What did SFFA vs. Harvard reveal about admissions?
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This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past to kickstart the disproportionate enrollment demographics, but it was past due to get rid of it.
The most interesting part following SCOTUS' ruling is that Harvard said it wouldn't change their ways, and nobody enforced the ruling.
Can you really claim that the trend won't reverse if purely meritocratic admissions are reinstated (disregarding legacy admits...although very unfair to disregard since their racial makeup heavily tracks with asian/white/etc)
It's simply a single lever to change the racial makeup of the upper class. And certainly it goes both ways, but to simply remove it with no solution implies a regression to the former system, which was all but equal, much less equitable.
Affirmative Action is institutionalized discrimination, at least when used to promote some groups over others. (Though it didn’t start that way; it started as a call to be purely race-blind in hiring.) I wouldn’t call it racism though, because it’s not based on any belief that races have different capability, it is purely intended to correct systemic bias based on the belief that races are equally capable.
> it was past due to get rid of it
This might be true, but there are still achievement and pay gaps in the US. There are lots of debates about why, and I don’t want to start one. I’m just curious how else to solve systemic biases if they’re still here. The whole problem with cultural bias is it’s sticky and difficult and people don’t believe they have biases. Today’s politics has done a lot to convince me that we haven’t solved it yet, but at the same time I’ll be the first to point out that we’ve come a long way even in my lifetime. The last little bit might take longer to fix than suffrage did just because of how subtle the issues are. If we take any preferential treatment off the table, preferential treatment that tries to artificially force equal opportunity, the question is what’s the alternative? We might have momentum, and do nothing might work, but what if it doesn’t? Wouldn’t that also be a form of institutionalized discrimination, effectively, like it was before Affirmative Action existed?
Apart from enforcing neutral principles, the other solution is individualism. We need to stop reinforcing the salience of race and racial communities and treat people as individuals.
One problem with that platitude is that there are plenty of ways that two negative things can balance each other out or become positive in some way.
Aren’t you making deep cultural presumptions and imposing your own opinions? Affirmative action is controversial, and it’s had unintended consequences when used, but what’s the rationale for claiming it’s a “wrong” or “injustice”? Not everyone believes that.
You’re also deliberately ignoring the point that there might be no such thing as innocent third parties, but only people who aren’t aware they’re part of the problem, even if it’s subtle and unintended.
History already tried the Laissez Faire approach, and it didn’t work. Chips fell in a bad place. This isn’t about proving wrongdoing or punishment, it’s about acknowledgement of a problem, and reflection and self-improvement as a group.
Affirmative action is wrong because we have defined treating an individual differently based on their race as a moral wrong. The act is wrong, regardless of your motivations. It’s like how stealing is wrong even if you’re doing it because someone else stole from you first.
I’m not ignoring your point that third parties may not be innocent. I said above that if you can prove wrongdoing by specific individuals, you can punish them.
> acknowledgement of a problem, and reflection and self-improvement as a group
There are no “groups,” just individuals who must be treated according to their individual merits, without regard to their group membership. That was the whole principle of the civil rights era.
No, I don’t think so, You’re conflating racism with discrimination. We humans discriminate positively and negatively all the time. People discriminate based on race and gender and age for the purposes of picking a life mate or sexual partner, and society has exactly zero problem with that. Discriminating based on race is absolutely not a morally wrong act regardless of motivations. Intent matters, and the situation matters.
This talking point about all discrimination being wrong is fairly popular, and there are a lot of people who can’t see the difference between positive discrimination and negative discrimination. This is one reason I think affirmative action should end; it’s too subtle of a distinction and we were too successful at planting the idea that discrimination is bad.
You’re also conflating law with mores in your example. There are cases where stealing something is moral, regardless of whether it’s legal. There are also cases where stealing something is legal too, for example you can legally take back something stolen from you if you do it non-violently.
> There are no “groups”
I was referring to humanity, to all of us.
I was about to post the same and that's 100% my take... sure, I didn't own slaves and I don't intentionally do anything racist... but I can absolutely acknowledge that by virtue of genetic lottery (white, with educated parents, etc) I had it orders of magnitude easier than the kids who grew up on the other side of town (black, less educated parents, etc).
I said it in another comment - affirmative action may not be the best solution, but it's tiresome to see people trot out the "2 wrongs" argument without proffering a better solution to the problem.
How do the white kids with unfortunate life circumstances have an advantage over similarly situated black kids?
Slavery, racism, and sexism have happened in every single human society that has ever existed in some form or another, the US isn't special here. Discrepancies in average outcomes between different ethnic groups as measured by the statistical tools of industrialized states are at least as old as industrialization, and have relatively little correlation with whether a particular ethnic group was acting racistly towards another one in any given time and place.
> We know for a fact that outcome discrepancies were caused by racism before 1965.
No we don't.
> What reason is there to believe outcomes discrepancies aren’t a problem, given that society generally believes they are?
Societies generally believe all kinds of contradictory and mutually-inconsistent things, because a society is comprised of the aggregate of a large number of individual people who all have different understandings of the world, self-interests, group loyalties, etc. I don't assume that if society generally believes something, this is an unchanging fact about society, or that the thing is in fact correct, or that I should agree myself.
Sexism is different as its not a group trait that affects whole families or communities so the disadvantage is not inherited.
The US is not unique with regard to race, but not all societies are the same. The US has a history of race based slavery which had a cultural impact, and it had racist laws and lynch mobs etc. until very recently.
> have relatively little correlation with whether a particular ethnic group was acting racistly towards another one in any given time and place.
