Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions | Hacker News Reader

Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

latimes.com

959 pointsrbrown1,681 comments

The SCOTUS opinion here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong.

But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? Who loses in this case?

I don't mean this as a hihi actually sneaky anti-affirmative-action post, I don't understand the subject matter well enough (nor America in general). I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?

> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race?

Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether people who had been legally discriminated against all their lives should be compensated, as if they had been wronged in a tort sense. This would obviously be extremely expensive, and anyway impossible to quantify, so it never happened.

Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status. Since black people were under-represented in this category, people came up with the idea of putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission. Can it balance exactly against the disadvantages of discrimination? No.

> I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?

America is not in the least social-democratic, but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead.

(It could be worse: Haitians who had freed themselves from slavery by the mass murder of their oppressors were made to pay a huge amount of compensation to them!)

The intent is to factor in some unknown "racism" value. Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average, so if you naively stratified by income, you'd still wind up with a mostly white and Asian student population.

There are a lot of reasons Black and Hispanic kids underperform, and it's just easier for the school to short circuit all that and choose based on race rather than incorporate all those other factors. It might not even be viable to incorporate all those other factors.

We really only have two choices:

1) Wait out the effects of racism, historic and contemporary, which will take hundreds of years.

2) Sacrifice some of our "individual determination above all else" principles to reach some palpable level of racial equality.

I think both are flawed in their own ways, but the world is always imperfect, so pick your side.

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?

I recently listened to an NPR piece on this and it seems like you're right here. Even with affirmative action you're really only affecting those that are going to elite colleges, and a large amount of people who benefited from it actually didn't come from low-income households. Essentially affirmative action benefited a tiny (like <1%) portion of all people going into universities in the way it was intended. What would be much more useful is exactly what you say, taking much more of the student's overall socioeconomic status into account rather than race.

We would probably find that this does a better job of helping those who actually need help. And that would likely mean that minorities are still prioritized.

Finally, what we should really be doing if we care about helping those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder is make all community college free. It's already very cheap as-is , we just need to take the leap to make it totally free. This would also help the student loan crisis since those who are going for bachelor degrees would only need a couple more years of education vs. 4

> I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong.

More or less, but not precisely. How do you define a "minority race"? Universities in America discriminate against Asian Americans despite them being a minority of the American population generally, ostensibly because they're over-represented in universities.

There was a logic to the idea of racial preferences as originally envisioned. Studies show that the income gaps between American descendants of slaves and indigenous Americans basically have been unchanged even after segregation and legal discrimination was ended. The reasoning goes that racial preferences are necessary to undo these disadvantages.

But the actual practice in US universities has become completely disconnected from that logic. For example, the largest group eligible for racial preferences is Hispanics. But Hispanics enjoy similar income mobility to whites and previous generations of white immigrants: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Insofar as they are poorer than whites as a group, that’s a transient condition due to recency and circumstances of immigration, just as it was for say Italians or Vietnamese.

A child of a poor Guatemalan immigrant statistically will end up better off than the child of a poor Appalachian whose family has been in the US for centuries. It makes no sense to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the Guatemalan under the original justification for racial preferences.

Moreover, most black students admitted to say Harvard are not American descendants of slaves: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/. Some are immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, who also are descendants of slaves. But many (up to half) are immigrants from Africa. Not only are they not descendants of slaves, they are typically elites in their home countries.

> Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?

In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that doesn't exist in the way many people think. In many large states, such as california, they already for a long time do not consider race as a factor in admissions, as per law. And, IMO, california has done a pretty good job of having fairly diverse schools, and they do precisely what you say - they focus their efforts on lifting up those who come from poor socioeconomic situations, which tends to capture a lot of the same people affirmative action was trying to do.

European naturalized American here and yes I do agree with you. In the few EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies. Just help poor people and that's it.

I'll put on my tin foil hat here, but I genuinely believe that "race" (and now "gender") is being weaponized by the American elites/politicians to form nice clear camps/teams for voters. People need to focus on race otherwise they would start to pay attention to the enormous social/financial disparity between the top and the bottom of the pyramid. And we really do not want that.

To preface: I don’t really have an opinion on affirmative action per se:

That said, the elephant in the room is that institutions like Harvard and UNC aren’t really about education. They’re “ivy leagues” for preserving class inequality having been marketed as schools.

To the extent that race is a distraction from class, the fact that counteracting racial bias in admissions has failed to uplift the poor just puts too fine a point on this arrangement.

There’s some good discussion downthread already. I want to make a particular observation that your intuition is:

- totally obviously correct in a vacuum with no other factors

- reflective of how most white Americans think of the issue, because their experience of persistent racism is that it’s mostly unnoticeable or trivially ignorable

- what people motivated to reverse AA have reinforced for decades, because they want this to be the predominant intuition even for people with more context

- logically reasonable if you assume advantage barriers generally follow a similar pattern and even then if you assume good faith

- untenable on inspection for the same reason any social democratic institution needs to exist: a thing that’s supposed to be structurally fair intrinsically isn’t, and demands correction to address that

The problem is that an economic axis isn’t the only one involved. Sometimes it isn’t even involved at all. Racism is deeply embedded in American culture and history and outcomes, even when other factors are otherwise favorable. And at least in the US, this is a huge source of conflict among otherwise like minds even on the left.

It would be much better if those with an open mind to “can’t we just level the field” had a more open mind to the various axes of relative and historically intentionally stratified advantage. That applies to race, to sex, to sexuality and gender identity, to disability. And in each, structural inequality is much more particular and involved than access to money/resources.

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too?

This is what I will never understand, why don't we focus on just helping the poor instead of based on race. If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race.

However in my more conpsiracy minded moments I can't help but wonder if the focus on race is designed to keep the power and the middle class fighting each other over things like that rather than fighting against the people that have the power.

But seriously why can't we just focus our help and aid around people who are poor and needs based rather than all this faffing about with race?

EDIT: Well the votes on this comment are going up and down faster than an "Essex birds drawers" as the BOFH would say.

There is another reason, less talked about, that higher education started considering factors like socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and national origin in admissions.

It became clear that immersing predominantly white, privileged students in a predominantly white, privileged campus during 4 years of college was poorly preparing them as leaders for a future world in which they will encounter a greater diversity of backgrounds than their parents did. (Because of both changing U.S. demographics AND growing global trade.)

And it became clear that sourcing students primarily from white, privileged backgrounds was poorly positioning the institutions themselves in an increasingly diversifying society.

As legal barriers to the financial and political participation of women and minorities fell, there were more opportunities for people of those backgrounds to succeed. And elite higher education institutions want to remain the schools of choice for the most successful members of society (regardless of background). They can’t do that if everyone thinks they only care about rich white people.

Adjusting admissions to increase the diversity of backgrounds of new students was a way to short-cut solutions to these challenges.

In short, a thumb on the scale to bring the student body more in line with global diversity was also done with an eye toward remaining competitive as a top choice among options for higher education.

> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already.

I don't know about this. Like about 1000 undergraduate students are admitted to Harvard each year, Harvard being named in this suit. Affirmative action at Harvard being necessary to help anyone seems like a stretch. Is Harvard really the only way to help people? It's an elite school so I think the stakes are different than helping people because the applicant pool is very elite already.

I think in reality the US is embroiled in ethnic conflict and people are fighting over spots at elite schools for their children and a lot of this is political. There are other countries where affirmative action is used and a similar thing happens. Like in India for example, the child of a billionaire from the OBC designation has a much higher chance of getting into IIT than the child of poor Brahmins. The OBC designation has expanded over time for political reasons to form coalitions, as I understand it.

> Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too?

Ironically the SFFA case argued that specifically white kids were being backdoored into Harvard at the expense of Asian students[1]. So yes, the goal would not be met. Although I need to read this case closely because the official decision mentions more about Black and Latino affirmative action.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

I think it's a mistake to think the intent is to benefit individuals of specific races. This has very much been something where the intended benefactor is American society in general.

As an example, I went to a good public school that had a policy where the top 5% of high school students were automatically given admission to the university. While this was technically race blind, it was de facto affirmative action, because a more poor high school is not as competitive as a rich high school.

At first, I too, thought that affirmative action was bad because racism of any kind is bad. However, it dawned on me one day that if this policy wasn't in place, there just wouldn't be many minorities at our university, and in a way I would be deprived off a well-rounded, diverse college experience.

Simply put, being exposed to a a rich, diverse student body is good for everyone, not just minorities.

I don't think it's really any different in how the American justice system doesn't exist solely to provide justice for victim or the accused. The most important beneficiary of our justice system, is what happens when you have justice for society. Sure, individual cases don't always have what is perceived as the "right" outcome, but that's considered acceptable in our system if the result is justice for society.

> I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong.

In theory, but in practice it often includes “unless you are Asian.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-fight-school-dis...

To add in a slightly different angle, this sort of thing is not exclusive to America.

For example, in New Zealand, a couple of weeks ago there was a bit of a kerfuffle due to reporting on those of certain ethnicities being prioritised on surgical wait lists.

Those against it were arguing (validly) that prioritisation should only be based on clinical need.

However, the data over many years was showing that for people with the same clinical need, those from the minority ethnicities were not getting the same prioritisation.

So how do you resolve this? In an ideal world you will dig into the details, and figure out why that was happening, and resolve the underlying issues. But as with a lot of these problems with a human element there's no quick and easy solution.

Instead you get a "hack" like this to increase the weight of the minorities to even things out overall, hopefully to be removed later while you resolve the trickier issues.

Sometimes just targeting things to those in most need doesn't always fairly target across ethnic groups.

You can read a bit more detail about the NZ situation here: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/ethnicity-a-factor-in-surgery-wai...

The problem is, according to my reading of SCOTUS, that you can have affirmative action on anything but race. It occurs to me that it would have been far more effective if Harvard based their selection criteria on socio-economic considerations rather than race.

It seems like a well-intentioned but badly thought through process designed to ensure disadvantaged groups gain access they might not have gotten to their system.

The general idea seems to be - if you are of a particular race, you are automatically disadvantaged over ever other race. There is probably some truth to this. However, perhaps they now need to look at how people of a certain race are disadvantaged (other than because of their race itself) and use this as their selection criteria. This might actually also raise all groups - there are plenty of people in other racial groupings who also are disadvantaged for reasons other than their race.

FWIW, I am not American and I realise this is a sensitive area, so if I am out of line for whatever reason I can just say this is an observation which may not be accurate.

Imagine the same argument but swap race for gender.

Why are you trying to get women into medicine? Just to help the historically disadvantaged? Why don't you just let poor people in and not care about their gender?

Nowadays, you could probably get away with that because everyone has got over the whole "women's brains are too small and their wombs too big for logical thought to even be possible" idea. But when the (highly successful) affirmative action for women was brought in, that was still a major part of American culture that it was designed to work around.

Similarly with the race thing. The US fought a big civil war about whether people with dark skin were livestock or people and the losing side didn't actually change their mind just because they lost. So they needed laws to address that.

As a non-American, I think watching season 4 of The Wire, which has an education and politics focus, was both eye opening and profound. Highlighted the profound gap between US and where I grew up on a number of issues.

I am from India and have lived in the U.S for over 2 decades. I have observed "affirmative action" arguments in two continents.

I am going to answer your specific questions,

>Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?

Racial justice issues are separate from economic justice issues.

Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?

Racism is a complex issue and in listening to Black/Asian/Brown Americans I have come to the realization that such programs have to be specific to each and every race because they experience racism in different ways.

