“We cannot let this decision be the last word,” Biden tells us at White House, in remarks on SCOTUS decision on race in college admissions.
“Discrimination still exists in America.” pic.twitter.com/2qQjVaGKtS— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) June 29, 2023
Asked if this a rogue court, Biden says of US Supreme Court, “This is not a normal court.” pic.twitter.com/IMJQhQS9hM
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) June 29, 2023
22 Democrats voted to confirm Roberts
22 Democrats voted no
Joe Biden voted no. https://t.co/vubbkFbNfp
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) June 29, 2023
Wow. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissent. pic.twitter.com/ica3ED6LZq
— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) June 29, 2023
This is really interesting. For so long, Thomas, as the only Black person on the Court, has gotten to frame race issues for his colleagues with very little pushback.
With KBJ on the Court, there's a competing voice and perspective on race. And he has to respond to her views. pic.twitter.com/wQn5b9JWkz
— Melissa Murray (@ProfMMurray on Spoutible ?? ) (@ProfMMurray) June 29, 2023
?? Ketanji Brown Jackson has a two-part footnote on Clarence Thomas.
She says he "responds to a dissent I did not write… demonstrates an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or UNC’s… ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here." pic.twitter.com/s4XQ39kyyI
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) June 29, 2023
Progressive group Take Back the Court notes Jackson recused from Harvard case to avoid "even the appearance of conflict" since she was on its board til last spring.
But Clarence Thomas failed to recuse despite wife being on Natl Assn of Scholars board, which filed amicus briefs.
— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) June 29, 2023
‘Just Us’ Roberts: Of course, if you’re one of the good ones, like our Clarence…
This is just emotional vampirism. 'Entertain me with your trauma. In a manner that absolves me.' https://t.co/rQK2mqujhj
— zeddy (@Zeddary) June 29, 2023
Earlier this month, I asked Anita Hill about the possibility of the Supreme Court ending affirmative action. Here's what she told me. pic.twitter.com/GKcFUKKAb0
— Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) June 29, 2023
I wanted to share some of my thoughts on today's Supreme Court decision on affirmative action: pic.twitter.com/Wa6TGafzHV
— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) June 29, 2023
“So often, we just accept that money, power and privilege are perfectly justifiable forms of affirmative action, while kids growing up like I did are expected to compete when the ground is anything but level.”
Lotta conservatives explaining to me that white guys at Harvard deserve to be there and POC don’t forget I worked for c student and Harvard grad Jared Kushner.
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) June 29, 2023
Tucker Carlson is still allowed to ask Hunter Biden for helping getting his kids into Georgetown.
— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) June 29, 2023
War for Ukraine Day 491: Just a Brief Thursday Night Update
Martin
So I wrote up a bunch a few threads back about how you implement around this decision.
But if we’re going to establish that race based admissions is unconstitutional, then it’s logical to extend that to legacy, athletic, and income based admissions.
The first are a big category – and one that is both generally larger than race based, and one that is *always* at odds with race based. So one way of balancing this new equation is knocking out the legacy ones.
Athletic is one I’ve generally had a bit of soft defense for but, in light of this decision I think it’s now untenable because athletic ability is not a component of merit in terms of how any academic selection process works, it’s orthogonal to it, just as race has been argued to be.
Income preference shows up in a variety of places. It’s common for international graduate admissions – if you can prove you don’t need support, there’s a broad category of seats for you. But it also shows up in undergraduate admissions at one end at schools that have limited financial aid pools – they will shape their pool to remove lower income students to make sure the entering class doesn’t break the financial aid bank. But at privates it’s a form of legacy admissions. Even if Elon Musks kids don’t come with a big financial gift, they’re a good bet to have that cash at some point in the future and be able to be hit up for a gift later.
bbleh
The whole thing is sickening but was almost inevitable. John Roberts has spent his WHOLE LIFE preparing to be the Roger Taney of the 21st century, and now by God he has achieved it.
It’s certainly no solace to point out that the Supreme Court is historically the most conservative — and often reactionary — branch.
The only glimmer of good news is, Cal has been dealing for a while with this very situation, and they’ve found a work-around that so far seems to be pretty good.
