This is exactly what I predicted would happen at the conclusion of this Michigan AA case. Colleges will be getting the same results as before this case, just spending more time and money on bureaucracy to do it. There will certainly be another lawsuit concerning this new program simply being AA in disguise which it is but it's legal, funny how that works. Michigan Revamps Admissions After Court Ruling Thu Aug 28, 4:00 PM ET Add U.S. National - Reuters to My Yahoo! http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030828/us_nm/education_diversity_dc_1 By Tom Brown DETROIT (Reuters) - The University of Michigan unveiled a new admissions policy on Thursday aimed at maintaining student diversity, replacing a system the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) struck down on grounds it went too far in providing advantages for minorities. Under the new policy, racial preferences can still be used as a factor in admission decisions, and future applicants will be asked to share their thoughts about diversity in an essay. But university officials, who stress the school remains committed to building the most diverse student body possible, said they would no longer use a controversial system that automatically gave extra points to blacks, Hispanics and American Indians. In landmark rulings on the civil rights issue in June, the Supreme Court upheld the admissions policy at Michigan's law school but said the point-based system Michigan used for undergraduate applicants was unconstitutional. The court favored the law school because it said it reviewed every candidate individually -- with no formulas or anything resembling a quota system -- and aimed for a "critical mass" of minorities in each incoming class. Senior faculty members, speaking in a conference call with reporters on Thursday, said the law school's policies provided the "road map" for revamping admissions at the undergraduate level. "The court said that race may be a factor in admissions. Like the law school policy that was upheld by the court, the new undergraduate admissions process provides the opportunity for flexible, individualized consideration for every applicant on a broad range of factors that will contribute to the overall excellence and diversity of the class," said Paul Courant, the university's provost. The state-funded school accepts up to 13,000 of almost 26,000 undergraduate applicants each year. Under the new system, undergraduate applicants will be required to submit extensive information about their backgrounds and their families' socioeconomic status, something officials said was not done in the past. Instead of the lone essay required under the old system, students will now be asked to write a minimum of three essays, including one about how they would contribute to campus diversity or how "cultural diversity" or the lack of it had affected their lives. "There is nothing duller than a classroom and people whose backgrounds and training are identical," said Courant. "They don't learn from each other and they don't teach the teacher. Diversity, diversity broadly, diversity of points of view, of experience, of intellectual style, is crucial to excellent learning at this university." The new admissions system will be put in place for applicants seeking to enter Michigan in the fall of 2004 and Courant said the additional staff and resources needed to implement it would cost the school up $1.5 million to $2 million this year alone. "We'll know more about these students, they'll have a better opportunity to convey to us, in the way that we will demand of them, the kind of work and the kind of thinking they can do," Courant said.
So they are aiming for a "critical mass" of minorities. That sounds like a quota to me. It is truly ridiculous, as Timing said, the hoops people are jumping through to achieve this imperfect system. If the problem is that blacks, hispanics and native americans cannot score high enough on tests to gain admittance, the problem lies in their K-12 education. We need to reform the schools they attend and the way they are (or AREN'T) learning. Perhaps there are broader implications such as required cultural changes to emphasize the value of education at home, as other minority groups such as asians and indians do. As far as I know there are no physical or genetic reasons that these minority groups cannot score high enough on tests to gain admittance to college, so we need to focus on how they are learning instead of practicing a discriminatory admissions process.
Yep...funny how school administrators will fly in the face of a court ruling so they can have diversity just so they say they have it. Personally I am in favor of a system where the applications come to the admissions committee with the name, race and gender boxes redacted out. Just a number would identify each candiate. Then the decisions would be made on the raw data (test scores, transcripts, etc). I guess I am just an idealist in that regard. Admissions requirements be damned I guess.
Having gone to predominantly poor and predominantly wealthy schools in my lifetime, I can safely tell you that it is near impossible to make a teacher who does not want to be where they are, teach with enthusiasm. Suburban teachers tend to be happy and enthusiastic about their jobs. Inner city teachers can't wait to get out of there and as a result the children suffer. Until that mindset, not to mention the gross inequalities in budget seen in juxtaposing these two types of schools, is eliminated, nothing will ever change.
yea this is bull**** , now we gonna get replaced by less qualified applicants just to bring diversity. diversity is good but not at the expense of people who are actually smart and educated , if you not smart, then suck it up and go to a small school. I go to UT , and this was offered by someone the other week. its ridiculous
I believe Dallas has the highest per student spending of any district in the state of Texas, yet their problems continue. If kids don't want to learn, then it doesn't matter how much money you throw at a problem.
Perhaps we should throw some money at the K-12 schools instead of trying to export the meager public funds to private schools in DeFacto Segregationist efforts [i.e. vouchers] Rocket River
What an insult to the intelligence of minorities. Only when they set the bar higher will the underperformers begin to work harder. They need a higher standard to reach for, in order to push themselves to improve their track records. Achieving their lower standard through the help of racial quotas takes little effort and they seem to be comfortable with that. Unfortunately, that will only perpetuate their failures.
Yep...funny how school administrators will fly in the face of a court ruling so they can have diversity just so they say they have it. If I remember right, the Michigan court ruling didn't actually prohibit AA, did it? Didn't it reject the undergrad points system but allowed the law school AA system to still continue? If so, then they just rebuilt their system to be consistent with whatever is allowed. Personally I am in favor of a system where the applications come to the admissions committee with the name, race and gender boxes redacted out. Just a number would identify each candiate. Then the decisions would be made on the raw data (test scores, transcripts, etc). I totally agree.
