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This feels like more of a dumb question but why did we have any significant amount of affirmative action for Hispanics in the US?
Thought about it on this tweet on DEI at a UC med school
There are a lot of white hispanics. I would have assumed they could have just picked off to fill their classes with University of Michigan quality white hispanics. Basically Rubio, Cruz, Fernando Mendoza types. And they all for demographic purposes qualify as Hispanic. And you could find a bunch of German Brazilians or Mexican Jews if you needed to. Is the needing to take students that will show a legitimate achievement gap primarily cultural?
The article says the school was 4.6 times more likely to admit a Hispanic student than a white student. I would have assumed that ratio would have been a lot smaller. Is the American hispanic population just a lot browner?
Because Affirmative Action is about satisfying a perceived aesthetic. Colleges thought diversity in line with population percentages was aesthetically a good, so they pursued it, and really didn't care if anyone was "cheating" or they weren't actually achieving their perfect brochures IRL on campus. They wanted the stats to look like their perception.
I don't think there really is much more to it. If there was we would have seen much more sophisticated systems compared to just giving free points (which were explicit in the UMichigan case in the early 2000s, and only since have become hidden, but with the same results). Its not like ADOS were getting lots of points while Nigerian sons of oligarchs were not, or Mexican daughters of construction workers were getting more points that the grandson of Peronist leadership. Its just all paper aesthetics, with a bit of an extra f-you thrown in for white rural and urban males.
That’s sort of my point. There are lots of ways to boost Hispanic and just take in white guys. Why is the Hispanic bump 4.6. Just feels high to me.
Its a supply demand things currently. The demand is high because they see the large Hispanic % on the census. But most of those are pretty crappy. So they give big bonuses
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