Racial discrimination in the US significant enough that, for example, merely having a "Black" name leads to worse results from job applications, regardless of other factors [1]. Merely focusing on wealth levels won't counteract that kind of effect.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/distincti...

Lex Fridman had a very good discussion of the topic with Harvard professor and author Randall Kennedy: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WRIDTV6l5WcbNt2aaO02K?si=f... The discussion of affirmative action starts at 2:22. The entire episode is very much worth listening to if you want to get hear a nuanced perspective on race problems in the US.

It's worth thinking about this beyond the money— what values does the USA and its people want to stand for? Affirmative action can be viewed as an obstacle to individualism and self-determination, but as a boost to multiculturalism and tolerance.

Specifically in the context of education, do we want to think of universities as institutions that help people earn more money and affirmative action as the university deciding who _will_ earn more money, or do we want to think of universities as institutions formative of the American zeitgeist, and affirmative action as the university ensuring the zeitgeist involves said multiculturalism and tolerance?

My experience, as a foreigner who went to a university in the USA, is that the cost of college leads a lot of students to think of universities as the former— one can't really blame them. Another thing I noticed, and this might be cultural, is that at my university I saw a lot of fear of mediocrity and a very clear idea in students of what their "path path success" was. I came in quite lost and undecided, thinking of college as a place to explore, take different classes, figure what I want to study and what I want to do with my life as I go. Some of my peers seemed to think as college as a step in a grander plan, and were doing internships freshman summer already aiming for a specific job at a specific company after graduation.

For people in that mentality it's not hard to see why affirmative action very much matters, and why they might think of it with so much disdain.

One issue is it isn't applied fairly. I know a Chinese-American who inquired into AA and was turned away because he wasn't a "traditionally disenfranchised" minority.

Because the US has systematically disenfranchised ethnic minorities over the course of its history. Any time there was a non-white person or community that was starting to become prosperous, the power of the state could be used to crush them. At times it was overtly murderous[0], but as that became unfashionable, it was relegated to more subtle methods. Some of the most blatant examples include:

- Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black or brown neighborhood.[1]

- Want a stadium? Build it in a black or brown neighborhood.[2]

- Black folks got a nice property? Just take it from them.[3]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre [1]https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-... [2]https://americanhistory.si.edu/pleibol/game-changers/big-lea... [3]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/01/bruces-beach...

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? Who loses in this case?

Universities would do this instead of affirmative action if it would lead to the same result. But it wouldn't. It would help poor Asian students. And it would hurt the URMs who are not poor. They currently benefit from strong affirmative action programs but would fare much worse under a program like you describe.

I've long thought that poverty is the best way to do this, because it's self-correcting. We'll probably never be truly and fully equal in every way, just because random stuff happens and there's only one perfectly equal state out there, but a whole lot of unequal possibilities.

So inasmuch as any group is disadvantaged, they'll get more help due to there being more of them that are poor and this strategy will work to self-correct the imbalance.

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?

Data shows that poor white children fares better in life than poor black kids[0][1]. This pattern is not even exclusive to the US: Brazil, for example (a case I'm familiar with), faces the same problem[2] and this led the government to implement affirmative action racial quotas for admission in state-owned Universities since 2012[3] with very positive results[4].

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/12/black...

[1] https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/two-american-experiences-ra...

[2] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2022/10/pobre-preto-t... (article in Portuguese)

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/world/americas/brazil-ena...

[4] https://nacla.org/affirmative-action-brazil

As an immigrant to the US I also see things that way on the basis that you can't fix the wrongs of a race based problem by using a race based solution. Especially left leaning folks around here like to deride that notion by calling it "color blind policies" but I think seeing everything in the frame of race is THE problem and it just entrenches the views of people on both sides of this debate.

I think it's much saner to completely throw away the framework and look at the issue: what you're trying to fix here is economic inequality, so do that. The side effect is you can avoid resentment from people unjustly disadvantaged by race based policies and avoid further radicalization of a discourse that has no basis in anything measurable.

To be clear: race is made up BS, and how americans view race is absolutely idiotic for anyone that hasn't been raised here. Whenever I need to check a box I have to choose between being white, or latino, or black etc...

Right there you see the problem: that list has two skin colors of uncertain definition, and a category that's cultural and not based on skin color or other physical attributes.

I was born in a mediterranean country (Italy) and according to current categorization I'm white but I went to school with other Italians that are darker skinned than people I know that call themselves "of color" in the US. So which box do they check? Can I check "latino" since well, we're the original ones? Or do I have to ask to add a "cisalpine gaul" since I'm partially from the north of the country and have a red beard?

It's complete nonsense. You're not missing anything, it's just an entrenched cultural view that people raised in this country can't seem to be able to escape.

Because the US uses race as a trigger to keep the poor fighting amongst themselves.

That's why.

I think if you want the historical context, read the dissenting opinions from the other justices. Such as https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/Jacks...

Affirmative Action is not about social-democratic "lets help poor black people". Nobody is gonna help poor people in America.

Poor people are always told to "pull themselves by the bootstraps (sic!)"

The beneficiaries of AA are:

1. Kids of rich black people (like children of OBAMA)

2. Rich international students from African continent (Nigeria, Ghana etc)

3. Rich white young women (for those colleges that do AA based on gender)

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?

Mostly it was a justice thing. The US spent decades disadvantaging people based on race and this was a step to try and reverse some of that.

I agree that changing it from race to economic class is probably the right move at this point.

That being said, I don't like that the SC is legislating from the bench. They are striking this down for purely political reasons.

For many in America, the race issue is more about who we are as a nation than it is about practical results. We want to identify as abolitionists, who defeated the slaveholders and moved toward "a more perfect union" (a line from the Constitution which Lincoln echoed in relation to the war).

The disagreement is essentially about the best way to achieve equality, which though a nebulous term is accepted as a goal without debate, even though the definition of the term can be widely different, as in this case. The conversatives argue that we can only achieve equality by being colorblind. The progressives argue that we can only achieve equality by consciously addressing inequality.

I see some merit on both sides. I tend to lean toward the conservative view, but I recognize moments in our history where active intervention was both noble and necessary (desegregating schools, for example). The question is whether those actions were special cases or are examples for us to follow going forward.

People want to play identity politics, not solve tangible issues like income disparity and economic mobility.

Basically it’s a bandaid. There is a massive problem with the talent pool coming from minority communities.

Look at any school in a lower income area and it’s plagued with issues of attendance, resources of things like access to technology, commitment of parents to help their kids outside of the classroom with homework, and general safety that fails to provide a quality learning space for children to become qualified when they leave school.

Since you can’t put massive school reform with budgets and funding to provide this to schools in a political cycle of 2-4 years, we just keep kicking the can down the road and accept instead of helping build better youth who all can compete for jobs and colleges, let’s just lower the bar and make it seem like we are doing something.

There are a lot of replies here and anything that talks about "economic" conditions probably doesn't understand AA.

AA is not a poverty alleviation program. It is a social justice program.

Poverty alleviation can be done just with money, but social systemic unfair treatment cannot be undone with money. For example, despite owning homes in the same neighbourhood, the appraisal of homes of black people ends up lower than white folks[1], there are more traffic stops and searches for black folks than white[2]..etc., you get the drift.

So, if a poor white family is given a lot of money and they move into a richer neighbourhood, they would enjoy a social capital the same amount of money cannot buy for a black family. Now there aren't many ways to suddenly make this go away. So, AA is an attempt at making this go away by saying, put more of the people from the underrepresented community in places where they are underrepresented, starting with the high echelons of education. By that the society hopes to the laws we create, systems we build as a result will have the perspective of people from those community. It's not a silver bullet, not a magical solution, but one amongst many things to try.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/realestate/racial-bias-ho... [2] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?

"Poor people" aren't a unified political coalition in the US.

For various reasons, you can't do political favors for poor people and expect them to reliably vote for you.

Black people are a unified political coalition in the US.

I recommend reading about Bueno de Mesquita's model of selectorate theory for understanding how stable political patronage networks operate; the model is very insightful for cases like this.

I assume it's similar to the system of "minorities quotas" for admission into Romanian universities in Transylvania. The region has a significant number of Hungarian ethnics and used to have Germans too but now they're rather vanished.

Anyhow, from the total number of seats per year, a larger number is allocated to Hungarians and a smaller one to Germans. The caveat being you don't have to be ethically German, only to speak it. In the wake of the new woke movement I can see a radical version of affirmative action where you don't have to be black as long as you identify as one ;) ;) ;)

So with Hungarian they fill those places with what I estimate to be 100% ethnic Hungarians. With Germans however, they're like 99% Romanians and Hungarians who take the hit of having to learn / speak German for the advantage of having fewer competition. Like mainstream (Romanian, Hungarian) computer science can have 10 candidates per seat, the German line has 1.5 or so: much easier to get in. I know a guy who couldn't code a FOP loop (with the typo of P instead of R) out of a paper bag but completed the German computer science line.

I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation.

In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a civil war to end racial discrimination. In his opinion, he argued that affirmative action which is a race based policy is logically incompatible with the Equal Protection clause.

Affirmative Action was always about race. The US historically and systematically discriminated, disenfranchised, and disadvantaged slaves and children of slaves. The problem with race based policies like Affirmative Action is (a) like Roberts argues it is illogical to fix historical racial discrimination with modern racial affirmation (b) you have unintended consequences like discrimination against Asians (c) how do you even define race in today's hyper connected world? e.g., Is Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, an African-American? Are recent immigrants from West Africa also African-American? Race conscious policies are generally distasteful because you then dwell into how many generations of your ancestors were from X continent and what percentage you are of Y race.

Go read any article/book about living as a person of color in America, also read about the history of slavery, jim crow, and civil rights. You might understand then, you will never get that story via HN or American mainstream media. I mean if you're serious about it at all, read about it from the perspective of those who are being discriminated against.

The podcast of the WSJ might answer this for you (episode of june 29 https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-supreme-court-r... ) They say, some states already banned affirmative action. Universities in those states have tried to still recruit minority students, by going to schools with large group of minority students, and actively recruit there. The problem is, those tend to be schools with poor students. Students who cannot pay their university fee. Universities end up subsidizing those students, which is expensive. With affirmative action, they could more easily attract rich minority students.

The one thing I find that is often lost in this discussion in America is, why aren't we targeting the K-12 system where the majority of these discrepancies occur? We talk about tipping the scales at admission to universities, but never to what I believe is the actual root of the problem.

Amen. AA benefits middle and upper-class black kids far more than it does kids in the inner city. You can't convince me that Ivy Blue Carter (Beyonce and Jay-Z's daughter) has faced more hardship and prejudice in her life than a white kid who grew up in a trailer park.

The answer is basically: America has managed to make race and socioeconomic status incredibly highly correlated, especially in its large coastal cities where basically all poor people are non-white. It's nothing like, for example, Northern European cities with large white working class populations.

Obviously there are a huge number of poor white people in America. Mostly in the vast countryside with its small towns. And you're right that they're forgotten about a bit in this debate; certainly no one expects them ever to send their children to Harvard.

I think the reason they are forgotten about in this debate is that the white educated classes feel very guilty about the terrible race-wealth correlation.

Basically the problem is that poor Whites and Asians significantly outperform even affluent Blacks and non-White Hispanics. So simply going based on income would lead to a wildly unrepresentative low proportion of Black and Hispanic students.

Income based help is the only non discriminatory way of admissions. Colleges dont like this because then the college would overwhelmingly reflect poor white people, and they would not be able to claim "diversity". No institution of wealth exists that does not play politics.

