First, let me thank you, SimpleDon, for being the first person to address anything in the OP. Loren and Metaphor, don't let Athena, untermenche, and Jimmy succeed in their efforts to derail the thread into the completely irrelevant issue of women being helped by AA policies. It has no bearing on any of the particular issues I explicated in the OP.
You are right, blacks like whites tend to apply to schools where there are a lot of people of the same race. This is easy for whites, harder for blacks.
Blacks and white are not acting similarly. The evidence suggests that blacks are deliberately choosing schools based on racial make-up, thus the fail to apply to or choose to attend if accepted schools that of a higher quality that they would have gotten into with AA. There is no evidence that whites do so. In fact, it is likely the case that % Asian students at schools is positively correlated with school quality, and yet white choose these schools over other schools with more whites. For example, white kids are not turning away from UCLA in favor of lower quality schools in that area, just because UCLA is only 27% white. UCLA still has 83% rejection rate.
I don't know how fine of a definition you want to put on elite schools. If you mean the Havards, Yales, Stanfords, etc. they are very expensive private schools.
See my posts in other threads. I am not using "elite" in a narrow sense but rather as a relative term to refer to differences in how selective the schools are in terms of the grades and prior academic record required to get in, which also reflects the level of learning and performance required to pass the courses and graduate in that school.
I put "elite" in quotes because many people are making argument that only apply to the Ivy leagues or a handful of schools. That has no relevance to any basic issues around AA policies the kinds of arguments against it that prompted any of the recent threads.
For example, UCLA is elite relative to most schools in the state of CA, and U of Texas is more elite than many colleges in TX.
For this reason, I am not directly replying to those comments you made that are exclusive to that narrow definition of elite.
Blacks are twice as likely to be economically disadvantaged. This is the main reason for affirmative action, to try to address this disparity.
And yet, half of all students who are economically disadvantaged in ways that hinder their education and college options are white. Thus, AA policies not only racially exclude half of the people with such disadvantages, those policies actually hurt those people because they are the ones most likely to be among the whites who are just above the normal acceptance cut-off levels and that get rejected to open a seat for minorities below those those cut-offs.
That is the root of the problem. The policy only cares about equalizing the group-level rates of disadvantages, not actually helping the most people who have disadvantages. These are inherently opposed goals, thus efforts to do the former actually undermine the latter.
But I imagine that this is one of the major reasons why fewer blacks apply to these expensive schools. Blacks make up about 6% of the student population of these schools.
The link I provided shows that it is not simply a matter of school costs.
Here is another link, this one to the full research paper. It shows that controlling for income and financial support to attend more competitive colleges, blacks students are less likely to apply to competitive schools, and this is true of students at all achievement levels (meaning students who can and cannot get in based on academics alone). It shows that independent of income or of school tuition costs, black applicants choose schools with more minorities.
IOW, there are cultural/psychological factors independent of economics leading black students to choose not to apply or attend more competitive schools.
To their credit these private universities are trying to increase their minority admissions.
Its only to their credit, if they are doing things to attract more minority applicants with strong academic credentials. It shows selfish political posturing if they are just admitting students with lower credentials, so long as they are minority. This is what most AA policies amount to and the evidence shows clearly that these students with low credentials are more likely to fail out, which is why the narrowing of the admissions gap has done nothing to the narrow the graduation gap. Also, the linked study has data showing that blacks are more likely to apply to schools where others from their community have gone and succeeded. Increasing the number of minority students who go to and fail out of more "elite" schools, which is what happens with AA policies, harms the communities they are from more generally, turning future students off from not only that school but college generally. The ethical and long term effective strategy is to get students into colleges where they will succeed and graduate. Doing that is directly undermined by AA efforts to shifts students from less to more competitive schools, regardless of whether they are prepared.
All that said, it is plausible that some of the most elite and $ private colleges rarely get applicants from outside the top percentiles of students. These are schools where the range of ability is from the 97th to 100th percentiles, which isn't going to show up reliably as differences in class performance. Thus, its common at those schools for failure rates to be extremely low, despite high standards. Going down to the 96th percentile to increase minority representation won't mean getting students likely to fail.
So, my arguments apply more to the less extreme and more common situations where there is a range of ability from say the 60th to the 100th percentile and and average of 80th. Trying to double the black student means pulling them in from the 50th percentile where the probability of failing to meet even moderate classroom standards is high.
This desire of the elite private universities to encourage blacks and the poor twio enter their schools doesn't come from a begrudging attempt to follow the affirmative action law, they don't really have to, they are private universities after all. The tentative attempt to hold private schools to affirmative action laws have never been enforced since there is little chance that they can be held constitutional. They can't discriminate but they aren't forced to favor minorities or the poor.
