Supreme Ct Decision on Univ of Mich Affirmative Action

Interestingly, every single man posting in this thread is now considered a minority on college campuses:

"In 2000, the latest year for which national statistics are available, there were 128 women in college for every 100 men. The U.S. Department of Education predicts this trend will continue, with 138 women enrolled for every 100 men by 2010."
From: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/1953964

Even more interesting, some colleges are starting "affirmative action" style programs to attract more male students (of any race) and replenish the rapidly dwindling supply of college-educated men: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june03/college_women_06-04.html

 

But Harvard and Yale are private institutions, which will always allow them more leeway in determining admissions than public colleges and universities.

But my point is still the same, if UT starts to take up race as an admissions criterion, should they also start a legacy policy if they do not already have one. Those two are often treated as equal in debates about affirmative action, so if we do continue to allow affirmative action, should we require its "equal", the legacy consideration, when an affirmative action plan is in place.

That argument is that using race as an admissions criterion (something that helps minority applicants) is akin to using legacy considerations as an admissions criterion (something that would help far more non-minority applicants) and therefore if legacies are legal, so should be affirmative action. There's nothing wrong with that argument; whoever, if the two criteria are roughly "equal", is a school being overly discriminatory if they have an affirmative action policy and no legacy policy?

Personally, I had no problem with the undergraduate admissions policy that Michigan had that the court struck down. These wereall students who weren't qualified for admissions under the normal admissions criteria. So they used several factors, including race, to determine who should fill the remaining seats the school had open after all the qualified students were admitted.

If you're going to admit students who don't otherwise qualify, there has to be some system to determine who gets in and who doesn't. To me, things like race, economic background, legacy status, home state, AP classes, etc. should be able to be on the table to fill slots beyond those filled by qualified students.

In that scenario, no qualified student is giving up a seat to one who didn't meet the qualifications. All those students were ones who didn't meet the admissions criteria.

 

Good Article:

America is a class act

The US regards itself as the ultimate meritocracy, but social mobility is as feeble as Europe's - and declining

Gary Younge
Monday January 27, 2003
The Guardian

When Republican Senator Frank Murkowski was elected governor of Alaska in November it was his task to select his replacement in the US Senate. He scoured the state, and produced a list of 26 names, including the son of Alaska's other senator, Ted Stevens. In December, after careful consideration, he decided the best person for the job was - his daughter. "I felt the person I appoint should be someone who shares my basic philosophy, my values," said Murkowski as he named Lisa Murkowski as his successor. "Your mother and I are very proud."
Frank Murkowski is a principled opponent of affirmative action, with a voting record to prove it. Like most Republicans, he believes there is no need to address inequities based on race and ethnicity. Like most right-minded people, he believes the best person should get the job. In the case of the Alaska's seat in the US Senate, that person just happened to be his own daughter.

With the supreme court hearing on the University of Michigan's admissions policies about to begin, the US right once again hopes to eliminate affirmative action from the political landscape. The contentious nature of their efforts can be gauged by the fact that an administration which has maintained public unity on everything from lifting taxes on the rich to dropping bombs on the poor, has been openly split on this issue.

Last week the White House filed papers with the supreme court urging the judges to find against the university, which awards extra points to black, Hispanic and Native American applicants in its scoring system for entry.

Bush spoke out against college admissions policies that "unfairly reward or penalise prospective students based solely on their race". His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, backed him, but went on to insist that race should be taken into consideration. And then secretary of state Colin Powell completely disagreed.

Despite the confusion coming from Washington, the case for affirmative action on racial grounds in the US is not difficult to grasp. Just start at the point where settlers stole the entire country from Native Americans, then work your way up through slavery to the end of segregation, less than 40 years ago. Then ask yourself whether that was wrong, what must be done to make it right and whether, having suffered the last few centuries, people should have to wait a few more for the wrongs to be righted.

The narratives for affirmative action based on gender and ethnicity are all different, but the plot endings are the same - redressing historical imbalances. Bitter experience shows us that time and tide will not do it alone. The number of women in the UK parliament shot up by 172% in 1997 thanks to women-only shortlists in the the Labour party. It virtually stalled in 2001 after those shortlists were outlawed. Similarly, California banned affirmative action in 1996. By 2001, black undergraduate enrolment had dropped by 33%. Concerns that the best people should get the job are valid. But they make the case for affirmative action, not against it - unless, that is, you believe that the best people these last few centuries have consistently been wealthy, white men. It is not, as the plaintiffs in the Michigan case claim, about "reverse discrimination", but reversing discrimination.