To demonstrate this fact you will overwhelmingly see black individuals from very white and non-poverty backgrounds graduating from unis. Most don't make it their first year, the costs are insane and the culture drinks its own Kool aid.

If blues legitimately cared about people the streets would back them - they do not. It's us vs gov.

> "illegally discriminating based on race"

Is there a legal way to discriminate based on race? I thought that was pretty much illegal in most countries, despite efforts in sections of both left and right to keep racism alive...

I have wondered this myself and I think the answer is that American universities want to discriminate based on wealth. They actually want the richest kids possible going to their schools. Their business model depends on it.

A tangent question I have, and have asked here before without any satisfactory answer:

How does it even work? I can proof I'm poor with for example tax returns, but how does someone proof they are of a certain "race"?

At some point, you have to declare the war against something, over. The war against polio, the war against dengue fever, etc. even while there may continue low-grade outbreaks. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

It’s a part of the equation because the Equation is so designed to be against it by the variables that are included and excluded.

I promise if you spend even an iota of time digging into this you will find some meaningful substance that resonates wi the buoy without asking other (indirectly or unintentionally) to do your mental labour for you and to your satisfaction to be convinced otherwise.

This itself is an example of the type of variables and equations that exist that seem second nature because of how they are conditioned into most people from a young age without awareness.

We do have policies to benefit the economically disadvantaged. The amount we spend on this front is vastly, vastly more than any race-based interventions. I would argue we should do much more on that front.

But, people can and do suffer from racism without being poor. Controlling socioeconomic status, Black people (I'm going to focus here) statistically have worse opportunities and outcomes. This is why race-based policy is important in addition to purely financial considerations. There is no perfect implementation of affirmative action to address the root of the problem, but on the whole, I think it's extremely important that institutions are able to try.

The older people in my parents' generation were often prevented from having a full education, often even up to the high school level. My mom was born in the North, instead of the South as her older siblings were, because her family fled the Klan. These are just a couple examples of how the history of de jure and de facto racial oppression are still very much with us.

If not for reforms and affirmative action, I probably would not have had the opportunity to be raised in a financially stable household in an area of bountiful opportunity. It's heartbreaking to me that the policies that allowed my family to go from oppressed sharecropping to earning our way into the middle class are being revoked.

The truth is, affirmative action was never enough, and it is unlikely to be replaced with anything any more sufficient.

You misunderstood the intention of the program. The problem is not to help poor people, there are other programs available for that. The problem is to fight racial based discrimination, which is rampant in the US. Until the 60s, universities were out of reach for African Americans and other minorities, not just because of economic issues. This type of programs came to revert this situation.

math needs to work out. if you have a 100 people and 50 defined to be poor, but can only admit 5 people. How do you decide which of the 50 poor come first ? The top 5, and you are back to square 1. The bottom 5, and you have the devil's problems. Remember the poorest people, the people with billions in negative wealth, are in jail or worse. You do not want to bring them back to the top !

One of the things of "why not class only" is because in America race matters a lot. I mean it quite literally: studies have shown simply having a black-sounding name makes you equivalent to a white-sounding name of an order of magnitude less qualification. In some cases black people with a college degree have job prospects similar to a white person with a felony record.

Ethnic and cultural discrimination (in the US and elsewhere) is not just a form of discrimination against the poor; in fact, it is a causative factor (in the US and elsewhere) in relative and absolute poverty. Trying to squeeze the issues into a one-dimensioned worldview misses what is really going on.

Because we did harm to African Americans and Native Americans as groups, so the remedy has to be to them as groups.

I'm going to assume positive intent on this and that it's not a troll comment.

Race in the US is horribly complicated and tied into so many parts of life here in the US. Full Stop.

HN comment sections aren't really the place to go into the very fine details, especially just one comment like mine. and the fine details do matter. Ok, all that out of the way, now to the questions here.

Let's take a small micro-example and explore a bit:

You are an African-American woman experiencing preeclampsia at 30 weeks gestation. Preeclampsia is a very serious medical condition and can cause death to you and your baby. You go into the hospital not knowing what is wrong with you, but you know something is wrong.

Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that African-Americans don't feel pain like other people do.

Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that women over-react to pain [0].

Like it or not, many medical professionals do not believe the above if they are African-American women.

So, as a worried mother-to-be, you get a doctor assigned to you, likely at random. If your MD is not of the same race or sex as you are, then your experience is likely to be less positive than if they were. From what I have heard from African-American women whom I am able to talk with about medical care, the experience is highly likely to be a negative one unless they get someone of their own race or are lucky.

So, having more people that are of diverse backgrounds in the medical field leads to more positive outcomes for patients of every race and sex.

Meaning that you have to get more diversity into the med schools to begin with. Which means that you have to get more diversity into colleges. Which means you have to get more diversity into Secondary education, and in primary education. Which means you have to get more diversity in pedagogical training. And round we go.

Yes, we could solve this by untying med school from college. Yes, we could open up the med schools to more than just the select few we already have. Yes, we could have more nurses and RNs that accompany MDs. Yes we could make medical care a single payer system and try to solve this from there. Yes, there are a million other ways to fix this.

Hopefully you begin to see what a complex mess racial issues are in the US and how at each and every level, race is a contributing factor that affects everyone. I haven't even come close to any of the real issues here, and there are so many spider webs that tie into each sub-issue. Look at this Supreme Court Decision itself, the first black supreme court justice, a Harvard Grad, voted to end it. Thing get really really squirrely.

[0] I have personally experienced this with my SO during labor, BTW. The attending OB-GYN, a man, remarked to me 'How can you stand the screaming all the time'. I threw him out of the room. No joke, this really did happen.

Racism tells us that the white race is superior to all other races. If you reject that, you expect to see that white people (or “model minorities” like Asian race) are not disproportionately receiving access to opportunity or disproportionately controlling the wealth. In the USA, it’s the opposite.

You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system.

Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct.

If your values include a rejection of racism, you need to create a system that achieves the outcome of proportionate access to opportunity and proportionate control of wealth. Affirmative Action is the system that got the USA closest to achieving that outcome.

It's foreign to most American college students too, almost all US colleges accept almost all applicants.

A very small number of private, public and military colleges attract so many applicants they have to select students for admission.

>> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already.

That's actually where you have missed the point. This isn't about disadvantaged people. This is only about race. In the US, racial discrimination is evil and is generally disallowed. But you are 100% allowed to discriminate against poor people. That is capitalism. If someone said Disneyland was discriminating against poor people because they charged an entrance fee, the vast majority of Americans would laugh at the concept of even calling that discrimination. Everyone who sells something for a price, including schools that sell access to education, are allowed to discriminate against those who cannot afford to pay. So "disadvantaged" isn't enough. To get protection or some sort of leg-up your disadvantage must arise from race/sex/religion ... basically anything other than lack of money.

The reason often given is that most poor people are white

It's an idea as obsolete as daylight savings time.

And don't forget the blatant high rejection rate smart asian kids. You get rejected just because there are too many smart asian kids.

> I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race"

Is that true? I have heard that white males benefit most from admission rules to colleges (perhaps primarily in California?). But maybe that's "quota rules" and not affirmative action.

Regardless, it appears as though the while male is probably going to take a hit if all admissions become strictly academically based.

Modern affirmative action is not about helping disadvantaged groups up. It’s about ensuring diversity.

For 350 years of US history africans and their descendants were enslaved. Native Americans were ripped from their land and relocated, often with genocidal levels of casualties.

After that, these two groups were substantially discriminated against in law, and other races were added to the mix to be given less rights than others.

Today, there are huge disparities between outcomes for different races in large part due to this historical discrimination. There's also an ingrained culture of stereotyping and discrimination that's hard to lift. It doesn't matter if you're the first generation of Americans descended from African immigrants who came in the 1980s... you still are impacted by this legacy.

The concept of affirmative action was to specifically counteract the effects of these negative, historical circumstances and provide a countervailing effect.

I can't speak to other countries, but in the US, it is definitely the case that poor people of color have a harder time getting ahead than equally poor white people. (I suspect it's similar elsewhere, but we are also a pretty racially diverse country, so the effect is larger)

> But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?

Because the state apparatus systematically oppressed people by race. If poor smart white kids succeed but smart black kids do not, this is a failure of the policy goal to repair the harms to black families, and black communities.

The tl;dr is: because there exists systemic disadvantage-ous-ness clearly caused by, and maintained along lines of race. It's not just The Past™ that was racist to damaging degrees, Now™ is too.

All people in bad circumstances beyond their control deserve ways out. There are tons and tons and tons of subsidies and whatnot targeting individual reasons, like poverty (people think you're poor? you're less likely to get a good-paying job, and more likely to get one that abuses you). Race is just one more, and it's particularly effective at leveling the field because it has extremely strong correlations with (and very clearly a cause in) tons of them.

> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right?

It has been transformed into that through the twin attacks of "diversity" and "class, not race," but what it was meant to do was aid the problem that the US ran into after it released millions of slaves into the street with nothing, and they didn't manage to magically create something from nothing.

It transformed from that into an efficiency argument to stay "constitutional" in a country that largely doesn't feel any guilt over slavery. Instead of staying an excuse not to pay reparations to their discarded farm equipment, the justification was A) that everybody should get a fair shake, and some people couldn't because of who their parents were ("class, not race", "equality of opportunity"), and B) that "diversity" of background gave an creative and decisionmaking advantage to businesses.

The problem with these stupid justifications for affirmative action is that they don't support it at all. A) actually argues against race-based affirmative action, and B) paints it as a problem that should be naturally solved by the market with no intervention.

The problem that the US has is that it had brutal discrimination by laws at times so harsh that in 18th century Maryland (iirc) there was a law that would sentence a white person to death for teaching a black person how to read. The problem is that black people collectively have barely more per capita wealth than they had when they were freed (which was $0.)

That being said, black people have increased their proportion of national wealth since freedom, and white people's proportion of national wealth has been reduced, so that's sure libertarian evidence that black people are intrinsically superior to white people, though who can say if that's due to genetics or culture. If reparations were paid that brought the black share of national wealth to parity with the black proportion of the population, racism against black people would cease to be an issue that the government should be concerned with.

ROFL. This is the Communist Propaganda machine of pit the free people against the free people so the liberate media aligns with this message.

One of the issues with the US is not just that certain races are more likely to be poor but they are segregated as well, meaning that there are counties, neighborhoods, and school districts where minorities are concentrated, at levels sometimes approaching 90% or more. And as a result of that, historically the residents of those neighborhoods weren't just economically deprived, but cut off from power, and influence. People lived in dilapidated housing. They couldn't afford to repair because banks wouldn't issue loans. They couldn't afford good schools because schools are funded by county or district in the US and so a poor local population means underfunded schools. They couldn't get good jobs because they had a poor education. All of their friends, family and neighbors were similarly dirt poor. In other words there was a cycle of pervasive generational poverty which didn't exist in the mainstream culture. Even if they scrimped and saved to try to move to a better neighborhood, they were often either entirely excluded on the basis of race, or faced rampant and sometimes dangerous discrimination upon settling in the new neighborhood.

Anyway, so the goal of affirmative action was to try to break that cycle, by essentially awarding the best and brightest from those segregated communities opportunities they could never achieve otherwise.

There was also maybe a sense of society thinking (at least in the case of blacks and maybe indigenous americans) "We owe them because we put them in this situation by kidnapping/enslaving or massacring their ancestors." Whereas with just generic poor people, to say that we owe them anything (as in "we owe them because our economy requires a pool of desparate labor") would be an indictment of capitalism, which is not an acceptable thought pattern in the USA.

