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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32034 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Looks like the Supreme Court is finally getting around to challenging affirmative action. Of course we don't know what the ruling will be, but with the decisions so far I'm hopeful they strike down AA, or at least put a dent in it.

I'm surprised this isn't a bigger deal as I haven't heard much buzz about it from my liberal friends. According to the article, 74% of Americans don't believe in using race as a factor in college admissions (although that question and whether or not Affirmative Action should be struck down likely have far different approval rates.) It may be a Roe situation where they really don't care until one of the sacred cows is gored because they believe in their own invincibility. I'm curious if AA does get struck down, will we have the same reaction as Roe?

I'm sure some people will be upset, but do you think liberal states will start changing their constitutions to allow race filtering for college admissions? Or is the political will for AA just gone on both sides of the aisle?

I think a lot of discussions about AA focus on the effect on black enrollment and try to depict it as a kind of "black vs. asian" conflict. Perhaps this is partly because those are the racial groups for whom the differences between standardized test scores and admission chances are most dramatic, but I think it somewhat misreads the issue. Black people are a relatively small percent of the US population (~13%) and are not increasing especially fast. Hispanic people, on the other hand, are an increasingly large share of the population because of immigration, high birth rate and changing fashion in racial identification among people of mixed race or ambiguous race (e.g. an ethnic white person who was born in Mexico). Even if no black people were admitted to elite universities (an unlikely outcome even if admissions were based entirely on test scores), this would only allow an increase of about 12% in asian admission. However, to some extent now and perhaps much more in the future, the rate at which hispanic people are admitted to elite universities could have a large impact on asian admission rates (as could white admission rates, of course).

Liberal states will trust in liberal admissions offices to ignore court rulings and find a way to keep admitting underperforming minorities. The only real way to fight affirmative action would be to adopt a Kendiesque policy of assuming discrimination as the default whenever student demographics don't match up to the racial distribution of test scores, and/or to ban interviews and institute blind admissions.

Yep. Race-conscious admissions have technically been unconstitutional in California for decades, and the universities don't even try to pretend that they're complying.

Oh properly blind admissions would be great. Not only would they kill AA but also kill legacy and donor admissions (an even bigger travesty, at least AA has noble though misguided goals). The schadenfreude when Daddy finds out his $2 million donation led to zilch since anything on his children's applications that connected them to him got scrubbed out by a minimum wage worker before they even got delivered to the admissions officers is so great even imagining it fills my heart with warmth, pride and childlike joy.

Agreed. I keep seeing people try to buttress AA by crying "What about legacy admits? If we're banning AA, why not that first/too?!", and I'm just like "Your terms are acceptable even better."

There's another easy solution: Ban admission based on anything other than test scores (like in most of Europe).

Grandes écoles still base the admission on nationally ranked exams similar to rest of Continental Europe. There is a fundamental difference in the mindset when it comes to admissions. Anything as subjective as admissions scoring based on application essays and "personality" is considered fundamentally inequal (mostly in a socioeconomic sense, although it happens to also act as a guard against wokism in this case) and can be outright illegal depending on the country.

Europe does have surprisingly balanced laws around abortion and college admissions. Their governance is weak in other areas I suppose.

Prop 209 passed in 1996. Are you really arguing that a one year increase, 25 years later, is evidence that they are cheating somehow? What took them so long?

And, btw, the easiest way to increase black student admissions at Berkeley is to encourage them to apply to the College of Letters and Sciences, rather than to one of the more competitive colleges

In my opinion it is valid evidence. "What took them so long?" In 2020, many major institutions suddenly became much more concerned about avoiding the appearance of discriminating against black people. This gave universities like Berkeley the motivation to try to admit more black students. The fact that they were able to do so in such a short time shows that they do have some ability to change admission decisions based on the race of applicants (either they were previously discriminating against black students or they started discriminating in favor of black students or both). If admissions were truly race-blind this would very likely have been impossible. Admittedly, university admissions in 2021 were also effected by covid (e.g. that was part of the justification for many universities to drop SAT requirements) and this makes the argument weaker than it would be otherwise. However, it seems obvious to me that 2rafa's point is evidence in favor of "covert AA" at schools like Berkeley and that "what took them so long" is not a convincing rebuttal.