But while the debate has focused around race, at its heart lies the very concept on which the American dream was built - meritocracy. And underlying that stands the very issue in which American political culture remains in denial - class.

"Class", claims African-American intellectual Bell Hooks, "is the elephant in the room - as a nation we are afraid to have a dialogue about class."

There is a good reason for this. America prides itself on being a country where anyone who works hard enough can make it - a nation of taut bootstraps and rugged individualism.

Reality in the last half century has been quite different. America has a better attitude towards class than Britain. But that's not saying much. Britain is the home of genetic privilege, where the head of state - the Queen - simply inherits the job. Nor is class as socially and culturally constructed here as it is in Britain, where everything from accents to dress codes mark out status and a peevish resentment attaches itself to anyone regarded as too openly ambitious.

But that doesn't mean that class does not exist. No one here would deny that there is inequality. How could they in a country where one child in six is officially poor, and 1% of the country owns one-third of the national net worth?

But that inequality of wealth is justified on the grounds that there is equality of opportunity. Were that true, it would be debatable. The fact that it is patently not true makes it deplorable.

A recent study here showed that social mobility in America is actually decreasing. Comparing the incomes and occupations of 2,749 fathers and sons from the 1970s to the 1990s, it was found that mobility had decreased. "In the last 25 years, a large segment of American society has become more vulnerable," says Professor Robert Perrucci of Purdue University.

"The cumulative evidence since the second world war is that measured mobility in the US is little different from Europe's, despite all the propaganda," writes Will Hutton in The World We're In.

The problem with affirmative action as currently applied, is not that it applies to race, but that it does not also apply more comprehensively to class as well. For it is in addressing the plight of the poor, white or black, that America can honestly examine its own self-image. So long as those who wish to have an honest debate about equal opportunities confine themselves to race, they will only understand inequality as an aberration in the normal order of things. Only once they wed it to class does it become a systemic flaw which underpins the order of things.

If the poor have serious problems progressing, the rich seem to have none in storming ahead. According to Fortune magazine, the average real annual compensation for the the top 100 CEOs in America went from $1.3m in 1970 - 40 times the average worker's salary - to $37.5m, or more than 1,000 times, by 1998. "By the beginning of the century," writes Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy, the US, "had become the west's citadel of inherited wealth. Aristocracy was a cultural and economic fact."

Class here may not have as strong a social dimension as in Britain, but there is no mistaking its political expression. Lisa Murkowski is but the most flagrant example of political power being bequeathed down the generations. Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, Southern Christian Leadership Conference head Martin Luther King all carry the names and the job titles their fathers did.

Which brings us to that other elephant in the room - the Republican C-grade student who made it into Yale because his father had been there and thus received preferential treatment. The man who made it to the highest office in the land purely on intelligence, who now leads the charge for meritocracy. The best man for the job - George W Bush.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,882935,00.html

 

And if I go to an inner city school over a school in say the Plano Suburbs, I'm going to have to have a much lower GPA to get into the Top 10% (and even before the Top 10% rule, undergraduate admission standards were based on class rank, rather than on GPA). So should I be penalized just because I go to a school that is more competitive? Is that fair?

As for debt, if they're that far in the inner city, they should be far more likely to qualify for grants rather than having to take out loans. Is that fair that just because my parents made money that I have to take out loans rather than getting grants to pay for my schooling like many inner city high school grads would qualify for? Traditionally, we would say yes because the poorer one is, the greater their need. But if you're going to argue that AP classes are an unfair advantage because students who get early college credit might make it out with fewer loans than inner city students, then you also need to take into consideration the grants available to poorer students. But that's not really an admissions-based argument, which was what I was getting at. (Personally, I don't recall there being classes I could get college credit for in High School, but we had honors classes which gave those who took them extra points on their GPA than students who took the non-Honors course. The thinking being that the grade in an Honor's class was worth more than the grade in the regular class since it's supposed to be more difficult. And that's what I was talking about because that's all we had when I was in High School).

He said "extra points" for AP classes, which assumes an admissions-related argument. I don't think you're ever going to get to a point where schools cut off access to early college credit. If anything, it needs to be expanded.

But that's not a college-admissions related issue, either.

