I've had a couple of observations about this whole process, and I would love to be convinced (either way!) with real data / evidence.
1) For all the contortions that universities in the US go to, to adjust and hand-tune their population -- does it produce a meaningfully better class than if they used a simple score cutoff? Would such a class (chosen by simple, unbiased score cutoff) be so much worse at innovation, leadership, (alumni donations??) than a class chosen by our heavy judgement-laden process? Sports, maybe?
What is all this extra effort and political decision-making worth, in actual outcome? Many other countries use purely exam based entrance. Or allow anyone in, and test them once there and kick out if they don't pass. What is the value of the "high judgement" method of admissions? Is it that you're more likely to produce a president or CEO?
2) To echo Justice O'Connor's final question on the matter in oral arguments, when do we know that we're done with this policy? Who says we're done and fixed the situation? How will we know we've reached a point where we can agree that we've achieved something that was the goal, or is it just arbitrary, up to whomever is in power at the moment? If not, will this just go on forever? Is that not ripe for some bad side effects, or worse, corruption of the process?
3) Why have universities adopted themselves as the place where this modification of outcomes should be applied? As I understand it, the problem of diversity etc. etc. happens long before the college/university stage. Attempting to fix it at the end does no one very much good, than if the effort was applied earlier in students' lives. Or, the metrics by which you decide if it's working become softer and softer.
I struggle to find satisfactory answers to these questions, and therefore don't find myself convinced for why AA is reasonable (or legal).
1) The incentives are different for different universities. Less elite universities don't (generally) do all this because, you're right, there's no point. More elite universities do, because they're incentivized to.
Elite universities play a zero-sum game with one another for the far right tail of prestige/power/access. Part of that game does depend on producing the right sort of graduates -- but no exam will find them, and the sorts of things that identify them aren't generally the sorts of things you can grade/fail them on either. The other part of the game is played not with the graduate but with _everyone else_. Harvard is Harvard (to most people) not because of the mean Harvard grad's success, but because everyone else couldn't get in. Those two incentive structures point more or less at what we've got: painstaking care taken to identify a very small group of candidates, who are then _highly_ credentialed (ex: grade inflation). (All while retaining the aura of meritocracy.)
> Part of that game does depend on producing the right sort of graduates -- but no exam will find them, and the sorts of things that identify them aren't generally the sorts of things you can grade/fail them on either
And this is just a way to show class/status with more steps. The fundamental problem is that there exists positions in society where holding it isn't merit based, but connection and class based. Harvard is a vector for which some people of a lower class are allowed to ascend - but only under the auspices of the current crop of upper-class.
Sure, but Harvard's position in society is no more fixed than anyone else's (albeit with more inertia). They maintain their status by producing high status graduates.
If we want to influence that dynamic (say, to push it toward justice, perhaps meritocratic justice), we can identify high status-granting institution/processes (ex: Harvard) and try to make them grant status differently. But, of course, if you interfere with that process it's going to be less effective... but maybe that's okay; maybe burning the process/institution (slowly) and redistributing status along the way is worth it. Or, maybe, if you're skillful, you can get away without burning the process. But this is a big, complicated, social process and heavy-handed manipulation simply won't work -- you'll never rid status of connection and class, because status /is/ connection and class. You can only hope to redistribute things in a more just way (however defined).
The effect of AA on these universities is that they gradually lose their prestige amongst the population they discriminate against. Supposedly amongst the Asian population, UCB is held in as high a regard as Stanford. UCB was mandated by law to not discriminate by race. Stanford could do so.
> does it produce a meaningfully better class than if they used a simple score cutoff?
It depends on the goal. Is it to produce the best possible set of mathematicians, etc, at graduation? Or is it to pick the candidates that are the most likely to benefit the current network of alum and their sphere of influence? If its the latter, a simple cutoff is a terrible idea.
I don't think the purpose of these policies are to produce a "better" student population, but are more that a) there are too many qualified applicants for the number of seats and they need a good alibi to justify cutting people basically randomly, and b) the racial aspects are more of an advocacy choice to try to make up for past racial injustices by ironically biasing the system racially.
