it's telling that we narrowly discuss affirmative action as an offense against theoretical equality, then some defend legacies in terms of cost-benefit, or as a justifiable appendage of wealth. you're not allowed to benefit from being poor, only from mom and dad being rich. and if they are rich we'll ponder some broader calculus of value extending beyond just admissions.
it's telling that we narrowly discuss affirmative action as an offense against theoretical equality, then some defend legacies in terms of cost-benefit, or as a justifiable appendage of wealth. you're not allowed to benefit from being poor, only from mom and dad being rich. and if they are rich we'll ponder some broader calculus of value extending beyond just admissions.
I would be comfortable with people being able to benefit from being poor and/or having faced other concrete documentable hardships (eg helping single mom run a family small business while also balancing school work). Having similar grades as a rich kid while facing significant hardships beyond your control is effectively equivalent to having higher merit.
it's telling that we narrowly discuss affirmative action as an offense against theoretical equality, then some defend legacies in terms of cost-benefit, or as a justifiable appendage of wealth. you're not allowed to benefit from being poor, only from mom and dad being rich. and if they are rich we'll ponder some broader calculus of value extending beyond just admissions.
I would be comfortable with people being able to benefit from being poor and/or having faced other concrete documentable hardships (eg helping single mom run a family small business while also balancing school work). Having similar grades as a rich kid while facing significant hardships beyond your control is effectively equivalent to having higher merit.
Also, need-based scholarships are common, as is taking hardships into account in admission decisions, so I’d say you are already allowed to benefit from being poor and that’s just fine.
This is pretty ridiculous. Having different standards for children of alumni or donors is really no different than having different standards for athletes. If they want to make everything fair, just make college applications purely lottery at that point.
an athlete may have their own good scores and grades, as well as their own unusual athletic ability superior to the rest of campus and most of the country.
a legacy is literally underqualified and getting in for someone else's accomplishment.
Nope. A legacy is literally just someone who had a parent who went to the school. Some are qualified and would get in anyway. Some aren’t.
Athletes have completely different admissions standards than other students. Why does athletic ability outweigh poor grades or weak class load any more than having alumnae parents?
Athletes have completely different admissions standards than other students. Why does athletic ability (meritorious) outweigh poor grades or weak class load any more than having alumnae parents (not meritorious)?
legacy and donor are being conflated. legacy means daddy went there. donor means daddy didn't necessarily go there but wrote a check to fund an endowed chair or building or something. saying that legacy got in because of the cost-benefit of a parental check is confusing the two.
donor you can at least make some sort of utilitarian argument. legacy is just saying you have a leg up because someone else got in there, which is even worse than affirmative action, as it's past advantage getting future advantage.
personally i tend to find legacies or donors or favoring wealth funny because the kids are by definition screwups relative to their resources. if trump's dad is a multimillionaire who could afford private schools, needing to wave around money to get his transfer from fordham to wharton (after ending up in military school) is weak.
likewise, if tucker is err to the swanson fortune, sent to the best boarding schools on the east coast or europe, and can only get into trinity (CT), that's pathetic.
in other words, if after all the youthful advantages -- superior private education, tutors, money, etc. -- you still need an admissions push? pathetic. no dice. find a school will let you in and pay full sticker. they should be the worst possible admissions bet as they have frittered away all the type of elite, snobby resources college can provide. unlike some kid in an inner city school who might be all potential and got inferior teaching quality and situation to learn in. and still managed competitive grades and scores. to me i'd bet on the scrappy kids 8 days a week, given college level resources, serious students around them, and a safe place to be. but we've decided that's "affirmative action."
legacy and donor admissions shouldn't exist. their private school resume line and superior SAT score from that experience should be their advantage in the process. if we know they made little of that previous academic and social advantage, how do we think they do in college, really?
Athletes have completely different admissions standards than other students. Why does athletic ability outweigh poor grades or weak class load any more than having alumnae parents?
(a) you're making an inaccurate assumption. i and several other athletes had higher profiles than the school did -- not worse. you're making the same assumption as the brats who think that jocks are all dumb or mindless.
(b) even if the athlete gets a leg up, you're ignoring that college might be broadly defined as a set of things, including athletics, arts, music, and such, not just an academic hothouse of only the best paper students. school needs a football team, soccer, track, plays, musical shows, art created. school might see its success as producing famous artists, musicians, actors, pro athletes, businesspeople, and not just 4.0 folks.
(c) and you might also have unusually bright or inventive kids with demonstrable accomplishments, inventions, businesses, subject matter expertise, but meh numbers. sort of the "good will hunting" savant thing. there should be at least some room for the math department to go, dude's a genius, i don't care if he goofed off in school, i want to work with him, help develop, and have him teach me even.
(d) this last bit i see as a conservative philosophical pretzel they have created. joe schmo they want to be able to get a job without a degree based on being street smart. but joe college applies to university, he needs to have test scores and grades and be there on numbers. pick a lane, are we looking past paper to generic merit, or are we going by credentials and numbers?
(e) which is why it's no surprise they are bending back to utility on things like legacy or donor admissions. because, far be it from me to bring up the racial aspect of their brief detour from anti-credentialism on every other aspect. hint -- they don't like welfare or any other form of black help. despite slavery and jim crow with effects lasting until ~ 1990 in parts of the country.
