Black privilege in College Admissions

JimiH wrote:

The OP is saying that Blacks, Latinos that come from the same income and lifestyle have a better chance at getting into a university. You guys are forgetting his point, which he stated clearly: It should be based on "where you are from, education, and other life experiences"

I'm not making an opinion just trying to make this debate less about race

I just came back to this thread and your post is on target. There are many well meaning people posting nonsense here because race issues are involved. I just think kids should be assessed on merit and let's throw skin color out the window. If people really think skin color should be a criterion, should darker tone blacks get preference over biracial or light skinned blacks? It is so foolish.

Many try to make the economic arguement, but if that's the case use family income not skin color.

To think people with dark skin need an advantage to be me demeans them and their abilities.

wake up dude wrote:

not36baby wrote:

I have. You said it's not crazy in reaction to rejecting someone because they are white.

So explain why skin color should be part of any equation in choosing an applicant to anything? Stop avoiding the question.

lmao. No one is getting rejected “because they’re white.” Tens of white kids might get rejected from an elite school because students of color managed to achieve nearly identical results to theirs given much more adverse circumstances.

A black student with a 1500 SAT who’s grown up in adverse circumstances shows MUCH more promise than a white kid who grew up with every privilege life can offer and scored a 1550. If you don’t get that, I pity you.

dude, you have a real argument to make - you don't have to exaggerate to make it

obviously, black students get much more than a 50 point boost. Hundreds of points. Be honest or you won't get anyone to go along with you.

From OP’s study:

“The median SAT score for those who had been admitted but wouldn't have based on test scores were 1120 for black and Latinx students, 1130 for Asian Americans and 1140 for white people.”

The difference between the marginal white student and the marginal black student is literally 20 points, lol.

The only people getting a boost worth “hundreds of points” at elite schools are athletes and rich kids.

A few more points

Giving preference or biased treatment based on skin color is not only wrong but it's against our constitution.

There has not been one valid argument supporting this discriminatory practice.

Everyone deserves a fair and equal shot based on their merits. I ca me from a single parent family, with a mom who dropped out before 9th grade, I never felt for a second I should get special advantages. And if someone told me I needed special help because of my ethnic background I would have been insulted.

Everyone has a different background, many have advantages other don't. Give financial help but be fair.

Don't demean high achieving

blacks by implying they need extra help more than others.

No one is demeaning "high achieving blacks." The highest achieving students receive acceptance regardless of racial background. They aren't the pool of applicants that are affected by affirmative action. Read the study.

The question is how to fill the remaining spots. The hypothetical study posits that you could do this based on SAT scores alone (which, as OP's article explains, would be silly and unprecedented). If you have a hard score cut-off (again, no college does this), you'll end up with a whiter student body than if you applied a broader set of criteria.

There are basically two arguments here. Both have been made repeatedly, but you choose to dismiss them as "not valid." The first is that test scores are a poor indicator of one's potential (the makers of the SAT agree with this, by the way). A student that has faced significant adversity in life and still managed to be in the running for admission to an elite college is more likely to be successful than someone who had every advantage in life and just managed to be on the bubble for admission. So, colleges would rather take the student who's faced more adversity and still managed to come within 20 points of the hypothetical cutoff. Whether you're willing to accept it or not, white Americans and black Americans - by and large - face vastly different levels of adversity. "I don't see color!" is just another way of saying that you're ignorant to the realities of being a person of color in this country.

The second argument is that diversity is good for its sake. College is supposed to be an educational experience in which young people are exposed to new ideas, people, and cultures. It's not meant to be a government-mandated entitlement, or a safe space for elitists who can afford an SAT tutor. Elite colleges don't owe you anything. If they want to fill their freshman class with people of color at the expense of white students who earned lower test scores than their white peers, that's their prerogative.

As for the legality argument, the Supreme Court has upheld affirmative action in the past (see: Univ. of California v. Bakke; They basically agreed with the second argument above). This particular Court is historically right-wing and may reverse that ruling (as it relates to public schools) if the ideological make-up doesn't change. Nonetheless, no one seriously believes there is a legal argument against affirmative action for private schools, which make up the vast majority of the "most competitive 200 colleges" that made up the study this thread is discussing.

These are the arguments. Disagree with them if you want, but you can't say they're "not valid" simply because they don't conform to your beliefs.

RunRaider wrote:

The only people getting a boost worth “hundreds of points” at elite schools are athletes and rich kids.

+1

"Men — especially white male athletes — have an unfair admissions advantage over women

The process at my college (and many elite liberal arts schools) was particularly brutal to qualified women. We simply had more qualified women than men in the pool; to keep a gender balance on campus, many ended up in the rejection pile. (Rarely do you hear people debate this form of affirmative action.)