 

really?

http://www.chronwatch.com/featured/contentDisplay.asp?aid=1228

 

I don't know, your link says this: "To be sure, other poll results have been less dramatic; and the phrase ''affirmative action'' usually elicits a very positive response from black poll respondents and a mixed response from whites."

That implies that, in other poll results, Blacks show a very positive response to affirmative action, which is the claim that was made.

They just don't seem to support racial preferences.

 

I don't believe that affirmative action is the sollution, but a step towards it. Integration is a key to reducing racism. I've seen it first hand. I can see in my friends parents and older neighbors that were around before integration, and in generations since integration. For more than 400 years Blacks in the US were denied an equal education. Education begins and continues in the home. Unless you take action to educate minorities homes of minorities won't be educated environments for them to grow up in.

This is only one little part of the problem. It starts with expectations placed on minorities in k-12. They should be held to the same high standards and expected to acheive them. Educators, however, should also be trained in dealing with language and cultural differences in order to teach more effectively as well communicate, and better assess the minority students in K-12.

That's not happening, but familiarizing minorities with the world of higher learning, and making that an expectation for future generations is needed now. 40 years of equal access doesn't make up for 400 years of oppression and denial.

 

What nobody has brought up yet is that affirmative action works. "less qualified" applicants to the Universtity of Michigan law school who benefitted from affirmative action went on to have careers as successful as their "more qualified" white counterparts, or so a University study suggested.


Similarly, what nobody has brought up, even our resident pretend economist TJ, is the overwhelming market preference FOR affirmative action. The amicus briefs in support of the University ran the gamut from your usual suspects of liberal political groups to academia to Fortune 500 companies to assorted military officers who described it as vital for national security.

The amicus briefs submitted against? a bunch of right wing think tanks and legal groups and the bush administration. Yes, I'm sure that the stigma of affirmative action really causes internal dissenion in the hallowed halls of the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation, I mean practically half their janitors are black!

Macbeth, maybe this is true when discussing it in an abstract sense on an internet message board, but the real world results seem to suggest something completely different.

 

I don't visit this forum very often, but I thought I would pay a visit to see what all you gifted and talented people were saying on this subject.

It seems that Universities, and society as a whole, has decided that diversity is a good thing. The problem is, how do you achieve diversity in a way that is fair? How do you strengthen a University through diversity without denying students admission who have earned the right to be there?

Obviously, there are no quick or easy solutions to solving the diversity problem. The best long-term solution is to raise the abilities of the groups that are currnetly underperforming academically. This would probably require some sort of extra funding on a massive scale to underperforming school districts for many years. Lets face it, minority students aren't playing on a level playing field when it comes to public education. I wonder if all of you who are against AA are willing to do what is neccessary to eliminate the need for AA?

By the way, if you are poor and white, and don't excel academically, you are really screwed.

Please excuse all spelling and grammatical errors, I graduated from a small state university. OK, it's back to the regular hangout for me, I've got a spear to throw!

 

Affirmative Action was was put into place for a reason. Post Civil War, the African-American community was denied the opportunity to move up in social class. Up until perhaps the 70s, African-American families were blocked from entering middle-class neighbordhoods. As a result, they and, more importantly, their children were forced to live in poor, decrepit areas and school systems. Anyone will tell you that that environment absolutely kills a child's future. For decades, a terrible cycle formed in their community. You were born in the ghetto, you died in the ghetto and their was nothing you could about that. Affirmative action helped alleviate that problem partially. In such terrible school systems, it is near impossible for a poor minority to compete with a middle-class student with all the opportunities available to him. Affirmative Action leveled the field for the poor and underpriviliged. The cycle could finally be broken.
Though affirmative action did succeed partially in its goal, it was not totally efficient. Because, of its wording, it also benefits minorities who may not be altogether underpriviliged and that clearly needs to be amended. In reality, it should benefit all the poor in destructive homes and neighborhoods regardless of their race. That would make it ideal.

 

It isn't money that districts like the Dallas ISD lack. They are extremely property-rich, and they spend more per student that their suburban districts that often outperform DISD students academically. Dallas ISD per student spending is above the state average, yet DISD students routinely perform below the state average.

I don't know that increasing spending in the DISD will make any difference.

 

No, no, no. The evil white devil is making sure that inner city underperforming schools are not allowed to spend money on the students educations. Haven't you seen the movies, their textbooks don't show that man has walked on the moon and still talk about how the negro is not as intelligent as the white man. I don't know what fancy schmancy website you got your stats from, but they certainly can't be right as they disagree with our preconceived notions.

