There are many reasons to view libertarianism as the destructive toddler of American politics. Among them is certainly the tendency of libertarians to get all ginned up about totally irrelevant theoretical problems and to remain totally indifferent to real problems. So, you know, the Affordable Care Act sucks because it represents Friedrich Hayek’s creeping serfdom, in some Matt Welch daydream, but the fact that millions of Americans have previously suffered for lack of adequate health care is no big deal. You can also see this in attitudes towards the now-daily experience of big banks fucking over people who have no ability to fight back. Libertarianism simply has nothing to say to that kind of power imbalance. Libertarianism has a vast literature about power as a theoretical entity, but it doesn’t have a vocabulary of power as it is experienced by real people leading real lives. (IOZ graphically represented this gap pretty well a while back.)
So it is with Tim Kowal, blogger at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen and member of the Orange County Federalist society, which is apparently a real thing and not a stock villain from the West Wing. Kowal is very upset that the California state legislature is considering reinstating the right of public universities to use race as a determining factor in admissions decisions.
Here’s the deal, homeslice. After California banned affirmative action practices in 1997, the number of black students in the UC system plummeted. This was a predictable result, and one that supporters of affirmative action had warned about for years. The year following the ban, the number of black students admitted was sliced in half. In a state where the black population is around 6%, black students barely make up 2% of the UC system. As college is a system that requires a certain amount of gating, there’s no sense in attempting a purely racially proportional system of college admissions. But this kind of discrepancy is disturbing, and as college is also a system that cares about fairness and which is dedicated to addressing historical and systemic inequality, it is totally within the mission of the university to make outreach to racial minorities a priority.
So now you have this scenario in California where the population of the premiere public university system looks nothing like the population of the state as a whole. The proportion of black UC students is dramatically lower than the proportion of black Californians. You can find similar dynamics in other states. Does Towal consider this a problem? Does he care that the state’s university system is now contributing to leaving California’s black population farther and farther behind? There’s no indication that he does. He doesn’t consider the impact of abandoning affirmative action at all. He hides in the theoretical, as libertarians always do, and treats the real world as if it is an annoying distraction from the important work of considering philosophical questions nobody is asking.
As is typical of these anti-affirmative action screeds, Kowal couches his argument in the terms of racial equality and describes affirmative action as racially discriminatory. But this is the real/theoretical divide exactly: the racial equality that matters is racial equality in fact and not in theory. And in California, on a vast swath of metrics, it is the black and Hispanic people who are served by affirmative action who need the most help. If Kowal would bother to look outside his myopic framework he might see that white people in California aren’t suffering under the oppressive yoke of racial discrimination but rather are richer, healthier, and longer lived than their black and Hispanic counterparts. That’s the reality of racial discrimination, not the slogan-ready bullshit of theory.
There are many ways to attack Kowal’s argument, starting first with why Kowal assumes such a reductive vision of what college is for and what the mission of the university is. And a long history lesson on the entrenched and powerful discrimination that black and Hispanic people have faced and continue to face is in order, and might make him reconsider what, exactly, is unfair in the “meritocracy” of contemporary America. But I’m afraid that as long as he is permitted to play in the sandbox of purely theoretical politics, there’s no getting through to him. Abstraction is the playground of the privileged.
LittlePig
Roy said it pretty well the other day:
“the libertarian movement is just one big agoraphobia support group.”
In a more civilized time in our history, these folks were the ones locked away in the attic.
trollhattan
Professional victimhood from the perch of the overclass. It’s the Klein bottle of “conservative” logic.
I’m honestly more concerned that the UC system is headed for being priced out of reach of the middle class, period. They’re not endowed in the way private universities are and are looking at opening up enrollment to premium-tuition foreign students as a way to make ends meet.
My kid will be applying to colleges in a few years. That two-year school down the street is looking better every day. Compromise–it’s what’s for dinner.
rikryah
libertarians do NOT live in the real world.
Ash Can
QFT. Full disclosure : I married a libertarian (one more along the lines of Gary Johnson than Ron Paul). Once in a while we get into a discussion about his “religion,” and I always end up running circles around his arguments by placing them within RL contexts. It’s amusing, but also a little sad, especially in light of the fact that there are people who think like that in positions of actual authority.
Ben Cisco
He may claim it is for a higher principle, but he acts as though we’re in a (and FSM how I’m beginning to despise this term) “post-racial” society.
