Should Affirmative Action Consider Social Class?

calibc · April 18, 2009, 9:36pm

The amount of money a kid’s family has is supposed to be a way better indicator of whether that kid will attend college or not…

I definitely think that eliminating these sort of things would be better though… it’s like need-based admissions… ridiculous.

fudgemaster · April 18, 2009, 9:37pm

"siserune:

I don’t agree an Asian’s odds would necessarily increase in the most selective schools. UC schools are not the most selective. I am talking about top national schools where the acceptance rate is 20% or less.

In these schools, it takes more than just top grades and scores to get in. Many of these schools turn away thousands of kids with perfect SAT scores every year.

At these schools an Asian student may pass the first filter; but what is unique about Asians that will get them selected in greater numbers amongst all the other non-Asian students with equally impressive academic stats?"

This is really disturbing to me because there is an underlying implication that Asians only have high academic stats and nothing else. This is simply not true; I think most Asian applicants know that high stats will not get you into a top school and hence they pursue ECs such as music, sports, volunteering, research, etc.

Also, there was a paper put out by Princeton a couple years ago that suggested that the elimination of AA at their school would primarily benefit Asians. I cannot find the paper right now but I’m sure another poster probably can.

pyn · April 18, 2009, 9:41pm

If Asians were not disadvantaged by AA then, they would comprise 30-40% of top universities’ populations rather than 15-20%.

How does AA help to heal the issue of racism, all it does is propagate the stereotype that blacks and hispanics can’t get into college based on their own merit. While that statement may be false, by giving them a large boost in admissions, whites and asians who are screwed over tend to have that point of view on AA. If AA does what it’s supposed to do, then we shouldn’t need AA anymore because AA would have made our society have equal opportunities for all races…

fabrizio · April 18, 2009, 10:21pm

You’re referring to the 2005 paper by Espenshade and Chung. They concluded that Asians would be the biggest winners if affirmative action were eliminated. Naturally, the defenders of the status quo loathed this paper and jumped at any “rebuttal” that surfaced. William Kidder did in fact publish a critical response to Espenshade and Chung’s paper, but even a cursory read of Kidder’s paper would reveal that he only criticized the conclusion; he did not criticize the methodology. Kidder argued that Espenshade and Chung conflated negative action with affirmative action and attributed the former as the reason why Asian applicants were treated as if they had fifty fewer SAT points.

I hoped that Kidder’s paper would be the “bridge” between the two sides of the affirmative action debate because it basically said that you could have your cake and eat it, too. Kidder argued that you could remove negative action but keep affirmative action. The former helps Asians by not penalizing them, and the latter helps protected minorities. (I oppose racial preferences, but unlike Rorschach, I am willing to compromise.) How na

fabrizio · April 18, 2009, 10:30pm

Sure, I agree with you. There’s just one problem: the Supreme Court has never, ever approved “mak[ing] up for past wrongs” as a rationale for affirmative action. Diversity is the only approved reason for affirmative action in higher education.

sleepycat · April 18, 2009, 10:33pm

“Should Affirmative Action Consider Social Class?”

YES!!

ch0iminy · April 18, 2009, 10:44pm

tomjonesistheman: I totally agree. AA is dumb and probably will be why, although I think I have decent stats, i will be rejected from my top choices. Those who have the best stats should be accepted…not based on how much money or what the color of your skin is. People who work hard, regardless of their skin color should be the incoming class. It’s total discrimination. I feel bad for the asians out there man.

aspasp · April 18, 2009, 11:38pm

Why do you blame AA and not yourself is the question.

tomjonesistheman · April 18, 2009, 11:50pm

I remember reading an article written by Watson (DNA guy) who did research and found that african americans had a lower intelligence than other races. Does anyone have a link to it?

tokenadult · April 18, 2009, 11:51pm

Kids with perfect SAT scores number only in the hundreds, not the thousands. The only college that could fill its whole entering class with students with perfect SAT scores is Caltech, and only if all those students applied to Caltech and preferred it to all other colleges.

<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/413821-sat-score-frequencies-freshman-class-sizes.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/413821-sat-score-frequencies-freshman-class-sizes.html</a>

radio_rabbit · April 19, 2009, 12:14am

I absolutely think that affirmative action should consider social class.

True story: two of my friends applied to Princeton. Princeton was their dream school. One of these friends was hispanic, the other white. The white friend was really high up in our class rank (honors society) with a 23-something SAT, a phenomenal writer (wanted to be an English major), and great EC’s too (including work exp.). the hispanic friend, although also intelligent, was not up to par with my white friend: he had around a 3.7 weighted GPA, high 19’s to low 20’s SAT, applied undecided, had good ECs. He wasn’t a laughable, completely out of range Ivy applicant, but he certainly was not up to par with the other friend. Both were high income students who didn’t apply for finaid. They both had the same opportunities to succeed.

Needless to say, my hispanic friend got in, and my white friend didn’t. She was crushed.