One notes also the ELEVEN women and/or non-White judges just nominated by Biden for the Federal bench. As Sonia Sotomayor said at the conclusion of her read dissent today, we shall overcome.
Jerzy Russian
I am glad that Justice Brown Jackson is on the Court. I hope she keeps (metaphorically) kicking Thomas in the junk.
geg6
Fuckers. I hates them.
geg6
@Jerzy Russian:
Yeah, that is the one bright light in all of this. Brutal ass kicking.
Another Scott
– Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
Nominated.
Cheers,
Scott.
kindness
The political game that plays out in America has a curious back and forth over time. The moment in time determines our shared reality. And time is the one thing we don’t seem to have enough of.
geg6
@geg6:
I’ll bet he’s terrified of her.
Suzanne
Justice Jackson is fantastic.
Here’s hoping for an early and painful exit for Thomas, Alito, Squi’s Buddy, etc.
Kay
So this will stop the Right wing whining about their kids not getting into exclusive schools, right?
That’s over? We’re done with that excuse?
Of course not. They’ll now claim top secret affirmative action – a conspiracy- because they are always, always the victims. With each “triumph” they somehow get even more whiny, hateful and miserable.
They’re complete sore losers of course- they never admitted they lost in 2020 and 2022- but they are also sore winners.
Martin
@bbleh: There are virtually no black students at Cal. They fared worse than we did on that front – any black students that did meet the criteria for Cal got scholarships to Stanford, etc. So yeah, Cal has a process to admit those students, but not a process to get them enrolled, in part because publics are also prohibited from having race-based scholarships.
I haven’t seen any analysis of whether this ruling would end that at other institutions, but I’d presume so.
The privates could then also be prohibited from offering race based scholarships, but they also almost universally do in-person interviews and would be able to offer them that way. Privates will also have pretty straightforward ways to, shall we say, put those students in billionaires private jet in a seat that would otherwise have been unoccupied.
There are ways around these restrictions that the top privates will have no problem routing around, and even if caught, will get a free pass by the courts because these are the Right Schools™ doing right for the Right People™.
Martin
@Suzanne: I agree. She’s really good at keeping one eye on the lawyers arguing their case and one eye on the other justices and cutting off their bad faith arguments before they offer them.
mrmoshpotato
@Jerzy Russian:
Fixed. :)
Kay
@Suzanne:
I knew she was something special watching her handle her confirmation hearing and I think the Right did too. There aren’t a lot of people that good.
Kay
@Martin:
Like voter fraud, I feel like “I was kept out by affirmative action” is a myth that will continue, no matter what rules there are.
Since conservatives invented voter fraud, so since 2000, they have put in tens of new voting laws to “fight fraud”. It hasn’t made a bit of difference. Their insane base are nuttier about fraud than they were before all the ID laws and such went it. They imagined the problem so it can’t be fixed.
sab
@kindness: They are lawyers on the court. If we can stop this bribery stuff then the justices will have to focus on lawyering instead of blasting small birds and catching big fish.
I think Kavenaugh and Barrett are reachable. Never leftists, but at least Rule of Law and stare decisis. I naively think Barrett believes in what she does. Kavenagh is finally having to be a grownup, not a bailed out frat boy.
Another Scott
@Martin:
I guess Ted Sorensen wasn’t available to polish it before he mailed it in…
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
This was a huge, huge corruption case– the whole damn Ohio GOP were implicated in it one way or another- and yet it got almost no national coverage.
It’s a great STORY too- involves turncoats wearing wires and sleazy, conniving CEO’s and (literal) bags of cash exchanged. Just the audacity of it- they charged ratepayers for the bribes they were paying Ohio Republicans– put a special “bribery fund tax” on their their utility bills.
bbleh
@Martin: true, and it remains to be seen to what degree other private schools are restricted (although I’d bet it will be significant). But I think the approach Cal has taken — considering the economics of their high school districts — has promise. And the parameters of such a factor can be tweaked: exactly what constitutes an underfunded school district, how important is that in considering admission, yada yada. Moreover, if schools such as Stanford adopt similar policies, then other factors will make the difference, and admissions at all schools then MAY start to normalize.