__
Another example of chasing “purity.” Keeping a boot on the neck of the “nears” is just gravy.
__
Actually, it sounds more and more like “conservatism” by the minute…
Linda Featheringill
Remember the phrase, “all things being equal”. The problem is that all things are not equal. If life were equally good/bad for everybody at birth and afterwards, there would be no need for affirmative action. Everybody knows that.
Pliny
Tim Wise, woop woop
Hbin
Wow, the “Muslims need better PR guy is still blogging there?
As for the issue at hand, Kowal tried couching it in the end as the Legislature (the “elites”) denying the will of the people. But only after writing paragraphs after paragraphs about the evils of racial discrimination (against white people).
joeyess
I eagerly await the day when Senate hearings convene with a singular question:
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Federalist Society?”
Samara Morgan
Kowal is also a JAFI, like Kain and Anne Laurie.
does this mean you are starting a kangaroo slap fight with the LoOGies?
ppcli
Look, affirmative action is already being practiced at all top universities. Talk to any admissions director at a top university and they’ll tell you, as long as they are sure that no recording devices are around, that their campuses would be at least 70% female and at least 60% Asian if they didn’t keep their fingers on the scale. And this tendency is growing, not receding. I have a feeling that as this becomes more and more apparent, support for affirmative action among white male Republicans is going to suddenly blossom.
Gin & Tonic
It always reminds me of freshman physics, with the massless stings and frictionless pulleys.
BGinCHI
Kowal’s basing his whole theory on UC basketball.
Five black guys and a scrappy white sixth man.
And for the record, Kowal was the equipment manager of his HS basketball team.
kindness
Orange County – where the egos of Los Angeles go when they find they can’t make it in the Big City but still feel the need to goose step over their less fortunate fellow citizens (and non-citizens).
Alex S.
@rikryah:
Heh, that’s so true and so explanatory.
@Samara Morgan:
I don’t know if I want to know what a JAFI is. Jewish American for Israel?
Hbin
There’s already a smackdown from someone at LOOG
And wow, I completely missed that Kowal was sort of making an analogy between slavery and affirmative action (what he insisted on calling reverse discrimination, hey, if you repeat it often enough, it becomes true, right?)
gttim
Affirmative Action isn’t just to balance out today’s racism, which does exist. It also tries to balance out past racism. Remember those people in the 60’s who could not get an education, get admitted to many schools and colleges? Those people who could not get hired and if they did, could not get promoted? Those people who were working multiple jobs and were not able to stay at home to help their young kids with homework and stuff? Those people who ended up in poverty? What happened to them affects their kids and grand kids. The vast majority of those families were minorities.
Alex S.
@ppcli:
Interesting. So maybe affirmative action has a future, but it requires white people to give up the idea of their own superiority.
The Republic of Stupidity
I hafta admit… when I read that line, MY mind saw “Orange County FEUDALIST Society…
And I’m thinkin’, “Well, at least they’re being honest about it for a change…”
ppcli
@Alex S.: I scratched my head about that too. So I did a Google search, and apparently she-with-many-names maintains that Kowal, Kain, and Anne Laurie speak the Jafi dialect of Kurdish. Or perhaps they are members of an indigenous tribe in Brazil. Either of which is, frankly, pretty cool if you ask me. Thanks for the quality info, Samara!
Comrade Dread
I believe the response from the Libertarian camp would be that if they haven’t earned it, they can go through the Jr. College system first.
300baud
What I would really like to see from the libertarians is something like: “We find affirmative action morally repugnant, and also ineffective. So we are raising a $10bn private fund for increased K-6 education funding for poor black and Latino students. As part of our belief in minimal government for all, we will also be lobbying for a simpler, saner, fairer school funding system, so that poor and rich districts alike can afford to properly educate all tomorrow’s workers.” That is, something still their special flavor of crazy, but not actively sociopathic, and not aiming directly to turn America into something akin to a Mad Max movie.
But yes, Freddie, you have nailed this, and so I’m sure the Libertarians will continue to disappoint me.
Amir Khalid
@Alex S.:
Apparently, m_c has gained the power to award members of the juicitariat with titles of her own creation. In fact, she has awarded me two titles of my very own: “maftoon” and “Balloon Juice house
negroMuslim”. (Maybe she wikes me.) As for JAFI, I think you’re pretty much on the money, although I’m pretty confident AL’s a Gentile.Martin
@ppcli:
Well, no, actually.
