I don’t buy the Joe Biden theory of why being anti-affirmative action is so impactful on vote choice (or that Kelsey’s Bay Area acquaintances are representative here).
I think it’s more straightforward than that, which is that most voters are white, the great fear a lot white voters have about Democrats is that they don’t care about “regular people”, and affirmative action is a very legible proxy for this. Conservative white people I know bring up affirmative action all the time, and did so long before Biden was president.
What you see in practice is that when affirmative action policies, e.g., exam schools in Virginia and NYC, are made into a campaign issue, Republicans gain the most in heavily-Asian precincts.
College’s core function is to sort for the cognitive elite and route them into desirable white-collar jobs. Fewer than 40% of Americans have a college degree, and the average American reads at about an eighth-grade level, which means many would struggle with a typical New York Times article.
Once you see that, affirmative action as actually practiced looks like one of the dumbest policies produced by the progressive intellectual class. These are people who despise intellectual diversity and studiously ignore cognitive ability, even though both are central to elite selection. But if the racial ratio of certain brown-skinned groups is off, suddenly that is treated as a profound injustice requiring correction. It is blatant racial discrimination repackaged as virtue signaling, all while ignoring the real privileges that govern access to elite institutions.
I think this is an overcomplicated theory. The simplest explanation is that most Americans believe judging people by the skin color is wrong and also believe in a meritocracy. This is basically the American creed post the civil rights movement.
The change after the Supreme Court ruling was less than expected because most elite universities defied the letter and spirit of the order to get what they wanted. They’re still using race.
If the Democrats switch to promoting income and economic hardship as the best criteria, elite universities will still use race.
They aren’t suddenly going to favor the son of Chinese immigrants who had to work at the family’s dry cleaners 7 days a week (and studied every free second).
The United States continues to be a highly segregated country by race, even if it is less segregated than other countries. And this is especially true for segregation of Black Americans. This segregation has gone down in some areas, but it continues to be incredibly strong in others (attend any wedding or church service, for example).
Maybe you think a liberal society cannot correctly care about this directly. That's a plausible position although I don't agree. But if we do care, then just as in any other context, if you don't focus on your actual goal, you aren't going to reach it. That's true in reading education and in AI policy and it's true if we want to build an integrated society.
It is a demonstration that our social circles continue to be extremely segregated. If you don't think that's a problem, fine, I'm not going to try to make that argument here. If you do think it's a problem, then integrating educational institutions, which are an important way that people form social circles for their lifetime in the US seems like an effective approach.
I think the country would be better (and better off) if we were more socially integrated in exactly the manner you suggest. But the widespread faculty and administrative support for affinity groups* shows that no one is seriously trying to achieve that.
The problem is highly resistant to top-down interference.
* Segregated clubs, dining halls, and living spaces that provide demographic minority students with the opportunity to live partially in environments where they are not a minority.
The fact that the interracial marriage rate continues to climb suggests it’s happening naturally, without very unpopular policies like bussing, is a strong indication that the best thing to do is nothing. As you point out, Leftists seem to want MORE segregation (affinity groups, race-essential polices, anti-gentrification, public housing), so the battle is probably fighting against those kinds of things.
I think for most people who are members of small minorities on campus, they already live quite integrated lives, unlike either majority groups or people outside those environments. But I'm open to the idea that we need to be more heavy handed, Singapore style, to create integration.
I don't mean to be cute here, but if college admissions already selects for people living integrated lives, you can't really make the case that college is solving the social circles problem.
I can come up with complicated arguments about how the weird college integration equilibrium might have positive downstream effects, but I think those are probably wrong, and speculative at best.
Re: Singapore, I'm not aware of their policies that integrate churches and weddings. What did you have in mind? It seems like more heavy-handed policies would require grotesque interference in matters of intimate choice, and minority groups would have to sacrifice the most for them to be effective at all.
My view is that policies that would directly address segregation are political poison, and the liberal and left faction doesn’t have room right now to take unpopular positions.
That's certainly plausible. Like Kelsey I don't want to make this decision for my based on what voters think, but I'm ok with politicians doing otherwise.
When I worked on the March for Science in Denver in 2017, I came across research that CU Boulder had done on affirmative action based on standardized testing and socioeconomic status.
How it would work is that the college would assess students socioeconomic status with measurements like parental income, whether two parents were involved in upbringing, the performance of the school they went to, and other things. There would be a prediction of performance based on socioeconomic status, and if a student performed better than the prediction, they would qualify affirmative action.
The punchline was that such a system would, in contrast with other class-based proposals, facilitate a more diverse campus while the students subject to the affirmative action tended to perform the same as peers that were not there as a result of affirmative action.
It's been a while since I've looked back into this and I don't think it was implemented at the time, but I thought it was neat.