Not trying to understate the setback, only to say that there may be ways to mitigate it, perhaps even mostly.
sab
@Kay: My stepgrandaughter is a black child from a broken home, home-schooled by a drug addicted mother in Cleveland. Lived with us for a few years and went to Akron schools, but most of her education was her self-teaching herself.
We knew she was bright but we didn’t think anyone else would notice.
Her ACT she was 30 out 32. We always believed in her but even we were surprised.
Kay
@Another Scott:
The application process is horrible, even if you’re not a nut and let the kid lead it. I felt such huge relief when my youngest was done with it. I never, ever have to do it again :)
different-church-lady
“So, you’re an individual who is black.”
“Yes.”
“You must have experienced a lot of racism on a regular basis.”
“Pretty much.”
Jeffro
@Kay: wait…you can go to prison…for 20 years??…just for some
white collar“process” crimes?Kay
@sab:
Oh that’s nice. We used to do a little celebration for the kids who got 30 or better. Now so many of them get 30 or better I don’t think they do it anymore. They seem to have gotten better at the ACT.
I’m good at standardized tests. It’s the sort of thing I’m good at. I think it’s its own skill and not really transferable to real life but it certainly is valued in public schools so I enjoyed that.
bbleh
@Jerzy Russian: @Suzanne: @Martin: Jackson is brilliant. Her legal résumé is unmatched on the court. And she does not shrink from a fight. I sincerely hope (and I do think) she is taking the long view as well. She is the future, and bitter, self-loathing bigots like Alito and Thomas are unfortunate holdovers from the past. (The remaining question is how to get around the apparatchiks, but I have confidence that, if anyone can figure out a way, it is she.)
TriassicSands
Chief Justice John Roberts, BA, JD, RPOS (the R stands for “racist”).
sab
@Kay: What did Borges get? My newspaper didn’t care. Of course First Energy owns this town. A shame, because we are a nice town.
Kay
@Jeffro:
This was EGREGIOUS. If this dude didn’t go to prison yu can just stick a fork in “justice” – it’s done.
He operated as if he were protected and maybe he thought he was- I don’t know that he ever would have been caught without a whistleblower who literally called the FBI and volunteered to wear a wire.
Another Scott
@different-church-lady:
Cheers,
Scott.
Jeffro
I will be interested to see how VA parents react in a few years, when their kids are trying to get in to top state schools and still can’t.
Hint hint, parents: it wasn’t affirmative action keeping your kids out, it was the extremely slow/nearly non-existent growth of said institutions, coupled with the ridiculous college prep arms race that the parents themselves fuel.
We have plenty of fine state universities in Virginia; the problem is the parents’/kids’ perception that only a couple of those schools are worthy of them and the rest by default are…not good. Nothing could be further from the truth.
different-church-lady
@Another Scott:
JFK had a kind of golden hue, so I’m not sure where to fit him into this.
Ramalama
RRO, a FB group seeking donations, has a fund earmarked for passports for Black people. Reparations, something something. They are seeking funds to help Black Citizens get passports for travel, BUT ALSO for VOTING. Just asked them if there wAs a non FB way to support this effort. Anyone interested in this endeavor?
Martin
@bbleh: All the UCs have basically the same approach. There are variations within that structure, but not substantial ones. Variations in magnitude, but not nature. Even relatively tame departures or refinements of the approach require a pretty serious review systemwide.
Cal’s biggest problem has always been that they are not receptive to ideas put forward by the other UCs (this is a subset of the broader problem that UC is not receptive to ideas put forward by other universities) so they can be a little slow to catch on to things that we demonstrated on other campuses. But they get there in the end.
Overall UC has been relatively successful at routing around 209. Not as good as before 209 in terms of the admit picture, but I would argue that heavy lift has resulted in a better result when looking at degrees granted. So if I’m allowed to shift goalposts to what I think is the better measure, I think we did pretty well.
That doesn’t take away from the fact that everything we were doing, at almost every stage was still an effort to deconstruct the systemic advantages given to the right™ kinds of people. Which, you know, includes my community and all that.