But the attitudes inside the CA public university system are pretty simple: the universities chartered with providing a service to the residents of the state should look approximately like the state itself. And they don’t. It’s not in dispute that they don’t.
Guys like Kowal assume that the status quo is the unbiased system and that the affirmative action efforts would introduce bias. However, they cannot defend the status quo, nor do they try. They don’t defend that test scores used for admission correlate more strongly with income than any other variable. The state is not obligated to serve higher income households more than lower income households, and the libertarians won’t go near that topic. They don’t defend that higher income school districts have a better prepared pipeline to help students understand what it means to go to college and to get them there. They don’t defend that lower income school districts routinely have students working 20-40 hours per week while in high school to support their families – so not only do they not have the income to go to Kaplan every night, they don’t have the time to. They have no explanation for why a state where nearly 50% of 18 year-olds are Latino, fewer than 25% of UC and Cal State students are Latino, and 15% of 18 year-old are African American, fewer than 5% of UC and Cal State students are African American.
They don’t try and defend the current system as unbiased because the only way they can do that is to admit that if the current system is unbiased, that means that Latinos and African Americans are inherently less academically capable. And they know they can’t go there (even if they might believe it). So they don’t defend the current system as unbiased so much as they merely declare it so by fiat and by extension any change to the system must be biased – and so they attack every proposed change – always have.
The changes the UC and Cal State system have been working toward are roughly to:
1) Eliminate the SAT, or at least further de-emphasize the standardized tests over grades. Standardized tests are, unfortunately, heavily biased due to test prep.
2) Further level the playing field between students coming out of districts with no AP and honors courses vs those coming out of high-income districts with AP and honors courses (and therefore weighted GPAs).
3) Establish not so much racial quotas as geographic ones. Make sure that all school districts and all counties are represented in the system – still the strongest students, but students should not be held back due to their tax base.
4) Broaden the profile used to evaluate students. If students are doing well in school and working full time, give them credit for that – that’s damn hard to do, and more indicative of future success than someone with great test scores who’s never actually had to work hard.
Linda Featheringill
@Amir Khalid:
I prefer to think of her as a Brazilian indigenous person. Cool!
:-)
Roger Moore
@kindness:
FTFY. Unfortunately, the OC is starting to fill up with Latinos, so the rich racist trash are going to have to find somewhere else to live. (The poor racist trash mostly live in the Inland Empire.)
sb
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
So what Kowal really wants to do is stand in a group of like minded people and argue the philosophy of why we don’t fall off the earth?
Chyron HR
@Samara Morgan:
Are you saying that if we fold the page together, it will reveal the hidden messages in your posts?
Tyro
Hm. I see what you’re saying, but California has an extensive Cal State system for those who don’t necessarily make the cut for the UC system or want to attend a nearby university if they don’t get in to the nearby UC school and don’t want to go to a different part of the state.
There’s a good argument be made that the UC system should be more diverse across the board, but denying access to college education in general because of the ban on affirmative action is not the argument being made.
ppcli
@Martin:
I’m not sure where the “no, actually” is coming from. Are you disagreeing with the ballpark guesstimates of 70 and 60, or with the basic claim that positive efforts have to be made to prevent student bodies from skewing wildly toward women, to a degree that would be a social and recruiting catastrophe, and that Asians are disadvantaged directly by admissions committees as they currently act. I’m happy to adjust the numbers, but I’m reporting the input of several close friends who work in college admissions – one in the Ivy League, and a few others at highly ranked state schools, plus several acquaintances, who I have less reason to trust, but whose reports are pretty uniform. That jibes with my own experience, since I have participated in and even chaired admissions committees on many occasions, though admittedly in my case at the graduate level rather than undergraduate. [Perhaps I should have also said explicitly that I am not including universities with a specifically technical focus, such as MIT or Caltech.]
But perhaps this is a biased sample. That can happen. What is your basis for your assertion to the contrary?
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
Aren’t legacy admissions just affirmative action for the rich and well-connected? Wasn’t C+ Augustus a legacy admission?
