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.
Yep, liberals spent decades arguing that it was wrong to discriminate based on race. And they won the argument. The vast majority of people including Republicans and conservatives now all agree, it's wrong to discriminate based on race.
Then they tried to change it up and say well it's ok if WE do the discrimination. And they lost the argument.
100% — the fact that this plain and obvious interpretation seems to elude Kelsey or that the poll results puzzle her just seems like part and parcel of the problem.
Most upper quintile/decile Dems don’t understand why these policies are so unpopular, because we were going to get all the goods anyway, so we weren’t threatened by them. It’s the rest of the country that resents the way in which we — the winners — will simultaneously demand that our achievements are meritorious while rigging the system against them, just so we can feel good enough about ourselves to pretend we've absolved ourselves of our sins.
Exactly this. The connection to Joe Biden seems tenuous at best. A much simpler reason that people prefer the non-discriminatory stance is that discriminating isn't fair even when it's done with good intentions at heart. Those intentions can get twisted pretty quickly (as this article eloquently points out).
I think that you’re absolutely right and that the author of the article would agree. I also think that the author is right to point out that the Democrats’ brand was seriously hurt by support for policies like race-based college admissions and other non-race-blind policies. I don’t think that people dislike these things because Joe Biden was associated with them, but I do think that Joe Biden’s support for these things contributed to people disliking the Democrats. Joe Biden, the President, the one political figure that *everyone,* low-information voters included, knew between 2020 and 2024 (other than Trump), changed the Democrats’ brand in the minds of everyone and especially in the minds of low-information voters by supporting these kinds of policies.
The Democrats need to rehabilitate their brand, and doing that means doing something substantively different (like supporting things like income-based admissions policies). And that necessarily means distancing themselves from the brand Biden built.
… at least I think that’s what the author meant, lol.
Affirmative action was originally supposed to be reparations for the descendants of slaves. The Supreme Court precluded that early on and made it about diversity. Furthermore, a lot of the beneficiaries of affirmative action were not the descendants of slaves, and Americans don’t much like reparations either.
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.
For good reason! Harvard was clearly, explicitly discriminating against Asian students in enrollment, and they aren't alone in taking that stance. During the COVID spike in anti-Asian bigotry my own school district was looking at school closures and specifically targeted those with disproportionate asian communities on the grounds that those students aren't disadvantaged. (A counter factual statement when considering economic status, English language learner status, etc.). Asking people to support anti-asian action under the guise of racial justice is adding insult to injury, and that's a sin that the progressive left needs to acknowledge and correct.
Not disagreeing with your point here. Yet I think it's worth considering what the reaction will be if top universities start very heavily tilting towards Asian students even just as a natural result of test scores and fair admission practices. This seems to me like a recipe for resentment that is not going to end well unless something is done to expand access to more people not by lowering standards, but by raising capacity.
Yeah, that's a concern, but it's a separate issue. Institutionalizing discrimination against Asians, while lauding it as the 'progressive' position, can't be justified by the worry that if prestigious universities accept a lot of high acheiving Asian students then people will be uncomfortable with that.
Like Harvard and other selective schools are the pipeline to power not education and we want that power to be compositionally similar to the population. Like fundamentally no one is an individual in this because this is choosing who gets to make the laws. It's choosing who will be on both sides of the ballot and their staff, and the people doing the reporting and in the permanent bureaucracy.
The idea that all this power should be blindly handed out based on a pretty isolated version of merit seems far more discriminatory than saying we need to actively manage and the nobility.
Did you read the article? The part where the admissions people were tossing around 'brown? no Asian' as deciders on a kid's future is pretty bad. Most Americans don't like blatant skin color based discrimination.
I don't know why it should matter though. To me like if you don't have people in Washington who are afraid of being pulled over for looking out of place then that's a way bigger problem than we're being unfair to this applicant or that one who goes to a nice state school and becomes a dentist or something.
Selective schools aren't about individual fairness they're about who can be your boss based on no merit or credential to be so. They're about who even matters in passing the laws or discussing what matters. To not be in these institutions is to simply not matter at all in America.