I would also offer that another way to counter this decision is to start chucking money at higher ed. If you expand opportunities, you will help the people this decision harms, and that’s really where so much of the pressure on UC was from – the academic performance of students in the state and the population growth drastically outstripped the growth of the institution, even with the addition of a new campus. If you want your kids to have the same chance of getting into a UC as you did, double the number of undergrads the system educates, and you’d pretty much get there. And then double the public funding again to get fees more or less in line to what you paid.
sab
@Kay: Sorry. Checked with husband. She was 32 not 30. I did SAT so I don’t understand ACT scores.
I wish we could get her into school, but I don’t want her in before she is interested and focused.
sab
@Kay: I am good at them too and I think they mean nothing.
I passed the Michigan bar on the multistate alone in 1980. I am pretty sure if they had looked at my essays I wouldn’t have passed the bar at all.
ETA Although when I talked to other lawyers later (out of Pepperdine) they were shocked by unknown results that I thought were property 101 (land contracts are part of our legal system and have been since we were colonies.)
H.E.Wolf
I appreciated the list of organizations, with links, that Michelle Obama included in her tweet (embedded by Anne Laurie in the body of this post).
UNCF (United Negro College Fund)
Hispanic Scholarship Fund
APIA (Asian Pacific Islander American) Scholars
American Indian College Fund
TheDream.us [for undocumented individuals]
and one fund named after the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, may he rest in power:
Thurgood Marshall College Fund
Kay
@sab:
This is me butting in but if she’s open to it you really can help her when the time comes to choose. They really do need adult guidance. They are young and they make poor decisions. And of course if she can get money (and she can in Ohio with that score/background) graduating debt free is wonderful.
Kay
@sab:
Oh, that’s funny. My husband is (also) licensed in MI and like you didn’t have to do essays because he did well on multistate.
I worked hard at the bar exam – I recall it as just crazy hard work, and fast, I looked up and it was over. But I remember the LSAT going so well I was really cruising-practically humming. You get in that standardized test zone when it’s going well. You feel unstoppable :)
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Who could have known?
Ella in New Mexico
Fucking Clarence Thomas.
He still thinks all his millionaire white “friends” actually give two shits about him when in reality he was merely a means to an end. This likely also applies to his wife.
What internalized racism can do to a human being–Exhibit A.
James E Powell
@Kay:
Why didn’t that cause the collapse of the Republican Party in Ohio? It seems like it didn’t even damage them.
Ella in New Mexico
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
How old is this? Cuz if it’s recent someone should take Suzie for a dementia evaluation.
sab
@Kay: Breaks my heart but her stepmom listens to no one least of all me. My job is love but not sense.
I will focus now. She is really bright.I don’t want her to be pushed into stuff she doesn’t want to do but.. She does have a lovely boyfriend since she was 14. He knows how bright she is and he is focused.
Sure Lurkalot
@Kay:
It’s just one moral panic after another. The rubes fall for them all, all the time.
And totally unrelated, Ketanji Brown Jackson is the bomb. Reasoned, knowledgeable, confident, unafraid.
rikyrah
Portia ♍️ 🐳McGonagal portiamcgonagal1619 on Insta (@PortiaMcGonagal) tweeted at 2:30 PM on Thu, Jun 29, 2023:
THIS!!! I will constantly remind yt ppl that it took the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments, plus the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, and Brown v Board to ensure Black people had the rights they were born with. Yt women got the 19th from the start. BW needed more. 1/
(https://twitter.com/PortiaMcGonagal/status/1674500574908383233?s=02)
bbleh
@Martin: agree, and evidently you’re far better informed than I. (And by Cal I meant California universities generally, not UCB specifically, but probably irrelevant.) My point is only that this is not a complete disaster, and we’re not back to fighting Sammy Alito et al on, eg, whether wimmin should be allowed into what is obviously serious men’s preparation for men’s work. And I think there will always be pressure from many quarters to make sure the children of the Right Kind Of People™ are put in line to get the Right Kind Of Degrees™, and there will always be an imbalance in their favor, so the question becomes only how best to mitigate it.