There were actual racist laws in the US which is pretty good evidence of people being racist in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit...
In most of the world people could legally marry someone of different race. In the UK an author could depict a marriage between people of different races in a children's book in the 1950s - I cannot think of any American examples of the same.
You’re either trolling or completely ignorant of U.S. history.
Look up Jim Crow laws; it was the law to suppress blacks in the U.S. for the better part of a hundred years, ending around 1965. Yes we absolutely do know for a fact that racism was a major causal force of racial disparities in the U.S. before 1965. This isn’t even up for debate, and there are zero respectable sources that claim otherwise. Saying we don’t know doesn’t make it true, nor change any minds, it just reflects really poorly on you.
You might also want to google Suffrage, lynching, red-lining, and the U.S. history of racial disparities.
It’s funny that you have heard of slavery, but apparently don’t understand how it held black people back…?
Here’s just one place to start educating yourself, if you want:
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/how-the-racial-w...
Whether affirmative action is a wrong is your presumption, and it’s hotly contested, absolutely not universally agreed upon, which makes your use of ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ a straw man.
There are plenty of things wrong with preferential affirmative action, but I reject the framing that it’s evil, this is essentially an ad hominem attempting to quash any debate of the actual relative merits or the outcomes.
I feel like we can’t make forward progress if you refuse to acknowledge the reasons that history has happened the way it did. See Chesterton’s Fence.
In that case, the punishment is not a “wrong” because the person being punished has moral culpability due to their bad act.
That’s different from imposing a punishment on someone because of someone else’s bad act. That’s a principle that some societies hold that ours does not. In clan based societies, a wrong committed by one member of clan A to a member of clan B can justify retaliation against a different member of clan A.
> If you help someone, you are punishing the entire world?
You are missing (or maybe even ignoring) the huge difference between these two viewpoints.
I shell out thousands for engineered plans for a petty AF retaining wall because the boomers and their parents were cheap fucks and kept building shit that mushed over too fast (all retaining walls fall over, it's just a question of time).
Damn near every area of society has tons of stuff like this.
It's just blood guilt/debt with extra steps IMO.
> share the proceeds with nu employees … nu employees descendants ,who continue to profit from the previous theft by an order of magnitude
Slaveholders were feudal lords. They didn’t “share the proceeds” with the serfs. They “privatized the profits and socialized the losses,” as we would say today. The profits flowed to a handful of families who happened to be white. But all the other white people suffered a deadweight loss. And the civil war nuked much of the south’s wealth. The war cost the south $2 billion, more than the south’s GDP and almost as much as the total value of its real and personal assets. The war also cost the union over $3 billion, an amount equal to its entire GDP. After that, there wasn’t some pool of money to generate dividends shared by all white people. Instead, there were taxes to pay for a war over something nearly all over them never benefited from.
If your ancestors were white independent farmers or sharecroppers, they were poorer for having to compete with massive plantations powered by slave labor. German Americans (the largest group of white Americans) never even arguably benefited from slavery. Half of them came here as indentured servants themselves in the 1840s. They scraped out a hard life in the midwest while having to compete with slave plantations in the south. Their biggest involvement with slavery was fighting and dying in disproportionate numbers to end it. And of course Irish, Italians, Asians, etc., came here after slavery ended.
So let’s tweak your example to reflect the reality. The C-suite of the company happened to be nu, and stole from gamma employees. They hired their nu kids as nepo babies and shared the profits with them, while underpaying the other nu employees. Eventually, some of the nu, including a large number who joined the company only recently, overthrow the C-suite and end the theft. Over the next 150 years, more nu employees keep joining the company, so today more than half have no ancestors who were even here during the theft.
Then the company creates a promotion policy where it gives a big preference to gamma employees over employees who happen to be classified as “nu”—regardless of whether the nu employee’s ancestors were even at the company during the time of the theft. Nobody would consider that a fair arrangement.
The ChatGPT summary accurately captures the expert consensus on this: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a58046380288191b946198c5de72ce7 ("Most modern economic historians conclude that slavery enriched plantation owners but constrained the South's broader economic development. While non-slaveholding whites gained social status from the racial hierarchy, they likely had lower wages, fewer economic opportunities, less industrial development, and slower long-term income growth than they would have had in a Southern economy organized around free labor. In other words, economically they were probably worse off, while socially and politically they enjoyed privileges that would not have existed in a society without slavery.").
I’m citing ChatGPT here because I think it’s pretty good at summarizing the literature on this sort of factual question.
I'm not claiming to know the solution to the problem of ~200 years or slavery and ~100 years of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and further discrimination. I am saying that doing nothing about it seems pretty fucked. I am saying that claiming that it's immoral to do something about it, which you seem to be doing, makes you look like the worst kind of offensive and racist asdhole, too.
I'm saying it's immoral to try to correct one injustice by doing a further injustice to an individual who had nothing to do with it. And it's not even me saying that, Plato said that 2,400 years ago.
That doesn't mean you can't do anything. You can have race-neutral policies that directly target individuals who have economic need. Cory Booker's baby bonds proposal, for example, would go a long way towards erasing racial wealth gaps: https://www.acluok.org/news/baby-bonds-path-toward-prosperit.... And it would do so without creating a new racial class system.
Also, it's seems suspicious to insist that all Affirmative Action be halted before these race-neutral policies are implemented. It's almost as if it's some sort of cheap justification for more shitty racism. How about we get rid of affirmative action after we get a this baby bonds proposal? And also a bunch of other stuff that creates a more equatable playing field? Again, minorities were fucked over for decades-to-centuries before Afirmative Action, why not just let it ride for a little while before knocking out the ladder from under them?
