When affirmative action began, there was clearly institutional discrimination against minorities for getting into colleges. In theory you could have fought that discrimination on a case by case basis, but in practice that would have not worked. I don’t think colleges are discriminatory against minorities in general today. They might discriminate among different minority groups. Personally, it seems backwards that we should be putting “race/ethnicity” on any application for anything. It is supposed to make things fair, but fairness would be that colleges don’t know the race of a candidate. It is a way to keep people associating themselves with being oppressed.
Also, putting people in a university over their heads is harmful. If you are in the bottom 1/3 of your university in academic ability then you tend to fail there. You ideally don’t want to “get in” to the best college you can, but you want to get matched with the best college for your ability. being in the 40th-80th percentile of your university tends to make the experience the most valuable. Being below the 30th or above the 90th tends to mean you get less out of it that you would get somewhere else.
It’s just coincidence that the people who were once enslaved, and then, post Reconstruction, faced legalized discrimination, are living in segregated, high crime/low income neighborhoods?
It’s what we have already in the ghetto, and it’s working according to plan.
Affirmative Action is literally a racist concept right out the gate. Think about it: a college chooses to accept a pupil who is African American. Said pupil has a 1.0 high school GPA, yet because of his skin color, and colleges having to meet the Affirmative Action “quota”, he is immediately accepted over people with better grades. How is this not racist? Waiting for the hysterical Liberal spin.
I’d say this below is a hysterical right wing spin:
I don’t agree with how AA is set up FTR. At the same time, I don’t think it plays out like this. The candidate might not be quite as qualified, but a 1.0 GPA won’t even get you a HS diploma.
African American’s accepted into colleges via affirmative action were on average having a SAT score 350 points less than the white counterparts being rejected, and 450 points less than Asians being rejected.
So, that isn’t too far off. That is an ENORMOUS gap.
This isn’t the exact article, but it discusses averages.
“For the test as a whole, Asian students scored 1633 compared to 1581 for non-Hispanic whites, with most of the disparity resulting from a significantly higher mathematics score. Other groups did not do nearly as well. The scores of Native Americans and Eskimos averaged 1448; Hispanics, 1364; and African-Americans, only 1273. Males of all races, who counted for only 46.5 percent of test takers, outscored females, 1523 to 1496.”
There are tons out there concerning the massive gap in scores.
The lawsuit states Asians were not even being considered for Harvard unless their scores were at least 250 points above African American scores. African American’s were being accepted at 1100 on the combined SAT scores.
Even to be considered Asians were not being looked at until 1350-1380 - with most acceptances being much higher than that.
For the first article, it seems to me that those scores weren’t the scores of those admitted to a college, just the scores by race of those who took the SAT?
I acknowledge there is a difference in ACT / SAT and even IQ scores between different groups of people (when looking at the averages), but I think those getting into top schools have better scores than average.
The lawsuit alleges scores of 1100 for black applicants were being accepted for Harvard. While Asian and White scores for acceptance were generally in the 1450+ range.
So if you are black - a 1364 score will get you into Harvard with ease relatively.
That is more extreme than I thought, and it does lend credence to the idea that accepting those applicants is actually cruel as many won’t finish, and will have to pay back their loans.
I was unfamiliar with the scores. 1364 is quite good it seems. I was thinking that was average or something (1050 is average). 1100 is not good enough for a school like Harvard though (I think).
The ACT / SAT is a good predictor of college success. It should be used as a variable for admissions.
I got a 35 on my ACT and I got rejected from every single Ivy that I applied to. In order to gain admission to a prestigious school like Harvard or Columbia, you must have a 5.0 GPA, clock hundreds of volunteer hours, manage a non-profit to feed starving people in third-world countries, and come from a rich socialite family with hidden connections.
You’ll also have to pay one of those amazing Reddit writers $500 for a flawless admissions essay that obviously wasn’t written by a high school student. For context, I’m white. Didn’t get into any Ivy’s, but I earned a full academic scholarship to my University.
The admissions process is flawed and people with 1600 SATs get rejected or waitlisted on a whim because they didn’t clock enough volunteer hours.
Alternatively, their admission essay didn’t align with leftist narratives.
No, the people in the ghetto. Obama, not from the ghetto. Kanye, not from the ghetto. Thomas, not from the ghetto. Lebron, born poor but went to a predominately white private high school.
The Sumerians? We’re talking about US history; what happened here.
Ok. What does that have to do with Jim Crow, Plessy vs Ferguson, redlining, etc.? All of these things are gone but in their place we have welfare and the drug war which contributed to the demise of the African-American nuclear family when added to the vestiges of past institutional racism.
When you tell a people to depend on the government for their very existence you create a permanent underclass with a sense of entitlement.
Change won’t to shouldn’t because students have graduated with lower than that. Schools have changed grades. I worked in a school where teachers were directed by the superintendent to just pass kids.
Take out SATs, as many activists in education want to do and some colleges are now making them optional, and what do you have to judge a student on, grades? Grades which tell you nothing because even good schools inflate them and curriculum has become less rigorous. The SATs have already been made easier which turned out, not surprisingly, to help those who could do well on the harder versions even more, that is, Asians and whites, when it was supposed to help black students.
Lots of people from the ghetto have made it out. My parents were 19 when married, had me at 20, no money, lived in a funeral home that had an apartment in it and worked there to pay the rent with labor while attending night school. They made it out with the assistance of affirmative action… why can’t others? The answer is they have and can.
Yes exactly. The ONLY place in the world to try large scale social engineering to make up for it. It worked well so far didn’t it?
Parental (or other adult figure) involvement in education, especially at an early age, has consistently been shown to be one of, if not THE MOST important factors in educational attainment
And yet, many more don’t. Maybe it isn’t as simple as you need to believe. Go live in the ghetto, as I have, and you just might question whether or not you would have made it out if you were raised under those circumstances.
I was born in what most would consider a ‘ghetto’. Thankfully my parents had pulled themselves out of poverty and into lower middle class by the time I have my earliest memories. They did that on their own and I’m damn proud of them.
I think it certainly is possible. I think looking at what actually happens on average tells a different story.
I for sure used to think the same regarding the Native Americans, especially the ones on poor reservations. I have some friends that have lived on or near these places. Visiting these places has made me realize, that I probably wouldn’t leave if I was born into it. I wouldn’t be the same person with the same ideas I have now.