It was not meant to be a rebuttal; the OP's conclusion might well be true. It certainly would not surprise me, esp given the low enrollment of African Americans freshmen at Berkeley the year before (see data discussed below). It was meant to be a commentary on OP's poor use of evidence, or really their laziness. As you and others have noted, there is much better evidence on both sides, and one would think that, having seen one very weak data point, OP would at least have wondered what the data looked like in the intervening years before posting with such confidence in his conclusion.

Re institutions being more concerned about the appearance of discriminating against black people, the timing is not right. Despite the OP's statement that the increase was in 2021, if you look at the article and the links, the increase was for Fall of 2020 (note the article's reference to admissions "this past fall", and see link below). Admissions decisions are announced in March, which was before the George Flloyd incident.

BTW I don't know why you claim that the outcome would be impossible if admissions were race-blind. First of all, the 40% is overstated, because overall numbers of admittees increased. The pct of total freshman admittees who are black went from 3.57 pct to 4.76 pct, an increase of 33%. Second, as I implied in my original post, admissions decisions at Berkeley are made at the college level, not the university level. So, while overall acceptance rate at Berkeley is 14%, at the College of Engineering it is 7%. Given Simpson's paradox (ironically first identified re Berkeley grad admissions), we need to see those numbers in order to make valid inferences; if more black students started applying to less selective colleges (eg Letters and Sciences), then the increase could easily be possible.

PS: Another possible explanation: Some of this might be PR; the acceptance rates include wait listed students and students offered Spring admission. The actual enrollment at Berkeley went from 178 students to 229 students out of 6000 total (and that 178 figure is an unusually low base, esp as a pct of total enrollees).

First, I don't think it's a poor use of evidence. Prop 209 is supposed to mean that public universities cannot decide admissions based on race. The fact that when the school has an incentive to suddenly admit more people of a certain race it is able to quickly do so shows that they likely do have the ability to at least let race have some influence on admission. The fact that this happened 25 years after Prop 209 passed doesn't matter much since the relevant change in incentives happened in 2020 and the change in admissions happened in 2021.

Second, I agree that it is a problem for 2rafa's argument if the change took place in 2020. Looking at the links you sent, it looks like there was a change in 2021, but you are also right that, especially for Berkeley in particular, there was a bigger change in 2020.

Third, saying "impossible" was too strong on my part and I apologize. Also it is reasonable to critique 2rafa for overstating the magnitude of the change. However, I don't buy your second argument here. If you want to explain a change in overall admission rate using the fact that different colleges have different admission rates, you have to explain why black people suddenly started applying to the various colleges at different rates than they had previously. Of course there are many possible explanations for a sudden change in admission rate but the one you propose does not seem plausible on the time scale of one year. A better counterargument, in my opinion, would be to cite changes in admissions policies (such as waiving SAT requirements) brought on by covid. Although this counterargument no longer works if the change happened in 2020 rather than 2021. Your argument about massaging public statistics by including waitlisted students is reasonable too, although again there is the question of why the university wouldn't have done this in previous years (more relevant if the change was in 2020 than in 2021).

EDIT: I should clarify that when I say "I don't think it's a poor use of evidence" I mean when 2rafa's claims are taken at face value. If 2rafa had the year of change or magnitude of change wrong then it may be poor evidence.

Yes, the increase in 2021 seems to be a function of the increase in applicants; admission of black applicants admitted actually declined in 2021: It was 850/6587 (13 pct) in 2021 versus 733/4454 (16 pct) in 2020.

However, I don't buy your second argument here. If you want to explain a change in overall admission rate using the fact that different colleges have different admission rates, you have to explain why black people suddenly started applying to the various colleges at different rates than they had previously.

