To anyone trying to defend race-conscious admissions: Who do YOU trust to factor race into an application process?
Seriously! Who would you trust to do that? Is there *any individual* that could reasonably balance that? Maybe. But there's just no way an *institution* or a subsect of it could ever do that in a just, rational, publicly justifiable way.
Slow Boring fam: I vibecoded a little polling tool to survey questions like this "Should race matter in college admissions" (among other, more substantive policy/opinion questions) by different podcast/newsletter/media communities. Not very interesting yet without meaningful data but if y'all enjoy seeing poll results sliced up by cross-tabs, would love to get some responses to test out the flow.
Going to Yale does not produce as much value as Jerusalem claims. Yale attracts the sort of student who already knows about, say, prestigious fellowships, and it makes it easier for those students to get said fellowships. If you show up at Yale not knowing about the fellowships, Yale won't explain it to you. If you turn out to be a superstar student at Yale, which is very hard, faculty will guide you to those fellowships, but that is true at every school. If you are not a superstar student, Yale's advatage is in you learning about these fellowships and having a network to put that knowledge to use for the benefit of your children. But the Ivy League schools, overall, have very weak network effects for most students. It might help you network at the country club, but only if you are a member of the country club in the first place, at which point you can't separate the effect of going to Yale from the effect of being a member of the country club.
This is a very weird choice of discussion to have because I think that a. the merits case for affirmative action is obvious but also that b. the public, which is concededly dumb, does not agree with the merits case and so therefore affirmative action is as dead as a doornail as public policy. I do not even see any colorable path to persuade the public on the issue; leftist academics have been tacking into the headwinds on that issue for 40 years and they've gone backwards. Take a fuckin' hint.
I can think I'm as attractive a hottie as can be, I can get people to publish articles describing me as a most eligible bachelor, but if women don't want to sleep with me that doesn't mean jack diddly.
The other big problem with using race in college admissions is the fact that race isn't a verifiable reality the way that your family income or gender is. Even if you're transgendered, you're required to have something on all your government documents, and it has to be the same thing all the time. All the racial categories have blurry edges. Are Afghans White/Caucasian or Asian? As I pointed out to an Afghan friend in high school, his parents' country of origin is much closer to the Caucasus than my Scottish ancestors ever were. If you're trying to split blacks between African-American descendants of slaves and African immigrants, what does one make of children of Caribbean immigrants? And that's all assuming people are being honest, which there's no good way to check anyway, since race is entirely self-identified and not something that schools can check.
I wish you had focussed on why we need affirmative action in the first place. Yes, systemic oppression under slavery is a good reason, but one would think with passage of the civil rights act in 60s and affirmative action till recently should have bridged the gap a lot more than it has. I mean it is three generations (Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z). George Will used to point to cultural capital to explain the gap; why have we not implemented policies to build that cultural capital in poor families, say through outreach on best practices on raising kids, nutrition in meals, inculcating good habits in kids and so on? Trying to fix the problem in college is sub optimal and bound to fail.
I find myself quite uncomfortable with the idea that we should be race blind into who gets into power. I think it's really quite scary that people just want the top level of scores and like push certain kind of people out of power.
Like why do we want a ruling class that is substantially less black or hispanic than the country as a whole so that the people in the room who can destroy you without consequence. It should have like the full cross tabs of American society in the ruling class.
So more of a quota system like in India where everyone is assigned a racial category (none of this weakass self-ID stuff) and every race has set-asides for how many ruling class seats they get to have?
I think if you asked me to design a system from scratch I might go for something more like a credit score that could be more responsive but the idea seems better than elevating a bunch of 18 year olds based entirely on test scores and grades.
I got to the ends where they talk about the paper. Jerusalem mentions that people are more likely to have crashes or fatalities from car crashes when they're alone, but isn't that because people do the vast majority of their driving alone? I don't know the study or if they controlled for the amount of time people spend in the car alone, but I feel like they should be a little more worried of spurious correlations. When they used to do this sort of thing on the weeds back in the day, I probably should have been more skeptical. I need a lot more information before I consider whether a study is done well and likely measuring something real. It would be better if there were many studies that showed the same thing
Haven't had time to listen yet, but I do want to flag that unlike the regular SB blog posts, this page has every comment everywhere load all at once, instead of highlighting the top 2 and hiding everything else "below the fold". Similar to what ACX does, and the outcome is similar: grinds page loading to a halt, not helped by loading the actual podcast too. I don't know if this was intentional? And it probably won't become as bad an issue, since the podcasts attract an OOM fewer comments generally...but until Substack improves their backend to not choke on loading tons of comments, I'd prefer going back to the regular display format. My ISP thanks you.
