"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion 13

[neela1]

They should make their support conditional on outcomes that matter to them. They don’t. Let alone run for politics.

[UnsentDementor]

Some might. My younger kid getting into Stanford one day…yeah, that’s an “outcome” that matters to me, but isn’t in my top 500 reasons to cast a vote for someone.

[neela1]

Different people have different priorities. Clearly it is important to the people that are asking for affirmative action. Some people ask for things. Some people don’t. Unless you ask you won’t get anything.

[Ethic]

“The question is, if you don’t give a boost to URM, then are you effectively actually rigging the system against URM – especially lower class URM.”

This statement is the problem, it perceives all URM as disadvantaged (which is racist by itself). Many are, some are not. The basis for admittance should include socio economic condition (which schools legally can), basing on race alone is a red herring and makes it look like one race needs more help than another. Only those coming from poor socio economic conditions should see a boost, and by extension that will include more URMs as they are over represented in those conditions.

[Dadto2NY]

You just proved the need for diversity – European Jews were but a small minority. But putting that aside, through history, the greatest advancements in physics were made of people of all races and creeds. Heck, go back 1000 years, Middle Eastern Arabs were much more advanced in physics than Europeans.
Go back even further, the pyramids required extremely advanced physics that Europeans were incapable of.

I’m sorry, but any suggestion that diversity isn’t beneficial is simply wrong.

[Dadto2NY]

Ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, gender diversity is always good on the community level, (and a college/university is a community).

Full stop.

[Dadto2NY]

What you’re saying is not irrational. Except, URMs often have roadblocks beyond economic class. The degree roadblocks are related to economic class versus solely due to their race is very hard to quantify.
I certainly agree evaluation based on socioeconomic status is less troublesome from a constitutional standpoint.

[1NJParent]

@Dadto2NY

You just proved the need for diversity – European Jews were but a small minority. But putting that aside, through history, the greatest advancements in physics were made of people of all races and creeds. Heck, go back 1000 years, Middle Eastern Arabs were much more advanced in physics than Europeans.

The point isn’t about which race is/was more capable in physics. Whether they were European Jews or Middle Eastern Arabs, they didn’t benefit from racial diversity in their respective periods, did they?

[PL3]

Political?

[ucbalumnus]

@1NJParent

The point isn’t about which race is/was more capable in physics. Whether they were European Jews or Middle Eastern Arabs, they didn’t benefit from racial diversity in their respective periods, did they?

Countries that they lived in benefited. The US being less anti-Jewish than Germany in the 1930s-1940s meant that European Jewish physicists preferred to be in the US rather than Germany (or places that could get invaded by Germany) in that time, bringing the benefits of their work to the US.

[1NJParent]

That’s another matter. The primary reason the US is what it is today in sciences and technologies is because we attracted some of the most talented people from abroad, based on merits, not some racial quotas. Without them, we’ll lose our advantages (ironically to countries that are much less diversified racially than us).

[skieurope]

Please limit comments to the thread title: race and admissions. If someone wants to expand the scope, they can start a thread in the politics forum. Off-topic posts on this thread are subject to deletion without notice.

[LostInTheShuffle]

@ChangeTheGame

I believe the real answer is in fixing our K-12 schools so that the educational playing field is eventually equalized so that African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics are at the same level as White Americans and Asian Americans.

Totally agree. We’re trying to fix the problem of inequality (and academic underachievement) at the wrong stage of the academic journey. If the US is serious about rectifying past wrongs, we must start much earlier than college admission.

I also see a lot of hypocrisy among us - many of us say we support greater equality but we hoard the resources to help achieve it, including by maintaining the current mechanisms of funding schools through local property taxes (with concerning instances of gerrymandering to boot!) and unwillingness to allow “affordable” housing to be built in wealthy areas (see this NYT documentary).

[Rivet2000]

I agree that investing in early education is the best route.

Also, agree that school funding needs to be fixed. I’ll add that I think that students should be able to attend any school they choose.

I don’t agree on policies that require “affordable” housing to be placed that do not match the neighborhood. I know I’ll hear about NIMBY and more, but a home is usually a families largest investment, it matters where it is located. High density housing, transition housing, group homes impact value neighborhoods.

[theloniusmonk]

“SAT W: -0.15 fist gen, -0.13 ALANA
SAT (M+V): -0.13 ALANA, -0.08 fist gen
Number of AP Credits: -0.12 ALANA, -0.03 first gen
HS GPA: -0.08 ALANA, +0.01 first gen
Rigor of HS Courses: -0.04 ALANA, +0.05 first gen”

With SATs out now, AP credits and rigor would favor students from private high schools or public ones in wealthier districts.

