California Colleges Mull Return of Affirmative Action

The flip flopping socioeconomic/race argument rears it's ugly head again. Crime? The blacks, the rap music! Education? Oh, let's not focus on race. haha

 

You're only in favor of policies that favor blacks, regardless of logic, reason, or "fairness". He actually raised a good point, this is more about socioeconomic obstacles than race. A wealthy black kid shouldn't be given a seat via AA over a poor Asian kid, but you want to focus on skin color. You're the biggest bigot on this forum. GTFO!

Personally I think whites and asians are under represented in sports. Why don't we put minimum on the number of spots for 4 white kids and 1 asian kid, on the Duke/UNC/Kentucky basketball teams. It doesn't matter if there are more talented black players. Hell, why don't we do this for the NBA? Blacks are overrepresented, we need AA in the NBA.

 

CometsWin rears his ugly head again.

 

respect for your cuz

love hearing success stories like that where hard work pays off

 

What do anectodal stories matter? I know this guy who's x and he's from y and he did z. And? So what? We don't structure policies from anectodal stories, we do it to address a problem. The problem is the representation in our school system that is caused by an inbalance of quality in the secondary and primary school system. It's clear people don't really want to solve that problem and so AA is the solution. If you don't like it, present a better one that addresses the core issue but don't give me anectodal stories.

 

No wonder you're on ignore.

 

If we use AA, I want to take people from all walks of life from different classes and perspectives rather than filling an arbitrary black/mexican/native american quota.

Put a weight on everything instead of perceiving that geographic or income targeting fits some perfect one-size-fits-all weight or condition. Data science under commercial use is taking in far more factors into deciding a customer's attitudes and behaviors. It doesn't mean it's perfect or can't be gamed, but it allows students to encounter people with different hardships and perspectives without stirring the emotions of the political zero-sum battle we all know and love.

The culture of "hereditary aristocracy" you speak of is mostly color blind. For those who breakthrough those economic or academic barriers, they can instill these widely known principles into their everyday lives and practices: Save a certain %age of money from gross income. Invest in their children with private education such as extracurricular activities, tutoring for exam prep, or outright private schooling. Instill their children with an unspoken attitude of privilege, which makes them stand out during admissions and interviews.

All the other shadowy stuff such as money, power, influence, nepotism, "legacy", etc... add to the applicant's "weight" implicitly but aren't exclusive determining factors to the larger set of ethnic groups whom you described are trending into a "hereditary aristocracy".

There's a common pattern they follow just as how the "aspirational children of the poor" follow into similar poor decisions regardless of their race and are tied to a broader non-ethnic culture that is crippled through information asymmetry or last minute learnings/pivotal decisions that other groups were aware of much earlier in the admissions process.

 

Yeah, I'm sick of your thinly veiled racist prerogative so I called you out.

 

Even if that was a legitimate premise for AA, wouldn't poor black, white or asians attend these same schools? Obviously a rhetorical question since I don't expect CometsWin to carry an objective discussion. So by your logic anyway, the criteria should be socioeconomic, not race.

It's complete BS to think students who busted their ass to earn their grades and college entrance exam scores should be penalized because of their race. If that isn't discrimination what is? Can this kind of discrimination exist in any other setting? It's ridiculous because not all Asians can afford to go to an Ivy, and the UC system is in place to give quality education at affordable costs. What happens to the kid who can't afford private school? I don't buy the argument this is conducive to a "better learning experience". That's just a cop out statement without any legs to stand on. As in any school, having the smartest and brightest kids competing and learning from eachother (regardless of race) is the best learning environment. The cream will always rise to the top.

 

You're wasting time on a racist. CometsWhine's biggest dream is to kick out all Asians and whites from this country.

He's the the kind of delusional soul that actually demand 12% of all doctors must be black to reflect the overall population demographic and he'll never come up with an actual good reason for why AA needs to exist and only exist in the American education system and nowhere else.

 

Life, culture, and life experiences? How so? College life is completely different from the real world.

