Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action in College Admissions

If you are taking into account things other than a student's academic merit when it comes to applications, then you aren't after "equality" and you shouldn't pretend like that's the case.

 

Except equal policies only work when the status quo (current state) is equal. When things aren't equal then equal policies only serve to maintain the inequality. Explain how your desired system is equal when one student using his parents money can take $1,000 SAT courses and retake the exam twice to get the best score possible while a poor student can only afford to take it once and live with the result?

 

Then don't say you are asking for equality or for the system to be fair when you are asking for it to be unfair in order to benefit some over others.

I mean, there's no way to make things 100% fair given that smart kids are going to have a natural advantage over dumb kids and other advantages like those with more resources are going to be able to afford better tutoring and whatnot, but at least if you are going based on merit then you'd be rewarding success, even if it was easier for some than others rather that merely rewarding status which is what you do when you prop up any one group artificially.

I think you help those less fortunate with student aid but in no way should you reward students merely for their racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic status' by propping them up artificially. Rewarding merit is the way to go....even if it is easier for some to achieve academically than it is for others. Anything else is madness.

 

Sounds about right, getting rid of affirmative action will have little impact on white students and the Asians will benefit.

 

Never beleived in the Bell Curve
seems arbitrary and full of ****

Rocket River

 

Smart and dumb are arbitrary distinctions
the whole If smart is defined by tree climbing .. . all fish are dumb

I am 100% in the nuture over nature side of the argument
I don't beleive some are NATURALLY smarter or dumber than others
It comes down to environment, resources and suppose system

If i stole a baby from a tribe that has never seen civilization
in 20 years you could not tell that child from any other 20 something

Rocket River

 

We are all the same species, and I'm defining "smart or dumb" in this context when it comes to academic aptitude.

You can hold the opinion that it's 100% nurture, but that's simply not true. A child born r****ded does not have the potential of someone born a genius even if you "nurture" them the exact same. Not all people are born equal when it comes to intelligence, it's just how it is. The same goes for how people aren't born equal when it comes to physical attributes. My parents could nurture the hell out of me and I'd never be a 7 footer. Now, that doesn't mean that I couldn't end up being better at basketball than someone who was.....I would just have one hell of a hill to climb while it would be considerably easier for them.

I think the "nurture" side plays a part in maximizing or destroying potential, but it can't make something out of nothing. For example, I think of "nurture" as someone filling a container with water. If you start with a gallon sized container, you can fill it with a gallon of water, if you start with a pint, you can potentially fill it with a pint......if you start with a container with a hole in it, you'll never be able to fill it. Continuing that analogy, you could start with a 55 gallon drum and you'd end up with less in it if no one ever filled it than you would have in the pint sized container that was filled to the top.

I also understand that some people who are "dumb" when it comes to academics might end up being absolute geniuses when it comes to another aspect of life such as carpentry or whatever, so I don't want to make it seem like I am dismissing them, they just aren't relevant to a conversation about getting into college.

 

The percentage of kids going to 4-years after high school is around 65 - 70%. Obviously that won't get much higher but the sheer number of people getting rejected from their first choice school every year guarantees an increasing onslaught of lawsuits. I believe the Defense department in recent history has supported AA due to a high volume of non-white ROTC grads.

 

It does bum me out as a high school teacher when some of my students know they have to work harder then others just because of their race. You also hear stuff like "oh he got into that school cause he's hispanic, so and so had better credentials and didn't get in", which is sad but true.

 

As a minority who got called oreo, Carlton, burnt, fudge, double fudge everyday by classmates for being the only black kid in the honors program it's pretty obvious you don't empathize with your minority students or objectively recognize their ambition, ability or efforts. People have been saying this about college-bound minorities since before affirmative action and they'll say it long afterwards.

 

This is the classic game. Much like the wealthy pit the middle class against the poor, whites pit minorities against each other. Nobody says oh he got into that school because he's white. Why is that?

Anyway, interesting opinion piece. I highlight the important factor in Affirmative Action, the propensity to attack Affirmative Action as unfair and discriminatory without addressing the discrimination in k-12. If people were really interested in discrimination they wouldn't attack the one without addressing the other.

Black people aren’t keeping white Americans out of college. Rich people are

The 200th day of Donald Trump’s presidency draws near, and his legislative failures have become all too apparent. What better time to change the conversation and re-energize the base? And what better way than by raising the lightning rod that is affirmative action?

According to a memo leaked to the New York Times, the Trump administration is planning to redirect Justice Department resources to investigate and potentially sue colleges that use “intentional race-based discrimination” in admissions. The project was quickly understood to be targeting affirmative action policies that many on the right see as “discriminating” against white applicants — in particular, ones that might give black and Latino students an edge. This move comes despite the Supreme Court upholding the use of affirmative action to diversify campuses just last year.

