Justice Department sues Yale for illegal practices in admissions
justice.gov
justice.gov
"Yale expressly agrees to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a cornerstone civil-rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. "
They can "reverse discriminate" for Black applicants all they want, it's when they accept Federal Money it becomes an issue.
Yale is potentially on the hook for Billions in back Federal Aid.
I think the goal of having a more diverse student body is a good idea and studies show there are clear intergenerational benefits to having first generation minorities attending elite colleges versus a not so clear one for everyone else. I disagree with casting it all aside with 'racist BS'.
There can (and should) be critique, but it shouldn't be a broad swipe.
FWIW, affirmative action in various forms has been implemented and debated for a hundred and fifty years in the US. It has in the past been the law of the land, without contradicting the idea that we aren't allowed to discriminate against races. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_Unit...
I think you meant, racial or ethnic discrimination. Apologies, but nitpicking to make your position stronger.
Or in the context of say, admissions, i would expect to see discrimination on academic merit in the field of study for a program you’re applying to. If you were an outstanding undergraduate who majored in like, the archaeology of medieval germany, you should expect to have a very hard time getting into a graduate program in high energy physics.
(tangentially i happen to know a MD/PhD whose undergrad was performance ballet, but she double-majored as a physical chemistry major and did piles of lab work too, and thus didn’t have any troubles)
Undoubtedly they discriminate on the basis of grades and test scores, but also on the basis of things like extracurriculars. Whether or not race should be a part of this equation is the heart of this debate.
I think legacy status is a bit ridiculous, but legacy status admissions benefit those with higher socio-economic standings, not those of a certain race. The issue here is one of discrimination based solely on race. Legacy admissions are a weird from of classism (and therefor some degree of racism, I suppose), but not of race-based discrimination.
I think the difference is quite important.
It’s true that not every white applicant has a legacy status to benefit from. But if you look at the racial breakdown of students who benefit from legacy preferences, I think you’ll find far more white students than the in the overall student body.
And nowadays, legacy preferences -- I'm all for getting rid of them -- hurts the average white student more than the average black student, because they fill up the white quota.
In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."[1]
It's quite bizarre how we realized that quota system was unethical so dismantled it. But later re-established the same system but think totally fine because we changed the numbers?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/04/nyregion/yale-s-limit-on-...
White 43% Asian 19% Hispanic/Latino 13% Black or African American 8%
If your claim is that Yale should be accepting students blindly on merit only, and that as a result the number of Asian students would go up, then it would be hard not to conclude that you think one race is superior to the others and should therefor be accepted at a higher rate than their representation in the general population. Or is there some other conclusion you could come to?
Yale could presumably choose to admit only students scoring high but not too high if they wanted to. Or only take soccer players. Or only admit tuba players.
But they are being challenged for including race as one of those criteria.
[1]: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
Relevant (satirical) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
It's like if you had purple-striped people who all spent their after-school time at the shooting range and then wondered why the army is full of purple-striped people.
I Googled. What does it mean? Is it some American reference, or you picked a random race/region neutral analogy?
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015/indicator5_19.asp
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015/tables/table_19_1.asp
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...
https://medium.com/@syedmhamzatahir/iqs-of-east-asians-5fe60...
My main question, without disagreeing with the hypotheses given by the Justice Department, is this: if it's true that blacks are still being discriminated against, and nobody is allowed to compensate for that by taking action, what else can we need to do to solve the pre-existing discrimination, assuming that it's cultural and difficult?
Technically? Technically?!?!
Part of the assumption behind equalizing outcomes is that it might illuminate negative discriminatory behavior, and allow the system to equalize on it's own faster than it would without any intervention. I'd love to hear more about when & whether this works. If it does help fix racism, maybe it's worth some temporary action. If it doesn't help fix the underlying issue, then maybe the Justice Department is doing the right thing.
Instead, you fight racism by A) stomping it out where you see it, B) instituting policies that help poor and disadvantaged people in general. Strategies like that are much more foolproof than trying to fight racism with racism. Also much more expensive, which is why there's a temptation to kid ourselves that fighting racism with racism could possibly work.
If the policy is to look at race and give/take points, that's racism in the most literal way possible.
If the policy is to look at SES, it's not racist, even though there's a correlation.
At some point correlations become strong enough that it's difficult to disentangle concepts, but I don't think this is an example of that. In particular: would giving points based on SES have screwed Asians in the way that trying to balance races did? Probably not. It's a better formulation of the problem.