Again, I object to your characterization of Affirmative Action as wrong or immoral. It was designed to counter centuries of institutionalized racism. I'll grant that the implementation has been imperfect, but what in this world is perfect? It's just better than doing nothing, it's better than wasting further lives, it's better than creating a permanent underclass. Could it be improved? Yes. Should there be an open discussion about it's effects? Yes. But I think the results should be more like "tweaks to the system" rather than an outright ban, or crying and gnashing of teeth about how Affirmative Action immoral.
One other thing, you keep asserting that "correct one injustice by doing a further injustice to an individual who had nothing to do with it." A few comments ago I pointed out some obvious counter examples, which you neglected to address. The important point was that people who had nothing to do with all sorts of problems willing submit to unfair treatment because they believe that they,or people they care about, will be better of in the long run for having done the right thing, even if it's difficult and somewhat unfair. That doesn't make it immoral. It may be a difficult choice, but it's the kind of choice adults make all the time, and that's just part of living in a civilized society.
[EDIT: I made a mistake when I said "A few comments ago" - it was a separate thread in this discussion]
Gemini gave me an okay analogy: “If a pendulum is knocked permanently off-center by a structural bend or a magnetic field, the only way to center it again is to apply an equal and opposite force. Affirmative action policies attempt to apply this counter-weight to straighten the broader societal scale.”
I’m not sure but is there a question about whether we actually had pre-existing unfairness? Blacks got the legal right to vote in 1965. Before that was effectively institutionalized racism, fully entrenched cultural bias, right?
So, yes, there was pre-existing... "unfairness" may be too strong for some of it; it wasn't all unfairness. Some of it was the effects of past unfairness, even if the (deliberate) unfairness was no longer present. The pendulum was in fact bent, to at least some degree.
But I like the analogy, because you only apply the counterforce until the pendulum is straight. Then you stop. Things were bent enough that affirmative action may in fact have been necessary. But it should not be necessary forever. Even if it was the right thing to do, there comes a time when the right thing to do is to stop.
(Then you get into "is now the right time", and things get a whole lot murkier...)
Well said, it does need to stop eventually. Now might be the right time, even if we’re not all the way there, given all the problems and unintended consequences and all the backlash.
The historical argument also doesn’t survive attempts to generalize its underlying principles to immigrants. Objectively, Black americans are extremely privileged by virtue of being americans. A redlined community in 1950s America was still better than my dad’s village in Bangladesh.
Finally, your argument demolishes how affirmative action is actually practiced. Its biggest beneficiaries are immigrants and their children, in particular hispanics. That produces a very unfair result under your logic, because latin america is solidly middle income, and was even more so in the 20th century. In 1990, Mexico’s GDP per capita was ten times higher than India’s and China’s. Yet colleges and corporations discriminate in favor of “hispanics” descended from Spanish conquistadores, and against “asians” whose parents grew up in third world villages.
Racism is the thing we decided is immoral, actions based on belief that one group is inferior to another, not any and all notions of groups for any reason.
> Objectively, Black Americans are extremely privileged by virtue of being Americans. A redlined community in 1950s America was still better than my dad’s village in Bangladesh.
Whoa. They should be happy with what they have, and put up with racism and inequality here because there are poorer people somewhere else in the world? Some Blacks in 1950 couldn’t vote - they were “privileged”?
No, what we decided was wrong was using race as a salient factor to discriminate between people. That’s why all our laws use that word. The laws reflect the moral principle.
> They should be happy with what they have, and put up with racism and inequality here because there are poorer people somewhere else in the world?
You’re the one supporting a system of affirmative action that treats people unequally. My point is that, if your justification for that unequal treatment is the historical circumstances of people’s parents and grandparents, then it’s quite relevant that almost any applicant with roots in America has a huge head start over almost any applicant with roots in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.
I’m not the one who brought up the redlining example. That’s an example invoked by proponents of affirmative action. But if you invoke that reasoning, you should follow it through to its logical conclusions. If a university is choosing between an applicant whose family home in America has reduced value due to redlining, and an applicant whose family home is in a literal third world village, then what’s the moral logic for giving an advantage to the first applicant?
> Some Blacks in 1950 couldn’t vote - they were “privileged
None of my grandparents could vote in 1950 because they lived in a colony. Nobody whose family comes from China, Vietnam, etc., has grandparents who could vote in 1950.
No, and you’re intentionally escalating things and I don’t appreciate it. I’ve been more than clear already that I don’t necessarily support affirmative action, and that I’m aware it has downsides and have acknowledged multiple times that it can have unintended consequences.
Unequal treatment already existed before affirmative action. That is the reason that affirmative action exists, and it is what affirmative action intended to fix. You have yet to acknowledge that fact in this discussion.
So those countries should deal with those issues, then? I really don't understand how you are allowed to post so much all over this website. No less in such an intentionally obtuse and argumentative manner.
I think this discussion shows that there is fundamental disagreement about that. Many people believe that our laws as written do not reflect the moral principles they ought to reflect (and that the implementation/enforcement of those laws often does not even reflect the principles they supposedly encode).
I think you are overstating your case. You are right in principle because it is true of some people so race is not a reliable marker of privilege, but most South Asians I know in western countries are from families that were better off than many Americans, and did not face the racist laws that black Americans did.
> None of my grandparents could vote in 1950 because they lived in a colony.
