The Supreme Court has struck down affirmative action, which was widely expected by people who pay attention to such things but Supreme Court decisions are in general hard to predict so even the “expected” is a bit unexpected. Because I expect the Dobbs decision and abortion rights to feature heavily in Democrats’ 2024 campaign, I expect there will be considerable pressure to fold this decision into a broader critique of right-wing judicial overreach and it’s important to understand that
Milan: my ancestors were rock-ribbed abolitionist New Englanders. My great grandfather moved from New Hampshire to Iowa just before the civil war, where he was a fervent supporter of the union in a state that contributed more solders to the Union per capita than any other. Agreed your ancestors weren’t slave owners or Jim Crowe supporters, but neither were mine. Why should I have to pay reparations?
Maya: good news! Here in California affirmative action was banned by popular vote in 1996. The University of California system now is back to having as many people of color as it did in the affirmative action era. There are ways.
This decision will have very little impact. Ivy League admissions offices are clever enough to use race neutral language to do race based affirmative action.
All you have to do is say the Asian kids lack personality and the kids from whatever races you want to favor have overcome great adversity. And kick out standardized testing and that will make things even more “holistic” and they can achieve their desired racial mix under the fog of holding admissions
I haven’t read all 780 comments and apologize if this point has been made, but regarding Milan’s point, a lot of white people also feel not-responsible for slavery or Jim Crow. My ancestors came to America from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. They worked factory jobs in rust belt cities. We happen to be white, but we have no actual connection to this history.
“In my classes, we had discussions about race, identity, and oppression that would have been intellectually impoverished without the presence of Black, Hispanic, and Native American voices.” Curious is there were true ideological disagreements here, or just “diverse voices” competing with each other to prove their anti-racism/oppression superiority? Any heterodox thinkers? And how are they treated?
"I think professors at top universities face a conceptual problem in that they want to affirm values like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” but the whole point of top universities is to be elitist, hierarchical, and exclusionary. I’m not 100 percent sure what to tell people in this situation."
I'd say this is a short run/ long run confusion on their part. In the short term, the way you promote equity is by redistributing resources. In the long run, the way you do it is by increasing the pool of resources by pushing out the technological and scientific frontier, and by building needed infrastructure (physical, legal, and social). The latter benefits from empowering the most capable people to excel as far as possible, *no matter why* they ended up in the position of being most capable. It *also* benefits from from the world having as many well-educated people as possible working to implement and incrementally iterate on the fundamental advances being made. Those are distinct but related goals, and I always find it surprising when professors at elite schools can't wrap their heads around needing to pursue two goals at once.
I'd also challenge the extent to which elite employers, graduate schools, and professional schools favor graduates of elite undergraduate colleges and universities. The pipeline upward from those schools is what makes entrance to those schools so highly sought -after. And many elite employers are pursuing the same "look" that Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford are pursuing.
I think there's a little bit of tension between points 5 and 11 here. I attended Duke on a track scholarship and I found much more diversity of thought among the Kenyan and Nigerian athletes on my track team than the upper-middle-class Black students in my classes.
Yeah supporters of the affirmative-action-for-diversity as currently practiced viewpoint don't seem to have a good explanation for why it currently operates as a census-box-checking exercise.
Totally agree about the pipeline problem and the need to fix K-12 education, but it's not just "more phonics." That phrasing feeds into the false narrative, advanced by the "balanced literacy" camp, claiming that advocates of the "science of reading" just want to subject all kids to three hours of phonics drills a day. It's not "more" phonics that we need -- it's better, more systematic phonics instruction, and it could be just 20-30 minutes a day in K-2.
And it's not JUST better, more systematic phonics either. Unless we also provide ALL students with access to the sophisticated vocabulary and familiarity with complex syntax that kids from more highly educated families pick up at home, we're not going to make much progress. We'll produce students who can decode the text they're expected to read at higher grade levels--and in college--but many of them won't be able to understand it.
The solution is a curriculum that begins in kindergarten and provides both good phonics instruction AND systematically builds kids' knowledge of the world and familiarity with the complex vocabulary and syntax of written language. There are several such curricula out there, but they're currently used by only a minority of elementary schools.
While the under-representation among university students at elite universities is shameful, to my mind it’s a minuscule issue next to the vast inequities in K12 schools. We’ve been obsessed with college but the foundational education of K12 has been defunded and ignored. A few hundred students missing out on the chance to go to Harvard is bad, but there are thousands of students in dilapidated and asbestos-ridden schools in my city alone.
We’ve neglected public schooling and outsourced our education to colleges, and turned K12 into a college prep school.
of the 19 points, #14 may be the most important. over time, HYP and the rest will respond - and only respond - to a change in the flow of money. my wife and I have multiple degrees from Harvard & Stanford, but also deep connections with the University of California and the University of Michigan. we give exclusively to the latter two institutions, where a dollar has much more impact
I wonder if the politics of this might change in a few years as the ruling is implemented and we start seeing some universities get majority Asian student bodies, rather than seeing universities become more white.
