Debating affirmative action in universities is pointless and just makes things worse
I hate the debate over affirmative action at Universities, it is pointless. I would hate the debate even if I believed affirmative action was a bad thing. Affirmative action, like the rain and the wind, is going to keep coming. The only conceivable scenario I can imagine where it stops is one in which the Ivy League Colleges cease mattering. I support affirmative action, but even if, in some abstract sense, I thought it was a bad thing, I wouldn’t dare try to abolish it. Trying to abolish it only means it will be enforced in worse ways.
The Ivy League universities are sites of elite reproduction. They are where we sanctify and bless the next class of ruling brats, or at least a big portion thereof. They are not, primarily, sites of education.
Black people will not accept, nor should they accept, not being part of the elite class, or the big bit of it that goes through the Ivies. Of course, Black people are already underrepresented in the elite class, but they will not accept this state of affairs getting much worse. If white people are wise they would not want this to happen either, it would likely be tremendously destabilising.
<1% of those scoring over 700 in the maths SAT are Black. Black people make up 12.4% of the population. This means that Black students are much more than ten times as unlikely to score over 700 than would be representative of their population share.
Suppose that getting into Harvard was a lottery which every single person in the country who got over 700 on the maths SAT was entered into. This would mean that <1% of Harvard attendees would be black.
You might be thinking that the maths SAT is a bad choice of yardstick. True, scores on the verbal SAT are better, as is GPA, but this is more than balanced by the fact that 700 is nowhere near the cutoff. A Harvard that used quantitative methods of selection would be far more selective on the SAT and the ratio of Black to white students would be even more lopsided than our Maths SAT thought experiment suggests.
Without affirmative action, and using purely quantitative assessment methods, the percentage of black students at Harvard or any other Ivy league university would be well below one percent. We’d be looking for people who scored 790’s and 800’s and Harvard would look like a segregationist’s dream.
Of course, Harvard doesn’t use purely quantitative metrics, but to the extent the metrics are efficient predictors of future grades and thus ““““academic merit””””, they will correlate strongly with quantitative metrics.
So we have a quadrillemma:
Stop using Ivy League universities to create elites.
Have an entire section of the American elites with essentially no Black people.
Abolish the black-white high school academic performance gap
Use affirmative action
2 neither will nor should, be accepted by Black people. 3 can’t be done in any short period of time. That leaves only two options that are in any way tempting.
Abolishing the Ivy League universities as elite production factories certainly has its charms. The problem is that the devil you don’t know can be so much worse. Although in any society there will be more and less prominent people, I wish that elites in the sense that we understand them now didn’t exist. But getting rid of Ivy League universities won’t abolish elites, it will just push elite reproduction elsewhere.
Ivy League universities are massively entrenched in favor of existing rich families, but you know what is even more entrenched in favor of existing rich families: every other available system of selecting elites in our society.
So we are left with affirmative action. Now there are two ways to do affirmative action, sneakily and openly.
You do it sneakily by making the system vague, talking about essays, extracurriculars, letters of recommendation and other stuff, and having a very hush-hush sort of racialized selection process. This allows you to circumvent quantitative differentials in scores along race-based lines and makes it difficult to quantitatively prove bias in your selections, but it has many other undesirable effects. It:
Biases the process in favor of students who know prestigious people for letters of recommendation, have the money to participate in extracurriculars, and have the kind of sick soul that is good at marketing themselves in an admissions essay (and paying for people to read over it, or write it).
Reduces the accuracy of the process as a selection metric for talent.
And yes, the SAT is biased, but you know what’s more biased than the SAT- all the other methods of assessing academic firepower.
If instead, you choose to use Affirmative Action openly, you do so by using quantitative scores and adding bonus points to balance the races. This approach doesn’t suffer from the above problems and so is for what it’s worth fairer and more efficient at selecting the smart. Thus we’d be better off if we can just fess up at the start that we’re going to do affirmative action, use quantitative metrics, and give people bonus points as necessary to balance the races.
Every time there is a new crackdown on affirmative action, there are new incentives to make the selection process vague and opaque, muddying the waters with strange new instruments, tests, and criteria and going the sneaky route. Every time this stuff is fought over legally, and the affirmative action side loses, they can and will just use it as a reason to make their selection practices less open to scrutiny, and less quantitative. A reason? Dare I say an excuse? I suspect they prefer their methods as opaque as they can get away with. Still, the extent of their preference for quantitative measures has fluctuated over time, but their commitment to affirmative action is unwavering. This isn’t primarily due to their nobility of spirit- in a society like America as we’ve already discussed they simply wouldn’t be able to get away with having almost no Black students, even if they wanted to.
