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Comment by b9a2cab5 | Hacker News Reader

The author makes a good point but focuses on schools where affirmative action is legal. In contrast, schools where it's illegal (like for example, public schools in California and Washington) are dropping the SAT because it allows them to admit "holistically" and thereby admit more "desired" ("underrepresented") minorities because a larger percentage of the application is subjective.

I find this particularly egregious because voters in both states rejected affirmative action very recently and yet the state funded administrations of these schools are going ahead with these policies.

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Time to fire the admissions staff for not enacting the will of the voters.

IMO unelected officials aren’t meant to represent voters. They’re employed roles.

Why?

That mindset leads to bullying police departments believing it's okay to randomly shoot people.

The whole system is designed as an indirect democracy. I elected people who hire people who work on my behalf.

Elected or not, what matters is where the check is coming from. If the public is paying for it, they should have a say.

Is not the ultimate goal of the state to serve its citizens?

Exactly, and what could be better for all than equality and diversity? Obviously what's best for all isn't best for everyone.

I think there's a difference in an employed role where you can be hired and fired vs. a political office where voters determine occupancy.

Sure, relatively apolitical offices should be more distant from the voting process, but they should also act relatively apolitically, otherwise they might as well be determined by voters, directly or indirectly.

The only problem is that this is arguably a political decision by a non-political employed role.

The California situation is interesting because the universities initially fought back against the lawsuit for dropping test scores but then settled. It makes me think the administration feigned caring about the law or fairness but was actually very willing to change their admissions process. What’s more stunning is that the lawsuit that led to them dropping standardized testing requirements is based on one African American student who took the PSAT, got worse scores than he wanted, and decided that standardized testing was racist because he wouldn’t be able to get into the UC system with his scores. You can read the lawsuit (http://www.publiccounsel.org/tools/assets/files/1250.pdf) and settlement (http://www.publiccounsel.org/tools/assets/files/1588.pdf) for more details. But effectively the CA method of avoiding violating the law against affirmative action is to simply not measure merit anymore.

Another interesting development: WA rejected affirmative action once again in 2019, but recently the state passed a law requiring medical schools at state universities to set goals around increasing representation of underrepresented minorities (https://www.google.com/amp/s/mynorthwest.com/2911254/rantz-w...), which is effectively a race based cap on Asian enrollment. It seems the legislators are playing word games and trying to claim this doesn’t violate the law since it doesn’t set a “quota” but instead asks for correction of under representation.

Basically all major legal challenges with the exception of class actions originate from one person. That doesn't mean only one person was affected by it.

Rosa Parks wasn't the only person asked to sit in the back of the bus.

It's interesting to compare schools where affirmative action wasn't legal and where test scores were used extensively VS schools of the same caliber in states where affirmative action is legal.

Caltech [0] and MIT [1] are a good example (both small and extremely prestigious, catering to a mostly engineering/scientific crows and recruiting from the same pool of academics outliers both nationally and internationally)

Now, can anyone spot the difference?

[0] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/california-institute...

[1] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-instit...

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