Based on the way colleges are handling the test-blind vs test-optional trend, I think we could see further divergence in admitted pools of students. Some schools will be known for emphasizing test scores and recruit a student body that excels on those metrics. Others will be known for emphasizing other metrics and probably have far less Asians and somewhat less Whites. The latter will fall in most college ranking systems in the near term, will possibly decline in the medium term if their crops of students aren't graduating on time and will possibly fall in the longer term if their graduates are out-earned by the test-heavy schools.
It also brings to mind Brown University, which has somehow made itself the destination for Jews within the Ivy. I'm not sure if they are doing it with "affirmative action" or just effective promotion and advertising, but I suspect we'll see further specializations along these lines.
I don’t find Milan’s take at all compelling — none of the kids on either side of this are the ones who enslaved others or perpetuated Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Act was 60 years ago. I don’t like that the burden of AA falls overwhelmingly on Asians either, but if it fell on white kids, those white kids never drank from a segregated water fountain either.
I disagree that going to a slightly less selective school has little effect. For a concrete example, your two interns, Maya and Milan, are both from highly selective colleges. They are from Harvard and Yale. My peers who went to highly selective colleges have significantly achieved more accolades and have more power than my peers who went to the tier below. Lack of generational wealth creates a lack of diversity in the highest seats of power. Affirmative action is one of many levers that can help change that.
Affirmative action that was class-based could maybe change that, but one of the top things schools like Harvard care about when admitting is whether or not you can pay your tuition without student aid. The SCOTUS case showed that Harvard gave a large boost to African American applicants, but only if they already came from a wealthier background. Statistical regressions showed that Black & Poor applicants were actually dinged in the admissions process compared to the median applicant:
If you're in any doubt on this, ask yourself why 80% of Harvard's student body regardless of race come from wealthy families.
If there are any schools actually advancing the mission of creating turnover in generational wealth, they are probably the STEM schools which pay more attention to academic ability than anything else.
> Statistical regressions showed that Black & Poor applicants were actually dinged in the admissions process compared to the median applicant.
This is so damning. This should be in the lede of every article about the Court's decision. How can anyone decrying the decision defend this? It's sick.
Milan: my ancestors were rock-ribbed abolitionist New Englanders. My great grandfather moved from New Hampshire to Iowa just before the civil war, where he was a fervent supporter of the union in a state that contributed more solders to the Union per capita than any other. Agreed your ancestors weren’t slave owners or Jim Crowe supporters, but neither were mine. Why should I have to pay reparations?
Maya: good news! Here in California affirmative action was banned by popular vote in 1996. The University of California system now is back to having as many people of color as it did in the affirmative action era. There are ways.
This decision will have very little impact. Ivy League admissions offices are clever enough to use race neutral language to do race based affirmative action.
All you have to do is say the Asian kids lack personality and the kids from whatever races you want to favor have overcome great adversity. And kick out standardized testing and that will make things even more “holistic” and they can achieve their desired racial mix under the fog of holding admissions
Fog of holistic admissions*
I haven’t read all 780 comments and apologize if this point has been made, but regarding Milan’s point, a lot of white people also feel not-responsible for slavery or Jim Crow. My ancestors came to America from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. They worked factory jobs in rust belt cities. We happen to be white, but we have no actual connection to this history.
“In my classes, we had discussions about race, identity, and oppression that would have been intellectually impoverished without the presence of Black, Hispanic, and Native American voices.” Curious is there were true ideological disagreements here, or just “diverse voices” competing with each other to prove their anti-racism/oppression superiority? Any heterodox thinkers? And how are they treated?
"I think professors at top universities face a conceptual problem in that they want to affirm values like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” but the whole point of top universities is to be elitist, hierarchical, and exclusionary. I’m not 100 percent sure what to tell people in this situation."
I'd say this is a short run/ long run confusion on their part. In the short term, the way you promote equity is by redistributing resources. In the long run, the way you do it is by increasing the pool of resources by pushing out the technological and scientific frontier, and by building needed infrastructure (physical, legal, and social). The latter benefits from empowering the most capable people to excel as far as possible, *no matter why* they ended up in the position of being most capable. It *also* benefits from from the world having as many well-educated people as possible working to implement and incrementally iterate on the fundamental advances being made. Those are distinct but related goals, and I always find it surprising when professors at elite schools can't wrap their heads around needing to pursue two goals at once.
I'd also challenge the extent to which elite employers, graduate schools, and professional schools favor graduates of elite undergraduate colleges and universities. The pipeline upward from those schools is what makes entrance to those schools so highly sought -after. And many elite employers are pursuing the same "look" that Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford are pursuing.
I think there's a little bit of tension between points 5 and 11 here. I attended Duke on a track scholarship and I found much more diversity of thought among the Kenyan and Nigerian athletes on my track team than the upper-middle-class Black students in my classes.
