The white thing certainly is problematic culturally, but it's not REALLY the problem its more of a symptom of previous power choosing future power.
I think it is utterly fascinating to watch the world change and watch morals and mores change, but still see power reconfiguring, like mercury falling into a groove, to maintain power and bend law to its service! And the naive/idealistic among us say oh, we'd never do things like our ignorant and unenlightened ancestors. We don't see race. We don't see color. We're a pure meritocracy, with advancement ruled only by your access to the best schools ;)
Absolutely beautifully put.
It doesn’t benefit whites, it benefits kids with rich parents. Similarly, Affirmative Action benefits kids with lesser academics, but explicitly based on their race.
Perhaps if they want to draw apples-to-oranges comparisons they would do well to point this out.
pg 34: "Each of the ALDC preferences primarily benefit white students."
Many colleges care about legacy admissions because they cement a family (and their donations and alumni networks and job help and etc) to a college more securely than anything else. It is also true that this perpetuates the patterns of the past. One of those patterns in the US is that white people got to go to college and others did not. White people should not get too sensitive about this. It's just true.
You have made two factual misrepresentations about the content of the paper in this thread so far. That doesn't seem like discussing in good faith.
For reference, the abstract of the paper is:
> The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an un- precedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.