> But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?

Capitalist societies literally cannot subsist without a class of people living in poverty. At best, that poverty is exported to other countries but it must be somewhere.

It's telling that not a single reply to your comment actually engages with the question about poor smart white kids. The answer is simple: poor white kids are the outgroup, and "mainstream" American society would like them to kindly go away. They aren't wanted. Society has no use for them.

I cannot go into the actual reasons for automatic action here because it is heresy against the church, so to say. But let me put it this way, it makes no sense and is insane, because it is of course not logical or sane, regardless of the various excuses and irrational mental knots America has been twisted and abused into in orders to support it.

As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor.

But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my background on standardized tests and always checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity (which is how all the tests asked it in those days, not sure if it's still the case), without thinking much about it.

I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs and I feel like I was a strong candidate, but then everyone who gets into MIT is strong. And since I did successfully graduate then I guess it was fine that I was accepted, but I was constantly blown away and overwhelmed by the accomplishments of my peers there, and always wondered a bit if I belonged.

I've always had an identity crisis about what I am. I know in the current zeitgeist there's a big push for racial justice, of which being Hispanic and "brown" is a part. But it also feels totally irrelevant to me, personally, because of my upper class upbringing and elite education, and I feel like I've never really been discriminated against. Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.

So I don't know how I feel about this change. It's certainly a big one, but in the long run, maybe it's good? I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...

Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us.

Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We all knew those few incredible superstars who could run laps around us, but that doesn't mean you're not a star too.

If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.

> I went to MIT ... I was valedictorian [presumably in high school] and had a perfect score on the SATs

> I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs

I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishments.

AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed.

Hah this mirrors my life & experience to a T! [1] I had other "high-achieving" kids at my school be sour grape-y about the MIT thing, saying I only got in because I was Mexican. On the one hand, it probably helped. On the other, I was imo clearly a cut above them academically.

I've never really had an identity crisis about it though. I'm white, but I'm also Mexican. The majority of my extended family is Mexican (I basically have no extended family on any maternal branches). But I wasn't raised to speak Spanish and in general had a pretty generic white American upper-middle-class upbringing. Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting.

[1] Except while I got into MIT, I did not go (went to my very good in-state school - whole other topic + I am very happy with the outcome.)

I grew up in India, where they have taken "affirmative action" to the logical extreme: there are explicit quotas in admissions, jobs, etc. You can have up to 50% (if not more) seats in a college reserved for somebody or the other from some historically marginalized/discriminated classes. As a result, you have situations where somebody from a marginalize class scores, say, 30 in the entrance exam and still gets in, whereas somebody from the "general" class scores 90 and still doesn't get in.

Where I'm going with this is: this remedy (affirmative action) is a terrible one; because once it is in place, it is impossible to get rid of (notwithstanding today's USSC decision, which was caused by a unique confluence of factors which resulted in a court dominated by conservatives). No political party will want to touch it in the future, and if at all, politicians will fall over each other trying to add more and more reservation for their voting blocks.

IMHO, the solution to historical discrimination is not to lower the standards of admission, but to raise the standards of applicants. Inner city schools are terribly lacking in quality teachers, resources, facilities, etc. and that's where the fix should start. Make inner city schools so good that white families will lie about their residential status to get their kids into those schools. This, of course, requires hard work on the part of politicians, so instead, they choose the easy way out: let's just lower the standards.

> I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go.

the problem with aa is not about people getting in that didn't "deserve" it, it's people getting in who don't have the means to succeed; elite colleges brag about their diverse admissions but don't talk about people who go on to fail when they could've succeeded at less prestigious schools

if you succeeded then you deserved to get in.

I was interviewing a person and in post interview meeting with HR and managers, HR made a comment like "this would be the first hire from country X"

After the meeting I noticed that I am the first person that was hired from my country. I am still wondering if a similar comment was made about me as well

Do "white" hispanics face the same issues as those of say Indian heritage?

Not American and not familiar with American history so apologies if this is a stupid question. The reason as I understand it for AA for black Americans is the history of slavery. What is the reason for applying AA to hispanics?

> I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...

What I find amusing is that black college students tend to have a MASSIVE chip on their shoulder about people assuming that affirmative action helped them get in or get a job, but suggest that affirmative action should be eliminated and here comes the rhetoric about how black people will be banned from ever attending college or getting a good job. Affirmative action helps everyone else, but not me! No sir, I was 100% merit-based!

Why do you think you didn’t belong? I know a lot of white and Asian MIT grads and only one had perfect SAT scores. And several were valedictorian, but I’m not sure it was the majority.

Curious how often you wonder if the white people you work with had an advantage by not being historically discriminated against? Probably never. And rightfully so. If people do wonder then that’s on them. There’s a lot of dumb stuff people can wonder about.

Here's a crazy idea, how about universities lower costs? They're spending insane amounts of student Tuition on Administrators that were never necessary in the 80's or 90's or even most of the 00's. Why are colleges hiring so many administrators, some even approaching 1 administrator per 1 student, how is that sustainable?

Our world has foolish ideas with regard to class, and it is best to set them aside.

Be the person that you are. That person is no more or less worthy than any other.

The judgements of the world do seep into our subconscious, but with a clean view, you can put them where they belong, which is away.

I think the idea that anyone "deserves" to what they get is misguided at best. None of us got to where we are on our own, so I think all that we can really judge ourselves on is how we use the opportunities that we are given.

For me the most hurtful revelation from the Harvard case was their use of "personality scores" which were systematically lower for Asian applicants[1]. I don't mind that students from other backgrounds might be given a leg up in admissions. What I do mind is the implication it is because who I am is somehow less than - less interesting, less personable, less "deserving" - rather than merely a mechanism to create diversity. The latter is an attempt to rectify historical injustices, while the former an attempt to fuck up someone's sense of self worth.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

If your family benefited from it and taking it away is now 'good' then it sounds like you're saying you couldn't care less about any future generations who could've used this ladder to better their lives. As the immigrant, much like your father, whose father is a construction worker, that's how it reads.

I love this confessional personal anecdote of ambivalence. I often wonder how so many people seem to be so sure about how they feel about seemingly everything. But you, I relate to.

> checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity

I've always found it weird how Americans can just declare something without having to provide proof.

You have standard high achiever imposter syndrome and probably would if you were white/non-hispanic as well. You deserved to be there...

My friend, you absolutely deserved to go to MIT. I'm sure the person you "beat out" for your spot landed at a different, but equally impressive college and had an experience that they wouldn't trade for anything.

> Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.

So have a lot of people. You're probably surrounded by people whose familial background benefited them in numerous ways. You just happen to have some empathy about yours.

Harvard has said that 85% of students who apply would do well academically, but they only accept like 4%.

Do you think this ruling will help or hurt people who identify as Hispanic?

This smacks of (and I don't mean this in an unkind way) of pulling the ladder up after you use it.

Yeah, maybe you didn't need the extra help, but I'm pretty sure there are still a LOT of people with your background that did/do.

Take every advantage you can get. Don't be sorry.

I applied to university as African American/Black because I'm 1/4 Egyptian. I am very white. Some people may guess I'm Jewish (I'm not) but no one guesses African American.

I got into a nice school and I was enrolled in the "minority engineering excellence program". The program was like 25% white kids with "1/16 native American" or "1/8 Spanish". We got free tutoring and we all took an exclusive class just for the program and 100% of us got an A. It was definitely unfair.

Half of the minority engineers just left the program. They were clearly capable of passing engineering school and the minority program was culty and a bit weird. The kids who stayed were dragged through the system with copious free tutoring and paid staff helping them stay on top of their course work. These kids dropped out at Juniors when they would have probably otherwise dropped out as Freshman.

In America middle eastern counts as white, not black. But nobody is enforcing these things and now they won’t matter because racially discriminating on admissions is illegal.

I often wished universities (and other organizations) would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" to determine someone's background difficulties.

Like okay, you get X points if you're this race, Y points for that. Z points if your parents were poor. Or if you grew up in these bad zip codes. Or if your dad was gone and mom was an addict. Whatever.

As an Asian American of relatively privileged (middle class) upbringing who went to a state college, I often found it unfair that many of my desperately poor white peers worked their asses off their whole lives, despite minimal support from their parents, to get into college on merit alone. Meanwhile for me, my admissions counselor handwaved away all the entrance requirements (my GPA was low, I didn't have the pre reqs done, etc.) and admitted me on the spot. Years later I'd find out that I was part of their zip code based recruiting program designed to get non whites into the school for the benefit of their diversity quotas. In California they already weren't allowed to use affirmative action due to Prop 209, so they just used a geographical proxy for race (finding zip codes with high non white ratios to recruit from).

I didn't deserve that spot at all. I never worked for it, I never suffered for it, my parents didn't much either. I just happened to benefit from policies meant to protect Black and Hispanic people, at their expense, while simultaneously throwing white people under the bus. It was pretty unfair all around.

I get that as a society we want to help give people a chance to escape the circumstances of their birth. But skin color alone is an awfully broad brush that paints only a vague picture of who that person is and what kind of adversity they may or may not have overcome. I wish we looked at it with more nuance is all I'm saying.

The who is more privileged game is not a fun one to play.

Watched a white male friend and a white passing Hispanic female friend get into this argument before. He grew up poor in a rural area, only one parent worked a low paying job and the other was the care giver. She grew up middle class in a city, parents were college professors.

There are a ton of other factors but even at those basics it got complicated. Is a male always more privileged than a non male? How do you weight one point of privilege vs another? It all started to feel very subjective. I wonder if a matrix like that would even be legal.

This idea of a "matrix" often occurs to me when such topics are discussed. What attributes would you add to the matrix? You've suggested race, family wealth, zip code, whether a parent was an addict. You could also have height, physical beauty, IQ, degree of disability, sporting aptitude. Perhaps even degree of neuroticism or autism. The problem is, the matrix quickly gets bigger and bigger. The number of unique matrices starts to increase exponentially. What you end up with is a unique matrix for each individual. So why not do away with the matrix altogether, and just treat people as individuals, without fetishizing one or a couple of the attributes?

Also the weight you assign each attribute is a subjective judgement. Who do you trust to make such a judgement? For example, what bestows more "privilege", having a pretty face, or being from the middle class? And by how much? I don't know.

I don’t think this is a bad idea conceptually, but I worry that the implementation would be a race to the bottom. Who gets to decide who’s been the “most oppressed?” It seems like nearly anyone could feel slighted by this.

Institutional racism is highly corrosive to society.

All we’ve done is create new grievances among poor whites to justify the guilt of upper class whites about things their grandparents did. Those people are rightly upset that the government has been openly racist to them their entire lives.

How did that help? — I mean, besides soothing the feelings of elites that they’re not bigots, even though they made 1950s style racist policies about “too many” Jews and Asians in their universities. (Which is what triggered this lawsuit…)

That's what the University of Michigan used to do, it was ruled unconstitutional in Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003.

It was never really clear (imho) how affirmative action (as actually practiced) could be implemented; discrimination based on race has been explicitly illegal since 1964 but somehow the courts ruled that some discrimination was legal (in Bakke v. California) but the courts can't actually provide a workable solution, they can just shoot down what people try.

> I often wished universities ... would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression"

Be careful what you wish for. Like most well-intentioned ideas, this would become terribly exploited/gamified.

