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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32032 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?

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.

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