Humble Talent has provided a nicely provocative snapshot of the frustrating and weird state of the quest for fair college admissions. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “I’m Sick Of Hearing These Arguments That College Admissions Favor The Wealthy And Privileged Because The Problem Is Easy To Fix. So Fix It.” (It also touches on the “disparate impact” scam, discussed here in another context.)
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What I have trouble dealing with is how incoherent some of the positions some of the people are taking are.
Legacy admissions are a great example. We all know why they’re happening: Legacy admissions are a great way of enticing future philanthropy out of donor parents. While I’m sure there are some racists in admissions, that’s financially driven, not racially driven. But we pretend it’s a racial issue because of disparate impact.
In fact, we’re supposed to pretend that legacy admissions are a resource of white supremacy, despite the fact that legacy admissions are almost perfectly proportionate, at least for white applicants (hovering very close to 70%). I don’t know about you, but if I were designing a system that was supposed to privilege my race over others, I might devise a system where my race isn’t almost perfectly proportionately treated.
But it doesn’t matter that both white admissions and legacy admissions are proportionate. Because black admissions aren’t, and “their” slice of the proportionality pie is taken up disproportionately by Asians. So what do we do? Well, we put our thumb on the scale and make it so that the average Asian applicant needs an average SAT score something like 400 points higher than the average black applicant to make it in.
And even with that, black people are still under represented.
Why is that? No no, you can’t ask THAT question, or you can, but only if the answer is: Racism!!! Of course. White supremacy that doesn’t benefit white people.
The reality is that all the arguments being made about financial class, prep, life experiences… They’re all relevant. I have no idea what would have happened to me if I’d come from a broken home. But the steps of Harvard are a really shitty place to try to address that. The applicant who cannot compete on their own merit was failed long before then.
Which is an amazingly bitter pill to swallow. But again… You can’t fix that on the steps of Harvard. If you think the freshman year pool is disproportionate, look at the grad classes. The black dropout rate varies by institution, but it’s incredibly high. I got to see a version of this when I took my first two years of my degree through community college, my intake class was 23 people, 6 of us were white. My graduating class was 9 people, 6 of us were white.
You don’t do anyone any good setting them up to fail.
So what can you do? Nothing the progressives want to talk about. It’s not proper to talk about the blight of single motherhood. It’s not ok to talk about the failure of teachers unions to actually provide an education. What we’re left with is shoveling ever more money per student into systems bloated by administration and ever more divorced from results, and shrilly screaming “racism” when someone points it out.
Ethics Alarms 
Bravo
Legacy admissions are an anachronism. I have always thought they were odd. I think it would be ethical to eliminate such criteria and strictly admit based off merit.
The real problem is the education system. It sucks. No one would need prep courses if the schools were doing their job. Those courses mitigate the failings of the school system.
Well done.
Great perspective.
Great comment! The problem these days is that the problem goes way beyond admissions. Affirmative action was on play for admissions way back in the 1970s when I was an undergrad. But once admitted, the students still had to do the work and make the grades. Nowadays the whole institution is focused on making sure the favored minorities not only get admitted whether they’re ready or not, but also pass and graduate, whether they learn anything or not. They might as well just mail them a diploma and save them that pesky trip to classes every day. I really don’t think the system will be fixed before the whole thing collapses. Already the Ivy League schools are losing their luster with the tech firms that need hires who actually earned their diplomas and learned something. A friend in that sector confided in me that they actually do pre-hire testing of their own to vet recent graduates.
“Nowadays the whole institution is focused on making sure the favored minorities not only get admitted whether they’re ready or not, but also pass and graduate, whether they learn anything or not.”
The whole institution is about making money and indoctrination now. Not education.
Michael West wrote, “The whole institution is about making money and indoctrination now. Not education.”
Yes, that seems to be the case. Colleges should be weeding out the ones that can’t intellectually measure up to the high standards needed to succeed in college and beyond, but it seems that they’re slowly replacing a large chunk of their previously strong intellectual base with people of mediocre or less intelligence.
Jim Hodgson wrote, “Nowadays the whole institution is focused on making sure the favored minorities not only get admitted whether they’re ready or not, but also pass and graduate, whether they learn anything or not.”
This is not just happening in colleges.
This pattern has become very evident in our K-12 public education system which are graduating far too many ignorant students of all races that can barely read, can’t write a coherent paragraph, have no idea what respect is, can’t give change back after a cash purchase, can’t balance a simple checkbook, seem to believe that their rights override others rights, they seem to believe that they have the right to anything they want with no effort on their part, and last but not least, everyone has to honor and coddle to their feelings.
Ignorance and stupidity seems to be promoted right along side of intelligence and proficiency as if they’re all somehow equivalent. We’re definitely entering a knowledge black hole as baby boomer professionals retire. What could go wrong with a wide spread lack of knowledge?
Maybe Iserbyt wasn’t the conspiracy theory wacko that she was publicly tarred as, maybe she was right about a whole lot of things all along.
Yep
Well said Steve W. and NP.
Perhaps the long-range goal is for humans to become bio-batteries to power a Matrix?
Or, is that already happening and for some unforeseen reason the veil is being lifted thereby creating a disturbance within the Matrix?
My college proudly proclaims the student body is twenty-nine percent black! And they’ve joined with a group of other northeastern elite small colleges to hire a NYC law firm to figure out how they can keep blatantly admitting unqualified black kids to whatever extent they desire, the recent SCOTUS decision notwithstanding. Those kinds of statements are going to make great evidence in the litigation that will inevitably result.
Their student body, or their admissions?
Most colleges don’t have a whole lot of standards and can basically handle taking in most applicants, so it wouldn’t surprise me if with enough outreach and incentives, they might actually be able to entice disproportional black enrollment, but I would be fairly surprised if they were able to maintain that for the entirety of even a two year program.
The experience I described with my first two years in college was in part the function of tying benefit programs for natives to college admissions. Sure. 75% of my intake class was indigenous, but that reduced to 33% by the end of the second year.
Yeah, that was really good…and the COTD was well deserved.