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Just Imagine If College Administrators Followed the Law
I presume that colleges will find a way around the Supreme Court decision. They’ll find a way to discriminate based on race but conceal it with vague language about life experiences or something. Something very difficult to specify in a lawsuit. So I presume that affirmative action will continue as before — the same numbers, but differently worded admission policies.
But what if they don’t?
Steve Hayward posted this table at Powerline – it’s from John Roberts’ opinion. It shows that Harvard’s incoming class is 10% – 12% black every year. I wonder what that percentage would be with color-blind admissions? If you based admission on grades, standardized test scores, writing skills, etc., I wonder what percentage of the next Harvard class would be black? I’m sure somebody knows that statistic.
Anyway, suppose the college administrators follow the law (a ridiculous supposition, but follow me here). And then suppose, hypothetically, that the percentage of blacks in elite colleges were to fall significantly.
What then?
I presume Black Lives Matter would start burning down black neighborhoods, demanding better elementary and high school education for black students.
Or perhaps Vice President Harris would start an initiative to strengthen the black family. Encourage people to get married, then have kids, and then stay married. Reduce parents’ dependence on government, and increase dependence on families and churches. Keep fathers involved with their kids’ lives.
Or perhaps Al Sharpton will scream his demands into a bullhorn, that whites should expect blacks to stand on their own two feet. That he resents the soft bigotry of low expectations, and says that blacks will achieve the same as whites only if they are treated the same as whites. He believes that treating people differently based on their race is wrong. And every group throughout history that has done that, has ended up being wrong with the benefit of hindsight. Every time. He understands that there will always be a few racist individuals around, but that government-sponsored racism must stop.
He will scream that if we want to stop discrimination based on race, that we should stop discriminating based on race. He will point out that our racist admission policies hurt Asians and whites, but they also hurt blacks, because they know they don’t have to compete on a level playing field. Which means that affirmative action hurts everyone, helps no one, is blatantly illegal, and is ethically horrifying to boot.
Mr. Sharpton will demand that blacks be treated equally to whites, so that blacks can be equal to whites.
Obviously.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps the left might respond differently to a drop in black college admissions.
Hard to say, I suppose.
But it doesn’t matter. We won’t find out. Because college administrators will not stop discriminating based on race.
Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King would be furious. Al Sharpton and Barack Obama will be happy.
Which tells you all you need to know.
Published in General
Oh come on, if college administrators stopped discriminating on the basis of race everybody at Harvard would be Asian or Jewish. Am I stereotyping?
I wonder why these college admissions folks dislike Asians so much. They make up only 7% of our population, making them an even smaller minority than African Americans. Why don’t they rank higher on the sympathy list?
I know one or two Roman Catholics who sneaked in.
I’d be good with that as long as they discriminate against non-citizens.
I don’t know about Jews, but there will definitely be more Asians. Their admission numbers have been kept down for the sake of “fairness.”
A lot of smart students from around the world come here for college, and some stay here and open successful businesses. Is that detrimental to America?
Maybe I need to work on the ending.
Because they don’t fail. They succeed.
This undermines the entire Leftist explanation for the various problems among American blacks. Unless you assume that the Orientals have now joined the whites as oppressors of the poor black and brown people. Once you make that assumption, the Orientals are not only underserving of sympathy, but deserving of condemnation.
On the average, yes.
Because it is only some.
More than that, Chinese national engineering students (among others) may well be spies or future patent pirates.
Harvard may do as it pleases – they generally do – but whyever should state citizens pay state taxes to support state schools that educate non-citizens?
I believe the regressive’s have a bit of a guilt complex. Their government policies have created such pain and suffering in the inner-city communities. It is my understanding that African Americans were doing quite well in the 1940s and 1950s. If left alone, they would be achieving quite well and be represented fully in the university ranks. But I gave up trying to read a regressive mind a couple of decades ago.
Don’t most non-citizens pay their own way. It was my understanding that’s why colleges long for more of them. But I don’t really know for sure.
Good news for their academic programs, but bad news for the football team.
We have talked about merit promotions with our Marine son. He told of the experience with “blind” promotions boards. That is – they stopped including pictures of the candidates with the package given to the board. (The complaint was that pictures showed how Marines really looked, and some didn’t match the preferred conformation. That is – some were more fit than others ….. and that wasn’t fair.) Instead of achieving a more generous promotion quota for the desired demographics, assessments on assessment packages left more un-promoted. Pictures are once again in the packages.