What does it mean exactly to stomp it out where you see it? How do we see it and how do we stomp it out? What if it's hard to see, or difficult to stomp out?
Are there cases I can read about where these strategies have been proven foolproof, has it worked in other countries to eliminate racism by helping the poor?
I'm an engineer. Systems theory is how I interface with these ideas. It has notions of "gain margin" and "phase margin" -- i.e. how hard you can push (or how long you can delay feedback, the two are somewhat interchangeable, which is often under-appreciated) before your attempt to build a self-correcting airplane wing, power delivery circuit, rocket that points up, etc stops being self-correcting and turns into a wildly oscillating self-destructive mess that you should count yourself lucky if it only destroys itself without taking its surroundings with it.
In society, we can't calculate gain margin and phase margin, but we still have to decide how hard to push and if we push too hard, the system will still punish us. All of us. Nobody likes to hear "push more softly for the cause you believe in." I sure don't. But having screwed up this choice in an engineering context, I respect the possibility of screwing it up in a social context, and I see it as a strong argument for exercising restraint.
> What does it mean exactly to stomp it out where you see it? How do we see it and how do we stomp it out? What if it's hard to see, or difficult to stomp out?
We've stomped out most of the blatant, obvious racism that was easy to see, so from here out it's largely going to be difficult. That is: option B, above. That's how we go after the systemic racism: ensure that the system shrinks the influences of the past rather than growing them. In particular, we need to figure out what kind of support is necessary to give the next generation of kids a fair shake at life and give it to them. Even more specifically I'm thinking about federally funded health care, housing, and primary/secondary education. It's going to cost a lot. It's not going to let us indulge in fantasies of somehow canceling out the racism of yesterday. But it might let us fix tomorrow.
What examples are you thinking of? When has that happened?
> We’ve stomped out most of the blatant, obvious racism that was easy to see
Are you sure about that? Why are you sure about it? There are a lot of metrics that still show wide inequalities by race, such as pay and wealth, access to health care, and last but not least education. Police treatment differing by race obviously still exists.
I think this has been the sticking point, that some people will only “see” obviously oppressive or racist behavior as something we should stomp out, but when it comes to outcomes, even though outcomes clearly shows racism exists, there’s a flood of fierce debate like this one that we shouldn’t do anything about it, in the name of being anti-discrimination.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/04/economic-...
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02...
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/1-demographic-tre...
As a person in the discriminated against group of the DOJ complaint, I am against the DOJ motion. I agree Yale probably violated the law, but I don't view AA as inherently immoral.
Downvote time: my solution for Yale to serve the least empowered historically groups in this country, descendants of slaves and equally disempowered groups through generationally unfair/racist laws (e.g. interment camps, 3/5 compromise, Jim Crow, red lining, etc) is to say if you can trace your family history to any of these events, you get a boost. Same effect, not race based.
Fortunately, you don't need a pity circus to figure out who needs help today and going forward. IMO that's not only a less incendiary angle from which to approach the problem, it's much easier to correctly implement, much more productive, and much less prone to back-and-forth escalation.
Any distinction in a decision is discrimination. What is more relevant is it (legally or ethically, depending on context) impermissible discrimination.
The question is whether or not this is justifiable discrimination.
Those are much more difficult to game. Why not use those things instead of something like race?
You won't get many responses to this question. Stated plainly: If we aren't allowed to engage in some form of positive discrimination, we aren't allowed to compensate at all. To some people, that's how it should be. I don't agree, but I understand why they may feel that way. We all just want the best for ourselves and our respective groups, I guess.
The "historical" part is only useful so it doesn't happen again.
Attempting to compensate one race by taking from another race, one that had nothing to do with the harms inflicted on the first race, is robbing Peter to pay Paul. No amount of rhetoric can hide that.
Compensate all you want, just not at the expense of Asians.
I’m an Asian and I’m okay with affirmative action. But it’s worth noting that over 60% of Black people think race should not be even a “small factor” in college admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...
Insofar as the public might not want race-based preferences, there are things we can do that are putatively race-neutral but will disproportionately advantage Black people. One of the most effective things we could do is baby bonds: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/how-baby-bonds-could-help-a...
Fixing that disproportionately negatively affect Black people, such as criminal justice reform, would help. Police reform-not just to reduce brutality, but also to reduce crime in Black communities—would help.