Roger Moore
@sb:
Sure they do. Racial discrimination is when incompetent minorities try to use the power of the government to push themselves ahead of more deserving straight white men. The reverse case can never happen, of course, because straight white men have gotten where they are completely under their own power.
wrb
Kain, Kowal and AL are “wearing short skirts and low cut tops or barely any clothing at all? ”
Disturbing
Edit: Or do their flames impinge on their water walls?
ppcli
@Chyron HR: Lol from another person with fond juvenile memories of Mad mag.
Roger Moore
@Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water:
How dare you suggest such a thing! Legacy admissions are just an attempt to preserve vital family traditions of going to the same school. Just because they have the effect of ensuring that schools are overfull of undeserving rich white folk doesn’t mean they should be compared in any way to the evil, racially discriminatory practice of Affirmative Action./wingnut
NB: Proud graduate of a school that doesn’t have legacy admissions but still seems to do just fine at getting donations from rich alumni.
SKAN
Freddie, this post is much appreciated, but completely unnecessary. All you had to do was point out that Kowal cites Hadley Arkes, a man so radical he should be laughed out of any room he enters. He was famous, at the college he taught at, for saying that the only difference between him and his good friend Tony Scalia was that Scalia didn’t oppose interracial marriage.
gnomedad
@ppcli:
That high? What’s going on?
Lurking Canadian
@Roger Moore:
I have heard, though cannot confirm, that Colorado Springs fills this role.
Lurking Canadian
@gnomedad:
That depends very much on who you ask. Some will tell you it’s because primary and high schools overcompensated for past bias in favour of boys and now are biased in favour of girls. Others will tell you that it’s because academic curricula have been stressed for younger and younger kids, requiring overactive five-year-old boys, incapable of sitting still, to sit in desks; leading to over-diagnosis of ADHD and related disorders. Still others will tell you that it’s because girls mature faster and tend to be more driven, thus work harder in school.
Then there are those who will tell you that it’s because there’s a chemical in plastic water bottles that makes boys stupid and lazy. I am somewhat more skeptical of this latter claim than of the others.
I’ve read a few pop-ish analyses of this issue, but I have found it impossible to separate the political views of the author from the content, so I have no idea. The phenomenon seems to be real, though.
smith
Tell these libertarian losers to get back to me with their outrage over affirmative action when they go after legacy admissions who are wasting space and taking spots from more deserving applicants simply because daddy or mommy gave some cash to the school.
Roger Moore
@Lurking Canadian:
Not nearly enough space. The OC is much bigger than Colorado Springs; its population is about the same as Metro Denver. There’s no way all the racists from OC would fit in Colorado Springs, even if they could survive the winters and lack of beaches.
ppcli
@gnomedad: Perhaps that’s too high. Make it at least 60%. The basic situation is that girls are doing much, much better in high school than boys are. No doubt this is for a combination of reasons, among them the fact that they are, as teenagers, prone to mature earlier (previously girls were – in general – not encouraged academically as much as boys, and this compensated for the early maturity – once girls started being equally encouraged to set high goals the early maturity started to show itself). There are also lots of speculative conjectures, such as that boys have a weakness for video games. I don’t put a lot of stock in those.
But it is a phenomenon that education theorists are paying a lot of attention to, and trying to sift out the explanations from the noise.
Martin
@ppcli:
Both.
Direct experience with admissions policy at CA public universities.
Tom Levenson
@Gin & Tonic: You’re willfully refusing to discuss the true denizens of frosher physics: spherical cows and chickens.
Discrimination? I think so.
ppcli
@ppcli: Just to follow up on the last post. Here’s some more input saying basically the same thing.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20111646-503544.html
Remember that the numbers of admissions directors admitting this tendency will be deflated, because nobody’s exactly sure what is legal and what isn’t in this domain so there is a reluctance to go on the record.
ppcli
@Tom Levenson: Especially the ones of uniform density.
Lihtox
Objecting to affirmative action is like objecting to chemotherapy because it poisons the body. In a completely healthy society, affirmative action would be detrimental; and too many people want to pretend that we live in a healthy society. But it takes a damned long time to recover from Jim Crow, and given the GOP’s meddling with voter registration laws, *that* cancer can recur at any time.
deep cap
very good analogy Lihtox.
Martin
@ppcli: Keep in mind that even race- and gender-blind policy can lead to biased results simply by being bad policy. By and large, most undergraduate admissions policy is simply bad policy, based on old attitudes about predictive performance that have long since been debunked, but which live on simply due to institutional inertia.
