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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34929 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.

The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, which all five of his fellow conservative justices joined in, said that both Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

“We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Roberts wrote.

The majority said that the universities’ policies violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".

California officially banned racial quotas in universities in the mid-90s. Schools responded by doing detailed evaluations where the results just happened to exactly match the now banned quotas.

Yes, but now with Bakke and Grutter out of the way, these admissions policies can be challenged in federal court with the full arsenal of anti-discrimination case law.

There will be a check box on the evaluation form that says "Applicant discussed their experience as a member of a URM and how that ties in with how they would contribute to the University" and that will satisfy the courts. Roberts handed them a talisman to use.

Exactly, and even if this is against the spirit of the law it will be another decade before it gets back to SCOTUS and by then it’ll be more evenly balanced.

Quotas have been illegal since the Bakke case in 1972. The Prop 209 ban was re affirmative action more broadly. And the gap between black/Hispanic acceptance rates and White/Asian rates is indeed lower than it was. But then the overall numbers mean little, since admissions decisions at UC are made not at the system level nor the campus level, but at the college level (eg the College of Letters and Sciences or the College of Engineering at a given campus). I don’t know what the numbers look like at individual colleges.

Even with its efforts in recruitment and retention, Black students represented only 3% of the incoming 2022 freshman class, or about half of what they represented in 1995.

Asian students made up 43% of Berkeley's freshmen in the fall of 2022, up from 37% in 1995.

It did work in California and the in-state student demographics of colleges like Berkeley and UCLA did - for many years - genuinely reflect who the highest performing students in California were. Since 2018 the UC system has done everything possible to stealth-implement affirmative action, with some success.

Still, the proportion of African American students at UC Berkeley is half what it was in 1995, and only 3%, whereas at Harvard and Yale it’s 12-15%.

UCLA is back to its pre-ban demographics.

Even by hugely reforming its admissions process over 20 years, radically changing its course offering to appeal to more black students, implementing possibly the country’s largest and most significant outreach program to black high schoolers, and eliminating test scores from consideration entirely, they’re at 8%.

In 2021, 18% of incoming Harvard students were black.

If the court had taken the wording of the California proposition, that would have been a much better judgment.

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