Most former British colonies were independent by then. India and Pakistan became fully independent in 1947 and had a degree of self-rule and elections for decades before that.
Affirmative action doesn’t look at a specific individual’s economic history. Virtually everyone who benefits comes from a family that’s better off than most Americans. Don’t forget that there’s lots of affluent black americans. They make up 8-9% of millionaires in the U.S. And don’t forget hispanic people: the Harvard data shows they got a preference nearly as strong as the one for black applicants. There’s a huge population of affluent immigrants from latin america for these programs to draw from.
And remember that, for asians, status is different from financial condition. My family was high status in Bangladesh. But my dad took a boat to school during monsoon season, and the school had no walls.
You mention “racist laws.” But asians faced terrible non-material injustices. My parents lived through a genocide of 300,000 bangladeshis by the pakistani military. Millions of Indians died in famines. Most of my sister in law’s family was killed by communists. This was all in the 20th century. I don’t think we should be weighing these injustices against each other. But that’s exactly what these affirmative action programs are doing when they give a huge preference to a black applicant over an otherwise identical asian applicant.
> But asians faced terrible non-material injustices.
Some did, some did not. Some perpetuated and and benefitted from those injustices.
> I don’t think we should be weighing these injustices against each other.
I agree with you there.
As the article says the best universities here look at predicated A levels grades, their own admissions tests, and interviews. From what I have heard at open days etc. they are often clear that they do not care about ethnicity or skills at sports.
Our system of morality and justice operates on individuals, not groups. It’s fundamentally mistaken to view the issue in terms of a pendulum that represents group outcomes.
People pick partners based on race. Is that morally wrong?
> Our system of morality and justice operates on individuals, not groups.
What do you mean? Class actions don’t exist? Did I imagine the 19th amendment?
Depends on their reasoning. If it is that they are attracted to people with a particular physical appearance that correlates with race, then its not morally wrong. If you are doing so because they do not want to pick a partner who they believe is of an inferior race, that is morally wrong.
Wrong, but not illegal.
> What do you mean? Class actions don’t exist?
You can’t have class actions based on pre-existing groups (say, “Italians”). You have to define the group in a way that provides a high level of certainty that all class members were subject to the harm that’s the basis for the suit.
Why is racial preference in partner wrong?? Who agrees with this anywhere?
Yeah, and?
No response on the 19th amendment?
What definition of "some people" and "unfair" are we using?
I ask because I'm pretty sure that Obama's daughters "have a bias in their favor" in comparison with my lily-white nieces. (The parents of said nieces make around $40k/year.)
Is it fair to apply "countermeasures" to benefit said daughters relative to said nieces?
You can argue that said nieces have an unfair bias relative to similarly situated black children, but that's not how these systems tend to work.
And, it's not just Obama's daughters.
Simple example: at the doctor’s office, I want them to measure my height, without regard to the fact that I’m Bangladeshi. But that doesn’t mean that medical journals must blind themselves to the fact that a group of 10,000 Bangladeshis is going to have a much lower average height than a group of 10,000 Germans.
You are also different policy treatment of these groups.
It doesn't matter whether it's height or anything else. The point is that there's a fundamental difference between contexts in which you're evaluating an individual, and contexts in which you're evaluating groups in the aggregate.
> You are also different policy treatment of these groups.
I do not support any policy that would treat a specific individual differently because they're Bangladeshi.
Obvious counter examples: plenty of people have been drafted and died in wars they did not cause or start. Also, people pay taxes to educate others, which (hopefully) fixes a problem they didn't cause or start. The list just goes on and on. In fact, I think it's a fair argument to say that modern society is fundamentally based on the opposite your claim, that people who had nothing to do with all sorts of problems willing submit to unfair treatment because they believe that they,or people they care about, will be better of in the long run for having done the right thing, even if it's difficult and somewhat unfair. In general it's called being an adult. Yeah, sometimed it sucks, sometimes it's unfair, but generally it's better for everyone in the long run.
People will think “if XYZ group has a handicap maybe it’s because XYZ group is genetically inferior?” XYZ members themselves will think that and it will subconsciously affect them. People around them will think that and it will subconsciously affect their opinions towards them.
If you point out that XYZ group is only handicapped because they’re statistically environmentally disadvantaged, then it follows, why not handicap everyone with that disadvantage, or any comparable disadvantage? Why not handicap ABC minority? Some members of ABC will be jealous of XYZ and subtly discriminate against them (for this reason; these members would otherwise).
It creates the background conditions it seeks to destroy. Instead, handicap on things like health and income, which are more obviously fair and necessary (most people can accept that bad health and income are an especially serious disadvantages in today’s world).
We are closer to ending sexism and racism than we were 70 years ago before any affirmative action existed, right? Who’s to say that all the backfiring and unintended consequences that have happened aren’t better than the parallel universe in which maybe slavery still exists? Would it have happened faster with no quotas or boosts for groups that were historically discriminated against? Maybe yes, that’s possible, but we can’t know. What we do know is that we’ve made forward progress, even if imperfectly.
The thing that tends to be forgotten when people talk about affirmative action being preferential treatment is that the previous ‘in’ group was already getting preferential treatment, and maybe still is. We did not start from a level playing field. The core idea is to try to balance the pre-existing preferential treatment out. Unless you can resolve the cause of that, an easier way to attempt to handle it is to try to artificially make the preferences equal. The idea is not to give preferential treatment as an outcome, it’s to remove preferential treatment. This is related to how discrimination is not racism, and why positive discrimination is different from negative discrimination.
