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whocares1970There is a popular misconception that racial preferences in college admissions and personnel matters simply help to decide between applicants of essentially the same academic level. This is not true, and here is just one quantifiable evidence of this:
<< A 2009 Princeton study showed Asian-Americans had to score 140 points higher on their SATs than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics and 450 points higher than blacks to have the same chance of admission to leading universities. >>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-unfair-advantage-in-admissions.html
Sure enough, the article in NY Times concentrates on the unfair advantage of white applicants over the Asians (yes, it is unfair as well, of course), that's their narrative. But the numbers are there, and so you can easily see that and average black applicant is admitted with 310 points less on their SAT than an average white one. That's is quite a lot. And, on top of that, please pay attention to the "leading universities" part of the above quote. This is important. Apparently, there are not enough well qualified black applicants even for the top schools.
One may wonder, what would happen if schools and colleges stopped using racial preferences in the admission process. Luckily, we have a way of knowing., as there are still some schools that base their admission process entirely on qualification of the applicants and do not take race into the account. Here is one example:
<< Stuyvesant is one of New York City’s “specialized high schools.” To gain admission, you must first take an entrance exam. Every year, thousands of kids take the test—last year it was 27,817—to try their luck at getting into one of the city’s eight specialized high schools. What separates Stuyvesant from the rest of the specialized high schools is simply that it has the highest cutoff. It admits the highest-scoring 950 or so students, not all of whom attend.
....
Stuyvesant’s straightforward, exam-based admissions process is enshrined in a state law, the Hecht-Calandra Act of 1971.
.....
Of the 952 admissions offers Stuyvesant made in 2014, 71 percent went to students of Asian origin, while only 2.9 percent went to black and Latino students, despite the fact that 70 percent of the eighth-graders currently enrolled in New York City schools are black and Latino. >>
Sure enough, the left have been fighting a war against this "color-blind" qualification-based admission approach, but the main point is that Stuyvesant
offers a glimpse into how much the racial preferences in admission skew the demographics of the student population, how huge the advantages given to the "minorities" really are, and, once again, how short is the supply of truly qualified "minority" applicants.
Another example is given by the University of California system, as the Affirmative Action has been officially banned there by the voters in 1996:
<< Proposition 209 — approved in 1996 — instantly changed the odds for black, Latino and Native American students vying for a spot in the selective University of California system. The change was felt most acutely at UC Berkeley and UCLA, two of the nation’s most competitive and prestigious public universities.
At Cal, the freshman admission rates for those three groups plunged by more than 50 percent between 1997 and 1998, the year the ban took effect — from 45 percent to 20 percent. The proportion of black freshmen fell by half, to 3.4 percent of the class.
....
Black, Latino and Native American students made up almost 54 percent of California’s high school graduates in 2012 — but just 27 percent of all freshmen, UC-wide, and 16 percent of UC Berkeley’s freshmen class that year. >>
http://www.mercurynews.com/2013/06/21/affirmative-action-ban-at-uc-15-years-later/
And so, once again, the number of truly qualified "minority applicants is very low, and only the monstrously severe racial preferences can propel their percentage in the student body into the values that are suspiciously close to their proportion in the general population.
By the way, it is clear that the preferences have to be especially huge in high-level schools. This contradicts the typical narrative that there are may be not enough qualified "minorities" for mediocre colleges, but the elite universities have sufficient supplies of candidates of any ethnic background, and they can choose excellent students from this pool in any way they want without any detrimental effect on the qualification of their classes.
As a bonus question, let me ask you this. How come that the students of Asian origin are doing so well, inspite of all the very real discrimination that they faced (and are still facing, according to the above data)? Chinese people were used as de facto slave labor way after slavery was officially abolished in this country. In many cases, they were literally kidnapped and brought here. Asian immigrants have an obvious disadvantage in the sense of their need to learn a very different language. During World War II, Americans of Japanese origin were put in camps, literally. And yet, they deliver the most qualified applicants and in disproportionally significant numbers to schools and universities these days. What is the reason? Would anyone like to guess?
Let me mention another popular misconception about racial preferences at this point. Many people believe that these preferences are instituted as a way to remedy the past discrimination. This is not so, and it cannot be so legally because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that explicitly prohibits current discrimination. And so the preferences are actually executed on the ground of promoting "diversity". In other words, there are essential racial quotas that virtually guarantee the "minorities" percentages in admissions, etc. that are at least equal to the percentages of these groups in the general population, regardless of the qualification. This is pure social engineering. This leads to the usual injustice and other consequences that arise from undeserved privileges.