The latter issue, I don't see a clean cut way to rectify - as an Asian American I get the feeling of being discriminated against, but I also see the power of giving the most discriminated minorities more opportunity to exploit the power that elite degrees bestow.
Personally I end up being OK with affirmative action policies - as much as I'd like a fair system, an unfair system built on past injustices make that impossible, and I'd rather exclusive universities adopt these unfair policies to shift the balance back.
If this is a topic that interests you, I'd encourage you to listen to the oral arguments/ opinion announcements from the landmark supreme court cases: Bakke [0] and Grutter [1], the latter of which parent references.
The legal underpinning, at least, of considering race in admissions actually IS to make a better class and in turn, a better experience for students.
I also find it a more compelling moral argument than the past injustices or tilting the scales arguments. If the goal is reparations for past injustices, surely japanese internment should count for something. If the goal is to balance the economic scales, we should penalize underrepresented students from wealthy families (and frankly, the preference should be along economic, not racial lines). If the goal is to ensure students don't graduate thinking black (or non-asian, or athletic, or poor, ...) people are dumb because I didn't meet any in my prestigious college class, that seems to me a worthwhile goal that is legitimately furthered by trying to create a diverse class. To GP's point, I don't have data, but also think that outcome is hard to measure.
The problem with your stated goal is that it can justify any length or extent of remedy. That is where a big problem lies. How are we (or the courts) to decide that your chosen remedy is right, reasonable, or effective? Or that it's not merely symbolic and will go on forever? Or that you will say later it's not enough, and choose a different action, and that gets added to the pile?
Is there a concrete actionable principle you can state, to be applied by everyone who needs to apply it?
There seems to be some emerging evidence that election processes, even those which supposedly require significant expertise (e.g. selecting NIH grant recipients), don't perform meaningfully better than random selection. Which, to be honest, shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone steeped in Kahneman and Tversky's behavioral psychology.
The problem with universities simply selecting by score is that it reinforces the inequality feedback loop. Education tends to correlate with wealth. Wealthy people are really good at investing into educating their descendants. Selection by score becomes equivalent to selection by wealth/heredity.
Used properly, “hand-tuning” of university population could offset biases liable to be introduced by a seemingly-unbiased simple score cutoff in presence of social inequality—though I wouldn’t go as far as to claim it works as intended.
The alumni admissions point is an interesting one. I wonder how one's propensity to donate is affected by their perception that they were chosen by the institution vs. they were selected by a deterministic process.
My college experience was made massively more enlightening because it exposed me to people from very different backgrounds. I grew up in a nearly 100% white suburb of Detroit, and even though I only had to walk 5 blocks north from my house to be in nearly 100% Black Detroit, I had never had a real conversation with a Black person until college, where both dorm life and coursework put me in close frequent contact with many people from diverse backgrounds. My undergrad degrees were in physics and mechanical engineering, and many engineering courses involved group projects where you end up spending maybe 100+ hours with the group members over the course of the semester. This situation specifically lead me to a number of eye-opening conversations and experiences where I discovered my own blind spots. For example, one time when I was driving to Home Depot with a Black electrical engineer groupmate and friend, I was pulled over for no obvious reason. I'm white and my father was an FBI agent so I have always been comfortable around law enforcers, so I asked what the issue was but the officer gave a vague non-answer (I made a "suspicious turn") and asked my friend for his ID. I asked the officer for clarity and why he would need the ID from a passenger if it was a moving violation, to which he asked how I knew the passenger. I explained we were engineers going to pick up supplies for a project, and I could see in his demeanor relax, right before he said "that explains it, something just didn't seem right" and let us go. After heading on, I ignorantly wondered what that was about as there was no legal basis for it, and my friend asked if I seriously didn't see that the cop just thought it was strange and possibly a sign of trouble/distress that me, a bookish white young man was driving with a Black young man. I couldn't see that in the moment, but in retrospect it was obvious. I was able to better see part of the world that was hidden from me because I was with a Black person who I met through school. Without the coursework, I wouldn't have developed that friendship, and without the friendship, I couldn't have started a real conversation about what it was like being Black in America and what other stuff like that happened to him.