It's not like students sit in a room going over life experiences and learning about each other's cultures and then all hold hands and sing songs.

Most people go to class, listen to the lecture, maybe go to the bookstore or library, get something to eat, etc. I don't see how different races being on campus even matters. Most people are just doing their own thing going through their day.

 

No, actually the people with the most money, who have faced the least structural inequality or have the most structural benefits, and have the highest educated parents rise to the top.

It's the tragedy of education that affirmative action is started only a college. It's also unfortunate that income, geographic, parental education metrics for affirmative action are so unworkable or we might be able to go toward a composite. The focus on college alone makes non URM minority groups feel like their piece of the pie is drastically reduced. It is a myopic focus when they should be focusing on what happens after college after their educational experience is finished and they get to the work place. There they tend to advance at a slower pace than their white peers and on average are more likely to be denied the upper echelons of power in the country.

All non-whites face many of the same barriers in the job market, but they are at each others throats in the area of education. The focus is just on a small part of what actually matters instead of actually working together. It's easy to focus on affirmative action for URMs because it is easy and there is a lot of money out there attacking it, but good luck to get the same people to actually work on coalition building to challenge the structural problems of society.

 

Does parents' focus on education play no role at all in it? Does hard work by students play zero role?

it's all about income?

 

Some of the people posting here should do some research into the history of affirmative action programs in America. It was a brainchild of the Nixon administration and it is doing exactly what it was meant to do: putting enough black people (and other minorities to a lesser extent) in visible positions as to placate the masses, avoiding any real structural change like equalizing public primary education, preserving the place of white people in America's power structure (as in top corporate boardrooms, politics, etc.), and getting a portion of minority communities (who also happen to be the wealthiest in their group because of AA) invested in and defending the system. There are recorded conversations between Nixon and his aides where he directly says these things. What he didn't envision was how popular the programs would become with the left, particularly with colleges.

 

As I said before I was at Cal when it was much more diverse than it was today and I can tell you first hand that there is a lot of value to a more diverse learning environment. We live in a diverse society and also an increasing globalized economy. My experiences dealing with students from backgrounds that I hadn't spent a lot of time with before I went to Cal has had a direct bearing on my education and career. In my professional career I have dealt with clients with as diverse backgrounds as first generation immigrants from Africa to people whose Scandinavian ancestors settled Minnesota 150 years ago.

As for this argument that people segregate themselves anyway while people do socially they cannot in their classes and in the dorms. In a diverse environment people will be interacting daily with those of different backgrounds even if they choose to socialize with those of similar background.

The other issue while diversity is valuable is for society overall. Entrenched inequality isn't a good thing for society. The more opportunity to address that the better it will be in the long run for society.

 

As I said, it's a mix of factors that are all interrelated. i.e. money, those who have faced the least structural inequality or have the most structural benefits in pursuit of their education, and those have the highest educated parents.

Parents focus on education is usually strongly related to the education level of the parents or the general education level of their perceived surrounding community. Hard work by students is pretty difficult to disentangle from overall wealth and societal context because we define hard work by what the student gets on a series of test - not their overall life.

A persons desire and ability to do "hard work" is also usually hard to divorce from societal context. For example, I know that I personally did not have to as work as hard as some of my classmates and I got better grades. No because of some sort of inherent ability, but because of all the other advantages I had in my life. l got better grades because I didn't have to juggle multiple jobs to put myself through college and because I had a stable family. Anyone would look at my grades and scores and say I worked harder; however, I'll know that the Mexican-American kid who came from South Texas who worked full time and went to class despite knowing no one else from his area who went to college and who still managed to do almost as well as I did worked a hell of a lot harder than I ever did.

Of course there isn't anything that is absolutely determinative in educational attainment nor should we diminish the value of hard work, but when you speak about averages and correlations, it becomes pretty clear that there are certain indicators that aren't just hard work that have a strong connection with higher achievement in school.

 

This is one of the reasons, I like the top X percent rule in Texas. You can get diversity, you are rewarding hard work, and you normalize for differences in education quality in different neighborhoods.