Correlation does not imply causation
> Who’s to say that all the backfiring and unintended consequences that have happened aren’t better than the parallel universe in which maybe slavery still exists?
They are better, but it's a low bar and an even lower one
> Would it have happened faster with no quotas or boosts for groups that were historically discriminated against?
Maybe, but even if "no", keeping the quota may cause a backslide.
Artificially balancing preferential treatment by applying it badly in the wrong direction is a duct-tape solution. Sure, it may have been justified after the Civil Rights Act. But it's not ideal and doesn't seem justified anymore, when we can easily positively discriminate for traits that are more obviously and universally negatively discriminated against, like income.
This is not relevant to what I said. We are closer to ending sexism and racism due to legislation, which is causal. We took specific actions to try to end sexism and racism and we know they had a positive effect.
> Artificially balancing preferential treatment by applying it badly in the wrong direction is a duct tape solution
I agree! It was meant to be a duct tape solution, from the start. It was meant to be temporary and end preferential treatment and go away.
> it may have been justified after the Civil Rights Act
I agree with this too, the justification was probably much stronger 60 or 70 years ago. It is weaker now… and that might be an indicator of its success.
Applying it badly has happened, and it’s lame and sucks, but that’s not an inherent feature or outcome of the core idea. Some might rightly say it was predictable.
The big open question is whether turning off all affirmative action will close that remaining gap, or leave us with a little bit of persistent systemic bias, or worse, a backslide. If that does, the next question is what to do.
If you're unwilling to have a debate on why achievement and pay gaps exist, then you should be unwilling to assert that systemic bias is a problem, or even that achievement and pay gaps are a problem.
Of course it is too late by now, by have Americans considered maybe abolishing all that and admitting students only based on the exam results, with preference given to the kids with better results (or no preference)? And replacing professional sportsball with a 1 lesson/week of general fitness? Maybe then they won't need to get so much debt to study too.
No, because that's "not fair" to some groups.
But there is also a legitimate reason to pursue fairness. When a society loses upward mobility and becomes a calcified caste social unrest becomes an existential threat. When we ignore that disparity compounds and locks people out of the social system we risk destroying the very system that we benefit from.
I'm open to arguments that there are better ways to achieve the goal of equitable access to higher eduction, but looking at enrollment numbers, the problem is far from solved.
- One which maximizes Harvard's power network?
- Most likely to succeed in the future?
- Representative of the general public by race?
- Representative of the general public in other ways (e.g. religion, political affiliation)?
- Academically, best-qualified right now?
- Academically, most potential? At birth? Now?
- Most likely to donate?
Etc.
However defined, Harvard has much modest discrimination by race compared to discrimination by religion, political affiliation, or home town.
Harvard is 95% liberal, and much more so at the faculty level. If you look at the further-out evangelical, born-again Christian groups, or more conservative Muslim groups, the discrimination is even more extreme. Atheists are vastly over-represented, in contrast.
Until one is aligned on goals and definitions, one can't speak of goals being met or unmet. Harvard can be -- and indeed, is -- racist against blacks by one definition, against whites by another, against Asians by a third, and so on.
I would prefer to have colleges [elite or otherwise] be generally representative of the population by race, religion, socio-economic background, etc.
The problem, as I understand it, is "best qualified" is massively impacted by things like race, parental income, and other factors outside the control of college applicants. Society is far from a meritocracy.
If you're the smartest, most knowledgeable, most conscientious, most humble person because you had a fantastic support system, well you're still genuinely a great person. If you are a D student with a felony criminal record because everyone around you was a horrible influence and your parents abused you, you're still genuinely terrible.
I've seen parents in a store together where one just "supervises" their toddler watching youtube or something while the other shops. Meanwhile I'm there reading to my kids while my wife shops. I'll not be surprised if my kids have better outcomes in large part due to the family they were born into, because I do that on purpose. Society should incentivize people to devote ourselves to raising the best next generation we can. Trying to define merit via some counterfactual hypothetical person instead of the actual person in front of you makes no sense. In fact it's counterproductive as you end up incentivizing people to do things like send their kids to worse schools so they can appear relatively better.
I doubt people are incentivized the way you think they are. Smug attitude aside, everyone wants best for their kids. Many people don't know how. They don't know how because their parents, grandparents, and no one in their community knows how. You end up in what research calls a culture of poverty.
That common among, but not exclusive to, many low-income black communities, due to a history of Jim Crow and slavery, but also in many immigrant communities, and white communities in places like, again, where our vice president comes from.
Improving outcomes for such communities means:
1) Improved economic growth
2) Improved social stability
Representation at Harvard means such communities might trust science. I have very little sympathy for white liberal university faculty complaining how some groups don't believe in climate change when those same faculty are giving those same groups every reason to distrust the academic establishment.
There's also no law which says schools should be meritocratic.
Admissions departments can and do optimize for things like future donations, political influence, and so on.
The point is we should not point to that and say "you didn't really earn that;" we should point and say "here is the example for others to look to. Everyone be more like them."
Like I had a broken home growing up. The valedictorian had an intact family in a higher social class. I put in no effort, was rude to people for no reason, and was generally not a great person. He worked hard, was friendly to everyone, and was generally a better person along pretty much any metric.
The takeaway from that is not to think "wow that wasn't fair," but to think "how can I try to be more like his parents for my kids?"
The SFFA lawsuit targeted Harvard specifically and made the claim not that Affirmative Action was a problem but that secretive racial policies to help whites at the expense of Asians were. There wasn't any direct evidence of it and it's kind of laughable to think Harvard would do that. The SC didn't evaluate that claim and just struck down using race for admissions. But that doesn't mean you can't ask people to write a diversity essay about their race and grade them on that.