Well, an obvious hypothesis would be that the university encouraged them to do so. See the links in OP's post, where university reps explicitly talk about efforts to increase enrollment. But, regardless, I want to emphasize that my point is not that no chicanery is happening, but rather that the data presented is insufficient to conclude one way or the other. I taught high school in Oakland for many years and had a lot of students apply to Berkeley, and the Asian-American students (who were a majority of the students, or a large plurality) overwhelming applied to the colleges of engineering, or chemistry, etc. I assume that is true statewide. Yet, the pct of Asian-American students admitted in 2021 (6113/36827) is greater than the pct of black students, as was the case in 2020. Whites were 16% in 2020 and 14% in 2021, which is the same or higher than black applicants. From the campus-level data alone, it is hard to make a claim of racial preferences, but data at the college level might imply that (since college of application is a [very] rough proxy for quality of student.

I would say that's evidence, yes, but far from the best evidence. It's easily dwarfed by the absolute mountain of evidence uncovered by Prof. Sander at UCLA that the UCs were comprehensively violating Prop 209 since shortly after it was passed, and that evidence was covered up by UC Admissions while the UC Administrations told massive straight-face lies for the next decade or two.

One of the methods was using multi-pass evaluation of admissions packets where the first pass sorted into "admit/marginal/no admit." For some odd reason, when the second pass went through the "marginal" category, 75%+ of black applicants got an admissions offer, and approximately 0% of white and Asian students were accepted.

I knew some black students in the UCs that went there well after Prop 209, but before Prof. Sander's discoveries. They expressed bitterness that they were seen as affirmative-action students, despite Prop 209 clearly making racial preferences illegal. "Unjustified racism," they called it. And yet they'd been betrayed, and the suspicions of the "racists" were actually correct. They did get in under lower admission standards.

I think you are overstating your case here. It is clear that Prop 209 did have a major effect on admissions in the UC system. For example, you can see here that the number of black freshmen students at Berkeley fell by about 50% from 1997 to 1998 (the first year the new rules were in effect) from 6-7% of new freshmen to 3-4%. I believe that the UC system did try to circumvent Prop 209 in various ways and may have become more effective at this over time, but claiming that "UCs were comprehensively violating Prop 209 since shortly after it was passed" doesn't seem correct.

Before Prop 209, the UCs used particular metrics and methods to preferentially boost black admissions to UCs. Then Prop 209 mandated an end to racial preferences, and decreed that admissions should be race-blind. After Prop 209, the UCs covertly used different methods some of which I specifically described to boost black admissions, in violation of Prop 209, and conducted a massive coverup of their illegal behavior. I'm not evaluating the post-Prop 209 behavior on the basis of statistical analysis; I'm talking about the actual behavior that Prof. Sander uncovered.

That the post-Prop 209 methods produced fewer black admissions to the UCs than the pre-Prop 209 methods is an interesting point in itself, but it's not a counter to what I wrote.

I didn't claim that the UC system made no attempts to circumvent Prop 209, only that these attempts, at least for the first decade after Prop 209, did not manage to bring admissions numbers close to where they were before Prop 209. That seemed to contradict the phrase "comprehensively violating Prop 209" but perhaps we interpret the word "comprehensively" differently.

That could still be consistent - if the "true" percentage with no preference was 1-2%, then there could have still be a thumb on the scale which was not pressed quite as firmly in 1998.

I objected to the phrase "comprehensively violating" which to me seems to imply that Prop 209 had little to no effect on admissions numbers. I was simply pointing out that it did have a large effect on admissions even if this effect may not have been as large as in a scenario with no attempts to circumvent Prop 209.

Prediction: if AA is struck down, we will not see any decrease of URM students at elite universities (say, top 10).

I do think we'll see a marginal shift toward more Asians and fewer whites.