I dont' follow your argument. This article is about why the electorate doesn't support race based affirmative action. I think it mostly boils down to fairness. You seem to be arguing that fairness doesn't matter because of...capitalism? Feel free to make that argument all you want.
I remember polling in the past that said that a majority of the American people think Democrats only care about poor people, which is so funny to me. It is not true. The Democrats are a party for the middle class and so are Republicans, just different parts of the middle class.
I think you are right because I think a lot of Americans equate being poor with being black.
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.
The "cognitive elite" is mostly an artifact of the distribution of the uneven distribution of education, financial and cultural resources in society, not an actual biological phenomenon like you seem to be suggesting here. This isn't my belief or opinion, it's what actual research shows. Here's one of the latest studies on the issue:
The paper does not claim cognitive capabilities are “mostly” explained by the factors you cite. They show that identical twins reared apart always have correlated IQs, but the correlation is less when their schooling environments differed significantly. It’s still quite high at 0.56 for those with very different schooling.
So yeah, it is just your belief/opinion and your misrepresenting a related scientific article suggests it is a belief you hold despite the evidence, not because of it.
"The very dissimilar group has an ICC of 0.56 ± 0.04 (n = 10); this value is much closer to non-twin siblings. They also had an absolute IQ differential of 15.1 points (SD = 7.1); this is much closer to complete strangers."
Is 0.56 a very high ICC number in genetics? No, not really. The estimated ICC for personality is about 0.5 based on similar twin studies, but you don't see people running around talking about personality as though it were a group characteristic, because we know from real life how big that 50% variation from non-genetic factors is IRL!
Also, are you going to ignore other background evidence brought up in the paper during the literature review section, such as the global 30 point gain in IQ scores in the last century that tightly correlates with increased access to school and number of school years?
I must admit I bristle at the idea of using a candidate's "experience of racism" as a criteria for anything. This criteria, it seems to me, would further incentive young people to be on high alert for examples of racism in their own lives, and in my experience, if you are looking for something, you will definitely find it.
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).
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.
ALSO-- if it is racist to do racial affirmative action, I'd like to also hear Kelsey proclaim that it is sexist to bump males up in admissions, as many colleges do, so that classes are gender equal.
As a matter of fact, I would like to make a big stink about this.
That the U.S. makes a huge whiny deal about racial affirmative action but not man affirmative action is telling.
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.
I would argue that the left focusing on race is having the opposite effect it's making race mixing less likely and stirring up anxiety.
People live in fear on being labeled a racist. Better be really careful with your interactions. You never know when an innocent comment will ruin your life.
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.
So do you support income based affirmative action?
I like it very much because it is targeted. It will still help the people we all wanted to be helped with racial affirmative action-- and more. And it won't give advantages to kids who don't need it.
It also solves the problem of everyone being suspicious that students of color are only there because they got a boost in the admissions process. Who wants to be doubted their whole time at school?
For the record though, I think racial affirmative action was well intended, and I remember it as a good-will project. Calling it "racist" strikes me as too catering to sad white nationalists. I would call it "unfair" at worst and perhaps acknowledge its flaws such as tokenism and people falling through cracks in the system.
To me university admissions seem like a very cut and dry example of failing to expand access because funding a build out of capacity is hard, so you end up with people just fighting to the death over an ever more scarce resource.
Expand the universities, especially the best preforming ones. This to me is a no-brainer from a societal benefit standpoint. Sure people that like to brag about attending so and so school might not like it because it may marginally lower the prestige, but that is a very small price to pay for increasing the number of well educated citizenry.
The whole point of elite schools though is they are elite. They aren't really providing a better education.
When I was at my CC, I had some teachers from UCSB. When I did my MBA at LaVerne I had teachers from the UCLA and Malibu MBA programs. Same courses but VERY different prestige levels.