Harvard's present demographics[1]:
Of students in the class who self-identified their race, 11.5 percent
identified as African American or Black, 41 percent identified as Asian
American, 11 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino, and nearly 2 percent
identified as Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.
[1]: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/10/class-of-2029...
I think there is a good argument for a help up for people whose communities are still impacted by the history of American slavery (and all its ills) but giving these slots to children of the wealthy and often immigrants does not feel right.
If you talk to admissions officers, over drinks, they'll tell you that poor black students from marginalized US communities have abysmal performance at elite schools. The decision to admit rich black students is very deliberate.
There are many reasons why. Schools in the US are locally-funded, and a marginalized community might have 25% of the per-student spending of a rich community (actual, typical figures). Until inequities like that are addressed, there is little elite education can do to help, even if it wanted, which it doesn't.
The point of an exclusive university is to be, well, maximally exclusive. That's the literal opposite of inclusive.
However, there are *many* such effects. Whack one, and I can point to a dozen others.
Until and unless they're systematically addressed, it's actually very hard to either make progress or even draw good conclusions.
What's needed is a project to address *all* of the obvious ones, comprehensively, ideally on a national scale, but initially, at least on a pilot scale.
Further, both are male, hetero, only 1/4 hispanic, and my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics so they'll get nothing from the "whole student" review. There's a huge swath of the population in this boat. The middle/upper-middle class pays for everyone else as always.
Yet, you still have two years.
If you mean only one grandparent is born in a Latin American country, then according to the U.S. Census Bureau, you are Hispanic.
All this stuff is self identifying too, so there are far more dishonest applicants than someone with a single LatAm grandparent marking themselves hispanic.
Are you sure? If you're household income is <$340k (depending on details) you'll still get some scholarship, and as long as your household income <$200,000 tuition is free.
[1]: https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...
Now, this is a pretty phenomenal position to be in for most Americans, I can't complain too much. But, my oldest (white, straight, varsity basketball, 4.7 GPA, 35 ACT, 36 on Math) wants to go to a school like USC or Vanderbilt, and we will get 0 aid help. I refuse to let my kids suffer through student loans like my wife and I had to; at one point I made $2500/month as a postdoc, and $1800 went to loans while I had 2 kids under 2. My search history at that point was pretty grim, involving what circumstances life insurance would pay out, etc.
So, assuming all 3 kids go to a $100K/year type school, and we pay cash, that is $12 MILLION dollars over the next decade I will be paying (ignoring inflation, etc). This is the worst case, etc, but still bleak. And, apparently Stanford CS students can't get job offers, so they are entering a horrific job market. I don't think any college is worth that, not even Ivys, but not going to a good college is still worse. If I had a crystal ball 10-15 years ago, we would have left the country.
You forgot a decimal there.
If you want to fund your kids’ elite education and you can’t front the cash, you can take out the loan or agree to pay a loan they take.
Plus, your $300k bonus (maybe $150k after taxes) will go a long way towards financing this obligation.
Obviously a lot of reasons to do it this way. But you gotta think at some point not working for 4 years while paying ~2x median annual wage has gotta go the way of the dodo.
That said, your view that they need "trauma" to get in is very wrong. You need to find a hook. The hook should be positive and not negative. (Why should they let you in to the private club?)
Source: I've gotten my kids into 6 Ivies. Non-athletes, white, public schools, and I am not a doner.
I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh and attended a very good public school. I had friends who lived only ten or fifteen minutes away but attended schools that were substantially worse by nearly every measurable standard. How should a university compare our applications on an apples-to-apples basis?
Some people would say, “Just use standardized test scores.” And sure, those can be part of the equation. But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education. The list goes on. How exactly should those advantages be measured? Is it a university’s job to account for them?
Others may disagree, but if I were on a university admissions team, I would say that it is...at least to some extent. I wouldn’t want a completely homogeneous student body. I would want every admitted student to clear a reasonable academic floor, but beyond that, I would value diversity in backgrounds, opinions, interests, intended majors, and life experiences.
In my opinion, the issue is much more complicated than people often make it out to be, and I don’t personally believe there is some vast liberal boogeyman behind it. I don’t think the process is perfectly fair to everyone, nor do I think perfect fairness is possible in the first place. But I also don’t automatically agree that it is wrong for universities to try -- however imperfectly or ham-fistedly they might do it -- to understand the broader context in which an application was submitted.
OK but what would your goal there be? What do you think an existing admissions team's goal is in various different universities? What if some desire to build an elite club but can't say it on record? And is that such a bad thing?
I would argue: no. There are always applicants with even more advantages than you, and those with fewer.
Standardized tests level the playing field IMO. Money can only help you so much. Talent and hard work become the dominant factors.
Mommy and daddy can't pay for expensive hobbies, finagle unpaid internships at prestigious non-profits, or anything else. Personal tutoring for standardized tests has diminishing returns compared to just grinding. Think Leetcode: how much does coaching help a SWE vs just being good at coding and solving 2000 problems?
Now you may say: under-privileged students often have less stable home environments. So they have less time to grind problems. This is true. But it's also true for admissions as they're done today. They have less time, money, and opportunities for hobbies, volunteer work, sports, and internships. They can't hire essay coaches or admissions consultants.
Thrusting students into a more challenging academic environment than their current demonstrated abilities merit doesn't help anyone. On the other hand if poorer students can demonstrate merit without spending much money, just by writing a single test, this is as egalitarian as possible.