I disagree with you. Based on historical precedent, it seems relatively likely that enrollment of URM students at elite universities will fall, at least in the short term. For example, as you can see here, when prop 209 passed in California, the number of black freshmen students at Berkeley fell by about 50% (from 6-7% of new freshmen to 3-4%). The social atmosphere is of course substantially different now than it was then and perhaps the UC system's experience with Prop 209 will give other universities a leg up on circumventing a possible AA ban, but I think the default hypothesis here should be that it will effect enrollment somewhat.

By the way, according to the numbers I linked to above, when Prop 209 passed, the number of black and hispanic students at Berkeley fell a lot but the number of white and asian students rose only slightly (at least in percentage terms). One reason is that there were many more white and asian students than hispanic and black students to begin with, so the same change in absolute terms looks much smaller in relative terms. Another reason seems to be an increase in percentage of "not given" as a response to demographic questions. It's not clear to me why this is and what the demographic breakdown of "not given" was at the time. I doubt that it was mostly black and hispanic students, but I'm not sure.

The reality is that striking down AA won't change much. There are a thousand things that colleges can select for that are, in intent, proxies for race but ostensibly for some other nonracial aim. Depending on what they are, they'll be struck down, but for every approach struck down there'll be ten being trialed on the ground.

It's unclear how a ban an affirmative action would even be enforced. Today even Harvard implausibly claims that it doesn't take race into account. University admissions policies have enough opacity that even if it's obvious from the outside that they're based on race, when it comes down to brass tacks it will be hard to prove.

It's unclear how a ban an affirmative action would even be enforced.

It won't. But it could, the same way the ban on discrimination against black people was enforced. It requires buy-in from the lower courts and administrative agencies, so they turn a critical eye on the sorts of nonsense would-be violators would pull. Do you think old-fashioned racists couldn't come up with crap like "them n-words just have bad personalities"? They could and they did, they just got slapped down and their institutions put under court supervision. That won't happen here, because nobody in the system except maybe a few members of the Supreme Court really wants affirmative action to go away.

Prediction market thinks there is very good chance AA is struck down.

https://kalshi.com/events/SFFA/markets/SFFA-COMPLETE

I'm sure some people will be upset, but do you think liberal states will start changing their constitutions to allow race filtering for college admissions?

There will certainly be some response. but if they persist in racial discrimination I would wonder how they will deal with the likely outcome of lots of talented applicants being siphoned off to colleges in other states? Will there be some kind of additional certification or requirement that a school has to meet to be listed as a 'truly' accredited institution? Maybe federal funding is tied to some other metric that is loosely tied to racial diversity.

An interesting tactic that I might expect to see is simply raising tuition prices across the board WHILE offering special scholarships to cover all or most of the price to eligible students based on race, so at least you can get applicants to self-select for which schools they go to, and can say "well we are not using race-based admissions standards!"

Although the ultimate decision striking down AA might be broad enough that even THAT form of discrimination would be suspect.

I'm curious if AA does get struck down, will we have the same reaction as Roe?

I can't imagine it will be as severe as all that, and yet Universities as a class have a LOT of political sway so I'm thinking we will definitely see some fits pitched.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if affirmative action, in practice, increased. I could see universities and states like California amd New York doubling down on AA out of spite, using the court case as a flag to rally around.

Maybe packaged with a larger 'reparations' policy or otherwise making it clear that they're going to spend EVEN MORE money trying to achieve racial parity, even if it isn't allowed in Admissions.

I didn’t feel like the reaction to Row was severe

No riots, but someone allegedly tried to kill Brett Kavanaugh over that decision.

I do not expect an assassination attempt to occur if AA is overturned.

Due to increasing education polarization and affinity of liberals for AA, I actually wonder if, somewhat perversely, states that don't implement AA would have to worry about talented students and workers leaving to go to other states.