You're worried about skin color being used as a determining factor, but you were admitted based on zip code. That's trying to admit disadvantaged people, but not doing so based on skin color. So maybe in this specific case, they're already looking at it with more nuance? Or at least a different axis than skin color?

> I often wished universities (and other organizations) would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" to determine someone's background difficulties.

Why make it so hard ? Why not just let everyone in and end discrimination

It is important to note that Harward’s admission policy that is the subject of this case was designed to favor White students over Jewish ones [1]. Today it is being used to discriminate against Asian Americans.

Colleges are already prepared for this ruling. Many, such as the University of Washington have abandoned standardized tests because such tests compell universities to admit the kinds of students universities are trying to limit (Asian Americans).

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...

America has long had most of the best universities in the world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.

This ends up moving the burden onto individuals.

If you have an Asian Medical Doctor, they are AAA. If you have a multiple minority Medical Doctor, they are not necessarily AAA, they could be As.

Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you?

Without Affirmative action, you'd trust a multiple minority doctor equally to an Asian doctor.

I wonder what the cost is on the healthcare system/US citizens when we have worse performers in critical positions.

The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative action was used to help people who had been systematically discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an attempt to make up for some of these wrongs.

Although a difficult process I believe most people genuinely believed in the concept.

Fast forward to today and we have a much different framework. Equity.

There is a belief that any group, race, subset of people should have the same outcomes everywhere. This premise is much more controversial and not universally supported.

Should women have the exact same percentage acceptance into computer scientist or welding programs? Or should it be a 50/50 split and anything short of that screams discrimination.

It boils down to equal opportunity vs equalized outcomes. They are not same … one has almost universal support the other seems to be taken directly out of a dystopian novel.

> There is a belief that any group, race, subset of people should have the same outcomes everywhere.

Of course we need to be more specific than just "percent of population". For example, the average age of whites is older than for minorities. So we shouldn't expect the total population percentage for whites college students to line up with their percent enrollment in college, not in the total adult population.

But considering age is just one factor. Of course we need to consider others in order to be equitable. If Harvard admits students with 1500+ SATs, then shouldn't we be looking at that population? It turns out that population is 43% Asian and 45% white. [1]

Interestingly this lines up with Caltech's percentages almost exactly. UC Berkeley, where affirmative action is banned, has roughly the same percentage of Asian students, but many fewer white students.

1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-an...

Yeah, this is conflicting with their another topic: diversity. Diversity and Equity are contradictory. If you accept diversity, you accept people of different groups should and could behave differently. Then you should accept that with these different behavior, the outcome should be different.

If you accept Equity, then you accept whatever group you are in, the outcome should be the same. Then this defeats the diversity.

> The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative action was used to help people who had been systematically discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an attempt to make up for some of these wrongs. Although a difficult process I believe most people genuinely believed in the concept. Fast forward to today and we have a much different framework. Equity.

The people who believe either of these ideas aren't a monolith. Some people subscribe to affirmative action for the original reasons you describe without wanting or subscribing to this "equity" concept.

Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this has all underscored what has been true for a long time:

Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea.

If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them.

(Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)

I completely agree with legislation via judicial branch being a bad idea. However, affirmative action isn't legislation. This is judicial review striking down policy (executive branch interpretation and implementation of legislation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/af...

I don’t love the decision, but I actually like the process. And I don’t think it is legislating. It is interpreting the law.

I’d like term limits on Supreme Court justices. But I think the arguments on both sides of this debate are well thought out.

Again I don’t love the decision, but Im OK with it. That said I’d love to see universities stop giving weight to legacies. But the money is just too strong.

The judicial branch does not make laws.

You're implying that the judicial branch legislated in this case.

They did no such thing.

They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law.

Indeed, legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea, and so it's a good thing that they do not and are not able to.

But somehow, some people only feel the need to mention it when they don't like the result.

There's only approximately 330 million of us, but yes, your main point is correct. I think that judicial activism has led to a perversion of both the legislative and the judicial branches. Why try to pass legislation that requires broad consent and lots of work when you can just bank on getting your policies through via the judiciary? At the same time, why constrain the judiciary's decisions on something as irrelevant and inflexible as the constitution?

The legislation in question (the Civil Rights Act) prohibits all racial discrimination and it was only previous (in my opinion, misguided) Supreme Court decisions that allowed affirmative action as an exception to that in the first place.

Laws aren't (and can't) be written to cover all current and future use cases. The judicial branch is meant to provide interpretation of the law.

Federal courts enjoy the sole power to interpret the law, determine the constitutionality of the law, and apply it to individual cases. The courts, like Congress, can compel the production of evidence and testimony through the use of a subpoena.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-governm...

This also works in the opposite direction though:

New York has a right to shelter law because of the judicial branch of government. Basically, a pro bono lawsuit and a judge forced NY to have enough shelter space for all people sleeping in the street.

Compare and contrast that to San Francisco (and more broadly California) - where everything can be decided on at the ballot box (like kidney dialysis staffing levels) - which has more people sleeping on the street than all of the UK, and has a wait list of each night of 1000+ for a shelter spot.

Everything has advantages and drawbacks.

They aren't legislating from the bench. Legislating from the bench is the opposite of what is being done here. The role of the judicial is to look at laws and actions and determine if they're legal within the meta framework. That is what was done here.

Whether to a sufficient degree or not, SCOTUS agrees with you on this point and exercises a strong reluctance to second-guess past generations of itself, especially on statutory (as opposed to constitutional) matters, since it is theoretically easy for Congress to amend its own statutes if ever Congress should disagree with how the Court has interpreted them.

Indeed, just today, SCOTUS also released a unanimous opinion protecting a person's religious rights against his employer [1]. Sotomayor and Jackson left an addendum pointing out that this man had asked them to overrule a 50-year precedent in interpreting a law, and they explicitly chose not to do so (though they ruled in his favor in a different, narrower way) precisely for the reason I mentioned about Congress having the opportunity to correct the matter if they so choose.

The "liberal" justices usually get the most flack for "legislating from the bench" (although arguments can be made that the "conservative" ones do it too). But here we have the most liberal justice on the Court saying "The Court's respect for Congress's decision not to intervene promotes the separation of powers by requiring interested parties to resort to the legislative rather than the judicial process to achieve their policy goals."

If I could air a very broad-brush opinion, complaints people have about SCOTUS being a partisan institution these days are best levied against Congress (and litigants) for how they treat the Court, not against the Court for its own behavior. When people express low confidence in the Court, I'm always eager to see them aim their low confidence at Congress instead of (not in addition to) the Court.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-174_k536.pdf

>Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea.

If the Citizens United decision didn't teach us that, nothing will.

The Judicial branch also has the job of ensuring whatever misguided ideas the Legislative branch may come up with, regardless of what they are (Communications Decency Act, anyone here?) are compliant with the US Constitution and other applicable laws.

The population of the US is roughly ~330M

SCOTUS rules on the constitutionality of laws. It doesn't write or institute any laws whatsoever. Now people need to get into college on merit instead of scoring high in the Victim Olympics. That's a great thing for our society.

> 600 million

You mean 330 million?

> Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea.

Perhaps, if there is no 75% majority of opinions at the supreme court, then the case is just put on hold indefinitely until new clarifying laws are passed?

I only hear complaints from either side when the tables are turned against them. When its in their favor it's just the right thing to do.

The judicial branch does not legislate. It interprets existing legislation. In this case they were interpreting the 14th amendment to the US Constitution.

Now, they may not have interpreted it the way you or I would, and they may not have interpreted it correctly. But that is what they do.

600 million?

Beyond that it took Gore losing in Florida by a handful of votes (butterfly ballot?!), Trump carrying the states he did by less than 100k votes and effectively two Supreme Court Justices to die, and one to retire for this to be overturned.

I got an email about this from my university president expressing his disappointment with the ruling. He assured everyone the campus will continue to strive for more racial diversity and that this ruling is a hindrance to that goal because race based discrimination is a good thing for achieving diversity.

The school is already about 25% white in a country that is ~60% white. Is that sufficiently diverse? What is the optimal amount of diversity and why? There are a lot of questions I could ask. But I think it's interesting that schools have announced so strong a commitment to diversity without really explaining what diversity is or how having certain racial demographics results in the best possible outcome. How would you prove that?

I don't think this ruling will have any effect. The schools are pretty clearly committed to diversity, whatever that means and for whatever their reasons may be.

I think you’re pulling your punches. It sounds like you already know that college diversity is a red herring.

College populations are a window into the staggering inequality of our society. Shallow as we Americans are, many of us will be content if we can just apply a little window dressing and create some stories to make ourselves feel better. (Be warned, this strategy has now entered many workplaces.)

People with jobs like university president and CEO are stuck in a bind - most can’t stick their neck out. Unfortunately there’s no reasoning with a person whose job depends on not conceding their argument.

The reasons? Racism.

“ I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

—- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-spee...

Beautiful quote - hope we get to see it in our lifetime

Relevant summary from the decision:

> Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack suffi- ciently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereo- typing, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from consid- ering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the uni- versity. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

> Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.

This conflates whether racial discrimination is legal, with how much people base their identity on race. Because on the latter question, the universities have concluded correctly - 74% of Blacks, 59% of Hispanics, and 56% of Asians (but only 15% of Whites) say their race is extremely or very important to their identity:

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in...

Considering the failure and timing of prop 16 and overall makeup of the California electorate compared to rest of country, official discrimination on the basis of race likely won't return in higher ed. Also consider that prop 16 failed by double digits with the pro-discrimination crowd outspending the opposition 19x

What I'm curious about is this: the Harvard decision is wrt a private entity, the court ruled that they discriminated against whites and asians

Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next? Could this trigger a wave of litigation?

> Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next?

I'm no fan of regulation and government intervention in private business, but its gotten out of control in tech and the corporate world. I've flat out heard hiring managers say they'll only hire a woman, lgbtq, or [certain minority] for certain roles. I've sat in hiring committees where candidates preform horribly, esp compared to others being reviewed at the same time, and get pushed through to offer stage just because of their inalienable characteristics. If these meetings were recorded and leaked to the press, there'd be outrage. These managers talk of human beings like people collect coins or action figures. And HR/Recruiting/C-suite is super complicit in all this, if not actively encouraging it.

The decision affects private entities that accept some form of federal financial assistance (this is language from Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), not private entities writ large. Granted, that is still a big bucket.

Oh yeah, it surely will. Time to say goodbye to DIE statements when applying to jobs and forced indoctrination in the workplace. This junk is on borrowed time.

Companies are not allowed to discriminate in their hiring. In other words, it is not legal to have affirmative action in a hiring decision (e.g. only hiring female candidates or only hiring black candidates).

To get around this, companies do a couple things to increase the likelihood of hiring an underrepresented person into a role:

1) They will quietly try to fill up their candidate pipelines with people who match the criteria they are looking for to increase the likelihood they wind up hiring a candidate who matches.

2) They will apply the "Rooney Rule" which says at least one person from an underrepresented minority group must be interviewed for a position before a hiring decision can be made.

>Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next?

As someone who is white, and got 100% job offers from every interview, I wonder if I got it out of discrimination, or I'm so elite and they picked me despite being white.

I’ll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information)?

Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with.

In any case I doubt this will change the makeup of schools at all:

> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.

It is already illegial to consider all of the characteristics you mentioned.

Historically, there was a specific legal exemption 14th ammendementment allowing racial discrimination.