Eh, not so sure. My son got a 32 on the ACT the first time he took it, and after 4 months of private tutoring got a 35, with 36 on math. Could he have grinded himself and got there? Possibly, but I doubt it. Having someone who knows what they're doing and holding him accountable was invaluable.
Why does it matter? How deep do you want to go to hunt for advantages? Are there no other places than Ivy League schools where one not so advantaged can get an education? Do you want the doctor saving the life of your loved one be the most qualified or one who ticked the disadvantaged boxes?
Also, they could make a separate department for the riches where there also is no math.
This has long been a farce though. They would be put in made up classes with no actual work and given fake grades.
While I'm sure it varies by school, I suspect you will find a similar dynamic at many other elite private schools. The undergraduate program is going to be much less important to a top-tier research university, and consequently the admissions board can go nuts with other priorities. When even the runners-up (on a merit basis) are quite strong you can go quite far indeed before anyone would notice a slip in standards.
"Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing."
I never know how to resolve these two statements. In our case, my daughter happened to choose a good public university. Maybe that is what they mean.
Yet, most upper-middle-income students are considered "full-pay."
Therefore, most upper-middle-income students now attend public universities.
Or at least that is the conclusion I drew from the two statements I quoted.
They also tend to be smarter because smarter people have smarter kids.
Most people applying to an Ivy are already self-selecting as pretty exceptional applicants (putting aside the delusional) and the legacy admits had same/worse SATs, etc.
edit: just looked it up, Harvard is at ~34% legacy admit rate versus regular 6% admit rate..
“Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430.”
At Harvard, my understanding is that the legacy admits have slightly higher test scores than non-legacy admits.
Maybe for Harvard, but I'm not sure a legacy for some random private liberal arts school nobody has ever heard of (or $STATE University) will be any more academically gifted than someone whose parents both went to college anyway.
Maybe we need to differentiate between "legacy of a school" and "legacy of a school with a historically high academic quality"
Cooper: You're ruling my son out for college now? The kid's fifteen.
Principal: Tom's score simply isn't high enough.
Cooper: What's your waistline? 32? With, what, a 33 inseam?
Principal: I'm not sure I see what you're getting at.
Cooper: You're telling me it takes two numbers to measure your own ass but only one to measure my son's future?
If you really care about multiple dimensions, add more types of standardized tests - general science (or specialized - separate physics, chem and bio sections), history, geography, whatever.
Or tell students to take the standardized tests that most closely map to their preferred major.
My mother was a special ed teacher who eventually became a diagnostician whose job it was to determine eligibility for services. Part of this job was to give a standardized test to a child to see if they met state set criteria. That said, this was only part of an assessment and was used along with parent preference, teacher recommendations, and other people involved with the process at the school. Outside of meeting state criteria, the numbers in the test were used to identify areas of strength and weakness to help understand a child and put this in perspective of a broader story. For example, if a child struggled with math, was it because they couldn't read well, struggled with the math itself, was distractable? There were also other instances where the test scores themselves were misleading. For example, did a child perform poorly because they were sick, or the AC of the building broke, or they set a test date on a school holiday when the child knew the other kids had a day off?
My point in telling this story is that the raw score in a standarized test can be helpful, but it does not tell a complete story. It is part of a broader assessment. The SAT and college admission is not different.
Purely using a test score does provide an objective score to rank a collection of applicants, but I still contend strongly that it misses the point. Depending on your point of view, college is meant to educate a populace, provide job training, give economic opportunity, or a whole host of other goals. One can use test scores a proxy to determine which applicants best approximate these goals, but I think we should consider whether they really help achieve this.
I'll also mention that using tests scores is not entirely "fair" either. I'd a friend who dated a guy who worked for Kaplan, one of the test prep companies. They had very good data about how much their test prep improved test scores. They were also very expensive. As a result, money and wealth can be used pretty directly to improve one's score. It's difficult for a university to fully address wealth inequality in society. However, since tests can be gamed so easily, I would caution against their over use.
No one's saying a person is a collection of numbers.
> My point in telling this story is that the raw score in a standarized test can be helpful, but it does not tell a complete story. It is part of a broader assessment
And that's very noble and well-meaning. But it can also be used to discriminate and deny opportunity. Raw scores, on the other hand, are hard data. You either have them or you don't. Do factors outside of one's control go into them? Absolutely. Those factors are all-pervasive and will influence anything you might use to determine merit.
> Kaplan, one of the test prep companies. They had very good data about how much their test prep improved test scores.
Of course they would say that. Even assuming it's true, Kaplan test prep books are only around $50 on Amazon. You could also get them for free from a public or school library (or the high seas, if that's your thing).
As I understand it, Kaplan has apps and dashboards and more material if you're a subscriber. Is there data about the marginal score improvement using that versus just the books?
When you get right down to it, everyone's starting point is different. Reducing the number of variables improves opportunity IMO.
As far as Kaplan, I don't have metrics to share, but what I saw shocked me at the time. It appeared as though they collected data as to how much their test prep improved scores and it was pretty dramatic. And, they were smart enough to distinguish between their test prep books and their in person tutoring. In person tutoring worked better and by a lot, but it all helped.
As far as tests, I've never contended that they shouldn't be done, but that these scores need to be part of an overall portfolio. I have in fact sat on admittance boards for graduate school and the two dominant factors other reviewers used were GPA and where they went to undergrad. Both of these were hard metrics and full of bias. I'll also contend that they weren't particularly effective in identifying students who successfully completed the program.