There actually isn't a scarcity issue in access to higher education; there's only a scarcity of admissions to prestigious institutions issue. We are actually likely to continue to see a number of lower tier college and university permanently shutting down as the total number of students expected to apply to and attend college declines in the coming 1-2 decades (if you search the term "demographic cliff" you will see there has been hand-wringing for years in higher education over this). See for example, this recent commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
"Shrinkage
BY CLAY SHIRKY
From the Land-Grant Acts to the end of higher ed’s Golden Age in 1975, the number of institutions, students, and faculty all grew. From 1975 to the Great Recession, the number of institutions stayed relatively static, and student and faculty growth slowed. After the Great Recession, the number of institutions started shrinking, and now domestic-student numbers are following, as are international enrollments and research funds. The most selective colleges will engage in belt-tightening and fund raising. Everyone else will be forced into painful restructuring, mergers, or closures. If we were an organized sector, the 4,000 or so degree-granting institutions would create a fund and process for helping future Mount Idas, Millses, and Marymounts wind down in an orderly way. Because we are not organized, we will see a chaotic potlatch in which the inevitable shrinking wastes far more money and harms far more students than it needs to.
Clay Shirky is vice provost for AI and technology in education at New York University."
If it were up to me, my affirmative action college policy position would be:
1. Do not consider race in admissions, it's discriminatory.
2. Weight class heavily, via proxies like parental income, housing value in the census tract, and high school rating.
3. Make it so only people from the bottom half of the income distribution can have athletics considered as part of their admission. Lacrosse prowess is just affirmative action for rich white people, and the fever dream of "getting a scholarship" has marred children's sports.
The other question is why the Democrats won't accept this lesson.
California's state legislature just tried to get a new version of affirmative action passed (AB7, vetoed by Newsom last year, though it may be back soon) and is working on a new initiative to weaken Prop 209's protections, the "California Remove Public Education from Affirmative Action Ban Amendment". 57-43 clearly wasn't good enough for them; they seem happy to keep rewriting the initiative language to try to get this past the voters.
I don't really understand how we can possibly have a fair society where Harvard and Stanford and other selective colleges are basically the only path to the ruling class and just shrug our shoulders when we see that stop becoming representative.
These schools aren't about getting an education they're about who runs the whole country. Maybe there's an explicit political answer to diversifying the pipeline instead of an administrative one and including more colleges in who gets to be in the bureaucracy, the clerks for judges, who is selected to be on both sides of the ballot etc. but it seems positively worse than saying we've reached enough asians or enough whites you have to go to a mid tier state school and have a good career but we won't create a government strictly on the basis of 18 year olds SAT scores.
Would help if more people stopped being impressed by those fancy degrees and made commitments to hire from other places. It's a vicious cycle though because many of those in power now benefit from their connections to those places.
I have always been interested in how affirmative action affects schools that have fairly high acceptance rates, and therefore can't afford to engage in any kind of "quota" systems.
Most of the more selective schools aim to achieve a gender balance of men and women in order to create somewhat even dating pools. So they discriminate against women and give men a modest boost so they are closer to 50/50. So now 63% of UVM students are women, because the more selective schools scooped all the men who would often be UVM students.
The more selective colleges trying to make their student bodies gender balanced has created a massive imbalance at colleges like UVM.
And I assume similar things are happening with race.
Unpopular opinion, but I think the reasoning in UC v Bakke, that race could be considered because a diverse classroom has educational benefits, is underrated. I think a lot of people view that particular reasoning as a pretense to uphold what was really a remedial policy, but beyond the legal realm I think it is substantively correct on the merits. I benefited in college from getting the perspectives of people who are different from me, including minorities who have actually experienced significant racial discrimination. That was true in a diffuse social sense and during actual classroom programming like class discussions and course projects. Race is really just one quality of many where it seems educationally beneficial to have a diverse student body, but I think it’s definitely there and admissions officers should be allowed to target that.
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.
Yep, liberals spent decades arguing that it was wrong to discriminate based on race. And they won the argument. The vast majority of people including Republicans and conservatives now all agree, it's wrong to discriminate based on race.