The political will for AA exists in the universities and bureaucracies, and will be abetted by ideological fellow-travelers in law, politics, and journalism. If this iteration of AA is struck down in these particular places, colleges and universities will simply change their methodology and bury the decisional factors even further under layers of committees, unrecorded exercises of discretion by low-level admissions staff, and student advocacy. They will stop collecting, and attack as racist, the metrics which would reveal their actions to be discriminatory (e.g. standardized testing). They will bog down litigation in years of lawyering, backed up either by billion-dollar endowments, or blue state's public fisc. One or two red tribe suits might win, but on the whole, the system will remain.

I think the system of racial quotas at US universities will remain, no matter what.

The dilemma for the establishment is the vexing problem of both ever-greater share of Asians in the US population combined with Asians pulling away from everyone on the SAT college exam, which Steve Sailer [wrote]](https://www.takimag.com/article/asian-supremacy/) about recently.

One possible exit route could to be declare racial discrimination illegal but open the door for everyone within the top 10% of their high-school graduating class to get a spot, which would invariably hit against Asians as many high-schools in the US are overwhelmingly Latinx and/or black. Or universities could just ditch the test. Can't break the rules on something you can't measure.

It's depressing to ponder, but it appears that Asians in particular will simply have to get used to doing their undergrad at places like University of Pittsburgh or Boston University rather than the very elite universities, and then move up one step for grad school. To truly do away with racial quotas would mean that black enrollment in many top universities would collapse by 80% or even more. The amount of hysteria that would generate would be very hard for the system to manage. Asians and whites, for better or worse, are more passive and thus easier to steamroll.

Consider that wherever those students go will become elite over time.

Is this true though? I don’t know if the eliteness of schools is extremely correlated to raw intelligence or aptitude. Sure students from ivy leagues succeed but that could be due to networking opportunities and status signaling.

Well, eliteness is clearly extremely correlated to raw intelligence and aptitude, that just doesn't mean that those are sufficient factors alone to explain the eliteness.

status signaling

If this was the major factor, though, that would in itself make "become elite over time" come to pass. If suddenly all the smart graduates are coming out of Podunk U, eventually the people who make hiring decisions will figure out to headhunt smart candidates there or to put branch offices in the Podunk Corridor.

networking opportunities

This, on the other hand, might make things a bit more sticky. Suppose "eliteness" is a nonlinear effect, a consequence of the things you see accomplished in places where you get all the smartest people and all the richest people and all the most well-connected people to mingle. Intelligence benefits from network effects with more intelligence, but to a lesser extent than money and pull. Lose all the smartest people to Podunk, but don't lose the venture capital and the clout along with them, and it's not clear that the smartest are going to be harmed the least by the separation, at least not for a few generations.

Similar effects concern me when I'm tempted to join in on the schadenfreude upthread about potentially getting rid of "legacy" admissions. "He needs help with his homework" might be annoying, but combine it with "I need help with my job-hunt/startup/etc" and it looks like a win/win. Like the old saying goes: It's not what you know, it's not who you know, it's who knows what you know.

It won’t have the same reaction because progressives can’t convince themselves it’s a vote winner.

RBG..the gift that keeps on giving . The problem is, how do you prove affirmative action? It's harder to prove it compared to abortions. It took decades for evidence of Harvard discrimination against Asians to surface.

Changing state constitutions can't help if it's either the 14th Amendment or Federal Law that any decision is based on. And there probably are not the votes to change the Civil Rights Acts to specifically allow for this.

Instead, if the Court decides that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." and bans all racial discrimination in admissions including affirmative action (and no, Harvard, we're not fooled by your 'Asians have bad personalities' claims), the response will be just to ignore it. The administrative agencies will continue to allow it, or turn a blind eye. The lower courts will endorse this. Maybe in another 10 years another case will make it to SCOTUS, but in the meantime nothing changes.

The US court system's "binding precedents" work mainly through respect for the institution by those below; courts and agencies are expected to follow precedent even when they'd rather not. But the people pushing these policies see them as the highest moral imperative and will put their desires above any such institutional controls.

Do you think federal institutions outright ignoring a SC decision is more likely than just using other factors to get to a similar outcome, as proposed below?