I agree. They aren't just obeying the law. They are engaging in PR and PC to create a superficial appearance of doing something positive, and don't really care that it does harm. IOW, that are doing it for the same reasons why AA is usually done.
The reason that the elite schools try to increase their diversity is simple. We live in a very diverse country. Graduates of more diverse schools make better employees and managers, better doctors, lawyers and teachers, for our country.
You cannot be a very good manager, doctor, lawyer, or teacher, if you do not graduate and the evidence that the prior preparation reflected by academic record predicts graduation and learning is much greater than the evidence on the importance of the race of one's classmates. Not to mention, if the minority classmates are more likely to fail (which they are due to being admitted when unprepared), then the effect of that is likely to be negative and stereotype reinforcing.
Not to mention, the negative impact on classrooms overall when under-prepared students require an overall slow-down in the curriculum.
Also, poor students, regardless of race, are far more under-represented in college and elite schools than black student as a whole. Thus, since racial AA leads to poor whites being replaced with non-poor blacks, the net result could often be a wash-out in terms of diversity of experiences tied to SES.
Basically, your arguments, at best, only support the general goal of finding ways to get more minorities into more competitive schools. They do not support the particular destructive methods of doing so constituted by current AA policies. I agree with your theoretical goal, but the whole point of the OP is that many obstacles to that goal lie within the black community and within the students themselves who choose, despite economic options, not to apply or go to more competitive schools. Efforts to address that can be done with the harmful aspects of current AA admissions policies that try to make up for the lack of prepared minority applicants by admitting under-prepared ones likely to fail and rejecting prepared students, some of whom were highly economically disadvantaged but who put in the effort to have credentials that would have been good enough if they weren't born white.
Yes, we self-segregate. But rather than being a signal that integration and tolerance for diversity are hopeless, it is the reason that they are needed.
The OP doesn't suggest that integration is hopeless. The point is that the lack of integration at more competitive schools has much to do with competitive minority students choosing not to go to more competitive schools. Thus, no sensible solution to that would simply try to force less competitive students who are not prepared but did happen to apply to those schools into the classrooms and then be upset when the highly predictable high failure rates of those groups occurs. AA admissions standards do nothing to create a long term fix that issue and if anything exacerbate it, in addition to exacerbating other problems, including rationalizing racism.
But if instead of the elite private schools you look at the first tier of the more affordable public supported universities, the so-called research universities, our picture changes, especially if we consider historically black universities. In Georgia there are three large research universities, Georgia Tech, University of Georgia and Georgia State. Using your standard of 13% of the population, blacks are under represented at Georgia Tech (however, almost one half of their total student body is foreign born), about on par at UGA and much over represented in Georgia State, at about 40% of the student population.
Yes, agreed. This is the larger issue that affects for more people and about which the issue AA laws centers.
Is it great travesty that blacks, though over-represented among college students in general, are not evenly distributed across all types of schools? IF they were being barred from some of those schools for being minorities, that would be an injustice. But they are not. In the schools were they are under-represented, some can't get in because they lack the academic preparation, and many others simply choose not to apply or to enroll if accepted. If and where it is thought a problem, the solution is to address preparation and choice, not to ignore both these factors and kick out kids who are prepared and choose to go there in order to equalize group numbers.
Racism will not disappear until the rather questionable concept of race itself disappears. We are obsessed to this day with race. Even while no one can define what is race, everyone seems to know what it means. Affirmative action doesn't help because it relies on race to try to correct one of the worse problems created by this centuries long obsession.
Agreed. Which is why it in fact exacerbates racism, not just because its racist and thus undermines principled arguments against racism, but because it increases performance disparities between racial groups within the classrooms, thereby reinforcing assumptions of racial differences in aptitude, effort, etc..
When half the black students in a freshmen math class fail, as strongly predicted by their low gpa and test scores that were ignored in favor of their race, then this "exposure to diversity" does nothing but harm everyone from the kids who failed, to their classmates who now have another data point consistent with racial differences in aptitude, to everyone else indirectly impacted by all these people and their experiences.
It would be much more straightforward to eliminate poverty rather than to try to balance the numbers of whites and blacks who are poor in portion to their over all numbers in the total population.
Not only more straightforward method, but a respectable goal, which balancing poverty rates is not. One way to balance poverty rates is to increase the % of white who are poor. That illustrates the fact that balancing poverty is nothing we should be striving to do and has no inherent positive value. Incidentally, it is just what race-based AA policies do. They are an act of redistributing educational and related economic opportunities, and the people most likely to have their taken from them and suffer as a consequence are poor whites.