I don't know the merits of this case, but I know the second paragraph in this release is a load of BS. The Justice Department is claiming that those African Americans accepted into Yale are actually hurt by being accepted because their acceptance is reinforcing stereotypes that they needed extra assistance to get accepted. This is just the same conservative talking point that we have heard for generations that you can't do anything to help anyone because any assistance just makes them weaker.
"Admitting people into college when they do not have the academic merit to be accepted harms them because they end up failing out of their class, even if they could have been wildly successful at a less rigorous university."
Perhaps they're referring to this line of argument?
I'll try to find the source, from one of his books.
>We estimate that over three quarters of the students who apply for admission to Yale are qualified to do the work here. The great majority of students who are admitted stand out from the rest because a lot of little things, when added up, tip the scale in their favor.
Their applicant pool is so deep that they have their pick of qualified students of every type. They aren't admitting people who can't do the work just to meet some quota.
But let's say your theory is true and that the lower ranks of Yale's graduating classes are full of Black students, why is that a problem? Is getting bad grades at Yale going to damage your life? Are people graduating low in their class from elite universities worse off than people graduating higher in their class from worst universities? Plenty of successful people weren't highly ranked in their graduating class. Getting bad grades at an elite university like Yale seems to almost be a requirement to run for president nowadays. And regardless of the admission policies, some people have to end up being the worst ranked in their graduating class. Why does it matter if it is a Black students or anyone else?
Would I personally pick worst in class at a top uni over middle or best a level lower? Eh, probably.
Either way, it's really not my theory. It's something Thomas Sowell documented in one of his books. Here he is talking about it: "Thomas Sowell: affirmative action creates academic failure & resentment" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvnTByzTmA.
Sowell is black, if it matters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell.
The students who get bumped up to a better school (and graduate) end up getting better paying jobs, but it must cause a lot of people to form negative stereotypes along the way.
Maybe a better solution would be to provide extra help to disadvantaged groups before students are academically segregated.
Yes, the better approach is to help this kids as early as possible. However the problem is that kids are academically segregated from the very start by the quality of their school district. I am all for fixing that.
I might be more willing to believe this academic segregation is a genuine concern from this administration if they actually made any effort at improving these poor districts instead of seemingly ignoring the problem and giving parents the choice to simply abandon these school districts.
It is perpetuating the racial stereotype of black people as stupid and likely creates strong unconscious bias in everyone at that college that black people are dumber, since among the students accepted to the school the black students will have the worst track record. It doesn't hurt the black people individually, but it hurts black people as a group. I wouldn't be surprised if we include the group effect that even the individuals are hurt more than helped long term.
Here are Yale's student body demographics, from the department of education's scorecard [1]:
42% White
19% Asian
13% Hispanic
11% Non-resident alien
8% Black
6% Two or more races
0% American Indian/Alaska Native
0% Unknown
0% Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander
Non-Hispanic white - 63.4%
Hispanic and Latino (of any race) - 15.3%
Black or African American - 13.4%
Asian - 5.9%
Native Americans and Alaska Natives - 1.3%
Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders - 0.2%
Two or more races - 2.7%
[1] - https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?130794-Yale-Universi... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
To me this is an effort by people who are angry that they can not game the system anymore due to the sheer volume of people that are trying to the exact same way. So they're targeting the people that weren't gaming the system (African Americans by and large) and saying "why are they getting in when I didn't and I did XYZ?" even though the school never said "Do XYZ and you get in."
I wish I could be less of a cynic, but unfortunately not under this admin.
Some interesting notes:
> Yale uses race at multiple steps of its admissions process resulting in a multiplied effect of race on an applicant’s likelihood of admission. And Yale racially balances its classes.
That is a sentence fragment, not sure why they included it in the press release like that. It seems 'tacked on' and rushed.
Also, I've heard a lot about Yale's affirmative action policies, but I haven't heard much about the nationality based admissions policy. I'm interested in knowing how that works.
As a Chinese american, AFAIK, this has been a crucial issue for majority of the community. Could you stop labeling a core issue for a group of people "pliticization"?
Show some respect to a group of people that have been systematically discriminated through well-known laws. Even black people are not treated in that fashion nowadays.
You can't deny that the timing of this decision is suspect.
If Black Americans were not subject to high levels of structural discrimination, maybe this issue would be less fraught.
There's also the matter of the China virus.
The ideal for college admissions should be to get a set of students that have the best possible chance to succeed. Unfortunately, a high school student doesn't have much experience with which to base that determination.