Then they tried to change it up and say well it's ok if WE do the discrimination. And they lost the argument.
100% — the fact that this plain and obvious interpretation seems to elude Kelsey or that the poll results puzzle her just seems like part and parcel of the problem.
Most upper quintile/decile Dems don’t understand why these policies are so unpopular, because we were going to get all the goods anyway, so we weren’t threatened by them. It’s the rest of the country that resents the way in which we — the winners — will simultaneously demand that our achievements are meritorious while rigging the system against them, just so we can feel good enough about ourselves to pretend we've absolved ourselves of our sins.
Exactly this. The connection to Joe Biden seems tenuous at best. A much simpler reason that people prefer the non-discriminatory stance is that discriminating isn't fair even when it's done with good intentions at heart. Those intentions can get twisted pretty quickly (as this article eloquently points out).
I think that you’re absolutely right and that the author of the article would agree. I also think that the author is right to point out that the Democrats’ brand was seriously hurt by support for policies like race-based college admissions and other non-race-blind policies. I don’t think that people dislike these things because Joe Biden was associated with them, but I do think that Joe Biden’s support for these things contributed to people disliking the Democrats. Joe Biden, the President, the one political figure that *everyone,* low-information voters included, knew between 2020 and 2024 (other than Trump), changed the Democrats’ brand in the minds of everyone and especially in the minds of low-information voters by supporting these kinds of policies.
The Democrats need to rehabilitate their brand, and doing that means doing something substantively different (like supporting things like income-based admissions policies). And that necessarily means distancing themselves from the brand Biden built.
… at least I think that’s what the author meant, lol.
Affirmative action was originally supposed to be reparations for the descendants of slaves. The Supreme Court precluded that early on and made it about diversity. Furthermore, a lot of the beneficiaries of affirmative action were not the descendants of slaves, and Americans don’t much like reparations either.
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.
For good reason! Harvard was clearly, explicitly discriminating against Asian students in enrollment, and they aren't alone in taking that stance. During the COVID spike in anti-Asian bigotry my own school district was looking at school closures and specifically targeted those with disproportionate asian communities on the grounds that those students aren't disadvantaged. (A counter factual statement when considering economic status, English language learner status, etc.). Asking people to support anti-asian action under the guise of racial justice is adding insult to injury, and that's a sin that the progressive left needs to acknowledge and correct.
Not disagreeing with your point here. Yet I think it's worth considering what the reaction will be if top universities start very heavily tilting towards Asian students even just as a natural result of test scores and fair admission practices. This seems to me like a recipe for resentment that is not going to end well unless something is done to expand access to more people not by lowering standards, but by raising capacity.
Yeah, that's a concern, but it's a separate issue. Institutionalizing discrimination against Asians, while lauding it as the 'progressive' position, can't be justified by the worry that if prestigious universities accept a lot of high acheiving Asian students then people will be uncomfortable with that.
I'm genuinely unclear why it was bad.
Like Harvard and other selective schools are the pipeline to power not education and we want that power to be compositionally similar to the population. Like fundamentally no one is an individual in this because this is choosing who gets to make the laws. It's choosing who will be on both sides of the ballot and their staff, and the people doing the reporting and in the permanent bureaucracy.
The idea that all this power should be blindly handed out based on a pretty isolated version of merit seems far more discriminatory than saying we need to actively manage and the nobility.
Did you read the article? The part where the admissions people were tossing around 'brown? no Asian' as deciders on a kid's future is pretty bad. Most Americans don't like blatant skin color based discrimination.
I don't know why it should matter though. To me like if you don't have people in Washington who are afraid of being pulled over for looking out of place then that's a way bigger problem than we're being unfair to this applicant or that one who goes to a nice state school and becomes a dentist or something.
Selective schools aren't about individual fairness they're about who can be your boss based on no merit or credential to be so. They're about who even matters in passing the laws or discussing what matters. To not be in these institutions is to simply not matter at all in America.