I plan to write more on this topic and on the current developments of the related school of thought in other post. In the meantime, I want to give you excerpts from an article titled "Race Preference and the Universities-A Final Reckoning?" by Carl Cohen published in the Commentary magazine on September 1, 2001. Much of it is about some court cases related to racial preferences in admissions, and It gives useful historical information on the subject.
<< From 1995 to 1998, the University of Michigan sorted all applicants for undergraduate admission into “cells,” using grids marked on the vertical axis with grade-point averages (GPA’s) and on the horizontal axis with test scores (SAT or ACT). Admissions officers were instructed to give standard ratings to applicants in each cell; but not everybody in the same cell received the same rating. In cell after cell, applicants with a given set of academic credentials were rejected if they were white but accepted if they were from a targeted minority—African American, Hispanic American, or Native American.
Overall, admission rates for these minorities were much higher than admission rates for white and Asian applicants.
These and many other facts became public in 1996, when the university documents revealing them were reluctantly delivered up in response to a request under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).3 For years, the university had explicitly denied giving racial preferences, but by the time the present cases were filed in 1997, the reality was no longer in dispute. Then, in 1998, the university changed the mechanics of its undergraduate-admissions system to eliminate the embarrassing grids while continuing to give preference in other ways. The newer system, still in force, is based on point totals: out of a
possible 150, 100 normally suffice for admission, with minority applicants receiving twenty points automatically.
.....
As sworn depositions revealed, the number of points awarded for minority status in the new system was decided upon by determining statistically how many points would be needed to insure the same number of minority admissions as the old system!
....
The Michigan law school is highly competitive; thousands apply each year for some 380 seats. Using undergraduate grade-point averages, and LSAT rather than SAT scores, the law school charted admissions by race from day to day. Each cell in these charts (also obtained through a FOIA request) disclosed the number of applicants and the number of acceptances in each category of academic achievement. Separate charts were prepared by the school for “Caucasian
Americans” and for “African Americans” and other minorities. The admission rate for white applicants in many cells was 2 or 3 percent while—in those same cells—the admission rate for blacks was 100 percent. Statistical analysis showed that, for minority students, the odds of admission were hundreds of times greater than the odds for majority students with the same academic credentials.
None of this could be denied. But how the number of minority students was decided, and whether numerical targets were in fact used, were matters hotly contested at the trial ordered by Judge Bernard Friedman. Deans and admissions officers of the law school were examined and cross-examined, minutes of faculty meetings and other records were analyzed scrupulously. The university repeatedly sought to assure the court that although race was indeed considered, it was merely one minor factor among many. But, with awkward inconsistency, administrators were also anxious to persuade the court that, if they were not permitted to continue to use race in admitting students, the Michigan law school would be devastated. Thus was confronted what may be called (after the
university’s president) Bollinger’s dilemma: if the elimination of racial preferences would indeed be devastating, race could not have been a minor factor; if it really were a minor factor, the elimination of preferences could not be devastating. The law school wanted it both ways. University officials found cross-examination at this trial greatly discomfiting. They were obliged to duck and dodge the questions seeking to determine what the target percentage of minority students had been. Law-school officers expressed abhorrence of any “quota,” denied using any target numbers, and insisted repeatedly that they sought no more than a “critical mass” of minority students. But how did they know when they had achieved a critical mass? Was there really no target number at all? How did they know when they had too few? Responses were doggedly evasive, but the university could not escape disclosing, through its own documents and in answer to questioning, that it had indeed always found its critical mass at the point where minority admissions reached 10 to 12 percent of the entering class, or more. The regularity with which minority enrollments over recent years fell neatly into that range was quite remarkable.
What was really going on in the Michigan law school could not be hidden, and proved highly embarrassing for a great university. Judge Friedman, in his findings of fact, put the inescapable conclusion bluntly: the system of racial
preferences at the Michigan law school, he said, was “practically indistinguishable from a quota." >>
I recommend reading the whole article to anybody who is interested in this topic.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/race-preference-and-the-universities-a-final-reckoning/
no subject
Date: 2017-10-22 12:32 pm (UTC)мне прямо неудобно было смотреть на жалкого Майерса - у него не было никаких аргументов, на чёткие вопросы он отвечал саркастическим смехом и заламыванием рук, статистику обзывал crap & baloney и через слово поминал наследие рабства и сегргацию.
и это их лучший debater!
no subject
Date: 2017-10-23 10:44 pm (UTC)Кoгдa я жил в Мичигaне, этo время oт времени и прoисхoдилo. A здесь я сoвершеннo behind the enemy lines, ничегo пoдoбнoгo уже не oбсуждaется.