That doesn’t mean that race- and gender-blind policy requires a thumb on the scale, just that if they do have to put a thumb on the scale to the degree you are suggesting means that their policy is fucked. That’s not ‘affirmative action’, that’s applying a neutral stance in practice that doesn’t exist in policy. But that’s not affirmative action. If the policy gives weight to households that belong to a country club, and the admissions directors ignore that policy, that’s not affirmative action – that’s just stupid fucking policy. And most of the ivys, privates, and even quite a lot of the publics have stupid fucking policies.
Judas Escargot
@Martin:
They certainly do have “an explanation” in mind: It assumes, shall we say, a reverse correlation between melanin content and intelligence.
They just don’t say it out loud anymore.
catclub
@Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water: “Aren’t legacy admissions just affirmative action for the rich and well-connected? Wasn’t C+ Augustus a legacy admission?”
And it is _extremely_ impolite to point this out. Politeness is all.
ppcli
@Martin:
With the actual admissions, or with the formulation of policy concerning admissions? Two very different things. There are all sorts of policies, worked out in consultation with lawyers, etc, and then there are strongly desired outcomes, that the committees are expected to get.
Personal experience: One year I was chair of a committee that brought in a superb class, perhaps the most academically accomplished the department had seen in decades. But it was drastically gender-imbalanced. Less than an hour after sending around the email announcing the class, the Director of Graduate Studies sent me an email that said, in quite harsh terms, that I should make sure this doesn’t happen next year. Not even any nominal “hey, great class” opening.
I replied with an email detailing all the things I did to strive for gender balance, and pointed out that anything else I could have done would have been clearly contrary to policy, and also illegal (our U had faced a lawsuit that went up to the Supreme Court about these things. So the policy was quite explicit and carefully crafted.)
The DGS replied with a long email explaining in condescending detail all the reasons why gender balance is important to learning, and what social pathologies can result if it is skewed.
I replied with an email that said, yes, yes, I’m aware of all that. Please tell me what I could have done differently and still have respected policy.
The DGS replied, making absolutely no suggestions about what I should have done, or should do in the future, but merely repeated, in only slightly different words, the previous email detailing how important gender balance is.
A few more go rounds of this – me saying “no, really, what should I do differently? – the DGS saying “let me tell you how important this is and how serious your failure is [without actually telling me anything to do differently]” before the unstated message became clear: “I am not about to put this in an email, of course, but I don’t want to hear anything about the damn policy. I do not want a gender balance outside of a certain margin. Make it happen next year. Just do it and don’t tell me how.”
But look, there are lots of different applicant pools. If UC Berkeley, say, has a roughly 50% male-to-female ratio in its entering classes each year, despite the nationwide tendency for women to, on average, drastically exceed men in high school and on test scores, maybe it’s because there are features special to that applicant pool that I don’t know about. I haven’t done a professional review of the literature. I could be wrong.
David in NY
On libertarians, I rather thought that Belle Waring had pretty much had the last necessary word in the 2004 blog post that also gave new life to the “and a pony” concept: http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html
Mnemosyne
@Tyro:
You mean they used to have an extensive Cal State system. Not so much anymore after the massive budget cuts that happened over the past few years.
Right now, it’s not that ambitious kids don’t want to go to college — it’s that there are literally fewer places for them to go once you factor in the cuts in admissions.
Jules
never mind.
ABL
“homeslice.”
that word needs to be reintroduced into my lexicon.
ABL
when i was applying for law schools, i had always dreamed of going to berkeley. i was fresh out of oberlin, still a hippy.
(i graduated from college the year prop 209 was passed.) i got accepted to berkeley, thanked them, but declined on the grounds that i didn’t want to be expected to speak for The Blacks and that i thought prop 209 was bullshit.
who wants to be a minority in a school where you’re looked at as some anomaly? not me.
goblue72
@ppcli: Just wanna say I appreciate your thoughtful replies in this thread.
goblue72
@Roger Moore: Your snark reminds of the time when I picked up a copy of the Atlantic Monthly and the cover story was about how nepotism was awesome. Knew right then and there that the new ownership was a wingnut. Cancelled my subscription right then and there.
Samara Morgan
@Alex S.: Just Another Fucking Islamophobe
Lysana
That last bit nearly made me drop my coffee filter. Lovely snark.