This ruling closes the exemption for racial consideration. Discrimination based on other protected statuses remain closed

>Any exceptions to the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee must survive a daunting two-step examination known as “strict scrutiny,” first whether the racial classification is used to “further compelling governmental interests,” and second whether the government’s use of race is “narrowly tailored,” i.e., “necessary,” to achieve that interest. Acceptance of race-based state action is rare for a reason.

The court tends to rule narrowly. If no one takes the case to the Supreme Court then they won’t decide on it.

I’m curious how this case would play out if some males applying to CalTech did this against female applicants. That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.

That's occurred to me too. Or put more bluntly, the admissions boards who strongly disagree with this ruling will find a way around it by simply putting their own personal bias into essay anecdotes about race.

India had a caste system for a long time. The lower castes were relegated to menial jobs while upper classes enjoyed ruling. After India got independence in 1947, a new legislation was passed with 20% seats given to the lower castes. Soon, people demanding more and more seats, A classic case of vocal minority.

Now, In 2022, almost 70% of all seats reserved for the "lower" castes with a small population. The rest population competes for 30% of seats.

If someone tries to reduce the amount of quota: Riots happens, ministers are dethroned, shot etc. Nobody even touches this issue anymore.

The result is that the top brass of the skilled population have built up a deep resentment. The moment they start earning well, they leave the country and surrender their citizenship without hesitation.

This leads to a feedback loop where the general population is taxed more and more to cover the revenue gap of HNI (High Networth Individuals) leaving. And then more population with the ability to leave , leaves.

1. https://www.shiksha.com/engineering/articles/jee-main-reserv...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India

3. https://www.forbesindia.com/media/images/2023/Jun/img_210405...

The Mandal Commission in 1980 determined the fraction of OBCs to be 50%, a later sample survey in 2006 showed it to be around 40%, [0] current reservation policies for this category are around 30%.

The Indian Census of 2011 shows that SC/ST category accounts for roughly 25% of the population. [1]

I agree with people making the point that these designations have now been used as a political tool, and that sometimes cases arise where people fake credentials. But to claim that they are a lower population is absurd, given that SC/ST/OBC would account for more than 50% of the population.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduled_Castes_and_Schedul...

This may be the only time ever I’ve ever felt like I agreed with the conservative side of SCOTUS.

I just do not know how to politely say any form of affirmative action is bizarre.

If your schools suck at teaching worthwhile things to minorities or poor people, the problem is that your school system sucks. Not that some people don’t get into a few highly prestigious universities.

You could argue it’s a kind of bandaid, but at the cost of introducing discrimination yet again and hiding the true problem. Which is that your system sucks at creating opportunity for everyone.

Because we can't raise taxes on the very people getting legacy admissions into these universities.

If you study things beyond the media garbage level / midwit level and if you're a rationalist, you'll find conservative jurisprudence and constitutionalism more appealing. It did for me, start with Scalia.

Worth noting that while affirmative action has been banned, we still have proxies for race (aka legacy admissions) which overwhelmingly favor rich and white students. And given the historical discrimination of elite universities, this ban on affirmative action without addressing legacy admissions or historical harm will only increase the number of white students at universities. We can't pretend that eliminating race based admissions will serve the greater interest without addressing past (and current) systems of white supremacy.

Link to demographics on legacy admissions: https://www.culawreview.org/journal/legacy-admissions-an-ins...

> overwhelmingly favor rich and white students.

not really. Legacy students have higher SAT scores than non-legacy. https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi...

Whites are also the only ethnic group on Harvard's campus that are underrepresented relative to their percentage of the population. I think to argue that Harvard (I am using them as the example since they are part of the SC case and relevant here) is white supremacist is absurd. It's really quite the opposite.

In fact, I think the SFFA case will reduce the number of white students because Harvard may have been using affirmative action to help poor white students who are the least likely to take test prep[1] and likely didn't attend a high powered high school.

There is absolutely 0 appetite from Harvard to favor white people in any way.

[1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/th...

This ruling will overwhelmingly help Asians and only marginally help white people

From your source

> In addition, 70 percent of Harvard’s legacy applicants are white.

From US Census:

> Race and Hispanic Origin

> White alone, percent

> 75.5%

An important nuance from the majority opinion:

> At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. See, e.g., 4 App. in No. 21–707, at 1725–1726, 1741; Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 20–1199, at 10. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.” Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 325 (1867). A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.

The elite schools are cartels of opportunity that feed themselves a self-affirming diet of the smartest people to maintain their place. It’s a diversion to look at your race versus somebody else’s race. That’s only a small fraction of the admission. A fraction of the best and brightest across races will gain admission, but the rest are usually the elites. These people pay for college out-of-pocket but the colleges themselves don’t actually need tuition to function, their endowments are well-funded by the same families ahead of time to maintain the business talent conduit.

So what does the elite institution actually do? It largely feeds the smartest to lower business ranks to allow elites to better their portfolios. You are smart when you get out to Harvard and you’ll still be smart when you leave. A great school would change low performers into high performers, but that’s not what Harvard does, it looks for those who will already do well after Harvard. Note that with the business focus on DEI, elites need DEI in their portfolio, but nepotism comes first. DEI is a worthy cause to address structural inequities, but it’s now also a business scorecard.

A meritocracy would eliminate the legacy admissions and make admissions not only need-blind but also PII blind. Some elite universities have done need-blind, but this is only sustained by their endowment which is predicated on admitting the less qualified legacies. A meritocracy like this is only possible if the endowment is self sustaining or the college is a public institution. But is meritocracy what we want? Should we focus the most energy on advantaging the already gifted?

It’s notable that in other areas of the world, public institutions provide the best education. Here society is less stratified and college is for learning more than networking. What is needed for the same in the US is a change in perception about our elite schools.

These are good points. I think a compelling argument can be made towards the admixture of the best and brightest with the daughters and sons of the rich and famous. Net net, I think that the opportunities provided to the best and brightest from exposure to, and friendship with the offspring of the spectacularly rich is why schools and network spun out of Harvard have generated such an effective flywheel effect over the generations. Granting access and pedigree to society's elite by a school isn't purely a vocational exercise - and the social element is why the Ivies and Oxbridge have thrived so spectacularly.

Harvard used "personality score" to sort out applicants. Now, they got rid of "personality score", SAT/ACT/LSAT/MCAT, etc., scores. They can tell their feeder schools even four years earlier, how to prepare admission packets for prospective students. Schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford can pick whatever students they want.

At the risk of getting sued and having it go back up to the same court that gave us this decision

When I grew up one of the values instilled in me (moreso by society and personal interactions rather than passed on by my parents) was to see human beings as human beings, without cognitive overhead to their race. i.e. To me it was akin to hair color - neat, but not something by which I'd make judgements.

Theoretically a world which doesn't distinguish, seems most equitable (and sane, at least to me). I'm genuinely trying to understand the impetus toward a different status quo. Is it because the reality of growing up a certain race is so far removed from that ideal that justice requires accommodations be made?

Grateful for insight and experiences. I grew up in a diverse city in Canada so my reality may be a bit skewed from readers in other parts of the world.

The world you propose sounds good in theory, but we are starting at a point where certain groups of people have been discriminated against (or enslaved) for the better part of two centuries. So some argue that we cannot simply treat everyone "equitably" when our society has been decidedly inequitable up to this point.

It’s really about handicaps starting out, or if you’re into maths, initial conditions.

This is some naive approach in my opinion. Nobody sees human beings as “human beings” in their day to day life, it is all about statuses, circumstances, etc AND also the individual. Distinction is an incredibly important feature between groups of people.

For example, someone may bring a lot of your cultural assumptions into how the country should be run, but a different group of people may see things completely differently. So when the majority group of people imposes their culture and influence on the less powerful groups, how is this fair and just to say everyone is equal & we don’t need to see distinctions?

To give you a silly example something like bathroom design is heavily influenced by culture. In places where water was important and cleanliness, they had bidets. But in places like the US and Canada, there really isn’t this present in many places, as a result we lose many benefits of bidets from imposing the current cultural standard for bathrooms.

People talk about tests, well standardized tests are also rooted in gate keeping undesirable groups of people, and by setting requirements that are “equal” they actually discriminate against people who were actively hurt by unjust social policies and circumstances. For example if one group is more illiterate because of historical injustice against them, if you make a test requiring literacy and then nothing is done to address the injustice, you are just perpetuating an excuse to continue discrimination under the guise of being equal.

Does that make more sense?

There are different opinions on affirmative action, and I have to admit assessing people based on what group they are member of, even if your intentions are good, really doesn't sound that good to me.

I can recommend Thomas Sowell book on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_Action_Around_the_...

Harvard and UNC are well intentioned but they are trying to fix inequities which start much earlier.

They sit at the end of 12 years of schooling for applicants, where the quality of that schooling and the level of funding for extra curricular activities will have been vastly different based on where that student lived and which school they attended.

Trying to fix this problem at the college admissions level creates the unintended effect and consequence that Asians and whites who are objectively better academic candidates get rejected in favor of non white/Asian candidates with lower academic scores. That is wrong and it's discrimination on the sole basis of the color of your skin.

The real fight needs to be about fixing our education system so every kid of every race and everywhere gets the same high quality education. It means giving parents school choice to take their kids to private school instead of the poorly run public schools that may be near them. It means raising the standards for training teachers so they can have real workable educational tools to make sure their students succeed.

You can't fix this broken system with more racism, and it was wrong to try to do so.

Equality of opportunity at the n-th step totally depends on Equality of outcome at the n-1 th step. It id better to focus on earlier steps where it doesn’t appear to be a zero-sun game.

I think universities can probably come up with a different set of non-protected criteria to lift underrepresented communities out of social/financial oppression. This might even provide greater access to some equally needing students that are looked over by racially-based criteria. In a perfect world, everyone would have equal opportunity and support throughout their primary education, and college admission could be much more merit-based. Unfortunately, that is not the country we live in and there is little appetite to invest in ensuring all Americans have access to high-quality primary education.

Yeah, and I think it will be pretty simple to do. Just switch over to looking at what district the applicants graduated (or what neighborhood they grew up in) from and try to equally represent all school districts over time. For instance, if you have a poor high school that's never had anyone admitted to your university, then try to choose the next outstanding applicant coming out of that high school. That promotes diversity without involving race. Poor families can't easily change school districts just because they find themselves with a gifted child on their hands. I know because I've been there.

My read and view has been for a long while that to reverse the centuries of race based discrimination you have to do something to specifically funnel opportunities and resources to those affected groups. PoC were kept out of many of the big wealth building booms in the US like the post WW2 golden era for example so unless we're willing to wait for one of those to come around again or a couple centuries of diffusion to even the starting point discrepancies the pre Civil Rights Era built deep into our cities and economies, the race based issues of the past kind of demand addressing with race based solutions.

> lift underrepresented communities out

There already is, though - study hard!

Why does it need to be more complicated than investing more into underperforming areas? Money talks

The most elite colleges already pre-empted this ruling by rapidly moving towards non-merit based admissions

they will just make it so you can't really tell if they are using affirmative action or not instead of having it be explicit.

Won't people be able to prove statistically that they are obviously still using affirmative action policies via GPAs/SAT scores/racial mix? I'm not that great at statistics but that doesn't seem like a very hard task even using basic figures of merit like ratio of applicants to population of accepted students. Seems like something easy to bring a class action suit against a University after a few years of data is available.

There will be many lawsuits, especially if these can be litigated via 'section 1983', which appears to be applicable for state schools. [1] In these cases, attorney's fees are granted for plaintiffs that prevail, which significantly incentivizes lawyers to take on cases that have a decent chance of winning.

