also have a significant percentage of alumni who are black, so legacies are now also black.
To me, Harvard’s arguments weren’t as strong. They want to have diversity, which is good for the students who are at the school and provides for good discussions and brings in views, but there is no question that they do that by using different admissions standards for some groups.
So I think Harvard will lose but UNC may win.
The reader comment is wholly ahistorical regarding the “clear, obvious intent” of the 14th Amendment and the CRA of 1964. For just one example, Congress repeatedly voted down attempts to add the phrase"without distinctions of race or color" to the 14th amendment. Further, the idea that 14A and CRA definitively micro-managed a private universities admissions policies regarding what they should and shouldn’t “strive for” is ridiculous.
It is ironic that this thread is being revived on MLK Day, as the evolving conservative legal reasoning on affirmative action closely mirrors the bastardization of his “I Have a Dream” speech. Below is an interesting article from a Princeton Historian from last year. If focuses on CRT but it equally applicable in this context . . .
My oldest kid has now see the extremes of college life on both sides (finished up undergrad at a HBCU that was over 85% Black, and has started graduate school at a large highly ranked institution with a Black population between 2-3% at the undergraduate level and slightly lower at the graduate school level). She has been able to navigate both worlds (especially the academics), but she has talked about some of the cultural differences and how conversations sometimes get “weird” or “lost in translation” because of those differences at her new institution. I think that it would have been tough for her to go to a school with a really small Black population (under 5%) at 18 years old. At the 2% mark, it almost certainly would have been a “no go” and I believe that Black students may actively avoid applying/attending schools with such low thresholds (unless they are truly great financial options).
Repost.
My kids have all attended historically predominantly white K-12 schools. Though many of them are now closer to 30-40% students of color, the numbers of black students are still relatively low compared to students of other races. My kids have been fine, but I am just trying to imagine my D24 sitting in a humanities or social science discussion based class where only 2% of the student body is African-American. I think D22 would still speak up in that kind of setting, but if there are no other black students in any of her classes, D24 would never open her mouth or be willing to talk about any text or topic with any connection to race --which is kind of all of the texts that one would read in a humanities or social science class! The conversations will be different as will the subject matter explored by performing or visual arts extracurricular activities on campus absent the voices of black and latino students. Campus literary magazines and newspapers would likely publish different work. Just living in the dorms and making friends will be a harder experience if the numbers are as low as 2%, and she will have to put up with more ignorance and bigotry.
I don’t know. Maybe D24 will surprise me and still want to apply to some of the schools that her sister did. But I am not sure that I would feel comfortable with her going. My other worry is that I am not sure that the college offices at my kids’ schools know much at HBCUs. At my eldest kid’s school, they sent 2 kids to Morehouse, 1 to Spelman and 2 or 3 to Howard over the last ten years. I don’t think that they’ve sent any one to any other HBCU though I could be wrong. Still we may be on our own in researching and applying to historically black institutions. I may be leaning on CC a lot more than I did with D22. 
Thank goodness affirmative action is going to be shut down in the next year or so.
I can’t wait for the day when one’s race does not influence their outcomes in the college admissions process and that day has finally come. I hope that my kids will never have to know how hurtful it is to essentially be ‘worth’ less to schools than African-Americans and other ethnic groups.
Harvard’s going to try and find loopholes which is reminiscent of the Jewish experience in the 1920s but I remain hopeful that they struggle to do so. We live in a multiracial country where all of us are individuals, not representatives of our ethnic group.
I’ve been waiting for a decade for this policy to be over but I can’t imagine what it’s like to be Edward Blum who has been waiting 30 or so years for this sordid policy to be over. He was in the courtroom in 2003 when Gratz vs Bollinger was decided and it was then he decided to sue UT Austin and now Harvard.
Blum said in a podcast I watched, this case is only the beginning because race will likely be eliminated from other aspects of society. I work at an asset management firm where I know for a fact that certain groups get priority over others and I hope that corporations are next after schools to be race-blind.
I’m so excited for the next chapter of American history!