That's just one example (one of the most impactful for sure) of the great extracurricular educational value I got out of being around a diverse group of people.
As a high schooler, I held similar views to many of the people commenting on this link, that affirmative action was unjust. Today, I know that my educational experience was greatly improved by my exposure to people with very different lived experiences, educational backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives. My understanding of the world and the problems to be solved is so much richer because of these experiences and connections, and universities absolutely improve the quality of the education by promoting and facilitating these connections. Even excluding the societal benefits of affirmative action (eg helping a systematically oppressed population gain access to better economic opportunities), affirmative action is a smart and good policy for universities to embrace.
modriano says>After heading on, I ignorantly wondered what that was about as there was no legal basis for it, and my friend asked if I seriously didn't see that the cop just thought it was strange and possibly a sign of trouble/distress that me, a bookish white young man was driving with a Black young man. I couldn't see that in the moment, but in retrospect it was obvious.<
But it was not obvious!
There are many alternative explanations for what happened. I suggest that you create a list of alternative explanations as an exercise; there are an infinite number of them. This will allow you to admit that you really do not know why the police officer stopped you!
You accept your friend's explanation as if it were the only one that makes sense! Consequently everything that follows from your friend's explanation is likely flawed. I would ask that you reconsider and learn to leave final explanations indefinite. Part of life is not knowing.
I see futile efforts by people trying to understand others all the time. They concoct explanations that shatter under the slightest scrutiny. Even the brightest people fall prey to the belief they can explain others' actions w/o at least asking that person (sometimes worthwhile, but also often misleading!).
Wrong and/or unsupported explanations are assumptions and have an effect: they fix thinking along a path that is likely wrong. Learning to live with "I don't know." will allow you to think more clearly without incorrect assumptions and also more clearly reveal the limits of your knowledge, showing it to be far more limited than one might wish to admit.
"When you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME!"
There is a difference between the positive effects one wants and the methods to achieve these effects. It is also valid to criticize and propose alternatives to policies which seek to give the same results but without other side effects. Other countries do things differently but want the same end result, some organisations do things differently from others but also desire the same result.
What I find absurd in the US is that high school students cannot choose their own public school, but are assigned based on where they live. This creates a big divide in rich schools and poor schools. Or white and black schools.
Where I am from in Europe you can choose your own school and schools compete for students. I came from a poor neighbourhood and the nearest high school had a terrible reputation, and I am glad I had the choice to go somewhere else.
I think the population density in the US makes this difficult.
If you can't get into the nearest one or two high schools, you may end up with a 40+ minute commute to get to school which would make morning classes and extra curriculars pretty difficult.
1) For all the contortions that universities in the US go to, to adjust and hand-tune their population -- does it produce a meaningfully better class than if they used a simple score cutoff? Would such a class (chosen by simple, unbiased score cutoff) be so much worse at innovation, leadership, (alumni donations??) than a class chosen by our heavy judgement-laden process? Sports, maybe?
What is all this extra effort and political decision-making worth, in actual outcome? Many other countries use purely exam based entrance. Or allow anyone in, and test them once there and kick out if they don't pass. What is the value of the "high judgement" method of admissions? Is it that you're more likely to produce a president or CEO?
2) To echo Justice O'Connor's final question on the matter in oral arguments, when do we know that we're done with this policy? Who says we're done and fixed the situation? How will we know we've reached a point where we can agree that we've achieved something that was the goal, or is it just arbitrary, up to whomever is in power at the moment? If not, will this just go on forever? Is that not ripe for some bad side effects, or worse, corruption of the process?
3) Why have universities adopted themselves as the place where this modification of outcomes should be applied? As I understand it, the problem of diversity etc. etc. happens long before the college/university stage. Attempting to fix it at the end does no one very much good, than if the effort was applied earlier in students' lives. Or, the metrics by which you decide if it's working become softer and softer.
I struggle to find satisfactory answers to these questions, and therefore don't find myself convinced for why AA is reasonable (or legal).