So I say that AA should definitely consider social class. While I love both my friends, I feel terribly for my friend who didn’t get into Princeton, who totally deserved it more than the one who did.

sclx90 · April 19, 2009, 1:51am

I’m Asian. Reverse discrimination is wrong. Read wikipedia on affirmative action…yeah. Helping lower class is a given, but setting quotas on Asians is as bad as setting quotas on Jews.

vociferous · April 19, 2009, 3:00am

IT ALREADY DOES INCLUDE SOCIAL CLASS AND IT ALWAYS HAS. People are really uninformed when it comes to the history of affirmative action.

Oh yeah and the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative action in its history? WHITE WOMEN

Gender was also a factor and a majority of our universities today and majority women.

siserune · April 19, 2009, 7:13am

The famous statement from their paper is that 80 percent of the places URM would lose under race-free admissions would be taken by Asians. What is equally important and less recognized, is that their paper also showed Asians being penalized by athlete/legacy preferences, and that their method strongly underestimated that effect by considering only recruited athletes.

There are minor technical criticisms that could be put forward, but neither Kidder nor any of the hundreds of other academics with an incentive to attack the E & C paper have indicated any problem whatsoever with the methodology or any reason to disbelieve the results. That’s not surprising, because E & C make numerical what had been known for a long time, as well as from the state ballot initiatives.

Kidder’s criticism is somewhat dishonest, because he was fully aware (as the study shows a strong effect even with a lot of underestimation) that Asians suffer “disparate impact” from athletic and legacy preferences. By ignoring the simulation of preference-free admissions in the paper, which was the most favorable scenario for Asians, Kidder wrongly limits his consideration to Asian-specific discrimination and competition for spots with URM. That’s ridiculous, because for Asians the pro-white discrimination for athletics and legacies is just as much of a problem as the pro-URM affirmative action or the much smaller anti-Asian effect measured in the paper.

amazon · April 19, 2009, 9:07am

There was a series in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago. They went behind the scenes of an admissions officer of an elite college. He went over the application of an Asian girl with a magnifying glass and rejected her because one class she took wasn’t the hardest version of that class offered by her school. Then there was a Hispanic girl whose mother was a college graduate and who was in an elite private boarding school on scholarship and not doing particularly well there. He bent over backwards to give her every consideration and accepted her.

There was another article about when the University of California started considering something like life stories in lieu of minority status. An Asian boy’s mother got breast cancer and died while he was in high school. He was also pretty poor and did extremely well on his SATs. This wasn’t good enough. This wasn’t the tragic life story that they were looking for. Minority kids were coached to put something in their essay to indicate that they were minorities.

toadstool · April 19, 2009, 9:24am

Are we training a society that establishes the criteria for winner to be he who whines the best? Sad.

Every kid who perceives that he or she lost out to a URM or whiner is tomorrows backlash. When the AA pendulum swings the other way, thing will get ugly.

Whiner=winner>backlash

bdawa · April 19, 2009, 9:53am

How about this:

1) View all applicants completely Blind choosing to accept whatever you would have accepted.

2) Unblind accepted and sort into affirm qualified pool and non qualified pool.

3) if you need more affirm act (and non), blindly choose to accept from the remaining pool

4) repeat steps 2 and 3 (loosening your accept criteria each iteration) until your affirm qualified pool is filled

5) If, at that point, the non affirmed accept pool has grown too large, reselect from that pool the subset needed.

NOTE - the issue of “criterion for membership in affirm action pool” Must be agreed before undertaking the process, otherwise you are back to square one.

On a personal note - I believe affirm action should be solely socio ecoomic.
It seems to me racist to imply that someone was denied opportunity soley based on race.

twomules · April 19, 2009, 9:53am

Radio RAbbit: I think you are missing out on a component of the decision. The accepted student was male;the rejected student was female. I don’t know about Princeton in particular but in general more females are applying to college than males. Her competition wasn’t her male classmate. It was another female from her area. Plus no one “deserves” to get in over another. You said that his scores weren’t out of consideration. Then it comes down to recommendations,ECs. and essays. Believe it or not, his point of view and family experiences may be valuable in a class discussion.

I like siserune’s last point - white legacy and athletes are a bigger “problem” to asians than URMs. Why aren’t people as hot under the collar at that? I think that is because those are the students they want to network with. As a parent of minority kids, I read these threads and get a feeling that the angry ones are feeling very superior to the minority student.

These arguments are really focused on only a handful of colleges/universities. No one is getting upset at the thought of AA at Luther College in Iowa. People - spread your applications around. Apply to LACs in the midwest and south in addition to the Ivys and UCs. Admission rates at the most selective school are so low that no one can be surprised to not get in.

eye · April 19, 2009, 9:58am

Why are we giving AA status to students at all based on anything but academic merit? We certainly don’t practice AA in our collegiate sports, it dumb , its stupid and its time for it to stop. If we don’t , then I suggest we start practicing AA in every aspect of collegiate selection, including sports so that our collegiate athletes have the benefit of a “diversity” experience on and off the field. I for one demand to see more asians on our football and basketball teams, how else are we to ever correct the grave social injustice of the dearth of Asians in the NFL or NBA.

bdawa · April 19, 2009, 10:15am