Black people arent keeping white Americans out of college. Rich people are.

[TygrBright]

From this NY Times Op-Ed

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 students who 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.

Essentially, one from the "duh" file. But nice to see it in the NYT.

wearily,
Bright

[Warpy]

1. Yeah, there's nothing like that rich white kid affirmative action

I saw a lot of it in Boston, even at "difficult" schools like MIT. Now most of those rich kids had brains. Three quarters of them had never been given a reason to bother using them. The "gentleman's C" was alive and well at all the big name schools in the city.

If they want to attack affirmative action, attack that rich boy prep school to name school with no real effort pipeline.

[TygrBright]

2. Not gonna hold my breath on that. Blue doesn't look good on me. n/t

[Igel]

3. People keep looking at the Fischer case.

In which case it's all white and black. Some go so far as to allow "brown" to be part of the group claimed to be the white anti-affirmative-action people's bogeyman.

Of course, this is inference based on incomplete data, but it must be true because it's truthy. (There's a word we've forgotten. Synonym in 2017-speak: Fake news.) Either the leaker overreacted, had incomplete knowledge and made assumptions, or wanted to manipulate the NYT and others (who continue the narrative, having gotten their teeth into it).

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/03/541430130/trump-admin-looking-into-whether-harvard-discriminates-against-asian-americans

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-americans-complaint-against-harvard-could-get-dept-justice-review-n789266

http://www.masslive.com/news/boston/index.ssf/2017/08/trumps_justice_department_to_i.html

Now, it may be that both are going on, anti-non-white affirmative action *and* anti-non-white discrimination. Stop and think about that, though: We don't like affirmative action because we're biased towards whites, but please, let's stop discrimination against Asians.

There's only evidence for the latter.

While a lot of people have recently discovered the split in the Asian community over aff. action, it's been around for a long time. When prop 8 passed in California, we heard percentages about how it hurt Latinos, blacks, Indian, and AIPAC students. 50% reduction for this group at UCLA, 80% reduction for this. But it was a reduction of 50% in 1.8% of the incoming class of 8000. In other words, a reduction of 100 kids to 20, a huge ... percentage (roughly speaking). What others heard was "there's a 20% increase in the Asian population!" Some argued that 80% > 20%, so one was more important than the other. But that 20% meant 1600 additional "students of color". But those were "model minorities" and didn't count ("model minorities," surely a dismissive term, issued on the basis of race and expectations that belonging to a given race requires obeisance to certain behavioral and ideological norms).

So, yeah, the "Asian community" was split. There were East Asians, often against affirmative action because, seriously, that number of additional East Asian admits is not a small deal. Some East Asians opposed it on ideological grounds. "Yes, it hurts us, but it helps others"--surely a case of arguably not *really* knowing "their own interests." AIPAC and Southeast Asian, also "Asians", like it because there were carve outs for them and because of that they had dedicated programs for funding and tutoring their students.

[GeoWilliam750]

4. If we actually selected students ONLY on the basis of grades and test scores

Young white men would fare not very well at all.

Currently, on average in the United States, girls/women form 54-55% of high school graduates.
In terms of course work, girls tend to have a roughly 3.2 GPA versus just under 3.0 for boys, and those girls take more - and more difficult courses.

The only thing in which graduating boys do better than girls is the math portion of the SAT - which has been consistent for a number of years. However, in actual math classes, girls' work tends to be on a par with boys (which raises some interesting questions around the testing protocols).

I have seen no statistics about the extra-curricular activities (no minds in the gutter, please) of boys versus girls, but would initially assume the levels to be similar.

The key difference in all of this is that girls tend to focus and get their work done. They also have a far lower predilection for engaging in criminal activities.
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Another couple of forms of affirmative action include the preference of applicants whose parents went to the university, apparently worth about 10% on the SAT, allowing a large number of under-qualified (and overwhelmingly white - no idea on the break between the genders) applicants to be accepted. Furthermore, contributing vast sums of money to a university will often get one's child a place that they would not have otherwise merited.

Thus, be careful what you wish for. If young white males actually wish for fairness, they might not like the outcome.
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Although I am uncertain as to the existence of legacy as a factor in admissions at UT, Ms Fisher would have a far better chance of success if she said that white males are being unfairly admitted at the expense of white females.

[Nitram]

5. Actually, the elephant in the room that no one is talking about is the affirmative action

that benefits admission of men who score below women. I found this out in a discussion with a University of Virginia professor on the Admissions Committee. It is apparently an issue nation-wide.