I don’t buy the Joe Biden theory of why being anti-affirmative action is so impactful on vote choice (or that Kelsey’s Bay Area acquaintances are representative here).
I think it’s more straightforward than that, which is that most voters are white, the great fear a lot white voters have about Democrats is that they don’t care about “regular people”, and affirmative action is a very legible proxy for this. Conservative white people I know bring up affirmative action all the time, and did so long before Biden was president.
What you see in practice is that when affirmative action policies, e.g., exam schools in Virginia and NYC, are made into a campaign issue, Republicans gain the most in heavily-Asian precincts.
College’s core function is to sort for the cognitive elite and route them into desirable white-collar jobs. Fewer than 40% of Americans have a college degree, and the average American reads at about an eighth-grade level, which means many would struggle with a typical New York Times article.
Once you see that, affirmative action as actually practiced looks like one of the dumbest policies produced by the progressive intellectual class. These are people who despise intellectual diversity and studiously ignore cognitive ability, even though both are central to elite selection. But if the racial ratio of certain brown-skinned groups is off, suddenly that is treated as a profound injustice requiring correction. It is blatant racial discrimination repackaged as virtue signaling, all while ignoring the real privileges that govern access to elite institutions.
I think this is an overcomplicated theory. The simplest explanation is that most Americans believe judging people by the skin color is wrong and also believe in a meritocracy. This is basically the American creed post the civil rights movement.
The change after the Supreme Court ruling was less than expected because most elite universities defied the letter and spirit of the order to get what they wanted. They’re still using race.
If the Democrats switch to promoting income and economic hardship as the best criteria, elite universities will still use race.
They aren’t suddenly going to favor the son of Chinese immigrants who had to work at the family’s dry cleaners 7 days a week (and studied every free second).
The United States continues to be a highly segregated country by race, even if it is less segregated than other countries. And this is especially true for segregation of Black Americans. This segregation has gone down in some areas, but it continues to be incredibly strong in others (attend any wedding or church service, for example).
Maybe you think a liberal society cannot correctly care about this directly. That's a plausible position although I don't agree. But if we do care, then just as in any other context, if you don't focus on your actual goal, you aren't going to reach it. That's true in reading education and in AI policy and it's true if we want to build an integrated society.
Why is it a problem is weddings and churches tend to be race segregated and what would you even do about it?
It is a demonstration that our social circles continue to be extremely segregated. If you don't think that's a problem, fine, I'm not going to try to make that argument here. If you do think it's a problem, then integrating educational institutions, which are an important way that people form social circles for their lifetime in the US seems like an effective approach.
I think the country would be better (and better off) if we were more socially integrated in exactly the manner you suggest. But the widespread faculty and administrative support for affinity groups* shows that no one is seriously trying to achieve that.
The problem is highly resistant to top-down interference.
* Segregated clubs, dining halls, and living spaces that provide demographic minority students with the opportunity to live partially in environments where they are not a minority.
The fact that the interracial marriage rate continues to climb suggests it’s happening naturally, without very unpopular policies like bussing, is a strong indication that the best thing to do is nothing. As you point out, Leftists seem to want MORE segregation (affinity groups, race-essential polices, anti-gentrification, public housing), so the battle is probably fighting against those kinds of things.
I think for most people who are members of small minorities on campus, they already live quite integrated lives, unlike either majority groups or people outside those environments. But I'm open to the idea that we need to be more heavy handed, Singapore style, to create integration.
I don't mean to be cute here, but if college admissions already selects for people living integrated lives, you can't really make the case that college is solving the social circles problem.
I can come up with complicated arguments about how the weird college integration equilibrium might have positive downstream effects, but I think those are probably wrong, and speculative at best.
Re: Singapore, I'm not aware of their policies that integrate churches and weddings. What did you have in mind? It seems like more heavy-handed policies would require grotesque interference in matters of intimate choice, and minority groups would have to sacrifice the most for them to be effective at all.
My view is that policies that would directly address segregation are political poison, and the liberal and left faction doesn’t have room right now to take unpopular positions.
That's certainly plausible. Like Kelsey I don't want to make this decision for my based on what voters think, but I'm ok with politicians doing otherwise.
When I worked on the March for Science in Denver in 2017, I came across research that CU Boulder had done on affirmative action based on standardized testing and socioeconomic status.
How it would work is that the college would assess students socioeconomic status with measurements like parental income, whether two parents were involved in upbringing, the performance of the school they went to, and other things. There would be a prediction of performance based on socioeconomic status, and if a student performed better than the prediction, they would qualify affirmative action.
The punchline was that such a system would, in contrast with other class-based proposals, facilitate a more diverse campus while the students subject to the affirmative action tended to perform the same as peers that were not there as a result of affirmative action.
It's been a while since I've looked back into this and I don't think it was implemented at the time, but I thought it was neat.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2137126