Extracurriculars are supposed to show that the student is well-rounded and driven - attributes that have been shown to be positively correlated with success in college and careers.
How would you want colleges to try to determine if a given student will be successful? Because straight academic scores are not the full picture of a person.
If extracurriculars are so important then why doesn't colleges require them to graduate? Why is their admission criteria so different from their graduation criteria? They ought to look similar.
If grades are enough to graduate they obviously don't value other things and therefore should just look at grades of incoming students. If however grades aren't enough to say that a person is a good individual then why do they choose to graduate unbalanced people who only got good grades but suck at extracurriculars? Don't they care about their output at all?
This might be a dumb question, isn't this very common among medical schools, where the numbers are just as bad? Are they also target of potential lawsuits?
https://global-uploads.webflow.com/5f035f109555c1787ed64988/...
Interestingly, Texas tech medical school abandoned affirmative action recently. https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1789
And I am surprised that the current behavior of most colleges regarding this issue is so pervasive, has gone on for so long, and so far out of line with a simple reading of the law.
I would think either the law would have changed, or the behavior of colleges would have been brought in line with the law a long time ago.
Here is the law, for reference, as quoted from the article. It feels pretty clear to me.
"No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, … be subjected to discrimination under any program … receiving Federal financial assistance."
1. When students borrow money from the federal government, whoever they pay that money to is "receiving federal financial assistance". This makes absolutely no sense.
2. When a government program intended to produce research does so by funding researchers, those researchers' employers are "receiving federal financial assistance".
The second one doesn't make sense either; it appears to be exactly analogous to saying that if the federal government engages private contractors to repair damage to the White House, those contractors are receiving federal financial assistance.
It could be considered the same. So lets consider that hypothetical.
Would people have a problem with a law that said that the government is not allowed to hire a private contractor repair company, that discriminates in hiring, based on race?
On its face, I would not find such a law to be unusual or outlandish, to say that the government can't hire a repair company that refuses to employ people of a certain race group, for example.
Would you find it unusual or outlandish for a law to place contractors employed by the government in the category of "entities receiving financial assistance from the government"?
The category isn't really the important part here. I don't care about definitions. Instead, I care about the actual real world effect. Th semantics is not important here.
So, no, I would not find it unusual for a law to have the real world effect of preventing the government from hiring a repair company that discriminates on the basis of race.
And whether or not those laws reflect the definitions of words, as defined by some webster dictionary here, is not the important part of the debate about whether we ought or ought not have certain laws.
Instead what matters is the actual effect of those laws.
It is not the wrong category though, because this is a well established definition within the law that everyone in that community understands.
Instead, the problem is that your intuition is different than the well established definition of these categories, as according to what the court system has established.
> to shoehorn them
It is not shoehorning though. It is an established and understood concept that courts understand. Instead, it is your personal intuition that is wrong regarding a law that is well understood by the court system.
> All persons who apply for admission to colleges and universities should expect and know that they will be judged by their character, talents, and achievements and not the color of their skin.
If I achieve better grades and have broader extracurriculars versus somebody who was in a substantially less advantaged position than me, how much of that comes down to my 'talent' and 'character', and how much comes down to my wealthy parents?
Yale could attempt to make an argument that a proper comparison of character, talent and achievement across a diverse, heterogenous population requires interpreting these elements in their context (the bar should be higher for those with more opportunity). Then they just need to establish that their equity programs are well substantiated by educational barriers which are inescapably racialized.
Basically the argument is that since race in America is unavoidably intertwined with educational opportunity, it is not possible to have an admissions procedure which is 'neutral' with respect to race; that in fact equity programs aim to strike the best balance in this conundrum, and are therefore the least discriminatory policy available in the overall context of the program.
Sure. You could argue that judging someone on the basis of extracurriculars is discrimination in favor of people with wealthy parents.
But, there is no current law, on the books, that explicitly says that discrimination in favor of wealthy people is illegal.
Instead, the law prevents discrimination "on the ground of race, color, or national origin".
And furthermore, I do not believe that that there has been significant court ruling saying that discrimination in favor of wealthy people, would be equivalent to discrimination on the grounds of "Race, color, or nation origin", if you are going to make that argument.
You're correct that this is essentially the argument I'm proposing (although you could broaden 'wealth' to a wider range of racially influenced factors of educational success/access). It might not have been made before - Yale may try to make it.