My bigger "pain point" if you will is that there is no way to sort the comments chronologically; I am stuck with the abysmal "top comment" view which forces all conversation to whoever got their hot take in first.
As a Canadian, I always find it strange how American discussion of Ivy league universities doesn't dwell more on how small they are. Harvard has 6500 undergrads. Princeton has 5500. Yale has 6800. In Canada, the university of Toronto is a prestigious institution, and it has 80,000 undergrads, with a tenth of the endowment that Yale has.
I feel like most of this discourse would melt away if these institutions were to spend their vast hoards of capitol and teach more people. If each ivy league school had capacity to teach 50,000 undergrads the arguments about composition would be much less cutthroat since more people that were interested and had sufficient academic achievement could attend. No more needing to cut the asian with 'bad personality' (ick) to make room for the latino with the 'inspiring story' or the person lying about indigenous heritage, you could just let them all in cause they all have a 1500 SAT or whatever.
I think you could argue this would dilute the quality of the product.
What I'd really like the ivies to do is open a chain of magnet schools in disadvantaged communities. You don't even need to offer a fast track to Harvard - but you're actively making the "highly qualified applicant" pool much more diverse
Right, but if this were to happen, admission to the Ivies would quickly mean much less, because the degree would distinguish each individual graduate far less from the broader population. In such a situation I imagine some other mechanism than admission to an Ivy would come to perform the same function, perhaps skull & bones style societies, perhaps social clubs like the union league, perhaps something else entirely. Insofar as the goal is to make access to the general American elite purely meritocratic, though, I think that would be enormously difficult to achieve.
To anyone trying to defend race-conscious admissions: Who do YOU trust to factor race into an application process?
Seriously! Who would you trust to do that? Is there *any individual* that could reasonably balance that? Maybe. But there's just no way an *institution* or a subsect of it could ever do that in a just, rational, publicly justifiable way.
Dead on arrival social policy today.
Slow Boring fam: I vibecoded a little polling tool to survey questions like this "Should race matter in college admissions" (among other, more substantive policy/opinion questions) by different podcast/newsletter/media communities. Not very interesting yet without meaningful data but if y'all enjoy seeing poll results sliced up by cross-tabs, would love to get some responses to test out the flow.
Subpage for Slow Boring: https://votto.app/slowboring
Customer request (admittedly kind of trivial):
Would it be possible to edit out the verbal “like”s from the transcript version?
Going to Yale does not produce as much value as Jerusalem claims. Yale attracts the sort of student who already knows about, say, prestigious fellowships, and it makes it easier for those students to get said fellowships. If you show up at Yale not knowing about the fellowships, Yale won't explain it to you. If you turn out to be a superstar student at Yale, which is very hard, faculty will guide you to those fellowships, but that is true at every school. If you are not a superstar student, Yale's advatage is in you learning about these fellowships and having a network to put that knowledge to use for the benefit of your children. But the Ivy League schools, overall, have very weak network effects for most students. It might help you network at the country club, but only if you are a member of the country club in the first place, at which point you can't separate the effect of going to Yale from the effect of being a member of the country club.
As much (and as little) as always, as an indicator of unobserved strength in a candidate with near equal observable characteristics.
This is a very weird choice of discussion to have because I think that a. the merits case for affirmative action is obvious but also that b. the public, which is concededly dumb, does not agree with the merits case and so therefore affirmative action is as dead as a doornail as public policy. I do not even see any colorable path to persuade the public on the issue; leftist academics have been tacking into the headwinds on that issue for 40 years and they've gone backwards. Take a fuckin' hint.
I can think I'm as attractive a hottie as can be, I can get people to publish articles describing me as a most eligible bachelor, but if women don't want to sleep with me that doesn't mean jack diddly.
Close enough, welcome back The Weeds
John McWhorter's latest essay addresses AA: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/opinion/ai-dei-arts-academics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Z1A.x3Fh.Ib3ZODS7834F&smid=url-share
The other big problem with using race in college admissions is the fact that race isn't a verifiable reality the way that your family income or gender is. Even if you're transgendered, you're required to have something on all your government documents, and it has to be the same thing all the time. All the racial categories have blurry edges. Are Afghans White/Caucasian or Asian? As I pointed out to an Afghan friend in high school, his parents' country of origin is much closer to the Caucasus than my Scottish ancestors ever were. If you're trying to split blacks between African-American descendants of slaves and African immigrants, what does one make of children of Caribbean immigrants? And that's all assuming people are being honest, which there's no good way to check anyway, since race is entirely self-identified and not something that schools can check.
