> This argument, whenever it shows up, is usually a thinly veiled attack on affirmative action, which is aimed increasing the equality of opportunity - university education being far more an opportunity than an outcome.
First of all, I’m not sure it’s “thinly veiled”; being opposed to affirmative action is a legitimate position with its own set of arguments. The confidence with which you declare your opinion about affirmative action as though it is some settled fact makes discussing these issues extremely difficult. Ultimately, you’re entitled to your opinions, but they’re still opinions.
“University education being an opportunity than an outcome” is extremely debatable. Is your first job out of college also an opportunity rather than an outcome? Where we draw the line is something society needs to litigate, and it’s by no means a settled issue. For example, one might argue that while attending university is an opportunity that everyone ought to have, attending Harvard University (or other selective institutions) isn’t. The reality is that adolescents are rewarded for their academic achievements by being accepted to prestigious institutions (and yes “legacy admissions” are anathema to this); that can be considered an outcome rather than some random opportunity. In fact, you lose all of the nuances, edge cases, and asterisks associated with the messiness of reality when you make blithe declarations like “university education is an opportunity not an outcome”. It’s like lossy compression; we lose information and the discourse is worse off for it.
> The thrust of current civil rights efforts: ending disproportionate police violence against POC, bolstering public education in poor neighborhoods, healthcare as a right, these are all about the equality of opportunity.
Sure, and in any grab-bag of policy positions, you’re bound to find positions that most of society would agree fall under the “equality of opportunity” bucket. There are disagreements as to how best to achieve all of those things, but by and large most people agree that “everyone having access to better education” is the goal or “everyone having access to better and cheap healthcare” as a goal. If you’ll notice, I never said “public education” or “x is a right” because those declarations start to become more prescriptive as to what the solution should be — and I encourage you to try to understand the steel-man arguments against those specific prescriptions.