Eliminate legacy admissions and make everything race blind but incorporate a generational wealth score. The result for certain groups will likely be the same but the explanation becomes clearer.
We can't talk about this issue without looking at the disparity between Asian Americans and African Americans with the former making almost 2x as much as the latter [0] on median in 2010. If we focus on generational wealth groups of students with large real estate, business, and financial holdings would be penalized and a rich African American or poor Asian Americans wont slip through the cracks due to their race.
We're past the point where admission can be based solely on merit because if they let in everyone with enough merit the school couldn't handle it. So we have to start looking into the circumstances under which that merit was accomplished, e.g. were they affluent and with greater resources than their impoverished counterparts?
[0] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian...
You know, that's a really interesting idea. Sounds similar to Kapor Capital's "distance traveled" metric they use when hiring — basically, what were the candidate's circumstances and how hard did they have to work for their accomplishments. https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/kapors-2/
In my experience this pretty much applies to anything related to affirmative action around race, gender, or political affiliation. Also all of politics generally is off-limits unless it's related to technology.
On the other hand, my father who graduated at the top of his class in a small rural school, earned his undergraduate admission through a program in the Soviet Union that helped disadvantaged folks to fairly compete with those who were given a bigger piece of the pie.
I don't know if I was where I am today if not for policies like these. I still don't think that race or national origin should play a role here, but maybe some other factors that help the best of us in life's worst circumstances to succeed.
Maybe today's financial aid policies accomplish just that. But it's still worth exploring other factors beside finances that potentially successful college applicants need help with.
If they lose that they are no diffent than any other school. I'm torn on this issue, not because of any injustice against Asians or whites... I couldn't care less about them on this issue, most of them have been groomed since children with tutors, classes and activities to "look good" to these universities.
I'm torn because this might be a step towards these places losing their precious exclusivity and become just like any other but I doubt they will let that happen and if this does not happen then whatever happens will not be any good for society.
There are definitely valid arguments in favor of Affirmative action, but the notion that this doesn't amount to substantial racial discrimination is nothing less than counterfactual.
1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/10/04/does-har...
I'm not even a fan of Affirmative Action, but this is one of those cases where it sends the absolute wrong message. A lot of states are trying to screw with thousands of people's rights to vote and the DOJ goes after... a few tens of people going to an Ivy League school.
I think people want to believe these jobs or college admissions are awarded based on merit, because it feels much more fair to both the applicant or the institution than alternatives of thinning the applicant field such as nepotism, leveraging one’s wealth/class, or flat out discrimination. But the problem with how we’ve implemented our pseudo-meritocracy is that the metric becomes the goal. Our metrics aren’t good enough to actually say student A should be accepted while student B shouldn’t based on some nebulous combo of test scores, grades, extracurriculars, essays, and personal uniqueness compared to the other applicants being considered. It’s much like people working at Google who say “I could never pass the Google interview if I had to take it.” The results are only partly based on actual merit, and partly based on arbitrary criteria that aren’t fair.
So, we have a huge applicant pool, and for the sake of argument let’s say 20% are totally qualified based on the regular college admission factors. The school only admits 5%. The school wants to admit the “best” of the bunch, so the admissions committee invents an arbitrary gauntlet of evaluation that succeeds in ruling out 3/4 of the candidates that passed the initial bar.
Or, the school could admit they can’t actually predict who will succeed the most, and of the 20% who cleared the bar, randomly choose 1/4 of those students in a lottery to admit. This feels less prestigious to Yale et al, so they won’t do it. Consider that back when these universities gained their prestige, admissions were largely based on wealth and class and being the correct gender and race, and you may wonder if the point of an elite school to preserve a signaling mechanism for an elite few rather than output better graduates/research/etc than other institutions.
Personally, I would be happy with a system that rules out the 80% or so that clearly don’t qualify, and of the essentially equally qualified 20% remaining, awards admissions randomly in a lottery but with quotas matching the demographic percentages of the US to try and compensate for the inequities that cause the applicant pipeline to not mirror the demographics of the country. At any rate, by pretending the current unfair system is merit-based and fair, schools like Yale have shot themselves in the foot.
Yale has policies to give slots to legacies, effectively the same thing.
Only this time the federal government and Justice department is what fights to keep the handful of those of African descent going to Yale.
It's what America means. It's what the flag stands for.
"For the great majority of applicants, Asian Americans and Whites have only one-eighth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials. Yale rejects scores of Asian American and White applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit. "