I dont' follow your argument. This article is about why the electorate doesn't support race based affirmative action. I think it mostly boils down to fairness. You seem to be arguing that fairness doesn't matter because of...capitalism? Feel free to make that argument all you want.
I remember polling in the past that said that a majority of the American people think Democrats only care about poor people, which is so funny to me. It is not true. The Democrats are a party for the middle class and so are Republicans, just different parts of the middle class.
I think you are right because I think a lot of Americans equate being poor with being black.
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.
You’re just moving the goalposts now.
The "cognitive elite" is mostly an artifact of the distribution of the uneven distribution of education, financial and cultural resources in society, not an actual biological phenomenon like you seem to be suggesting here. This isn't my belief or opinion, it's what actual research shows. Here's one of the latest studies on the issue:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691825003853
The paper does not claim cognitive capabilities are “mostly” explained by the factors you cite. They show that identical twins reared apart always have correlated IQs, but the correlation is less when their schooling environments differed significantly. It’s still quite high at 0.56 for those with very different schooling.
So yeah, it is just your belief/opinion and your misrepresenting a related scientific article suggests it is a belief you hold despite the evidence, not because of it.
"The very dissimilar group has an ICC of 0.56 ± 0.04 (n = 10); this value is much closer to non-twin siblings. They also had an absolute IQ differential of 15.1 points (SD = 7.1); this is much closer to complete strangers."
Is 0.56 a very high ICC number in genetics? No, not really. The estimated ICC for personality is about 0.5 based on similar twin studies, but you don't see people running around talking about personality as though it were a group characteristic, because we know from real life how big that 50% variation from non-genetic factors is IRL!
Also, are you going to ignore other background evidence brought up in the paper during the literature review section, such as the global 30 point gain in IQ scores in the last century that tightly correlates with increased access to school and number of school years?
nothing about my analysis depends on whether genes or environment are responsible for smart people. Your point, even if true, is a non sequitur.
I must admit I bristle at the idea of using a candidate's "experience of racism" as a criteria for anything. This criteria, it seems to me, would further incentive young people to be on high alert for examples of racism in their own lives, and in my experience, if you are looking for something, you will definitely find it.
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).
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
ALSO-- if it is racist to do racial affirmative action, I'd like to also hear Kelsey proclaim that it is sexist to bump males up in admissions, as many colleges do, so that classes are gender equal.
As a matter of fact, I would like to make a big stink about this.
That the U.S. makes a huge whiny deal about racial affirmative action but not man affirmative action is telling.
Wait holy shit I'm going to pitch this to people. Schools can still even put classes by gender legally but not by race.
We should PROTEST THIS. I would like to propose legislation.
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.
I would argue that the left focusing on race is having the opposite effect it's making race mixing less likely and stirring up anxiety.
People live in fear on being labeled a racist. Better be really careful with your interactions. You never know when an innocent comment will ruin your life.
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.
So do you support income based affirmative action?
I like it very much because it is targeted. It will still help the people we all wanted to be helped with racial affirmative action-- and more. And it won't give advantages to kids who don't need it.
It also solves the problem of everyone being suspicious that students of color are only there because they got a boost in the admissions process. Who wants to be doubted their whole time at school?
For the record though, I think racial affirmative action was well intended, and I remember it as a good-will project. Calling it "racist" strikes me as too catering to sad white nationalists. I would call it "unfair" at worst and perhaps acknowledge its flaws such as tokenism and people falling through cracks in the system.
To me university admissions seem like a very cut and dry example of failing to expand access because funding a build out of capacity is hard, so you end up with people just fighting to the death over an ever more scarce resource.
Expand the universities, especially the best preforming ones. This to me is a no-brainer from a societal benefit standpoint. Sure people that like to brag about attending so and so school might not like it because it may marginally lower the prestige, but that is a very small price to pay for increasing the number of well educated citizenry.
The whole point of elite schools though is they are elite. They aren't really providing a better education.
When I was at my CC, I had some teachers from UCSB. When I did my MBA at LaVerne I had teachers from the UCLA and Malibu MBA programs. Same courses but VERY different prestige levels.