Yeah supporters of the affirmative-action-for-diversity as currently practiced viewpoint don't seem to have a good explanation for why it currently operates as a census-box-checking exercise.
Totally agree about the pipeline problem and the need to fix K-12 education, but it's not just "more phonics." That phrasing feeds into the false narrative, advanced by the "balanced literacy" camp, claiming that advocates of the "science of reading" just want to subject all kids to three hours of phonics drills a day. It's not "more" phonics that we need -- it's better, more systematic phonics instruction, and it could be just 20-30 minutes a day in K-2.
And it's not JUST better, more systematic phonics either. Unless we also provide ALL students with access to the sophisticated vocabulary and familiarity with complex syntax that kids from more highly educated families pick up at home, we're not going to make much progress. We'll produce students who can decode the text they're expected to read at higher grade levels--and in college--but many of them won't be able to understand it.
The solution is a curriculum that begins in kindergarten and provides both good phonics instruction AND systematically builds kids' knowledge of the world and familiarity with the complex vocabulary and syntax of written language. There are several such curricula out there, but they're currently used by only a minority of elementary schools.
While the under-representation among university students at elite universities is shameful, to my mind it’s a minuscule issue next to the vast inequities in K12 schools. We’ve been obsessed with college but the foundational education of K12 has been defunded and ignored. A few hundred students missing out on the chance to go to Harvard is bad, but there are thousands of students in dilapidated and asbestos-ridden schools in my city alone.
We’ve neglected public schooling and outsourced our education to colleges, and turned K12 into a college prep school.
of the 19 points, #14 may be the most important. over time, HYP and the rest will respond - and only respond - to a change in the flow of money. my wife and I have multiple degrees from Harvard & Stanford, but also deep connections with the University of California and the University of Michigan. we give exclusively to the latter two institutions, where a dollar has much more impact
As an alumn, I appreciate the callout of "the Berkeley" xD
I wonder if the politics of this might change in a few years as the ruling is implemented and we start seeing some universities get majority Asian student bodies, rather than seeing universities become more white.
I've been reading a ton of this person's substack: https://clarkecollegeinsight.substack.com/p/contra-yglesias-on-test-optional
Based on the way colleges are handling the test-blind vs test-optional trend, I think we could see further divergence in admitted pools of students. Some schools will be known for emphasizing test scores and recruit a student body that excels on those metrics. Others will be known for emphasizing other metrics and probably have far less Asians and somewhat less Whites. The latter will fall in most college ranking systems in the near term, will possibly decline in the medium term if their crops of students aren't graduating on time and will possibly fall in the longer term if their graduates are out-earned by the test-heavy schools.
It also brings to mind Brown University, which has somehow made itself the destination for Jews within the Ivy. I'm not sure if they are doing it with "affirmative action" or just effective promotion and advertising, but I suspect we'll see further specializations along these lines.
I don’t find Milan’s take at all compelling — none of the kids on either side of this are the ones who enslaved others or perpetuated Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Act was 60 years ago. I don’t like that the burden of AA falls overwhelmingly on Asians either, but if it fell on white kids, those white kids never drank from a segregated water fountain either.
https://open.substack.com/pub/clarkecollegeinsight/p/affirmative-action-is-probably-mostly?r=bwu2j&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Some more views!
Really eye-opening stuff in that guy's substack, great find.
Agreed, though fwiw, it should be "that gal's substack".
My mistake
“When my son was five, he asked if the weakest students enroll at the best colleges because they’re the ones who need the most help.”
My son is five, and he asks me about train derailments.
I disagree that going to a slightly less selective school has little effect. For a concrete example, your two interns, Maya and Milan, are both from highly selective colleges. They are from Harvard and Yale. My peers who went to highly selective colleges have significantly achieved more accolades and have more power than my peers who went to the tier below. Lack of generational wealth creates a lack of diversity in the highest seats of power. Affirmative action is one of many levers that can help change that.
Affirmative action that was class-based could maybe change that, but one of the top things schools like Harvard care about when admitting is whether or not you can pay your tuition without student aid. The SCOTUS case showed that Harvard gave a large boost to African American applicants, but only if they already came from a wealthier background. Statistical regressions showed that Black & Poor applicants were actually dinged in the admissions process compared to the median applicant:
https://clarkecollegeinsight.substack.com/p/harvard-lets-in-more-asian-americans
If you're in any doubt on this, ask yourself why 80% of Harvard's student body regardless of race come from wealthy families.
If there are any schools actually advancing the mission of creating turnover in generational wealth, they are probably the STEM schools which pay more attention to academic ability than anything else.
> Statistical regressions showed that Black & Poor applicants were actually dinged in the admissions process compared to the median applicant.
This is so damning. This should be in the lede of every article about the Court's decision. How can anyone decrying the decision defend this? It's sick.