A plaintiff doesn't have to be able to prove its case in its initial filing: if the initial complaint isn't thrown out (which a good lawyer could likely avoid), then the plaintiff gets to go through 'discovery', where it can compel the defendant to produce relevant documents and data. In the case of affirmative action, this would include potentially damning evidence like notes from admissions meetings (if the school is foolish enough to put illegal considerations in writing), as well as detailed statistical information regarding the makeup of the applicants and admitted students.

1: https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/what-are-the-elements-...

Yes, they can do that. However, they have to be very, very careful, because of this: '[U]niversities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. ...“[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name' (pp39-40 of https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf)

Thomas Sowell successfully convinced me that affirmative action is a disservice with his cogent affirmative action book.

Justice Thomas's concurrence cited Dr. Thomas Sowell TWICE in support of the disservice affirmative action can have on preferentially-admitted students of color. Justice Sotomayer's dissent dispelled Dr. Sowell's sage publications.

I found it particularly offensive the pettiness embedded within the footnotes, to an obviously-divided court [and on such a simple topic, too].

From majority ruling:

"ELIMINATING RACIAL DISCRIMINATION MEANS ELIMINATING ALL OF IT."

I never understood why are people against standardized testing. I would rather fail test than be judged by someone then deemed not worthy.

exactly. I have a kid in 4th grade . He got bad grades all year in his internal assessments. All the teacher would do is circle out the mistakes for silly mistakes. My kid scored a 96 percentile , toping all the 4th grader in his school My kid knows how to solve and understand the concepts just lack in describing it. I completely favor standardize test as there was no person involved to judge (who can also be biased).

I'm against building an entire education system around having children excel at standardized tests. Which is basically what will happen if it's the sole determinant of ability for universities.

Because average performance in standardized testing (SAT, ACT, and so on) is highly variable between racial/ethnic groups.

People with all different kinds of motivations and agendas have various explanations for why that is, but ignoring all that the fact of the matter is that a strict "meritocracy" of that sort ends up with certain groups overrepresented and others underrepresented.

I'm confused, isn't that what SAT and ACT are?

Regardless of what your take is on the substance, as a former lawyer, I was really struck at the language in the various concurrences and dissents. They are very clearly pissed and/or disgusted with each other in a way that is very not-normal, even for hot button cases.

This issue is personal for justices Thomas, Jackson, and Sotomayor especially. I think that is reflected in their opinions.

If you agree with this decision on the grounds of supporting meritocracy, consider that the real travesty with regards to meritocracy in college admissions are legacy admissions.

How big a deal and how common is it in reality? "We have one fewer spots because we admitted the son of a donor" and "we won't accept you based on race" are different magnitude.

> Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina, has been the boldest defender of what she prefers to call “race-sensitive” admission policies and has referred to herself as the “perfect affirmative action child.”

That will probably not do a lot to convince those happy with this outcome.

Im really not so sure. I've seen plenty of support for "affirmative action", just not based on race. Most people are more than ok with giving those in need an edge, given their situation, but many are against promoting a rich black person over a poor white one.

And sure, race can serve as a proxy, the black population in the United States is impoverished compared to the mean, but in the same way that it's not acceptable to take race as proxy when it comes to crime, it's not acceptable to do it when it comes to livelihood, in my opinion.

Sotomayor revealed in oral argument for this very case that she does not understand the difference between "de facto" and "de jure". There's plenty of other things to dislike her for beyond one liners in interviews.

Good. I'd be sickened to hear I got a lucrative opportunity because of the colour of my skin (which incidentally is not white and I'm not oriental so I'd guess I'd have benefitted from affirmative action if it was present where I grew up).

I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept. You could have 10% or 20% percent of candidates chosen by lottery, or have a lottery for all candidates who have the minimum pre-requisites, etc. Some sort of randomness whould guarantee a diversity of candidates and would even span across dimensions which are not even considered currently.

As an Asian, all I care about is that we should not atone for the crimes committed by someone else (e.g. the white slave owners). That AA disadvantages Asians the most is quite contrary to the whole "atonement" argument of AA.

The only way affirmative action makes 'logical' sense to me is if people believe in biological differences of intelligence between races. Not saying I believe this, but it's the only way I could think of to logically allow for AA.

Because now you have "Race A" paying the same tax rates for public university as "Race B", yet their children could be biologically limited (on average) in comparison.

One thing I never understood is why colleges themselves fight so hard for affirmative action? Wouldn't admitting the most qualified students, regardless of race, be in their own interest? If they are afraid of the political pushback for having too few Black and Hispanics, doesn't this decision give them cover?

The LA Times I feel like is 0 for 2 recently on accurately reporting on the Supreme Court:

> In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.

I don't understand why people are freaking out about this?

FWIW, I always thought using ethnicity as a factor was a misguided approach.

1. It lumps all ethnic groups into one without any regard for culture or sub-ethnicity, which matters. I think Nigerian immigrants tend to do really really well compared to say their black American counterparts. There's also different measured outcome for different groups of Asians (say Vietnamese vs Chinese).

2. I understand the desire to correct the past wrong... but going about that via reverse-racism seems also wrong. I think Gandhi said it best when he said "eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

3. It feels more egalitarian and less discriminatory to fix the past wrong by providing programs/support for disadvantaged Americans, regardless of race.

There's a lot of discussion about switching to wealth or income as a criterion for diversifying the student body, rather than race or ethnicity. Adding to the blizzard of proposals, here's mine:

The "elite" colleges can take care of themselves. They will figure out how to curate their student body to maintain whatever image they want to project. And they're swimming in money, so let them spend it.

Instead, let's focus our attention and support on the public universities, community colleges, and tech schools. I'd never say that low income students "belong" there, but it's where they have the best chance of success. And every dollar spent at those schools educates more people.

My kids both attended public colleges, and I know plenty of people who have sent their kids to community colleges and trade schools. Those institutions are the true jewels in the crown of higher education.

I don’t have anything formal to add.

Both my parents were drug addicts, lived separately, beat me, and didn’t pay for my college. Dad was in jail.

I am Hispanic and was lucky enough to go to the University of Chicago. I did do very well in school, nearly perfect scores with tons of extracurriculars, but I never knew if I belonged.

By the end of my college experience, I did just as well as anyone else in my university, and I have a good job and met lovely and supportive people.

I don’t know if I got in because of affirmative action, but if I did, it has forever changed my life

One question I have is: did it work?

These types of policies have been in place for decades. We have data on inequality between different demographics over time. So can we detect a measurable improvement attributable to the policy?

I admittedly skimmed the opinion, but is this the first case that establishes a private entity like Harvard University is bound by the Equal Protections Clause? I thought existing law and precedent only had it applied to state/state actors (and a few cases where private businesses acted like governments, eg company towns).

Amazed that the people who felt disadvantaged because of the one or two accepted Blacks who were possibly below the cut but had significant systemic societal and economic impediments have no problem with all of the incredibly sub par legacy students who are accepted because of their parent's wealth. I know of a very affluent person who funded two professorial chairs a year before his music school educated son was accepted at a top 3 business school. No one has a problem with that but they act as if the schools are overflowing with nothing but illiterate and unqualified minorities. Maybe 2% if not less are affirmative action acceptances and that is considered too much. I guess their ancestors intentionally became slaves to ensure their descendants could steal admission spots.

Good: race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc should not be used as an advantage, or disadvantage in totally unrelated matters (education, work, etc)

Can't Harvad et al just stop taking Pell Grants and all other Federal funding and mostly admit who ever they want? If so would they do this or do they value that funding too much?

In Brazil, public universities were dominated by the rich, mainly whites, since the entrance exams required high grades that only those who could pay for expensive exam prep courses would have.

Since 2012, with the Law of Social Quotas, that reality has changed, since 50% of the new admission spots are destined for students coming from public high schools, with further subdivisions for racial minorities based on the demographic makeup of each Brazilian state. Those racial minorities quotas are as high as 30% at some universities.

I could personally see that change, since I did undergrad in engineering 10 years ago, and my colleagues were mainly white. I'm doing another undergrad and my new colleagues come from truly different backgrounds, some are black, poor, from indigenous origin... and that matters because if we don't share the same spaces as universities students, we probably won't share latter on, when occupying spaces of power

1. The largest beneficiaries of admissions policies at elite institutions are legacy admissions of wealth alumni’s kids. If SCOTUS wants to interfere with the admissions policies of private institutions based on the equal protections clause, maybe that’s a better place to start.

2. The vast majority of students attend colleges that accept almost everyone.

This is good. When life and death is on the line I don't want some guy/girl/thing with a lower SAT/IQ score than me doing the differential diagnosis.

I think it's worth considering how much economic mobility is tied to economic status prior to college. I find a purely race based admission system fails to identify that, and in place gives an easier solution to building diversity compared to giving discounted education to those who can not afford it.

Of course there remains issues of opportunity for students of color, who are more likely than white students from disadvantaged backgrounds. However economic status, or rural/urban based admissions would capture many of these inequalities.

Of course this all comes from a conversation that supposes college should be as scarce as it is, and that the earnings benefit from college should be as large as it is.

Excellent analysis from Matthew Yglesias: https://www.slowboring.com/p/19-thoughts-on-affirmative-acti...

Clarence Thomas's concurrence does not mince words:

> This, [Justice Jackson] claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood. [...] What it cannot do is use the applicant’s skin color as a heuristic, assuming that because the applicant checks the box for “black” he therefore conforms to the university’s monolithic and reductionist view of an abstract, average black person.

> Accordingly, JUSTICE JACKSON’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step. Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.

> JUSTICE JACKSON then builds from her faulty premise to call for action, arguing that courts should defer to “experts” and allow institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. Make no mistake: Her dissent is not a vanguard of the innocent and helpless. It is instead a call to empower privileged elites, who will “tell us [what] is required to level the playing field” among castes and classifications that they alone can divine. Post, at 26; see also post, at 5–7 (GORSUCH , J., concurring) (explaining the arbitrariness of these classifications). Then, after siloing us all into racial castes and pitting those castes against each other, the dissent somehow believes that we will be able—at some undefined point—to “march forward together” into some utopian vision. Post, at 26 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). Social movements that invoke these sorts of rallying cries, historically, have ended disastrously.

> Unsurprisingly, this tried-and-failed system defies both law and reason. Start with the obvious: If social reorganization in the name of equality may be justified by the mere fact of statistical disparities among racial groups, then that reorganization must continue until these disparities are fully eliminated, regardless of the reasons for the disparities and the cost of their elimination. [...] If those measures were to result in blacks failing at yet higher rates, the only solution would be to double down. In fact, there would seem to be no logical limit to what the government may do to level the racial playing field—outright wealth transfers, quota systems, and racial preferences would all seem permissible. In such a system, it would not matter how many innocents suffer race-based injuries; all that would matter is reaching the race-based goal.

[...]

> The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.

> The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U. S., at 298 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”).

> While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.

Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion begins on page 49. He pulls no punches, and its worth a read.

His concluding 3 paragraphs:

If you read Harvard's response to the rule, you will quickly realize that they can still decide who gets the admission based on race without ADMITTING THAT because even if there is no checkbox for race on the application, they can still figure what kind of race each applicant is and they can still evaluate how the race impacted the applicant's life for the consideration of admission.

A good development but I think this won't stop the practice. Harvard lawyers are now hard at work finding new way to achieve the same effect.