And as a Californian, it really is criminal what’s been going on in our schools. Kowal is part of the problem.
Martin
@ppcli:
Both. You want to change the policy from this to that and want to know the impact, I’m the kind of person you ask. I know where the policy works, for who, how, the impact on overall performance, and how to work the whole thing backward – and how to do it differently for drama vs architecture. You want to improve retention? GPA? Time to graduation? I’ll tell you how to change the policy. You have limited resources? I’ll tell you what corners to cut and what the consequence will be. And I’ve read 5,000 applications in a cycle. I’ve set the cut lines for admits. I’ll tell you what admits to recruit to achieve the above, what ones to ignore, and where your best bang/buck is.
Shaping a study body doesn’t just happen with how you admit, but also how you recruit, and how you do outreach to get students to apply. What you can’t do in admissions policy you can often do in other areas.
If you have that kind of discrepancy in test scores, why are you giving so much weight to test scores? That’s my point. Gender and race-blind policies don’t devolve to a single unbiased formula. If your policy is leading to gender and race biases, maybe the problem is the policy, and not the lack of affirmative action. That’s not an argument against affirmative action, but against biased policies, and test scores are unquestionably the most biased elements of every admissions policy out there. Everyone knows this, but nobody has the political clout and courage to do it. But there’s a world of difference between eliminating standardized tests and minimizing them – and too many schools aren’t even willing to minimize their effect.
You give me a pile of redacted transcripts and test scores, no names, no school names, addresses, etc. and I’ll put them in piles by race, gender, and median school district income – and more accurately than anyone here would think possible. What’s more, I’ll tell you with pretty good accuracy what major they applied to, the ones with single parents, the first generation applicants, and the ones that are working while they go to school. If you can work the system backward from grades and test scores, then you sure as hell have to conclude that the system is being worked forward the same way – that the supposedly unbiased grades and test scores are in fact biased, or else there’s no way I could do what I just described.
And regarding the GPA discrepancy between men and women, the differences seen in HS don’t translate nearly so strongly into the college applicant pool, particularly when you unweight the GPA. And on testing, the difference in mean scores leads to some different conclusions when you look at the distribution of scores. One reason why minority population scores tend to be lower is that they’re more willing to risk taking the test and getting a weak score, than say whites or asians are. If a white student thinks they’ll get a 400 Math SAT, they’re more likely to just not take the test at all and bypass college – or go to a school that doesn’t require the SAT – community college, tech school, etc. than a minority student. The white students typically have options that the minority students don’t have (or don’t feel they have). What’s always lost, particularly in the test averages, is that it’s always a self-selected pool, and whether a student can afford to self-select in or out of that pool depends a great deal on their socioeconomic situation. That same holds true for who applies to college, to what college, and so on. You can only draw conclusions within a fairly narrow context, and the policy the institution sets for itself shapes how the community interact with the institution. If you’re seeing bias in your applicant pool, then you’ve almost certainly contributed to that bias in some way, often times right in your admissions policy.
ABL gives an example of that above. If she were 10 years younger, she might make the same decision but based on different triggers. Right now, UC is seeing very weak interest from African American students because of stupid shit happening down at UCSD and some other similarly stupid events state-wide. You wouldn’t see this from outside the community, or even give it much seriousness, but within the community it’s a real point of concern and having a measured effect of having students self-select out of the applicant pool.
Samara Morgan
@SKAN:
having failed to engage any A-list bloggers (like MattY or TNC) in one of his epic kangaroo slap fights, freddie is lowering his sights to C-list bloggers.
Alex S.
@ppcli:
Yeah, I’m interested, actually. I can disagree later, but hey, maybe it’s something interesting.
@Amir Khalid:
That’s the only problem I have with her. Calling you a house muslim is like saying that a true muslim should be disliked by others. That makes her religious identity look like a stunt. But maybe it makes sense in muslim thinking? I have no idea.
Alex S.
@Samara Morgan:
Thanks, I want to keep up with you ;-).
Short Bus Bully
Fuckin’ A Freddie, this post should be required reading for EVERYONE. Outstanding.
Svensker
@Martin:
Actually, I think they do. It’s called The Bell Curve, and they may not admit it but they believe it.
trollhattan
BTW, even (especially?) at UC Berkeley, jerks bein’ jerks.