What an insult to the intelligence of minorities. Only when they set the bar higher will the underperformers begin to work harder. They need better elementary & junior high schools, I think, more than they need to work harder. Plenty of inner city students work damn hard, but don't have the tools, resources, teachers, or learning environment to get the same results as suburban schools.
If the problem is that blacks, hispanics and native americans cannot score high enough on tests to gain admittance, the problem lies in their K-12 education. bibtexx. So since they had poor K-12 ed, they should continue to suffer for the rest of their lives. Their kids should suffer, too, since since they won't t get good jobs and better income to provide for their kids? The President of UT has said their data shows that top 10% kids consistently do as well as kids with scores 200 points higher. Come on. You have all taken these tests. They pale in comparison to motivation, except at the extremes ranges of the score results. Now if you can give me some data that all these minority kids are all flunking out and doing poorly at these schools, they got some sort of break to go to, then I might reconsider.
I completely agree. Unfortunately, that's why Refman's idea, while a goal to strive for, is completely unrealistic in this day and age.
This was an interesting article I read on this this weekend and raises a point that I have repeatedly challenged Trader_Texx or BigJorgeee or whatever he calls himself these days: how they/he can explain away and disregard the obvious market preference for affirmative action? I thought market dictated outcomes (as this one clearly is, as the fortune 500, the military, and the academic establishment all filed briefs on the AA side as opposed to the usual conservative suspects (heritage foundation and other ideologues who have no real stake in AA) were more efficient and thus better than non-market dictated ones? To paraphrase from you, I'd trust CEO's on the ground who deal with the effects of AA every day rather than some nutcase from the Eagle forum hypothesizing. Do you have an answer for this gaping hole in your logic or do the crickets chirp? Affirmative action: A conservative victory By David A. Strauss Chicago Tribune June 27, 2003 Everyone knows that liberals favor affirmative action and conservatives oppose it. So when the U.S. Supreme Court decided on Monday that universities may engage in affirmative action, it was a great victory for liberals, or at least something of a defeat for conservatives, right? Actually no. The Supreme Court's affirmative action decision was deeply conservative, in an important way. The fact that it wasn't perceived as conservative tells us something not about affirmative action but about what counts as conservatism in the United States today--about how American "conservatives" like those who fought affirmative action are not conservative at all but radical social engineers, a right-wing version of what they claim to condemn. Conservatism took shape in the late 18th Century, in response to the violence and the wrenching changes of the French Revolution. The great conservative thinkers--like Edmund Burke, the 18th Century British statesman who was the most famous critic of the French Revolution--had some very clear reasons for objecting to revolutionary change. Societies, they said, are complex organisms that obey their own internal logic, a logic that cannot be captured in abstract theories about justice and the good society. The actual, on-the-ground practices of a society reflect a kind of accumulated wisdom; they are the result of thousands of decisions by individuals and groups, grappling with complex problems as best they can. Revolutionary thinkers--people who want to exalt their fine-sounding abstract ideals over the humble, day-to-day lessons of experience--are, conservatives like Burke said, "sophisters and declaimers." They presume to know better than all the people whose combined efforts built the social practices they are attacking. They are an arrogant, destructive menace. Over the last generation, affirmative action has become deeply woven into the fabric of American life. That's one thing that became clear during the litigation over the University of Michigan's affirmative action programs. Businesses, universities, governments, the media, the military--all of them engage in affirmative action. (So do presidents, including nominally anti-affirmative action presidents, in appointing Cabinet officers and Supreme Court justices, but that's another story.) This nearly universal practice of affirmative action didn't happen because someone commanded it. It didn't even happen because an intellectually satisfying rationale for affirmative action became widely accepted. It happened because each of these institutions, in struggling to deal with its own part of the enormously complex problem of race in America, found that things worked best if they allowed some role for affirmative action. The critics of affirmative action, by contrast, have a bright, shining abstraction--the ideal of colorblindness. With that abstract ideal they proposed to sweep away these accumulated decisions of literally thousands of individuals and institutions, big and small. This is not conservatism; it's radical social engineering that the French revolutionaries would have recognized. It was an effort to make society conform to an intellectually pleasing blueprint. The current Supreme Court--a very conservative Supreme Court--wouldn't go for it. It was, for the justices in the majority, just too big a change to impose for the sake of intellectual symmetry. The justices didn't have a very satisfactory rationale of their own; Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion, with its distinctions between "holistic" and "mechanical" admissions decisions, is already being picked apart. But theoretical soundness was beside the point. The court was simply not going to uproot a practice that much of American society had already settled on, for myriad, often unarticulated, reasons of its own. Some of us would prefer to defend affirmative action in a less conservative way, on the basis of ideals of equality and racial inclusion. But the Supreme Court's decision was not based on those ideals. It was based on a resolutely conservative rejection of the right-wing radicals' efforts at social engineering. On Monday, the conservatives won. It was the revolutionaries, the latter-day successors to Burke's sophisters, who lost. David Strauss teaches constitutional law at the University of Chicago.
Sammy boy, the reason CEO's are so pro-AA is because of a course that they all take before starting the job: Lawsuit Prevention 101
If you think that having AA policies are a deterrent to frivolous EEOC filings, you are even more disconnected from the marketplace than I thought. Try again.
T_J is correct. Ceo's are just posturing for the press. That's most of their job, anyways. I have seen AA misused at my company so many times it's disgusting. People who have NO business anywhere near corporate America are in a position to FAIL every day. Sounds like a win-win for all parties involved, huh?
Does it get confusing? Do you ever accidentally post "T_J is RIGHT" when you're logged in as T_J and mean to be posting as bigtexxx? you two hopeless ideologues need to get with the program, Your ideology does not put food on the table and has been siphoned out of the real world by market forces.