6/23/2003 --> 6/29/2023 Looks like the justices' expected illegality in 25 years was actually prophetic, 5 years from now in 2028 this has now all become illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger

Sanity prevailed. The different reads like a political manifesto rather than a legal opinion.

You need a mental gymnastics of the highest order to justify racist policies like the ones employed by Harvard. Sometimes people get so deep into ideology that they can't think straight anymore. Ask someone detaches from American political discourse to read the Constitution and then ask them how adding points for race plays with that.

Coming from a former communist country where "social class points" where the thing we were so happy to get over I can't see how affirmative action isn't just a worse, more blatant and unjust version of that.

I could understand how this applies to state universities, but how does the US Constitution have this kind of jurisdiction over Harvard?

> Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.

But this is affirmative action. What did they strike down?

Also god damn I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions. Even the ones I would personally benefit from. This is going to ruin the court in the long run for partisan bullshit. If going to the court twice for the same issue can get you different decisions then the ruling of the court means absolutely fucking nothing. You might as well just continue your affirmative action program because the next time the court makeup might be different and they'll change their mind again.

This was already decided forty years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...

So, legally, does this apply to corporate quotas by extension?

Good thread summarizing and highlighting key points of the majority opinion:

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/167442708751463629...

I can see the social good of admitting disadvantaged groups, but how does it help the individual colleges?

I can't come up with a clear path from increased diversity to increased profitability.

I must be missing something because for profit entities don't do things out of the kindness of their heart.

I wrote my thoughts on this news (and how it relates to MLK) here:

"I Have A Dream" Today https://synystron.substack.com/p/i-have-a-dream-today

I'd rather live in a society that made it an imperative to have more students from more ethnicities be eligible for the best universities every year.

That requires addressing inequality earlier, and more thoroughly, and across more axes, than an approach that is, in the final analysis, about setting quotas based on ethnicity.

Affirmative action can do everything it was designed to do while having essentially zero impact on inequality in society at large - it's always seemed like a cop out to me.

Y'know, I predict that this will change absolutely nothing. Racial preferences in admissions will simply go from official policy to unofficial policy..

My take is, there's no completely "fair" and "merit-based" way to measure university applicants. But can we approximate by using a ranking based solely on grades and financials? leave out essays (that can be paid for), race, extra curriculars, legacy etc. Adding some randomness (lottery for people on the same band) is an extra idea.

Can someone explain why the military academies were explicitly exempt from this ruling when their policies are similar to those of UNC and Harvard?

"In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people.

Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder."

Elsewhere: "Two of the nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices – Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – also have direct ancestors who enslaved people."

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-slav...

This is only politicians, doesn't include former and present business leaders. Wealth may have disappeared at certain points, but the social networks remained and wealth was rebuilt. It's a fascinating read - Barack Obama's ancestors were part of that club!

I understand that many think this was a good decision because logic, but let's hope the same enthusiasm goes into figuring out a way to deal with the disparities that were born back then, at both ends of the spectrum.

High quality education and resources being gate-kept makes less sense moving forward. Easiest solution is to let a LOT more people in regardless of background. Letting more people in means you get more money anyways. Who cares if letting in more people makes things less "elite". Elitism is cringe.

For people who are against affirmative action, what is your preferred course of action, given the racial disparities that exist in academia? I see three options:

1) say that these disparities are inevitable

2) wait for the disparities disappear on their own

3) address the disparities through some other policy or initiative

This comment section is a frightening wake-up call to how peoples' mindsets are nowadays. I choose to believe that it's over-represented on HN because most people that exercise interest in the topics HN is made for, are the stereotypical liberal types.

DEI?

Does this impact internal corporate DEI programs?

Here's the opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

Colleges in Boston in the last ten years have been inundated by international students, a majority of which are the wealthy elite from mainland China

I find the timing of this decision curious because it reverses an appeal by Asian students who were previously denied by SCOTUS.

I am not a lawyer, but I worked on a project at Facebook years ago that touches on the underlying case law here. I spent a full year of my life bashing my head against opaque legal precedents to understand how to build a product that met legal requirements and user needs. Maybe this comment will prove useful in distilling some of the nuance here so you don’t have to spend 12 months of your life doing what I did.

This decision confirms a nearly-unanimous legal consensus that existed before this ruling about the legality of disparate treatment vs disparate impact.

Disparate treatment is enshrined as illegal in other legislation like the fair credit and lending act. It basically states that the use of protected class data for most use cases is illegal. I know the most about how this is interpreted in the context of private companies, but my understanding is that the embargo on the data use is much broader.

Disparate impact, by contrast, is a legal theory without much case law to support it, but it asserts that what is illegal is not the use of the protected class data, but unequal outcomes.

This is super thorny territory. On the surface, disparate treatment (which again, is what the court upheld here) appears to only reinforce the racist, sexist, unequal status quo. And personally, I agree, but it at least prevents overt discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and other important human characteristics. The law right now makes it illegal to outright say that you are treating someone else differently on the basis of those traits. It doesn’t prevent all the other ways to still be racist and sexist and awful, though.

So you might say, let’s go with disparate outcome, then! And this is indeed what I first thought. But there are huge problems here, too. First, the only way to ensure that outcomes are equal is … to measure and report on the very traits we think are sensitive. This wouldn’t just be invasive, it would entrench the collection and measurement of this information. I can think of a lot of ways that bad actors could misuse petabytes of accurate racial demographic information in ways that would make current ML-based inferences and regression correlations laughably indirect.

Then there’s the issue of whether or important things in our society should be equal at all. Take the example of sex and employment. There are professions that are heavily male or female dominated. How would you feel if a colleague of the opposite sex with no training in your discipline was offered 2x as much compensation as you to perform the same task because society insisted that your profession have exactly equal representation? I think of myself a bit of a bleeding heart liberal, but I don’t think that’s a desirable outcome.

And then there are the second and third order effects to consider. Is the fact that most commercial truck drivers are men a reflection of different preferences, social norms, or something altogether different? I have no idea and I’m not about to go all Charles Murray and act like I do.

My goal in writing such a long post isn’t to make an apologist defense for what seem to me a clearly socially regressive finding from the Supreme Court, just that finding a better alternative is really, really hard.

So let’s not get discouraged by this setback. Let’s find a better alternative and get that written into law.

The best method of college entrance is whats done in east asia. China does the Gaokao (hard SAT), and students list their university preferences and filters students into colleges based on their score and their preferences. Japan takes entrance exams for a university. These seem like infinitely fairer methods than the US where they try and correct for disadvantage in a variety ways.

Racial discrimination is racial discrimination no matter how you try to sugar coat it.

What does this mean in practice?

I'm happy this happened because Asians are the only ethnicity that suffers true systemic racism when it comes to education.

However, my fear is that the universities are working hard to figure out ways to continue this practice against Asian Americans by skirting around the rules.

A very interesting quote from the ruling:

'These classifications rest on incoherent stereotypes. Take the “Asian” category. It sweeps into one pile East Asians (e.g., Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and South Asians (e.g., Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi), even though together they constitute about 60% of the world’s population. Bernstein Amicus Brief 2, 5. This agglomeration of so many peoples paves over countless differences in “language,” “culture,” and historical experience. Id., at 5–6. It does so even though few would suggest that all such persons share “similar backgrounds and similar ideas and experiences.” Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin, 579 U. S. 365, 414 (2016) (ALITO, J., dissenting). Consider, as well, the development of a separate category for “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” It seems federal officials disaggregated these groups from the “Asian” category only in the 1990s and only “in response to political lobbying.” Bernstein Amicus Brief 9–10. And even that category contains its curiosities. It appears, for example, that Filipino Americans remain classified as “Asian” rather than “Other Pacific Islander.” See 4 App. in No. 21–707, at 1732. The remaining classifications depend just as much on irrational stereotypes. The “Hispanic” category covers those whose ancestral language is Spanish, Basque, or Catalan— but it also covers individuals of Mayan, Mixtec, or Zapotec descent who do not speak any of those languages and whose ancestry does not trace to the Iberian Peninsula but bears deep ties to the Americas. See Bernstein Amicus Brief 10–

The “White” category sweeps in anyone from “Europe, Asia west of India, and North Africa.” Id., at 14. That includes those of Welsh, Norwegian, Greek, Italian, Moroccan, Lebanese, Turkish, or Iranian descent. It embraces an Iraqi or Ukrainian refugee as much as a member of the British royal family. Meanwhile, “Black or African American” covers everyone from a descendant of enslaved persons who grew up poor in the rural South, to a first-generation child of wealthy Nigerian immigrants, to a Black-identifying applicant with multiracial ancestry whose family lives in a typical American suburb. See id., at 15–16. If anything, attempts to divide us all up into a handful of groups have become only more incoherent with time. American families have become increasingly multicultural, a fact that has led to unseemly disputes about whether someone is really a member of a certain racial or ethnic group. There are decisions denying Hispanic status to someone of ItalianArgentine descent, Marinelli Constr. Corp. v. New York, 200 App. Div. 2d 294, 296–297, 613 N. Y. S. 2d 1000, 1002 (1994), as well as someone with one Mexican grandparent, Major Concrete Constr., Inc. v. Erie County, 134 App. Div. 2d 872, 873, 521 N. Y. S. 2d 959, 960 (1987). Yet there are also decisions granting Hispanic status to a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors fled Spain centuries ago, In re RothschildLynn Legal & Fin. Servs., SBA No. 499, 1995 WL 542398, 2–4 (Apr. 12, 1995), and bestowing a “sort of Hispanic” status on a person with one Cuban grandparent, Bernstein, 94 S. Cal. L. Rev., at 232 (discussing In re Kist Corp., 99 F. C. C. 2d 173, 193 (1984)).'

This is good. The criteria should be based on income, not the race.

Why don't they Just ban people from divulging what college thet went to during Job applications?

Not everyone can go to an Ivy League College. Employers should only be focusing on GPA or other performance metrics. If its really about meritocracy.

<< Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.

Yep.

You can't fix racism with more racism.

Interesting to see if companies will be slapped back to reality away from their DEI bullshit that hires lesser qualified individuals simply because of their levels of melanin.

if I were a non-white adversarial nation with plenty of high-achieving youth, I would take maximal advantage of this decision and the US's student visa programs by doing everything I could to send as many students from my country to US colleges as absolutely possible, so as to deprive American youth of college education as much as possible.

Good - lets do the workplace next.

Sounds good to me.

I think public college admission should just be a random lottery.

Ok. Did they propose a different way to combat systemic racism?

It's strange that no one is talking about that if it weren't for Trump and the conservative nominees, we'd still be stuck with AA. The dissent was apalling and completely ideological.

Please unflag this.

Why is this flagged? Previous discussions were at the top of HN.

why was this flagged?

Wow flagged within 30 mins before people could even start having a discussion. HN audience is wild.

"Racism in US college admission has been banned"

I'm a huge fan of this.

That won't stop people complaining about it.

A win for meritocracy - https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...

> In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.

You... can't. Even if you want to only consider the individual experience, race is deeply tied up with the individual experience. If you only considered race, that would be even more crazy. But you cannot just ignore race, as much as you want to.

A white legacy applicant at Harvard is 5 times as likely to be admitted as a non-legacy white applicant. "Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as typical white applicants."

All of you writing that if a Black kid gets admitted then some white or Asian kid gets bumped off are scrapping for the little bits the rich have left to you, while misunderstanding the fundamental mathematics at work. You're pawns. This is the genius of racism -- sow manufactured division among the "little people" so that those on top (of whatever color) can continue comfortably while no one else can rise.

http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf

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