FYI, the correct term for "driving in silence like a psycho" is "raw-dogging"
I wish you had focussed on why we need affirmative action in the first place. Yes, systemic oppression under slavery is a good reason, but one would think with passage of the civil rights act in 60s and affirmative action till recently should have bridged the gap a lot more than it has. I mean it is three generations (Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z). George Will used to point to cultural capital to explain the gap; why have we not implemented policies to build that cultural capital in poor families, say through outreach on best practices on raising kids, nutrition in meals, inculcating good habits in kids and so on? Trying to fix the problem in college is sub optimal and bound to fail.
I find myself quite uncomfortable with the idea that we should be race blind into who gets into power. I think it's really quite scary that people just want the top level of scores and like push certain kind of people out of power.
Like why do we want a ruling class that is substantially less black or hispanic than the country as a whole so that the people in the room who can destroy you without consequence. It should have like the full cross tabs of American society in the ruling class.
So more of a quota system like in India where everyone is assigned a racial category (none of this weakass self-ID stuff) and every race has set-asides for how many ruling class seats they get to have?
I think if you asked me to design a system from scratch I might go for something more like a credit score that could be more responsive but the idea seems better than elevating a bunch of 18 year olds based entirely on test scores and grades.
I got to the ends where they talk about the paper. Jerusalem mentions that people are more likely to have crashes or fatalities from car crashes when they're alone, but isn't that because people do the vast majority of their driving alone? I don't know the study or if they controlled for the amount of time people spend in the car alone, but I feel like they should be a little more worried of spurious correlations. When they used to do this sort of thing on the weeds back in the day, I probably should have been more skeptical. I need a lot more information before I consider whether a study is done well and likely measuring something real. It would be better if there were many studies that showed the same thing
Haven't had time to listen yet, but I do want to flag that unlike the regular SB blog posts, this page has every comment everywhere load all at once, instead of highlighting the top 2 and hiding everything else "below the fold". Similar to what ACX does, and the outcome is similar: grinds page loading to a halt, not helped by loading the actual podcast too. I don't know if this was intentional? And it probably won't become as bad an issue, since the podcasts attract an OOM fewer comments generally...but until Substack improves their backend to not choke on loading tons of comments, I'd prefer going back to the regular display format. My ISP thanks you.
My bigger "pain point" if you will is that there is no way to sort the comments chronologically; I am stuck with the abysmal "top comment" view which forces all conversation to whoever got their hot take in first.
As a Canadian, I always find it strange how American discussion of Ivy league universities doesn't dwell more on how small they are. Harvard has 6500 undergrads. Princeton has 5500. Yale has 6800. In Canada, the university of Toronto is a prestigious institution, and it has 80,000 undergrads, with a tenth of the endowment that Yale has.
I feel like most of this discourse would melt away if these institutions were to spend their vast hoards of capitol and teach more people. If each ivy league school had capacity to teach 50,000 undergrads the arguments about composition would be much less cutthroat since more people that were interested and had sufficient academic achievement could attend. No more needing to cut the asian with 'bad personality' (ick) to make room for the latino with the 'inspiring story' or the person lying about indigenous heritage, you could just let them all in cause they all have a 1500 SAT or whatever.
I think you could argue this would dilute the quality of the product.
What I'd really like the ivies to do is open a chain of magnet schools in disadvantaged communities. You don't even need to offer a fast track to Harvard - but you're actively making the "highly qualified applicant" pool much more diverse
Similar to the comment below, that sounds more like Berkeley?
Very different atmosphere, much more anonymous than having a chance of knowing a good number of people, far less selective, etc.
Right, but if this were to happen, admission to the Ivies would quickly mean much less, because the degree would distinguish each individual graduate far less from the broader population. In such a situation I imagine some other mechanism than admission to an Ivy would come to perform the same function, perhaps skull & bones style societies, perhaps social clubs like the union league, perhaps something else entirely. Insofar as the goal is to make access to the general American elite purely meritocratic, though, I think that would be enormously difficult to achieve.
Nice question: give me a transcript and I'll weigh in with any thoughts...