There actually isn't a scarcity issue in access to higher education; there's only a scarcity of admissions to prestigious institutions issue. We are actually likely to continue to see a number of lower tier college and university permanently shutting down as the total number of students expected to apply to and attend college declines in the coming 1-2 decades (if you search the term "demographic cliff" you will see there has been hand-wringing for years in higher education over this). See for example, this recent commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
"Shrinkage
BY CLAY SHIRKY
From the Land-Grant Acts to the end of higher ed’s Golden Age in 1975, the number of institutions, students, and faculty all grew. From 1975 to the Great Recession, the number of institutions stayed relatively static, and student and faculty growth slowed. After the Great Recession, the number of institutions started shrinking, and now domestic-student numbers are following, as are international enrollments and research funds. The most selective colleges will engage in belt-tightening and fund raising. Everyone else will be forced into painful restructuring, mergers, or closures. If we were an organized sector, the 4,000 or so degree-granting institutions would create a fund and process for helping future Mount Idas, Millses, and Marymounts wind down in an orderly way. Because we are not organized, we will see a chaotic potlatch in which the inevitable shrinking wastes far more money and harms far more students than it needs to.
Clay Shirky is vice provost for AI and technology in education at New York University."
If it were up to me, my affirmative action college policy position would be:
1. Do not consider race in admissions, it's discriminatory.
2. Weight class heavily, via proxies like parental income, housing value in the census tract, and high school rating.
3. Make it so only people from the bottom half of the income distribution can have athletics considered as part of their admission. Lacrosse prowess is just affirmative action for rich white people, and the fever dream of "getting a scholarship" has marred children's sports.
The other question is why the Democrats won't accept this lesson.
California's state legislature just tried to get a new version of affirmative action passed (AB7, vetoed by Newsom last year, though it may be back soon) and is working on a new initiative to weaken Prop 209's protections, the "California Remove Public Education from Affirmative Action Ban Amendment". 57-43 clearly wasn't good enough for them; they seem happy to keep rewriting the initiative language to try to get this past the voters.
I don't really understand how we can possibly have a fair society where Harvard and Stanford and other selective colleges are basically the only path to the ruling class and just shrug our shoulders when we see that stop becoming representative.
These schools aren't about getting an education they're about who runs the whole country. Maybe there's an explicit political answer to diversifying the pipeline instead of an administrative one and including more colleges in who gets to be in the bureaucracy, the clerks for judges, who is selected to be on both sides of the ballot etc. but it seems positively worse than saying we've reached enough asians or enough whites you have to go to a mid tier state school and have a good career but we won't create a government strictly on the basis of 18 year olds SAT scores.
Would help if more people stopped being impressed by those fancy degrees and made commitments to hire from other places. It's a vicious cycle though because many of those in power now benefit from their connections to those places.
I have always been interested in how affirmative action affects schools that have fairly high acceptance rates, and therefore can't afford to engage in any kind of "quota" systems.
Most of the more selective schools aim to achieve a gender balance of men and women in order to create somewhat even dating pools. So they discriminate against women and give men a modest boost so they are closer to 50/50. So now 63% of UVM students are women, because the more selective schools scooped all the men who would often be UVM students.
The more selective colleges trying to make their student bodies gender balanced has created a massive imbalance at colleges like UVM.
And I assume similar things are happening with race.
Unpopular opinion, but I think the reasoning in UC v Bakke, that race could be considered because a diverse classroom has educational benefits, is underrated. I think a lot of people view that particular reasoning as a pretense to uphold what was really a remedial policy, but beyond the legal realm I think it is substantively correct on the merits. I benefited in college from getting the perspectives of people who are different from me, including minorities who have actually experienced significant racial discrimination. That was true in a diffuse social sense and during actual classroom programming like class discussions and course projects. Race is really just one quality of many where it seems educationally beneficial to have a diverse student body, but I think it’s definitely there and admissions officers should be allowed to target that.