TriassicSands
I’d still like to see Lani Guinier’s plan used. Set a mimimum standard of acceptability for all students and then choose randomly from the pool of qualifiers. The standard could be set at a point to include enough minority students. I might go further, but it could get complicated and i doubt John Roberts, BA, JD, RPOS would like it.
As angry as today’s (thoroughly predictable) decision makes me, I don’t think we should be punching the legacies into unconsciousness. Legacies should be zeroed out, period. So should the children of rich donors. Buying admission for your kid is a unique form of “meritocracy.” One, I imagine John Roberts would not object to, this being America and all. When symphony orchestras (some at least) do auditions, the judges aren’t allowed to see the players. That way their opinions have to be based entirely on what they hear. (In the film Tár, we see her sneaking a peak and then exercising sexism to pick the winner. But then, Tár is corrupt like certain justices are. When anyone applies, give the applicant a number/code and strip off the name and identifying information. Once the decision has been made, reattach the identity.
Ivy League schools don’t give athletic scholarships in any sport, so that won’t help or affect them. Now that college athletes (some anyway) are professionals, universities should cut out all athletic scholarships. ? Not gonna happen, certainly not as a result of a John Roberts decision.
Foreign students? I think that diversity in a student body is important, but I don’t see any way that US universities are going to change their policies to start educating an economic cross section of foreign students. Foreign students normally pay full tuition at state schools and the argument is that that is good for in-state students. But the world would benefit greatly, if instead of giving rich foreign students even more of an advantage than they already have, we started educating worthy students who aren’t rich, but the chances are most probably haven’t gotten the preparation they need to succeed without significant remedial help.
Ohio Mom
@James E Powell: Yeah, you think it would have had an effect but the Republican stronghold on our state is stronger than ever.
I don’t watch the news on TV so I can’t tell you how they handled this story but my local paper’s treatment was a big mess. It’s like they did the opposite of editing, the stories were muddled and had to follow.
Cameron
Once again, Florida’s very own Governor Puddinghands has displayed his vision of the future and insight into the present. Bypassing the affirmative-action debate entirely, he is boldly proceeding to make the state’s university system so bad that nobody will want to go there.
sab
@James E Powell: Ohio apparently likes crooks. We just don’t like crooks who admit they are crooks ( Taft who really wasn’t a crook. just bent some golf rules.) We want real crooks. Megamillion crooks. Orange hair and orange makeup crooks.
We are a drab midwestern state that SNL laughs at. We want action!
patrick II
Today the Supreme Court put into law Stephen Colbert’s motto “I don’t see color”. It was supposed to be a joke.
TriassicSands
@Ella in New Mexico:
Ella, if you haven’t, I highly recommend you watch the Frontline (PBS) documentary about Clarence and Ginni. It provides some real insight into why Thomas is such a damaged human being. In truth, no one should have to go through what he experienced as a child — not only white on black racism, but black on black racism. Shuffled from mother to horrible grandfather. But there came a time when things improved for him and after that his choices could have been different.
He hates Affirmative Action because it got him into Yale Law and it got him a seat on the SCOTUS, but he was in a position to get that seat because he chose to suck up to Republicans, where, as a rare African American he stood out. Had he sided with the Dems, he would have been overshadowed and probably ignored.
I’ve tried to find the Scalia comment about Thomas where he made it clear he thought Thomas was not conservative, but crazy.
Another Scott
ICYMI, Biden today in New York – Whitehouse.gov:
+1
Cheers,
Scott.
sab
@Kay: I had to do essays. Nobody read them, but I did have to do them and I thought somebody would read them and realize I was a legal idiot.
Though meeting other lawyers later I wasn’t so stupid. I just didn’t rise to my high standards.
Eric S.
@Jerzy Russian: agreed, but if she does it non-metaphorically I won’t complain.
Kay
@James E Powell:
I don’t know. Do you remember Coingate? Where the GOP invested hundreds of millions in workers comp funds in rare coins and Beanie Babies and other risky investments to the benefit of their donors?
It was HUGE. It absolutely contributed to the Dem wave in 2006. The Toledo Blade won a Pulititzer for uncovering it.
