By "it" you mean Jeff Sessions, right?

Legacy admissions is basically affirmative action for whites tbh

Yeah legacy admissions need to go too but it's less of a problem than AA which is much more widespread.

Small sample size but the one legacy admit I knew in law school actually wasn't that dumb. By comparison every AA admit was borderline ******ed

Nice. Cphoya how does AA pass scrutiny of civil rights act and 14th and whatever else.

How did you typically identify AA admits?

It's basically any Under-represented minority at a top law school. Based on the detailed stats LSAC puts out there are basically no URMs that score high enough to get into a top school on their merits (might literally be zero but haven't looked at the lsat score by race breakdown in a long ass time)

Legacy admits are harder to identify unless they have a famous last name or something

Disko, serious question:
Do you believe that white people are naturally smarter than other races?

I'm completely oblivious re: LSAT stuff but would you agree that a URM of equal intelligence and potential might score lower on an SAT or similar aptitude test due to other factors?

I know for a fact that I overall scored about 180 pts higher (out of 2400) on the SATs due to being able to hire a tutor and take the exam multiple times. This isn't even factoring in the benefits I had of having college grad parents that always encouraged my education and helped me along the way.

Re: legacy admissions


Hard to say what's more of a problem, but legacy admissions is a pretty big issue too. If we're stripping AA and making it a strict meritocracy, then in turn you would need to get rid of legacy too, which you mention.

The issue is this would never happen in practice. Universities are in the business of making money. What better way to maximize revenue than to take advantage of a legacy student whose parents have likely been donating to the school, will continue to donate if their kid is admitted and then that kid will likely continue the cycle. So that issue would need to be dealt with too.

Fwiw, I think it's more socioeconomics than race based and can see the counter argument that AA hurts poor whites for example. I would need to see an alternative solution to dump AA completely tho.

Idk I haven't done enough research into it and it's a super tricky question imo because I'm not sure it's correct to define "smarter" as something specific like IQ or whatever

I've seen some very compelling research on intelligence being hereditary etc but honestly haven't looked into it that much and am not smart enough to figure it out

i think the worst thing you could say about AA is that it just isnt that effective at accomplishing its stated goal and needlessly gives reactionary white society something that looks "racist" on paper to point to and vote for a donald trump level buffoon.

it seems like it hasnt been a hot button issue for a while, so the latter point hasnt been particularly relevant (compared to immigration or anything containing the word "muslim"), and that mostly this DOJ announcement is about making it into a news item again because it might get the FOX "news" crowd all riled up and back on Team Trump after this healthcare debacle.

I should add that based on research I've seen, if there is a correlation between race and intelligence asians were smarter than whites so I guess the answer is no either way

I think there's variance in aptitude tests for sure but that's within the test itself

On the socioeconomic part, I don't think so. we know that on the SAT for example poor whites with no tutoring outscore wealthy blacks with tutoring, so I don't think I would count that as an outside factor that would put a URM at a disadvantage relative to other races

I'm sure there are some outside factors that could make a difference but idk if they would be specific to a certain race or anything like that though

Can you cite the poor whites outscoring wealthy tutored blacks? Either way, I would say typically a wealthy student will be advantaged over a poor one with all other factors equal?

From some quick googling, legacies and URMs comprise roughly the same amount of Harvard's incoming class (12-13% vs 14% URM). Acceptance rate for legacies was 30% vs total acceptance rate of 5-6%. URM acceptance rate not published. My guess is the legacies are adding a lot more to Harvard's 40 billion tax free hedge fund endowment than the URMs though.

I am on my phone but it should be easy to find via googling.

On the flip side The problem with eliminating AA completely is that you're giving too much discretion to potentially racist admins. That's the real goal of AA, not forcing undeserving minorities into schools they don't belong in to meet a quota. Idk of a good solution though other than using robots to spit out an accept or reject letter solely based on grades and tests scores

this appears to be a pretty racist blog but the graph appears to be from external source, cant seem to confirm that its real so...

https://benkurtzblog.files.wordpress...-score-gap.png

It clearly goes way deeper than this. Even rich black families are still driven by a lot of factors into worse neighborhoods, schools, and opportunities than similarly wealthy whites.

There's a lot of data that solves for these things too (idk what you mean by opportunities but certainly schools and neighborhoods) and the findings all show that whites outscore blacks with all things being equal

That being said, it doesn't really matter in the context of AA imo since AA is purely based on skin color and not these other factors. That's why it's so problematic.

youre right, its disgusting how much asians are discriminated against in higher education

Disko,

Honest question- when you say AA has no place in the 21st century, does this mean that you think there was a time and place where it was appropriate and an overall positive?

If so, when did that time end? And why is it so clear that the best solution now is to eliminate it entirely as opposed to say - allowing individual schools to determine the amount of weight they wish to give it. (I know that last question skirts the "is that legal at all" question. I'm just asking a what do you feel would be best?)

As an Asian who grew up in California and has since moved to several increasingly less diverse places, I have a lot of mixed thoughts on the topic but am generally of the opinion that using race as a proxy for a whole host of factors is likely an overall positive.

I mentioned the 21st century because granting certain people advantages solely based on their race is a practice that should've been eliminated a long, long time ago.

As far as what I think is best, I don't know. Like anything else in politics, you can further break it down into:

What's best for me? What's best for the country? What's "right" (from a religious/moral/perspective)? What's legal?


What's best for me? AA was fantastic for me obviously. I'm not a URM but I finished at the very top of my class partially because a decent % of people I was curved against were drawing dead vs me. My LSAT was a standard deviation above the median and the average AA student was a standard deviation below. Sure, I had to beat everyone else but it was nice to have a 15% cushion given the variance in law school. I have a great career to show for it that I may not have had if there were 50 more deserving/intelligent students in the class and in law there's a big difference in finishing #2 in your class vs #48. What's best for me today? This makes no difference in my life anymore as I'm out of school but obviously I was a huge "supporter" when I was younger.

What's best for the country? I don't know enough to say whether giving undeserving students a better degree has any benefit to the country as a whole. I do think there is a clear moral benefit to preventing minorities from being discriminated against and held back from opportunities they would otherwise be entitled to but for their race. That's what AA seeks to accomplish and I think probably does a fine job but looking at the AA policy as a whole together with all of its side effects makes calling it +EV overall more difficult.

What's legal? I would defer to the real lawyers like Hoya.

I guess the underlying debate is whether to be fair to everyone vs. level the playing field as quickly as possible for all races at the cost of being unfair to some races in the short term.

Which in turn really depends a lot on how you feel about the role of government in variance reduction.

This is one of the most wild claims ive ever seen anyone make lol. Theres no way that is correct lol.

disko, what percentage of poor whites outscored heals on the SAT? If heals was tutored would his score have decreased enough such that he would fall below those poor whites?

New anti legal immigration bill.

Also prevents welfare for any immigrant ever.

https://twitter.com/npr/status/892784568712830976

Well, so many of those discrepancies in other factors are directly attributable to skin color, such as extant racist housing practices, racist policing, etc., on top of historical racism that has deprived minority communities of wealth they would have otherwise accumulated. If higher education admissions are an inappropriate way to address this discrepancy, is it permissible to give minorities a boost based on skin color in other ways?