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2011/09/uc-berkeley-blog-diversity-bake-sale.html
Leave Ward Connerly aloooooone!
Tyro
If you have that kind of discrepancy in test scores, why are you giving so much weight to test scores?
Martin, you sure do like to write a lot!
Weight is given to test scores and grades because they are believed to have predictive value, and in some cases the racial/gender discrepancy is an artifact of one group being more prepared than the other, on average. Now the fault is of the secondary school system for not better preparing all of its applicants across the board, but that has nothing to so with whether one gives weight go test scores or not. Test scores would lose their weight in the admissions process as they are shown to have less and less predictive value with respect to preparation of the student.
In the case of gender, women have better test scores and grades, but the university doesn’t want to lose highly qualified men to other competitors, so they put their thumb on the scale to admit more men.
Berkeley’s reputation as an undergraduate institution has definitely declined over the past 15 years, but the reason is because of the lack of funding for the UC system. The fact that the UC system has been hurting in general creates symptoms like the calls to end affirmative action based on the idea that the pie is smaller and smaller and less of the pie should be available on an affirmative action basis. Everyone has lost: fewer minorities attending Berkeley while those who are admitted are now attending a lower quality product.
Silver
The same guys who tend to whine about letting the blacks and the Mexicans into higher education also tend to whine about competing with the Asians.
It would be comical, if you found ignorant racists funny…
ppcli
@Martin: Well, this thread seems to have run its course, but I’ll make a couple of remarks. You write:
In fact, I mentioned test scores once, in passing. Where you get “so much weight”, I don’t understand. I personally discount test scores drastically when I’m not allowed to ignore them completely. To go on and on about test scores is to bash a target that is orthogonal to what I actually said. I also never mentioned minorities, apart from the issue that Asians are under-represented, relative to their performance. I’m prepared to believe that I am mistaken about this, and given your expertise you could no doubt enlighten me. But what you’ve written doesn’t address *that* issue at all.
I concentrated on gender imbalance for the simple reason that I understand the literature there better. I freely grant that issues pertaining to minority enrollment (apart from Asian enrollment, about which I have more extensive knowledge, for odd reasons) are very puzzling to me and I don’t issue any opinion. The things you say are plausible, but don’t address what I’ve said.
Concerning gender imbalance – which is what I was principally talking about – here the sum total of what you say:
“Don’t translate nearly so strongly”? – OK, but that grants my point. There’s a difference, but not as much as I suggested.
“Difference in mean scores leads to different conclusions when you look at the distribution of scores”. I’m not sure what you’re getting at – that males have lower mean scores but a much higher variance, so that they may be overrepresented at the very top? (The claim that Larry Summers (sp?) got in trouble about at the MIT conference, though admittedly it was his interpretation of these numbers and not merely reporting the facts that did him in.) This may be.
But without more meat in your response concerning gender differences, it sounds like you’re granting that there is a difference, but not as great a difference as raw numbers would suggest. That may be, but it concedes my basic claim.
Samara Morgan
@Alex S.: a real muslim believes in the message of the Noble Quran.
that is the First Pillar.
Proselytizing the poor and ignorant is forbidden by the Generous Quran..
Freedom of speech legalizes the proselytization of the poor and ignorant.
its not that hard.
Menzies
@ABL:
I got a bit of this when I was going to college. I got into the program I’m in due to being male and Hispanic. Normally, I would not believe the first part of that – but when we got down to the last fifteen applicants, I was the only male still in the running.
Mind you, I had the grades and the activity sheet that should’ve made me a great candidate even if I had been a white woman, like most of the others. But I definitely heard more than one person comment that my “geographic region” and my “race” somehow meant I was taking up a spot someone else deserved. I heard this about other people in my class who likewise had APs, grades, activities out the wazoo, and were sometimes legacies – but because they were Hispanic and from Puerto Rico, clearly that was the only reason they were accepted at Ivies.
Mnemosyne
@trollhattan:
Yeah, I heard one of those WATBs on the radio. He was shocked, shocked that when he insulted his fellow students to their faces by telling them them didn’t belong there, they got upset with him.
Do white men really spend so much of their lives being deferred to that they genuinely don’t understand that people get pissed off when you insult them and you can’t just say any assholish thing you want with no repercussions?
