327 Comments

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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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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I’d like to share my experience as a first generation college student who went to an elite school (Vanderbilt) and credits it with much of my success in life. In my mind there are four main factors that made the education good:

1. It’s free. Vanderbilt and many other elite schools are essentially free if your parents make less than $70,000 a year which is the median American income. This is only about 15% of the student body which is a problem…

2. Meeting elites. Most readers of this blog probably don’t understand that when you grow up in a middle class life in an unfashionable town, you don’t understand possibilities. Your neighbors are plumbers, grocery store managers, and maybe a marketing guy who works in the city. The richest people in town are the car dealership guy and the local surgeon. If you’re smart, people tell you to be a doctor or lawyer. Finance? Consulting? Never heard of ‘em until I went to college. It’s nice to have friends with parents that actually have connections and can set you up with job interviews! I ended up become a doctor so this didn’t really matter but when I was considering finance it sure as hell would have.

3. Prestige. People and jobs respect you. You get boost just by saying where you went to college. People assume you’re smart in a way that even saying a top state school like UT Austin doesn’t give you.

4. Academic rigor. Like most of my classmates, I was top of my high school class and it wasn’t particularly difficult for me. Competing against a class of valedictorians is extremely difficult but brought out the best in me academically. Med school was easy compared to college. This was not the case for my med school classmates that went to state schools.

Anyway only tangentially related to the post but I think #2 is the biggest benefit for low-income students. If your dad is gonna get you a job at Citigroup or help you start your politics website a fancy college doesn’t help. If you never even though about working for McKinsey until you heard what that was in college that can change your whole life. I saw this first hand as lower-income friends (who universally all came into college for pre-med, teaching, or pre-law) switched into more exotic career tracks like “marketing analytics” or “financial analyst” that the rich kids had wanted to do from the start.

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Regarding students and early-career folks not succeeding in opportunities given due to affirmative action.

I was a very high-achieving upper-upper-middle-class white dude who took a nose dive at age 19 because my brain decided alcohol was delicious. At 27, while my college roommates were working at Goldman and McKinsey or finishing med school, I was making minimum wage and living in a terrible roach-infested apartment.

Quit the booze. Did well in a grad program at directional state commuter university. Started climbing the career ladder from many rungs below where I would have started had I not screwed up college/early-to-mid 20s.

My initial colleagues included many first-generation college grads. At the next rung up, I started running into young graduates who had benefited from diversity hiring programs.

Despite having a privileged background, I did not have any family or other connections that got me jobs or promotions. However, it was immediately striking how my background made moving up much easier.

Knowing how to behave in social settings was a big leg up. How to play golf or tennis. More importantly - the etiquette of those sports. How to act at a sporting event or fancy dinner.

The bigger advantage was the vaccine, if you will, that having grown up around very successful career people, provides against imposter syndrome. The corporate world is complicated. The list of skills and experiences you're supposed to have at leadership levels is beyond daunting. Of course, almost no one actually has all these skills. Of course, most managers and directors are as clueless about many aspects of their jobs as one would expect. But first-gen folks frequently struggle to understand this and get intimidated about moving up. When your idiot uncles are both VPs at big banks, you understand that it's all a Potemkin Village.

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“ possibly by intensifying the test-optional trend so it’s harder to quantify discrimination against Asian applicants.”

It will be amusing to watch a future Republican government in California mandate SAT/ACT-only admissions decisions. The party of merit, ladies and gentlemen!

Christ, is there anyone outside of the activist community the left is *not* trying to piss off?

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When I read the dek, I was all ready to snark that we need to "[r]edistribute Supreme Court seats away from the richest, most exclusive schools", and thankfully as I continued to read, Matt included an entire paragraph on that. Well done!

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Feb 2, 2022·edited Feb 2, 2022

Own the Libs by Tax Endowments Ivy League Endowments?

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Would SES based affirmative action pass SCOTUS muster? Matt has mentioned that since Black people are disproportionately low income, programs that target low income people help Black people. It’s also a lot more politically palatable.

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There is fundamental value to composing a class not just of the most technically smart, but putting together a class that includes driven and well connected individuals. Maybe I’m biased by my own experiences attending two top 5 public universities, but there was nothing wrong with the instruction there. And knowing many friends who went to UCF, USF, FSU, FIU, FAU, etc (the lower UCs of Florida), there’s not much throwing money at the problem would do to make the experience better. The curriculum is the same, especially for hard sciences and engineering.

