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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Affirmative action means Whitey's oppression is not small, it's negative. Young Earth creationists at least have the valence of time correct!

I've seen the idea that affirmative action does keep minorities down by giving them positions but not the skills to grow. Some of those people, I assume, were even serious about it.

"Act white/the correct type of black and you can too get into Harvard" and all that.

"Act white/the correct type of black and you can too get into Harvard" is a source of skills and growth. Except it's not particularly acting "white"; my white ancestors used to be literal barbarians. "At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead."

The harm done by affirmative action comes from mismatch theory, the idea that "the fundamental problem created for black and other minority students admitted to elite colleges and postgraduate programs under affirmative action preferences is not that those students are "unqualified" to be in colleges and universities, but that they are far too often mismatched with the particular colleges and universities that admit them". I'm pretty sure Thomas Sowell is serious about that (as are the authors of the book he's reviewing here), and with at least some reason:

The empirical data presented in Mismatch shows that black students admitted to colleges and universities where the other students have higher academic qualifications do not graduate as often, graduate with much lower grades, and, when they start out trying to major in difficult subjects like mathematics, the natural sciences, engineering, or economics, they end up majoring in much easier subjects with much less of a payoff in terms of their careers in later life. Moreover, black students with very similar academic qualifications who attend predominantly black colleges succeed in graduating with degrees in the natural sciences, mathematics, engineering, and economics far more often. Nor is this simply a matter of their being granted college degrees while having less knowledge of their subjects. Predominantly black colleges are 17 of the top 21 colleges whose black graduates go on to receive Ph.D.s in scientific, mathematical, and technical fields.

...

When racial preferences were banned by the voters in California, there were dire predictions that this would mean the virtual disappearance of black and Hispanic students from the University of California system. What in fact happened was a 2% decline in their enrollment in the University of California system as a whole, but an increase in the number of black and Hispanic students graduating, including an increase of 55% in the number graduating in four years and an increase of 63% in the number graduating in four years with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher.

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