This scandal is much, much bigger and it hasn’t even caused a ripple. It’s a mystery to me.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Ella in New Mexico: That is from 2016, but through out Dump’s term she would give interviews and insisting she was right
Kay
@sab:
Right – my mistake. You have to do the essays in MI but if you do well enough on the multistate they don’t read them.
rikyrah
@Kay:
May he rot in jail
TriassicSands
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
Admitting you are wrong, especially when you helped elect the worst president in American history, is not easy.
Regulon
TriassicSands
Above The Law
Scalia Calls Thomas ‘A Nut’
Justice Scalia is asked to evaluate the jurisprudence of his partner in crime. His answer will amaze.
By JOE PATRICE
onJuly 11, 2014 at 3:02 PM
Look, I’m an originalist, but I’m not a nut.
— Justice Antonin Scalia, when asked to compare his judicial philosophy to that of Justice Clarence Thomas. The story comes to us from an anecdote told by Jeffrey Toobin a couple years ago that is now available on
Kay
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
It’s just dumb that they don’t vote on judges. Even if you hate the Democrat how dumb do you have to be not to realize they’ll appoint better judges?
That ALONE is enough.
sab
@sab: Right now she is working in a nursing home. She likes it.
My dad is about to be 99 in a nursing home. I love our nurse’s aide and she is amazing with him.
But she is an amazing warm person, and very intelligent. She could be doing a lot with her life, and instead she is taking care of him.
This isn’t ambition. This is duty, love and trust.
I feel so fucking guilty that this wonderful person trusts us so much.
Kay
@rikyrah:
Ohio is so gerrymandered they re-elected him AFTER the scandal came to light. They are completely safe in those seats. There’s no competition at all. That’s why they’re all strutting around openly stealing- they know they are guaranteed the seat for as long as they want it.
James E Powell
@Kay:
I don’t know if it’s still the same, but when I took the Ohio
Bar back in Feb 85, if you scored high enough on the Multistate, they pulled two of your essay books random. If your scores in the two essays in each book averaged 7, then you passed. I don’t remember what the tell was, but that is how I passed.
RevRick
Off topic, but under the “proud to be a Democrat “ category, I have been entertained by a two-day flaming on Twitter by a bunch of lefties. What I’ve found most striking is how much they sound and behave like the MAGA crowd I’ve encountered. It’s wall-to-wall dogmatic assertions that there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans, that the Democrats have moved right in the past thirty years, and Democrats are all corporate sellouts. When I pointed out that all the Yellow Dog Democrats have been exterminated in the elections of 1994 and 2010, the responses are just a doubling down on the original claim. And like MAGA, I’ve been bombarded with insults, name-calling and the usual lame memes. It has been enlightening. I’m used to MAGA frothing on Twitter, but this is the first time dealing with leftists.
Maxim
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: So many otherwise good, or at least enjoyable, films have been ruined by that woman’s political insanity.
Maxim
@Kay: Maybe because the corruption these days is so widespread and blatant, thanks to TFG and the GOP generally, that everyone’s inured to it. Especially people who vote Republican and don’t want to admit their party has sunk so low.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, … (Warning) TheHill:
Bipartisan!!
:-/
Apparently the National Spelling Bee is having issues with ties and trying to figure out ways to fairly pick a single winner.
One can argue that spelling bees should be about spelling, and that’s fine. But being admitted to get a college education is about much, much more than academic scores.
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@TriassicSands: The challenge with random selection (which in a perfect world I would prefer) is that you have the matter of yield. I need to fill 5,000 seat and they can’t all be in English – they need to be spread out as we have resources – and different students will have different yield rates. Those yield rates are factored into the selection model. For example, in order to fill an engineering seat I might need to admit 2 3.9 GPA students (just to simplify things) or 10 4.3 GPA students. Admitted students are not interchangeable.
And our margins of error on an entering pool of 5,000 students was no more than 1%. If we’re under by 50 we can fix that. If we’re over by 50 we have 50 unsubsidized students, that’s half a million dollars in costs you don’t have revenue to pay for, and we have 50 student with no dorm to hold them in.