Justice Department officials attempted to play down the initiative after the story broke, stating that they planned to investigate a single complaint involving Asian American applicants, not whites. But it barely mattered. The message was sent.

Affirmative action is a consistent hobbyhorse on the right because it combines real anxieties with compelling falsehoods. College admission — especially to the elite institutions most often hit with affirmative action lawsuits — has become more selective and is an increasingly important factor in the creation and perpetuation of wealth and opportunity. Elite colleges serve as steppingstones into politics, finance, law and Silicon Valley; higher incomes tend to follow. Even so, 80 percent of top studentswho apply are accepted into at least one elite school, if not their No. 1 choice. But measures that help historically disadvantaged populations to take advantage of the same opportunity are nonetheless characterized as zero-sum.

What is essential to understand is that it’s not a vast crowd of black or brown people keeping white Americans out of the colleges of their choice, especially not the working-class white Americans among whom Trump finds his base of support. In fact, income tips the scale much more than race: At 38 top colleges in the United States, more students come from the top 1 percent of income earners than from the bottom 60 percent. Really leveling the admissions playing field, assuming the Trump administration actually cares about doing so, would involve much broader efforts to redistribute wealth and power. A focus on fringe campaigns against affirmative action suggests it does not.

Addressing inequalities in K-12 education, for instance, could help at-risk students of all races increase their chances of attending a top college — or any college at all. Policies such as property-tax-based funding for schools and the curiously slanted allocation of talented teachers (in Louisiana, for instance, a student in the poorest quartile of schools is almost three times as likely to be taught by an ineffective teacher as a student in the wealthiest quartile is) give a tremendous boost in college admissions to children from high-income families, often at the expense of their lower-income peers.

And right up to the application-writing doorstep, the beneficiaries of the biggest extra edge in admissions are more often than not the children of alumni. At Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Stanford universities, the acceptance rate for legacy applicants is between two and three times higher than the general admissions rate. Pressing universities to drop legacy preferences, following the example of other elite schools such as the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge, could free up spots for those without that built-in advantage. Trump’s own wealthy-parent-sponsored education at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by the subsequent admission of three of his four adult children, makes that particular initiative seem unlikely.

In many ways, the Trump Justice Department’s proposed attack on affirmative action is a microcosm of how the president won the 2016 election and continues to maintain a base of support. First, Trump taps into a mainstream concern, one tied to how America’s economic system is changing and how some individuals are left at the margin: Employment? Immigration? College? Take your pick. Then, instead of addressing the issue in a way that embraces both its complexity and well-established research, officials opt for simplistic talking points known to inflame an already agitated base: Immigrants are sneaking into the country and stealing your jobs! Minorities are pushing you out of college!

The Trump administration assumes that picking race-focused fights is the most successful way to distract from its failures and to pander to a grievance-inspired base. The level of support for this latest attempt may prove it right.

 

This part is total garbage but whatever, it is what it is. I don't grade any of the kids differently because of their race or gender, yet when i give an Asian kid a B+ instead of an A-, I know it's going to hurt them a lot more then someone who's a different race. What i do is OBJECTIVELY recognize them.

 

Your entire first post was garbage. Your only thought as a teacher when your minority students fulfill their education goals is to assume - let's not pretend for one god damn second that you're checking their transcripts or test scores - that their metrics were too low to get into their applied institution without special consideration.

 

I said it bums me out when kids are thinking this way......i don't really know where you're getting any of the stuff you're saying, just making random assumptions

 

You said it burns you when some of your students know, which means you agree with their crappy bigoted logic meant to undercut and invalidate their non-white classmates. Then you reaffirmed that rationale with a bullshit hypothetical - likely slandering one or several of your hispanic students' academic performance - then claimed it was sad but true.

 

All of this could be prevented by simply eliminating AA and requiring colleges to admit based on merit and not take race or gender into account in order to prevent bias.

 

I have pretty much zero white students. Are you saying that the college admission standards are identical for all students?

 

I rather remove race and legacy requirements from admissions and create more cultural diversity by skewing admissions through socioeconomic and regional differences.

A student growing up in the poorest neighborhoods should be judged better by his/her merits than a kid growing up in Beverley Hills despite having 12 AP courses, 1 sport, and 1 volunteering cause.

The latter might be genuinely smart, but having great parents with resources and an excellent support network is more a matter of luck in the genetic lottery.

The rich kids are more likely think and act the same despite looking outwardly different.

The thing about some of these Ivy Leagues is that a good number of the students they mint are fundamentally dumb streetwise even if they can study better than anyone else.

 

Are college admissions standards identical for all schools, do all the minority students of the same race, even at your campus and under your disdainful instruction, have the same grades, test scores and do they all narrow down to identical lists of the same college choices with the same consideration for their likelihood to get in?