Something to consider, I do think test scores can help screen candidates. For example, if one is going to admit into a math program, then their quantitative score should probably be above a certain level. After that, I personally don't think it matters. In that way, one could just set minimum criteria to be accepted, which includes GPA, tests scores, research, jobs, whatever, and then randomly select from that group. That would certainly eliminate a huge amount bias, though not all, but most people hate this approach because it contradicts this belief that we live mostly in a meritocracy. They want rankings and they want to know who number 1 is. My continued argument is that it's impossible to distill a person down to a hard ranking in a reasonable matter, especially with test scores, and it's not necessary for college admission since one can select a group of applicants for acceptance without ordering them.
> In person tutoring worked better and by a lot, but it all helped.
Are money and other resources only helpful for getting a good test score? They don't matter at all for the factors that improve one's chances of admission? For example, going to a good high school district, participation in certain sports, hobbies, or access to internship, volunteer, or research opportunities?
My argument is simply: by making it about the test, you remove all the other factors where money could potentially have an influence. The rich students will get tutoring no matter what. But they can't gain any other advantages over the poor students.
> In that way, one could just set minimum criteria to be accepted, which includes GPA, tests scores, research, jobs, whatever, and then randomly select from that group.
That wouldn't be a terrible approach either. You are correct it would be unsatisfying.
> GPA and where they went to undergrad...were [both] hard metrics and full of bias.
I would argue they weren't "hard" at all. Undergrad is already gated by "squishy" criteria. Normalizing GPAs across universities (and countries, in the case of international applicants) is tricky and imprecise.
Where I think we differ is that my contention is that money also allows one to game a higher test score on something like the SAT and by a significant factor. Yes, it would focus attention on this one factor, but I believe it also misses the point. College admissions is not meant to be a singular contest or game, but part of a broader ecosystem and that system has choices.
A university has a number of competing criteria and wants for its applicants. Generally speaking, a university does not want someone to drop out. They want graduates and part of screening applications is meant to determine whether they believe someone can successfully complete their degree. Some universities essentially operate like hedge funds that have classes. These universities have an interest in high net worth and connected applicants because these people can trade favors or give donations as alumnae. This is reflected in legacy admissions and automatic admission for certain classes of donors. Some universities want to give preference to in-state or in-city students. The purpose here is to ensure the university is locally connected because the state and city have the most influence on what is really a city inside of a city for most universities. Some universities want to give children of those who never went to college preference because it ultimately broadens their base and likely ensures their children will want to attend there as well. Some universities want to maximize their rating on the US News and World Report ranking because it means they can charge higher tuition.
None of those metrics above, moral or amoral alike, need a total ordering of applicants based on a test score.
As one other comment, when I sat on the graduate board, our department was flooded with applications from one particular country, more than half. Don't know why, but it was. Certainly, we accepted some of those applicants. However, consider the implications of accepting students purely from that one place. Would the local government be happy if we did not accept any local or domestic students? Would the federal? Probably not. However, if we accepted applications purely based on a singular test score, there would be incentive for that place to game the system and help with the test, legal or otherwise. No idea if they did then, but it wouldn't have mattered since we still read the broader application.
Welcome to the adult world, where you are distilled into a collection of number each step of the way: look at credit scores, performance reviews, etc.
> I'll also mention that using tests scores is not entirely "fair" either.
Unfortunately we didn't come up with a better way to rank a group of people on scale in a reasonable amount of time. So tests are a necessary compromise. I also know plenty of examples where people aced their tests by just spending $30 on a prep book and studying hard.
As an example, my wife is a physician. She and her colleagues use metrics to help assess a patient, but ultimately treatment is based on their judgement. Purely relying on hard numbers, such as what an EKG gives, would lead to dead patients. Many of them. I am a mathematician. My world revolves around hard computational numbers, yet my algorithms will often given misleading results. Determining when that is requires judgement. Despite a push too the contrary, good hiring managers assess applicants and take responsibility for both good and bad hires. This requires judgement.
And, yes, I can also find examples where someone either didn't study or used a book and did well on their SAT. That said, in person test prep with a tutor absolutely has a large, positive effect on test scores, much more than simply a book. Kaplan has the internal data. It's absolutely worth the money if one can afford it. Most can't.
The framework to do it was introduced to prevent Jewish people from going to universities where it was found that when it was impossible to keep the Jewish people under 25% of enrollment it rapidly became possible once they accounted for well-roundedness.
The Jewish people of the age, like Asian people today, seem to have been narrow and pointed like a spear where others were like a sphere. Such is life. We aspire to spherical homogeneity. Other shapes need not apply.
Some random chart feedback. I found the use of red for elite colleges and then the use of red to mean white applicants to make the article slightly harder to read and understand. Recommend changing using completely different colors from that chart to he next one, because they are completely unrealted axis and
The race factor is irrelevant in practice. Even more so when you look at literature indicating that your success is actually more predictive from high school success than college attendance.
In other words, if you get into Stanford you will likely succeed even if you don’t go.
I can’t pull older numbers on my phone at the moment but in the last 12 years the number of applications to colleges (applicants*applications) has risen 50%.
So correct for the reality that…
1) that immediately skews your denominator and changes your percentages.
2) the upper middle class students are the most likely to apply to the most schools (because they can and don’t have the other paths)
3) more and more marginal students who previously would not have gone to college are getting encouraged to apply.
And their model is just breaking.
In the UK you can apply to upto five colleges.
In the US the recommendation seems to be between 5-8