 

I know you like to joke alot but you should probably lay off when it comes to racial issues. Your "wit" tends to come off as tasteless and mean-spirited. I'd made mention of this once before but you may not remember. Racism is real. If you haven't felt the sting of it, then you're in no position to make light of it.

 

The diversion is yours alone. You consistently choose to remain oblivious to the hardships of being a minority in America and why programs like Affirmative Action have been in place. It genuniely seems fun for you to scream racism about school admission policies rather than berating the situations that have fostered their creation. Your posts on this topic are inanely disingenuous at best. Get a life.


I said it before, this case matters not at all. There are such huge socioeconomic divides between the races in our country that it would be pretty easy to create an admissions policy that uses criteria that heavily favors minorities without actually using race. This case is much ado about nothing, just another opportunity for the angry TJ's of the world to get on a soapbox and spew more bull.

 

His absence from this thread is explicable, you can't really gloat when your side loses, thus he's got nothing to say.

 

delete

 

I got an idea....let EVERYONE in, and if you don't make the grades.....you get booted.

DD

 

Legacies are favorable admission based on a set of circumstances where some people were prevented from going to school based on their race or even gender. AA is a remedy for racism while legacy is in a way the perpetuation of our past. Twenty or thirty years from now I'd have much less of a problem with legacies.

And really when we're talking about legacies, they have more important advantages than being a "legacy". Mainly being the child of a college graduate and having a higher standard of living which would provide the big advantages of living in a safe neighborhood, having good schools/health care, etc. When x white student doesn't get into a college due to AA it's not because that student was white but rather that, having all of the statistical advantages of being white in our country, he/she was the least qualified white student applying. Of course it's not perfect and there are going to be exceptions and problems but I guess that's the best we have right now. It's strange that we have two sets of students who are getting a drastically varied quality of education leading up to college and then they're supposed to compete against each other for the same spots in college. That's what some would call fair but it's pretty obvious it's far from it.


Damn how'd I get dragged in here...

 

Yes because teachers don't know how to teach minorities. There have been studies done that show that 4 groups of people regardless of spending etc. underperform. They are Hawaiian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Native-Americans and African-Americans. The difference is in the way that voluntary immigrants learn as opposed to peoples were conquored, colonized, and enslaved.

As an example African-Americans are diagnosed higher for needing special classes, sent to remedial classes even when they test on par with other groups. The same is true for Mexican Americans. The African American language also has it's own structure. Most don't even realize it, but it's based on the West African languages, and then has English vocabulary thrown into it. In many languages including those of West African structure saing someting like, 'No you ain't going to hit her' isn't grammatically incorrect. Double negatives are fine in many langauge structures. Also speech replacing the 'th' sound with 'f' is consistent with West African language structures. 'Come wif me' is an example. The 'th' sound isn't part of that language. Emphasis on syllables is also consistent like saying PO'lice. The list goes on and on. This is also true of translation. If an African-American said, 'Why you waitin' on her? she be late.' It doesn't actually mean 'Why are you waiting on her? She's late?' It means, 'Why are you waiting on her? She's ALWAYS late.' This is because the adverb was often included with the verb in West African Languages. So sometimes teachers misinterpret speech and don't model it correctly when trying to show the Standard English version.

It's important to remember that when they were enslaved Africans were forbidden frome ever learning English, and only had their language structure to fall back on, along with whatever English vocabulary they picked up. Most slaves were from different tribes with different languages but the same language structure. It's also true that before the age of five most grammatical structures have been ingrained in children's learning. Thus many young children will say 'I goed to the store.' They already understand that 'ed' usually means past tense. Anyway so having generations of African-Americans who weren't allowed equal education and the early learning of grammatical conventions is responsible for the speech patterns that often get African-American students labeled as lazy, ignorant, or not capable of achieving highly.

I'm not saying that these students needed to be cut a break. In fact I'm saying the opposite. They should be held to high standards, the same standards that others are held too, but in order to teach them properly it would be improtant to realize that lack of standard English doesn't mean unstructured speech, laziness, unwillingness to learn, or anything else. Unless teachers are able to address the needs of all the students the problem won't fix itself.

This is why affirmative action in colleges can do tremendous good. The better educated the parents are the better chance the children have. Three generations is the standard time to make the change somewhat permanent.

 

Just for the record I, as a Black man, have never said "She be late".