Athletes have completely different admissions standards than other students. Why does athletic ability outweigh poor grades or weak class load any more than having alumnae parents?
Athletic ability is an individual merit criterion that the college values, and you could argue that the training time needed to be devoted to it is equivalent to a hardship, justifying class load and GPA accommodations. Scoring lower grades with a hardship could in principle be considered comparable to higher grades without.
To whom you were born does not merit being considered a merit.
Athletes have completely different admissions standards than other students. Why does athletic ability outweigh poor grades or weak class load any more than having alumnae parents?
Athletic ability is an individual merit criterion that the college values, and you could argue that the training time needed to be devoted to it is equivalent to a hardship, justifying class load and GPA accommodations. Scoring lower grades with a hardship could in principle be considered comparable to higher grades without.
To whom you were born does not merit being considered a merit.
This is true. But it should go both ways. Either treat everyone like a black lesbian or make every application race / gender / orientation-blind (by not allowing any mention).
Athletic ability is an individual merit criterion that the college values, and you could argue that the training time needed to be devoted to it is equivalent to a hardship, justifying class load and GPA accommodations. Scoring lower grades with a hardship could in principle be considered comparable to higher grades without.
To whom you were born does not merit being considered a merit.
This is true. But it should go both ways. Either treat everyone like a black lesbian or make every application race / gender / orientation-blind (by not allowing any mention).
Affirmative action has already been illegal for a year now, and many colleges even earlier had proactively switched to race-neutral admission policies, so you have what you seem to want.
I think the issue for most, libertarian or not, is "Why is it the States business what goes on in a private business/university?"
It's so overreaching.
And yet not even as close as the over reach of states telling a woman what she can do with her body.
Horrible comparison/analogy. Not at all the same as far as overreaching. Letting the states decide=letting the voters decide on a local level=more power of the people to decide. There are more women than men in the United States. The real question is why if this issue is so important to ALL women, then why haven't WOMEN voted it into local law. If ll 50 states had the same law on the books, then it becomes de-facto law and you wouldn't need the Supreme Court to tell you how to live.
And yet not even as close as the over reach of states telling a woman what she can do with her body.
Horrible comparison/analogy. Not at all the same as far as overreaching. Letting the states decide=letting the voters decide on a local level=more power of the people to decide. There are more women than men in the United States. The real question is why if this issue is so important to ALL women, then why haven't WOMEN voted it into local law. If ll 50 states had the same law on the books, then it becomes de-facto law and you wouldn't need the Supreme Court to tell you how to live.
nonsense. on a national vote pro-life is highly unpopular. 70% or so pro-choice to at least some degree. that's real democracy. the game is to push the issue down to the states where some states are conservative and can force a bill through the legislature even if they would probably lose a referendum of voters in those red states.
in short, let me use federalism to game where the issue is decided and thwart popular positions. about every time this comes up for referendum you lose even in a red state.
all public schools should have strict admission requirements. in order to get into a school, you must have X gpa and Y sat score. no subjective personal statements to rig the whole thing. maybe give an exception for people who live locally to a school to allow them to have slightly lower gpa and sat score.
private schools should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as they do not receive any government funding. if a private school runs completely on their own, then they should be allowed to discriminate or let people pay their way into a school all they want. it's their own reputation that they are ruining in doing so (ie U Penn letting trump and his idiot kids into that school). however, if they receive any government funding, then they must obey by the rules in my previous paragraph.
all public schools should have strict admission requirements. in order to get into a school, you must have X gpa and Y sat score. no subjective personal statements to rig the whole thing. maybe give an exception for people who live locally to a school to allow them to have slightly lower gpa and sat score.
private schools should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as they do not receive any government funding. if a private school runs completely on their own, then they should be allowed to discriminate or let people pay their way into a school all they want. it's their own reputation that they are ruining in doing so (ie U Penn letting trump and his idiot kids into that school). however, if they receive any government funding, then they must obey by the rules in my previous paragraph.
you're assuming all things are equal when they are not. what if an elite private school has an SAT average just under 1500; a local suburban HS has an SAT average around 1200; and an inner city HS has an SAT average around 900. are we really treating that as an equal playing field? might an inner city kid who manages 1300-1400 be a miracle from his school, suggesting high promise, while a kid with the same scores from the elite private is actually below average for his background and advantages.
i brought this up for tucker carlson, an heir to the swanson TV dinner fortune, went to those kind of elite private schools here and abroad, and yet ended up at trinity college, one of the weakest NESCAC, which at the time would have had an average SAT just over 1200, and these days 1300-1400.
but, anyhow, bringing it back to the unusual inner city kid, while i don't believe in generic affirmative action, just about race, and not considering background -- i knew a kid who got a full ride to a state school as a hispanic who lived in a much nicer neighborhood than i did, and was actually adopted -- i think a more targeted approach is justified. more about class and how average students from your area do. in some areas a merely above average score might be amazing relative to what your average kid manages. and some kid in the 1300s or 1400s from an elite private may actually be fairly dense -- a grind and that's it -- despite every advantage possible.
i'll accept "objective" when you give most kids an equal school system.
Somewhat unrelated, but when CA publics ended in affirmative action in the 1990's, they replaced it with a system where the top 9% of every high school is guaranteed entry into at least 1 UC school and the top 25% of every high school are guaranteed entry into at least 1 CSU school, although that often means the likes of UC Merced and not Berkeley or UCLA.