Martin
@Tyro:
But that’s been shown for decades. Test scores at best serve as a throttling mechanism for future performance – once you cross a certain level, generally in the 550/800 range – higher scores are predictive of at most a slight increase in first year GPA, and nothing after that. And lower scores are only predictive when coupled with weaker grades. Everyone has seen this. Nobody really disputes it.
But nobody wants to be the school that shows lower test scores because everyone will interpret it as an indicator that the quality of the institution has gone to hell. So the perception that test scores are all-important by the general public force them to be important, even when everyone inside the institution knows that they’re largely shit. And once those scores appear to fall off, stronger students stop applying and the actual quality of the student body declines. So it’s not a causal relationship between test scores and weaker student performance, but a causal relationship between the measure of test scores and the profile of the next student population, which in turn leads to weaker student performance because you attracted a weaker entering class. It works the opposite that most people think, but it means that test scores wind up being propped up as key indicators even when they aren’t.
lou
Often colleges have other forms of affirmative action. There’s geography, for instance. A friend of mine readily admits he had an easier time getting into Harvard as a Montana farmboy than someone with his credentials living in Boston.
Some folks, like Richard Kahlenberg, argue that colleges should turn to income instead of race. there’s some issues with that. Blacks have not built up the wealth that whites have (hello GI Bill and 1930s home loans), so the black middle class is more shallow, so to speak. So black middle-class students don’t get the SAT scores white students with similar incomes do. However, if you look at SAT scores by wealth — NOT income — scores flatten by race.
polyorchnid octopunch
I haven’t read the comments yet, but I will say… you are being far too kind to That One.
Tyro
martin, as you’re no doubt aware, plenty of schools have de-emphasized test scores outside of a “backstop” to weed out those who lack basic english and math skills or as a supplement to get an idea of their school preparation rather than as a quantitative admission requirement.
It’s really hard to understand what point you’re trying to make in everything you’re babbling about. As best I can tell, you’re trying to say, “I get paid to adjust admissions metrics that magically result in entering classes that mirror public demographics.” That isn’t an unbiased set of requirements at all. It’s simply “plausible deniability affirmative action”– which is even worse because affirmative action at least stays aware of what the individual capabilities of the admitted students are so that they can be supported.
Darkrose
@smith: That was my question about the stupid bake sale the Berkeley Young Rethugs are doing:
If my parents come and write a check for $50 bucks, can I get six free cupcakes?
If I’m from out-of-state–or even better, an international student, do you pay me to take cupcakes?
IrishGirl
@gttim: Good point, there was a story on NPR last week about the generational effect of poverty in the AA community. It was very interesting and really illustrates your point well. Can’t find the darn link….
Darkrose
@Mnemosyne: Yeah. At my school, the number of applicants goes up every year and the number of spaces goes down. For this fall, we had around 60,000 undergraduate applicants for 5,000 spaces. Keep in mind that for more than half of those applicants, we were their second or third choice among the UC’s.
Our Chancellor has come out and said that they’re focusing hard on bringing in out-of-state and international students who will pay more in tuition, to make up for the loss of state funding.
gex
Oh, this post is so apropos. My eldest brother-in-law suffered a massive stroke a month ago. The family has been busy trying to get him good medical and rehabilitation care. It’s all so very expensive, but he’s wealthy so it will probably go well for him.
The difference between being able to afford the rehab and not is the difference between putting back together a functional human adult and having a living body take up space in the cheapest health care facility until neglect kills them. (Douthat probably would have something to say about how killing them might be kinder than housing them in a nursing home until death, who knows.)
Anyhow, my other brother-in-law, a Reaganomics fan, a hater of taxes but works for a contractor on the JSF project!!! asked my girlfriend, rhetorically, “what do poor people do?” Her reply was “they’re fucked”.
The sad part is that this new glimpse at a perspective will do nothing to change his politics. He’ll still be a libertarian voting Republican because “government is killing small business!” while he sits at a comfy desk making tons of money at Lockheed Martin. Soon enough he can stop worrying his little head about the underclass wasting away for lack of resources. He’ll feel much better once he forgets that moment and votes for Romney or Perry, or whomever the fuck he votes for. (He currently voted for the sitting FL governor, so you know he’ll vote for any R).
AAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Just had to get that off my chest. Fuck him for asking the question now, but not when he thinks about his political philosophy.