What you’re missing is the competition and connections. Students at the lower schools care less about learning and care more about finishing college with the least amount of effort (and learning!) possible. And they have worse connections to start life, and given their lack of drive, will have worse connections throughout life.

That’s my take — at least as someone who went to top public universities and works in places where almost everyone went to an Ivy or equivalent (Eg MIT).

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My overarching theory on everything college admissions/pricing/attendance/etc. is that the source of the problem is the lack of rigor in public high schools. We've incentivized graduation rates and college attendance rates at the cost of actual education. Grade inflation has moved us into a world where a BA is now what a high school diploma was 50 years ago. The answer is to raise public school year to year standards, hold more kids back and give out fewer diplomas, while offering more non-four year college tracks to success in the workforce. Offer 16 year-olds a 2 year program at the local CC to learn a skill. Make an 18yo with a high school diploma a valuable asset. Constrain college admissions to those likely to succeed pursuing a truly advanced degree.

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This is all well and good but I think misses the core political question. Is affirmative action supposed to be the end of a racially gerrymandered past or the beginning of a (differently) racially gerrymandered future? People are right to read proponents as supporters of the latter, and, based on the polls Matt cites, I think it's a good sign for America that healthy majorities reject that approach to public policy.

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How robust is the conclusion that "meritocratic sorting generates an inefficient outcome because educational resources are more valuable when targeted at low-SES students than when targeted at the best students"?

I find that very surprising, so much so that I just don't believe it. I would've guessed that resources are more valuable when targeted at the highest-potential (i.e. best) students, who would probably have good outcomes without any resources, but even better outcomes with more resources. Is the research measuring the upper tail of outcomes? How can it be that the best students don't benefit from the best education?

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Beyond Matt's main point, but I do think the fact that you have a significant Affirmative Action case about to be decided by the Supreme Court that has drawn a lot of interest from Asian-Americans and the President has basically come out and said he will not consider an Asian-American for the court (despite there never being Asian representation on the court) is a pretty good distillation of the problems with the current trajectory of the Democratic Party.

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Feb 2, 2022·edited Feb 2, 2022

The chart from The Economist is misleading. The Asian-American % of students shouldn't necessarily track with the absolute population of Asian-Americans. Since 1990, the total US population has grown from 250mm to 330mm. So it seems that the share of CalTech students that are Asian-American has probably grown faster than the Asian-American share of the broader population.

None of that matters to me, personally. I'm part of the 73% that believe in race-blind admissions. But let's be careful about the data we use to argue for this.

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Placing all the costs of affirmative action on Asians (which is probably the most diverse intra-racial category) to win social justice points and to maintain a large proportion of an admitted cohort as rich & white is pretty perverse.

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Separate and apart from the larger argument, I would like to quibble with the Economist graph (2nd graph), from which Matt draws the (unsupported, IMO) conclusion, "A large share of elite universities seem to be applying de facto quotas to prevent the Asian-origin share of their student body from rising in line with their share of the population." It's a mis-leading graph - the conclusion it is clearly trying to lead you to is that Caltech is just following population trends, and the Ivies are not. But it's an apples-to-oranges comparison - the bar graph is comprised of raw numbers; the trendline is share. As a % of California's population, some light googling tells me that Asians made up 13.0% in 2010 versus 9.6% in 1990 (though I didn't break it down by age cohort, as this graph did, and the graph goes to 2013, I assume the numbers are roughly similar for this critique).

Without seeing the underlying data and just eyeballing the chart, it looks like the median Asian-American Ivy enrollment has ticked up from maybe the low teens to the upper teens - in any event, not dramatically dis-similar to proportional growth in the population.* Whereas Caltech has jumped from the low-20's to the low-40's. So if anyone is an outlier versus overall trends, it's Caltech, not the Ivies - the exact opposite to what the graph purports to show.

Long-time subscriber/reader (via the morning email), first time commenter. Love the overall quality of the content, but this could be better.

*It's also unclear whether the graph is talking about Californian Asian-American admittance rates, or the entire population, so that may also have an impact. Have I mentioned I think it's a terrible graph?

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