If you really want your child to have the best chance to go to an Ivy league university, I’d say you’re better off calling for the abolition or dramatic reduction of legacy admissions (assuming you’re not an alumni yourself). Intuitively legacy admissions are much more unfair than affirmative action and have a far less noble purpose. Currently, about 12% of admissions to Ivy League Universities are legacy admissions, but there are a large number of research universities that don’t use legacy. Scrapping legacy admissions is at least somewhat plausible.
Fight against affirmative action and the selection methods are likely to get even worse and more opaque. Not only is this debate counterproductive, it’s boring. I’m aware that what I’m saying here might seem nihilistic, but there can be no locally just institutions in a structurally unjust society. As soon as racial disparities exist, as soon as class disparities exist, there can be no perfect response to them.
The Ivy League’s rejection of quantitative methods is bad for everyone- but it’s especially bad for the smartest among every group. There are numerous Black people in the top decile of academic performance among applicants to Harvard- almost half of them- who aren’t accepted. Meanwhile, Black applicants from the sixth decile are accepted regularly.
Maybe you think that my opposition to subjective methods for selecting college students is naive by my own benchmark. As long as a College is dedicated to elite reproduction, it’s going to have incentives not to literally just select the ‘best and brightest’. Alright, fair enough, but this is a battlefield in which things get better and worse, and the only real effect of pushing against affirmative action is to push the universities to use even more subjective, inscrutable, and unmeritocratic methods.
This debate is so incredibly tedious and dull. I’d much rather talk about giving more life chances than this useless, and counterproductive grievance-mongering. Right now a typical Ivy League might have 9% Black students. What do you think the odds are that this figure will ever, say, halve? Not high. Who benefits, then, from the endless whinging about it?
Not commenting on the substance but critiquing some bad math:
"<1% of Black students score over 700 in the maths SAT. Black people make up 12.4% of the population. This means that Black students are much more than ten times as unlikely to score over 700 than would be representative of their population share."
Pause here. By this logic, since whites are over 50% of population, over 50% of whites should score over 700. Non-sensical. Instead what you need to do is compare % of blacks over 700 with % of total over 700. Or if you insist of using % of population, % of people over 700 who are black vs total % of students who are black.
The actual numbers: 1% of blacks who take SAT score over 700 on Math, vs 9% of total test takers. Same general ballpark you discussed. But just correcting the framing.
I don't totally disagree with this, but a few points:
1. As we've seen at elite high schools in the US, if you make the selection process purely based on test scores, likely the winners will be majority Asian. In one sense it is very good that you have families coming in as immigrants, easily understanding how to get ahead in society, and then working hard to do so. That said, in the mode of pure politics, majority Asian institutions are very vulnerable politically, which is why many notable elite high schools are being reformed to deliberately have their Asian share reduced.
2. Holistic admissions and ALDC biases would exist without affirmative action, and schools do then because they want to have the biases these processes create, not by accident. I'm very much of the view that, as stated by now-ignored SCOTUS precedent, schools should have to take all other measures to raise class diversity before going to affirmative action, and thus should be forced to scrap ALDC biases before affirmative action goes in place, which is currently not what almost anyone asks of them.
3. Our current system for racial sorting in the US is a kludge. It would advantage the children of Nigerian oil barons but a refugee from Afghanistan or Palestine would likely register as white, and a low-caste Indian immigrant would be treated as Asian, the worst penalty that can be earned. Meanwhile, there's no formal accounting for socioeconomic class, so poor whites typically don't benefit at all.
4. This post is focused on elite institutions, but affirmative action is everywhere. Outside of elite institutions, my impression is that there is more evidence that affirmative action pushes some portion of students into academic challenges they aren't prepared for, leading people who could have been successful graduates to drop out.
5. It's fundamentally strange to me that these schools have been caught engaging in pretty bad discrimination, e.g. the quite offensive texts between NC college admissions officers about Asian students, and yet there is not widespread condemnation of this from the left, and everyone has just accepted that the schools will try to breach the law as much as possible without being in active contempt of court, which is something we accept for few other institiutions.