US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8302

On August 05 2017 02:42 Falling wrote:
Well I think it is definitely worth investigating to make sure the policy is actually doing what it is supposed to be doing. Just because you implement something, doesn't mean it actually work in the way you hoped to.

By most standards, Austin Jia holds an enviable position. A rising sophomore at Duke, Mr. Jia attends one of the top universities in the country, setting him up for success.

But with his high G.P.A., nearly perfect SAT score and activities — debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra — Mr. Jia believes he should have had a fair shot at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Those Ivy League colleges rejected him after he applied in the fall of 2015.

It was particularly disturbing, Mr. Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-American, like him — were admitted to those Ivy League institutions.

“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Mr. Jia, 19, said.

Students like Mr. Jia are now the subject of a lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other racial minorities.

The case, which is clearly aimed for the Supreme Court, puts Asian-Americans front and center in the latest stage of the affirmative action debate. The issue is whether there has been discrimination against Asian-Americans in the name of creating a diverse student body. The Justice Department, which has signaled that it is looking to investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” may well focus on Harvard.

The Harvard case asserts that the university’s admissions process amounts to an illegal quota system, in which roughly the same percentage of African-Americans, Hispanics, whites and Asian-Americans have been admitted year after year, despite fluctuations in application rates and qualifications.

“It falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life nor help you in life,” said Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that is suing Harvard.

His group, a conservative-leaning nonprofit based in Virginia, has filed similar suits against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin, asserting that white students are at a disadvantage at those colleges because of their admissions policies.

The federal government potentially has the ability to influence university admissions policies by withholding federal funds under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination in programs that receive federal money.

In many ways, the system the lawsuit is attacking is one Harvard points to with pride. The university has a long and pioneering history of support for affirmative action, going back at least to when Derek Bok, appointed president of Harvard in 1971, embraced policies that became a national model.

The university has extended that ethos to many low-income students, allowing them to attend free. Harvard has argued in a Supreme Court brief that while it sets no quotas for “blacks, or of musicians, football players, physicists or Californians,” if it wants to achieve true diversity, it must pay some attention to the numbers. The university has also said that abandoning race-conscious admissions would diminish the “excellence” of a Harvard education.

Melodie Jackson, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said that the university’s admissions policy was fair; that it looked at each applicant “as a whole person,” consistent with standards established by the Supreme Court; and that it promoted “the ability to work with people from different backgrounds, life experiences and perspectives.”

Harvard’s class of 2021 is 14.6 percent African-American, 22.2 percent Asian-American, 11.6 percent Hispanic and 2.5 percent Native American or Pacific Islander, according to data on the university’s website.

For the Harvard case, initially filed in 2014, Mr. Blum said, the federal court in Boston has allowed the plaintiffs to demand records from four highly competitive high schools with large numbers of Asian-American students: Stuyvesant High School in New York; Monta Vista High School in the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino; Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.; and the Boston Latin School.

The goal is to look at whether students with comparable qualifications have different odds of admission that could be correlated with race and how stereotypes influence the process. A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called “the Asian tax.”

The lawsuit also cites Harvard’s Asian-American enrollment at 18 percent in 2013, and notes very similar numbers ranging from 14 to 18 percent at other Ivy League colleges, like Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale.

On August 05 2017 03:05 warding wrote:
Also, the only place in Europe where I believe ethnic background is taken into account in anything at all is the UK. In most EU countries that's a big no-no. I was pretty shocked to be asked several times in school and such in the US what my ethnicity was.

On August 05 2017 03:11 Plansix wrote:

We have a long, long, long history of repressing people and making sure they cannot advance. Right down to our real estate practices. College admissions is no different and used to use flexible metrics like “character” to justify favoring white students. This newish tactic of attacking systems like affirmative action is designed create a fool proof way to argue reverse discrimination(IE, black students being admitted over higher scoring Asian students), while avoid the optics of white people arguing that they are repressed. But the end goal is the same for someone like Blum.

On August 05 2017 03:18 TheTenthDoc wrote:
The biggest problem I have with the way current affirmative action is implemented is that the people it disadvantages (yes, it has to disadvantage someone, otherwise it couldn't work) the most are the people who stand to benefit the least from their privilege. It's the low income white/asian students who grew up in shit households and got good but not perfect marks and didn't have the family structure to be captain of the tennis, debate, and chess team who run into real long-term problems rather than just "I didn't get into the school I want."

Unfortunately, those people can never sue because they don't have money, and so if the system changes it'll change and still probably not benefit them much.

On August 05 2017 03:27 GreenHorizons wrote:
I'll tell you right now that affirmative action is far from perfect. It's mostly been outdated from it's original intent (reducing people citing skin color as the reason they wouldn't hire people). It's just the best we have and going back to before we had it is obviously a terrible idea.

I'm interested in how people who don't like it would like to see it fixed, but going back to not having it isn't an option.