There will be a way to fill classes with kids the colleges want. I do wonder how the colleges will cope if that Los results in more scholarships or direct grants and that hits their endowments unduly. Not every scholarship admit pays their own way through increased sports attendance or tv fees.
My information may be out of date. The way I understood it is if you are going to a state school in the state you have always lived in you get a subsidized tuition. If you are going to a state school in another state, you don’t get the subsidized rate, unless the two states have a reciprocity agreement. So I presume that when a student from Egypt, India, or Canada is going to school at a state university in the U.S., they are paying for their own education.
As for China and spies, sure I can understand having different rules for China, but that is a decision that should be taking place at the U.S. State Department, not at the level of individual schools or state governments.
There are in-state and out-of-state tuition rates etc, but I doubt that even the out-of-state rates actually cover everything.
And in some places such as the People’s Republic of California, non-citizens can get it all for FREE.
The bigger the catchment the smarter the school.
Can’t we find anyone objectively less anti-American than the State Department? Hamas, for instance.
Because they practice what are stereotypical WASP virtues and succeed. They don’t worry about it being said that they are “acting white”. The American failures can’t stand that.
No, not really.
Blacks were on an upward trajectory in the 1940s and 1950s, which took a turn for the worse in the 1960s, probably because of family breakdown, and welfare was probably a major contributor.
The empirical evidence is that black average IQ is around 12-13 points lower than white, and it’s not much affected by the environment. It looks like it’s simply a lower IQ group. Orientals are a bit higher than whites, though not by as much, maybe 5 points or so.
It’s not necessarily the case that the group with the higher average will be overrepresented at the top, as there could be different group standard deviations, but this doesn’t appear to be the case.
The Leftists don’t have a guilt complex. Not exactly. They blame other whites for the failures of blacks. That’s not guilt, it’s a misplaced sense of injustice. Injustice is never zero, of course, but when it comes to overall treatment by race, we’ve actually been living under Black Privilege for the past 50-odd years. It just doesn’t help much, because it’s hard to do much for a person with an IQ in the 85-90 range.
And I read that the military found that someone with an IQ of like 82 or less can’t be trained to do ANYTHING useful even in the military. Apparently not even peel potatoes. Because there’s also problems with showing up on time, etc.
Jordan Peterson discussed that at length. There is a video on youtube. He left out the racial aspect.
His assumption was that modern society is approximately as complex as military life. That means that if the average IQ is 85 and assuming a normal distribution, approximately 1/2 of that population is unfit for today’s society. “Unfit” in the sense that they cannot contribute anything of value. What happens to them?
Yes, I saw that video also. And he doesn’t mention race himself, but as noted elsewhere/previously, something like 40% of the black population has an IQ of 80 or less. At least in the US.
Assuming true, I’m unclear on the practical significance of this. IQ tests?
I would say the same about the factoid regarding the relative difference between black and white IQs, if true.
Don’t know what you mean by IQ tests being “practical” or something, but in real-world terms, especially as the world and many occupations become more technical, the ability of many blacks to effectively participate goes down. Even faster than for “average” whites and other races.
Here is the CliffsNotes version:
The U. S. Army was trying to find a metric that predicted success as a soldier. Since they had a war to win, they had a motivation to find the correct metric. They settled on IQ. Their research concluded that an individual with an IQ of less than 84 could not be trained to do anything that would help the war effort.
Jordan Peterson took the complexity of the American military to be a good analog for the complexity of today’s society. Assuming the average IQ to be 100, that meant approximately 1 in 10 is unqualified for today’s workforce. He ignored the racial aspect, but if the average IQ within a group is 85, then just under one half of that group is unqualified. Given today’s emphasis on “equity”, i.e. equality of outcome, we have some serious issues to address.
There are other studies that I hope, yes sincerely hope, are faulty. I’d rather not address them unless you insist.
They practice “white” values more than white people do. Get married. Stay married. Work. Study. Delay gratification. Avoid committing crime.
I don’t know about them as a group, but the ones I knew personally did those things. And did quite well overall.
They vote for Biden in 2020 because someone told them Trump was a very rude person who sent out very nasty tweets, even though they may not even know what a tweet is.
Best satire I have read this week. Babylon Bee worthy.
I was able to find data quickly about illegitimacy for the last year reported, 2021, here. The illegitimacy rates are:
“Asian” probably best captures the Orientals — Chinese, Japanese, Korean — who seem to be what we generally have in mind when we say “Asian” these days. I continue to use the old term, which is not pejorative in any way, and which better expresses the identity of the group. Otherwise, we end up including India-Indians and others in this category.