The yield model is as complex as the admit model. The total model would have 50-100 rules and a LOT of hand adjusting. We’d run dozens and dozens of simulations to get a final model. The benefit of this approach is that each simulation is determinative so once the rules are established you can run it and get the same result. The problem with a randomized model is that you could in theory run the simulation enough times until you get the outcome you need – 5,000 freshmen, x English majors, y history, z business – expand this out for roughly 100ish different programs, and take your chances on hitting housing demand, etc. But that’s probably hundreds of thousands of simulations. This is also a proper application of machine learning, but you now have all the challenges of controlling those inputs when training that system. It’s not necessarily a harder problem to do that, but it IS a harder problem to verify it. I could always produce the rules that generated the pool and that could be rerun to prove that it produced that pool. The rules were there for all to see. Machine learning, that’s not so easy.
These are not necessarily insurmountable problems, but they are very challenging ones, and they bring with them new obstacles. The idea of safe schools go out the window, so the number of students that get no offer will go way up, and that will prompt students to apply to even more schools which will make that yield harder to predict which will cause pretty massive gyrations in school enrollment, which will produce all new funding problems for states, programs will need to be able to scale up rapidly, etc.
This is why a lot of countries do national college placement because you can jump in front of all of this.
Martin
@Another Scott: Spelling bee would wrap up more definitively if they didn’t limit themselves to one language.
Kay
@Another Scott:
I just don’t want to hear another word, ever, about how their kid didn’t get into Harvard because a black kid did get into Harvard. That particular whining complaint from the Right is now moot. They’re all inummerate so they think this is going to make some huge difference but it won’t. They’ll go from 97% of them not getting in to…97% of them not getting in. it isn’t even going to bump them a point.
And I still get to make fun of them because so many of them are not just legacy college admits, but also lifelong legacy hires.
gene108
@TriassicSands:
From my experience, most foreign students aren’t rich. They go into debt just like ordinary Americans.
Martin
@gene108: Most foreign student admits are pretty rich these days. They are generally a mechanism to backfill lost state revenue.
Soprano2
@Kay: Not just that, they invented a conspiracy theory about the organization that checks voter rolls across state lines to help prevent “double voting”, and got several conservative states to pull out of it, even though this is one of their main worries when it comes to so-called “voter fraud”. They are resistant to things that actually solve the problem because they don’t want to solve it at all
I’m not sure what they’ll blame when all their kids still don’t get into whatever college they want, but I’m sure they’ll figure out some boogie man to blame.
Kay
Soprano2
@TriassicSands: Acording to a podcast where a man who wrote a bio about Thomas was interviewed, he hates affirmative action because the Yale degree didn’t get him any good job offers like the ones his white classmates got, so he had to go to work for the government. And yeah, his early life sounds horrible. It’s no excuse, though.
Soprano2
Ot Covid update – still feeling tired and still have a sore throat, although it’s better today than yesterday. It’s hot as hell here – it was 98º today, with the same or higher forecast tomorrow, so it’s a good time to stay inside. I’m still tired of it, though. At least I got my check books balanced today.
TriassicSands
@Regulon:
That’s the quote. Obviously, Scalia was in awe of Thomas.
Since they were both running around claiming to be originalists, I imagine Scalia didn’t want to be considered the same as Thomas, whose reputation wasn’t exactly that of one of the greats. I first became aware of that quote when I heard the interview long before Scalia’s death. It wasn’t something that only came out after his death. (When Scalia would have been safe from Ginni’s hit squad.)
NotMax
@Soprano2
Whoa, missed that news. Carnegie related?
TriassicSands
@Soprano2:
That is covered in the Frontline documentary. What Thomas wanted was a place at a big law firm making lots of money. Unless he was very different then, it’s not surprising he didn’t get any offers. Glowering Your Way to Riches and Stardom, by Clarence Thomas.’
On the other hand…racism.
different-church-lady
@RevRick: It’s not a horseshoe, it’s a mobius strip.
Soprano2
@NotMax: Probably, I was tired on Monday but thought it was from travel. Got a sore throat and sniffles on Tuesday and tested 2x, both + for Covid. It was worth it, though. I kept meaning to get the latest booster but ran out of time.
