Affirmative Action vs. Race-Neutral Admissions: A Case Study | WSJ

The Supreme Court has banned colleges from using race as criteria for admissions. Essentially ending the 50-year run of affirmative action programs.

California banned public colleges like Berkeley and UCLA from using race in their admissions in the 1990s. Since then, a large study measuring the academic success and earnings of students before and after the ban has shown what effects “race-neutral” admissions policies have on minority students.

WSJ explains how affirmative action worked, why the Supreme Court struck it down — and what we can learn from California about how higher education might look without it.

0:00 Supreme Court bans affirmative action
1:00 Admissions before race considerations
3:06 How affirmative action worked
4:58 Lessons from California
7:02 Race-neutral policies

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#SCOTUS #AffirmativeAction #WSJ

[freyafang]

If the intention is to protect students from a more vulnerable background (low income, moderate public education), just take those factors in directly. They should be totally irrelevant to race.

[saurabhb]

So how do you explain the success of first generation Asian American kids whose parents are not wealthy, are immigrants. They hardly got the benefits of Affirmative Action and yet now constitute the biggest number of college graduates. I'd love to see a study on that.

[krishp]

Why did the data he collected ignore the negative affects on Asian students? They are also a minority.

[kenattorri]

Glaring oversight in this video to not describe the harm inflicted on Asian Americans by affirmative action.

[bryantagas]

It’s extraordinary that this piece does not focus at all on the negative impact on Asian students of affirmative action policies at selective schools, where Asians need to have significantly higher scores to gain admission than whites or other minorities. Furthermore, it fails to note that minority representation in California’s selective schools was hardly impacted by the end of affirmative action, since Asian students were admitted in greater numbers. The charts all leave off Asian students when looking at the relationship between having a stable home and access to resources pre-18. All of this left-out data would have added nuance to the story, especially because the Harvard case was based on the argument that the university actively discriminated against Asian applicants through its policies. The Court agreed.

[damham]

Part of the solution might be to stop basing k-12 schools funding on property taxes and area and have all public schools funded and operated in a way so they can all be equally as good as the schools we currently only see in wealthy districts. I think Finland does this and they have one of the most successful education systems in the world.

[dude]

So my problem with all this is that almost everyone knows and says that the lack of racial diversity is really being caused by the lacking quality of education below the college level. Yet everyone is obsessed with fixing the symptoms of the problem (i.e., college admissions ratios) and not the actual problem. Maybe all the football stadiums and other needless stuff needs to get canned and replaced with real resources for grade schools.

[dominican]

As an Afro-Hispanic female who migrated at the age of 6 thank you for finally viewing me as an equal. I am tired of the indirect discrimination by suggesting I need special treatment to get into college or to find a job! I hate the subtle racism in which they are suggesting we are inferior.
The worst part is they pretend like they care and they are helping the community by discrediting our abilities from birth.

[alucardkoten]

Aren't Asian a discriminated minority?

[s]

I am curious on whether the Asian parents were actually higher income earners. If it's not then the argument that minority students from lower income background can't do better academically just didn't really work

[anthonyamory]

The problem is he is trying to categorize individuals as “Black” or “Asian” before he is looking at them as individuals. That is the textbook definition of racism. The dream is to have a world where “they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. You cannot fight racism with a “better” form of racism which still "judges by the color of their skin". Although he does not appear to know it, he is promoting not eliminating racism.

[waleedkhalid]

As an Asian, affirmative action has been the bane of my college acceptance journey. I have to be in the top 10% of Asian applicants to be considered, compared to the top 50% of Black applicants. All this ended up doing was creating spaces where Asians still out-performed most students regardless of their economic status. Whites were more prone to economic status than Asians. And Blacks performed worse overall (likely pulled down by lower performing Black students who were accepted due to quotas rather than ability).

Am I racist for saying all this? I don’t think so. I think not everyone should go to college, and some people just need a few years before they are ready. We should be expanding networks of vocational schools, who then in unturned should encourage students to pursue higher degrees upon graduation, the difference being that those low performing students are now older, wiser, and more ready for the rigors of college. They would also be able to support themselves with a trade. Want more Black engineers? This is how, not affirmative action. Help the community in the way they need it, not with some high road moral stance that does nothing to solve the actual problem.

[Chilicoach]

AA was effectively just a bandaid that made our education systems look better than they actually are (in terms of diversity). It didn't actually fix anything, instead just made it easier for colleges to be able to say "look, we care about diversity" instead of actually improving anything at its core

[major__kong]

This guy is absolutely correct. But the solution isn't to lower standards or enact affirmative action at the college level rather fix the problem at the source, which is in primary schools and family attitude towards education. But politicians don't have any game there because third rails and difficult truths are going to get them.

[williamxw]

All the "discrimination" and inequality happens at or before the starting line, yet we spend most of the time debating and implementing policies that would only reverse at the mid point or even finish line. Like we shouldn't be talking whether AA should have a place in college admission or job application, but how can we improve the education system overall so everyone has a equal chance since grade one. Also, instead of debating whether education loan cancellation is fair or not, we should be thinking why higher education costs so much nowadays and increasingly so, and what can we do to stop that.

[tashanmann]

Just imagine if Affirmative Action was applied to American Football and an Asian gets selected in College Football team over a Black student or a Hispanic one....Reaction to that would have been very different.

[JesusOurSavior]

Those who claim to be against “systemic racism” are upset that the only systemically racist policy still on the books has ended. You can’t make this stuff up.

[Scope]

Grew up in low-income neighbourhood but with strict 2-parent household doing homework everynight for most of my student years, and finally graduated medical school, I'd like to think I was smarter than average and not because of my skin color.

[RandA]

Here's something ground breaking: You don't have to go to an Ivy League to be successful, it's not life or death, and lets move beyond race already.

[thebordernow]

Interesting how at 7:27, Harvard admits that without the race-based admissions criteria, their black admit rate would drop. That is a pretty direct admission that those students wouldn't have been as competitive as other applicants on all of the other admission criteria, so it's not really using race as a "tie-breaker" among similarly-qualified applicants.