There’s another reason that men — specifically, well-to-do white men — had an advantage over women: athletics. Division III athletics allowed a regressive system of affirmative action for the demographic that needs it the least: white wealthy males.

No one can give a solid enough answer of why it’s important for an elite liberal arts school to have a strong D-III athletic program. Some claim it raises student morale; others theorize athletes go into more lucrative fields post-graduation (business, law) and are more likely to donate down the line. In some cases, it seems as simple and silly as a better football team making wealthy donors happy: They have reason to tailgate on campus and bragging rights at the water cooler among other liberal arts alum.

The most farcical aspect of this system was it favored underwhelming white male candidates. White female athletes who were unspectacular candidates were still generally qualified enough to get admitted the traditional way.

I witnessed the cynical strategy of deferring black male athletes to the general committee, their cases then championed on the grounds of increasing diversity. This saved tips in the athletic committee for more underqualified white men, while robbing non-athlete black students in the regular committee.

It was unsettling then, and it’s infuriating now. White males with wealthy, educated parents and substandard academic profiles and SAT scores had a back door into elite schools through athletic talents that couldn’t net them Division I scholarships. You wouldn’t want to pay to see the teams play, but these students were admitted as if they were contributing to revenue-producing sports teams at larger universities."

This thread is so confusing, but I'm going to go ahead and say that the people who don't want to cut college enrollment in half are not "the real racists."

Yepyep wrote:

My daughter had close to a perfect score in her SAT’s, 3rd I’m her class, competed in a sport, played lead roles in the theater, in the school choir, won three separate (one of which on the national level) writing contests, and applied early decision and still did not get into Brown.

What she had going against her was she was not a legacy, she was not an international student, and she was white. In the end I was disappointed for her but she felt that if those were the reasons for getting into that school then she did not want to get there anyway.

I understand the imbalance over the years but I’m not sure why someone in high school has to pay for past injustices.

"In other words, it’s difficult to get anyone to acknowledge the luck of birth and circumstance. To do so undermines a key cog in the American dream machine: the myth of the self, which reduces wealthy children’s built-in advantages to irrelevant biographical footnotes, while transforming others’ disadvantages to personal faults. It’s difficult to get those on the short end of the stick to see that diligence and acumen can take you only so far; they internalize failure or seek out scapegoats (“the black kid stole my spot”)."

Everyone deserves a fair and equal shot based on their merits.

Everyone claims to believe this RIGHT up until it's time to actually improve the housing, education, and social services available to people of color such that they're on par with those available to the vast majority of white Americans.

"Pick yourself up by your bootstraps!"

"Sir, I don't have any boots."

"Well, that's not my problem!"

wake up dude wrote:

So, colleges would rather take the student who's faced more adversity and still managed to come within 20 points of the hypothetical cutoff. Whether you're willing to accept it or not, white Americans and black Americans - by and large - face vastly different levels of adversity. "I don't see color!" is just another way of saying that you're ignorant to the realities of being a person of color in this country.

The irony of calling someone ignorant while generalizing entire groups of peoples.

I honestly can’t believe racist and incapable of seeing nuance you are.

White people face challenges, do black people face more challenges on average?

Who knows and who cares. If we don’t accept people into school based on their races average grades and sat scores, why should we accept them based on the challenges a person of their race faces on average.

We should look at people as individual, not as a clone of their race as you suggest.

Free_the_thigh wrote:

White people face challenges, do black people face more challenges on average?

lmao, ABSOLUTELY!

If you want to "look at people as individual," you need to consider the totality of their life experience, including their racial background and socioeconomic status. Assessing college applicants on test scores alone would be generalizing in its purest form.

RunRaider wrote:

Free_the_thigh wrote:

The irony of calling someone ignorant while generalizing entire groups of peoples.

I honestly can’t believe racist and incapable of seeing nuance you are.

White people face challenges, do black people face more challenges on average?

Who knows and who cares. If we don’t accept people into school based on their races average grades and sat scores, why should we accept them based on the challenges a person of their race faces on average.

We should look at people as individual, not as a clone of their race as you suggest.

If you want to "look at people as individual," you need to consider the totality of their life experience, including their racial background and socioeconomic status. Assessing college applicants on test scores alone would be generalizing in its purest form.

Never said just look at test scores.

Nobody in this thread has provided a convincing reason why race is relevant. Every “racial” disadvantage raised is really just a socioeconomic disadvantage.

The challenges come from being poor. So instead of using race as a poor proxy for socioeconomic status, why don’t we just use socioeconomic status.

safe spaces for whites? wrote:

Free_the_thigh wrote:

White people face challenges, do black people face more challenges on average?

lmao, ABSOLUTELY!

And is that relevant when considering an individual no.