To me it seems far to risky for these universities to continue to do AA as-is if it gets struck down, but I wouldn't be surprised if they shift to overwhelmingly accepting students that signal woke/leftist ideology in their applications.

They'll use 'other factors' which largely proxy for race (or are entirely proxies for race, in the case of the 'other factors' being subjective). And the (lower) courts will take a blind eye to this. They'll probably also try accept wokies only, but that signal is too easy for white true-believers to display and too easy for the unscrupulous of any race to fake.

I've certainly heard my leftist friends talking about and gearing up for the Supreme Court striking down AA. Though I doubt it'll have the same viceral-ity as Roe, since leftists have convinced themselves for decades that any touching of Roe is a literal attack on women's bodies.

Also, I think I remember a thread on the Motte a few weeks ago where someone indicated some evidence (I can't remember the exact evidence) that once AA is struck down, colleges will use other things as a proxy, which may even be worse for everyone. The proxy might be something like, far more preference is given to applicants who take part in DEI initiatives in high school, since that will heavily skew both towards non-whites, and towards leftists.

You may be thinking of the Astral Codex Ten link roundup for October:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397

Ah, yep, that's right.

far more preference is given to applicants who take part in DEI initiatives in high school, since that will heavily skew both towards non-whites

Is this true? I feel like anecdotally a lot of minorities don't care about this type of thing, especially kids in high school.

But yeah, unfortunately the academic system is thoroughly captured by the woke BS. Personally I think an even bigger issue is grade inflation + fear of giving any non-whites a bad grade but that's a topic for another post I suppose.

If you take a stroll over to the ChanceMe subreddit, you'll find that ambitious applicants, regardless of race, are already starting to pad their resumes with DEI initiatives. Youth ambassadors for mental illness, leaders of Social Justice, Equity, and Inequality clubs, clubs that work to promote inclusion of kids with disabilities, all of these and more abound in the resumes of the modern college applicant.

I think regardless of the Supreme Court decision, the racial makeup of colleges will stay the same.

I think you're right that minority kids mostly don't care. But if colleges start requiring this stuff, then they (and the non-minority students) will be forced to care. DEI initiatives will become the new sports and charity work to pad an application.

Of course, the question is then what will the colleges do this proves not to be a good way to indirectly implement AA. I don't know what it will be, but I'm sure they'll try. It's not as if AA was mandatory before, and yet all the big colleges did it by choice.

The electoral problem for the pro-AA side is that this doesn’t cut neatly across two-party divisions. White and Asian-Americans are both over represented relative to the general population in college admissions, and don’t want their kids’ chances dinged because of their census categorization. A lot of Asian Americans who were Clinton/Biden voters strongly oppose any quotas that will impact their kids.

White and Asian-Americans are both over represented relative to the general population in college admissions

IIRC non-legacy non-athletic non-jewish whites are a fair bit underrepresented relative to the general population at top colleges, but I don't have the exact numbers.

Could well be but that’s moot relative to the politics of this, in that there isn’t going to be a noticeable pro-affirmative action push for non-legacy, non-athletic, non-Jewish whites from any quarter.

Are Asian-Americans a strong or divided voting bloc? According to this survey 44% of Asians are registered Democrat vs only 19%. I'd have to look at how the other demographic breakdowns compare but it seems like Asians are firmly in the democrat camp.

If you break it down into subsets of Asians it seems that Indians and Japanese are the most Democrat, weighing in at around 57% Democratic. Vietnamese are mostly Independent and Republican, with only 23% Democratic. Interesting to go through the survey and see how it breaks down, I really wonder what 'Independent' actually means in this. Libertarian?

Image of demographic breakdown: https://imgur.com/a/jnsMKax

I think that Libertarian would come under "Other Party". Independent would be "no party affiliation".

That’s what I’m pointing at. Asians are firmly in the Democrat camp, but many in that camp break orthodoxy on affirmative action. It’s an issue Republicans can use as a wedge.

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