Mai Naem mobileI
How did the RWNJs on the court explain keeping AA in effect at the military academies? Because rich white men don’t want to die defending the country do it’s okay for brown and black folks to get preferential treatment there?
Steeplejack
@sab:
Borges gets sentenced on Friday, I think.
Tim Ellis
Funny how they never touch legacy admissions or tuition fees.
Affirmative action to support the wealthy and well connected is perfectly fine, as usual.
Tim Ellis
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Christ what a dip she was lol. I’m deep in the Bernie camp but I’m not an idiot (well, I like to think not). Clinton wasn’t my preference at the time but she was obviously a damn sight better than any Republican, especially the wannabe fascist.
The first time I donated to the Clinton 2016 campaign was during Trump’s RNC acceptance speech. It was dark and frightening. Anyone who couldn’t see the scale of the threat just by listening to his own words was, in my opinion, willfully ignoring it.
Anne Laurie
Well-to-do white ‘traditionalists’ are still fantasizing about creating their very own janissaries, is my best guess. A caste of ‘slaves, but in a higher social ranking’, that can be used to protect The Elite. And if those janissaries are people of color, well, it just makes them easier to distinguish, eh?
Chris T.
@different-church-lady:
I know this is snark but it’s a good launching point for something I keep being tempted to mention, which is: the Kennedy clan has something wrong with them genetically speaking—too much inbreeding or something. It shows up in all kinds of ways. In JFK’s case it was his Addison’s. In RFKJr’s case, it’s some kind of mental defect, perhaps….
RevRick
@different-church-lady: Ha! There’s only one side.
Anne Laurie
People who study neurodiversity have established a ‘cluster’ of traits that help them track the heredity of ‘autism spectrum disorder’ before there was a name for it. We don’t have the genetics worked out yet, but a family history of ADD, OCD, epilepsy, substance abuse (sometimes as self-medication), and Crohns / colitis (because the bowel also has so many dopamine receptors) is *extremely* common among those of us who are Not Quite Normal. In some cases, you can actually track how ‘weirdos’ married other ‘weirdos’ and produced future generations of increasingly off-the-bubble offspring. One reason, some people theorize, why there’s such a high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in high-achievement places like Silicon Valley is that modern tech has made it *so* much easy for us weirdos to get together — used to be that there were fewer chances for the neurodivergent to find a partner, much less one who also carried the ‘cursed’ genes!
brantl
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Susan Sarandon needs to be kicked in the junk. What a cartoon. “Doesn’t know what his policies are.”, JFCOAC.
Uncle Cosmo
Late to the party, but what the hell:
No it’s not. Not at all – once you accept the dirty little truth that “institutions of higher learning” in this day & age are just as obsessed with money as commercial operations, maybe more so.
“Legacy admissions” are a reliable source of revenue via tuition and alumni contributions. Hey, alums, that degree from Big Prestigious U. got you those cushy high-salary jobs through the Old Boy network, time to open up that checkbook if you want Junior to follow in your footsteps!
“Athletic admissions” are a great double investment – the sports teams make $$$ for the school at the box office and provide prestige in the larger society while inducing alumni with no (or few) legacies to pony up cash to build the field houses and stadiums.
“Income-based” admissions are a no-brainer: “You fatcats want Junior Fatcat-Wannabe to come here, you can pay the full freight; otherwise send the spawn to Gigundous State U.”
Meantime race- or gender-based admissions (other than athletes) drain endowments for financial aid and are thus a net loser for the school.
It’s a very simple game: Follow the money.
evodevo
@sab:
My advice, from experience…don’t let her go to college until she’s emotionally mature enough to ignore partying and make the most of the academics. Going to college too young can produce a flameout (thought my personal examples are all male) that will result in lost years … better to work a couple years till the necessary maturity is reached. My uncle (college at 16 – flunked out); husband – went at 18 – flunked out; son, same; several family friends – one 17 – went to Harvard on Merit Scholarship – flunked out….They all went back, some YEARS later, and made good eventually, but it was a rough ride and time wasted.