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Lance Hunter's avatar

I think a major cultural shift that is needed in this country is to normalize and promote the idea that the majority of students should attend (and graduate from) a two-year community college before attending a four-year institution. There is no significant difference in what one can learn in an English 101 class taught at Harvard and one taught at Northern Virginia Community College (Go Nighthawks).

In fact, it will likely be a better learning environment for most students because they’re more likely to be taught by a professor who is focused on teaching the subject and not a researcher who couldn’t be bothered and who shirks most of their duties to a grad student that has almost no teaching experience. (No, I’m not bitter about some of my intro comp-sci classes. Why do you ask?)

Finally, community colleges are almost guaranteed to be more diverse campuses than even the most affirmative-action-practicing elite institution. Not just racially, but also in terms of economics, age, and life experience. There is a genuine benefit for all students to be part of a diverse community that allows them to meet and interact with a broad range of people, and community colleges are far more likely to actually provide this benefit than most four-year institutions.

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Marie Kennedy's avatar

I'm going to avoid the temptation to pontificate on the injustice of race-based affirmative action and try to focus on Matt's stated thesis: What we should do after (race-based) affirmative action (assuming it gets overturned by the SC) is redistribute resources away from the richest, most exclusive schools. Like many of Matt's culture war-type posts, I feel like he buries his unique stance on these topics by dedicating too much ink to relitigating the heavily debated aspects. I kind of had to force myself to re-read for the meat.

Matt proposes:

-Putting less emphasis on elite school credentials when selecting candidates for elite positions like the SC

-Consider using the Top X% approach more broadly, which would have the effect of racial diversification while staying truer to progressive values

-Spend more resources on low-income students (specific method not shared here)

I agree with all of that. I think Matt kind of misses the heart of the issue here, which is, what problem are we trying to solve with any of this? Increase ease of upward SES mobility? Reduce the structural advantages of being born into a privileged, connected class? Maximize return on investment (of time and money) for every college-aged American? Make America fairer? More competitive? So much of this discussion is based on people's unstated values and goals. It's pretty easy to poke holes in the hypocritical values vs. actions approach of elite private universities, and it's fair to say that it's within the scope of the federal government to outlaw race-based discrimination in college admissions. But answering the question of "what next" requires some clearly stated public domain goals, and I don't think we have those as a nation when it comes to this discussion. I think Matt's unstated goal/value, which I share, is that we should make circumstances of birth less of a dominant factor when it comes to access to opportunity (which I personally think should be the goal of any morally consistent social justice movement) but this isn't necessarily the goal of American conservatives or progressives. Conservatives might prioritize American competitiveness, which might say it's more important to be brutally cutthroat about elite institution admissions, and progressives might prioritize group-based equality of outcomes. These unstated value judgements will influence one's ideas of what steps would be "fair" or "right."

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