"unwillingness to allow “affordable” housing to be built in wealthy areas "

Agree, the wealthier suburbs in CA are fighting hard not to comply with CA housing laws where every city or town has you to build more housing over the next 5 or so years and a certain percentage has to be affordable by lower-income families.

[ucbalumnus]

@Rivet2000

I think that students should be able to attend any school they choose.

Although parent money affects how easily the kid can get to a desired school that is not close to home. This is not all that different conceptually from a college student being limited to commuting to a nearby college because going to a residential college is too expensive, although the distances are scaled up.

@Rivet2000

a home is usually a families largest investment, it matters where it is located.

Yes, some places are where property values seem to be the only values when it come to opposition to any additional housing in the area.

Making K-12 better is an ideal goal, but difficult (see above) and mostly out of the control of colleges that face marketing and political pressures regarding the diversity (particularly visible aspects like race/ethnicity) of their students. Colleges presumably know that lack of visible diversity can harm their marketing efforts and that actions aimed directly to increase that are unpopular, so there is no way to satisfy both pressures at the same time.

[Data10]

@theloniusmonk

With SATs out now, AP credits and rigor would favor students from private high schools or public ones in wealthier districts.

The point was the stats you quoted suggest that SAT scores are more correlated with income than any of the other listed metrics, including both AP credits and rigor. They removed a metric that is more correlated with income and replaced it with a combination of metrics that are less correlated with income. The correlation can be >0 while still being less than occurs with test scores.

[skieurope]

Deleted several posts on problem solving. Back to topic please.

[1NJParent]

From The Economist:

A diversity of backgrounds in elite institutions is a desirable goal. In pursuing it, though, how much violence should be done to other liberal principles—fairness, meritocracy, the treatment of people as individuals and not avatars for their group identities? At present, the size of racial preferences is large and hard to defend. The child of two college-educated Nigerian immigrants probably has more advantages in life than the child of an Asian taxi driver or a white child born into Appalachian poverty. Such backgrounds all add to diversity. But, under the current regime, the first is heavily more favoured than the others.

Racial preferences are not, however, the most galling thing about the ultra-selective universities that anoint America’s elite. The legal case against Harvard, one of the universities defending itself before the Supreme Court, has prised open its admissions records to show the scale of unjustified advantage showered upon the already privileged—disproportionately those who are white and wealthy. A startling 43% of white students admitted to Harvard enjoy some kind of non-academic admissions preference: being an athlete, the child of an alumnus, or a member of the dean’s list of special applicants (such as the offspring of powerful people or big donors).

A cynic could argue that racial balancing works as a virtue-signalling veneer atop a grotesquely unfair system. A study published in 2017 found that most of Harvard’s undergraduates hailed from families in the top 10% of the income distribution. Princeton had more students from the top 1% than the bottom 60%. When this is the case, it seems unfair that it is often minority students—not the trust-funders—who have their credentials questioned. University presidents and administrators who preen about all their diverse classes might look at how Britain—a country of kings, queens, knights and lords—has fostered a university system that is less riven with ancestral privilege.

Unfairness in American education will not be fixed by one court ruling. But it will shock a system in need of reform. Legacy admissions should be ended. Colleges claiming that alumni donations would wither without them should look to Caltech, mit and Johns Hopkins—top-notch institutions that ditched the practice and, as The Economist went to press, still seemed reputable and solvent. Blunt racial preferences will probably need to be replaced in response to the Supreme Court. But a less socially divisive system based on income could take their place. That would do a better job of taking actual disadvantage into account. It would still favour non-white and non-Asian Americans, because they are more likely to be poorer, but would do so using a racially neutral method.

In some ways, the question of who gets into a handful of elite universities is a distraction from the deeper causes of social immobility in America. Schooling in poorer neighbourhoods was dismal even before covid-19. The long school closures demanded by teachers’ unions wiped out two decades of progress in test scores for nine-year-olds, with hard-up, black and Hispanic children worst affected. Efforts to help the needy should start before birth and be sustained throughout childhood. Nothing the Supreme Court says about the consideration of race in college admissions will affect the more basic problem, that too few Americans from poorer families are sufficiently well-nurtured or well-taught to be ready to apply to college. However the court rules, that is a debate America needs to have.

American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class | The Economist