When you want to know who is taller, you measure the two people. You don’t compare the average heights of their race.

Ok, I will clearly address both of your arguments, the 1st one is weaker than the second. Your first argument about a test score not predicting performance is a red herring. No one is arguing that a test scores should do that. The combination of grades, test scores, recommendations, course difficulty and accomplishments added together make a better decision. I would not advocate removing any. I don't mention skin color because that should not be in the equation.

So do you really want to add skin color and take out standardized test scores to this equation?

The diversity argument: This opens a can of worms. Do you really think skin tone is an import criterion to assess contribution? Should darker skin tones be of more value than lighter skin tones. If you were applying to a college and you were 1/20 black would you call yourself black for advantage.

If you were an accomplished black and you attended a school heavily into affirmative action wouldn't that diminish the view some have of your accomplishment.

In elite institutions the white middle class to upper middle class kid is not valued. White rich donor and legacy kids have a big unfair advantage. To balance out all these rich white kids, these colleges seek out black kids for diversity. The middle to upper middle class white kid is not sought after.

That reeks of unfairness. Colleges can be fair, treat everyone equally regardless of skin color and still get diversity. Not doing so will not help race relations and just adds to resentment. The wrong message is sent about preferential treatment for blacks and about blacks ability to compete.

I appreciate the more thoughtful response.

That being said, I want to address this:

This is actually exactly what OP's article argues. It's a study about the implications of offering acceptance based on test scores alone. A lot of people in this thread have actually

FWIW, I think that the actual process that elite colleges use is pretty damn close to what you're advocating. It's not that they're throwing white students' applications in the garbage.

What typically happens is the admissions office will first identify the highest-performing applicants (based on GPA, SAT/ACT, etc.) and grant those kids admission first. Race is not a factor at this point; the VERY best students get in regardless. (This is also the point at which "special" applicants like athletes, donors' kids, international students, and the very wealthy are granted admission.)

Once that's all out of the way, the admissions office starts the hard work of deciding who isn't going to be granted admission. Unless the school is test-optional, they'll typically pick a "floor" (based on GPA, SAT/ACT scores) and no one under that threshold gains admission, regardless of their racial identity or other factors.

The admissions office is then left with a hard cap on the number of remaining applicants they can accept. (At elite colleges, this is going to be a huge number of applications.) THIS is the point at which affirmative action comes into play.

If you have 1,000 remaining spots and 10,000 applications - all of which have scores between the previously-established floor and ceiling - you have to decide who gets in and who does not. All of these kids are on the bubble already; the truly highest-performing applicants (of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds) have already been accepted. You could just pick a higher "floor" and only grant admission to people above that threshold (think, the effective qualification time for the Boston Marathon vs. the published qualification times). The problem with that approach is that you end up with a very white and relatively mediocre applicant pool. The applicants of color are, on average, more likely to possess a test score that under-represents their potential. The college also wants a more diverse student body than what they'd have if they simply used test scores as a threshold.

Afmissions personnel consider race at every step of the way. 69% of applicants with perfect scores wefe rejected at Stanford last year. They were all white, Indian, or Asian. At the same time, they rejected no blacks or hispanics who had perfect scores or even near perfect scores.

For the highly selective schools, If just using test scores, the white population would increase by about 15% and the black population would nearly be cut in half. That is because they are receiving a several hundred point boost. Whites on average score 204 points higher than blacks.

Not only are blacks' scores on the SAT far below the scores of whites and Asian Americans, but they also trail the scores of every other major ethnic group in the United States including students of Puerto Rican and Mexican backgrounds. American Indian and Alaska Native students on average score more than 104 points higher than the average score of black students. On average, Asian American students score 227 points, or 19 percent higher than blacks. Differences in family incomes may be the cause. Or maybe family incomes are lower for people who are not as smart. Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.

69% rejected with a perfect score sounds low, if you ask me. These are the most competitive schools in the world. If the Ivy League really wanted to, they could only accept students with perfect SAT/ACT scores and still maintain a minuscule acceptance rate. Test scores aren't the only metric, however, so your point does not preclude mine. There is also GPA, class rank, AP/IB scores, etc. that come into play. A perfect score test score alone does not necessarily cut it, especially at an Ivy League school or somewhere like Stanford that's of a similar caliber.

There is a very simple explanation for this: racism. A low-income white family is more likely than a black family of an equivalent income-level to have access to quality education. Black families have been excluded from communities with quality schools for hundreds of years. Red lining has excluded even high income African Americans from owning homes in communities with quality schools.

If you're seriously trying to argue that African Americans simply aren't "smart enough" to go to college, then just own that argument. It's an incredibly racist argument, but you do you. If you're truly confident in that belief, then there's no need to hide behind euphemisms.