More like "because of Affirmative Action".
Just treat people as fairly as possible. The other way doesn't work.
Just treat people as fairly as possible. The other way doesn't work.
http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact....
Entry into an orchestra isn't something that is cost prohibitive for an economic class of individuals.
Applicants to orchestras likely enjoy a certain level of affluence given how demanding the required practice is for performers. Musical performers enjoy slightly less systematic discrimination throughout their careers and technkal musical ability is something that is largely self-taught meaning that the applicants to orchestras are more likely to share similar levels of abilities at the stage of auditioning for an orchestra whereas college applicants are more likely to express difference at the time of application due to systematic discrimination throughout their educational trajectory.
Playing in an orchestra doesn't share the same grave weight of attending college in careerist society where college is increasingly necessary. The demand is higher for college, and the supply can reflect that.
Orchestras arnt a part of a massive industry tied to sports, science, defense, state subsidies etc...
Maybe I just hold the value of having an objectively fair playing field higher than some others here. I personally love the idea of bling hiring in orchestras, in technology jobs, and in college admissions.
People's upbringings are never going to be fair. Nor is their potential, if we're being honest. But moving the admissions goalposts all over trying to make everything more "diverse," when that's really just a racist codeword for "skin color," is not a valid answer to me.
This is simplistic, but a weighted average of standardized test scores + being in a top percentage of your graduating class (regardless of school quality) is already going to give you a lot of genuine diversity.
Maybe you value it less than others, and that's why you're willing to give up on a whole section of the playing field so easily?
I care more about equal opportunity than others, because equal opportunity means truly treating people fairly and in a standardized way at a policy level, rather than discriminating based on skin color, gender or ethnicity.
The "reverse discrimination" solution is to take, after half of the game, the winnings of P-W folks and give them to C-J folks.
Reverse discrimination refers to discriminating against say non-hispanic white males because they are non-hispanic white or male. It seems obvious to me that making admission choices to increase minority representation at universities is tautologically decreasing the representation of other groups and is reverse discrimination. The question to me is, "Is this a good thing?".
Here in Texas, it works in a way that is not quite obvious. The University of Texas as Austin is a desirable state University. It was once all white (1950), clearly race was being used to discriminate against minority applicants--an unfair and condemnable practice. By 1996, the University, in an attempt to increase minority representation, had been using race as one of the factors in admission, blacks with lower academic scores were admitted ahead of whites with the same scores (clearly reverse discrimination). In 1996, Federal Appeals court ruled against the University and for a white student that made that claim.
The University stopped considering race, but minority representation started to drop and the University found a way in 1997 to discriminate between applicants to change the minority representation again, this time without explicitly mentioning race. It automatically admitted the top 10% of every high school graduating class, regardless of actual academic achievement. This discriminated against the high schools with high performing students. Since these schools were usually found in more expensive suburban neighborhoods that had well funded school districts and mostly white student bodies (so although there was no longer any explicit reverse discrimination, it still produced the same result, minority students were being admitted with lower test scores, etc).
This practice of admitting students based on where they went to high school helped but didn't completely achieve the goals that UT had for the make up of it's student body. In 2003, UT began to use race in addition to the 10% rule and now discriminates in favor of minorities that do not automatically qualify under the modified top 7% rule, this has resulted in a number of law suits that race based discrimination is happening, which it clearly is.
I have mixed feelings about all of this. I detest the idea that race is used to discriminate against anybody including groups like Jews, Asians, and whites. I live in a school district that has a very high performing public high school. A friend recently got perfect scores on the SAT and I believe that he got very close to a perfect score on the ACT. He had a very high GPA and was a varsity athlete on a top rank team. He now attends Stanford, but was only around the top 13% of his graduating class. He didn't even bother to apply to the University of Texas. No one needs to feel sorry for him, he's a genius going to Stanford; I feel sorry for so many of his classmates that would have been very successful at an affordable University that can't get in despite working so hard in high school.
Edit: admission to good public schools based on standardized tests instead of family real estate would be a good start
Your suggestions are all well and good, but do you see any of those happening soon? It's not like anyone is even remotely discussing this anywhere and with the current administration, it sure isn't happening soon at a federal level.
The question becomes if affirmative action is better than nothing at all.
At what point(s) should redistribution happen? At what point(s) should it stop to allow better decision making?
Notwithstanding the probably uninspired resulting college environment, I think it would be hypothetically fair to admit people solely based on their standardized test scores without any other consideration. The admission standard while somewhat arbitrary would be clear, such that anyone who wants to get admitted could work towards it.
If someone is provided with a substandard K-12 education, it would make it harder to work towards admission. In that case, maybe we should look into the K-12 environment. Maybe it turns out that it's not as much the K-12 environment, and it's actually home life. Maybe home life issues are related to incarceration or maybe they're hereditary. I think this is what an effort to root-cause the problem would look like. When you find the root causes, then you could provide help for anyone with that root cause problem.
Values are extremely subjective, people tend to base their values on however they feel about a situation at any given time.
You know about slavery of the past and the labor practices of big agriculture today yeah?
Wow, man, you just like, solved racism and discrimination.
Again, all you can do is treat people as fairly as possible by basing admissions policies on merit and standardization, rather than sloppily basing them on perceived group identity.
Where does the talk about genetic variation and unconscious bias even come from? It's not relevant in this context.
I 100% realize that there is massive variation in high school quality. It doesn't astound me. [1]
What does that have to do with making college admissions fair and standardized?
[1] http://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/6-baltimore-s...
Another ground breaking discovery! Everyone has equal opportunity in this world. Poverty, discrimination and access to quality education are completely fictional. Keep these thoughts coming man, I'm writing you up for the Noble Prize.