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Just a quick Sunday morning reflection, but just wanted to briefly float an idea about affirmative action, ethnic identity, and university reform. As most people probably know, the Supreme Court is widely expected to strike down affirmative action in the near future. However, speaking as someone well ensconced within the very apse of the Cathedral, I'm doubtful it will change much; Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making, and the religion of DEI means that there will be no shortage of reasons to prefer candidates from under-represented minority backgrounds. Sadly, I expect this to continue trumping any kind of class-based affirmative action, for which a far stronger moral case can be made.
If the US is indeed headed towards a new regime of ethnic spoils, how can young Americans who don't benefit from being in an officially recognized URM group - especially those who are nonetheless disadvantaged - still reap spoils of their own in the higher education systems? There are two particular groups I have in mind here. The first is Asian-American students, long the ones who have paid most of the price for boosting enrollment of otherwise underrepresented minorities, while the second is white Americans, especially those from working-class or otherwise economically underprivileged backgrounds.
I wonder if a similar solution might work in both cases. Specifically, is there any reason a new private university couldn't declare as part of its mission statement that it is dedicated to "understanding and promoting Asian and Asian-American identities", or some such, and require all candidates to submit a personal statement spelling out their identity or affinity with one or more aspects of Asian or Asian-American culture? Of course, non-Asian candidates wouldn't be barred from applying, and you'd probably want to take a hefty chunk of non-Asian students anyway, but it would provide a plausible and conveniently illegible selection mechanism to ensure that Asians and Asian-Americans applying to the university would have a natural advantage in getting in.
Could something similar work for white students? As stated so baldly, I think not. "Whiteness" as an identity is seen as too toxic, too vague, and too novel an identity to ground any kinds of claims for preferential treatment; any scholarship program for self-identified White students would be regarded with utter hostility, and would be a poison chalice for any student foolish enough to accept it. What might be more acceptable is to found institutions dedicated to one or another group of "hyphenated-Americans", the most obvious candidate groups being Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish- (or more broadly Slavic-) Americans. Again, in each of these cases, you wouldn't have any kind of explicit cultural discrimination in place, but candidates could be assessed heavily based on how deep and sincere their affiliation, identity, or attachment to the given identity was, as expressed in their relevant candidate statement.
While any such institution would be the target of snarky articles from the New York Times et al., I think that if done sincerely (and ideally using the language of DEI) it would be hard to truly tar the endeavor with the charge of Asian- or white-supremacism. There's simply too much obvious conceptual overlap with existing programs that favor URMs, so to truly rail against it, commentators would have to say the quiet part out loud, so to speak, which would alienate moderates.
Of course, the really hard part would be making these universities places that students actually wanted to go to. For my part, I think the current higher-education system in most of the world is a stagnant cartel, with actual teaching being near the bottom of priorities, and the whole edifice is ripe for disruption. The main challenge to overcome would be the brand power of the old guard, especially the Ivy Leagues, and that's hardly a trivial obstacle to overcome. Perhaps the best two initial strategies in this regard would be (i) hiring a bunch of very good emeritus faculty, who could write excellent letters of recommendation for grad school etc., and (ii) focusing in the first instance on teaching disciplines with relatively legible outcomes, e.g., material sciences, machine learning, data science, mathematics, etc., rather than the humanities. Over a few years, I think it would be entirely possible to cultivate a reputation for providing a superb education in these disciplines, such that employers would have to take note.
All of this would require a large amount of startup capital, but there are Silicon Valley libertarian-types who could - ideally anonymously - bankroll this kind of operation (so Peter Thiel, if you're reading, get in touch).
But perhaps I'm being naive, and there are obstacles here that I'm not seeing. What do you all think?
I think the biggest factor this overlooks is that it's not like the Asian and White students who aren't getting into Harvard or a UC school aren't getting into any colleges- it's been a minute since I've personally looked into it, but my general impression is that you have to be pretty darn incapable to not get into any school. And there's not only no obvious reason to prefer a new private school to northwestern Iowa Tech, there's cost related reasons for the opposite.
Almost any high school graduate in the US can get into college. The affirmative action fight is about attending elite colleges, which are different because of prestige that can't actually be copied. Yes, MIT and Stanford probably have tougher courses than podunk state. But prestige is the main reason employers prefer MIT diplomas to podunk state diplomas, and you can't actually replicate MIT's prestige with a new college no matter how tough the courses are.
I'm guessing there's some set of highly qualified kids who get rejected from all schools they applied to. I'm going to use some completely imaginary but plausible probabilities to demonstrate this.
Let's say that you're poor and don't have the funds for more than three application fees, and you're too prideful to ask for fee waivers. I know this happens because this was my situation when I was in high school. I didn't became aware that I could use my poverty to my advantage until I was already in college, and even then I was too prideful for it.
There's some chance that you'll not be selected for a top school like Harvard even though you have grades and scores that would put you in the 90th percentile of kids they do admit. Let's say that if you're Asian and have these qualifications you only have a 1% chance of admission. You apply anyway.
Let's say that you also apply to a top state school that you're pretty confident will admit you, but there's no guarantee. Say this is a 95% chance.
And then you apply to a safety school, which is still not a guarantee, but a 99% chance.
The probability of getting rejected by all three schools would be .99 * .05 * .01 = .00049. Roughly 5 in 10,000 people in this situation would find themselves with no acceptance letter. Are there 10,000 such people applying each year? According to Wikipedia there were 2.9 million college freshman in the United States in 2019. That seems plausible.
With such a huge population you're going to find very unlikely outcomes hiding in the tails. Especially with illegible admission criteria, it's not possible to know with any certainty that you'll be admitted unless you go through some assured admission program.
Seems like it did happen.
https://www.wsj.com/story/she-scored-1550-on-her-sats-top-us-colleges-still-rejected-her-68767071
False. Did not get rejected everywhere. Going to Arizona state. Not a great school, but I predict that founding a brand new private school better than Arizona state will be harder than we think it is.
I didn't say anything about the difficulty of creating an alternate education system. Even though I don't think its as onerously difficult as you claim it is, nor do I think its as easy as many others think it is.
It's not too difficult to imagine an alternate reality where this girl did not Apply to ASU or Rice. And did infact get rejected from all the colleges she applied to despite being very accomplished. Ofcourse that can happen to anyone who doesn't choose a safety school, but its more than likely that this time around AA has something to do with it.
In the comment I replied to you said
Now you're saying it hypothetically could have happened in an alternate reality where an obvious gunner didn't do basic best practices, like applying to safety schools.
The standard when I was a kid was seven, two reach two safety three target. That number just keeps getting bigger, I advise kids I know to apply everywhere, if the application isn't free send a letter to the dean asking for a free application and they'll give it to you 90% of the time, you never know who might give you money and money from one school you don't really want to go to can be leveraged against a school you do want to go to. Among kids gunning for ivies, they're going to be following best practices, the average among my AP friends was around 12 undergrads applied to in high school.
Fwiw, AA obviously plays a role in every marginal candidate's fate, but can never really be pointed to as playing a decisive role. Until you're applying your fate is always in your hands, you could always just be better.
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